Glitsky tipped up his club soda, sucked in a small ice cube, chomped it, looked across at Hardy. "Lanier"-the current head of homicide-"is retiring, you know."

"Nobody's that dumb," Hardy said.

"What's dumb? I'd retire myself if I could afford it."

But Hardy was shaking his head. "I'm not talking about Lanier," he said. "I'm talking about you."

"I'm not retiring."

"No, I know. What you're doing is thinking about asking Batiste to put you back in homicide. Isn't that right?"

"And here I thought I was being subtle."

"You and a train wreck." Hardy sipped some beer. "You talk to Treya about this?"

"Of course."

"What's she say?"

"You'll just do that eye-rolling thing you do, but she says whatever makes me happy makes her happy." At Hardy's reaction, he pointed. "There you go, see?"

"I can't help it," Hardy said. "It's eye-rolling material. Have you talked to Batiste?"

"Not yet. He did me a favor making me deputy chief. I don't want to seem ungrateful."

"Except that you are."

"Well, I've already put in three years there and it's not getting any better."

"And homicide would be?"

Glitsky moved his glass in a little circle of condensation. "It's who I am more. That's all. It's why I'm a cop."

FINALLY GETTING TO the reason they'd come out in the first place.

"It's just so different," Hardy said. "I mean, two years ago, I've got two kids and a wife waiting for me when I come home. We're playing Scrabble around the kitchen table, for Christ's sake. Watching videos together."

"If memory serves, you couldn't wait for that to end. It was so boring."

"Not that boring. And even last year, the Beck's off at BU but at least Vince was still around at home and we'd give a nod to a family dinner a few times a week. Now he's in San Diego and Frannie's a working fool and…it's just so different."

"Empty nest," Glitsky said.

"I thought I was going to love it."

"Well, there you go. Wrong again." He shrugged. "You'll get used to it."

"I don't want to get used to it. I want to love it the way it should be."

"How's that? Should?"

"You know, like go out on dates with my wife, and do fun nonkid things on weekends, stay over places, go back to being my carefree old self."

"Who? I don't believe I ever met him."

"You know what I mean. It just doesn't seem right."

"What? That Frannie's working?"

"No. No, she's wanted to go back to work forever after the kids moved out. I've been totally behind her. Going back to school and everything. I mean, we've been planning on it."

"But you just didn't think it would take so much time away from you?"

Hardy sipped beer, swallowed, blew out heavily. "She's a good woman," he said. "I'm not saying she's not."

"Few better. If you do something stupid with her around this, I'll hunt you down and kill you."

"I'm not going to do anything. I'm just trying to get my head around where we are now. It's like her job is her life all the sudden."

"You ever hang out with yourself during a murder trial? Miss a few dinners, did you?"

"That's not the-" Hardy's tone hardened. "I was bringing in all the money, Abe. I was supporting everybody. That's not the situation now."

"Oh, okay. You're absolutely right. It was different when you did it."

Hardy twirled his glass on the table and stared out across the dimly lit bar. Even going out with his best friend to talk about himself wasn't turning out to be such a party. Things were going to have to change, and as Glitsky said, he was going to have to get used to it. Hell, things had already changed under his nose and he'd barely seen those changes coming. "It's never easy, is it?" he said.

Glitsky chewed some more ice. "What was your first clue?"

AFTER YEARS OF AGGRAVATION and frustration, Hardy had finally broken down and rented some enclosed parking space in his neighborhood. The full double garage was still a long block and a half from his home and it cost him nearly four thousand dollars a year, but its door opened when you pushed a button on your car's visor, it was closer than most of the parking spots he would wind up finding on the streets anyway, it did double duty as a storage unit, and, perhaps best of all, it removed both the family cars from the immediate threat of theft or vandalism, both of which his family had been the victim of three times in the eighteen months before Hardy had plunked down his first rent check.

The walk home tonight wasn't bad, though. He'd stopped after the two beers with Glitsky; his caseload was light at the moment and so he was unencumbered by his usual forty-pound litigator's briefcase; the night was brisk and clear. His two-story "railroad" Victorian on Thirty-fourth Avenue up by Clement was the only stand-alone house on a blockful of apartment buildings. It sported a white picket fence and a neatly maintained, albeit tiny, lawn. A flower-bordered brick walkway hugged one side of the lawn; four steps led up to the small porch, a light on by the door. More flowers grew in window boxes.

Hardy let himself in and flipped on the hall light. The house was called a railroad Victorian because the ground floor was laid out like a railroad car. All of the rooms-living, sitting, dining-opened off the long hallway on Hardy's right as he walked through the house to the back rooms.

Turning on more lights in the kitchen and family room behind it-the house was dead still-he automatically checked in on his tropical fish, sprinkled some food on the water's surface, and stood in much the same attitude of passive repose he'd adopted after his last round of darts earlier that night. After a minute of that, he took a few more steps and found himself in the corner that held the doors to both Rebecca's and Vincent's rooms.

He opened the Beck's first. She'd slept in this room only a couple of weeks before when she'd been home for Thanksgiving, but there was, of course, no sign of her now. The bed was neatly made, the bookshelves organized. Vin had been home, too, and his room was pretty much the same as his sister's, although somehow louder in his absence-it was more a boy's room, with sports and music posters and lots more junk everywhere. Mostly, now, both of the rooms just seemed empty.

Checking the phone for messages (none), then his watch, Hardy called Frannie's cell and got her voice mail. She turned her phone off when she was with clients. He said, "Yo. It's quarter to nine and I'm just starting to cook something that I'm sure is going to be fantastic. If you get this and you're on your way home, let me know and I'll hold dinner. If not, you snooze, you lose. Love you."

Hardy's black cast-iron frying pan hung on a marlin fishhook over the stove, and he took down the ten-pound monster and placed it over one of the stove's burners, turned the gas on, grabbed a pinch of sea salt they kept on the counter next to the stove, and flung it across the bottom of the pan. Whatever he was going to make, salt wouldn't hurt it.

Opening the refrigerator, he rummaged and found mushrooms, an onion, a red pepper, some leftover fettucine with a white sauce he remembered as having been pretty good. He threw away one heavily mildewed tomato, but that still left two that were probably salvageable if he cut them carefully. Unawares, by now he was humming the tune to "Baby, It's Cold Outside"-driving home, he'd been listening to Steve Tyrell's standards on his CD player. The freezer held a four-pack of chicken-and-basil sausages that he loved.

In five minutes, he'd chopped all the ingredients, put them in the pan, added some random herbs and spices and several shakes of Tabasco sauce and a half a cup or so of the Zinfandel he'd opened. He'd just turned the heat down and covered it when the phone rang. Certain that it was Frannie, he picked up on the second ring. "Bob's Beanery."