'All right, then you know. I'm divorced myself, but I got a couple, and even the good ones try the patience of a saint, am I right?' He waited, then answered himself. 'I'm right. But Ron? Every day out to school, every day pick 'em up. Weekends with soccer and horses and who knows what else, and I've never seen him lose his patience with them. I mean, me, I get mine twice a month and I'm biting their heads off. Couple of times, me and Ron would take all of them to the park or something, and I'm pulling my hair-' A smile, acknowledging the baldness. 'Ron's just cool. Always.'

'What about with his wife?' Glitsky asked. 'The word is they were having problems.'

A nod. 'Maybe. Maybe disagreeing, who doesn't? But I don't see Ron fighting. He'd walk away.'

'Did Bree walk all over him, Mr Glenn?' Hardy asked.

The superintendent hesitated. 'I didn't know her so well. She worked long hours. I'd almost never see her. Sometimes in the elevator...' He stopped again.

Glitsky. 'What?'

Glenn shrugged. 'I got the impression she was like an absent-minded genius - you know what I mean? Real inside herself with all this brilliant stuff, and then like she'd forget what floor she lived on. Sometimes she'd be just sitting in the lobby, like she was trying to decide what floor to get off on.' He shook his head. 'Too smart, really. Unconnected.'

Hardy had a hunch. 'To the kids, too?'

'I don't know. I don't know I ever saw her go out with them. She kind of had a life of her own, I think.'

Glitsky pushed it. 'And yet you got the impression that she and Ron were happy together?'

'I don't know happy. But times you'd see them together, they were... comfortable, I guess.' He shrugged. 'A family, you know. Comfortable.'

'Phil Canetta?' Glitsky's face betrayed no trace of recognition. 'Can't say it rings a bell.'

'The guy you sent over from Central Station the first time I came here,' Hardy explained.

But Glitsky was still shaking his head, perplexed. 'I called the desk, that was all. Said they might want to dispatch a body to make sure you didn't hurt yourself, or more likely that you didn't hurt Ron Beaumont if he turned out to be home. Did this guy Canetta say he'd talked to me?'

Hardy hesitated. Even though Glitsky was his friend, this was not a casual moment. 'Not really. I just a.s.sumed it.'

'And you were both inside here?' Glitsky didn't like this one bit. 'How did that special moment come about?'

'The door was open.'

'Open?'

Hardy made a face. 'Picky, picky. You're too literal sometimes. Anybody ever tell you that?'

If Hardy thought this was going to side-track Glitsky, he was mistaken. 'Was the door open?'

A shrug. 'It wasn't locked. I knocked, tried the k.n.o.b, it turned. I walked in.'

'You walked in? Had Canetta arrived yet?'

'No. That was later. But if you're wondering, I had plenty of time to plant evidence or steal anything I wanted, neither of which I did. You're just going to have to believe me. Now how about if we talk about something else?'

Glitsky sighed heavily. 'Someday, you pull stuff like this, I'm not going to be able to help you - you know that?'

Hardy kept a straight face. 'It's a constant worry. But you wanted to come here today, and here we are inside, legally and all with your warrant. What did you want to see?'

They'd already looked out over the balcony and now stood in the middle of the open kitchen, where Glitsky had been casually opening drawers, the cupboards, the refrigerator. 'The usual,' he said distractedly. 'Everything.'

They began in the back, in the children's bedroom. The room was just as Hardy had last seen it.

Across the hall, they moved to the master bedroom. Two steps in, Glitsky stopped so abruptly that Hardy nearly walked into him. 'What?' he asked.

'You tell me.'

Hardy cast his gaze around the room. It was nearly a perfect square and quite large, perhaps twenty feet on a side. To his left, a door was open to a blue-tiled bathroom. Next along the wall were three paneled sliding doors, a long closet. On the back wall, a couple of high windows presided over a king bed neatly made up with blankets, no comforter or bedspread, with a reading table on Hardy's right side. A darkwood chest of drawers with several pictures of Ron, Ron with the kids, Bree with the kids. None of Ron and Bree.

