'I don't know,' Walsh repeated. 'I didn't take anything out of it.'

'But it sure seemed like he might have.' He was back now at Freeman's office, in the Solarium reporting to Treya and Amy. He'd eventually left Tiburon with a cardboard box now about a quarter filled with what he'd collected from the office and the rest of the house, including a copy of the Koran and, of course, the white memento box. On a whim, at the last moment, he'd also thrown in the framed photograph of Loretta Wager. But it was the empty drawer that had captured his interest. 'Any of you guys have a completely empty dresser drawer?'

'Drawers don't get empty,' Amy said. 'They get full about ten minutes after you move in someplace. Then too full. It's a law of nature. He must have cleaned it out.'

Treya disagreed. 'He would never have done that and left it empty knowing we were coming to look through her things. He would have put something back in before we got there.'

Rhodin had his own suggestion. 'Maybe he didn't really imagine that it would make any impression? I mean, it was just an empty drawer. Doesn't mean anything.'

'No,' Treya was sure of it. 'If he emptied it, he would have remembered and it would have seemed significant.'

'Then she emptied it,' Amy said, 'Elaine.'

They were all with their thoughts a moment. Treya finally spoke up. 'If she was leaving him, if they'd had a fight and she walked out one night, she might have just taken a handful of underwear.'

'I've got another one,' Rhodin said. 'In the bathroom, she had a couple of months' worth of birth control pills, but in her dresser she had maybe a dozen condoms.'

Amy had an answer for that. 'So she really didn't want to get pregnant.'

'Or she wasn't being faithful,' Rhodin said.

Treya looked at both of them. 'Or she knew he wasn't.'

'Dash Logan?'

The lawyer looked up from the newspaper he was reading, which happened to be the Democrat. Jupiter was beginning to hop in the long slide of a Friday afternoon, but he was sitting alone in his usual back booth, a bowl of pretzels on the table next to him, a half full glass of beer growing warm at his elbow. The look on his face was welcoming, untroubled. 'You got me.' He ran his eyes down the man who'd addressed him, extended his hand. 'And you'd be Mr Hardy, I presume. Dismas? Was that the name, Dismas?'

'Still is.' Hardy took the hand – a firm grip – and slid in across from him. 'You are one tough man to get a hold of.'

Logan nodded sympathetically. 'I hear that a lot. Sorry. I must be having some kind of mid-life crisis or something. My motivation's just gone in the toilet. I got your calls, though.'

'That's nice. I was starting to think the phone's weren't working.'

'Didn't I say you could always get me here?'

'Yes, you did.'

'Well, then.' He flashed a smile. It seemed genuine enough. Hardy didn't have to remind himself, though, that the greatest con men oozed sincerity – it was their stock in trade. 'Hey, listen, let me buy you a beer for your trouble. If it's any consolation, I would have called you Monday, but I figure now, Friday afternoon, nobody's in when you call them anyway. It'll wait for the weekend, right?' He raised a hand, flagging the bartender. 'Wally, a couple of cold ones, see voo play. What do you drink, Dismas?'

Hardy made an apologetic gesture. 'I've got to stick with water. I see a client at five.'

'And they wouldn't want their lawyer to have a drink in the afternoon? I hear you. Wally? Just one. And some of that stuff fish fuck in.' A grin back at Hardy. 'You know, I'll tell you, that's why I stopped working out of my office.'

'Why's that, Dash?'

'Why? 'Cause when clients come to an office, they see the trappings, you know? You've got the secretary and the law library and the phones and all that shit – which is just what it is, shit – and they get so they expect the rest of the package that goes with it. Hey, thanks, Wally. Here's looking at you, Dismas.' He held up his new glass of beer and touched Hardy's glass. 'So anyway, I'm not that guy. Used to try to be, but it didn't work. So people would come in with these expectations and I'd dash 'em. They wanted a different kind of lawyer and God knows there's enough of 'em. But if they want me – and a lot of folks do – they can come down and meet me here and they know what they're getting. No frills, maybe, but no bullshit either. And most of 'em, end of the day, they go away happy. So,' his limpid blue eyes fixed Hardy over the rim of his beer glass, 'I'm assuming you've reconsidered on settling with McNeil.'

'Actually, not.' Hardy sat back and enjoyed Dash's reaction, the quick snap in the mellow facade – a blink of an eye – then the impressive return to how he'd been. 'I'm here on another matter entirely. Do you know a kid named Cullen Alsop?'

Logan appeared to think about it. 'Some cop – Banks, I think his name was – was asking about him in here the day before yesterday. OD, wasn't it?'

'Yeah. Looks like.'

'So this boy Alsop,' Logan asked, 'was he your client?'

'No,' Hardy said. 'My client's Cole Burgess.' If the name registered, Logan didn't show it. 'Elaine Wager?'

His face fell. 'Oh, Elaine.' Logan had sympathy down pat. He clucked. 'Such a shame about her.'

'It was,' Hardy agreed. 'Though I'd understood the two of you had had some problems.'

'No, noth-' The smile. 'You don't mean that special master thing? That was nothing to do with Elaine.'

'Really? I heard she might have taken it that way.'

He shook his head back and forth. 'No. That was all for the benefit of the cops. They call me down here-'

'The police do?'

'No, no. My office.'

'I thought you didn't have an office.'

'Hey, what am I, stupid? No, I keep an office. I just don't use it much. So anyway, I'm down here having a couple of brewskis, my girl calls all in a panic. The cops are there, they got a warrant, they're doing a search. Well, I go a little ballistic and who's gonna blame me?'

Hardy lifted his shoulders ambiguously.

'So I'm smack in the middle of something in the female line here and I've got to run uptown, rush hour. Time I get there, I'm not feeling my most cooperative. Now Patsy, my girl, she makes a nice presence at the door – you know what I'm saying? – but she's a little weak on the business side, filing, stuff like that. So I say to the search party, "Fine. You're showing me this kind of respect, you're treating me like I'm vermin, you can go find the shit yourselves."' He wore his apologetic look again, his voice back to calm and reasonable. 'So that's all it was with Elaine. She got in the middle of it, that was all. 'Nother couple of weeks, I would have gotten back to her and told her I was sorry. If she hadn't gotten herself shot.'

The recitation seemed to tire him out. His expression went strangely blank, then he recovered, grabbed a pretzel, picked up his beer glass and drank. 'But how'd we get on Elaine? You were asking about the OD.'

'Cullen.'

'Right, Cullen, OK. And the guy who killed Elaine. Your client.'

'Cole Burgess. Cullen snitched him out. He was the source of the murder weapon.'

'And I'm supposed to know these guys? How do you get to that?'

'I don't, really. I went by the Hall today to see if I could get my hands on some early discovery on Cullen since Cole's prelim is next week. Cullen had a matchbook from here on him.'

'Yeah, that's what Banks said.'

Hardy shrugged. 'You'd told me you hung out here. I thought there was a chance you might have known him.'

Logan couldn't believe it. 'Dismas, turn around, would you?'

Hardy did.

'How many people you see here?'

Hardy did a quick count. 'Thirty-five, forty.'

'That's about right.' Logan popped another pretzel. 'At four o'clock. You know how many people are jammed in here come nine or ten? You can't take a deep breath 'cause there's no room to put it. So the odds of me knowing one guy…' He let the sentence drop, shook his head at Hardy's optimism. 'Forget it.'