"No idea," he said.

The other fellow, Hardy, leaned forward slightly. "We believe the MR stands for Malachi Ross. Does that help?"

Glitsky had seen a lot of burnout in his job and read the signs here. He pulled the page around, facing him again. "See Mike Andreotti about his recommendations on SS. Compare with the Malachi Ross memo dated October twenty-fourth. Does that help? What's SS?"

This time, there was no hesitation. "Sinustop."

"And what was your recommendation?"

"Well, it wasn't mine. I'm just the administrator, but the PPG recommended-"

"Excuse me," Hardy said. "What's the PPG?"

Andreotti blinked slowly, took a breath, and let it out. "The Parnassus Physicians' Group. Basically, they're the doctors that work here."

"Okay." Glitsky, staying with the program, continued, "And what did they recommend about Sinustop?"

"Just that we'd been inundated with samples, and that perhaps we should make it a policy for a while to go easy on giving the stuff out until more data got collected on it. Which now, in retrospect, was a smart suggestion."

"But you didn't implement it?" Hardy asked.

"No. Ross overrode it. He wrote a long memo justifying the position-I've got it somewhere here. I gather the stuff was medically pretty substandard. I'm not a doctor myself, but some of the senior staffers were appalled that our medical director would put his stamp on anything like that. So as usual, we compromised, and Malachi got what he wanted."

"You don't like him much." Glitsky didn't phrase it as a question.

But Andreotti merely raised his shoulders a centimeter. "People become pricks around money and money's been so tight here for so long…" Another shrug. "If it wasn't him, it would be somebody else."

"Only a couple of weeks ago, it was Markham," Hardy reminded him.

"No. It was still Ross. Ross has the passion for money. Markham just wanted to make a profit. There's a difference."

"What's the difference?" Glitsky asked.

"Well, take Sinustop, for example. It didn't have to be any issue at all, but Ross saw it saving us a million bucks a year, right to the bottom line. If there might be some downside, he was willing to risk it if it stemmed the bleeding."

"And Markham wasn't?"

"Sometimes, but nowhere near the way Ross did. You think it was Markham who made the call on Baby Emily? No chance." He pointed at Hardy's page again. "Anyway, I guess that's why he wrote that note to himself. He thought Ross went too far there again."

"What about you, Mr. Andreotti?" Glitsky asked. "What did you think?"

Another weary sigh. "I know this always sounds terrible, but I'm an administrator. I resist the temptation to play doctor. I follow orders."

But Hardy had what he needed, and had already gotten a hint on something else. "If we may, sir," he began, translating the second note as Glitsky had done. "Talk to Ross and address complaints about hands-on at Portola. Parnassus Physicians' Group ult, which must be ultimatum."

"It was." This wasn't any mystery to Andreotti. He actually almost seemed to perk up slightly. "Sometime last year, Ross started coming by the hospital all the time-drop-ins, he called them. Checking up on our physicians' procedures on everything from birthing to surgeries to ER procedures first, making recommendations to save a buck here, a buck there. Later actually advising doctors what they ought to do right while they were treating their patients. Now, when you realize that even the lowliest GP has a self-image just a notch below God's, you can imagine how popular these visits were. Finally, the PPG issued an ultimatum that he had to stop and, mostly, he did. At least enough to satisfy them."

"But not completely?" Hardy wanted to be sure.

"No. But the drop-ins fell off from twenty a month to maybe five and he stopped giving orders disguised as advice."

"Do you have any record of the days he came? The actual dates?" Hardy asked.

Andreotti pondered for a moment. "No, I doubt it. Why would we? He wasn't on staff here, so there'd be no personnel record. He just dropped in. Why?"

"No reason. Just curious." Hardy kept it deliberately vague, pushed the other pages across the desk. "If we could just take one more minute of your time, Mr. Andreotti, does anything else strike you about these?"

The administrator pulled them over and took time now, one by one. "I don't know Medras, but Biosynth is a drug manufacturer. Most of their stuff is low-rent, over-the-counter. They're not real players, but I've heard a rumor they've got something big with the FDA right now." He turned to the next page, looked up. "Foley is Patrick Foley. He's corporate counsel. I don't know who DA is."

Glitsky knew that one. "The district attorney."

A light was coming on in Andreotti's eyes, but he made no comment, turning to the last page. "See Coz. re: punitive layoffs-MR. Document all. Prep. rpt. to board. Severance?"

"Coz is Cozzie Eu. She's the personnel director." He labored over the rest of the note for a few seconds; then slowly he raised his head. "Tim was going to let Ross go, wasn't he?"

Glitsky's mouth was tight. "It's a little early to say, sir. But thanks very much for your time."

As they drove out to the Embarcadero Center and Parnassus Headquarters, the way they decided to phrase it to corporate counsel was that Hardy was an attorney working with the DA. That was true in all its parts if not quite literally. Pat Foley met them at the door, saw them through, then looked back along the hallway in both directions before he closed it. They didn't get a chance to try out their explanation before Foley started talking. "You caught me just as I was going out, but my appointment is just over in Chinatown. Maybe we could talk as we walk."

In five minutes, they were in Portsmouth Square, surrounded by pagodas and tai chi classes, some Asian porn shops, and a line of cars waiting for space in the garage below. High clouds had blown in over the night, and the morning air was chill with a brittle sunlight.

Foley's dome shone even in the faded day. The few hairs that were left were blond, as was the wispy mustache. Thin-shouldered and slightly paunched, he was the picture of what a life behind a desk with tremendous financial pressure could do to a young man-he didn't appear to be much over forty, if that. When he finally sat himself on the concrete lip of one of the park's gardens, he was breathing heavily from the walk.

"Sorry," he said, "I didn't want to talk about it in there. The walls have ears, sometimes."

"Talk about what?" Glitsky asked mildly.

"Well, Susan said you were with homicide. I assume this is about Mr. Markham, or the other Portola deaths. Although I have to say I work almost exclusively with corporate matters. I'm not aware of any information I possess that might be useful to your investigation. If I was, as an officer of the court, of course I would have come forward voluntarily."

Glitsky gave him a flat stare. "Do you talk that way at home?"

Before Foley could react, Hardy stepped in. "Do you really believe your offices are bugged?"

The one-two punch confused him. He couldn't decide which question to answer, so he asked one of his own. "Is this about Mr. Markham then?"

The truth was that neither Hardy nor Glitsky knew precisely what this meeting was going to be about. The telltale initials MR did not even appear in Markham's note. So though they both had their suspicions that Ross was somehow involved, they didn't want to give anything away. "Do you have any idea what the word 'Saratoga' might refer to, Mr. Foley?" Glitsky asked.

"You mean the city down the peninsula, out behind San Jose? I think there's another one in New York, as well, upstate somewhere, I believe. Is that it?"