Along the right wall, some hunting prints hung over an exercise area - a stationary bike and some barbells. Then another doorway, leading to another bathroom, was slightly ajar. Finally, coming back around to where they stood, there was a comfortable-looking stuffed leather chair with matching ottoman, another reading lamp, and a Bombay & Company lion's claw table which seemed to double as a writing desk, with its bra.s.s lamp, large green blotter, and ship in a bottle.

'I like it,' Hardy said. 'I could use a room like this.'

'You don't feel it?'

Hardy took another second or two. 'I don't feel anything, Abe, except that this is a great room. I want a room like this.'

'That's my point,' Glitsky said. 'Every guy wants a room like this. You know why? This is a guy's room.'

He crossed to the closet and pulled aside one of the paneled doors. Hardy was a step behind him and found himself looking at several suits, coats, shirts, a tie rack. On the floor were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, neatly arranged - dress, tennis, sandals, slippers. Glitsky nodded as though he'd found what he expected.

He walked to the other end of the closet and slid that door back. It was far less crowded. Glitsky started flicking the few hanging items aside. 'Two dresses, three skirts, and four sweaters,' he said, then went into a squat, reached around on the floor, arranging. 'Three and a half pairs of women's shoes, not to mention three more dresses on the floor. How in the world did even Carl miss this?'

'Maybe he found something else that caught his attention and got him killed first.'

Glitsky stood slowly, grimacing, a hand on his back. 'How do you get this old?'

'Stubbornly refuse to die?'

Glitsky broke a small smile. 'Words to live by. Bathroom?'

'No, thanks, I just went.'

The smile vanished as mysteriously as it had come. 'Hopeless,' Abe said, and pushed open the bathroom door. Compared to the s.p.a.ciousness of the master bedroom, it wasn't much more than a utilitarian closet - six by eight feet with a double-hung window over a blue tiled sink, a towel rack with one orange towel, a toilet with the seat up. Significantly, Hardy thought, there was no tub, only a gla.s.sed-in shower.

Hardy reached around and opened the medicine cabinet, which was nearly empty - bottles of Tylenol, Nyquil, some Band-Aids, razor blades. 'Lots of couples have different bathrooms.'

'Happy ones don't have different bedrooms, though,' Glitsky replied. 'I've done research. It's a true fact.'

Glitsky was moving again, and Hardy tagged along. They pa.s.sed back through Ron's room and stopped at the dresser, which Glitsky opened with the same basic results - a few articles of women's underclothes in two of the drawers. But four of the drawers out of six were packed, even overpacked, with Ron's clothes - jeans, junk, polo shirts and T-shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. When Glitsky closed the last drawer, he straightened up. 'You know,' he said, 'you could take a million pictures of this room, and I bet the scene guys did, and you wouldn't see any evidence of a crime.'

'I don't either. So they lived in different rooms, so what?'

'This, to you, isn't some evidence of marital conflict?'

Hardy shrugged. 'It doesn't mean he killed her. Besides, Frannie said they were having troubles.'

'Don't remind me. It does make me wonder, though,' he said, 'just how she got pregnant.'

Immersed in paper at the desk in Bree's office, Glitsky was going through the hard copy file, folder by folder - propaganda by the armload on what Hardy thought must be every imaginable side of the additive issue. Legislative reports, news clippings, executive summaries from various think tanks, media alerts. MTBE, ethanol, reformulated gasoline. It ran the gamut from copies of faxed pages to four-color advertising pieces, from page fragments to small booklets.

'Fascinating stuff,' Glitsky said. He was going fast, to Hardy's eye ignoring everything that wasn't personal in Bree's personal files, laying a slush pile of Bree's professional work on the desk to his right, behind him. Hardy made some noise that might have sounded like asking for permission, got a grunt in reply, so grabbed a handful and walked out into the hallway, where he folded it all up and tucked it inside his jacket.

He then returned to Bree's room.

Further evidence that Ron and Bree had lived separate lives, all right. Her bed was smaller, a double. It had a bright floral comforter and flounced pillows that matched. Even now, a month after her death, a woman's scent of perfume and powder hung subtly in the air. Her bathroom was done in light salmon tones and was three times the size of Ron's, with an oversized tub and make-up table, as much a woman's bathroom as Ron's was a man's.

