Silent, Roake shifted at the doorpost.

"I don't think she did it, Gina. That's why I said that. She didn't do it."

But Gina had been in more than a few trials herself. "Well, you'd better defend her as though you think she did."

"Sure. Of course. That's about all I've been thinking about all these months. How to get her off."

"There you go."

"But it's all been strategy. Get the jury to go for murder/suicide. Play up the harassment angle with Cuneo. Hammer the weak evidence."

"Right. All of the above."

"But the bottom line is, somebody else did it."

She snorted. "The famous other dude." "No, not him. A specific human being that I've stopped trying to find." Roake was silent for a long moment. "A little free advice?"

"Sure. Always."

"Defend her as if you believed with all your heart that she's guilty as hell. You'll feel better later. I promise."

But driving home, he couldn't get the idea out of his mind. So basic, so simple and yet he'd been ignoring it for months, lost to strategy and the other minutiae of trial preparation. If Catherine didn't kill them, someone else did. He had to get that message into the courtroom, in front of the jurors. In his career, he'd found nothing else that approached an alternative suspect as a vehicle for doubt. It struck him that Glitsky's failure to get an alternative lead to pursue-another plausible suspect- had derailed him from any kind of reliance on the "soddit," or "some other dude did it," defense. He never had come back to it, and he should have, because in this case some other dude had done it.

It wasn't his client. It wasn't Catherine. Somehow, from the earliest weeks, and without any overt admission or even discussion of the question of her objective guilt, Hardy had become certain of that. This was a woman he'd known as a girl, whom he'd loved. They'd met nearly every day for months and months now, and even with all the life changes for both of them, every instinct he had told him that Catherine was the same person she'd been before. He'd been with her when she sobbed her way through The Sound of Music. One time the two of them had rescued a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She'd been a candy striper at Sequoia Hospital because she wanted to help people who were in pain. This woman did not plan and execute a cold-blooded killing of her father-in-law and his girlfriend and then set the house on fire. It just did not happen. He couldn't accept the thought of it as any kind of reality.

Every night as he sought parking near his home he would drive up Geary and turn north on 34th Avenue, the block where he lived. He never knew-once or twice a year he'd find a spot. His house was a two-story, stand-alone Victorian wedged between two four-story apartment buildings. With a postage-stamp lawn and a white picket fence in front, and dwarfed by its neighbors, it projected a quaintness and vulnerability that, to Hardy, gave it great curb appeal. Not that he'd ever consider selling it. He'd owned the place for more than thirty years, since just after his divorce from Jane, and now he'd raised his family here. He felt that its boards were as much a part of who he was as were his own bones.

And tonight-a sign from the heaven he didn't really believe in-twenty feet of unoccupied curb space lay exposed directly in front of his gate. Automatically assigning to the vision the status of mirage, he almost drove right by it before he hit his brakes and backed in.

He checked his watch, saw with some surprise that it was ten after nine, realized that he hadn't eaten since his lunchtime lamburger. In his home, welcoming lights were on in the living room and over the small front porch. When he got out of the car, he smelled oak logs burning and looked up to see a clean plume of white coming out of the chimney.

Home.

Cuneo didn't hear the telephone ring because he was playing his drums along with "Wipeout" turned up loud. He had the CD on repeat and lost track of how many times he'd heard the distinctive hyena laugh at the beginning of the track. The song was a workout, essentially three minutes of fast timekeeping punctuated by solos on the tom-toms. Midway his sixth or seventh time through the tune, Cuneo abruptly stopped. Shirtless, shoeless, wearing only his gray sweatpants, he sat on the stool, breathing heavily. Sweat streaked his torso, ran down his face, beads of it dropping to the floor.

In the kitchen, he grabbed a can of beer, popped the top and drank half of it off in a gulp. Noticing the blinking light on his phone, he crossed over to it and pressed the button.

"Dan? Dan, you there? Pick up if you're there, would you? It's Chris Rosen. Okay, you're not there. Call me when you get in. Anytime. I'm up late."

Cuneo finished his beer, went in to take a shower, came out afterward wrapped in a towel. Armed with another cold one, he sat at his kitchen table and punched up Rosen's numbers. "Hey, it's me. You called."

