"Don't say that."

"It's true," he says. "At least they'd have a roof over their heads. I've got a million-dollar life-insurance policy. Paid up." He tells me his parents had bought this for him years before, in case something happened on one of his jobs.

"Borrow against the cash value," I tell him.

"There is none. Straight term policy."

I tell him to relax, to calm down. But my words sound like what they are, the bravado and encouragement of the unaffected.

"Let's think about options," I tell him.

"What options? There aren't any." He finishes his drink and raises his bottle toward the waitress. "This one's on me."

The waitress comes over. I order a beer. Frank needs the gesture, if only to buy some pride back.

"When did you find out about the medical-insurance cap?"

"The million-dollar cap I've known about, but I didn't know we were hitting up against it until last week. I guess I just didn't think. The hospital bills went to the insurance company. We got copies and stuck 'em in a drawer. Went on for what, I don't know. Two years, maybe."

"Do you have any kind of appeal, to the insurance company?"

"I don't know. You look at it." He reaches under his coat, to the inside pocket, and hands me an envelope, ripped across the top like somebody opened it in a hurry with a finger. "It's been burning a hole in my pocket for two days," he says. "You keep it. Please."

I read the letter. It is a notice of cancellation for the reason that the maximum lifetime benefits of the policy are about to be exhausted.

His second bottle comes, and Frank starts on it.

"Do you have a copy of the policy?"

"At home," he says. "Someplace."

"We need to look at it."

"Why? I suppose I could argue with them over the numbers. But I don't think I'd win."

"You think you're into them for that much? A million dollars?" I ask.

He nods. "Yeah, all the experimental stuff. The treatment at the university. She was hospitalized four times last year with respiratory problems, three times the year before. She can't control the saliva. It goes down her windpipe and gets in her lungs. She gets pneumonia and then she's in there for a month, sometimes six weeks."

"And a divorce will solve this?"

His eyes light up like those of some grifter with a good idea. He sits up straight in the chair and leans across the table toward me, salesman about to make a close.

"Here's what we figured. The hospital bills are gonna break our back. In two months our savings will be gone. We'll be broke. We have the other children to worry about. I talked to Doris, and she agrees. If we get a divorce, she takes the house, my retirement and custody of the other two kids. I'll agree to it. Division of property. That's what they call it, right?"

"a.s.suming some judge is willing to accept this," I say.

"Why wouldn't they? If I agree to it."

"Judges are funny," I tell him. "Especially if they think you're doing this to defeat creditors' claims."

He ignores me. "I'll have to pay support from my salary, whatever I take home in pay. They can't touch that. Right?"

I make a face, like maybe. "Who're 'they'?"

"The state," he says. "Here's the deal. I take Penny and all the bills. That would qualify her for state aid. I'd be broke." He smiles at the thought of being dest.i.tute and immediately reads the negative response in my eyes.

I start shaking my head.

"There's no other way," he says.

"Even if you did it, it wouldn't work," I tell him. "The state would see through it in a heartbeat. The Medicaid auditors would be all over the two of you before you could cash the first check."

It is a fact of life that some cagey live-on-the-edge con artist might get away with it, drive a Mercedes and live the high life on somebody else's laundered checks using a different name each day, bouncing from state to state always one hop ahead of investigators. But Frank and Doris Boyd are not cut out for this kind of life. I can see them in jail togs with their kids in tow.

I tell Frank this. From the desperate look in his eyes, I can tell immediately that this was a mistake. He looks at me like the enemy.

"That's okay," he says. "If they put us in jail, then the county could take care of Penny and the other kids, while Doris and I do time." He is serious. It is the kind of mindless escape the middle cla.s.s, people who have never seen the inside of a jail cell, might come up with when they are desperate. Frank has now sold his wife on this.

I argue with him, but he doesn't want to hear it. Frank feels he's found the only way out of a desperate situation. If I say no, he'll sell his van and his tools to come up with a retainer and find some low-life shyster who will take his money to file for this ill-conceived divorce. If I can keep him under my umbrella and talk some sense into him and Doris, maybe I can convince them not to do it. Frank is the mover here, the shaker in the family. Doris would follow him to h.e.l.l if he told her this was the way out. She's too busy trying to raise three kids, keeping one of them alive.

We talk some more. I tell him I would have to think about it, look at the insurance policy first to see if there is any other way.

"Carriers get dicey when you threaten lawsuits, especially for bad faith. There's a chance that you haven't hit the cap yet. They are notorious for inflating costs. It could be you've got some more time."

His eyes light up with the thought. "You think so?"

"It's possible. Even if you don't, we may be able to buy you some."

He reaches across the table, his hand cold and wet from squeezing the bottle of beer, and cups his palm over my forearm. "You'd do that for us?"

I nod and for the first time, he settles back in his chair and takes a deep breath, a moment of relief, eyes cast up at the ceiling.

chapter.

nine.

we are headed north on I-5, Harry at the wheel of his new Camry, the air conditioner humming. My partner is beginning to draw the line at riding in "Leaping Lena," my ragtop Jeep with its isingla.s.s windows pulled out in good weather.

