"Yes. It is."

"So they were murdered?"

"Yes, ma'am. Or maybe one of them killed the other, and then himself."

"Or herself."

"Maybe," Glitsky said. Although he found them compelling and consistent with his own experience, he wasn't going to get into a discussion of Inspector Becker's theories on why, in a scenario like this one, it probably wasn't the woman.

"But you think it was Paul?"

"I don't know." He was silent for a minute, then realized that the details would undoubtedly be in the paper tomorrow, possibly on the television in a couple of hours. He wouldn't be giving anything away. "The location of the woman's wound indicated that she didn't kill herself.

It was up behind her head. Probably not self-inflicted."

"And what about Paul's?"

Glitsky let out a breath. "About where you'd expect in a suicide. Just over the right ear."

Another short silence. Then Catherine Hanover said, "Wait a minute. The right ear?"

"Yes."

"You're sure?"

"The medical examiner was, and he usually gets it right."

"I think maybe you ought to go back and double-check." "Why?" "Because-I thought everybody knew this, but-Paul had polio back in the early fifties. His right arm was paralyzed. It was dead. He couldn't use it at all."

Glitsky caught up to Kathy West as she pursued a photo op out of the newly refurbished, utilitarian, yet lovely again Ferry Building at the bay, the eastern end of Market Street. The sun, dusk-bound, had just slipped under the blanket of coastal fog that came to cover the city at its western edge at this time of day, at this time of year. In late spring and early summer, San Francisco bore a marked climatic resemblance to Newfoundland. It was still nowhere near the evening proper, although what had only moments before been a shining, sparkling, even inspiringly welcoming downtown suddenly lost its direct sunlight and turned quite cold. Now gusts of the chill early-evening breeze flung open the jackets of businessmen, rearranged the hairstyles of women. Newspapers and food wrappers swirled in the eddies of alleyways and skyscapers.

The mayor's office told Glitsky that he'd find her somewhere along Market if he missed her at the Ferry Building, but he should try there first. He had Paganucci drop him out front and walked head down, hands deep in his pockets, until he got himself out of the wind and inside. Her honor and the press entourage surrounding her were just coming out of Book Passage, where she'd "spontaneously" picked up a couple of novels, three cookbooks, a handful of musical CDs, Don Novello's latest humor and a travel guide to Italy-all of it written and /or performed by San Franciscans.

Glitsky was standing to the side, listening with some skepticism while West talked to the assembled reporters, extolling the virtues of the city, its ongoing importance as a mecca of creativity and art, as these many eclectic works so amply illustrated. A bearded man in a wheelchair removed himself from the immediate group of a dozen or so reporters and photographers and rolled over next to him.

Glitsky knew Jeff Elliot well. A fellow alumnus, along with West and himself, of the DA's kitchen cabinet, Elliot wrote the Chronicle's "CityTalk" column. He suffered from multiple sclerosis, and Glitksy knew that he had recently had to abandon his sometime use of crutches for a full-time wheelchair.

"What are you doing here?" Elliot said.

"Some business with the mayor."

"Want to talk about it? See your name in the paper?"

"It's what I live for." Glitsky almost smiled. "Maybe later, if it turns out to be anything. Don't let me keep you from getting a quote about how artist-friendly the city is. You're not going to hear too many of them."

"Or none."

"Well, the mayor just said it, so it must be true."

"If it is, it's a major scoop." Elliot looked up at him. "You know any struggling artists that actually live here?"

"I hear a couple of homeless guys are tagging every inch of the Fourth Street freeway ramp."

"I don't think she's talking about them."

"She's talking about the city supporting artists. The only way it does that is if they're homeless first and artists second."

Elliot made no response, listened to the mayor for another minute. "It must just be me," he said.

"What?"

"Finding that this city is a bit of a challenge lately to survive in, much less thrive. And I shouldn't talk. I've got a good job. What if you're trying to do art? Can you imagine?"

"No. But the mayor says we're all open arms."

" 'And Brutus is an honorable man.' "

Glitsky looked down at him. "If you say so, Jeff." "That was Shakespeare. Antony's speech after they killed Caesar."

"I thought so," Glitsky said. "I was just going to say that." He brought his attention back to the mayor. "So why are you here? What's this about? It can't be the poor, struggling artists."

