‘Frannie’s running about three hours late,’ he whispered from the front of the house. He cast his eyes up and down the street out front. No Frannie.

‘Three hours?’

‘I thought you might check around.’ Hardy’s casual tone didn’t camouflage much for Glitsky. He knew what his friend meant by check around – accidents, hospital admissions, or the worst, recently dead Jane Does -unidentified women.

‘Three hours?’ Glitsky repeated.

Hardy looked at his watch, hating to say it. ‘Maybe a little more.’

Glitsky got the message. ‘I’m on it,’ he said. Hardy hung up just as Vincent let out a cry in the kitchen.

The Cochrans – Big Ed and Erin – were the parents of Frannie’s first husband, Ed, who was the biological father of Rebecca. Their son had been gone a long time now, but Ed and Erin still doted on their granddaughter and her brother Vincent. They loved Frannie and her husband. Hardy and his wife, with no living parents between them, considered them part of the family.

Now, after getting the word about Frannie’s absence, they had come to Hardy’s house. Erin was shepherding the kids through their homework at the kitchen table, trying to keep their minds engaged. Hardy and Ed were making small talk, casting glances at the telephone, waiting.

Hardy was on the phone before the ring ended. It was Abe Glitsky with his professional voice on. ‘She back yet?’

Hardy told him no, and endured a short pause. ‘OK, well. The good news is nobody’s dead, not anywhere. I checked Alameda, Marin, Santa Clara’ – the counties surrounding San Francisco – ‘and it’s a slow day on the prairie. Barely a fender-bender. No reports of anything serious. Nothing in the city at all.’

Hardy let out a long sigh. ‘So what now?’

‘I don’t know. We hang. She’ll…’ He stopped. Glitsky, who’d lost his own wife to cancer a few years before, wasn’t one for stoking false hopes. ‘She driving the Subaru?’

‘I’d guess so. If she’s driving.’

‘Give me the license and I’ll put it out over the dispatch – broaden the net.’

‘All right.’ Hardy hated the sound of that – broaden the net. It was getting official now. Objective. Harder to deny, even to himself.

Where was his wife?

Earlier that morning, Scott Randall was hosting an informal bull session with some law clerks in his tiny cubicle of an office on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. Even his most ardent admirers among these clerks would admit that Scott was the near embodiment of well-dressed, post-Gen-X arrogant disdain. But none of them viewed this as a negative. Indeed, the trait had allowed Scott, though only thirty-three, to rise to homicide prosecutor in the DA’s office, an eminence to which they all aspired.

This morning, Scott had a theme and he was rolling. ‘Listen up,’ he told the acolytes. ‘You are looking at someone who has gotten convictions on his first three murder cases – and I don’t need to tell you how difficult that is in our compassion-driven little burg.’ No false modesty for Scott Randall.

‘But do you know what those three convictions have done for my career? Or what the same kind of cases will do for yours?’ The question was rhetorical and he breezed ahead. ‘Zero, zilch, nada. You know why? Because no one cares about the people in them. Look.’ He held up a finger. ‘One, a motorcycle gang brawl over one of their common-law women; two,’ – another finger – ‘a drug dealer killed by an addict he’d tried to cheat; three, a bum stabbed after he’d stolen another bum’s grocery cart. This is not stuff over which newspaper readers salivate, believe me.’

One of the young men spoke up. ‘So what do you do?’

‘I’ll answer by way of an example. I think you’ll all have heard something about the murder of Bree Beaumont.’ He reached for a manila file that sat atop his desk and from it extracted a couple of eight by ten glossy photographs, holding them up.

‘Exhibit A, on the left,’ he began – Scott spoke a precise legalese even in private – ‘is a picture of the deceased. Bree Beaumont, very pretty, a player in the big-money oil business. Also married, two kids, and,’ he paused for effect, ‘rumored to be dating Damon Kerry.’

This was a trump that had been kept from the media and Scott enjoyed the reaction. ‘Perhaps our next governor, that’s right.’

Scott raised the picture in his right hand. ‘Exhibit B is Bree Beaumont’s body lying in the enclosed patio area underneath her penthouse apartment, where she landed after a long fall. As you’ve read in the papers, there were shards of glass in Bree’s hairline. They didn’t find glass where she landed, none in her apartment. So someone conked her on the head and threw her over. She was six weeks pregnant, too.’

Scott cocked an eyebrow. He had their interest. ‘This is high profile, career-making stuff. You can’t let these cases get away and if they start to slide, you’ve got to go pro-active.’

The first male clerk spoke again. ‘How is it getting away?’

‘It’s been three weeks, and our friends in the police department don’t have a suspect. After that amount of time, the odds say they never will. That’s how.’

One of the female clerks checked in. ‘But they must be looking? Isn’t it just a matter of time?’

Scott conceded that sometimes it was. ‘But in this case, the original inspector, Carl Griffin, was working solo and got himself shot to death – apparently unrelated – just a few days after Bree was killed. The new guys – Batavia and Coleman – haven’t found anything and it doesn’t seem like it’s bothering them. And until they bring us a suspect, we’ve got no job.’

Scott let them absorb the facts for a moment. ‘So if you’re me and you want this case, I mean you really want this case, what do you do?’

This was the kind of information the clerks came here to lap up. They were rapt as he continued. ‘I’ll tell you what I did do. I went to Ms Pratt’ – San Francisco’s District Attorney, Sharron Pratt – ‘and told her, promised her, that if she gave me my own investigator, I would bring the case before the grand jury to get an indictment.’

The second young woman spoke up. ‘How?’

Scott flashed a grin. ‘I’m glad you asked that question, Kimberly. And here’s the answer: the grand jury is your friend. You know how it works – no defense lawyers allowed, no judge in the room. You present your case to twenty average citizens, and do it without worrying too much about legalities. If you’re not brain dead, you get your indictment.’

‘But if the police don’t have a suspect, who do you call as witnesses?’ Kimberly asked.

‘Everybody I can think of, including Kerry, his campaign manager Al Valens; Jim Pierce, this Caloco oil vice president who was Bree’s old mentor. Then I go after the personal connections – and remember that no matter what else might be involved, murder is usually personal.

‘So I subpoena Bree’s husband Ron, Ron’s friends and friends of friends, her professors, colleagues, lab partners. Somewhere I’m betting I’m going to pull a break.’

‘So it’s a fishing expedition,’ the first clerk commented. ‘But we’ve always been told not to-’

Scott was brusque. ‘Forget the garbage they taught you in law school. Here’s Real Life One-A. There’s lawyers who win in front of juries, they’ve got careers. All the others wind up pushing paper or crunching numbers. Your choice. So I’m going to take this murder of Bree Beaumont and get my name on the marquee. The grand jury’s my vehicle. I’m riding it and taking no prisoners.’

Scott’s eyes were bright. ‘This time next week, mark my words, this case is front burner. And it’s mine.’

Scott had served his witness, a Mrs Frannie Hardy, at her home on the previous Friday. The subpoena had instructed her to call if her time on the witness stand presented a conflict or hardship. If that had been the case, Scott would have rescheduled – he’d done so with several other witnesses. If Mrs Hardy had called, he would have told her how long he expected her to be on the stand and what kinds of questions he was likely to ask.