“Well, on that cheery note.” Hardy tipped his wineglass up and pushed himself back from the table. “I’m on all my phones all night if anybody gets any ideas.”

“The clerk, I’d bet,” Glitsky said, “was named Julio Gomez. Twenty-four years old when he died in ninety-five. The place was Ocean Liquors.”

Glitsky, going out of his way to stop by Hardy’s home, had interrupted his friend’s seemingly unending perusal of his trial binders, and now, just past nine o’clock, they stood in the kitchen waiting for the microwave to beep for Glitsky’s tea.

“Was there an investigation back then?”

“No,” Glitsky said sarcastically. “Homicide just decided not to look into this particular murder. It seemed like too much work.” A beat. “Of course we opened an investigation.”

“And?”

“And we closed it about a month later.”

“No suspects?”

“Not a one.” He pulled an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “I copied the file and brought it around for you, though as you can see, it’s a little thin.” Then, gesturing back to the dining room where Hardy’s binders were spread out on the table, “Not that it looks like you need much more reading material. I gather that’s your case in there.”

“What there is of it.” The microwave’s timer sounded and Hardy crossed over, took the cup out, and handed it to his friend. “Santé. How about witnesses?”

“Witness. One. You can see him in there. Old Asian guy, coming out of a bar across the street, twelve-thirty on a Tuesday night. And the fog was in, evidently heavy. Plus, he’d had a few. Anyway, he heard the shot, saw somebody run out of the store, get in a car, then take off.” He pointed down at the envelope. “It’s all in there.”

“Yeah, but, so a driver? More than one guy? Two guys waiting in the car?”

“He doesn’t say. And I know what you’re thinking, that this is your Paco.”

“It could be. Is this the only liquor store shoot-up in those years?”

“No. There were actually six of them, homicides. But believe it or not, we got four of the guys, all solos, although to be fair, two of ’em got shot themselves by guys they shot behind the counter, which made it a little easier. The other one was a woman, never caught. That left whoever killed this guy Gomez. Maybe your Paco, after all.”

Hardy nodded with satisfaction. “That’s pretty thorough. You ought to do this stuff for a living.”

Glitsky blew over his tea. “I’m motivated. But none of this ancient history is helping much with Ruiz.”

“You haven’t got anything?”

“Well, we’ve talked to most of the workers at BBW. That’s going to go on for a while. But so far, not much, just everybody shocked that Ruiz could have been involved in drugs.”

Hardy chuckled. “I can imagine. But none of this helps Maya either.”

“I never thought it would.”

Sitting at his dining room table, having already scrutinized his binders all the way through again until he was nearly blind, Hardy accepted a kiss on the cheek from his wife at around ten-thirty and told her he’d be up in a while.

“This is going to be over soon, isn’t it?” Frannie asked.

“One way or the other, a day or two.”

“That’d be neat. I’ve been thinking it really wouldn’t be so bad having a husband again.”

“I know.”

“It’s why I’ve stayed married to you. To have a husband.”

“I know.”

She kissed him again. “I’ll probably still love you.”

“Good. That’d be good.”

But in reality barely hearing her, kissing the air in front of her face, reaching for another pass at one of the binders.

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

He closed the black binder and stood. Going back into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, closed it back up, cricked his back, and saw Glitsky’s envelope on the counter. This Gomez killing thirteen or fourteen years ago wasn’t his case, Glitsky had given him the summary, and even if it had been Paco, so what? So he’d left the envelope and gone back in to try one last time to find something in his binders.

Standing at the counter, he pulled out the half dozen or so pages-incident report, copies of some pictures of the deceased, autopsy, ballistics, two pages of testimony from Mr. Leland Lee, pretty much as Glitsky had described it.

More nothing.

He started through the pages again, his routine, more slowly this time. Eyes burning, he forced himself to read every line.

Wait a minute. Wait.

He turned back to first the autopsy, then the ballistics report. The bullet that had killed Julio Gomez was a.40-caliber. A handwritten, barely readable scrawled notation by an unidentified ballistics lab worker read: “Probably Glock.40. Ballistics markings unidentifiable.”

Okay, he had to make some assumptions, but they seemed warranted. And what other choice did he have anyway? Somehow these long-ago and near-invisible events and relationships, he was sure, were at the heart of the case that had consumed his life for the past six months. It was all about, perhaps not Maya at all, but certainly Dylan and Levon and the mysterious Paco.

Back at the computer in his family room he suddenly realized that although Hunt and Chiurco had looked into them, he himself had never really pursued any of the details in the robbery that Dylan and Levon had been convicted of.

And why should he have? It was, at best, tangential to Maya’s situation, and again in the far distant past.

But now he suddenly realized what he should have considered a couple of days ago, when he’d first become aware of the existence of Paco-that if there had been a trial back then, or even a plea bargain, there would have been both witnesses for the prosecution and possibly friends for the defense, friends and witnesses whose association with Dylan and Levon might have extended back beyond when Maya had met and hung out with them, back when Paco had been in their crowd, and as a real human being, not a nom de guerre.

In fact-

He pulled his legal pad around and wrote a note to call Wyatt Hunt and leave him a message and instructions for tomorrow as soon as he’d finished his computer search here. He’d just realized that Cheryl Biehl and the other three female witnesses that Stier had never called might fit into this same category-of people who’d been at USF back then and had known Dylan and Levon. And who might have known Paco under his real name.

But in the meanwhile he could do a quick search for the case that had involved Dylan and Levon, and armed with that he might be able to have Hunt or Chiurco identify the actual case files, the officers involved, other witnesses.

He went to Google and typed in Dylan Vogler’s name, recalling even as the short page came up that Wyatt Hunt had told him that there was little mention of Vogler on the Net other than the recent details about his death. Shifting over to California Inmate Record Search, he again entered Dylan’s name and there he was, at Corcoran State Prison in 1997 for robbery. Likewise, here was Levon Preslee in the system, starting two months into Dylan’s time.

Did any of this mean anything? Or help Hardy in any way? Certainly, these facts told him nothing about the actual crime they’d committed together. He spent another fifteen minutes or so searching the various criminal databases to which he had access. He found Dylan and Levon in several of them. What he didn’t find was any indication that they had committed their crime together, or had gone to trial together. That information had apparently vanished into the mists of time.

And if that was the case…

Suddenly, staring at the screen, the issue that had nagged at him for days came into focus with a startling clarity, bringing with it a jolt of adrenaline so powerful that it threw Hardy back into his chair, suddenly breathless, blood pounding in his ears. He brought his hand up to rest over his heart.