"No. Actually, it's an interesting idea. This is the first of Kathy's scheduled walking press conferences. You haven't read about them?"

"Nope."

"I've written about them twice now. The 'Neighborhood Strolls'?" "Still nope." "You're letting me down here, Abe." "I'll give myself twenty lashes when I get home, if I ever do. So what are they about, these strolls?"

"Well, it's going to be in several different neighborhoods in the next weeks, but today she's walking Market from here to Van Ness."

"That's a good walk. Lots of wildlife."

"About twenty blocks worth."

Glitsky lowered his voice. "Is she nuts? Here to Van Ness? That's derelict central." "Yes, it is. I believe she knows that." "So she wants to see people peeing and worse in pub lic fountains? Or selling dope on the street? And she's doing this because . . ." "Because she wants people to know that she shares the same concerns for public safety, cleanliness and general civility as does the majority of the public."

Glitsky shook his head. "She's barking up the wrong tree, Jeff. The voters don't care about that. They care that we're compassionate and diverse and sensitive, but I don't see much sign of caring about public cleanliness."

"Well, there you go. But Kathy's idea is that by her witness to the decay in these areas, she's-and I believe I'm quoting here-'serving notice that fixing this historically blighted corridor through the heart of the city is going to become a priority for my administration, and a boon to the city in general.' "

"And how is this going to happen again? By her walking down it?"

"That's the theory. We report on the problems she encounters, awareness goes up, people see how bad some places are and stop tolerating them."

This time, Glitsky snorted quietly. "No, no. You've got it backwards. We need to tolerate them more because we don't understand them. 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.' Shakespeare again."

"Thank you, I guessed. Ah, she sees you."

Handing her shopping bag to one of her aides-she hadn't known Glitsky was going to be there, but she instinctively rose to a political moment when she saw one-she turned to the reporters, quite a decent crowd considering that there was no real story to cover. "Excuse me," she said. "I need to talk to the deputy chief."

In an instant she was at their side, greeting them both, asking Elliot if he could give them a moment. Glitsky lifted a hand in an ambiguous salute-he was either greeting Kathy or saying good-bye to Elliot. Or maybe both.

"I didn't mean to crash your party, Your Honor. If you're in the middle of something . . ."

"Abe. I told you this morning, it's Kathy. And no, this is fine. We can talk as we walk."

The two left the Ferry Building with the reporter contingent, including Jeff Elliot, hanging back a respectable distance. The first several blocks along Market, while congested with foot and automobile traffic, nevertheless were relatively clean and populated with people who worked downtown. It had very little of the urban blight that Kathy West was hoping to expose, so it left her free to talk with Glitsky as they walked. Hooking her hand in his arm, she set a brisk pace. "I'm surprised to see you so soon. I'm assuming this is about Paul Hanover. Do you have something?"

"Pretty much what you wanted," Glitsky said. "I've talked to John Strout and Hanover's daughter-in-law, and between them got convinced that there's very little chance he killed anybody, including himself." In a few words, he outlined what he'd discovered-the entry wound over the right ear, the other one in the back of the woman's head. "So really that's about it. He could only have shot himself by some awkward contortion that makes no sense, and she had the same problem. So it probably didn't happen that way."

"When the chief said you were good, Abe, he wasn't kidding, was he?"

"I'll take lucky over smart every time. I ran into the right people."

They had gotten down as far as Seventh Street, and now the mayor's eyes were flicking back and forth rapidly, scanning for the signs of urban decay that Glitsky knew would begin appearing any minute. But her mind hadn't left their topic. "So what happens now?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"With the investigation?"

"Well, it continues, of course. Back with Inspector Cuneo, which is where it belongs."

A few more quick steps, and then she stopped abruptly. "This would be the same Inspector Cuneo who told the press this morning that this was a murder/suicide?"

Glitsky's lips went tight for a beat before he answered. "That's what it looked like to me, too, when I first got there."

"Yes, but you didn't tell anybody about it until you had more facts, did you?"

He showed her what he hoped would pass for a smile. "I've gotten a little more used to dealing with the media than your average inspector."

"Be that as it may, Abe, the fact remains that you've made real progress in half a day, and Inspector Cuneo hasn't been any part of it."

"That's not strictly accurate. He talked to Hanover's daughter-in-law first last night. . . ."

"But managed not to learn that Paul had a withered arm." "He didn't know where the entry wound was, so he wouldn't have known why that mattered."

