She had felt his eyes on her. Stupid, but it had been there. It was the first time she’d felt that kind of easy attraction in five years or more. More.

But – a cop to her bones – she wasn’t above using that attraction to get Graham to open up to her, as she’d done at his place. She could smile and feign enthrallment with his every word, and what made it work was that it wasn’t all acting.

And maybe, when she thought about it, it had been as Pratt had thought – Graham helping his father out of his misery. If that had been the case, Sarah didn’t necessarily have a problem with it. She had doctor friends who’d told her about pulling the plug at the request of anguished relatives of suffering patients. She didn’t think the practice ought to be institutionalized, lest it be abused, but she understood it privately.

Or maybe Graham hadn’t been any part of it. Even Strout’s autopsy, she had to admit, called the death suicide/homicide equivocal. In other words, Sal might have killed himself. The forensic evidence didn’t rule out that possibility. In any event, it was behind her now, and she wasn’t going to think about it, not tonight. Her softball team had a game.

She lived alone in a two-bedroom over a grocery store on the corner of Balboa and Fifteenth Avenue. When she opened the door, she stopped on her landing, loving the unusual – in San Francisco, almost unheard of – feel of a warm night. It was great to be in the yellow nylon Blazers shirt, the dark-green shorts, the yellow knee socks. She yanked the gold baseball cap with the green B down over her hair, pulled her ponytail through the adjusting slot in the back.

Forget the cop world. She was thirty-two years old, in great shape. She had the job she wanted and had worked for, but it didn’t rule her every waking moment. She knew it might, though, if she didn’t have other interests.

That was one of the reasons she played serious, organized women’s softball. It relieved the stress. It also guaranteed that she maintained her separate existence outside of the world defined by the Hall of Justice.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the grocery window as she passed it on the way to her car. She looked about eighteen. Life was good. The ball was going to carry a mile.

‘Oh, Graham, thank God you’re all right!’ His mother, Helen, rushed down the steps of the Manor in the exclusive Seacliff neighborhood on the northwest rim of San Francisco. He was only halfway up the slate walkway that bisected the enormous sloping lawn, and she ran down to greet him in the warm evening. She barely came up to his neck, but held his shoulders in her hands and pressed her cheek against his chest, a hug.

He put his arms around her and waited. The door to the Manor still hung open, but no one else appeared.

The skin on his mother’s face was as smooth as marble. Though he knew that several cosmetic surgeries stretched it to its limits, the results so far were seamless; she looked a decade younger than her age. This, Graham knew, was fortunate given the person she was married to, the role she played.

Helen had always attracted men, with her wide-set blue eyes, high cheekbones, cornsilk hair. Now, in the warm dusk, dressed in tailored pants and a scoop-necked blue cotton blouse, she could have been Graham’s girlfriend, not his mother. Beyond a doubt, on the outside she was a beautiful woman, as befitted Leland Taylor’s trophy wife.

He wondered if the mom she used to be when she was with Sal, when he’d adored her, before their lives had changed – he wondered if she had looked the same. In his memory her face had had a different quality back then, a softness. It wasn’t the one he was looking at now.

She pulled away and gazed up at him, a hand softly up to his cheek. ‘You look tired, Graham. They didn’t hurt you down there, did they?’

‘It wasn’t even a day, Mom. In and out.’

‘We would have come to see you – to the jail, I mean – but we didn’t know how you… we thought your lawyer would tell us something, but we never heard from him at all. I don’t think we know him, Dismas Hardy, do we? What kind of name is that, Dismas? But it was a mistake, after all, wasn’t it?’

He leaned over and kissed her. ‘It was all a mistake,’ he said. He met her eyes. ‘All of it, Mom. Every bit. I didn’t kill Sal. I didn’t help him die.’

A brief flash of perfect teeth. She took his arm and started steering him up the walkway. ‘Of course you didn’t. Now come on up. The family needs to talk about this. I’m so glad you could come right over.’

After Hardy had dropped Graham back at his apartment, he’d played back his mother’s message. It was the last of a half dozen on his answering machine – she’d called after his release had made the news. He’d taken a quick shower to wash away the jail. Within twenty minutes he’d been on his way to the Manor.

But the message had given him the impression only that his mother had been worried about him. She wanted to see him to make sure he was all right. Apparently, though, this was a misreading. ‘The whole family’s here?’

So his mother’s real purpose in running out to greet him, he realized, was to warn him what to expect when he entered the house, calm him down if he exploded. This was how it had always worked. He was the hothead, the emotional one. Most of the time Mom could neutralize him before he raised his voice or caused anyone to feel any embarrassment, the two cardinal sins in Leland Taylor’s home.

‘We decided earlier today to get together, Graham, after they’d arrested you.’ Holding his arm – protectively? to restrain him? – she stopped walking and looked up at him. ‘We thought we needed a strategy on how to deal with this, this whole situation.’

Graham recognized his stepfather’s involvement in this move. Leland Taylor probably strategized before he washed his hands.

‘Present a united front, you know.’

‘To who?’

But his mother continued, ignoring the question. ‘And then when you got out-’

‘You were all naturally so relieved…’

‘Graham. Of course we were. Don’t be like that.’

‘I hope Leland didn’t lose any business over the scandal. But, oh, that’s right then, why would he? My last name’s different. Nobody would have to know. That’s what this meeting’s about, isn’t it? Keeping a lid on it.’

‘No.’ His mother had been given her marching orders and she was a soldier. No wavering. ‘Emphatically not, Graham. We were worried about you.’

‘Which explains why everybody rushed on down to jail to see how they could help.’

Exasperated, his mother shook his head. ‘I’ve already explained that.’ She stopped one last time at the foot of the stairs that led up to the grand double-doored entrance. ‘Please don’t be difficult, Graham. Try to understand.’

He looked down at his mother’s face. Was it ravished or ravishing beauty? He could no longer tell. Of course, there were no worry lines. Lasers had erased them. He did think – hope? – he read some concern in her eyes, but he couldn’t tell for sure if it was for him or the mission upon which she had been dispatched, and which seemed now to be tottering on the brink of failure.

Helen Taylor’s husband’s family money came from banking. Roland Taylor had founded Baywest Bank in the late forties. Leland senior carried the torch for three decades through the late fifties and had passed it to his only son by the early eighties. Over the years the bank had merged and gobbled and steadily grown.

For a San Francisco entity it was remarkably conservative. The bank did not prefer to lend money to new or small businesses. It did not have a woman or person of color beyond middle management. It did not run touchy-feely ads on the television and had an all but open disdain for, as George called it, the ‘passbook crowd.’