Glitsky got the call back from Hardy at 9:15.

"Where have you been? I've been calling you for an hour."

"You only left one message."

"That's because if you hear that one," Glitsky said, "you won't need the others. Which apparently you did, since here you are, calling me back."

"True enough. I was taking a walk, clearing my brain. It didn't seem to do much good. What can I do for you?"

"You can listen to my adventure yesterday. Treya's getting a little tired of it after the fourth time, I can tell, but I think you'll appreciate it."

"All right. Hit me," Hardy said, and listened to Abe's version of his single-handed Cow Palace bust, leaving the van, loaded with illegal suppressors and paraphernalia, not to mention Ewing's driver's license and address, with the engine running, and blocking the unmanned Brisbane police cars into their places.

When the story ended, with Glitsky ducking into his car and making a clean getaway, he waited a minute for Hardy to say something. When he didn't, Glitsky did. "I said, is that cool or what?"

"Yeah."

"Yeah? That's your complete response to one of the great moments in my career?"

"Right," Hardy said. Then, with a small show of interest: "Sorry, Abe. I missed the end of it. What were you saying?"

As soon as he hung up, Hardy grabbed his telephone book and looked up Juan Salarco's number, which was listed. The phone rang four times, then he heard a message in Spanish.

"Juan," he said at the beep. "Soy Dismas Hardy, abogado de Andrew Bartlett. Importante, por favor." And he left his number in both English and Spanish.

He'd stopped listening to Glitsky about halfway through the saga, when it occurred to him that maybe his friend had inadvertently supplied him with what had been nagging him about Salarco's testimony all along. It was a small enough point, perhaps, but it could prove important.

He'd already listened to the Salarco tape several times all the way through, but to be sure now he got his briefcase, put it on the dining table and took out his notes and the tape. With some chagrin, he realized he'd even written a comment about street noise, and whether the gunshot could have been heard over it. But he'd never followed up. Now he put in the tape and started running the interview through another time. This time, knowing what he was listening for, it was even less ambiguous.

Salarco's voice. "… and turn on the TV, real quiet, but then there is this… this scream, the girl, and then a… a bump. You could feel it up here, like something dropped. The house shook. Then right after, a crash, the sound of a crash, glass breaking. And a few seconds later, suddenly boom again, the house shakes another time, somebody slamming the front door under us."

Stoked up now, Hardy ran it back, played it yet again.

A bump. "You could feel it up here, like something dropped."

A crash. "… the sound of a crash, glass breaking."

Boom again. "… somebody slamming the front door under us."

A bump, a crash, a boom. But no gunshot.

Paper-thin walls, where even the sounds of Andrew's and Laura's rehearsals could wake the baby upstairs, and yet Salarco did not hear, or did not comment upon, the explosive percussion of two 9mm automatic rounds fired probably within eight feet of him? Could it have been possible not to hear them?

The telephone rang, and Hardy leapt to it, perhaps Salarco getting back to him already, pulling a break on this case at last.

"Dad." Something wrong with the voice. Something wrong altogether.

"Vin. What's the matter?"

"Um, it's not bad. I mean, everybody's alive…"

"Jesus Christ, Vin, what?"

"It's Mom. She didn't want you to worry, but…

"Vin. What about her? What's happened?"

"She had an accident. Somebody hit her."

"In the car?"

"No, on the slope. Skiing."

"Is she okay? Where is she now? Can I talk to her?"

"She says she'll be okay, you know? You're not supposed to worry. But you can't talk to her. They had her on a backboard to the ambulance and now they've got her in the emergency room and the Beck's waiting outside in case… Anyway, she said I ought to call you."

"Where are you?"

"The hospital in Truckee. By the emergency room."

"I'm on my way up. I'm on my cellphone the whole way."

"Okay. And, Dad?"

"Yeah, bud?"

"Hurry, huh?"

Frannie was going to be okay. As Vinnie had said, nobody was going to die. But okay was a relative thing.

They let him take her home on Sunday, but as soon as she got there, Hardy was to make sure she got in bed and stayed there until her local doctor told her she could get up. She'd definitely sustained a concussion. It was very much out of character for Frannie, who didn't like to acknowledge physical pain, but she didn't argue with him at all. She'd be wearing a neck brace and sporting an arm sling for at least six weeks. After that they'd do some more tests and have a clearer picture of what, if any, further damage had been done to her spine and/or neck. She'd also cracked two ribs on her left side and sustained a Ping-Pong-ball fracture of the left shoulder socket in the course of dislocating it.

By the time he had fed her some soup and settled her into bed, it was full dusk, but the Beck still hadn't made it home. She'd been driving his hot little sports car, following close, but they'd lost sight of her in the traffic just outside Sacramento, and now they'd been home for almost an hour and still no sign of her.

For dinner, Hardy and Vincent cooked up two cans of corned beef hash- the black pan again, but without any romance- and quartered a head of iceberg lettuce with a mayo and ketchup thousand island poured over it. They amused themselves, and kept the unspoken fear about the Beck at bay by inventing tortures for the person who'd run into Frannie on the slopes, who of course didn't even slow down and had never been caught.

Finally, they heard the front door. Hardy put down his fork and prepared himself not to speak harshly. He'd almost been unable to swallow for the second half of his meal, as the minutes had passed. His beautiful, smart, clever seventeen-year-old was never late, and if anything had happened to her, too…

She stood at the end of the dining room. "I'm so sorry, Dad. I got a flat tire in Sacramento, and you had both cellphones with you, and I wasn't anywhere near a gas station. And then I couldn't figure out where they put the spare…"

"It's under the rug in the trunk," Vincent said.

"Thanks, dear brother, I know that now. And I even know how to change a flat tire. But, Dad, look, I pulled over and some guy stopped and… I mean, an older guy, and he helped me, but then he asked for my number, and I got… Anyway, I didn't think… I thought if he followed me…"

"Wait, wait, wait." Hardy held up a hand. "Did he follow you?"

"No. I don't think so. But I was afraid when I was parking…"

He stopped her again. "Are you okay now? Is the car okay? Good. Are you hungry? Sit down, I'll make you something." He stood up, put his arms around her, kissed the side of her face, the top of her hair. He kept his arms around her, tight around her back. "I love you. Everything's all right. Your mother's upstairs sleeping. Thanks for driving my car down. I'm sorry about the flat tire. They happen."

They separated and she looked up at him. Getting her bravery together. "But, Dad," she said, suddenly breaking a smile, "what a great car!"

Finally, finally, the kids both relatively calmed and catching up on their weekend's homework, he got to the Sunday paper. While they'd been gone, things had developed rapidly in the double homicides, and by this morning, "Executioner Stalks City Streets" was the banner headline. Ballistics had confirmed that both victims in the Friday night shootings had in fact been shot by the same weapon. Because of the nature of the attacks- the execution-style, point-blank shot to the heart- Marcel Lanier of homicide had told some reporters that he was afraid that what we had here was some type of executioner, and judging by the headline, the idiotic name looked like it was going to stick.