'He killed Elaine.'

'OK. And we hope he burns in hell for it. But his sister told me he was probably already in withdrawal this morning. He's got to get some treatment.'

Glitsky remained unmoved. 'When they process him in, they'll give him the standard tests. If it's heroin, they'll know soon enough.'

'When will that happen?'

A shrug. 'When we're done here.'

Hardy took that in. 'You mind if I ask what he's doing here right now?'

'Answering questions.' Glitsky came forward in his chair. 'And FYI, he waived an attorney. Though maybe if he'd known it was you…'

'He doesn't know me.' Hardy sat back, shifted angrily in his chair. 'You're sweating him, aren't you?' He glanced toward the door, came back to the lieutenant. 'If you were sitting where I am, Abe, you'd tell me something was wrong here. That I wasn't doing my job right. This isn't how it's supposed to happen.'

Glitsky's face was a slab. He said nothing.

Hardy sighed. 'Have you videotaped a confession?'

A crisp nod. 'I believe we're in the process of doing that very thing.'

Hardy's blood was running now. He spoke carefully. 'So if I'm moving ahead and getting him processed into a program, you're telling me I've got to go around you, is that it? Maybe a judge? Get a writ?'

Glitsky stared over his desk. 'You do what you've got to do.'

'I intend to.' Hardy paused. 'I hope you know what you're doing.'

'It's possible.' The lieutenant looked through him. Talk to you.'

The visit was over.

Glitsky's conscience was a mangy dog gnawing at his insides.

After Hardy left, he remained sitting behind the desk in the dim confines of his office for over an hour, until the quality of the light shifted. Outside, it had come to dusk.

He rose, went to his door, opened it, and looked out into the homicide detail. The workday had ended, but the door to the interrogation room was still closed. He heard voices behind it. Ridley still had Elaine's killer in there.

He surveyed the detail. The old school clock over the water cooler said it was six fifteen. Wearing headphones, head down over his desk, Marcel Lanier moved his lips and jabbed corrections with his pencil as he ran his interview tape and proofed it against what the transcriber had typed. Paul Thieu, who already knew everything anyway, had his nose in a book with what looked like Cyrillic script on the jacket – he was working a Russian mafia-related homicide and Glitsky thought he probably wanted to conquer the language before the case got too far along.

Neither of the inspectors looked up.

Nobody had messed yet with his door, either.

He closed it behind him and pushed in the lock. Flicking on the light, he got in his chair and pulled out his junk drawer, lifted out Elaine's picture. He couldn't look at it for long. He realized that his daughter wouldn't exactly be proud of how he'd handled things so far. But he'd told himself, when he'd given Ridley his marching orders, that this was an instance of bad things happening to bad people. Karma.

Now he was trying to sell himself on the idea that it wasn't as though he'd been actively complicit in torture, but it wasn't easy. Though it truly had been Glitsky's intention to 'sweat' the young man in the interrogation room, this might be cruel but it wasn't unusual – homicide inspectors did it frequently. Under the stressful conditions in that closed-up space, a suspect occasionally would waive his rights to an attorney, or tell a story that he later wished he hadn't. Once in a while, as in Burgess's case, he would even confess under conditions that might not qualify as legally coercive.

But now he realized that it had gone on long enough. He'd better go and tell Ridley to end the interrogation, get the suspect in the system. Burgess had killed Elaine. There was no doubt about that, and it was important that no screw-up create a hole he could slither through.

He stood, grabbed his leather jacket, opened his door again. If Ridley had gotten the impression because of Abe's obvious hostility to Burgess that the suspect should be sweated beyond human endurance, Glitsky would have to try and correct that. There was an important difference, he knew, between wishing pain and suffering on someone and making him experience it.

It was called civilization.

3

Sharron Pratt, the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco, sipped a pre-prandial new-fangled cocktail concocted from gin and chocolate liqueur and served in a tall, blue martini glass. Perched on a high stool at one of the financial district's power restaurants, Sharron cut an elegant figure in her tailored blue suit. She wore her hair shoulder-length and made no effort to hide the gray that had once lightly peppered and now dominated it. Lightly made up – a touch of mascara and a subtle shade of lip gloss – she was very easy to look at. Rimless bifocal eyeglasses added a few years to her true age of forty-four, but behind them, green-flecked eyes sparkled youthfully. Her wide mouth animated her face, the plane of her cheeks was well-defined, her skin smooth. Even with the added gray and the no-nonsense glasses, she was a woman who'd come into herself as she'd aged, and was now far more handsome than she'd been a decade before.

But internally, she suffered from a great discontent. Since the upset victory resulting in her election three years before, Sharron Pratt had suffered a steady decline in popularity. Now, with her chance for re-election coming up in November, she had eight months to recoup the eleven points which the latest poll told her she had lost.

'I don't understand how this has happened, Gabe. I really don't.'

Gabriel Torrey, her Chief Assistant DA and political mentor, was methodically breaking apart the pistachios from the bowl on the bar, gathering the nuts onto his napkin. When he'd accumulated somewhere between eight and a dozen, he would pop them into his mouth, washing them down with non-alcoholic beer.

Torrey had no trouble understanding what had happened to Sharron Pratt's fans. Conveying it to her was the difficult part.

He shrugged, cracked a nut, keeping a casual tone. 'Crime's up, Sharron. Convictions are down. That's the short answer. People are tired of it.'

'I'm tired of it too, Gabe.' Pratt leaned forward on her stool, moved a hand onto his sleeve. 'But the damn police are so hostile and we can't seem to get any coverage… What?'

Torrey was shaking his head. 'People are impatient with the excuses, too, Sharron. It's been three years. People are thinking that if you haven't been able to fix things in that time, you're not going to.' He'd only cracked two shells, but he threw the nuts into his mouth early. 'I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news here, but the agenda you got elected on last time just hasn't played in the real world.'

'It would, though. If everyone would just get behind it.'

Torrey knew he had to answer with a great deal of care. This woman might be his bedmate at widely-spaced intervals when the stars were aligned just right, but every day she was, after all, his boss. Traditionally she did not warm to philosophical argument.

She'd worked the legal trenches in San Francisco for years – social worker, public defender, lawyer for various civil rights coalitions – and she knew what played in this town. Her election had confirmed that the people were behind her. They were ready for a change. No more white guys prosecuting minorities. It was going to be a new age.

She had won by, among other things, promising to do all she could to stop police brutality. Stop prosecuting victimless crimes. Don't charge petty drug users or prostitutes. Institute counseling and rehab programs for people whose emotional and substance problems caused them to break the law.