Hardy nearly had to bite his tongue off, but he wasn’t going to get drawn into a discussion about Frannie. ‘I am specifically not addressing the judicial contempt, your honor. No one is arguing that. Only the grand jury citation.’

‘Well, there’s a rare and welcome display of good judgment.’ She drew Hardy’s piece of paper over to her, scanned it quickly, and repeated her initial response. ‘You don’t say she’ll talk and you don’t say why she doesn’t have to. All you say is it would be nice to let her go. This belongs with the DA. They make this decision, not me.’ She pushed the paper back over to him. He was dismissed.

But he didn’t move. Braun glared up at him, and pushed the document another time. ‘I’m going to lose my temper if you don’t…’

‘I don’t trust the DA,’ Hardy said. ‘I can’t take it there.’

Braun’s eyes narrowed.

Hardy pressed on. ‘It’s been my experience that this particular administration will take a convenient position in their offices, and when it’s on the record, suddenly it changes. In this case, they’ve abused the grand jury process-’

‘That’s a strong charge. How have they done that?’

‘Your honor, with all respect, you know as well as I do. The grand jury is a prosecutor’s tool. But it’s not supposed to be a blunt instrument.’

‘And that means?’

‘It means Scott Randall’s trying to make a high-profile case out of whole cloth and he’s using my wife to do it. How many times did you see his name in the paper this weekend?’

‘Not flatteringly.’

‘What does he care? In six months it’s all forgotten except the name recognition.’ Hardy was surprised Braun had let him argue even this much – he must have struck a chord with her. She knew that this DA’s administration had mostly a political, not a legal, agenda. As a judge, she’d no doubt run across her own examples of dishonesty and sleaze. Hardy played another variation on this theme.

‘Your honor, we’d all like to believe the DA is going to do the right thing. But even if they were convinced this wasn’t going anywhere with Ron Beaumont, there are folks down the Hall who would leave my wife in jail just to prove that they can.’

‘Except my understanding is that Ron Beaumont is likely to be indicted.’

‘If he is, there won’t be enough evidence to bring him to trial.’

Braun had just about reached her limit. ‘Well, that’s the system, Mr Hardy. Get used to it.’

‘The system’s broken, your honor. If they’re going to keep my wife in jail, at least make them do it out in the open.’

Braun put her elbows on her desk. ‘You know, Mr Hardy, this morning I had the mayor himself try to circumvent the judicial process. I’m tired of people who want to keep making this stuff up as they go along.’ She straightened up, pushing the paper away from her a last time. ‘You got your pitch; take it to the DA. Your three minutes are up.’

Hardy had one last shot and he hadn’t wanted to take it unless there was no alternative. But now he’d gotten to that. Still, it was a tremendous gamble. If it didn’t succeed, the consequences would be devastating to his credibility, to his entire career. ‘What if I can produce Beaumont at the hearing?’

Braun stared at him. ‘I’d understood he’d fled.’

Hardy elected not to answer directly. ‘Scott Randall doesn’t have anything, your honor. He jailed my wife to save his own face. If he’s got a case, let him make it in open court if he can.’

‘You’re telling me Ron Beaumont will testify at this habeas hearing tomorrow?’

Hardy nodded. His heart was stuck in his throat. ‘If he’s not in the courtroom, there’s no hearing.’

He saw her wrestling with it. Braun had a temper, and he was personally enraged at what she’d done to Frannie. But like most Superior Court judges, she prided herself on her basic sense of fairness. Hardy counted on that now.

It was no secret that this particular DA administration systematically abused the grand jury process. Finally, because of Scott Randall’s arrogance and grandstanding, Braun herself had just been squeezed and humiliatingly dressed down by the mayor.

She peered over her glasses, her mouth a grim pencil stroke. ‘I want you to understand that if I wasn’t so pissed off at your wife, I wouldn’t give you this hearing. But I’m not supposed to let my personal feelings get in the way, and if I don’t give you this hearing, I’m not going to be sure it wasn’t personal.’

She pulled the writ over and scratched an angry signature at the bottom. As Hardy reached for it, she held it back one last second. ‘If I take the bench tomorrow and Ron Beaumont isn’t in the courtroom, you don’t even get three minutes.’

Lou the Greek’s had a kind of Chinese version of paella as the special. Chunks of octopus (perhaps tire), sausage, maybe chicken – it was hard to tell – and some red stuff, all mixed into the rice with soy sauce. Since every day the special was the only item on the menu, Hardy ordered it. A wave of hunger had hit him in Glitsky’s office and he would gladly have ordered even some variant of spam musabi if it had been offered. It probably would have been better than the paella which, he had to admit, didn’t quite sing.

But he ate most of it, sitting in one of the window booths which, at the underground Lou’s, began at the level of the alley outside. As it was, he could have been eating tires for all he cared about the food.

Something far more compelling commanded his attention – the love letters of Jim Pierce to Bree Beaumont, the ones she’d saved in the back of her high-school yearbook. There were a dozen of them, all of them relatively short – half a page or a little more – and painfully, adolescently passionate. Hallmark poetry that made him wince: ‘Never have/I touched or felt/Never/Even knew/Oh, the craving/Touching/Wanting/ Only you.’

Three were on Caloco stationery. None were dated, although all of the paper had grown brittle, leading Hardy to conclude that the last of them had been written several years before.

So David Freeman had been right again, Hardy thought with awe when he put down the last letter. And why should that have been a surprise? Pierce might be married to a world-class beauty, as President Kennedy had been, but this was no guarantee that he wouldn’t have affairs. Human nature, Freeman had said. Men want a lot; women want the best one.

Just as Hardy felt they were finally closing in on some kind of Kerry/Thorne connection to Bree’s death, he didn’t need this complication. He could understand Pierce’s denials, especially in the presence of his wife. And judging from the age of these letters, the relationship might have ended years before, possibly before either of them were even married. But the discovery was unwelcome – he was trying to narrow his list of suspects, not expand it. And if Pierce and Bree had ever been lovers – now a foregone conclusion – it put the oilman back in the picture, at least tangentially.

‘How was it today, Diz?’

Lou the Greek himself hovered over the table, breaking Hardy out of his reverie. He smiled, indicating his nearly cleaned plate. ‘Maybe the best ever, Lou.’

The proprietor showed a lot of teeth under his thick gray mustache. ‘People been saying that all morning. I’m thinking we might go regular with it.’ He slid into the booth across the way. The dark eyes were not smiling anymore. ‘Hey, I hear some things. You, your wife, the house? You OK?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘Getting by, Lou, getting by.’

‘You need anything, you let me know.’ He brushed at his mustache, embarrassed. Lou hesitated another moment, then nodded. ‘OK, then.’ He extended his hand and Hardy took it. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘And today’s on me.’

Hardy thanked Lou and, struck by the unexpected kindness, watched him as he began to schmooze another table. It was one of the few personal interactions he’d ever had with the man in twenty-some years and he wasn’t at all sure where it had come from.