"He always did have a mind of his own." Hess spread her palms, gave him a sympathetic smile. "Well, if there's anything I can do, anything you need . . . you're sure you're up to all this running around?"

Mickey tried without much success to put on a rea.s.suring face. "My head's felt better, but I'll be fine."

"Somebody out in the cubicles might have some painkiller."

"I appreciate that. Maybe I'll just go and see what I can find."

He walked out into the lobby and noticed that the makeshift table where they'd earlier been preparing the pledge-card mailing was now doubling as a kind of study hall for half a dozen pairs of tutors and their students. Limping over to them, head truly pounding again, he knocked at one end of the table. "Excuse me," he said, as twelve pairs of eyes turned to him, "did any of you notice an older guy hanging around here yesterday afternoon, inside the building or out? About six feet, skinny, maybe seventy years old?"

A sea of blank faces stared back at him. Not much of a surprise.

On his phone call, Hunt had told Mickey to locate Al Carter if he could and ask him to give a call. After he'd done that, Mickey was to abandon his alibi search and phone calls to COO members and devote his time to trying to discover what had happened to Jim. His disappearance, Hunt had made clear, was now looking more and more as though it might be somehow related to this investigation, and this was anything but good news. In fact, the new development had seemed so immediate and important to Mickey that he'd totally forgotten that his boss had told him-first-to find Carter and give him the message to call Hunt. Then Mickey was to start looking for Jim, getting a line on where he'd gone after Irving Pizza if he could.

Suddenly Mickey realized he'd forgotten the first part of the a.s.signment. Back in the administrative cubicles where he'd been making his phone calls, he got some aspirin and learned that Carter was back in the parking lot-the city had returned the limo and he had gone out to make sure they hadn't damaged it too badly.

Mickey found him sitting alone behind the wheel, apparently sleeping in the new-minted and welcome sunshine. The front windows were down and Mickey hesitated, then started to walk with his halting steps up to the driver's side. When he was about five feet away, Carter spoke through his closed eyes. "The sound of your walking gives you away. Tell me I got the reward."

"Sorry. Not yet. But my boss would like you to give him a call. You might be getting close."

Mickey punched in Hunt's number on Carter's cell phone and handed the instrument back. He then moved away, out of earshot, and sat on the asphalt, his back up against the building, and settled into a drowsy seminumbness in the warming sunshine. In spite of himself, he dozed off. Seconds, or minutes, later, he started awake with Carter still on the phone, his side of the discussion consisting mostly of a series of yeses and noes. Except for his closing phrase, when Carter said, "I never thought of that."

Then Carter walked over to where Mickey sat, and with a shrug, handed the phone down to him.

Hunt's voice shimmered with intensity as he gave Mickey his new marching orders, and whether it was that or the short nap he'd slipped into or the aspirin kicking in, Mickey felt a sudden sense of clarity and purpose.

Hunt knew that Jim had already been drinking when he left Irving Pizza. Then the rain had come on at least close to the time that he was supposed to have started walking down to Ortega. It wasn't unreasonable to a.s.sume that a shower had caught up with him and driven him inside again, to another bar on the way. Hunt had Googled bars in the neighborhood and had located seventeen of them within walking distance of the Ortega campus. And now he gave Mickey those names and addresses.

At least these were places to look.

When he rang off, Mickey looked up at Carter and asked, "So what'd he say to you?"

And Carter replied, "He told me not to tell you."

Devin Juhle, Sarah Russo, and Wyatt Hunt met at Lou the Greek's, where they took an empty booth in the back. During their lunch in their car, Sarah had decided to phone Morton's. That call had revealed that Alicia Thorpe had called in sick with the flu. She'd be out at least through the weekend, which, with her normal days off, meant until the following Wednesday. To both Juhle and Russo, this was a good enough sign that she'd gone underground or fled, and so the inspectors canceled their canva.s.sing of Neshek's neighborhood and arranged this meet with Hunt. Now the priority was to turn up the burners under Thorpe and bring her in for questioning, if they could find her.

"Hey," Hunt said, "people get sick."

Russo, a deep frown in place, took a good pull at her lemonade. "True," she said, "but she's not home in bed trying to get better. She's not at her brother's. She's not in the hospital. We're a.s.suming she's not with your boy, Mickey, either."

Hunt kept his head down and refrained from comment.

"So what's that leave?" Juhle asked. "She's on the run."

"Maybe you scared her off yesterday," Hunt said. "She knew you had the scarf. It was only a matter of time."

Juhle was tearing his c.o.c.ktail napkins into tiny pieces. "s.h.i.t."

