"And what had the defendant told you?"

"She told me that she came home after her afternoon talk with Paul Hanover and had stayed there all night until she'd seen the news of the fire on television."

"Inspector," Rosen said, "would you please read from the relevant portion of Heather Hanover's diary on the day that her grandfather was killed?"

Hardy stole a rapid glance at the jury. Every person on it seemed to be sitting forward in anticipation. As he'd known it would be, this was a damning moment for his defense; and doubly so now that he had just ascertained to his own satisfaction that Will Hanover had in fact been having an affair with his secretary. If he could at least demonstrate the truth of that assertion, it might lend credence to Catherine's actions on the night of the fire, even if she had originally lied about them. As it was, though, he only had Catherine's lie, no corroboration of the affair, and her own daughter's handwritten refutation.

Cuneo had opened the little book and now cleared his throat. ". . . for some reason Mom wanted us all out for the night and told us to stay out and get a pizza or something. But the homework this week is awesome- two tests tomorrow!!-so I told Saul to just drop me off here so I could study. Had to scrounge food since Mom was gone again which is, like, getting to be the norm lately."

Cuneo paused, got a nod from the prosecutor and closed the book.

"And did you later talk to the defendant's daughter about the entry?" Rosen asked.

"I did."

"And what did she tell you?"

"She said she was home alone that night. Her mother was not home." Cuneo skipped a beat and added, gratuitously, "The defendant had lied to us."

Hardy didn't bother to object.

22.

Cuneo's testimony took up most of the afternoon, and Braun asked Hardy if he would prefer to adjourn for the day rather than begin his cross-examination and have to pick up tomorrow where he'd left off today after only a few questions. Like everything else about a trial, there were pros and cons to the decision. Should he take his first opportunity-right now-to attack the facts and impressions of Cuneo's testimony so that the jury wouldn't go home and get to sleep on it? Or would it be better to subject the inspector to an uninterrupted cross-examination that might wear him down and get him back to his usual nervous self again? In the end, and partly because he got the sense that Braun would be happier if he chose to adjourn, and he wanted to make the judge happy, Hardy chose the latter.

So it was only a few minutes past four when he and Catherine got to the holding cell behind the courtroom.

They both sat on the concrete bench, Hardy hunched over with his head down, elbows on his knees.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I'm thinking that I wish you'd have gone home after you talked to your father-in-law."

"I know."

He looked sideways at her. "So how did you hear about the fire?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if you weren't home, watching the news on television, and you weren't, what made you go back to Paul's?"

The question stopped her cold. "I don't know. I must have heard it on the radio. Maybe I had the radio on...."

"Must have!" Hardy suddenly was sitting up straight and snapped out the words. "Maybe you had the radio on! What kind of shit is that?"

"It's not . . ."

"You went to the fire, Catherine. You were there, talking to Becker and Cuneo. What made you decide to go there?"

"I... I'm not sure. I mean, I knew about it, of course. You can hear something and not remember exactly where you've heard it, can't you? I was parked outside Karyn's for I don't know how long that night; then I drove all the way out to Will's office, and nobody was there that late, and after that I was just driving around, not knowing where to go. I'm sure the radio was on then, in the car. I must have had it on, and when they announced the fire . . ." She ran out of words.

"You told both of the inspectors and me that you heard about it on television."

"I did. I mean I remember . . ."

"You remember what? What you told them? Or what really happened?"

"No, both. Dismas"-she ventured to touch his arm- "don't be this way."

He pulled away from her, got to his feet. "I'm not being any way, Catherine."

"Yes, but you're scaring me."

"I'm scaring you? I must tell you, you're scaring me." He sat down again and lowered his voice. "Maybe you don't understand, but we're looking at something like five hours between when you left Paul's the first time and when you came back for the fire. You've told me all this time that you went to Karyn's house and sat outside and waited and waited for her to come home, just hoping that she'd come home, which meant she wasn't with Will. Now I'm hearing you drove out to God knows where, maybe-maybe, I love that-with the radio on . . . Jesus Christ!"