Back in the bedroom, Hardy stood at the bookshelves - floor-to-ceiling built-ins that covered half the back wall. Possibly it shouldn't have surprised him after what he'd heard about Bree the ugly duckling from Damon Kerry, but the entire bottom shelf was filled with paperback romance novels. Next up was a half shelf of paperback commercial fiction, then a couple of shelves of hardbound literary fiction - almost entirely by modern women writers. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Gates, Barbara Kingsolver, Laurie Colwin, Amy Tan - a scientist with good literary taste, Hardy thought. Then a surprise - what looked to be a full set of Tony Hillerman. So Chee and Leaphorn had been in her consciousness, too. Maybe helping to spark the idealism that had driven her so strongly in her last months.

On the top shelf, though, at the end of the large section on travel books, next to a new copy of What To Expect When You 're Expecting, was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.

Her high school yearbook. Pa.s.sages 81, from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.

There were the usual autographs: 'To the smartest girl in the world.' 'Chemistry would have beat me without you.' 'Who needs boys when you've got brains?' 'Lab rats rule!'

And then, from one of her teachers, the one Hardy needed: 'To Bree Brunetta, my best student ever!'

He quickly turned through the seniors and found her - Bree Brunetta. Without the maiden name, he never would have been able to find, much less recognize, the ravishing Bree Beaumont from the uninspired and formal cap-and-gown photograph.

Bree Brunetta, at seventeen, had been slightly overweight with dark unkempt hair, bangs down over her eyes, braces, clunky gla.s.ses. The ugly duckling indeed, Hardy thought. There was a recent picture of Bree with the kids next to the bed and he looked at the smiling face with the shining blond hair, the cheekbones, the perfect mouth - it was hard to reconcile the two images.

He flipped through the rest of the book quickly. Bree had been an active and seemingly well-rounded student, a member of the Debating Society, the Science Club, the Chess Club. She played clarinet in the band and was the 'features' editor of the student newspaper. She was voted the Smartest Girl.

Hardy happened to notice one other detail, one of those cruel high-school moments that scar a kid for life. Bree was voted 'least likely to get a date with Scott lePine,' the Most popular Guy, Best-looking Guy, and Most Likely to Succeed. Whichever kids dreamed up that category must have thought it was hysterical. Hardy guessed Bree wouldn't have thought so.

There were some letters on three-ring binder paper folded over in the back, and he was just opening one when he heard Glitsky's steps coming quickly down the hallway. He folded the letters back and put them with the literature into his inside pocket as well. Then he closed the book as Glitsky appeared at the door to Bree's room. His eyes had a haunted look. 'I just got beeped. I've got to go,' he said.

'You mind if I stay behind a few minutes?' Hardy asked.

'Sure, no sweat. Just lock up when you leave.' Glitsky shook his head. 'Get real, Diz. We're out of here. We're not arguing about it, either, OK? Or making one of our clever remarks.' He let out a long breath. 'Somebody just shot another cop.'

24.

The two-man arson team was still at his house when Hardy drove up. He parked semi-legally and came up on to where the lawn had been before stopping to get their attention. They were huddled over an area near what had been the front bay window. 'How you guys doing?'

They both looked over at him with no interest, then held a quiet conference before one of them straightened up, and jumped down on to the porch's foundation. 'Your friend said to tell you he went to work. Otherwise, we're going to be here a while.'

'You got any idea what a while is?'

A flat glare. 'Hours, not minutes.'

This was pulling teeth, but Hardy needed to get some information. 'You finding anything?' At this, the arson investigator spread his hands in a futile gesture, and Hardy cut him off. 'You can't tell me anything, can you? I might have done it, right? Set fire to my own house.'

'People do it all the time.'

Hardy knew this was true. The man was doing his job, actually protecting Hardy's interests. 'OK,' he managed to say mildly. 'I was wondering, though, if I could go into the back and get a few things - clothes, toiletries, like that? Check my phone messages.'

In spite of what he'd told Valens, Hardy didn't think the answering machine in the kitchen had been destroyed. Driving over here, it had occurred to him that it might be instructive to see what the tape held.