But the quiet hum of the tires on the road is not enough to dispel the growing sense of dissatisfaction I feel from Harry. Warnake's testimony put a hole in our boat. The only question is whether it's below the waterline.

As we work our way up toward La Jolla and the university, Harry finally breaks the silence.

"You realize we dodged a bullet on the tensioning tool? We owe the G.o.ds of evidence on that one."

According to Harry, if Warnake had been able to link the tool, the one from Crone's garage, to the killer tie around Jordan's neck, Crone might as well start packing for the trip to Folsom.

"It doesn't make any sense," I say. "If he did it, why leave the cable ties in his coat pocket for the cops to find?"

"Maybe he forgot them. People tend to panic," says Harry. "Especially if they've been busy cutting off arms and legs. And he is forgetful. Remember, he's the one who couldn't remember arguing with the victim the night she disappeared." This is still sticking in Harry's craw. "You can chalk up the cable ties in his pocket with the other things he forgot."

According to Crone, the cable ties in his coat pocket were probably there from trash night the week before. It was a ritual. He would come home from work, don a pair of work gloves he kept in the garage, gather up the trash from the house and dump it in the can, then take the can out to the curb. Newspapers and cardboard he would bundle and tie up with the cables using the tensioning tool he kept under the workbench. According to Crone, there was no intention to hide the tool. It must have gotten pushed under an old piece of carpet when he put it away the last time he'd used it. It is a plausible story. Whether the jury will buy it may depend on how many people on the panel put out their own garbage.

"I'll admit it defies common sense," says Harry. "But then the man's a little frizzy. University type. You know what I mean. A lot of apt.i.tude and not much judgment." Harry's looking at me from the driver's seat offering a sideways glance. "He's stuck with the evidence, and so are we."

"Still begs the question why the cops didn't find his prints on the ties or the tool," I say.

Harry has thought about this. "The ties were too small, too narrow to take an identifiable print," he says. "And remember, they did find smudges."

"And the tool?"

"He wore gloves?"

"Did you ever try to put one of those cable ties together wearing gloves?"

Harry shakes his head.

"I did. It's not easy. If he took his gloves off to work the tie, why did he put them back on just to use the tool to tighten it?"

"He's eccentric? I don't know. It's a hole we're gonna have to plug," says Harry.

"It's possible he wiped the tool clean after he used it to kill Jordan. But if he did, if he thought about it enough to wipe off prints, why didn't he go the extra step and just get rid of it? Drop it off some dock, or better yet put it in the bag with the body, weigh it down and deep-six the whole bundle?"

"Maybe he didn't have time," says Harry.

"Maybe he didn't do it," I say.

He smiles, never one to commit himself.

Before Tannery finished with Warnake on the stand, he had him testify regarding the tensioning tool found in Crone's garage. But his strategy here was not to link Crone to the tool. Instead he wanted to sh.o.r.e up a weakness in his own case. Tannery couldn't link the death tie to the tensioning tool found in the garage based on tool marks. He wanted to tell the jury why.

It seems whoever killed Jordan pulled so hard on the tool that the cable tie got twisted in the process, deforming the edges and stretching the nylon before it was cut. Successive tests performed by Warnake were unable to replicate the precise toolmarks left along the edge of the cut tie. Tannery explained this to the jury, distilling this imperfection from his own case before we could exploit it.

He left me only one thing to talk about on cross: the fact that the heavy-duty cable ties used in this case marked them as unique. His survey of manufacturers limited the number of producers of that particular tie to fewer than a half-dozen nationwide. Consequently, anyone who purchased these particular kinds of ties would be limited to those same sources.

My point: There was a good chance that anyone purchasing the ties in San Diego would likely obtain them from the same point of manufacture, with the same toolmarks as those found in Crone's pocket. After I flogged him with this thought several times on the stand, Warnake finally threw up his hands and gave me the great concession-"Anything's possible." This was as good as it got, and according to Harry it wasn't good enough.

"I was looking at their faces," he tells me.

"Who?"

"The lawyer's dozen. Who else? Jury in the panel," he says. "And they weren't buyin' it. There was only one thing moved 'em," says Harry. "Tannery's question about the tie that killed Jordan. His inference that it came from the same package as the ones in Crone's pocket."

Harry is right. The judge may have kept Warnake from answering it, but the fact that the witness started to, and wanted to, was palpable in the courtroom. The jury could sense it.

"Tannery can take that to the bank," says Harry.

I have a sinking feeling this morning as we trek to the genetics lab at the university for a meeting with Aaron Tash. We are being forced to spend valuable time trying to get inside our own case, to discover the facts that our client won't tell us, mostly about relationships; and in particular the one between himself and Kalista Jordan.

University medical facilities abound in this county. There are two hospitals, both teaching inst.i.tutions, and a list of research and graduate programs that would be the envy of any city in the country. But unlike the Salk Inst.i.tute and Scripps, the University Genetics Center, known to all who frequent it merely as the Center, is not funded by any perpetual endowment or foundation. In fact, it exists in rented quarters, a four-story office complex just off campus, a measure of its precarious existence that is reviewed every year.

