"What's your point?"

Hunt thought the point was obvious enough-Mowery had protection of some kind in Sacramento and got thrown to the wolves down here when he had stopped cooperating-but he didn't want to antagonize Lamott so that he wouldn't talk to him anymore. "I just find it curious," he said. Then he tacked. "So what'd he do? For work?"

"Mechanic. Mostly private planes."

"That's a little unusual, isn't it?"

"I don't know. He's got a pilot's license and knows airplanes pretty well. He's a pretty sharp guy, actually, unless he's strung out. But I go call on him Saturday and he's loaded, I've got no choice. I've got to violate him."

"He's got a pilot's license?" Hunt with visions of Mowery dropping Andrea miles out over the ocean.

"Suspended now. And of course no plane. Although that's a question."

"What is?"

Suddenly suspicion showed in the sallow face. "The cops didn't tell you this? They should know."

"I'm looking for her," Hunt repeated. "They're looking for him."

Apparently, this was good enough. "A small plane, a Cessna I think, got stolen out of Smith Ranch Airport on Monday night. It still hasn't turned up."

" Smith Ranch Airport? I don't know it."

"It's a private place. Small planes. Lots of tie-downs, no security to speak of. It's near San Rafael, and as a flier himself, Arthur definitely would have known about it. You want to know the truth, the whole airplane connection is where CDC's been concentrating their efforts to find him."

"And where is it? Smith Ranch?"

"I don't know exactly-maybe three, three and a half miles from San Quentin." Suddenly another thought struck Lamott with an almost visible force. "Maybe I don't remember, but Parisi hasn't been gone since Monday, has she? It's been that long?"

"No. Wednesday afternoon."

"Hmm. Well, not saying that Arthur definitely hotwired and stole the plane, but if he did, and he certainly could have, he was long gone by then."

Down the street from the parole office, Hunt sat out in his car, trying to figure out what he had missed. And of course, as Lamott had said, it was still possible that Mowery had not stolen the Cessna at all. Or, for all Hunt knew, since Mowery was a flight mechanic, he might even have absconded with the plane out of Smith Ranch Airport, flown under everyone's radar to any one of the small private airports near the city, and committed all sorts of mayhem in San Francisco. But suddenly what had seemed almost too obvious only an hour before had become implausible if not impossible.

Lamott's reactions to Hunt's questions, or more precisely the lack of them, were instructive as well. Mention of one of his parolees had not sparked a trace of defensiveness, as it certainly would have if Lamott were involved in a conspiracy to break Mowery out of San Quentin so that he could assassinate a federal judge. Lamott appeared to be exactly what he was-a functionary in a civil service job that made few demands on his time or personal life. It was hard for Hunt to imagine the low-affect Lamott as any kind of player in the high drama and secrecy of the union's political arm. To this particular parole officer, Arthur Mowery was clearly just another one of the hundreds of mostly pathetic lowlifes he processed through the system again and again and again. Mowery may have had a controller among the parole officers in the Sacramento region, directing him in the union's mayhem, but Hunt couldn't put Lamott in the role.

Juhle had told him that half of California's prison population were parole offenders, but more than that, he remembered hearing that something like seventy percent of everybody out on parole in California got violated back in, which was twice the national average. Parole officers like Lamott weren't in the business of helping prisoners break out of jail, that was for sure. Not for any reason. The entire thrust of the CCPOA bureaucracy was to keep 'em in, keep the population up so there'd be more jails and more guards.

But all this left Hunt with a great hollowness. There had been a symmetry and even some elegance to the idea of the union as the solution to Andrea's disappearance. She and Palmer had both been involved with it on many levels. The judge's latest order was a great and immediate threat to the union's very survival. Andrea's clandestine research on the labor organization's apparent crimes furthering its political agenda may have been unearthed and exposed her to reprisal. But all of it, taken together, depended upon the belief that the union was engaged not just in systematic harassment but in actual premeditated contract murder.

And if that were the case, and Jim Pine had a war chest of many millions of dollars, which he did, then why would he use, at best, quasi-reliable parolees when he could simply pay professionals on the outside to do the same job more efficiently and with less possible downside? But if nothing else, Juhle had been adamant about one fact through all of their investigations: The Palmer/Rosalier murders didn't look like they'd been done by a professional.

That's what had led them to consider the parolee option in the first place. And now that theory, too, appeared to be fatally flawed.

Which left what?

Hunt pulled out his cell phone. He'd had it off all day and knew that if the damn thing rang right now as he was holding it, he wouldn't answer unless it was one of his gang. Thank God for caller ID. He had missed five more calls in the course of the day, though, and scanning down the list, he saw that they were all clients. Probably all at the very least frustrated with him; at the worst, furious.

Well, he couldn't help that. Not now. Not until this was over.

He'd have to get used to it.

Hunt closed up the phone, turned it off again, unclamped his jaw, threw the Cooper into gear, and pulled out into the street. Wisps of windswept fog condensed on his windshield and forced him to put his wipers on intermittent. He continued south and eventually pulled up half a block short of the Mission Street BART station, where he found a spot to park. Five minutes later, he was eating what he considered the biggest and best burrito in the city.

He kept coming back to Juhle's reluctance to accept the coincidence of Rosalier's presence at Palmer's when someone just happened to stop by to shoot him. Staci had always been there in the picture somehow, providing a tenuous link between Palmer and Andrea, but the CCPOA had always until now assumed a much greater prominence. Now, with all other options either discredited or disproved-it hadn't been the wife, it probably hadn't been Arthur Mowery. A professional in the employ of the union would have done a cleaner, more efficient job of the killings. Hunt could still give no credence to Juhle's early idea that Andrea herself committed the double homicide and then either ran or killed herself, and in any event, they'd tested her clothing and the weapons at her house and found no evidence to implicate her.

Itching to move, but with no place to go, Hunt sipped at his Coke, barely tasted the burrito.

Turning it all over, viewing it from every angle.

There were three victims. Start there.

If Hunt played Juhle's game and ruled out coincidence, these victims must all have been somehow related.

He sat indoors at a red plastic table. Too late for lunch, too early for dinner, there was only one other customer, a woman in her sixties or early seventies who was working on a bowl of albondigas a couple of tables down. Watching her, Hunt's mind flashed to Carol Manion of all people, whom he'd seen at Palmer's funeral that morning. Suddenly, it occurred to him that her association with the case, tangential at best, had always been because she'd made an appointment with Andrea Parisi. Parisi had been her connection, not Palmer. But now, apparently, if she'd been at his funeral, perhaps she'd known Palmer as well.