But to this inspector, whether or not Hardy had friends on the police force, he was a righteous suspect. He remained all business. 'No, sir. I'm afraid not. There's no electricity in any case. I don't know if the captain made it clear to you, but this house is fire department property until we clear it to you.'

There was nothing to be gained from antagonizing the man, although maintaining his demeanor took a serious coefficient of his resources. He forced a patient smile. 'No, I understand that. But I'd like to be able to make some plans. Can you give me any estimate how long that will be?'

Maybe Hardy had worn the inspector down, but it seemed for an instant as if there was a tiny thaw. 'Safest guess will be tomorrow morning sometime.' He paused. 'Maybe about the time your reporter friend runs his column.'

No, Hardy realized. It wasn't a thaw after all. It was a way to tell him that Jeff Elliot had been by, another unwelcome interruption to their task. Jeff had probably bothered them to distraction. 'If we get done by dark, we'll get it boarded up for the night. Somebody'll be here tomorrow to let you back in... if we're ready.' It was a dismissal.

There wasn't anything he could do.

On his private stool, right up by the front window, behind the bar at the Little Shamrock, Moses McGuire was nursing his Sunday Macallan on his private stool. He allowed none of the other bartenders either to drink or to sit, even for an instant, when they were working. His belief was that professional bartenders got paid to stand while they waited on customers - it showed respect. If they wanted to sit, he invited them to come around to the bar side and take a short break at some risk to their job security, but if they were behind the rail, they stood. And on either side of it, during their hours of employ, they were dry.

McGuire himself, though, as the owner, could do any d.a.m.n thing he wanted. When he and Hardy argued about the unfairness of how he applied his rules, he would explode. 'I'm a n.o.ble publican, not some G.o.ddammed wage-slave bartender.' And since McGuire owned three-quarters of the place, his word was the law.

He'd carefully drawn Hardy a tap Guinness and brought it to the bar after the foam had settled out to a perfect head. Now Hardy was down an inch or two into it. The time was a bit after two and the fog wasn't going to burn off - not today, maybe not until Christmas. The trees at the edge of Golden Gate Park, no more than a hundred feet away directly across Lincoln Boulevard, were barely visible.

Three other customers quietly took up s.p.a.ce in the oldest bar in San Francisco. On a couch in the dark far back, an obviously smitten young couple was possibly engaging in some kind of discreet s.e.x. They had ordered Old Fashioneds - the most frou-frou drink that the purist McGuire allowed at the Shamrock. In the tiny side alcove, a lone, silent mid-thirties dart player with a shaved head and a camouflage jacket was working on his game, drinking Bushmills Irish, Ba.s.s Ale, and a raw egg for protein out of a pint gla.s.s.

A year before, Moses had picked up some recently released recordings done in the thirties - Stephanie Grappelli on violin and Django Reinhardt on guitar just swinging their brains out with the Quintet of the Hot Club de France - and whenever things were slow as they were today, he'd run them on the juke box.

McGuire twirled his gla.s.s around on the condensation ring that had formed on the bar. 'You're welcome to come stay with us, you know. The lot of you.'

'Thanks, Mose, but Erin's already got the kids. She's got a bigger place.'

He twirled his gla.s.s some more. 'And when is Frannie out?'

This was treacherous territory. Hardy couldn't tell Moses that Ron had released Frannie from her promise without revealing that he'd talked to him. And that would, in turn, lead to the minefield of secrets, none of which Hardy could disclose.

And some of which he still, after everything, didn't know if he believed.

So he sipped Guinness, taking a minute. 'My bet is that Sharron Pratt lets her go Tuesday morning. She's taking too much political flack.'

'Why Tuesday?'

Hardy explained a little about the difference between the judge's contempt ruling and the grand jury contempt citation. Two different animals with similar names. Fortunately, this seemed to satisfy Moses. But he twirled his gla.s.s a few more times and Hardy knew him well enough - he might have bought the latest explanation, but there was more he needed to talk about. 'So what are you thinking?' Hardy prompted.

'How to say it.'

'Just say it, that's all.'

Moses drank Scotch, put the gla.s.s down, and looked his brother-in-law in the eye. 'OK. How's it all turn to s.h.i.t so fast?'