Russo nodded. "s.h.i.t is right. We had her."

"She'll turn up," Juhle said.

"Maybe in our lifetime," Russo retorted.

Hunt noticed the obvious tension between the two inspectors, perhaps brought about by Juhle's reluctance-due to his recent history, mostly with Gina Roake-to haul Alicia downtown to talk to her in one of the homicide interrogation rooms, where, due to the intimidating setting, results were often easier to obtain.

"So we wanted to get you and Mickey and even his sister on it too," Russo added. "All of them know a lot of the same people, don't they? We need you to put out the word."

"Absolutely," Hunt said, "we'll get right on that." Then, changing the subject, "Meanwhile, while we're all here having such fun together, you manage to dig up anything on Keydrion?"

"Ah, Keydrion," Juhle said. "How did you get to him?"

Hunt shrugged. "He's a colonel or something in the Battalion out of Sunset, but he's hanging around with Len Turner, and I was kind of wondering what his role was. You get anything on him?"

"He's clean," Juhle said. Then added, "As an adult. 'Course, he's only been out off the youth farm for seven months, so he's barely had time to get his sea legs back. As a kid, though, he was reasonably bada.s.s. Went in for manslaughter when he was sixteen, though there was some question about maybe it should have gone down as murder one. The DA almost charged him as an adult, but I hear our friend Mr. Turner applied some influence and suddenly Keydrion needed rehab and consolation."

"You think Keydrion is somehow involved in all this?" Russo asked.

"Not impossible," Hunt said. "But I wouldn't mind knowing for sure."

"I wouldn't mind knowing anything for sure," Juhle said.

Hunt didn't miss a beat. "Anthony," he said.

"What's Anthony?"

"My middle name. Something you can be sure of."

Juhle just shook his head while Russo gave Hunt a dead eye. "I appreciate that you're worried about him, Wyatt, but Keydrion's a low priority for us," she said. "We're looking for Alicia Thorpe, and if you want to be any help to us, you'll be doing that too."

"You putting out a bulletin?" Hunt asked.

Russo's head slowly tracked its way back and forth. "Can't. Not yet. Not officially. Officially, we just want to talk to her again."

Juhle said, "But first we've got to find her."

Hunt nodded. "All right. I'm with you guys. We'll see what we can do."

Hunt sat in his office with his stomach in a knot. After the last half hour, if Juhle and Russo ever found out, even after the fact, that Alicia was or had been at his place, he was dog meat. It was not impossible that he could face charges for obstructing justice or anything else they wanted to throw at him, and earn himself some jail time. And that's if he was right.

If he was wrong-if the inspectors were right and Alicia was in fact a multiple murderer, as he himself had believed until only a couple of hours ago-it might be much worse than that.

But he hadn't been able to come clean with them. He couldn't even include them in his slowly forming plan, because that plan depended on what Mickey discovered-on what he had to discover-and Hunt hadn't yet heard back from him. From where Hunt sat right now, from what Alicia and then Al Carter had told him, he only had a strong inkling of the truth, not a forged linkage that could withstand any a.s.sault.

He had to wait. He could only wait.

And the waiting was doubly excruciating because if Mickey came back with the answer Hunt was hoping for, the result he expected, it was the last thing he actually wanted, because it almost a.s.suredly meant that Jim Parr was dead.

"Come on, Mickey," he said aloud. "Come on."

Another cleverly named place on Noriega Avenue, the Noriega Lounge, was the closest bar north of the Ortega campus, only one block away. Unfortunately, it wasn't on Nineteenth Avenue and couldn't be seen from that main thoroughfare, and Mickey had decided to be his usual thorough self and start all the way south by San Francisco State University and move north to Golden Gate Park.

He'd already made eight stops by the time he got to the Noriega at four o'clock. Mickey thought that although it was rather generally unsung, the place might in fact be the location of "San Francisco's Happiest Happy Hour," which would formally begin in a half hour-two-for-one drinks, nothing over two bucks, and free hors d'oeuvres. A decent mixed crowd was getting itself in the mood to get more in the mood, a loud sound system with a very strong ba.s.s boost played disco music, and two silent televisions-one featuring Oprah, and the other ESPN-vied for s.p.a.ce and attention over the bar.

Every stool was taken.

Mickey found a spot suitable for standing between two stools and sidled himself up into it. His cast brushed up against his left-hand neighbor, a black-leather-jacketed, bearded biker with chains hanging off his belt loops.

Whirling on his stool, he started with "Hey, watch-" and then caught sight of Mickey's eye, the cast. " 'Scuse me," he said, moving down a few inches and giving Mickey a little more room. "You okay, dude?"

