“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Hardy came forward in his chair. “Maya,” he said, “are you talking about something that happened with you and Dylan and Levon?”

A dead, one-note bark of laughter didn’t break the harsh set of her mouth. “If you even can ask that,” she said, “you don’t have a clue what innocent means.”

“So tell me.”

“Like the unborn. That kind of innocent. How about that?”

That answer called to mind Hardy’s discussion with Hunt about whether the blackmail had been about an abortion early in her life, so he asked her point blank. “Is that it?”

But she shook her head decidedly no. “I would never do that. Not ever. But I’ve already said too much. The point is that whatever happens, however God decides all this has to go, I’ll deserve it. I’m good with that now. I’m at peace with it.”

“Well, I’m not.”

She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “I’m sorry about that.” She gestured around them. “About all of this.”

“I am too.”

“But… so, can we go back to what I was saying before?”

“What part of it?”

“Looking for who did this?”

A black, throbbing bolus of pain came and settled in the space behind Hardy’s left eye. He brought his hand up and pressed at his temple. What was this woman getting at? Hardy could think of several ways to interpret all that Maya had said to him here this afternoon as a kind of confession. And now she was urging him to look for the real murderer.

Who, he believed, very probably did not exist.

He looked across at his client’s troubled face and entertained the fleeting thought that she might be legally insane. Should he hire a shrink and do some tests? Would he be negligent if he didn’t?

The first day of trial had already been too long, too stressful. It seemed to Hardy that he’d been in constant combat since early in the morning.

And now this.

He squeezed at his forehead. “Maya,” he said, “are you telling me straight out now that you didn’t kill these two guys?”

Her eyes widened, closed down, widened again, and to his astonishment, she broke into a genuine, if short-lived laugh. “Of course not.” Leaving it as ambiguous as ever. Of course not, she was not telling him such a thing straight out. Or, alternatively, of course not, she hadn’t killed Dylan and Levon. After which she added in all seriousness, “How could you even say such a thing?”

Hardy left the jail shaken and confused. When he’d gone in to visit Maya, a February ball of pale egg yolk in the western sky was still dripping its feeble light onto the city. When he came out, his head still pounding, it was full night, and that added to his disorientation. The neighborhood around the Hall of Justice felt more than ordinarily bereft of humanity, but the emptiness seemed to go deeper.

A cold, hard wind was kicking up a heavy, dirty dust along with fast food wrappers from the gutters. Hardy had a walk of a few blocks ahead of him to get to where he’d parked his car, but when he got to Bechetti’s, the traditional comfort-food Italian place at Sixth and Brannan, he stopped long enough to consider going inside and having himself a stiff cocktail or two-although he knew it was a bad idea when you were in the first days of a murder trial.

Reason won out.

But he hung a left and walked a hundred yards down the street and knocked at a purple door set in the side of a gray stucco warehouse and waited about ten seconds in front of the peephole until the door opened and then he was looking at Wyatt Hunt.

“Trick or treat,” he said.

Hunt didn’t miss a beat. “I hope you like Jelly Bellies. That’s all I’ve got left.” He opened the door and stepped back. He was wearing black Nike-logo running pants and tennis shoes and a tank-top Warriors shirt and there was a shine to his skin as though he’d been working out. He certainly lived in the right place for it.

He’d converted an ancient decrepit flower warehouse into a one-of-a-kind environment. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high. The back third he’d dry-walled off into his living quarters-bedroom, bathroom, den/library, and kitchen. Which left an enormous open area, perhaps sixty by eighty or ninety feet, in front. Hardy had been here a few times before but every time was surprised by the fact that Hunt parked his Mini Cooper inside his domicile, just this side of the industrial slide-up garage-door entrance in the same wall as the front door. The other unique feature was the actual half-basketball-court floorboard Hunt had bought from the Warriors the last time they’d upgraded, for the fire sale price of four thousand dollars.

In the space between the court and his rooms on the other side of the court, he had several guitars, both acoustic and electric, out on stands. Amps, speakers, his stereo system. There was also a desk against the wall with a couple of computer terminals glowing with beach-themed screen savers.

But Hardy hadn’t gotten too far inside before Hunt called out, “You might as well come out now. I think the jig’s up,” and Gina Roake-barefoot, wet hair, running shorts, blue Cal sweatshirt-appeared from the back rooms, holding up a hand in greeting, a sheepish smile on her face. “Yo,” she said.

“Yo yourself,” Hardy replied. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. If this isn’t a good time…”

“Half hour ago,” Gina said, no shilly-shallying around, “wouldn’t have been a good time. Now the timing’s fine.”

“You can still have those Jelly Bellies if you want,” Hunt said, “but I think I’m good for a beer if you’d rather go in that direction.”

“If you’re going to twist my arm,” Hardy said.

“I’m starting to think she might actually be crazy.” Hardy, with his beer, was sitting on one of the tan stressed-leather easy chairs in the den-lots of books and magazines, CDs and DVDs, on built-in white shelves and a large TV. “Now she wants us to go after the killer.”

“Us?” Hunt asked. “With our huge investigating team and unlimited resources?”

“That’s kind of what I told her,” Hardy said.

Gina, next to Hunt, said, “I thought she was factually guilty.”

“Didn’t she tell you she did it?” Hunt asked. “I thought I’d heard that.”

“Not in so many words, but she never really denied it, and then she’s been acting all along like if she’s convicted, she deserves it. Not exactly an overt confession, but…” Hardy sipped from his bottle. “Anyway, so today she tells me she wasn’t with Levon and Dylan on the robbery either. Though maybe it was another one.”

“Another robbery?” Gina asked. “A different one?”

“Again ambiguous, but apparently.”

“Well, then,” Gina asked, “what would they have been blackmailing her about?”

“I asked her that. She said God was testing her.”

That struck Hunt funny. “Not just her,” he said.

Hardy nodded. “Tell me about it. So then she tells me she can’t believe I think she did this stuff. I mean, here we are almost a half year into this, and suddenly not only don’t we have what she’s being blackmailed about anymore, or what we thought it was, but now she wants us to find who really did these guys.”

“She’s trying to play you,” Gina said.

“That’s what I thought too. Maybe still think. I don’t know. But what’s in it for her if she plays me? What? She proves I’m gullible? So what? How’s it help her?”

Hunt cleared his throat. “This may be the obvious answer, and I’m not a lawyer of course and maybe don’t see the nuances like you two do, but if he or she does exist, and you find whoever it is, doesn’t that get her off?”

Hardy was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, and his shoulders sagged. “In other words,” he said, “what if she’s not playing me?”

Hunt shrugged. “It’s a thought.”

“Okay,” Gina said. “But why’d this just come up?”