A half hour later, Wu and Brandt were gone. His cigar finished, Hunt got up to leave at the same time they did, but after stopping by the bathroom on his way out, he caught another glimpse of Parisi at the bar. Without conscious thought, he boosted himself up onto an empty stool against the wall in the back corner, where he was all but invisible.

Tombo was gone, too. It was just Fairchild and Parisi, heads close to each other. From the suddenly drawn and empty look on Parisi's face, Hunt found it hard to imagine her laughing about anything. She turned her face away from Fairchild, and the bar's dim amber light reflected off the line of her cheek, and Hunt realized with a start that he was looking at the track of a tear and that she was crying.

Fairchild was leaning over, in toward her, when in a flash, she straightened and turned back to him. Her hand moved in a blur. At the same instant, Hunt heard the bitterly angry "Fuck you!" that brought the bar to a sudden silence along with the report of the slap against Fairchild's cheek. Again, "Just fuck you, Spencer!"

And then she was off her stool and moving unsteadily around the end of the bar to the front door. In the tense silence, Hunt heard a throaty sob escape as she pushed the front door open roughly enough to slam it against the side of the building. Outside, she stood for a half second, looking both ways, and then turned to her right and began to run.

Hunt was on his feet before the door closed, out onto the sidewalk and after her. She had less than a hundred feet on him. The sound she was making echoed between the downtown buildings. She seemed almost to be wailing-a continuous if staccato moaning punctuated by her footfalls. Hunt called her name and broke into a run after her.

Before the next corner, the street fell off more sharply and Parisi's voice rose in a startled yelp as she pitched forward, went down, and rolled to a whimpering stop into the gutter on Montgomery Street. In seconds, Hunt was next to her, trying to turn her over, see if she was all right.

But hearing a man's voice, her eyes clouded with tears and she lashed out at him wildly, screaming, "No! No! No! Leave me alone."

He didn't let her go but held her as she struggled against him. "Andrea, it's okay. It's okay. It's Wyatt."

Parisi, struggling against him, saying, "No, no, no, no."

"It's Wyatt, Andrea. Let's get you up."

"Can't." Closing her eyes, "Going to be sick."

Her body began to spasm. Hunt turned her head and held her as she lost her last couple of drinks and most of her meal.

"Okay," he said, "it's okay. Just let it go. You'll be all right."

When she seemed to have finished, he pulled off his tie and cleaned her face with it, leaving it in the gutter. Getting her to her feet, he backed her away from the curb. Her purse had flown away from her on her fall and was now in the middle of the street. He set her down against the nearest building while he went to get it. When he came back, her eyes were closed, her breathing ragged. Going into a squat, he touched her cheek.

"Andrea, can you hear me?"

She barely moved.

"Do you think we can get you home?"

No response.

He opened her purse, found a wallet, opened it up for her address. She lived someplace on Larkin Street, which ran way the hell up to the north end of the city. Hunt looked at his watch-nearly midnight. For all of its congestion during the workday, this time of night Montgomery was deserted. No cars had passed the whole time he'd been here.

Now he saw a cab on its way toward them. He got to the side of the road, put his hand out. The cab pulled up and stopped, and Hunt went to the driver's window. "My girlfriend's had too much to drink," he said, pointing over to Parisi. "If you can just give me a minute."

The cabbie was a middle-aged black man in a Giants cap and jacket. "You need some help?" he asked.

In a minute, they had her in the backseat, passed out.

"You want to take her to emergency?"

Hunt almost said yes, then decided that it might cause her more trouble. She was breathing. She'd had way too much to drink, but she wasn't going to die. And the emergency room meant complications with her job and her TV work. He didn't want to cause her any further problems. He just wanted to get her through this.

"I don't think so. Just home." He gave his address.

The cabbie turned the corner and stepped on the gas.

The morning interviews with Jeannette Palmer and the briefing sessions with both the FBI and Homeland Security blew Juhle and Shiu through lunchtime. After hitching a ride back downtown with Assistant Coroner Janey Parks, they picked up their normal car and headed back out to Clay Street to start talking to neighbors and look over anything else CSI turned up.

Which was not much.

A slug in the book that Juhle had noticed verified the murder weapon caliber as.22. Mostly based on the accuracy of the shots and gunshot residue on the desk, the forensics folks had determined that the shooter was probably standing very close to if not at the very front of the desk. Although further tests would seek to amplify the initial data, which was sketchy at best, this in turn led Shiu to surmise-based on the blood splatter and trajectory angle through the book-that the shooter was either a short man or a woman.

Juhle flinched. He knew that there were too many variables in the relative positions of the gun and the targets to draw conclusions. How could one possibly distinguish, for example, a tall man who shot from the hip from a short man holding the gun at shoulder height? He couldn't stop himself. "So, a man or a woman. Imagine that. As opposed to, say, a chimpanzee, which was my first choice."

The neighborhood was a bust as well, with one perhaps important exception. Shari Levin, who lived directly across the street from the Palmers and who had gone out to her bridge party at about seven thirty, had noticed what she thought was Mrs. Palmer's car parked out in the street. She noticed because she wondered why she hadn't parked as usual in her own circular driveway. At least it was the same basic type of car-"one of those sports convertibles you see everywhere nowadays."

She knew Mrs. Palmer drove the same BMW Z4 that was parked in the driveway now, and she thought it had been that car, although it had been near dusk and the car was dark, too. Juhle and Shiu filed the information, knowing full well that if it hadn't been Mrs. Palmer's, the car in question might well turn out to be an Audi, a Porsche, or a Mercedes. Even a Honda. In more rigorous questioning, all Ms. Levin had finally given them was that she'd barely glanced and hardly noticed, but there had definitely been a car on the street, parked up flush to the driveway, and she thought at the time that it had been Mrs. Palmer's. Whose else would it have been?

So they hadn't exactly broken the case wide open in the first few hours. Not that they expected to, but public forbearance over slow progress would be short-lived. Chief Batiste made that crystal clear in his afternoon press conference when he said that the murder of a federal judge struck at the very heart of our free society and that the apprehension of the guilty party for this atrocity would be the top priority of his police department until the case was solved. The "my police department" was ominous. He would take the credit for success and the blame for failure. He promised results-and fast.

Juhle hated when they did that. Batiste had no idea what they had, what they were working with; he hadn't the vaguest notion of the complexity of the crime. In fact, no one did yet. But Batiste was promising quick results. Stupid and counterproductive, and now all on the heads of Juhle and Shiu.