To Hardy, it was obvious that Canetta was consciously resisting the urge to talk about Frannie’s involvement. The sergeant cursorily rearranged a few items on the desk. When he’d stalled long enough, he straightened up, turned around, and cleared his throat. ‘Well, since we’re here, we might as well make sure nobody’s dead in the other rooms. What do you say?’

They walked down the hallway and turned into the first of the bedrooms, a child’s room with a twin bed made up neatly with a white lace bedspread. There was a collection of dolls on the bed and a decent-sized pile of beanie babies in the corner. On the wall, stenciled roses in half-a-dozen colors bloomed on the powder-blue sponge-painted wall.

Canetta walked directly across the room and opened the top dresser drawer. ‘Look at this.’ Hardy came up behind him. Except for a couple of pairs of socks, there wasn’t anything to see. ‘They’re gone,’ Canetta observed. ‘We’d better be, too.’

On the way out, Hardy made sure the front door was locked behind them. The two men rode down the elevator in an awkward silence, then crossed the lobby and stepped outside.

‘What’s your plan now?’ Canetta asked.

Hardy didn’t know. It was late and nothing had worked. He shrugged. ‘Try to find him. See if his kids are in school. If not, tell Glitsky, I suppose. If he’s on the run…’

A silence fell and Hardy sighed.

‘Your wife?’

A nod. ‘They’ve got her locked up at the county jail. The two of them, Frannie and Ron, he told her some secret…’ Again, he just trailed off. It sounded so lame. ‘She told me he’d never let her stay down there if he knew she was in jail, but it was his secret to tell, not hers. She promised him.’

Canetta had no solace to offer. Hardy could see what he was thinking and, worse, didn’t blame him. ‘Well, good luck.’

He drove around for a while, trying to decide whether to visit the jail again, go home and sleep, or wake up a judge. Everything felt wrong. Finally he wound up on Sutter Street, in front of David Freeman’s building, where he worked.

Upstairs in his office, Hardy called and woke up Glitsky at home. The lieutenant agreed that Ron Beaumont’s disappearance – if that’s what it was – increased his profile as a murder suspect. It didn’t help Frannie either. Finally, Glitsky promised that he would get in early tomorrow and talk to Scott Randall, maybe try to pull a string or two at the jail, but he didn’t hold out much hope.

After he hung up, Hardy thought a moment and seriously considered a night raid on Braun’s house, maybe getting David Freeman to accompany him, to make his case to the judge. But he knew he’d only make things worse with any kind of spontaneous act in the mood he was in.

He had to think, develop a plan, stay rational. But the thought of his wife lying on one of the jail cots, surrounded by scum, terrified and unprotected, made this a tall order.

It took very little imagination to see her there, curled under the thin fabric of the institutional blanket. Smells of disinfectant, sounds of desperation. Wide-eyed and sleepless on the unyielding mattress, wondering what she’d done, how it had happened. What tomorrow would bring.

Four days! Hardy suddenly sat upright with the realization. Braun had given her four days. She couldn’t do four days, even in AdSeg. He knew his wife, or thought he did. Four days in jail would cause a lot of damage that would be a long time healing.

He sat trying to come up with something, anything. But it was the middle of the night, and the world was asleep. At a little after one o’clock, he accepted that he’d failed. He wasn’t getting his wife out of jail today. If he didn’t get at least a little rest, he wouldn’t be any good for her tomorrow either.

There was nothing to do but go home.

But his night wasn’t over yet.

His house was a railroad-style Victorian – a long hallway down one side with rooms coming off to the right – about fifteen blocks from the beach, well within San Francisco’s belt of nearly perennial fog. He’d run into the wall of it, and by the time he’d reached his street, his windshield wipers were beating a steady rhythm. Of course there was no available street parking, but tonight he decided to take the risk and left his car in a no-parking zone right around the corner on Clement. He figured he’d be up and out before dawn anyway – most days the parking enforcers didn’t get rolling until well after that.

The house sat between a brace of four-story apartment buildings and was set back maybe forty feet from the curb. Hardy couldn’t see it until he was right in front. As he opened the gate through the white picket fence, he couldn’t see Moses, either, sitting on the darkened porch with his back against the front door. ‘Where is she?’

The surprise of the voice out of the dead night fog almost knocked him backwards. When he got moving again, he didn’t waste any words. ‘Still locked up. Let’s go inside.’

Erin sat in her bathrobe, her feet up under her in the window seat, the blinds closed against the night and the fog. Moses paced in front of the fire’s embers. Ed Cochran snored gently in Hardy’s favorite recliner, so Hardy had pulled in one of the dining-room chairs and now straddled it backwards. After twenty minutes of regaling them with the highlights of his frustrating night, he’d just asked if either one of them had heard Frannie talk about Ron Beaumont, his kids, Bree’s death, or anything that might relate.

Moses stopped walking, folded his arms, and scowled. He loved his sister, but between his work as owner of the Little Shamrock bar and his family, they didn’t spend a lot of time sharing special moments.

Hardy’s eyes went to Erin. She shifted where she sat and looked somewhere off into the middle distance. ‘Erin?’ he prompted her. ‘What?’

She came back to him. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s anything really. She never mentioned anybody by name.’ She hesitated and Hardy forced himself to wait until she figured out how she was going to say it. ‘From the way she talked, I assumed it was another woman, one of the mothers from Merryvale, but it could have been part of this.’

‘What?’

Erin sighed, hating to betray her own confidences, if that’s what this turned out to be. ‘This is all nebulous, but one of her friends – it might not have been this Ron or Bree – evidently had had a marriage go bad a long time ago, years. Now they had a new life here and suddenly this person was afraid the old spouse was going to show up and start causing problems.’

‘What kind of problems?’

Erin shifted again, and picked at some thread on her bathrobe for a few seconds. ‘Custody problems, I think.’

‘But how could that be? Divorces don’t get final until all the custody issues are settled. How did this come up, anyway? If this is her giant secret, I don’t know why-’

‘I didn’t say it was, Dismas. I don’t know if it had anything to do with this. That’s about as far as it went anyway, then suddenly she didn’t want to talk about it, maybe as though she remembered she couldn’t.’

‘That could be it,’ Moses said.

Hardy wasn’t so sure, but at this point he’d take anything.

‘How did the whole thing come up in the first place?’

Erin shook her head, as though she were unsure herself. ‘We were just sitting watching Rebecca and Vincent in the backyard here – it couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks ago. They were having one of their great afternoons, just playing and laughing and being wonderful.

‘Anyway, suddenly, really out of the blue, Frannie said she couldn’t imagine maintaining any kind of normal life if she thought someone were going to try to take away her kids. I told her she didn’t have to worry – why was she thinking about that? So she started to say something about this friend of hers, just what I’ve told you, not anything really. She didn’t mention a name, but now tonight when you asked, it occurred to me it could be this Ron.’