Standing again, turning away from her, he walked over to the bars of the cell and grabbed and held on to them. It took a minute, but finally he got himself under control, came back and sat beside his client. "You know, Catherine, a lot of this-everything we've been through together on this, it's all felt like the right thing because I've taken so much of what you are, who you are, as a matter of faith. You're the first woman I ever loved and I don't want to believe, and have never been able to believe, that you're capable of what you're charged with here."

She started to say something, but he cut her off. "No, let me finish, please. I believed you before when you lied to me about this alibi and said you didn't want me to think you were the kind of person who would spy on her husband. Now I know you are that kind of person and I can accept it and you know what? It didn't even really change how I felt about you. It was okay. Lots of us aren't perfect-you'd be surprised. But more lies are something else again. Lies are the worst. Lies tear the fabric. I'd rather you just tell me you killed them. Because then I know who you are, and we'd work with that."

Catherine's hands were clasped in her lap and her tears were falling on them. "You know who I am."

"An hour ago I would have said that was true. Now I'm going to sit here until you tell me something I can believe."

The silence gained weight as the seconds ticked. Hardy's whole body felt the gravity of it, pulling him toward despair. He turned his head to see her. She hadn't moved. Her cheeks ran with tears. Without looking back at him, she spoke in a barely audible monotone. "I did see it on the television."

He waited.

"I went to a bar. They had a TV over the bar."

"What bar?"

"Harry's on Fillmore. I stayed parked outside at Karyn's until it was dark, and when she didn't come home, I knew she was someplace with Will and I just decided . . . it just seemed that I ought to go cheat on him, too. Pay him back that way. My kids, my girls especially, they can't know I did this. I don't act that way, Dismas. I never had before. But I was in a panic. The life I'd had for twenty years was over. I know you see that."

"I don't know what I see," Hardy said. "Who picked you up?"

"That's just it. I chickened out. I had a margarita and talked to some guy for an hour or so, but . . . anyway . . . the fire saved me."

"On TV?"

"Yes."

"You had to go see the fire because it was your fatherin-law's house?"

"Right. And only a few blocks away. I had to go." She touched his arm again, this time leaving it there. "Dismas, that's really what happened. It's what I was doing. It's why I couldn't say. You have to believe me. It's the truth."

More tears, this time Frannie's.

Her face was streaked with them as she sat holding Zachary, Treya on one side of her and two-year-old Rachel on the other, all of them on the couch in the Glitskys' living room. Treya, still wiped out, had nevertheless gotten dressed. Rachel was uncharacteristically silent, picking up the strained atmosphere from the serious adults. She sat pressed up against Frannie, holding her little brother's bootied foot in her own tiny hand.

As soon as Frannie had heard the news, she wanted to know what she could do to help. At the very least, she was bringing dinner over tonight. She called her husband at work, telling him to meet her at the Glitskys' as soon as he could get away-something was wrong with their new baby's heart. They might be taking Rachel to live with them for a while if that was needed.

"But he looks so perfect," she said, sniffling.

"I know," Treya said. "It's just that they don't really know very much yet."

"They know it's not aortic stenosis," Glitsky said, but his voice wasn't argumentative. He and the guys-his father, Nat, and Dismas Hardy-were arranged on chairs on the other side of the small room. Glitsky gave everybody a short course on the cardiologist's initial visit, the two possibilities he'd described for Zachary's condition, with the VSD being the best outcome they could have hoped for. "So we're choosing to believe that we're lucky, although at the moment I can't say that it feels like it."

"But they're sure it's a hole in his heart?" Hardy asked.

"Yes," Treya said. "As of this morning."

"But it could change?" Frannie wanted to know.

"Well, not from being a hole," Treya said. "It's not going to turn into aortic stenosis, if that's what you mean. They don't think," she added.

"Trey." Glitsky trying to keep her accurate. "They're sure of that. It's not aortic stenosis. Right now it looks like a benign murmur. That's what they're saying."

"The hard thing," Treya said, "is that they can't predict anything yet. He could turn blue tomorrow, or today, or in the next five minutes . . ."

"Or never," Glitsky said, "maybe."

His wife agreed. "Or maybe never, right."

Nat Glitsky, in his eighties, got up and shuffled across the room. "Time to let the kid get to know his grandpa," he said, "if one of you lovelies would scoot over and give an old man some room."

