‘And?’

‘And I couldn’t do that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I’d promised Ron I wouldn’t.’

‘OK, so what was it, this big secret?’

She looked up at him imploringly. ‘Dismas, come on.’

At this moment, before Hardy could respond, there was a knock at the door and the guard admitted Abe Glitsky, who was a study in controlled rage of his own. Stealing a quick look at Frannie, his eyes narrowed for a millisecond and the scar between his lips went white. Then he focused on Hardy. ‘It’s not happening,’ he said. ‘Braun’s not budging.’

Instinctively, forgetting their disagreements, Hardy reached a hand out on the table and Frannie took it. He looked down at her and her eyes were brimming. He didn’t blame her.

‘I can’t stay here, Dismas. Abe?’

Miserable, the two men looked at each other. They didn’t have to say anything. Jail was a reality in both of their lives. When a judge ordered it, people wound up staying all the time. Finally, Hardy let out a breath. ‘So what’s left, Abe? What are our options?’

The lieutenant was shaking his head. ‘I don’t know. I could talk to the desk – maybe get her in Adseg.’

‘What’s that?’ Frannie asked. ‘I’m right here, guys. Don’t third person me.’

‘Administrative segregation,’ Glitsky explained to her. ‘Basically it’s isolation, a nicer cell. Keep you away from the general population, which you want – trust me on this.’

‘This can’t be happening,’ Hardy said.

‘Evidently,’ Abe went on, looking at Frannie, ‘you broke the first rule of the courtroom – you don’t insult the judge.’

‘She’s a pompous ass,’ Frannie retorted. ‘She insulted me first.’

‘She’s allowed to insult you. It’s in her job description. What did you say to her?’

‘I told her I held her in contempt, that this whole thing was contemptible…’

Hardy was shaking his head, believing it all now. When Frannie got her dander up, watch out.

‘It got her four days,’ Glitsky said.

‘Four days?’ Hardy gathered himself for a beat. ‘This isn’t about some secret?’

‘What secret? Not that I heard from Chomorro. It’s about Braun.’ Glitsky changed to a hopeful tone. ‘Maybe she’ll talk to you tomorrow, Diz.’

‘No maybe about it,’ Hardy said. ‘I’ll tackle her in the hallway if I have to.’

Frannie reached across the table. ‘Dismas, you can’t let them keep me here. The kids need me. This is some horrible mistake. It just started with this stupid promise. That’s all they wanted.’

‘So what is it? Tell me – I promise, I won’t tell anybody. You can hire me as your attorney and it’ll be privileged. Nobody will ever know and maybe we can use it as a chip. I’ll go wake up the judge at her house, explain the situation…’

Glitsky butted in. ‘I wouldn’t do that. What secret?’

Frannie ignored Abe. ‘They could just ask Ron. You, Dismas, could ask Ron. Go to his house and wake him up. Call him from here even. If he knew I was in jail, he’d tell them what they want to know. He wouldn’t let this happen to me.’

‘What is this secret?’ Glitsky asked again.

Frannie finally raised her voice. ‘The secret isn’t the issue!’ Her eyes pleaded with her husband, trying to tell him something, but what it was remained shrouded in mystery.

Then she shifted her glance quickly to Abe. ‘I promised Ron. I gave him my word. It’s his secret. Dismas, maybe if you could call him or go to his apartment and tell him what’s going on… I’m sure he’ll tell you. Then you come back and get me out of here.’

Abe was sifting through an armful of files he’d brought in from one of the desks in the homicide detail. He found the file he wanted and pitched it across his desk to Hardy. ‘As you recall from your days as a prosecutor, the address is there on the top right. Broadway.’

Hardy glanced down, then looked up. ‘No phone number? A phone number would be nice.’

‘A lot would be nice in that file, Diz. There’s next to nothing there.’ He sighed. ‘My first inspector got himself killed about a week into the case. You might remember him – Carl Griffin?’

Hardy nodded. ‘Yeah. He got killed how?’ He didn’t want to talk about any dead policemen, especially to his best friend the live one, but this might bear on Frannie and he had to know.

‘Some witness meeting went bad, we think.’

Sergeant Inspector Carl Griffin didn ‘t know it, but when he got up from his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice on Monday morning, 5 October, it was for the last time.

He was the lone inspector working the murder of Bree Beaumont, a 36-year-old environmental and, recently, political consultant. He’d been on the case for six days. Griffin had been a homicide inspector for fourteen years and knew the hard truths by now – if you didn’t have a murderer in your sights within four days of the crime, it was likely you never would.

Carl was a plodder with a D in personality. Everybody in homicide, including his lieutenant, Abe Glitsky, considered him the dullest tack in the unit. Loyal and hardworking, true, but also slow, culturally ignorant and hygienically suspect.

Still, on occasion Carl did have his successes. He would often go a week, sometimes ten days, conducting interviews with witnesses and their acquaintances, gathering materials to be fingerprinted and other physical evidence, throwing everything into unlabeled freezer bags in the trunk of his city-issued car. When he was ready, he’d gather all his junk into some semblance of coherence, and sometimes wind up with a convictable suspect.

Not that he often got assigned to cases that needed brains to solve. In San Francisco, nine out of ten homicides were open books. A woman kills a man who’s beating her. A jealous guy kills a wandering girlfriend. Dope deals go bad. Gang bangs. Drunken mistakes.

Low-lifes purifying the gene pool.

In these cases, homicide inspectors collected the evidence that a jury would need to convict the completely obvious suspect and their job was done. Carl was useful here, connecting the dots.

Once in a while, since homicides came in over the transom and got assigned to whoever was on call, Griffin would draw a case that had to be worked. This hadn’t happened in over two years when the call came in about a politically connected white woman on Broadway, so Glitsky really had no choice. It wasn’t apparent at the outset that the case was high profile and if the lieutenant had suspected that it would go ballistic, he would have assigned other inspectors and Carl’s feelings be damned.

But as it was, Griffin got the Beaumont case, and he was in his sixth day, and he hadn’t made an arrest.

After receiving her doctorate from UC Berkeley in the early eighties, Bree had run that institution’s environmental toxicology lab for a couple of years before leaving academia to consult for the Western States Petroleum Association, and later to work for Caloco Oil.

Only a few months before her death, though, she’d abandoned the oil company and changed sides in the volatile wars over the multi-billion-dollar gasoline additive industry. Going public with her opposition to what she had come to believe were cancer-causing additives in California gasoline, Bree had aligned herself with the state assemblyman from San Francisco, Damon Kerry, now running for governor.

The central plank of Kerry’s platform played on the public’s fears that these petroleum-based gasoline additives, particularly a substance called MTBE – methyl tertiary butyl ether – was seeping into California’s groundwater in alarming amounts. It was dangerous and had to be outlawed, but the government wouldn ‘t move on it.

When Bree, the oil industry’s very photogenic baby, had agreed to join his campaign, it had given Kerry a terrific boost. And now, after her death, radio talk shows hummed with theories that the oil companies had killed Bree Beaumont, either in revenge for her defection or to keep her from giving Kerry more and better ammunition to use against them.