"Precisely. When he could have shown some initiative and gone to the morgue with the body. Isn't that the case?"

Glitsky could only shrug. "Maybe he should have done that."

"You would have."

This was true, but Glitsky shrugged it off again. "Well, either way," he said, "we've got a good idea that Mr. Hanover didn't do anything wrong. That's what you wanted this morning."

She fixed him with that avian intensity. "But unfortunately, that's no longer the point."

Glitsky waited.

"The point, Abe, is that we now know that Paul was murdered, don't we? And you don't think it was the girlfriend, Missy. Which means they were both murdered by someone else. And that being the case, do you think I have any confidence at all that Inspector Cuneo will be more successful catching the person who killed one of my close friends and benefactors than he was identifying the cause or manner of death in the first place? You don't have to struggle with it. The answer is no."

The gaggle of reporters following them had stopped when they did, and now out of the corner of his eye, Glitsky thought he picked up an increasing awareness among some of them, including Jeff Elliot, that something significant might be transpiring here right in front of them between the deputy chief of inspectors and the mayor. He considered that the time might be propitious to try to get some mileage out of West's insistence that the two of them were really, basically, friends. He stepped closer to her, strove for a casual tone. "He couldn't keep his job in homicide if he wasn't effective, Kathy. Lanier would have lateralled him out."

"Abe." West wasn't having it. "Help me out here. I understand a little bit about politics, and I see your concerns. If it makes it easier for you, you can let Inspector Cuneo remain on the case in some capacity, but I'd count it as a personal favor if you stayed on with it, too. Whoever killed Paul Hanover isn't going to get away with it on my watch if I can help it, and you're the best man to see that he doesn't." She reached out and put a hand on his arm, looked up into his face. "Abe. Please. For me."

Glitsky glanced at the reporters, a couple of whom had already snapped some photos. This was turning into too visible a moment, laden with intrigue and import. It had to end or it would grow and become a real event, and he wanted to avoid that at all costs. At last, coming back to her, he patted West's hand in a fraternal gesture and nodded. "All right, Kathy," he said. "Let me see what I can do."

5.

Cuneo lived alone on what had formerly been the grounds of the Alameda Naval Air Station, across the bay from San Francisco. The nine-hundred-square-foot standalone building, which back in the fifties had housed a marine engine repair shop, sat perched on a concrete slab that jutted out ten feet into the channel. All day, every day, flotillas of mostly small saltwater craft glided by his bedroom window, sometimes close enough to touch. The ferry to San Francisco passed every hour or so, too, as well as the occasional Coast Guard or naval vessel.

After six hours of fitful sleep, Cuneo-dreaming of fire-started awake at twenty minutes after four in the afternoon. Tangled up in his blankets, he was breathing hard and sweating. Throwing and kicking the covers off, he shot up to sitting and looked from side to side, getting his bearings. The smoke smell was real enough, all-pervasive in the small house. He let his breathing slow down, the tendrils of his nightmare still clutching at his psyche.

For another minute or so, he sat as he almost never did, in absolute stillness. He wore only his Jockeys, but the stench of last night's smoke still clung to his skin. At last, unconsciously, he lifted the heel of his right foot, let it fall, lifted it again. In seconds, still unaware, he was tapping a steady rhythm on the concrete floor.

Next to the bedroom on the water in the back, a tiny, low-ceilinged workroom huddled to one side of the house. Going forward, the kitchen and bathroom divided the central segment of the building two-thirds to one, and after putting some water on to boil, Cuneo stopped in at the bathroom for a shower, mostly to get the smell off him. When he was done, wearing his towel, he made some Nescafe-two spoons of crystals, no sugar or cream, and went back to put on his clothes.

Up in the front of the house, a relatively spacious living room provided two front and two side windows that gave the space an open feel and plenty of light. A leather love seat sat against one wall, a small teak bookshelf and television stand on the other. By far the most immediately noticeable furnishing, though, was a full set of Ludwig drums in the middle of the room. Cuneo didn't have any idea where his nearest neighbor's home might be, but it was at least out of earshot. He could play all day as loud as he wanted and nobody ever complained.

