"All right," he said, "so was she involved with anyone else?"

Pinkert's smile struck Hunt as sad. "I really couldn't say at all. I never saw her outside of a medical environment, and she was always strictly professional in that context. Beyond that, I spend my time either with my patients or with my family. I find that's plenty. So I tend not to notice little personal things that might be going on right under my eyes. Kiyoko makes fun of me about it, that I'm such a nerd, but I can't really help that. It's who I am."

"I wouldn't worry about it," said Hunt. "You seem fine to me."

"Well, I'm happy," Pinkert said, the large, unfortunate, ugly mouth turning up in a cheerful smile. "And happiness, I believe, is the key. Don't you think?"

"Your mouth to God's ear," Hunt said.

An hour later, Wyatt Hunt was in North Beach. Jedd Conley's office was on Powell between Stockton and Grant, around the corner from Moose's, one of everybody's favorite restaurants. So since his next stop was Conley's, he took the opportunity to eat a real lunch at one of the best bars in the city. He ordered a simple Moose Burger, which bore little relation to the fast food item of the same name at your local burger stand, consisting as it did of freshly ground prime beef, grilled over mesquite-blood rare in defiance of the food police and their ubiquitous threats of E. coli-on a freshly made sourdough bun, with lettuce and tomato and onion (grilled, if requested) and a pickle made on the premises.

Sated, Wyatt walked back out into the drizzle and turned left. Turning left again, he walked uphill for half a block until he came to the storefront whose etched front window announced that it housed the offices of the Assemblyman for the 13 th District of California.

Inside, a counter divided the well-lit space. Two doors in the back indicated the presence of some private suites, or possibly one big one. A large poster of a beaming Jedd Conley commanded one wall. It was surrounded by smaller framed shots of the assemblyman posing with what looked like at least one representative of each and every demographic unit San Francisco had to offer, which made for a crowded wall. The opposite wall featured an enormous map of the city and also the official framed photo of Arnold, which struck Hunt as somewhat incongruous since the Governator was a Republican.

"Can I help you?" A sweet-looking, matronly woman in her mid-fifties had gotten up from one of the two desks behind the counter. The other desk was clean, with only a computer terminal and a telephone. The woman seemed to be the only person here, which Wyatt thought surprising until he realized that Conley's main office was in Sacramento. This was merely a satellite office he used as a local base.

And in turn, this gave him an idea and an opening, since he realized that walking in and announcing that he was looking to establish an alibi for Conley in a murder case probably wouldn't get him a whole lot of cooperation.

"Well, I don't know, really," he began with a self-conscious, tentative handshake. "My name is Wyatt and I'm a graduate student in poly sci out at San Francisco State, and I'm thinking about doing a report kind of like… well, do you know William James's book called The Varieties of Religious Experience?"

The woman looked at him warily. "I'm sorry, but no, not really. This is Assemblyman Conley's office. Maybe you want to go to the Archdiocese."

"No, I don't think so. I know it's Mr. Conley's office. And it's all right not knowing about William James," Wyatt said. "I only said that because I'm thinking about my report and calling it 'The Varieties of Political Experience.' So you see, it's not entirely stupid."

"No. It doesn't sound stupid. Actually, that sounds very interesting."

"Well, I don't know yet. I hope it will be. But I thought I'd come down and talk to somebody who was in the business, so to speak, and see if I could get a good place to start. You're not too busy, are you? I don't want to bother you."

The woman ostentatiously looked over Wyatt's shoulder, then turned around both ways and came back to him smiling. "I think I'll be able to squeeze you in," she said. "My name's Maggie Even. Long 'e.' And I wish it was Evans too, but it's just not. It's Maggie Even. When I was dating Jack, my husband, I used to tell all my friends, 'What I'm going out with him for-my plan is I'm going to get even.' And I did. Jack, I mean. Now it's my name too. Little did I know." She shook her head. "Anyway"-she put out her hand again- "Maggie."

"Wyatt."

"That's what you said."

"Just to let you know it hasn't changed." He grinned at her. They were now pals. "Anyway, I was hoping to get some record of the kinds

of stuff Mr. Conley does in the course of, say, his average month. Like fund-raising, or talking to groups-everything, really."

"Well," Maggie Even said, "we've got a little problem because I'm just a volunteer until they hire another full-time person and I'm pretty new here myself. But if you want to come around"-she indicated the hinged opening in the counter-"I'm pretty sure I could find a record of his appointments somewhere."

Today's Special at Lou the Greek's was Salt-Baked Merides- oven-roasted baby smelt over rice, served with a searingly spicy sweet red sauce on the side. The consensus at Gina's table-herself, Hardy, Farrell and Jeff Elliott in his wheelchair-was that possibly because she had done essentially nothing to a fresh and delicious single ingredient, Chui had conceived and executed her best-ever Greek/Chinese meal. The novelty of the unexpectedly excellent food brought the table to silence for a moment, and this served to punctuate the end of the shoptalk that had been going around since they'd come over from the Hall-mostly about Gina's stellar performance at the morning session.

Now Jeff Elliott said, "So Gina, after we got off the phone this morning, I did a little research and Googled the Dryden Socket, then got Bill Blair on the phone before I came down here. He didn't seem all that happy to be hearing from me."

Gina put her fork down. Turning to her two partners, she quickly filled them in on the Kelley Rusnak suicide and where it either

intersected or not with Stuart's case. When she'd finished, she turned back to Jeff. "Talk to me."

"Well, first, I'm sure you're going to like this, but the main thing I had to understand is that no matter what I might have read online or anywhere else, 'There is nothing wrong with the product. It sailed through the clinical trials. It's already been used on hundreds, soon to be thousands, of happy patients. Ninety-nine percent of the alleged problems came in long after the trials were complete and the reports written. And those reports haven't been vetted yet either. So there's no story.' "

"So you thanked him for his time and hung up," Hardy said. "I really wanted to, but force of habit, danged if just one more question just kind of slipped out before I could stop it." "What was that?" Gina asked.

"I asked him if it were true that Kelley Rusnak and Caryn Dry-den had both been working on the socket. And whether or not their two deaths in the past two weeks might have been in some way connected to their work at PII. Or to each other."

"That would have been the part he didn't like," Farrell said.

Jeff nodded. "Not too much, you're right."

Gina normally would have tolerated if not joined the banter, but today she was all attention. "So what'd he say?"

"That Caryn had been murdered, and Kelley had been depressed and was a suicide. There was no connection between them."

"But Stuart told me she wasn't depressed at all."