"Yeah, I did. I just wanted to make sure you were still cool about this Glitsky thing."

"Totally."

"I mean, today, earlier . . ."

"It just pissed me off, that's all. It still does. But what am I gonna do?"

"Well, that's what I wanted to talk to you about. What you're going to do."

"Nothing. That's what you said, right?"

"It's what I said, yes, but I've been reconsidering. Maybe we can spin this sexual thing back at them. I mean, everybody already believes Hardy's poking her, right? So she's the loose one, she's easy, get it?" Rosen gave Cuneo a moment to let the idea sink in. "I mean, isn't she the kind of woman who would have made the first move? We didn't want to bring it up before because, well, I mean, what would be the point? Try her on the evidence, not on innuendo or her personal habits. More professional. Blah blah blah. We didn't want to embarrass her. But once they introduce the whole question, the jury needs to hear the truth. I mean, only if it is the truth, of course-I'm not trying to put words into your mouth. But if she did come on to you first, and you rejected her . . . it's your word against hers. And you're a cop with an unblemished record and she's a murder suspect. If we bring it up first as soon as I get you on the stand . . . you know what I'm saying?"

Cuneo brought the ice-cold can of beer to his lips. His internal motor suddenly shifted into a higher gear, accelerating now on the straightaway instead of straining up a steep grade. He'd never done anything to harass Catherine Hanover. He knew it. Whatever it was had been her imagination and her lies. Not him. He was sure of that.

Let's see how she liked it.

For the first couple of Hardy's murder trials, Frannie had tried to have some kind of dinner waiting for him when he got home. She went to some lengths to try to time his arrival at home to coincide with dinner being done so that they could sit down as a family together-the sacred ritual, especially when the kids had been younger. But the effort turned out to be more a source of frustration than anything else. Try as he might, Hardy couldn't predict when he'd get home with any regularity. It was another of the many things in their daily lives that was out of their control. Aspects not as ideal as they had once imagined it, and yet were part and parcel of this constantly evolving thing called a marriage. Tonight, as Hardy stood at the stove and Frannie, in jeans and a white sweater and tennis shoes, sat on the kitchen counter with her ankles crossed, watching him, neither of them remembered the growing pains of the dinner issue that had led them here. Hardy was in trial, so he was responsible for his own meals. That was the deal because it was the only thing that made any sense.

From Frannie's perspective, the best thing about Hardy's cooking was that it was all one-pot-or, more specifically, one-pan. He never messed up the kitchen, or created a sinkful of dishes. This was because he was genetically predisposed to cook everything he ate in the ten-inch, gleaming-black cast-iron frying pan that had been the one item he'd taken from his parents' house when he'd gone away to college. Ignoring his own admonition to keep the iron from the barest kiss of water lest it rust, she noticed that he was steaming rice as the basis of his current masterpiece, covering the pan with a wok lid that was slightly too small.

Talking about the usual daily kid and home trivia, interspersed with trial talk, and then some more trial talk, and once in a while a word about the trial, she'd watched him add a can of tuna to the rice, then a lot of pepper and salt, a few shakes of dried onions, a small jar of pimentos, a spoonful of mayonnaise, some green olives, a shot of tequila. Finally, she could take it no more. "What are you making?" she said.

He half turned. "I haven't named it yet. I could make you immortal and call it 'Frannie's Delight' or something if you want."

"Let's go with 'something.' Now what are you putting in there?"

"Anchovy sauce."

"Since when do we have anchovy sauce?"

"Since I bought it. Last summer I think. Maybe two summers ago."

"What does it taste like?"

"I don't know. I just opened it."

"And yet you just poured about a quarter cup of it into what you're making?" "It's the wild man in me." "You've never even really tasted it?" "Nope. Not until just . . ." Hardy put a dab on his finger, brought it to his mouth. "Now."

"Well? What?"

"Primarily," he said, "it smacks of anchovy." Hardy dipped a spoon and tasted the cooking mixture. "Close. We're very close." He opened the refrigerator, nosing around, moving a few items.

"I know," she said, teasing, coming over next to him. "Banana yogurt."

