Pierce shrugged. ‘I don’t have any idea. A week?’

Hardy shook his head. ‘Thirty-two years, give or take a few months.’

Pierce chuckled. ‘Get out of here.’

‘It’s a really big number, a billion,’ Hardy said.

‘Can that be right?’ Carrie asked.

Hardy nodded. ‘It’s right. But my point is, it might be why people seem to have a hard time thinking three billion isn’t a lot of money. Why Bree might have been killed for it.’

‘She was one person, Mr Hardy,’ Pierce said.

‘So was Hitler. If he’d been killed, it might have avoided World War Two.’ He shrugged. ‘Look, I’m not saying I don’t believe you. I’m trying to get a handle on what I keep hearing on the radio, that the oil companies had a motive to kill her.’

Pierce remained unruffled, as though he’d heard it all before, which he probably had. ‘You’re welcome to look, Mr Hardy, but it will waste a lot of your time.’ He sipped coffee. Hardy had the impression he was stalling for a moment. Then he seemed to reach some decision, and sighed. ‘You know the source of all this radio nonsense, don’t you?’

‘No. I thought it was kind of a groundswell…’

Pierce was shaking his head. ‘Not at all. It’s a well-funded group of eco-terrorists. Don’t laugh, that’s what they call themselves. Eco-terrorists.’

‘And?’

‘And they all seem to be working to get Damon Kerry elected since he’s the standard bearer against MTBE.’

‘All right.’ Hardy didn’t see where this was going.

‘Well, at the time she left us, Bree was very much under the spell of Damon Kerry, too. Perhaps more, although I shouldn’t say that after all I’ve had to endure on that score.’ He glanced at his wife, whose lovely face again betrayed her distaste at this subject.

Pierce turned back to Hardy. ‘What I’m saying is that at least these are the kind of people who admit to resorting to violence, or the need for it. Maybe somehow Bree crossed them, joined the camp and was going to renege, something like that.’

‘You’re not saying Kerry-’

‘No no no, not personally. But somebody behind him. Possibly. Really I don’t know. I don’t like to point a finger at anybody, but…’ He trailed off.

Hardy remembered Canetta’s comments about Al Valens, who had also left a message for Ron Beaumont. A question presented itself. ‘You said this group – these terrorists – are well-funded. Where do they get their money?’

Carrie nearly blurted it out. ‘That’s easy. SKO.’

Pierce snapped at her. ‘We don’t know that, not for sure.’

‘Of course we do.’

Husband and wife glared at each other.

‘Who?’ Hardy asked.

Making a show of reluctance, Pierce let out a long breath. ‘Spader Krutch Ohio.’

‘The farming conglomerate?’ Hardy asked.

Pierce nodded. ‘Corn. Ethanol, the other additive. It’s a huge company, as you say, heavily subsidized by the government. They’ve got a stake in seeing MTBE outlawed.’

‘So they could make the three billion dollars?’ Hardy asked.

Carrie’s color was up. ‘They would kill for it.’

Pierce shook his head from side to side. ‘I doubt that. But there is, I believe, very little doubt that they are the source of these funds.’

Hardy digested this information for a moment. ‘Have you told the police about this?’

‘What exactly is there to tell?’ Pierce stood up. He’d given Hardy several minutes – nearly a halftime’s worth – and now the interview was over. ‘They asked me about my suspicions. I told them I’d heard about these economic motives and frankly, gave them short shrift. Poor Bree wasn’t assassinated, she was murdered.’

Hardy realized that this, from an oil company’s senior vice president, was self-serving. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. Still, he thought, three billion dollars.

They had all begun moving back toward the front door. Carrie laid a hand on his arm, guiding him through the dimness. ‘If there is anything more you need,’ she said. ‘Jim and I want to help, but we don’t really know anything more than we’ve told you.’

They’d arrived in the foyer and Pierce went for the door. ‘Now that we’ve opened this can of worms, Mr Hardy, if you’re convinced it isn’t Beaumont, you might look into Kerry’s campaign after all. The funding, maybe the eco-terrorist thing. There could be something there.’ He sounded skeptical, though.

Hardy stopped, blinking in the sudden sunlight let in by the open door. It was the second time that Pierce had inadvertently alluded to Ron’s involvement in the murder. ‘But personally, you still think it’s Beaumont, don’t you?’

A temporizing smile. ‘I believe these things tend to be personal, let’s say that. If Bree had just started an affair with one of Kerry’s people and Ron found out…’ He trailed off. ‘Well, that’s motive, anyway.’

Hardy wanted to say, ‘So’s three billion dollars,’ but instead he merely thanked the couple for their time, handed them his card, and turned back for the long walk to his parking space.

Sergeant Canetta’s sandwich from Molinari’s had given Hardy the idea. For all his peregrinations of the morning, there hadn’t been a minute when Frannie wasn’t somewhere in his consciousness. Now, heading downtown for another visit to the jail, it occurred to him that perhaps every instant she spent locked up didn’t have to be hell.

Since it often worked for him, he reasoned that some good food might improve things temporarily for Frannie to the point where it was only as bad as purgatory – same conditions as hell, but you really knew it would end someday.

So he stopped and bought a spread of delectables from David’s Delicatessen – lox, bagels, cream cheese, chopped chicken liver, pastrami, onion rolls, pickles, even three bottles of creme soda, which was her favorite drink in the world that wasn’t made from grapes.

Only to be harshly rebuffed when he arrived at the jail. Was he crazy? The desk sergeant wanted to know. Didn’t Hardy know better by now? Visitors weren’t allowed to bring anything for the inmates into the jail – any piece of cake might have a razor blade or weapon in it, any drink some dissolved drugs.

So reluctantly, Hardy left the bag at the desk. The best of intentions…

One step into the room, Frannie turned from the guard and saw him sitting at the table, smiling at her. He spread out his arms. ‘Sorry it’s just me,’ he said. ‘I bought all your favorite food in the whole world, I really did, but they wouldn’t let me bring any of it inside.’ With a helpless expression he repeated that he was sorry.

She dissolved into tears. Just standing there in her orange jumpsuit, hands at her sides, looking at him and crying.

Nat Glitsky didn’t like being interrupted when he was at temple.

Lots of times when he’d been younger, he’d been less than diligent at keeping the Sabbath, but now in his eighth decade he’d come to believe that the Ten Commandments had gotten everything exactly right if you wanted to have a world full of healthy and productive people. People should pay attention to the wisdom in all ten of them, he believed. They really should. Keeping the Sabbath, taking a day off, kept you sane.

But nowadays even religious people mostly only acknowledged nine. Keeping holy the Lord’s day was not only forgotten, it had been completely subverted, even reversed. Woe betide the lazy bum who took a whole day off every single week to reflect and try to gain some perspective on his life and work and the world around him. There wasn’t time for that. There was only work. It was wrong.

Nat’s working days were over, and all he wished now was that he’d kept the Sabbath sacred more often back when he’d get overwhelmed with childraising or working or the pressures of his marriage. It might not have changed his life much, but at least it would have planted the seed in his son Abraham, who was always crushed under his workload, and who now was sitting – fidgeting really – next to him.