Beat that, Farallon, she thought as she laid the halves of trout into the oil and spices. Eat your heart out, Boulevard-Farallon and Boulevard being two of San Francisco's finest restaurants.

When she finished eating, she took some boiling water and the dishes she'd used down to the lake to wash them. Back at the camp, she settled against her rock and sipped at the last of her wine from her Sierra Cup. The moon was up, and so was Venus, in a wine-dark sky.

The diamond in the ring on her left hand caught a glint from the bright moon and for a second she looked at the thing as though its presence there surprised her. There was no rational explanation for this reaction-she'd worn the ring now for almost three years, but in truth she didn't often think of it because it was too painful.

Now she stared at it for a long moment. Putting her wine down, she reached over, twisted it off her finger, and held it up in front of her. The facets in the diamond caught more moonlight as she turned it around and around, as though she were trying to find some secret magic within it.

But she knew there was no secret. There was no more magic in her life anymore, not as there had been when David Freeman had stunned her by proposing marriage and then placed the ring on her finger. Freeman, much older than she was, and a legend in the law world of San Francisco, was a slovenly dressed, big-living, profane, cigar-smoking genius in an ancient gnome's body whom, much to Gina's initial surprise, she'd come to love.

She often felt that he'd literally cast some spell on her. She would look at his ill-fitting brown suits, his scuffed shoes, the rheumy eyes under unruly and wiry eyebrows, the rosacea-scarred nose-Freeman didn't appear to be joking when he said that he liked to think of himself as mythically ugly-and during the six months she had lived with him, she couldn't think of a more attractive man of any age. Objectively, he was a frog, but she could see only the prince. It had to be sorcery. But whatever it was, it had worked and she had fallen under his spell, satisfied and happily in love at forty-four, for the first time in her life.

And Freeman, for his part, a seventy-something lifelong bachelor and notorious womanizer, apparently felt the same way about her. When he'd proposed, nervous as a schoolboy, this man who could be eloquent in front of the Supreme Court could barely get the words out. They were already living together most of the time in David's apartment, although Gina had kept her own place as well, and they decided to have a small, no-frills civil ceremony within the week.

But then David, who considered himself "bulletproof," had decided to walk home from work one night that week after he'd finished at the office. At the time, he'd been embroiled in some highly contentious litigation with a local mobster, and the gang leader's men had set upon the old barrister and beaten him into a coma from which he never recovered. When he died three days later, Gina felt a part of herself die with him.

But unbeknownst to her, in those last months of his life, David had changed his will, and Gina found herself the owner of the Freeman Building, downtown on Sutter Street. The large, gracious, recently renovated, three-story structure, complete with underground parking, housed the forty-odd employees of David's firm, Freeman & Associates, as well as one rogue "of counsel" tenant named Dismas Hardy. In the months following David's death, Gina, Dismas, and another colleague named Wes Farrell had reconsolidated the firm as Freeman, Farrell, Hardy & Roake, and it had become somewhat of a power player in the city.

But although Gina had been a practicing defense attorney for her entire career, and was a name partner in FFH &R, as time passed she took on less and less of the firm's law work. Her heart had gone out of it. She preferred to spend her time with physical exercise, with hikes and solitude, with the slowly accumulating pages of a novel-a legal thriller-that she was struggling without much passion to finish.

"Oh, David," she whispered, sighing. A tear hung in the corner of her eye. "Help me out here, would you?"

And suddenly, as she stared through the prisms of her engagement ring, she felt her shoulders relax as though relieved of a great load. She felt David's hovering ghost as an actual physical presence and realized that he was letting her go, telling her that she had mourned him enough.

He was gone, never coming back, and it was time to move on. The writing, the constant exercise, the long, lonely hikes, even the beautiful moments such as this one-she all at once came to see what David would have had to say about all of them: "That's not you, Roake. That's avoidance. That's not what you do. You always attack life. You engage. Something's beating you up, you take it on and wrestle that motherfucker to the ground. Why are you still wearing that ring, anyway? So guys won't hit on you? You want to get old and live alone? I don't think so. You've got good years to live, so don't wimp out now by not living them."

She was young, she told herself, or at least not yet old. Perhaps she was even desirable.

She brought the ring up to her lips and pressed it against them. Then she put it on her third finger, but of her right hand this time, and stood up. Walking to her tent in the moonlight, she let herself in, crawled into her sleeping bag and almost immediately was asleep.

In his city-issue Taurus, Inspector Sergeant Devin Juhle pulled up and parked where the front walk of a house on Greenwich Street on San Francisco's Russian Hill met the sidewalk. He was responding to a dispatch he'd received just as he was leaving his home on Noriega. In the past eighteen months, Juhle's previous two partners had been killed. Now, in a compelling demonstration of the superstitious nature of his colleagues in Homicide, he worked solo.

Two black-and-white squad cars were already at the scene, at the curb across the street. A Fire Department vehicle sat in the driveway. A knot of bystanders-three women, one man, four kids-had gathered at the corner, a hundred feet away. They all stared at the house as a unit, curious and intent, waiting for some official person to come over and tell them what had happened. Thus far, no media had arrived, but Juhle knew that this aberration in the natural order of things would soon correct itself.

Juhle waited behind the wheel and let his mind switch to what he

called his "detail gear." From here on out, he wanted to register everything he saw, heard, thought, or felt. He'd trained himself to pay attention from his first moments at any crime scene. Now, satisfied that he had taken in all he needed from the street, he looked at the house. A pair of uniformed patrol officers stood at its open door. The occupants of the second squad car, Juhle presumed, were inside.

He checked his watch. It was just shy of 7:30 on Monday, September 12. Juhle exited his car and took one last look around. The morning was glorious, the sky blue and cloudless, the sun casting its long shadows down the street in front of him.

He turned and walked toward the house.

Stuart Gorman's hollow eyes stared into the distance over Devin Juhle's shoulder. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You said you got home just before six. I asked you where you had been."

Gorman brought his eyes back. "We've got a place at Echo Lake, up by South Tahoe. I was there for the weekend." "So you must have left there early."

"A little before two. I couldn't sleep, so I figured I might as well come on home."

"And you were up there alone?"

"Yeah." Gorman raised his chin, thick with stubble. His face was drawn, the skin with a pronounced pallor even under the sunburn. The whites of his eyes were shot with capillaries. "I'm a writer. I went up there to do some work."