Three years ago, after his fellow inspector Lincoln Russell finally couldn't take partnering with him anymore, Lieutenant Lanier had recommended that maybe he might want to see a psychologist-his insurance through the city would pay for the first three visits-and try to get some handle on why he couldn't ever sit still, or shut up. He would sing to himself driving to crime scenes, hum during interrogations, often break into unconscious song while he wrote up his reports in homicide. Maybe he had Tourette's syndrome, or Saint Vitus' dance or something, Lanier had suggested, and if he did, it would be better to at least know what he was dealing with.

As it turned out, he only saw the shrink-Adrienne Schwartz-professionally the three times that his insurance covered it, though they dated for six weeks or so after that until she started hinting that she was looking for some kind of commitment. The best thing she'd done for him was recommend that he buy the drums and take some lessons, and now he'd almost always start his day with a twenty-minute workout, getting it all moving by playing along with some CDs of the classic big band guys-Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Louis Bellson.

Today, though, he didn't do his full twenty. Ten minutes into it, in the middle of "Sing, Sing, Sing," he suddenly stopped, stood up, grabbed his jacket. The Hanover woman from last night was a real babe, and he'd picked up the definite sense that she and her husband weren't doing too well. She'd told him he was down in Mexico, fishing for a week, and it didn't seem to bother her too much. He didn't think he'd have too much to do with the murder/suicide-that appeared to be straightforward enough-but he'd want to be thorough, find out what he could. You never knew. The arson inspectors and their police counterparts would have a hundred or more names they'd picked up at the scene, and he'd want to find if any of those potential witnesses had seen anything that might be telling, might call the basic facts into question.

But first the Hanover woman again. See how she was handling the tragedy. If she was lonely. Or horny.

One of the benefits of working nights was commuting against the traffic. Cuneo checked in at the Hall of Justice within twenty minutes of walking out his front door. Up in the homicide detail, Lanier wasn't in his office, and the other four inspectors still at work said hello from their desks and then cordially ignored him. The usual assortment of housekeeping and other messages cluttered his voice mail-a snitch needing some cash to hold him over until he testified in court; another witness sounding very afraid about her upcoming testimony against her husband, who was in jail for murdering their mutual lover; a friendly notice from payroll that his overtime last pay period had exceeded the approved hours; another call that he was behind on his credit union payments; the arson guy, Becker, wondering how he wanted to arrange his pickup of last night's witness list; a woman he'd stopped seeing recently.

Barely audible to the other inspectors, he was humming the opening riff to "Satisfaction" over and over and over as he listened to the messages, writing notes and phone numbers on the pad he carried in his back pocket. Glitsky's was the last message and, hearing it, Cuneo went silent. He played the message again, aware that a flush of anger was rising to his face, but otherwise trying to keep his expression neutral. He threw a quick glance around the room, wondering if any of his colleagues might have heard something, if they were watching for his reaction. But no one was paying him any mind.

The recording told him that he'd finished with his last message, to press one if he'd like to hear it again, two if he'd like to save it, three to delete it. It told him the same thing all the way through again. When it started to tell him for a third time, he finally heard it and slowly replaced the receiver.

What the hell did this mean? The deputy chief of inspectors didn't just call and say, "Oh, by the way, I'll be working with you on your latest case." Cuneo had never heard of anything like it. He'd been without a partner for almost three years now and didn't think much about whether he was popular or not. He was under the impression he'd been doing a good job, making triable cases on five killers in the past eight months, had gotten the collars. It was much better than the average for the detail. Certainly it was the best stretch he'd ever enjoyed professionally.

But what else could this be about except that somebody was checking up on him and his work? And on this of all cases, which on the face of it appeared very close to a slam dunk. It had to mean that they were going to begin some kind of bullshit documentation for moving him out of homicide, maybe out of the PD altogether.

And why would Lanier or anybody else want to do that?

Sitting back in his chair, he began tattooing the arms of it with a steady, rapid beat. It couldn't be about his work product, he thought. If it was, Lanier was straight-shooter enough to have told him, even if it was true that he and Glitsky went way back, sometimes even saw each other socially. Cuneo wondered if his lieutenant even knew about the message Glitsky had left-if he did, he certainly would have given Cuneo some warning, or at least an explanation. This kind of thing just wasn't done. It wasn't right. More, it was an insult.

And then he stopped his drumming, took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. Suddenly, with a crystal clarity, he realized what this was really about, what it had to be about.

And it wasn't his work.