"Hanging in there," Mickey said. "Car wreck."

"f.u.c.king blind four-wheelers," the biker said. "Never watchin' out for the other guy. Hey, Claudio!" he yelled down the bar. "Set my pal up here." He stuck out his hand. "I'm Ivan. What are you drinking?"

"Mickey. Just a c.o.ke's fine. I'm working."

Ivan laughed heartily. "You're working here? I want your job. I just about live here, man, and n.o.body's offering to pay me." The bartender appeared across the smooth cherry plank. "Claudio," Ivan said, "this here's Mickey. He's working. Give him a c.o.ke." Then, back to Mickey. "What are you working on?"

"Trying to find somebody," he said. He pulled out his wallet and flipped to the one picture of Jim that he happened to have. It was eight years old, taken at Tamara's graduation, all three of them in the photo.

"I'll take the babe on the right," Ivan said.

"She's not missing," Mickey said. "She's my sister."

"All the better. And I mean it," Ivan persisted. "I'll meet her anytime."

"I'll give her the message," Mickey said. "But who I'm looking for is the old guy in the middle. Might have stopped by in here for a drink yesterday about this time, maybe a little earlier. Maybe alone. Maybe with somebody."

Ivan turned on his stool and took the picture out of Mickey's hand, held it up to catch a little more light from the window behind them. "I can't really say for sure. He's a little familiar. But, hey, half of us in here today were here yesterday too." So he yelled again down the bar.

"Hey, Claudio! Get your a.s.s down here. Check out this picture, in the middle. Isn't this the guy got all f.u.c.ked up in here yesterday?"

33.

"Mrs. Como? h.e.l.lo. This is Wyatt Hunt."

"What's happened? Tell me they've arrested her."

"If you mean Alicia, no, ma'am. Not yet."

Hunt heard her sigh. "I can't imagine what's taking them so long when it's so clear to me."

"Well, that's why I'm calling. The inspectors share your frustration. Especially when they think they've got almost everything they need to get it sewn up."

"Then what's the delay about?"

"That's the question. I saw them this afternoon and they thought maybe they could move things along a bit more quickly if you and some of the other witnesses would agree to meet with them again in one place and all of you go over the information you've given in a little more detail."

"I don't know what that would be. I've already told you everything I know."

"I realize that. But as you say, you told me. Which means the police got it secondhand. I might not have asked you all the right questions. Or put together the information from all the other sources." Hunt paused. "We're not talking much more than an hour or two."

"And what other witnesses?"

"Al Carter. Lorraine Hess. Jimi and Lola Sanchez."

"What about them?"

"Well, they've all cooperated with the police to some degree or another."

"With information against the Thorpe girl, you mean?"

"I can't absolutely confirm that until the arrest is a done deal, Mrs. Como. The inspectors don't want to have the news get out before the suspect's in custody, which I think you'll agree is understandable."

"Well, yes. I suppose it is."

Hunt wasn't sure that he had her yet and thought he saw a way to sweeten the deal. "There's also the issue of the reward," he said.

A silence hung on the line.

"What about the reward?" she asked.

"You'll remember that in our interview, you said that if the information you provided proved useful to the investigation, you wanted to be sure you were in line to stake a claim to the reward? Well, it turns out it looks like there are going to be multiple claimants. You know Len Turner is administering the distribution?"

"Of course. I gave him my money, too, you might recall."

"That's right. Well, Mr. Turner thought, and I agree, that it would be worthwhile if the major potential claimants talked on the record with the inspectors present so there wouldn't be any dispute later about the relative value of the respective contributions to solving the case. But where I don't agree with Mr. Turner is that he didn't seem to think that your information about Ms. Thorpe's relationship with your husband and her subsequent firing on that last day rose to the level of real evidence."

"That's ridiculous," she said. "What could be more real than that?"

"Of course," Hunt said. "That's my feeling too. Which is why I thought you'd want to be down here to defend your position. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this, but I think you need to be aware that Mr. Carter corroborated the fact that your husband fired Ms. Thorpe on that last day, so he'll be making a reward claim on much of the same information you gave us first."

"That's just not right."

"No, ma'am, it's not."

"So where is this meeting? And what time?"

He told her, and then he hung up and looked around his kitchen table at the group he'd a.s.sembled-Alicia, Mickey, Al Carter, and Gina Roake to act as Alicia's attorney should the need arise. "Well," he said, "that's number three. Two to go. Then Devin."

"Sometimes it worries me, Wyatt," Roake said, "how easily you manipulate, cheat, and lie."