Juhle wasn't a native San Franciscan, but he'd moved up from the Peninsula for college at San Francisco State and had stayed. He had always loved Clay Street, especially this stretch of it. The gas lamp-style antique streetlights. The elegant gingerbread houses were set back a civilized distance from the sidewalk, usually with a low wall or discreet fence marking the property boundary. And then the landscaping, each house as though it were watching over its own small private park-no bigger than an average front lawn in suburbia-making a totally different statement about taste, urban life, civility.

Judge Palmer's place was in the mold. The house was a three-story Victorian, immaculately kept up. A low, tan stucco wall with a wrought-iron fence ran along the sidewalk. Then behind the wall, a circular driveway swept up to the steps of the porch. In the semicircular garden carved out by the brick drive, a three-tiered stone fountain splashed down into a small lily pond surrounded by flowering shrubs, seemingly every one of which somehow contrived to be in bloom.

The two inspectors had gotten to the scene so quickly that the sergeant from the nearest station, who was supposed to superintend at these types of scenes, hadn't made it yet, but Officer Sanchez, a field-training officer, met them at the front door and told them they could find Mrs. Palmer, apparently in shock, with his rookie partner in the living room, off to their right. The office, with the bodies, was to the left. "Nobody's touched anything in there," he said, "and the wife says she didn't either, except the phone on the desk to call nine one one."

Juhle and Shiu, partnered in homicide now for two months, knew that within minutes they'd be joined by the assistant coroner and the crime scene investigation unit, who would quantify and memorialize, videotape, photograph, examine, fingerprint, and/or book into evidence everything in the room. Depending on how fast the word flew, they could expect a team of field agents from the FBI, since killing a federal judge could be a federal crime. Homeland Security might even want to explore whether there might be a terrorist angle to the judge's murder, and Juhle had to admit that this might not, in fact, be out of the question.

Meanwhile, this was Juhle's chance to get some impressions without interruption, and he wasn't about to pass up the opportunity.

The bodies lay, as advertised, on the floor, mostly hidden from the door behind the desk. The judge was dressed in pale brown slacks, a white dress shirt, and darker brown pullover sweater. The chair, a big, comfortable-looking leather swivel, lay on its side next to the body. There was a small hole in the judge's right cheek and a congealed pool of black blood coming out from under the judge's head onto the clear plastic that protected his rug from the wheels of his chair. The room's lights were on overhead, as was a reading lamp on the desk, which looked pretty much undisturbed.

The woman was much younger than the judge-early twenties max. She wore stonewashed jeans, an undershirt of some kind, and a black sweater that left her midriff exposed. A diamond stud was visible in her navel. She lay flat on her back, her neck skewed a bit where her head had hit the wall behind her as she fell. There was no evident entry wound and no blood under her, although a thin thread of black came from her mouth and ended in a dark puddle on the floor beneath her. A large diamond glittered on a necklace chain out over the sweater.

"Well, it wasn't a robbery," Juhle said.

"No, and it happened fast," Shiu said. "She was standing next to him, the shooter whips it out, and it's bam bam over."

"Maybe." Juhle stood over to the side of the desk where he could see both bodies. But he wasn't looking at the bodies. He was looking at the bookshelves behind the desk. "But maybe bam bam bam. Three shots." Stepping over the woman, he leaned and pointed to a spot on a bookshelf at about the level of his waist, at what appeared to be a gap between two books. "There's a book pushed back in there. I'm guessing we got a slug." He looked some more. "Also good spatter all around it, pretty much the same height."

"Where do you see that?"

Juhle ignored the question. He wasn't here to give a class. "But only with one of them." He stepped back, scanned the bookcase over the woman's body. "Small caliber," he said. "No exit." He crossed over to his right, where a clutch purse was half-wedged into the cushion of a reading chair. He pulled on a pair of plastic gloves. "This ought to tell us who she is," he said.

But it didn't. It contained some cosmetics, a pack of Kleenex, eighty-five dollars and change in cash, a holder for a diaphragm, and a package of Trident chewing gum but no driver's license. No identification of any kind.

Shiu threw a look to the office door. "Where are those guys?"

Juhle shrugged. The crime-scene team would get there when they did.

"I wonder if anybody heard anything."

Juhle wondered if his partner was making these inane comments to fill the dead air, like Dandy Don Meredith on a slow football night. Did Shiu construe this as helpful? The thought made his scalp itch. As for himself, he had no idea if anyone in the neighborhood had heard anything and didn't really wonder about it. He knew that canvassing the residents in the surrounding area was in his and his partner's immediate future. They would find out if anyone saw or heard anything, usual or not. They'd also double-check the 911 log to see about any possibly related calls. But he said, "Unless somebody was right out front, they wouldn't have heard anything. In fact, a bullet this small, I'm surprised there was enough firepower to knock him out of his chair."

"He could have been halfway up. After the first shot to her."

More inanity. Could have, should have, might have been-all of it a waste of breath until they actually had some evidence. Worse, preconceptions formed without evidence interfered with your ability clearly to see the evidence when you actually got it. A big part of the job was to work a case from the facts and not from imagination.

Juhle continued to look around, checking the floor, behind the drapes, just in case. Behind a leather wing chair, leaning over, he made the mistake of putting pressure on his hand as he pushed himself out of his crouch, and he swore as the pain from his broken bones shot up his arm.

"Is that still bothering you?"

"Continuous. I've been trying to figure out some game I can challenge Malinoff to where I can hurt him back. Except he's stronger and quicker than I am at everything. And that's when I'm not crippled and hurting. I'm going to have to cheat. Maybe hire someone to hurt him."

"You can't do that, Dev. You're a cop," Shiu said. "Kids look up to you."

"Oh, yeah, the role model thing. I forgot for a minute. But I wouldn't cheat, anyway, Shiu. It's against my religion."

"You don't have a religion."

"Yeah, I do. Just not a formal one like you do. And one of its main rules is don't cheat."

As far as Juhle knew, Shiu was probably the only Asian Mormon in the state of California. And now he couldn't pass up the opportunity for his continuing missionary work. "That's a main LDS rule, too, Dev. You're halfway to being one of us. With some training and prayer, you could-"

"Shiu." Juhle went to put up his hand, but the pain stopped him, and he grimaced again. "Haven't we done this? We're in the city of tolerance, right? Hell, we celebrate our diversity. I tolerate your religion. You tolerate me not having one."

"But I don't like it, Dev. Our jobs, you know, we could get killed any day without any warning. I don't want to see you die and cast into outer darkness."