Sharron's own motto was: 'There's more to being a prosecutor than getting convictions.' To which the Locke crowd tended to respond, 'Oh yeah? Like what?'

So any mention of Chris Locke and his administration put Sharron Pratt on the defensive, and it was immediately apparent that she was on it now, the fingers of her right hand thrumming uneasily on the bar.

Torrey carefully reached over and covered her hand with his. 'Elaine was having an affair with Locke.'

'With the DA? While she worked for him? How much younger was she than he was? God, that man!'

Torrey suppressed his desire to point out to his boss that the two of them – he and Sharron – were in precisely the same relationship that Elaine and Locke had enjoyed. There would be no point – Sharron would be hard pressed to see any similarity, in spite of the fact that in both cases the DA was sleeping with an assistant DA. But Locke had been a predator of gullible young women; she was nothing like that. She and Torrey had a mature relationship between equals, and that could not have been true with Locke and Elaine.

Instead, he waited her out in silence. Then, 'In any event, after Locke was killed, she needed a shoulder to cry on, and we-'

Pratt pulled her hand out from under his. 'Don't tell me. I don't want to know.'

'It wasn't that, Sharron.' He took her hand again, patted it soothingly. 'It wasn't that. OK?'

She finally nodded. 'OK.'

'There wasn't anybody she could talk to here. The office was changing. She felt there were spies everywhere.' He shrugged, making light of it. 'I was doing some neighborhood work in the African-American community, outreach stuff, you know, just like you were. Anyway, Elaine and I, we got to be close for a while. Platonically. Really.'

He squeezed her hand. 'She'd lost her mother and her lover within a week. She wanted to talk ideas. What was the place of a strong, smart black woman in a white man's world? What was the price of her mother's fame? Was any of it worth it? Was it wise to have affairs with married men? Where was she going? What had she done? That kind of thing.'

He paused. 'Eventually, she got it together. I put her in touch with Aaron Rand and you know the rest. But she was just very special somehow. And now…' A sigh. 'I cared about her, and now I feel I owe her something.'

'What? You couldn't have prevented what happened with her. It wasn't anything to do with you.'

'No, I know that.' He considered his phrasing. 'Let's just call it a payback. This bum who killed her, if somebody's going to take him down, I'd like it to be me.'

Two hours after he'd left Glitsky, after a visit to Frank Batiste, the Chief of Inspectors, Hardy was coming out of his shock, but still wasn't sure how to proceed. He had, at least, gotten Cole Burgess booked into the jail, and now he wanted to talk to him, get some take of the damage. He took the outside corridor from the back door of the Hall. It was bitter with a wet wind, and when he got inside the door to the jail, he stood a minute getting the warmth.

The admitting sergeant at the counter was a short, skinny Caucasian with the name tag Reilly and a buzz cut of orange hair. Glitsky was six foot two, half black and all buffed. After his first three minutes with Reilly, Hardy thought it was amazing that they could look so much alike.

Because whether he knew it or not, the desk sergeant was giving Hardy his Glitsky imitation and doing a hell of a good job at it. Yeah, he was pretty sure Cole Burgess had been processed in. No, he hadn't heard about any heroin. Sorry, he hadn't made it into the computer yet. He couldn't say for sure where he was, even if he'd been taken to the 6th Floor or to the hospital.

Hardy took that runaround until it became obvious, then demanded to speak to Reilly's superior. Reilly told Hardy that well, darn, he really wasn't sure whether anybody was in this time of evening. Deliberately pitching his voice so low that Reilly had to lean closer to hear it at all, Hardy whispered, 'All right, Sergeant, then get me the Watch Commander, and if he's not in, I'll call Dan Boles' – the sheriff – 'at home. Oh, and I almost forgot, your inmate Mr Burgess is the brother-in-law of Jeff Elliot, who writes the CityTalk column for the Chronicle.'

Within two minutes, Reilly had located somebody who might know something. Big, black and beefy, the man appeared from a door behind the reception desk, made a show of spotting the man in the lawyer suit, pointed at Hardy and closed the space between them. 'I'm Lieutenant Wayne Davies, Mr…?'

Hardy said who he was, laid out the problem. Then: 'This man needs detox. His medical evaluation hasn't moved forward, not as far as I can tell. Your admitting sergeant tells me he's not even in the computer yet.'

'Then he's probably not been processed. That's when they do the med. eval.' Davies had his arms crossed, his brow furrowed. Hardy was to understand that he was thinking hard about all this, trying to remember one in what must have been dozens of people brought to the jail today for processing. 'And you're his attorney?' he asked.

The veneer of patience now transparently thin, Hardy nodded. 'His sister retained me on his behalf. And he's been in custody now for almost a full day.'

'Hmm… and you say Lieutenant Glitsky brought him down?'

'Look, Lieutenant, I'm talking about Cole Burgess, the suspect in the Elaine Wager murder. He's here. He's in withdrawal and you're responsible for him. What are you going to do?'

Davies decided, although he dressed it up for Hardy's benefit, pretending it had all just come back to him. 'Elaine Wager. That guy? Yeah, he's here, but I don't know how far he's gotten.'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean processing him in. It was busy today, thirty admits. There might still be some delay.' Another elaborate shrug. 'I don't know.'

Hardy had heard more than enough. 'OK, Lieutenant, let's cut the bullshit. I demand to see my client now. If he's not in detox immediately, you personally can probably look forward to being named in about a billion dollar lawsuit against the City-'

Davies held up an authoritative hand. 'Keep your shorts on, Mr Hardy. I'm sure he's here. We'll find him and get him checked out. He'll be upstairs in jail or on his way to County Hospital. You can see him either place when we're through, Mr Hardy. But not before.'

Cole Burgess wanted to be dead.

There was nothing but the pain and no way he could make it stop. Not here. Not without the god.

When he was a boy – still active, still doing sports – he'd get cramps in his legs that woke him, screaming, from sound sleep in the middle of the night. The calf on his right leg, or a muscle somewhere under the tendons of one of his feet.

Knotted muscle curled on itself, squeezing every nerve around it in a concentrated orb of agony.

But localized, at least. One place. One muscle per spasm. His mom would come in and rub it, knead it out, talk to him. It would pass, though the memory – the ache – would linger for days.

But it wasn't like this, now, when it was everywhere all at once. Never ending. Unbearable.

Somebody, please, come and kill me.

Did he say it? He didn't know. It was his only thought, but there really wasn't any thought as such, any words. There wasn't even consciousness outside of the pain. It consumed his entire being. Only the pain. He hadn't had any god in three days.

His body was draped in the jail's orange jumpsuit. It twitched, making small noises, on the floor of the cell used for the psychologically impaired.

The guard opened the cell door and held it while two other guards lifted the body onto a gurney and began pushing it down the hallway to the elevator that led to the jail's rear entrance.