Hardy said the first thing that came to his mind. "So he wasn't fishing last Wednesday?"

She kept her eyes straight in front of her. "He was in Southern California, though. That's where they met up. On the same goddamn boat as the last one." Finally, she cast a sidelong glance at him. "I'm sorry about the language, and I didn't mean to lie to you about Will and me the other night." Again, a labored breath. "Anyway, after you left on Saturday, it blew up. He made some smart-ass remark about you and me…"

"You and me?"

"All the time we spent talking, just making it sound sleazy."

"I was there as your lawyer, Catherine." Hardy didn't like being cast as the wedge between wife and husband, but he immediately regretted referring to himself as her lawyer. It seemed to be another irrevocable step.

"Of course you were. What else could you be? But you have to know Will. As though he needed a real reason to pick a fight. Anyway, he was slandering you, too, and I just thought, 'How dare he?' and lost it. I threw him out."

"He thought you didn't know about the affair?"

"He must have thought I was an idiot. He even wanted to… to have sex with me when he got home, maybe so I wouldn't suspect he'd been rutting around for four days. The bastard." A bitter little sound escaped. "I thought if I could avoid bringing it up, it might stay hidden from the kids. I used to hope I could hold out until Heather went to college, then I could file for divorce. The kids wouldn't really be in our lives as much, so it would be easier. This last time, though, last week, I realized I couldn't do that anymore. I couldn't go on that way. But I still hadn't really decided, you know?" "Decided what, exactly?"

"When I'd call him on it. Move out or have him do it. Bring it to a head. I didn't want it to just happen the way it did. I wanted to control the timing, at least. Now I'm just feeling so ashamed of myself."

"For what?"

She turned in her chair and faced him. "Don't you see? For ruining our home life. Bringing it out into the open." She shrugged. "But something just snapped. Maybe it's all this being a suspect."

"If your husband was having an affair, how was it that you ruined your home life?"

"I know, it's stupid, but it's how I feel. If I were a stronger person, I could have kept pretending"-she motioned around the room ambiguously-"except for all this. And seeing you, in some way. Remembering how good you were, how sweet a relationship could be. It all broke me down."

"I'm sorry if I had a role in it. I wouldn't have come over if…"

"No, no. It was going to happen sometime."

Hardy let a moment pass, then said, "So that's why you went to your father-in-law's? To talk about this?

Will's affair."

She couldn't hide her startled expression. "Why do you assume that?"

"Because that's what changed, Catherine. You're going about your normal life and your husband goes off with another woman. You're going to do something. I'm glad you didn't decide to follow him down and kill him."

"The thought crossed my mind."

"Let's keep that between us, okay?"

She found half a smile. "I wouldn't have killed him, Dismas. Or his father, either."

Hardy's antennae were all the way up. Without a conscious thought, he noted her use of the subjunctive and wondered if she'd done it on purpose. She wouldn't have killed Paul, except for…

And then something happened, and she'd had to. It was only a small feat of mental legerdemain. A child, Hardy thought, could do it. And they often did.

At the same time, part of him hated himself for realizing the fundamental truth that while what she'd just said sounded like an absolute denial of her guilt, in fact it was not. As a good, Jesuit-trained former Catholic, Hardy was often able to argue himself into a state of tolerable comfort in the outer reaches of moral ambiguity, and he knew that Catherine's education with the Mercy nuns had trained her in the same way. Hell, she'd been the acknowledged master-it was the thing he could never beat her at. And so now he also knew enough not to ask her for clarification; it would only complicate things down the line.

All this in the blink of an eye.

He asked her, "So what did you want to ask him? Paul, I mean?"

"The same thing I said last time, Dismas. I wanted to know what was going to happen to the money." She threw him a glance that he couldn't read. "He was going to marry Missy in the fall and change his will to make her his beneficiary. Maybe he'd leave a few thousand dollars to each of his grandchildren. That was it. They weren't doing a prenup."

"Why not? Did he say?"

"Because Missy wasn't out for his money, and Paul resented the hell out of his family for implying that she was. In fact, before the family had started the campaign, as he called it, he'd been inclined to set up trusts for the kids and all that. But then Will and Beth and Theresa, especially, wouldn't let it go. And the blind greed of it, he said, made him sick. His kids and their families were getting along just fine. And Missy had had a tremendously difficult life, we had no idea. Now it was her turn for comfort and security and he was going to give it to her. And too bad if we didn't like it."

"That sounds harsh."

She lifted her shoulders. "It didn't when he said it, though. He was a straight shooter. He'd worked hard to get his kids set on their way. Now they should do the same with theirs."

"So where did that leave you? Did you tell him about

Will?"

"I didn't need to." She looked away. "He seemed to know, yes. To have known."

"You mean about Will's other affairs?"

She nodded. "Anyway, he gave me what I'd come to find out."

"And what did that mean to you?"

She worried her lower lip. "I wanted to know where I stood. I know it sounds mercenary, but I'd already endured more than a few rather difficult years with Will. If it looked like he was going to inherit several million dollars…" She stopped, unwilling to enunciate it.

"You might try to endure a few more?"

She scratched at her pants again. "I admit it sounds awful." She raised her eyes to his. "But if there wasn't ever going to be a windfall, if he signed it all over to her…"

"You might as well leave him now."

She bowed her head in tacit agreement. "I needed to know my options, Dismas." Then, "I hate him."

Outside the Solarium's glass walls, a tiny parklike area, a hundred or so square feet of open space tucked between the buildings, held a concrete bench that the associates had chipped in for in memory of David Freeman. Hardy spent a minute watching a few sparrows pecking around in the decomposed granite. Finally, he came back to her. "Had he changed his will?"

"He was going to… oh my God!" Her hand went to her mouth. "The will!"

"What?" "That's today!"

Bob Townshend's office was on the same twentieth floor as Paul Hanover's in the Bank of America building. Its great windows afforded a stunning view of the city spread out below, with the sunlight glinting on the bay, far off the Golden Gate Bridge standing sentinel over the entrance to the harbor, and closer in the spires of the churches in North Beach. None of the Hanover relatives seated in front of Townshend's ultramodern chrome-and-glass desk paid it the slightest attention.

Theresa Hanover sat in the third chair from the right in the row of seven that Townshend had set up for the reading of the will. Will Hanover sat in the center chair, next to his mother. The chair next to him was empty, and beyond that to his left sat Mary and Carlos. On the other side of Theresa were Beth and her attorney husband, Aaron.

Townshend had finally put down his coffee cup and saucer at the service table against the inside wall and had come around to claim his seat behind the desk. Florid and overweight, Townshend-unlike his partner Paul Hanover-had never been comfortable interacting with actual living people. He enjoyed numbers and games and legal puzzles. He was also an excellent legal writer and a whiz at business strategy, which made him an invaluable partner to Hanover, but dealing with humans in the flesh was for him always a bit of a strain.