She tipped the can. ‘That letter from your dad,’ she said, ‘you were playing pro baseball?’

He didn’t answer right away. On the field the shortstop went deep into the hole for a ground ball, flipped it back to second, then on to first for a double play. It ended the half inning.

Graham finished up his beer. ‘I thought I could hook on as a replacement during the strike. I couldn’t.’ He risked a look at her. ‘I really didn’t follow you,’ he said. ‘This is where I come sometimes, that’s all. Then I saw you, watched you play a little. I figured, what the hell, we’re both here, I might as well say hello. It didn’t occur to me you’d think I’d followed you.’

‘But I arrested you.’

Graham nodded, a smile tugging at his lips. ‘I did notice that.’

‘Most people,’ she said, ‘you arrest them, they don’t like you anymore.’

‘But then they let me go. They’re not charging me. So you and me, we’re both citizens.’

‘I don’t think so, not exactly. I’m still a cop. You’re still a suspect.’

He chewed on that for a beat, then shrugged it off. ‘Well, guess what? I myself am an officer of the court. And P.S., I didn’t kill my father.’ He indicated the field. ‘You play pretty good, Sergeant. I saw your triple.’

She found herself loosening up. ‘Most exciting offensive play in the game.’

‘So my dad said.’

‘You still think so?’

‘Sure.’

‘Me too.’

‘Well, there.’ Graham pulled another beer from underneath his seat, popped the top. ‘Something else we’ve got in common. You want another one?’

She’d nearly finished the first. Sarah had never been much of a drinker, and she was already feeling the slow warmth of even so little alcohol beginning to spread. ‘I’d better not,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to be going. Work starts early.’

‘I remember,’ he said.

She hesitated another couple of seconds, taken aback by his ready acquiescence, surprised at the act of will it took for her to stand. ‘Thanks for the beer,’ she said.

He nodded. She’d gone off a couple of steps when he stopped her. ‘Sergeant Evans?’

She turned.

‘What’s your first name?’

Her face clouded, then suddenly cleared! She shook her head, laughing at herself, then met his eyes. ‘Sarah.’

‘Sarah,’ he repeated. His smile seemed completely genuine. Endearing. ‘I love that name.’

Back in her car, she checked her face in the rearview mirror. She felt absurdly pleased with herself and wondered if it showed. So what? Graham Russo liked her name. Big deal.

The warmth had spread. She told herself it was the alcohol. She’d better be careful driving home.

Great rivers may begin with a tiny trickle, but the creation of an avalanche does not occur in the same way, where one snowflake adheres to another and the growing mass slowly coalesces until it simply begins to fall over itself. No, an avalanche just happens - all at once the side of a mountain gives way, coming loose with explosive force, unstoppable and indiscriminate, rearranging the landscape of everything in the path of its inanimate will.

By two A.M. on Thursday morning, less than eight hours after Graham Russo’s release from jail, the momentum of the avalanche had pushed every other issue in San Francisco off the political map. By that hour the early-morning edition of the San Francisco Chronicle was coming off the press with the banner headline: ‘Mercy Killing Debate Rips City, State Offices.’ The long story merely scratched at the surface of the many fronts on which the battle had erupted simultaneously.

The mayor supported the district attorney. San Francisco had always been in the forefront of social awareness. Sharron Pratt had done the right thing. People shouldn’t be forced to live in unrelenting pain. Where was the quality in a life like that? If a person chose to take his or her own life to end their suffering, they had the right to do so, and the people who helped them were not murderers. They were heroes.

Dan Rigby, the city’s chief of police, was outraged. This was the latest and most serious example of the DA’s utter disdain for the police who kept the city safe. His officers had acted correctly in arresting a homicide suspect. There was no evidence that the death of Sal Russo had been anything but a murder in the course of a robbery.

But even if it had been an assisted suicide, ‘The DA is elected to enforce the laws, not make them. I shudder to wonder what other kinds of homicides Ms Pratt is going to decide are not crimes.’

Dean Powell, the state attorney general, was studying the case, refusing to disclose, or foreclose, any of his options. Art Drysdale, formerly of the DA’s office (and fired by Pratt) and now with the state attorney general, would only comment that ‘as a matter of law it’s unambiguous that we have jurisdictional responsibility. We’re not going to let murders go unpunished in San Francisco.’

The Board of Supervisors called an emergency session for late in the evening, and declared by a 9 to 2 majority that San Francisco should be a ‘right-to-die’ haven – the country needed a humanitarian city that would become a mecca for the terminally ill and hopelessly suffering.

The Catholics and the Protestants wasted no time squaring off. Archbishop James Flaherty reiterated the stand of the Catholic Church on any form of euthanasia. God took His children when it was His time. Jesus himself had suffered horribly, Flaherty said, and that he had allowed himself to do so was meant clearly to serve as an example to all of humanity: suffering was part of life. It had a purpose. It ennobled and strengthened the spirit, especially when offered up to the glory of God.

The archbishop ended his remarks with a not-so-subtle dig at the mayor’s stand on ‘quality of life.’ ‘Life is a sacred thing unto itself,’ he said. ‘A quality life is a life lived in the service of God, not in the pursuit of comfort.’

At first light, from the altar of Grace Cathedral on Nob Hill, with the huge AIDS mosaic on the floor, and AIDS blankets hung from the rafters, the Right Reverend Cecil Dunsmuir fired his own broadside back at Flaherty to his own bank of cameras.

‘Anyone who could extol the virtue of suffering ought to spend more time with our AIDS community. Here he will find great caring, great love, great sacrifice, and great nobility in the face of death. But the end of pain is a blessing from God, and administering to that end is the true meaning of Christianity.’

Police had to be called to a meeting of a previously planned anti-abortion protest group at an Elks Hall in Potrero Heights when differences on the morality of mercy killing erupted into a melee among the activists.

Barbara Brandt was an attractive woman in her late thirties who made her living as a Sacramento lobbyist. As the state’s chairperson of the Hemlock Society, the national right-to-die organization, Brandt saw Graham Russo’s picture on the front page of The Sacramento Bee - young and movie-star handsome – and, after reading the story, realized that here was this year’s poster boy for major fund-raising.

She looked up Graham’s number in the telephone book and was a bit surprised when he picked up on the second ring.

‘I’m really not interested in talking about it,’ he told her after a couple of minutes. ‘I’m a lawyer, you know. If I break the law, they’ll yank my bar card. I’ve already had enough problems with my career.’

‘But you did the right thing,’ Brandt persisted.

‘You don’t know what I did.’

‘Yes, I do,’ she said. ‘I know just what you did. I’m on your side.’

But it wasn’t any use. He wasn’t budging. After he hung up, she considered it for several minutes. She’d heard enough to know the truth. Graham’s law career would be over before it had begun if he admitted he’d helped kill his dad.