‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘No, that’s how it was.’

‘So what happened?’

He had come around on the chair now, hunched over. Elbows on his knees, his hands together. His shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t know, Frannie. Everybody got too busy. Certainly nobody cared what time I came home. Nobody even says hi anymore when I walk in the house. You’re doing so many kid things you’re always exhausted, and if it’s not about kids, you’re not interested. We don’t have date night anymore. Where’s any of our life together?’ He looked up at her. ‘Take your pick, Frannie. And OK, it was a lot me, all the things you say. But it was a two-way street.’

‘And you say you really want to go back to that?’

He thought for a beat. ‘No, maybe not to what we had a week ago,’ he said. ‘Something better than that, closer to what we used to have. But still with you and the kids.’

After a long, silent moment, she slid off the table and walked over to the door where the guard waited. For a second, Hardy was afraid she was simply going to ask to be escorted out. But she turned to face him. ‘The best thing,’ she said, ‘would be if I didn’t have to tell.’

Then she knocked for the guard.

Glitsky wasn’t in his office. Nobody was in homicide at all, which seemed a bit strange at ten o’clock on a Monday morning. Hardy sat himself at one of the inspector’s desks and opened his briefcase.

He thought he’d done pretty well with Griffin’s notes this morning, and now he was going to pull out his own notes and take a minute to go over what he’d written about Canetta’s findings. He stopped before he’d really begun.

He knew.

Marie Dempsey. Canetta had told him that he’d discovered she had been the secretary of the insurance guy, Tilton. That she’d actually been laid off in the wake of the claims adjuster’s decision to hold off payment on Bree’s life insurance until Ron had been cleared of any implication in the death.

So here was this woman without a job with the insurance company, calling Ron Beaumont twice – or was it three times? – in a two-day period. She wasn’t calling him to walk him through processing his claim. It seemed weeks ago now, though in fact it was days, and Hardy had been concentrating on Frannie when he had heard those calls at the penthouse, but he remembered coming away with the impression that Marie was personal, not business.

He reached for the telephone on the desk and punched for information.

‘This is Letitia. What city please?’

‘Yes. In San Francisco. The phone number please of a Marie Dempsey.’

‘How would you spell that, sir?’

He spelled it out, his patience all but eroded. Dempsey, after all, wasn’t exactly Albuquerque, spelling-wise. But Letitia eventually got it. ‘I don’t show any Marie Dempsey, sir. Do you know what street she lives on?’

‘No. How about just the initial?’

‘M?’

Hardy ground his teeth. ‘That would be the one, yes.’

‘I show ten, no eleven M. Dempseys.’

‘OK,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll take them all.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m only allowed to give out two numbers at a time.’

‘Please, Letitia, this is important. There may be lives at stake. I’m not kidding. Could you please just give me the numbers?’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m really not allowed to give out that information. Would you like to speak to a supervisor?’

‘Can your supervisor read me the eleven numbers?’

‘No, sir. I don’t believe so. If you have access to a telephone directory, they should all be listed in there, though.’

‘Yes, well, you see, I don’t have a phone book handy, which is kind of why I called you.’

‘Well,’ Letitia said brightly, cheerfully, ‘let me give you the first number. It’s…’

Hardy wrote quickly, then found himself listening to a mechanical voice telling him that after he got his number, the phone company could dial his call direct for a charge of thirty-five cents. ‘Press one if…’

He slammed the receiver down. Glitsky was in the doorway, pointing at the telephone. ‘That’s city property,’ he said. ‘You break it, you buy it.’

‘You got a phone book around here?’ Hardy asked.

‘I doubt it,’ Glitsky said. ‘They’re harder to find than a cop when you need one. You want to guess how many homicides we got this weekend, Hallowe’en?’

‘Including Canetta?’

‘Sure, let’s include him.’

‘Three?’

‘More.’

‘Two hundred and sixteen?’

‘Seven. Average is one point five a week. And we get seven in two days. I’ve got no inspectors left.’

Hardy nodded, looking around. ‘And this would also explain your mysterious absence from your office all morning. I thought you might have gotten tired and decided to take some time off.’

‘Nope.’ Glitsky was terse. ‘The first part’s right, but that wasn’t it.’

In his office, though, Glitsky did find a three-year-old phone book and it had seven M. Dempseys listed. The first one had the same number Hardy had written down from Letitia and he took that as a good sign.

He was copying and Glitsky was talking, shuffling through a pile of paper from his in-box. ‘So if Kerry ever called the mayor as he said he would, I haven’t heard about it, although as you’ve noticed, I haven’t exactly been waiting by the phone.’

Hardy looked up. ‘He’s not going to call the mayor. That would only raise the profile around him. He just wants this – and by “this” I mean “you” – to go away.’

‘You think I gave him the impression last night that I was going away? That he scared me off?’

‘If you did, it was real subtle. What?’

Glitsky had stopped at a faxed page. He tsked a couple of times. ‘Mr Kerry, Mr Kerry.’ He held the page out to Hardy.

‘AT &T Wireless for the morning of 29 September. Here’s a conversation beginning at seven ten a.m., duration twenty-two minutes. Somebody called him.’

‘The day he slept in?’

‘That’s what he said.’

‘Maybe he only meant he slept in until seven and we just assumed he meant it was later.’

‘That’s probably it,’ Glitsky replied sarcastically. He was shoving paper around on his desk again. ‘You got Bree’s number anywhere on you?’

As it happened, Hardy still had it in his briefcase. It was the number from which Kerry had received his call. ‘Maybe I won’t vote for him after all,’ Glitsky said.

Hardy sat back, crossed his arms. ‘So they have a fight first thing in the morning-’

Glitsky sat up straight, snapped his fingers, truly excited now. ‘He’s the father. She told him she was pregnant. She was going to blackmail him.’

All right, Hardy thought with relief. He never had to break his vow of silence to Jeff Elliot. Glitsky had come to it on his own. ‘That’s a reasonable guess,’ he said mildly.

‘He waited till he knew Ron had taken the kids to school, strolled over…’

But Hardy was shaking his head.

‘Why not?’ Glitsky asked.

‘No. Not himself. He called Thorne. Thorne called one of his operatives.’

Glitsky glanced back down at the faxed page. ‘Not from his cell phone anyway.’

‘Damn,’ Hardy said. ‘Why is it never easy?’

‘It’s just one of the general rules. But why would Kerry calling Thorne make it easy?’

‘This is one slick bastard, Abe.’ Hardy explained about the leaflets that had been printed up before the MTBE dumping, and about Thorne’s explanation for it.

Glitsky was enjoying the recitation. He was paying attention, sitting back in his chair, his fingers templed at his lips. When Hardy finished, he spoke. ‘So these terrorists who were trying to lay the blame on Thorne, they somehow assumed that Jeff Elliot’s colleague would just happen to drop by on Saturday afternoon and find the flyers in the hallway?’ Glitsky was almost smiling. ‘Call me cynical, but that’s a stretch.’

‘We thought so, too. Jeff and I.’ Hardy moved forward, put his hands on the desk between them, and spoke urgently. ‘Abe, you connect Thorne to the MTBE gang and you win a prize.’