It is left to its own devices when it comes to funding. We are told that Crone has had run-ins with university administrators and a few regents who have tried to monitor his largely private fund-raising efforts. The fear is that because of the center's ties, the university could get a public black eye if Crone were to take funds from the wrong people, ent.i.ties that might be political lepers. Crone took offense at this questioning of his judgment. According to observers, Crone is jealous of his independence, the freedom to pursue research and its funding as he sees fit. This has been a continuing source of friction between Crone and the university. This may answer the question of why it was that Kalista Jordan received offers of employment with lavish salary increases from other universities while David Crone was pa.s.sed over. He has a reputation for being difficult to deal with. There is even a rumor that some in the university hierarchy were eyeing her as a possible replacement to head up the center. We have done everything possible to hunt this story down and drive a stake through its heart. If true, it could supply a damaging motive for murder.

Harry parks on the street, at one of the two-hour meters. Whatever the reticent Dr. Tash has to tell us, it can no doubt be covered in that time.

Tash has been excluded from the courtroom since he appears on our witness list, and though we have interviewed him twice, Harry and I both sense that he is holding back. Getting information from Tash is like distilling water from an iceberg in a blizzard. He is cagey. Get your tongue too close and it may stick like a kid licking a water fountain in winter. If I were preparing him for a deposition, I would tell him only one thing: Act normal. As Crone's number two, he is keeper of the office flame, the man to whom all secrets are most probably known.

We take the elevator to the fourth floor. When the doors open we are standing in a small reception area, nothing fancy, antiseptic white walls and an industrial carpet to absorb the sound of heels that would otherwise be clicking on concrete. There are six chairs, black plastic inst.i.tutional seats with chrome arms and legs. These grace the otherwise-bare walls, three on each side of the room. A stack of old magazines, what look like science journals, is spread on a low table next to one of the empty chairs. Straight ahead is a desk, a clean surface with nothing behind it except an open door, hallway to the inner sanctum. There is no receptionist, simply the barricade offered by the desk. Harry's first instinct is to go around it, just walk right in.

"You did make an appointment?" he says.

"On my calendar for ten o'clock."

Harry glances at his watch. "On the dot." He waltzes up to the desk. "h.e.l.lo. Anybody home?" Harry knocks on the Formica surface.

Like a tomb, all I can hear is Harry's echo. We wait a couple of seconds, and Harry does it again. Nothing.

"What say we go in?" he says.

Then, before we can move, there's a slow shadow in the hall, followed an instant later by a tall, lean figure. Tash appears in the open doorway behind the desk. Slender and bald, he gives us an expressionless look from over the top of a file he is holding. I can't tell whether he is expecting us, or has forgotten about the meeting. With Tash, you can never tell much, a stone face, expressions that never seem to change. You are left to wonder if it is academic reserve, or arrogance, or whether Harry is right and the two are the same.

Tash is wearing a black cotton turtleneck top under a dark herringbone sport coat and dark slacks, so that he looks like a character from a sci-fi flick with undersized production values. Thin is not the word. The turtleneck hangs on him with wrinkles like ribs on a skeleton.

He looks at his watch. "You're on time."

"Guess that's why we're lawyers and not professors," says Harry.

Tash gives him a look, sly, off-centered, everything dead from the eyes to the mouth, John Malkovich.

"Come in," he says. No greeting or handshake. He is not a social animal. Tash would not think to offer coffee, or small talk. He lacks the social grace of his boss. There is not the slightest hint of warmth from the man. From our few meetings, his most admirable quality appears to be loyalty. He reports dutifully to Crone at least once a week. This to a man who is under indictment for murder and who has been suspended without pay by the university. If Tash feels threatened by fidelity to his mentor, he shows no sign of it.

He's had easy access to Crone at the jail since our earlier meeting, traveling there twice, once with Harry and the second time with me. On both occasions Tash was silent to a fault, all the way up in the elevator and into the small cubicle with its inch-thick acrylic part.i.tion they use for attorney-client consultation in the slammer. I had to a.s.sure Tash that it was safe to talk on the receiver hanging from the wall, that no one would monitor this during meetings with counsel.

On each trip, Tash treated Harry and me as if we were furniture. Even with his antennae up, Harry was unable to pick up anything. He told me that Crone and Tash perused more numbers, scientific mumbo jumbo, according to Harry. Tash pressed a single sheet of paper up against the acrylic so that Crone could read it. Then Crone wrote a few formulas on a sheet of paper on the other side and held it up while Tash made notes. It was a repeat of the session I'd had a week earlier with the two of them. Tash would then leave, as silent as a six-foot mouse, while Harry or I spoke to our client.

We follow Tash down the long, narrow hallway, past a door with a small plate-gla.s.s window in it. Inside I can see stainless-steel tables, gla.s.s beakers and electronic equipment. This, I a.s.sume, is one of the laboratories.