"Good idea, but maybe not." He closed the refrigerator and opened the cupboard, from which he pulled down a large bottle of Tabasco sauce. "When in doubt," he said, and shook it vigorously several times over his concoction. He then replaced the cover. "And now, simmer gently."

"Are you taking a conversation break while you eat this," she said, "or do you have more work?" "If you're offering to sit with me if I don't open binders, I'll take a break." She put a hand on his arm and looked up at him. "We're okay, right?" "Perfect." He leaned down and kissed her. "We're perfect," he said.

19.

Arson inspector Arnie Becker took the oath and sat down in the witness box. In a sport coat and dark blue tie over a light blue shirt, he looked very much the professional, completely at home in the courtroom. He canted forward slightly, and from Hardy's perspective, this made him appear perhaps eager. But this was neither a good nor a bad thing.

Chris Rosen stood and took a few steps forward around his table, until he was close to the center of the courtroom. After establishing Becker's credentials and general experience, the prosecutor began to get specific. "Inspector Becker, in general, can you describe your duties to the court?"

"Yes, sir. In the simplest terms, I am responsible for determining the cause of fires. Basically where and how they started. If there's a determination that it's a case of arson-that is, a fire that's deliberately set-then my duties extend to other aspects of the crime as well. Who might have set the fire, the development of forensic evidence from sifting the scene, that kind of thing."

"Do you remember the fire in Alamo Square at the home of Paul Hanover on May the twelfth of last year?"

"I do. I was called to it right away. Very early on, it looked like an obvious arson."

"What was obvious about it?"

"There were two dead bodies in the foyer. They appeared to have been victims of homicide, rather than overcome by the fire. The assumption was that someone started the fire to hide the evidence they'd left."

Hardy raised a hand. "Your Honor, objection. Speculation."

Braun impatiently shook her head. "Overruled," she said.

Rosen ignored the interruption. "Would you please tell us about the bodies?"

"Well, as I say, there were two of them. They looked like a man and a woman, although it was difficult to tell for certain. The burning was extensive, and the clothes on the tops of their bodies had burned away. Under them, later, though, we found a few scraps of clothing."

Rosen gave the jury a few seconds to contemplate this visual, a common prosecutorial technique to spark outrage and revulsion for the crime in the minds of the panel. "Anything else about the bodies, Inspector?"

"Well, yes. Each had a bullet hole in the head, and what appeared to be the barrel of a gun was barely visible under the side of the man. So that being the case, I decided to try to preserve the scene of the crime-the foyer just inside the front door-as carefully as possible, and asked the firefighting teams to try to work around that area."

"And were they able to do that?"

"Pretty much. Yes, sir."

After producing another easel upon which he showed the jury a succession of drawings and sketches of the lobby, the position of the bodies, the location of the wounds-the prosecutor definitely favored the show-and-tell approach-Rosen took a while walking Becker step-by-step through the investigative process, and the jury sat spellbound. According to the witness, the blaze began in the foyer itself. The means of combustion, in his expert opinion, was one of the most effective ones ever invented-ordinary newspaper wadded up into a ball about the size of a basketball. Even without accelerants of any kind, a ball of newspaper this size in an average-size room-and the foyer of Hanover's would qualify as that-would create enough heat to incinerate nearly everything in it, and leave no trace of its source.

"You used the term 'accelerant,' Inspector. Can you tell us what you mean by that?"

And Becker gave a short course, finishing with gasoline, the accelerant used in this particular fire.

"But with all these other accelerants, Inspector, surely they would burn up in the blaze? How can you be sure that this one was gasoline?"

Becker loved the question. "That's the funny thing," he said, "that people always seem to find difficult to understand."

"Maybe you can help us, then, Inspector."

Hardy longed to get up and do or say something to put a damper on the lovefest between these two. Earlier, Hardy had interviewed Becker himself and had found him to be forthcoming and amiable. Rosen's charming act played beautifully here-the jurors were hearing interesting stuff talked about by two really nice guys. Not only were they giving him nothing to work with, if they did get on something worth objecting to, and Hardy rose to it, he would look like he was trying to keep from the jury what this earnest and obviously believable investigator wanted to tell them. So he sat there, hands folded in front of him, his face consciously bland and benign, and let Becker go on.

