"If there's a ruling that she died after him," Theresa put in, "we'll find out who they are soon enough, believe me. Cousins and uncles and siblings she didn't even know she had."

"Well, maybe," Aaron said. "But the greater possible concern for us, I think, and what we should be prepared to litigate if necessary, is if he changed the will in favor of Missy…"

Theresa turned on him angrily. "Must you keep using her nickname, Aaron?"

He shrugged. "It's nothing personal, Theresa. It makes it clearer for everyone. But if he changed the will in her favor, then it's likely he changed the rest of it, too, maybe in favor of some charity, or to the kids, and I mean our kids. Your grandkids, Theresa. That's what we ought to be prepared for."

"That would be fine with me," Theresa said. "That's who I'm in this for."

"We're all in it for them, too, Mom," Will said with some asperity.

"Well, he didn't mention any of those other possibilities to me, Aaron." Catherine sat rigidly in her chair. "He told me it was going to Missy. That's what he wanted. It really wasn't any of the family's business."

"That's so ridiculous and just so like him," Theresa said.

"Easy, Mom, okay?" Will said.

"Well," she shot back, "you tell me. How could it be any more the family's business? We were certainly all well enough aware that it was before… well, before this week."

"Okay," Will said, "but it's still Dad."

"I'm sure it was mostly her," Beth said, "not him. She had him so fooled. I can't believe he intended to cut us out completely."

"You can believe anything you want, Beth," Catherine said, "but the fact of the matter is that once the marriage happened, the whole financial picture was going to be different. And we all know what that was going to mean in practice, even if they hadn't died."

"But they didn't just die," Mary said. "Somebody killed them."

"Well," Theresa said, "of course I'm sorry about your father, but all I can say about Missy is good riddance."

"Mom!" Mary exploded. "God!"

"What?" Theresa said. "If you're honest, I know you're all saying the same thing inside yourselves. Thank heaven that woman is out of the picture." The matriarch threw her gaze around the room, daring anyone to disagree with her. "I've heard all of us say one time or another that we wished she would either go away or just die."

Catherine spoke up. "If we did, of course we were joking, Theresa. What do you think?"

"No. Obviously. I was just making the point that we knew what a danger that woman was to all of us."

"Well, she's not now," Aaron said.

And at that truth, the family went silent.

Will was forty-five years old, with an athletic frame and a conventionally handsome face that had not yet gone to slack or jowl. Still wearing his Dockers and short-sleeved Tommy Bahama shirt, he was sitting on the bed as his wife came into the room carrying a load of folded laundry. "Hey," he said.

"Hey," she answered with an uninflected, mechanical precision.

"How are you doing?"

"I'm doing fine, Will. How are you doing?"

"Good."

She stood still for a moment, looking at him. Then she exhaled and went over to the dresser, put the pile of laundry on the chair next to it, and opened the top drawer. She wasn't facing him. "So," she said, "no fish?"

"None. No keepers anyway. Isn't that weird? We're out two hundred miles, feels like halfway to the Galapagos, and there are no fish. I've never been completely skunked before on one of these trips."

"How many of you were there?"

"On the boat? Just three of us, plus the captain and crew."

"Nice guys?"

"Okay, I guess," he said. "The usual. Good 'ol boys. Tim and Tom."

"Easy to remember." "What does that mean?"

"Nothing. Never mind." She closed the top drawer, opened the next one down. "I wish you'd have called, though. Not being able to reach you was terrifically frustrating."

"I'm sorry about that. Next time I'll remember." He pushed himself back against the headboard. "What was that motivation you talked about tonight?"

"When?"

"When Aaron asked why you'd gone to see Dad that day."

She stopped moving, let out a long breath, still facing away from him. Slowly she turned full around, holding one of his folded T-shirts. Finally, she shook her head slightly from side to side. "I guess I just got tired of not knowing where we were going to stand. Saul starts college in a little over a year, and he's the first of the grand-kids. I'd talked to Beth and Mary and both had asked if I'd heard anything from your dad, what with Sophie and Pablo right behind Saul. So I just thought I'd go get it from the horse's mouth." She was wringing the T-shirt between her hands. "Then, as you heard, we got on to other things." "Missy."

"Among others." "Did you have words?"

"Some. Nothing worse than usual. We just talked, maybe argued a little. But it was all his decision, and there was really nothing to fight about. Besides, your father, as opposed to your mother, likes me. Or should I say liked."

Will shrugged. "He liked attractive women. So does his son." He patted the bed next to him. "Speaking of which, you're looking good tonight, especially to a man who's just spent five days at sea. Are you planning on coming to bed?"

"Eventually," she said. "I usually do."

"I've missed you," he said.

Biting her lip, nodding to herself, she turned back to the dresser, dropped the crumpled T-shirt into the open drawer. Clearing her throat, she said, "Let me go check on the kids," then left the room.

The assistant district attorney who handled arson cases was Chris Rosen. He'd been a prosecutor for nine years now, after first serving a year fresh out of law school as a clerk for Superior Court Judge Leo Chomorro. So he'd lived his entire legal life in the Hall of Justice at Seventh and Bryant. Rosen thrived in the environment.

An old-fashioned, hard-on-crime professional prosecutor, he didn't believe that he'd ever seen an innocent person in custody. "You don't get all the way to arrested-and believe me, that is a long, long way- unless you did it," he liked to say. "That's the truth, it always has been and always will be nothing but the truth, so help me God."

Unmarried and slightly unkempt, with an easygoing personal style, he often grew a day or two's stubble when he wasn't due in court. His dark hair licked at the top of his collar. The conscious image he projected was borderline blue collar, a guy with no special passion for prosecuting his fellow citizens. He was just a regular working dog going about his business, doing his job. Nobody to worry about. Attorneys who hadn't already faced him in court found out the truth soon enough, and often found themselves on the defensive from the get-go, blindsided by his cold passion.

"No law says you can't come across out of court as sympathetic, you know, a little… sensitive," he was saying over midnight drinks to Dan Cuneo as they sat at the bar at Lou the Greek's. "Then you get 'em in court, suddenly I'm the iceman and whop 'em upside the head. They don't know what hit 'em."

Rosen's experience had taught him that he needed every advantage he could get in San Francisco, where juries tended to see their main role as finding some reason, almost any reason-stress, hardship, bad luck, unfortunate upbringing-to let defendants off. There always lurked some mitigating factor, some reason for juries to forgive.

"Hey, but enough about me." Rosen sipped at his single malt. It wasn't anywhere near his working hours on a Friday night. He was out here now with his Oban on the rocks as a favor to his main-man arson inspector Arnie Becker, and also because the recent double-homicide fire was going to be the biggest case he'd tried to date. "Becker says you got a lead on Hanover."