"What are you guys talking about?"

Bracco and Fisk weren't exactly talking. They'd come back and met at the hall after their respective interviews in the morning. The volume of their conversation out at their desks had pulled the lieutenant out of his office and his meeting with Ash.

"Nothing, sir. Sorry." Darrel Bracco didn't want to fink on his partner, although he was plenty disappointed in him.

"It didn't sound like nothing." Glitsky stood over their combined desk with the stoplight in the middle of it. He was looking down on them, one to the other.

At last, Fisk caved. "Malachi Ross told me when he went home on the Tuesday night, but it was a different time than his wife had said."

"So Harlen told Ross what she'd said," Bracco finished for him.

"You told him?" Glitsky's voice was flat. Ash had come out and was standing behind him, shaking her head at these Keystones.

Fisk nodded. "She said after midnight and he said ten o'clock. So he just said she was wrong. She'd made a mistake."

"And then, the minute Harlen walked out the door, he called her." Bracco was appalled at his partner's error. "How much you want to bet?"

"Easy, Darrel." Glitsky turned a surprisingly patient eye to Fisk. "Usually when you get contradictory statements from two witnesses, especially if they're closely related, like married, you don't want to tell the one what the other said until you can get them together and confront them with the contradiction. That can be instructive."

"Yes, sir. I got that now. I made a mistake. Do you think he's called his wife?"

"Absolutely," Bracco said.

Ash spoke from behind Glitsky. "Do you have her number? You could call and ask her yourself."

Fisk said he thought he'd try that. While he made the call, Bracco started to tell Glitsky about his interview with Brendan Driscoll. When Ash heard about the correspondence and computer files, she piped in, "What are all these papers? He never mentioned them when he was up before the grand jury."

"He told me you didn't ask about them."

"How could I? I didn't know they existed outside of the company computers. What did he do, steal them?"

"I gathered he e-mailed them to himself before he got fired."

"So he stole them. Are they still at his house?"

"I got that impression, the disks anyway."

Ash turned to Glitsky. "We need that stuff, Abe."

"Jeff Elliot's already got it," Bracco offered.

"Forget it," Glitsky said. "He's a reporter. We'll never see it."

"So we'll go for Driscoll's originals," Ash said. "Where are your warrant forms? You keep 'em up here?"

"You might not even need them," Bracco told her. "Driscoll's just looking for a way that he can disrupt things at Parnassus. He's bitter. He wants to get back at people, especially people who made life hard on Markham."

Ash nodded, but told them to get a warrant anyway. Fisk came back over to the knot of them, dejected. "She didn't admit he called her, but she said she remembered wrong and changed her mind. She was glad I called. She was going to call me." He looked mournfully around him. "Ten o'clock."

"He called her," Bracco snapped.

"It doesn't matter." Glitsky was in a fatalistic frame of mind after Kensing. "The wife wouldn't have testified at trial against her husband anyway. We haven't lost anything. Not like with Kensing."

The two inspectors shot glances at each other. "What about Kensing?" Bracco asked.

Again, Ash stepped in. "You can take him off your list. He has an alibi for Carla's murder. I was just telling Abe."

This brought them all to silence, which Bracco broke. "So it's all coming down to Carla?"

Glitsky nodded. "Looks like. Is there anybody left without an alibi? What about Driscoll?"

"I asked him this morning," Bracco said. "He might have been talking on the phone."

"To who?"

"His partner, Roger. I was going to check his phone records. It's on my list."

After a moment, Fisk perked up. "I don't know if you've heard, Lieutenant, but we've made some progress on the car."

Hardy should have been elated. After all, his client was no longer a suspect. He'd remained on the fifth floor, eschewing an opportunity to visit with either Glitsky or Jackman, waiting on a bench outside the Police Commissioner's Hearing Room until Kensing had come out. Eric told him how it had gone, which was pretty much exactly as Hardy had predicted.

The two men had walked up to John's for a celebration lunch but it had turned out to be a sober affair, in all senses. Hardy made a few-he thought-subtle attempts to get Eric to open up about his girlfriend. How had Judith Cohn gotten along with Markham? With Ross? With all the Parnassus problems, monetary and otherwise, with which Kensing had such difficulty? What were their plans together, if any?

Eric was reasonably forthcoming. She'd only been on staff at Portola for a year after her residency at USC and internship at Johns Hopkins, then two four-month stints-one in Africa and one in South America-with Me´dicins San Frontie`res.

"You know, Doctors Without Borders, although she always gives it the French reading, posters in her room and her bumper sticker even. She's proud of her languages, French and Spanish. And she's a fanatic about the organization, really. I think she's got me half-convinced to go over with her next time-it's Nigeria this summer-although God knows there's enough to do here in this coun try. But if Parnassus does let me go…andmy kids, I don't know how they'd handle it. Remember when decisions used to be easy?"

After they said good-bye, Hardy stood in the sunshine on Ellis Street, about midway between his office and the Chronicle building. It should be over, he knew, but somehow it wasn't. This wasn't the familiar emotional letdown after the conclusion of a trial. There was no conclusion here, not yet.

Someone had murdered Tim Markham and his family. Someone had murdered a succession of patients at Portola.

And he still had his deal with Glitsky. They were sharing their discovery, and he was privy to knowledge that Abe did not share. It rankled and left him feeling somehow in his friend's debt, which was absurd. Hardy had, if anything, done Glitsky a big favor.

But whatever the complications, he knew that he was too involved to quit, even if there was no one left to defend.

It couldn't be the end. It wasn't over.

PART FOUR

33

There was no reason now for Jeff Elliot to use any of the dirt that Driscoll had supplied on Eric Kensing. If he wasn't any longer suspected of killing Markham and his family, then he was a private person with his own private problems, and they were not the stuff of news-at least not the kind of news that made its way into "CityTalk."

Hardy sat in Elliot's cubicle, the stack of paper Driscoll had provided on the rolling table in front of him. He flipped through the pages slowly, one at a time over the course of the afternoon, while Jeff toiled on his next column. It was really a hodgepodge of data. The letters to Kensing that Elliot had shown Hardy the other day, for example, occurred over the course of several years, and were widely separated within the printed documents. Likewise, the memos to Ross and the board on various issues, including Baby Emily and the Lopez boy, occurred in chronological order. Hardy was finding that only a careful reading of all the documents related to any one issue would lead to any real sense of the gravity of the thing over time.