"All these accelerants, in fact everything, needs oxygen to burn, so whatever burns has to be in contact with the air. But there is only one part of a liquid that can be in contact with the air, and that is its surface. So what you can have, and actually do have in a case like this, is the gasoline running over the floor, sometimes slightly downhill, pooling in places. But no matter what it's doing, the only part of it that's burning is its surface. Maybe the stuff that isn't burning underneath, the liquid, soaks into some clothing fabric, or into a rug. Both of those things happened here, so we were able to tell exactly what kind of accelerant it was."

"And it was?"

"Gasoline."

"Inspector, you used the word 'exactly.' Surely you don't mean you can tell what type of gasoline it was?"

Hardy and Catherine were of course both intimately familiar with every nuance of this testimony. Unable to bear his own silence any longer, he leaned over and whispered to her. "Surely he doesn't mean that?" A wisp of a smile played at Catherine's mouth.

"That's exactly what I mean." Becker gushed on, explaining the mass-spectrometer reading, the chemical analysis (more charts) of Valero gasoline, the pointby-point comparison. Finally, Rosen, having established murder and arson-although no absolute causal relationship between the two-changed the topic. "Now, Inspector, if we could go back to the night of the fire for a while. After you told the firefighters to preserve the crime scene as best you could, what did you do then?"

"I went outside to direct the arson team." He went on to describe the members of this team-another arson inspector, the police personnel-and their various functions, concluding with getting the names and contacts of possible witnesses from people gathered at the scene. "And why do you want to do that?"

Becker seemed to have some trouble understanding the question. Suddenly his eyes shifted to Hardy, but he braved a reply. "Well, lots of people tend to come to a fire, and you never know which of them might have seen something that could prove important. Sometimes a spectator might not recognize the importance of something they've seen. We just like to have a record of everybody who was there so inspectors can go back and talk to them later."

The reason for Becker's sudden edginess soon revealed itself. Rosen had obviously rehearsed this part of the testimony to get to this: "Inspector, isn't it true that, in your experience, when arson is involved, the arsonist, the person who set the fire, often comes back to admire his or her handiwork?"

Hardy shot up. "Objection, Your Honor. No foundation. The witness is not a psychologist." This was kind of a lame objection, since the question was more about what arson inspectors observed than what was in the mind of arson suspects, but it sounded good, and the judge went for it.

"Sustained."

Rosen tried again. "Inspector Becker, among arson inspectors is it common knowledge that a person who sets a fire ...?"

Hardy wouldn't let him finish. "Objection! Hearsay and speculation."

"Sustained. Mr. Rosen, ask a specific question or drop this line."

"All right, Your Honor." Rosen stood still, all but mouthing his words first to make sure he got them right. "Inspector, in your own experience, have you personally ever identified and/or arrested an arsonist who had returned to a fire he or she had created?"

Hardy was on his feet. "Your Honor, I'm sorry, but I must object again."

But Rosen, this time, had made it narrow enough for the judge to accept. "Objection overruled. Go ahead, Mr. Rosen."

"Thank you, Your Honor."

Hardy caught a bit of a smirk in the prosecutor's face and, suddenly realizing his own blunder, he tightened down on the muscles in his jaw. By objecting time and again to Rosen's questions, he'd fallen for the prosecutor's bait, thus calling the jury's attention to an item they might otherwise have overlooked as unimportant. Now no one in the courtroom thought it was unimportant, and Hardy had no one to blame for that but himself.

Rosen asked the reporter to read back the question, which she did as Hardy lowered himself to his chair.

The answer, of course, was yes. Becker himself had personally had cases where arsonists had returned to or remained at the fire scene at least a dozen times.

"So now you were outside, across the street from the fire? Can you tell the jury what happened next?"

Hardy had seen this coming. He might have objected on relevance with some chance of being sustained this time, but he had a use in mind for the information.

Becker answered. "Yes, a woman saw that I was in a command position and she approached me and told me that she was related to the man who owned the burning house."

"Do you recognize that woman in this courtroom?"

"I do."

"Would you point her out for the jury, please?"

"Yes." He held out his hand. "Right there, at the table."