Treya still resisted giving it up. Glitsky's position as a lieutenant of homicide was the font of his power and she found herself reluctant to undercut that. So she temporized. 'Well, you know. They've got a suspect in custody who's been charged with the crime…' She left the conclusion unstated. 'The point is, he's doing it on his own.'

'Eliminating any other possible suspect but Burgess?' Jackman rocked in the chair behind his desk.

'Yes.' She hesitated, leaned forward. 'Which brings me to what I wanted to say.'

He waited.

'I'm probably the best source of what Elaine may have been working on.'

'And this means?'

'I think I could be valuable to an investigation, if the lieutenant's interested.'

Jackman drew in a lungful of air. 'Interested in what, precisely?' he asked carefully.

'If you'll forgive me speaking up, sir, Elaine was one of this firm's premier assets. It seems to me that it's in the firm's best interests to make sure that her murderer doesn't get off.'

'The firm's best interests,' he said dubiously. 'In what way?'

'Cole Burgess took something from you, sir. The lieutenant doesn't want him getting away with it, and I don't believe you would stand for it, either.'

She knew that she'd hit the right chord. Someone had stolen from him, from everything he'd built up from scratch, and nobody was going to get away with that. For a moment, her boss's eyes were alight with intensity, and she realized that it had become personal now – somehow she'd made him see that. 'You do what you have to do,' he said finally. 'Bill it to admin.'

She stood up. Her employer, too, got out of his chair and came around the desk. Now he stood perhaps a foot in front of her. She looked up into his face. 'What bothers me,' she said evenly, 'is that I didn't even know she had enemies. I know we confided in one another. I think she would have told me.'

Jackman drew back half a step. He folded his arms and stared out at something beyond her right shoulder. 'Maybe enemies is too harsh,' he said. 'More like competitors. She was strong-willed, vibrant. She wanted her way and got it. People were jealous of her, thought her aloof and arrogant. That she was unaware of that reaction – maybe even of the people themselves having it – only made it worse. Perhaps you've experienced some of the same thing yourself? Even here at the firm?'

And of course, he was right. She acknowledged the truth of it with a small smile.

'I know she could rub people the wrong way, so in that sense, yes, she had enemies.' Jackman's face suddenly set itself in ice. 'I was one of them.'

24

It was closing in on dusk, and Ridley Banks was back at the same crime scene to which he'd been summoned just after dawn.

He'd had a busy day, putting a greater concentration of investigative field work into the past ten hours than he normally would get to in a month. The results were mixed, as they almost always were in homicides anyway. But they were also, in his opinion, provocative in the extreme.

The victim had been found dead in room 412 of the Excelsior Hotel at 16th and Mission. In spite of its name, the Excelsior is not a hotel in the usual meaning of the word. Rather, its clientele rent rooms by the week or the month, and these tended to be casually bartered by its inhabitants mostly for drugs, but also for sex, booze, clothes, money.

There was no current guest registered to the room containing the body of Cullen Leon Alsop. The door had not been locked when he'd been found. Still, the homicide team upon its arrival had little trouble indentifying him – his wallet bulged in the back pocket of his jeans, which he was still wearing. He also had his jail release and OR papers on him, stuffed into the front pockets. So it was Cullen, all right, and Ridley's name was on one of the sheets, so he got looped into the call.

The inspector spent a few hours at the scene, asking questions of the crime scene investigations unit. He then decided it would be instructive to wait for John Strout's arrival. He wanted to talk to the coroner before things moved too far along. Because while people died quite often from heroin overdoses in the city – especially in this neighborhood – there was too much coincidence in this case for Ridley's liking.

The sergeant with the CSI team was of the opinion that somebody else had been with Cullen and then, not too surprisingly when he realized what was happening, fled. He was surprised, though, that he'd left the baggie with a reasonable amount of white powder still in it on the small table next to the bed. This stuff was far more valuable than gold to any addict – it was unprecedented in the CSI sergeant's experience that this much would be left behind, regardless of what had occurred in the room. Cullen also had six hundred and fifty-four dollars in cash, a couple of joints, and a matchbook from a bar called Jupiter jammed into his other front pants pocket.

When Strout came, he was his cautious, but helpful, self. After he'd examined and autopsied the body and all forensic evidence relevant to it, the coroner would eventually release his opinion on the official cause of death. Before that, Strout wasn't going to be hurried, nor was he inclined to make any official pronouncement before he had time to analyze all of his facts. But there were a few informal opinions he could share with an inspector of homicide to guide him in his investigation.

The first was that the residue left in the bag appeared to be an unusually pure form of heroin, possibly almost uncut China White. Strout told Banks that if this was a representative sample of the latest stuff to hit the street, they could expect half a dozen overdoses, maybe more, in the next couple of days. Neither Strout nor the CSI team could see any sign of struggle, and that, combined with the probable cause of death, suggested to Strout that this was most likely an overdose situation. An accidental suicide, not a homicide.

Banks couldn't shake the feeling that in this the coroner was mistaken.

Over the next two hours, he talked to everyone who'd been in the building and who hadn't managed to escape before the word got out that the police were on hand. Of the twenty-seven people he interviewed, fourteen admitted to knowing Cullen at least by sight, but none of them had seen him come into the building. None admitted to knowing he'd been there last night.

The 'manager' was a toothless mid-fifties gnome in a lime-green bathrobe and combat boots. He had no idea how that poor boy had gotten into the room. It was vacant. See? He still had the key! Far more concerned with getting reimbursed by the city for the room's rent during the time the police kept it closed off as a crime scene than he was with the death, the manager had not seen or heard anything unusual in the past couple of days. Of course, he would have said the same thing even if he had personally witnessed the Second Coming.

In the next four hours, Ridley had first called his old mentor Glitsky in the hospital. After that, cursing himself for everything he was and everything he'd done in the past ten days, he'd gone back to the beginning, and remembered the matchbook from Jupiter. Armed with a mug shot, he got to the bar at around two thirty, and five people, including the bartender, a lawyer, a private investigator, and two random daytime drinkers recognized Cullen's face. Yes, he'd been there, had a few drinks, seemed impatient, but didn't cause any trouble.

Ridley was glad to run into some cooperative witnesses. The five of them had been helpful, sitting in a circle around him at the bar trying to help him connect the dots. The lawyer and the private eye – Logan and Visser – were sure that they had left the bar before the victim had so they couldn't vouch for when he left, but the other three witnesses came to an agreement that Cullen had left at a little after dark.