‘What’s it doing in your briefcase?’

Hardy avoided that. ‘You wouldn’t believe the stuff I accumulate in here.’

Glitsky held out his hand. Hardy stood and passed the belt over the desk. ‘You want it?’ he asked, keeping the joke running. ‘Maybe it’ll fit you.’

The lieutenant wasn’t smiling. ‘What was this evidence of?’

‘Nothing. We never used it.’

‘Though of course you checked it out?’

Hardy cocked his head. Suddenly Glitsky was interested and that made him interested. ‘Of course. Before they tool belts they call them blanks. This is one of them. Anyway, there’s no tannery mark, except that E-2 punch in the back. Nobody I talked to knew what that stood for, not even Freeman, and Freeman knows everything. Best we could come up with was a friend of Sal’s was going to make him a belt and the old man picked out the blank, then the other guy never got around to it.’ Glitsky stared across at him. The scar had gone pale across his lips, a sign of tension. ‘It might not be anything,’ he said, ‘but North Beach Station – all their stuff, they punch E-something on it, just like this. North Beach Station is E-2.’

‘The North Beach police station?’

‘No.’ Glitsky shook his head. ‘Fire.’

A line drawn from the Hall of Justice to Hardy’s office on Sutter Street would almost intersect the administrative offices of the main fire station on Golden Gate Avenue. Hurriedly grabbing a cab uptown, Hardy couldn’t help but notice, and thought it provocative, that that same line would probably cut through both Mario Giotti’s chambers and the living room in Sal Russo’s apartment.

Escaping his attention until this moment – it was, after all, an imaginary line – now he couldn’t shake the conviction that this might be the axis around which the Russo case revolved.

It had gotten late, he wasn’t sure how. He did finally return the storage-room key, then ran into some attorneys outside the municipal courtrooms who wanted to talk about the case, buy him some drinks, which he refused.

Then Jeff Elliot appeared outside the reporters’ room on the third floor of the Hall and another forty minutes or so went away. He tried to keep a lid on what he was thinking, knowing that unless you wanted to leak something specific or start a rumor, and that wasn’t his intention now, it wasn’t a good policy to speculate to newspaper reporters.

Now, somehow, it was nearly five o’clock. He was relieved that he had made it to the building before the main fire department offices would close.

A bright sun flirted with the tops of Twin Peaks, but the day itself continued truly cold. The biting wind of the previous afternoon had picked up steam and an attitude coming across the Sierra Nevada mountain range, erasing the last memories of Indian summer.

Hardy hurriedly thrust some bills at the cabbie. Briefcase in hand, he half ran two at a time up the wide steps leading into the building.

In the lobby the late-afternoon glare against the polished right-hand wall was blinding. Shading his eyes, he found the office he wanted on the opposite wall and walked in.

For a city office the place appeared to run very well. Hardy was approaching the counter when a uniformed young black woman saw him, stood up at one of the desks, came around it, and asked if she could help him.

‘This might be unusual,’ he said, ‘but I’d like to know if you can identify something for me.’ He took out the belt and placed it on the counter.

Picking it up, she turned it over once or twice, noted the E-2 stamp on one side, put it back down. ‘This is a hose-and-ladder strap,’ she said as if she saw one every day, and maybe she did. ‘We use ’em to wrap up gear on the trucks. This one’s stamped by North Beach station. Where’d you get it?‘

Hardy kept it vague. ‘A friend of mine had it,’ he said. ‘He gave it to me. I thought I might make it into a belt.’

The woman laughed. ‘This old thing? You’d have to cut off half of it first. Repolish it. Get it tooled.’

This had been Glitsky’s second point, which Hardy felt he should have seen much earlier. The ‘belt’ was far too big for Graham or for Hardy, and Sal had been a wiry old man. What had made Hardy think it would fit him, that it was a belt in the first place?

The woman was turning it in her hand again, then snapped it a time or two. ‘Besides, it’s pretty brittle,’ she said. ‘Your friend must have had it a long time. Did he say where he got it?’

‘I think he found it left behind at a fire scene,’ Hardy said. ‘Forgot to return it.’

She gave him another smile, obviously assuming that Hardy’s ‘friend’ was himself, that guilt over the stolen strap had finally caught up with him. ‘I don’t think North Beach would use it anymore. You might as well hang on to it. Or I could just throw it away here. It won’t make much of a belt.’

‘I’ll bring it back to him,’ Hardy said. ‘Maybe it’s got sentimental value.’

She gave him a dubious look, handed the strap back to him. ‘Maybe. Is that all you need?’

‘I think so. Would North Beach know where they lost this? Or when?’

‘I don’t know that. You could go and ask them. Maybe they keep some kind of inventory of losses, something like that. Stations do things differently. But that thing is old. I’d be surprised.’

Hardy was wrapping it around his hand. He slipped it off and put it back into his briefcase, snapping the clips. ‘Me too.’ There was nothing else to say. ‘Well, thank you. You’ve been a big help.’

He walked back out into the lobby, took a few steps, and came to a stop. For a moment he considered turning around and going right back down to Glitsky’s office. Since Graham’s release Sal Russo’s death was again an unsolved homicide, and in theory Abe ought to be interested in any evidence related to it.

Except that now, thanks to Hardy’s efforts, the entire city believed the story that Graham had killed his father out of mercy. Nobody – except possibly Graham himself, Sarah, and Hardy – nobody was looking for a killer anymore. The case, although technically still open and unsolved, was concluded to everyone’s satisfaction.

Even to Glitsky’s.

Subliminally aware that people were beginning to stream out of the elevators and offices around him at the end of the workday, Hardy felt strangely rooted to where he was. He didn’t want to lose his train of thought. If he was going to bring up anything about this case with an eye to another suspect, he would need a lot more than this hose-and-ladder strap.

But he did have an idea where he might get just that. First he’d go back down to the Chronicle and re-examine the archives related to the fire at Giotti’s Grotto. It might have been months before the date on the wrapped money, but months, after all this elapsed time, was close enough. Without the strap any connection between that fire and Sal was a tenuous stretch. With it Hardy thought he had a causal link that was compelling. It was damn near conclusive of something. He just couldn’t put his finger on exactly what it was.

He would turn Sarah loose on it too. She wouldn’t share any of Glitsky’s reluctance. Whoever had killed Sal Russo was her enemy, her man’s torturer, and Sarah was going to bring that person down if she could.

Could it have been Giotti? Hardy visualized the affable and brilliant jurist. He could, though it was a big ‘maybe,’ imagine the judge helping Sal kill himself, as Hardy had argued that Graham had. Try as he might, though, and much as the symmetry appealed to him, he couldn’t see Giotti murdering Sal. Not struggling with his oldest friend who was now a feeble old man, then knocking him out, fatally injecting him with morphine.

And that, Hardy reminded himself, is precisely what had happened, regardless of the story he’d made so convincing to the jury, to the city at large.