He nodded. "She's very good-looking. But, you know, we've already done the fantasy thing with you and me this morning. I'm yours, you're mine. Like that."

"Yes, but here's a case where you can help someone you care about who you think is probably innocent and make half a million or more dollars in the bargain, and at the same time you'd get to professionally destroy someone who's out to get you and Abe. How can I ask you not to take it?"

Hardy put his coffee cup down, reached over and pulled his wife close against him. "You say, 'Diz, I'd just prefer you let someone else take this one.' "

"I'm not going to do that."

"Well, that is your decision, Flaversham." Hardy quoting a longtime household favorite line from Disney's The Great Mouse Detective. "And I haven't made my own decision yet, either."

"You can't turn her down if she needs you." "Somebody else could defend her." "But who as well as you?"

"Well… "

"But between us," Frannie added, cutting him off, "it is a little scary."

Just off the main lobby in Hardy's Sutter Street offices, the Solarium conference room contained a proni-sion of greenery-rubber trees, ferns, dieffenbachia. One of the associates had even brought a redwood tree in a two-hundred-gallon pot; thriving, its trunk was a foot thick and its boughs scraped the glass ceiling.

Now, after he and Frannie had continued their morning date with an early lunch, cell phones off, at Petit Robert, Hardy sat in one of the sixteen chairs that surrounded the immense mahogany table in the center of the room. Waiting for him on his arrival at the office were three urgent calls from Catherine Hanover-the first when the police had come early in the morning to serve a subpoena for her to appear tomorrow to testify in front of the grand jury, the second when Cuneo had arrived personally to deliver another search warrant at her house, and the third in a barely controlled, I need help right now hysteria, similar in tone to the first call he'd gotten from her on Saturday night. He called her right back and told her to get down to the office as soon as she could. She was barely coherent. Her voice had been choked and hoarse-"I'm sorry. I can't seem to stop crying."

Hanging up, he put in a call to Abe's pager. He wondered what, if anything, had happened on Sunday, or maybe Saturday, with the results of the first search warrant. Had the lab in fact uncovered significant evidence?

Clear on what he next wanted to do, Hardy forced himself to take a moment before he did it. Every action he took now as Catherine's de facto lawyer moved him closer to the decision he hadn't yet consciously made. But at each small incremental step, he didn't seem to be able to stop himself. Of course he would call Catherine back after her three urgent calls. What else could he do? Of course he would page Glitsky and try to discover what the police had come up with. On some level, he felt he didn't really have a choice. But up until now, his moves had been small and personal. What he contemplated next was larger and more public. He wanted more certainty about his commitment before he moved.

Whether it was more hangover from the guilt he'd felt at the way he'd had to drop her so long ago or a testament to the bond they'd once forged together, he couldn't deny that between him and Catherine there remained a strong personal connection. They'd come of age in the same culture-it had been immediately clear to Hardy on Saturday night at her house, when they'd easily fallen into a comfortable familiarity, even with the hard questions. The plain fact was that she'd been his first love, and the person he'd become could not bring himself to abandon her when she needed him so badly. Even as he recognized that she might-he told himself it was an infinitesimally small chance-even now be playing him. Because she knew she could.

But that, he told himself, was her fate, her karma. Hardy himself had no choice but to be true to his own character, and to trust that she would not betray him.

Finally, telling Phyllis to interrupt him if Glitsky called, he rang up the district attorney's office, where he talked to the relatively new chief assistant district attorney, Craig Bellarios, about the grand jury subpoena. There was really only one question Hardy needed to have answered, and that was whether his client-his client!-was considered a "target" of the investigation, i.e., a suspect, as opposed to a witness.

Bellarios, who didn't know Hardy very well, wasn't the most forthcoming man on the planet. He told Hardy that he couldn't predict what the grand jury would do, and that it was always wise to be prepared for any eventuality. Thanking him for nothing, Hardy asked and did learn the name of the presenting prosecutor-Chris Rosen-and called him next, but he was out.

He sensed a stonewall and it tightened his stomach. If things had gotten to this juncture already, he had no choice but to tell Catherine to plead the Fifth Amendment before the grand jury and to refuse to talk anymore to the police. And in the terrible catch-22 of the legal game, once she adopted that strategy, though technically she'd still be a witness, in the eyes of the prosecution she would have moved a long way toward becoming the target of the investigation.

Now, with his legal pad and another cup of coffee on the table in front of him, Hardy was cramming with a single-minded attention, reviewing all the notes he'd taken at Catherine's on Saturday night. Feeling her presence as soon as she entered the lobby, he looked up, stood and walked over to the Solarium door. "Catherine."

If she'd been crying, there was no sign of it anymore, other than maybe an added luminosity to her eyes. She wore a well-tailored khaki-colored pantsuit. Hardy was thinking that he was glad she'd chosen demure even as she turned toward him to reveal a light tangerine garment with a lace top, a sweep of decolletage underneath the jacket. An elegant chain of malachite beads encircled her neck and rested in the deep hollow of her chest. He realized that she'd had her breasts enlarged.

But he'd hardly digested these impressions when she stepped into his arms. Vaguely aware of the stares of Phyllis and Norma, the office manager, and a pair of paralegals who had stopped at the reception area for something, Hardy held her against him for the briefest of seconds, then turned to the gathered multitudes and introduced her, all business, as an old friend and new client.

A new client.

Back in the Solarium, they got seated and Hardy asked if he could see the subpoena. "You got this this morning?"

"Seven o'clock. I was hardly out of bed."

"They're still hassling you."

"I thought so, too. And they're doing another search. Is that unusual?"

He didn't answer that one. Instead, he asked, "When did they do this, the search? At seven, too?"

"No. Nine or so. They were separate. Cuneo was with the second bunch. I called you again."

"I had business this morning," Hardy said. "I called back as soon as I got in. Was Glitsky with the search team this time?"

"I don't think so. I've never met him, but I'm sure that wasn't the other name. I would have remembered."

"So what were they looking for this time?"

"I don't know. Everything, I think. They went upstairs and just started in."

Hiding his exasperation, Hardy smiled helpfully. "They list specifics on the warrant. Did they show that to you?"

"No."

"What about your husband? Wasn't he there? Did he ask to see the warrant, by any chance?"

She looked down, scratched at the fabric of her pants. "Will's taken a…" She stopped. "He's not home right now."

Hardy waited.

After a minute, she wiped an eye with her finger, then the other one. Reaching down, she opened her purse and removed a small package of Kleenex, brought one of the tissues up to her face. "This is anger, not sadness." She dabbed at her eyes some more, sniffed once, clenched the Kleenex in her fist. "He started having another affair," she said without looking at him. "The son of a bitch."