They just got back to the car when Juhle's phone went off, and he picked it off his belt on the first beep, checked the number coming in, said, "Talk to me, Shiu. Make me happy."

But the call didn't produce that effect. After listening for less than a minute, shaking his head back and forth the whole time, he said, "I'm just leaving San Quentin with Wyatt Hunt. No, not the prison, Shiu. San Quentin, the burger joint. You don't know it? Out by the Cliff House. Awesome fries. Anyway, we might have something else maybe. But he can drop me back at the Hall. I'll tell you about it then."

"Let me guess," Hunt said when Juhle closed the phone. "The ballistics didn't match."

"I hate that guy," Juhle said.

On the rest of the drive back down to the city, Juhle made a couple more phone calls to verify that neither Andrea nor Arthur Mowery had turned up. No, to both.

After another lengthy phone call, during which Juhle asked a few questions but was mostly silent, he rang off. "That was Jeff Elliot. 'CityTalk'?" This was a popular Chronicle column that often dealt with the law and its practitioners.

"I know him well. What did he know?"

"Basically, everything. But I only asked him-you heard me-if he knew what it took to bring a guy in on parole violation. Give up? His parole officer says he's violated, period. Smoked a joint. Hung out with the wrong person. No warrant, no proof required. Is there any kind of hearing on this? Any moment with a judge or jury or lawyer?"

"I'm guessing no."

"You'd be right. So your violated parolee finally gets all the way back to prison and what happens?"

"They have a big welcome-back party?"

"Right. Balloons and everything. But after that, within thirty-five days he gets a hearing before a violation committee composed entirely of correctional officers, and guess what percentage of the time they uphold the violation?"

"A hundred and ten?"

"Close. Ninety-nine and a half. So then our guy gets up to a year on the violation. And this can be continued up to three years even if you're originally in on a one-year sentence. Can you appeal? Sure. It takes eight months and succeeds point oh-five percent of the time. One in two hundred."

"Was Elliot going to write a book on this or something?" Hunt asked.

"I hit him on a good day. He talked my ear off. I told you he knew everything. You want any more facts?"

"Does it have to be on the union? I'd like to know the depth of Lake Tahoe."

"Too deep to dive to the bottom. That's all you need to know. Here's your last real question, though. How many inmates in California prisons are there for violating parole? I'm talking percentages."

"Nineteen?"

"Fifty."

"That would be half."

"Correct."

"So more than nineteen percent?"

"Way more, Wyatt. Way more."

Juhle had to wait for Shiu, but Hunt had his own wheels and his own agenda, and he wasn't going to wait for anybody anymore, not when he felt they were getting this close. He finally dropped Juhle off at the Hall of Justice on Bryant, went around the corner and up to Mission and, doing his best imitation of Mickey Dade's driving techniques, turned left. The parole office for units 1-3 was six blocks down, and if Phil Lamott wasn't at that one, number 4 wasn't much farther away. It had gotten to midafternoon, between two thirty and three, now almost exactly forty-eight hours since he'd left Andrea at her house. Having worked within the city's bureaucracy for a good portion of his life, Hunt knew that there was a better than reasonable chance that parole officers, like his former CPS coworkers, would be at the office on Friday afternoons, getting their paperwork filled out before the weekend.

Close-up, Hunt put Lamott at about his own age. He wore his dirty-blond hair a bit long by police standards. He'd had bad acne at one time, and now tried to cover the scars, mostly unsuccessfully, with a short yet scraggly beard and wispy mustache. He was hunched over a dinosaur of a manual typewriter to the side of his cluttered desk, pecking away, filling in some official-looking form.

"Officer Lamott?"

His fingers stopped. His head turned. Hunt immediately recognized the expression from his days at CPS-don't let this be more work with only a couple of hours to go until the weekend. "Yeah. How can I help you?" No turn to face his visitor, no offered hand.

Hunt introduced himself, flashed his ID. The explanation of his involvement that Juhle had given to Warden Harron had been a good one for a sense of legitimacy, and he used it again. "I'm working with a law firm in town, Piersall-Morton, trying to locate one of their attorneys who's gone missing."

"Andrea Parisi," Lamott said. The story still big news.

"Right."

"What's she got to do with me?"

"Nothing. But she may have something to do with Arthur Mowery."

This got his attention. He abandoned his typewriter and swung around. "What do you mean?"

Hunt realized that in order to make any sense of the scenario they were pursuing, he'd have to give Lamott the same kind of in-depth explanation that he'd provided for Harron. This he wasn't prepared to do for any number of reasons, not the least of which was that any conspiracy theory involving CCPOA members more or less contemplated the involvement if not of Lamott himself, then of someone in an analogous position.

So he kept it simple, omitting any mention of the Palmer/Rosalier murders. "I mean the police are now considering him a person of interest in her disappearance."

"Arthur? Did he know her somehow?"

"I was hoping to get that from you. I'm assuming you're the one that violated him the two times he's gotten out."

"Yeah, that was me. Both times."

"What did he do?"

"The usual. He was loaded. He's a crackhead, but you probably knew that. What would he have…you're saying you think he abducted Parisi or something?"

"The police must think so. I got it from them."

"They're talking to private investigators nowadays?"

"I'm trying to locate her. They're trying to find him. We're cooperating."

"They give any reason? They have any evidence?"

"Not to me and, no, not that I know of."

Lamott pulled at one side of his mustache, then the other. He squeezed the meat of his lower lip. "So what's their interest based on? Is there a ransom note? Did he call from somewhere?"

Hunt feigned ignorance. He was asking his own questions. "I noticed he went about eight years between arrests?"

"He got married and straightened out for a while. He moved up to El Dorado Hills, someplace like that, evidently lived like a citizen until his wife left him a couple of years ago."

"Isn't that a little odd? A guy with his record? Especially with the violence. You'd expect a DV"-domestic violence-"complaint, wouldn't you? Something."

"Maybe not. People get better." Lamott shrugged. "It happens. Get off the dope, you're okay. But you're right, either way, Arthur's a violent guy."

"He's got an attempted murder by firearm on his sheet. Last time you picked him up-Saturday, wasn't it?-he had a gun on him, too. I understand he got into some shit in prison. You believe he really was straight for eight years?"

"Yeah, I do. More or less."

"You see him during that time?"

"A couple of times. Like I told you, he moved up by Sacramento, so he reported up there."

"And never got violated?"

"Apparently not."

"Until he got down here, and you hauled him in?"

"Right."

"After eight years?"