"The one I'm not allowed to mention?"

"Yeah, that one."

Hardy blew out in frustration. "I've been wrestling with that all day. What am I supposed to do? I promised the kid."

"Against Andrew's life?"

"I know, I know. But the question I have is really, so what? If Andrew didn't know Mooney was gay, then nothing changes. He'd still be just as jealous. Maybe I could run it up for a jury in the trial, but it's weak. It's not going to do it on its own. And without the kid's testimony, it's only hearsay anyway."

"Could you get it somewhere else?"

Hardy considered, drummed his fingers on the desk. "Even if I did," he said slowly, "what does it get us? So Mooney was gay? Maybe Andrew's homophobic and killed him for that?" He shook his head. "And meanwhile we've outed the boy and screwed up his dad. No, it just doesn't work."

"Except it opens up another world about Mooney."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that everybody loved him, right? He was the world's best teacher, and so on. But the truth is, nobody knew him. He had a secret life. It seems to me anything we could bring up that points that out has got to help Andrew. At the barest minimum, it might give us somewhere else to look for who killed him."

Hardy's fingers stopped drumming. He suddenly sat up, put out his hand over hers. "The wives," he said.

"Whose wives?"

"Mooney's."

"He had wives?"

Hardy nodded. "Two of them." His ridiculous memory had somehow retained the names. "Terri and Catherine."

"Well. What about them?"

"They would have had a hunch, wouldn't you think?"

The regular Tuesday lunch meeting at Lou the Greek's was both a somber and an ill-attended affair. Jackman, of course, was there, but not presiding, since there wasn't much of an assembly. Glitsky, having missed the last few of these luncheons because of scheduling conflicts, had decided on the heels of his involvement in these latest murder investigations that he was going to take a more proactive stance in defining the parameters of his job, and basically do what he wanted to do, pleading out of as many meetings as possible. He sat next to his wife. Gina Roake, like Glitsky a frequent absentee of late, was also at the table.

But missing were Hardy, the "CityTalk" columnist Jeff Elliot, both city supervisors- Harlan Fisk and Kathy West- and, of course, Allan Boscacci. So instead of the big round table in the back that they usually filled, they had a booth for four under one of the alley-level windows.

Instead of the usual- convivial gossip, personalities and politics- they talked about the Executioner, who had apparently claimed another victim last night, although the shooting hadn't taken place in the city, and nobody investigating down in San Bruno had put together a possible connection until early this morning, when the police chief in that town had put in a call to Lanier and wondered if somebody from the city would like to come down and have a look.

Lanier had driven down himself, accompanied by Sarah Evans, and they'd learned that Morris Tollman, an engineer with Amtrak, divorced, living alone in a small house by the Tanforan Park Shopping Center, had taken one shot to the head, point-blank, on his driveway as he was getting out of his car last night sometime between six and eight-thirty. Near sunset, a woman walking her dog had seen the body and called police. The local crime scene people had found a.9mm casing in the weeds beside the driveway, but no slug so far.

On Glitsky's prevailing theory, wild shot though it might be, Lanier, Evans and two of the local cops had gone door to door. The neighbors on both sides of Tollman had been home all evening, and nobody in either house- four adults and five children- had heard anything resembling a gunshot.

That had been good enough to juice up Lanier, and he'd called Glitsky, who, grasping at straws, asked Lanier and Evans to try and talk to Tollman's next of kin, if any, and see if he had a murder trial in his past. After that, he had called the ATF to try to light a fire under them. Then he had come back downtown, where, in response to the request he'd fired off after talking last night with Hardy, he'd already received by fax a long list of names from the California Department of Corrections, convicts who'd been released from California's various jails and prisons in the three weeks or so since just before Elizabeth Cary's murder.

Since these people were in the computer, Glitsky assigned his General Work officers to look up the original case numbers that had been assigned to them, and then begin checking them against the hard files downstairs in the basement to see which of them, if any, Boscacci might have prosecuted. By the time Glitsky left for lunch at Lou's, the two inspectors had identified thirty-one of the four hundred plus case numbers.

"Which is why I'd like to get my hands on more bodies," he was saying to Jackman.

"He doesn't mean dead bodies, either," Treya said. "He means people to check the files."

Glitsky nodded. "I can't ask homicide inspectors to do that, even my event number people. They'd mutiny, and I wouldn't blame them. Even the GW guys are grumbling."

"I'd imagine so," Jackman said.

"I've got a call in to the mayor now," Glitsky said. "If he sees 'serial killer' here, which I'm starting to, he'll give me some more staff, but even so, it's a monster of a job. I don't think the FBI could do it in a month. But maybe hizzoner can also persuade the ATF to get off their duffs. Although that's just one more list to check out."

Jackman lifted a peanut with his chopsticks and looked at it skeptically. The special today was Kung Pao Moussaka- not one of Chui's all-time triumphs- and everyone at the table was picking at their food. "Are you sure it's even worth the time, Abe?"

Glitsky knew what Jackman meant. He sagged a bit. "No. I don't."

"On the other hand," Roake said, "if it's the only thing you have to go on, what do you have to lose?"

"That's my feeling." Glitsky sipped some tea. "Whatever else he is, this guy knows what he's doing. I don't believe somebody's paying him to hit these people, and he's not picking them at random."

"Are you even sure of that?" Jackman asked.

Glitsky had to shake his head. "At this point, Clarence, I'm not sure it's Tuesday."

"And no hint about Allan, either, I assume."

Treya answered for her husband. "Abe sent out Inspector Belou this morning to talk again to Edie." Boscacci's widow.

"Meaning no leads on anything in his professional life?" Jackman asked. "Any of his active cases?"

"He didn't really have any, Clarence, as you know better than anybody. There might be something on the home front Edie couldn't remember with the initial shock. But I'm not holding out much hope there, either."

"So you really think Allan might have been shot by this Executioner, too?" Roake asked.

"No. I can't say I'm all the way to thinking it, Gina. I'm really just back where we were," Glitsky said. "It's the only place I've got to look. What I'm really hoping is that this guy last night has got a huge extended family, who'll tell us that a long time ago he invested in Wong's produce and dated Edith Montrose and bought a used car from Elizabeth Cary, and they all had the same banker."

"Who is a gun collector," Treya added.

"Right," Glitsky said. "That'd be even better."

"But you doubt it?" Roake said.

Glitsky nodded. "Seriously."

Everyone stopped and looked up as Marcel Lanier suddenly appeared at Glitsky's elbow. "Excuse me, I don't mean to interrupt. Abe. I was just up at your office."

Lanier's face was mottled with emotion. His breath came as though he'd been running. "I'm just back up from San Bruno," he said. "I begged crime scene down there to come back and look again and they found the slug."