Hardy kicked his feet against the concrete. “Nope. Same thing as a rubber raft, where the wind or a passing boat might change the course. It’s got to float, but not on the surface.”

Pico said, “Aha,” and jumped down onto the floor.

“What?” Hardy followed him into his office.

Pico reached behind the door and pulled down one of the wetsuits that hung there. They were always there-the volunteers used them when they walked the sharks.

“The closest thing to a body is a body. Put this on, go and hang in the water and see where it takes you.”

How did things get so complicated? Glitsky was thinking. He was driving south on 101 past Candlestick Park, on his way out of the city and out of his jurisdiction to interview an ex-cop with only the slightest connection to any active case. He shook his head. Flo was right-he cared too much. He had to turn over every rock to make as sure as he could he at least didn’t get the wrong man…

One of his first cases… Haroun Palavi, in the country about seven months, importing rugs from Iran, had killed his wife and the in-laws living with them. Neighbors had heard them all screaming at one another for weeks. When Glitsky questioned Haroun he had no alibi-he’d been in his warehouse working alone. There were no other plausible suspects. Haroun’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, which he’d tried to explain by saying that he’d come in and just picked up the gun he’d found near his wife’s parents. He was scared. He thought the killer might still be around.

So Glitsky had arrested Haroun. He’d investigated and found that one of the neighbors, another Iranian woman, had talked a lot to Haroun’s wife and found out that she was miserable in this country and wanted to go home. Haroun was ruining her life and her parents’ lives. At the time, Glitsky had thought that she’d probably just nagged Haroun until she pushed him over the edge. He didn’t understand these Iranians anyway, but he did know, or thought he knew, that they had this eye-for-an-eye mentality, and seemed, in general, to hold life pretty cheap. Haroun hadn’t done a very good job of learning English, either.

So Haroun had gone to trial and was found guilty and sentenced to fifteen-to-life second-degree murder plus two for the gun, of which he served three days before they found him with a crushed skull and a broken neck on the floor of his cell. It was an effective way to kill yourself, Glitsky thought, diving headfirst from your upper bunk onto cement, although most people lacked either the nerve or the imagination for it.

And that would have been the end of the case except that about two months later the Iranian neighbor woman turned up dead, too, and it finally transpired that Haroun’s business partner, Revi Mahnis, couldn’t take a woman’s no for an answer. Under questioning he revealed that Haroun’s wife had threatened to tell Haroun that he’d been propositioning her. So he’d had to kill her or be humiliated and out of business. Both. And, because her parents were there, he had to kill them, too.

It had been Glitsky’s darkest moment on the force, knowing that his preconceptions and prejudices had killed an innocent man. He wasn’t about to let it happen again…

He took the San Bruno turnoff and doubled back on the frontage road, looking for a street name. It was a light-industry and duplex neighborhood wedged between the freeway and El Camino Real.

He didn’t want to be hasty in jumping to a conclusion about who had murdered Maxine, but it still bothered him, coming down here because the lab was backed up and Hardy had said that Hector Medina had a possible connection to Rusty Ingraham. It was a reach. Here he’d got a righteous murder victim and, if you looked at the statistics, the best suspect-an estranged husband. If he was writing a book on murders he’d start with the chapter on families. After that the book would get thin pretty quick.

But the lab still didn’t have squat on the results of picking apart Ingraham’s barge, so he still couldn’t place Ray Weir at the scene. He was pretty sure they’d find something that did that, and when they did he’d go down and bring Ray in. Not exactly open-and-shut, but just about as close as they came.

As for Rusty Ingraham, Abe wanted to believe that he was hiding out from the jealous husband Ray Weir. But he had to admit Hardy’s point that he would have at least gotten in touch made some sense. Of course, until there was either a body or some compelling reason why there wasn’t one, Rusty remained officially alive, and, more to the point, not a homicide victim. And if he wasn’t a homicide victim he wasn’t Glitsky’s business. Life was complicated enough.

He’d gotten Medina’s number from the telephone book and called down for an appointment.

“So the faggot told, huh?”

Glitsky hadn’t known what he was talking about. “I wanted to see you about Rusty Ingraham.”

A laugh. “That, too. All the roosters home to roost. Well, come on down. I got nothing to hide.”

There were cars parked on lawns all down the street, oil smears on driveways, bottle caps, beer cans and broken glass in the curbs. It was a hot, still, gas-smelling afternoon. The four trees on the street had lost their leaves; an abandoned yellow schoolbus with broken windows sat on its rims at the corner. The sky seemed to hang low, a hazy blue-white.

Medina was wearing a dirty white tank-top T-shirt over baggy khakis, washing his car in his front yard with a teenage girl. The one-story frame house had once been painted lime green with yellow trim, colors from a decade before, once perhaps brightly gay, now faded to garish.

As Glitsky got out of his car Medina began drying his hands on a chamois. The girl didn’t even look up-just kept wiping at the front windshield with a soapy sponge. Medina crossed the small yard and met Glitsky near his car by the curb.

“I’d rather we didn’t say anything in front of Melanie,” he said. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

Glitsky leaned against his car’s hood. “You got me stumped,” he said.

Medina, squat and flat-footed, turned the chamois over in his hands. “You don’t have to play games with me. I used to be a cop.”

“Sure, I remember you. I understand you got a raw deal. What kind of games might I be playing?”

“Good guy, bad guy?”

Glitsky spun around from his waist, exaggerating. “Somebody else here I don’t see?”

The girl called, “Daddy, I need more soap.”

He turned to her. “In the bucket, sweets. Just go to the bucket.” He came back to Glitsky. “My daughter. She’s not all here.”

Glitsky watched her go to the bucket and squeeze out her sponge, then come back to the car. He took a breath and let it out. “Why I’m here is because you talked to a friend of mine, Dismas Hardy, and said you’d had something to do with Rusty Ingraham in the last couple of weeks. Ingraham’s missing and I wondered if you might have a lead on it, if he said anything to you about where he might go.”

Medina shook his head, as if clearing it. “Hardy said Ingraham was dead.”

“Hardy jumps to conclusions. Something went down where he lives. We found some blood matches his type, but no body. He could be alive, anywhere.”

“Shit,” Medina said.

“Shit what?”

“Shit he’s not dead, that’s what.”

“Well, he might be. We just don’t know. But either way, if you talked to him-”

“I didn’t. I told your friend I didn’t.”

“He said you’d called him.”

Medina shifted on his feet, stared out over Glitsky’s shoulder. Abe waited him out.

Medina turned around and said his daughter’s name. “Melanie.” She stopped cleaning the windshield, obedient. “You wanna get us a couple beers?”

He motioned with his head and went to sit in the shade of the cement steps by the front door. Glitsky followed, glad to get out of the heat. When Melanie came out, Medina patted next to him and she sat down. He popped the tab on a can of Lucky Lager and handed it to Glitsky, did one for himself, giving Melanie a little sip first.