"Yes, I think so."

"You talked to her personally," Shiu asked, "and she was going first to meet a client at her house. Did she do that a lot? Meet clients at their homes?"

"I think so, yes. Sometimes. It depended."

Suddenly Juhle broke in. "Do you know the name Staci Rosalier? Was she one of Andrea's clients?"

Carla shook her head. "No. That name isn't familiar. I'm sorry."

"Nothing to be sorry about, ma'am," Shiu said. "Did Andrea tell you who she was going to see?"

"Yes. Carol Manion. You know the Manions? Except she never got there."

"How do you know that?" Shiu asked. "Did you call her?"

In Carla's nervous state, the question appeared to startle her. "Who?"

"Mrs. Manion."

A haunted expression of guilt settled in Carla's dark eyes. "Well, no. I mean, there was no reason to last night before I left, and then…because she called here instead. I mean, the office. Later last night. There was a message on Andrea's line when I got in this morning."

"From Mrs. Manion?"

Head sunk into her shoulders, she nodded. "Wondering if Andrea had forgotten or gotten the wrong day or something. Which of course Andrea would never do."

"No." Juhle made circles with his index finger on the table. "So she never made it to the Manions? If she was going there at all."

"I think she was. That's where she told me she was going. Then coming back here."

"And that," Juhle asked, "is the last you've heard from her?"

She reached under her glasses and brushed away a tear. "As far as I know," she said, "that's the last anyone's heard from her."

Wes Farrell's work environment didn't bear much resemblance to the other law offices Hunt visited throughout the city. It took up nearly the entire third floor of a stately renovated building in the heart of downtown. A casual visitor who came up via the elevator in the underground parking lot-thereby avoiding the formal reception area and bustling legal offices on the floors below-might reach the conclusion that this was the private residence of an eccentric and spectacularly slovenly person.

Farrell's mostly unused desk sat over in the corner under one of the windows, which left the rest of the space free to resemble a living room, with an overstuffed couch and matching easy chairs, a couple of floor lamps, a Salvation Army coffee table. A Nerf basketball net graced the wall by the door. Farrell had willy-nilly pinned up some old and unframed advertising prints from the Fillmore era and one poster of Cheryl Tiegs walking out of some water somewhere wearing a see-through bathing suit and a killer smile. The counter and cabinets on the left-hand wall might have been a college student's kitchen, with the sink and coffee machine and mugs out, and binders of stuff, legal pads, and books scattered about everywhere.

But nobody was enjoying the place at the moment. Farrell, slouched on the couch, his feet up on the table, summed it up for all of them. "I'm getting a bad feeling here."

Wu slumped in one of the easy chairs, hands folded in her lap. Hunt, who'd charged out of McClelland's a few blocks away after his depos finished up, was standing by the television perched on a low wall unit under the street windows. He reached over and switched the thing off. They'd just finished watching today's Donolan wrap-up on Trial TV, featuring only Richard Tombo, no mention at all of Andrea Parisi. "Amy and I, we're ahead of you on that one, Wes," he said. He turned to Amy. "You talked to Spencer recently?"

"Forty-five minutes ago," she said. "She hasn't called. He's thinking it's serious."

"He's right," Hunt said. "So, as far as we know, nobody's talked to her since she left to go to the Manions?"

"Do we know she even did that?" Farrell asked.

Hunt nodded. "She took her car. We know that. It was in her garage when I dropped her off at her house, and it wasn't there last night."

"So where's the car?" Wu asked.

"No lo se." Hunt blew out in frustration. "And apparently she never made it out to her meeting. Manion called her office and asked where she was-if she'd forgotten the appointment."

"So she just gets in her car and disappears?" Farrell asked.

"So far," Hunt said, "that's what we've got. It's not good." He walked over to the seating area, straddled the armrest on the other easy chair. "And while we're at it, here's the other thing I've been wondering about most of the day. She'd just found out she wasn't going to get the anchor gig in New York, right? She was badly hungover. She even thought that slapping Spencer might cost her the regular gig on Trial TV, with ramifications if it got out at Piersall as well."

"You're saying she might have killed herself?" Wu asked.

Hunt didn't want to think that but knew that it wasn't impossible. People were complicated, endlessly unknowable. What he had interpreted as a hopeful beginning, she could have seen as another possibly tawdry episode in a life that might have been filled with similar connections. He said, "I've got Tamara calling emergency rooms all around the state because it's the only thing I can think of. But you know her better than I do, Amy. What do you think?"

"Do I think she might have killed herself? I want to say no, but…"

Hunt's cell phone rang and, holding up a finger to Wu, he got it and moved over to the window for better reception. "Yeah, we just saw it, too," he said. Then, "I know… Uh-huh. Sutter Street, Wes Farrell's place upstairs… Yeah, we're all here now… What about?…Okay, just a sec." He turned back to face the room, spoke to Farrell and Wu in a suddenly husky voice. "Devin wants to come up and say hi to all of us. It's about this. We all gonna be here for ten more minutes?" He got nods all around and went back to the phone. "Okay, Dev, we're here. Sure, it's your call."

When he closed the phone, he remained standing by the window, facing out. His shoulders rose, fell, rose again.

"Wyatt," Wu said with some concern. "What is it?"

Finally, he turned around. "It's just that Devin and Shiu are homicide, and they want to come up here and talk about Andrea." He let out a long breath. "Homicide means somebody's dead."

The next few minutes passed in an agonized semi-silence. At one point, Wu said, "If they had anything definite, it would have been on the news. Especially what we just watched. They can't have anything."

"Unless the police didn't tell them or asked them to sit on it. But let's hope," Farrell said.

Hunt called Tamara again, found out that Andrea hadn't been admitted to any of the emergency rooms she'd called so far, although she still had another ten or fifteen to call in the nine-county Bay Area alone, to say nothing of the state at large. It was going to be a while.

The conference phone buzzed and Farrell picked it up and said, "Good. Send him up."

The first sight of Juhle's face was reassuring. He looked done in after a long day of work, but it didn't look like he was here to deliver the kind of bad news they'd all been fearing-his eyes, in fact, appeared lit up with a kind of expectation. But the sense of relief hadn't gotten any chance to take hold before Wu asked if they'd heard anything about Andrea.

"Just tell us she's not dead," Farrell added.

Juhle shook his head. "Not that I know of. You got any reason to think she's dead?"

"You do homicides, Dev," Hunt said. "You wanted to talk to us."

"I did. I do. And it's a homicide, all right, but not hers." He looked into the three concerned faces in front of him. "I just came from talking to Rich Tombo down outside the Hall after his gig. He'd called and left a message that he felt there was something he needed to tell me. Any of you guys hear the rumor that Andrea Parisi had been romantically involved with Judge Palmer?"