Now he looked up at Cuneo. "I'm going to let my bride here make the call on this one, Inspector. She knows very well who she saw. If she says it's this woman in the color picture that we saw last Wednesday, then that's who it was."

As advertised, Jeffie from the Valero station was working on Sunday, manning the cash register. Cuneo had learned from his earlier experience with the Willises and this time only brought the picture of Catherine Hanover in with him.

Jeffie didn't have to look for very long. "Yep," he said. "She the one."

Coming out to the living room from the back half of the duplex, Treya Glitsky sagged against the doorway to the kitchen. "Okay, she's down."

Finally getting around to reading the Sunday Chronicle, Glitsky sat sideways in the leather love seat by their front windows, which he'd opened to let in the fresh air. It was early afternoon and sunlight spilled over him. The tone in his wife's voice sparked concern, and he put his section down, started to rise. "Are you all right?"

She nodded wearily, then barely lifted a hand, motioning for him to stay seated. "Thank God she still takes her nap."

"I hear you. But you don't look too good."

"I don't feel too good." She closed her eyes for a moment. "I know it's unusual, but would you mind terribly if I just took a minute and lay down for a while? I don't mean to be boring, but it's like somebody suddenly just pulled the plug. I don't know what it is."

"I can guess."

"You think? The pregnancy?"

He shrugged. "It's pretty normal, isn't it?"

She let out a deep breath, fatigue all over her. "Not for me. I never got any kind of morning sickness or anything with Raney or Rachel. Neither of them."

"So this one's different." He pointed. "Go, sleep."

She dropped her head and sighed, but didn't move. "Wake me up when she does."

"No promises. Do you want me to carry you in?"

"No, really. I just need a couple of minutes." "Okay. Go, then."

He got up and walked across to her. She was standing with her eyes closed, all but asleep on her feet. Peeling her off the doorpost, he put his arm around her. "I'm sorry," she mumbled. "I'm just so tired."

Five minutes later, she was covered up in their darkened bedroom. Glitsky closed the door to the hallway and returned to the living room. There he took a few steps toward his paper, but stopped as though some physical force had restrained his movement. He stood in the center of the room, hands at his sides. Closing his eyes, he let out a stream of air and realized that he'd been holding his breath. He wasn't aware of any noise, even from the street through the open windows. He drew another deep breath. Another. Closed his eyes again.

Perhaps a minute passed. In the house, all was Sunday-afternoon stillness.

When he opened his eyes, the rectangle of sunlight had grown and it now covered the whole love seat and a few inches of floor. He realized that, incredibly for San Francisco, it was almost uncomfortably warm in the room. He walked to the front door and opened it for some cross-ventilation, then went to the refrigerator, took out a bottle of iced tea and drank half of it down in a gulp.

What had been his sons' rooms when they'd lived with him were down a hall behind the kitchen on the opposite side of the duplex from his own bedroom. Now his youngest boy Orel's old room was Rachel's, and at her door Glitsky turned the knob gently and went to stand over her bed-still a crib, really, with the bars up. She was sleeping soundly, sprawled on her back, her breathing regular and deep, and he couldn't resist putting his palm down flat over her chest. She didn't stir. He felt a vibration at his belt, someone paging him. The number wasn't immediately familiar and his initial reaction was to ignore it, go finish reading the Sunday paper, maybe let himself doze off like the rest of the world.

Instead, in the kitchen, he picked up the wall phone's receiver and punched in the number.

"Hello."

"This is Abe Glitsky. You just paged me. Who is this?" "Dan Cuneo. We need to talk about Catherine Hanover."

Assistant DA Chris Rosen didn't mind being bothered about work at home on a Sunday night, least of all by a homicide inspector with a big case. He lived in a small, stand-alone bungalow in the flats of Emeryville, across the bay from San Francisco, not more than six miles from Cuneo's place in Alameda. The inspector's long day in the city had come to an end, and the two men decided they'd meet up at the bar of Spenger's Fish Grotto, just off the freeway in Berkeley.

They arrived almost simultaneously. By the time they got their drinks-the place was packed and it took a while -Cuneo had brought him pretty much up-to-date. Three witnesses had definitively identified Catherine Hanover from her picture as the woman who'd 1) purchased the Valero gasoline in a portable container and 2) left the Hanover house about a half hour before the fire. Cuneo had taken the rug sample from the back of Catherine Hanover's car directly to Arnie Becker, since the regular police lab probably wouldn't be able to get to it within a week. Becker had ready access to the fire department's own mass spectrometer, and yes, in fact, the gasoline in her trunk was Valero, the same brand that had started the fire. He'd luminoled the pants from her closet himself, and though he'd found no evidence of blood spatter, he'd dropped the clothes at the police lab and was hoping they'd find something useful.

Throughout this recital, Rosen sipped his Scotch and said nothing. After Cuneo stopped, he signaled the waitress for another round for both of them and said, "Don't get me wrong, Dan. There's nothing I'd like more than to be able to move on this. But you've got to admit that you don't have much in the way of evidence."

Cuneo was ready for this. "I didn't expect much. The fire burned it all up. But she denies being near Hanover's house when one of my witnesses put her there. Same day she got the gas around the corner. She did it, Chris. I swear to God."

"I'm not saying I don't believe you." He centered his empty glass on his napkin. "Last time you mentioned a motive, but we didn't get to it."

Cuneo spent a little time spinning it out. Aside from his work on the warrant and this morning's identifications, in the past two days, he'd spoken to all the other members of Paul Hanover's nuclear family except Catherine's husband, and no one denied that his coming marriage to Missy D'Amiens and the possible change to the inheritance was a very big concern to all of them.

What set Catherine apart from her other relatives was the fact that she'd gone to Paul's that day to "have it out" with him. "Her own words from the first night I talked to her at the fire-'have it out.' One sister and the mother-in-law both had heard her say it. And now we know she was at the house not just in the afternoon when she admitted it, but later, just before the fire."

"Anybody see her walk in there, with the gas?"

"Not yet, no."

"Or walk out with it?"

"She left it in the house. Arnie Becker's got the container with the other stuff from the house down at the station." One of an arson inspector's most tedious yet most important jobs after a fire was to go through the ash and debris in a three- or four-foot radius around a body and sort everything-the burned and destroyed remains of furniture, floors, walls, clothing, appliances, knickknacks, jewelry-until they had identified every item down to the size of a match head, to see if any of it might be relevant to their investigation. "No prints, if that's what you were thinking."

"Hoping." Rosen frowned. "Anything else?"