"Who you calling old?" Frannie said, making room.

Hardy gave Glitsky a sign and the two of them went into the kitchen, out of earshot of the rest of them as long as they spoke quietly. Hardy took the large casserole they'd brought out of its brown paper shopping bag, then took the foil off the top. Frannie had made her world-famous white macaroni and cheese with sausages. It was still warm. Hardy slipped it into the oven, then pulled a head of lettuce out of another bag. "Salad bowl?" he asked. Then, when Glitsky got it out of the cupboard and handed it to him. "How you holding up?"

"A little rocky." Glitsky let out a long breath. "It comes and goes. The hospital was pretty bad. When the doc said I should hope it's only a hole in the heart, I wanted to kill him."

Hardy was silent. He'd lost a child once. He knew.

Glitsky was going on. "I just keep telling myself it's good news, it's good news." The scar through his lips was getting a workout, dealing with the emotion. "We go in for some more tests tomorrow. Then we'll see."

"Tomorrow?"

Glitsky nodded. "The first days, they like to keep a close watch."

"But they let you go home?"

"He's fine at home, except if things change. I had a few minutes today when I managed not to think about it at all." He went on to tell Hardy about his unsuccessful efforts to locate Missy's car, but getting her address, his talk with Ruth Guthrie.

All the while, Hardy was silently washing the lettuce, rinsing it, tearing it into bite-size pieces and dropping them into the large wooden bowl. After Glitsky had gotten through where Missy had lived, where she'd worked, and that she had paid her rent from her checking account, Hardy dropped the last piece of lettuce in the bowl. "Do you have premade salad dressing or should I whip up a batch?"

"Maybe you didn't hear me," Glitsky said.

"I heard you. I'm glad it gave you something to do and got your mind off all this stuff here, but Missy D'Amiens isn't going to matter."

"Why not?"

"Partly because she never has mattered, but mostly because Catherine changed her alibi today. Again."

"At the trial?"

"No, thank God. Privately, with me." He met his friend's eyes.

"You think she did it?"

"I don't think it's impossible anymore. Let's go with that." He went over and grabbed a dish towel off the handle of the refrigerator. Drying his hands, he said, "So now letting her testify looks like it could be a huge mistake. . . ."

"Why is that?"

"Because they'll ask her about her alibi-they'll have to, since they've already got that she lied about it originally. And to answer them, she'll either perjure herself or change her story again. Either way, a disaster. But if she doesn't testify, there goes the sexual harassment, which was always my theory of why Cuneo got on her in the first place. And more than that, it's one the jury might have believed."

"You don't think they'll believe me?"

"Oh, sure. They'll believe Catherine told you about it. But so what? If I don't have her take the stand and say it herself, then you have nothing to corroborate. Your account is just plain hearsay and inadmissible . . . you know as well as me. To say nothing of the fact that we've already made a big deal about this and we're committed. So no chance if she doesn't testify. And if she does, we're screwed."

Glitsky was leaning back against the counter, arms crossed, a deep frown in place. "I don't want to believe Cuneo's been right on this all along."

"I don't either. But Rosen's got his eyewitnesses coming up next after my cross on Cuneo, and that's not going to be pretty, either. They all say they saw Catherine, and I'm beginning to think they're saying that because they did."

Glitsky remained quiet for a second or two, then asked, "So you think she's got the ring after all?"

"The ring?"

"Yeah. Missy's ring." At Hardy's questioning look, he explained. "Ruth Guthrie mentioned it today again before I left, and I remembered I'd heard about it way back at the beginning of this thing. And I know it's never showed up in evidence."

"I was going to call Strout about that. You're sure? It wasn't on the body?"

"No possibility. I saw the body, Diz. No ring. No fingers, in fact."

"Okay, but why would I think Catherine's got it?"

"Because if . . . well, if she's in fact guilty, whoever did it most likely took it off the body. The thing's supposed to be worth, what, a hundred grand? And it hasn't showed up? What's that leave? Somebody took it."

"Or it fell off in the fire."

"Okay, then it would have been in the sweep."

"And maybe Becker or one of his men kept it."