Hardy drew in a breath, then let it out. "These past couple of years, I kept hoping to hear he'd been busted out of homicide."

"Not happening. If you're a certain type of cop, homicide's a terminal appointment."

"Not for you it wasn't."

"No. But unlike Cuneo, I'm born for greatness." The banter fell flat, though, and Glitsky's face reassumed its natural scowl.

"I don't like him anywhere near either of us," Hardy said after a short silence.

"Do tell. Me? I'm thrilled."

Getting up, crossing to the Sutter Street window,

Hardy pulled the shades apart and looked down through them. "And you've got to work with him?"

"I don't see how I can avoid it."

Hardy kept staring out, down at the street. "You can't say a word, Abe. Not one word."

"Oh really?" A hint of anger, or frustration, breaking through.

"Hey." Hardy, catching the tone, spun around. "You work with a guy every day, you know he suspects you of something-I don't care what it is-you might get so you want to get along, try to make him understand."

"Sure, that's what I'll do. I'll say, 'Uh, Dan, about the Gerson thing…' " Lieutenant Barry Gerson had been Cuneo's boss, and he'd been killed at a shoot-out in the course of trying to arrest one of Hardy's clients. In the aftermath, Cuneo pushed for an investigation into the role that Hardy and Glitsky had played in Gerson's death.

"I'm just saying…"

"I know. That I'll be tempted to reason with him, tell him Gerson was dirty and it was pure self-defense, we had no choice." He shook his head at the absurdity of the idea. "You have my word I won't go there."

Hardy came back and boosted himself onto his desk. "Even if you don't, though, you're back on his radar. He might remember what he forgot to keep up on."

"Forget nothing. There wasn't any evidence, thank God, and he got ordered off."

"I remember, but he needs to stay off. For both our sakes. And working with you is going to bring up old memories. That's all I'm saying."

"I was aware of that even before I came in here, believe it or not. If you have any ideas, I'm listening, but otherwise the mayor's ordered me to work with the guy. What do you want me to do, quit?"

Hardy brightened. "It's a thought."

"Great. Let me just borrow your phone and I'll call Treya and let her know." He stood up and went to pull some darts from the board. Turning back with them, he shrugged. "I've kept a close eye on him, as you might guess. The plain fact-and good news for us-is that he's careless and sloppy. This morning's an example. He's at Hanover's fifteen minutes and tells the press it's murder/suicide."

"So it's not?"

"I don't know. I've got a couple of questions. I don't see Hanover burning down his house, for one big one. He just shoots the woman, stands there a minute, then does himself, okay, that flies. But Becker, the arson inspector out there, he says it looks like he did her, then in no particular order after that poured gasoline on her, wadded up a bunch of newspapers, and opened the lower-floor windows and at least one in the back on the top floor for ventilation. After all that, he goes back to where she's lying in the lobby, starts the fire, then shoots himself."

"That does sound complicated," Hardy said. Glitsky nodded. "At least. Did you know him?"

"Hanover? Slightly, to look at. I met him a couple of times, but never faced him in court. I can't say he made a huge impression."

"Kathy West wouldn't agree."

Hardy broke a small grin. "He gave Kathy West a lot of money, Abe. If he gave me a lot of money, I'd remember him better, too." Pushing himself off his desk, he took the darts from Glitsky, threw one of them. "You know, here's a real idea, and you won't have to quit. Use the opportunity to mend fences with Cuneo. He tells the media it looks like a murder/suicide, you back him up, say he did a fine job. Everybody wins."

"Everybody but Kathy. But that's what I will do if that's what it turns out to be. In the meantime, Cuneo's going to resent me being involved at all, I guarantee it. That's my real problem. It's going to look like I'm checking up on his work."

"That's what you are doing."

Glitsky sat back down, elbows on his knees, hung his head and shook it from side to side. Finally, he looked back up. "I've got to talk to him," he said.

₄

Glitsky got Cuneo's extension at work and, calling from his car phone, left a message that they needed to talk. He was going to make every effort to be both conciliatory and cooperative. They would be in this investigation together, and would share information both with each other and with the arson inspectors-a mini task force. But Cuneo wasn't scheduled to be back on duty until six o'clock. And Glitsky, who preferred murder investigations to all other forms of police work, thought he might spend some useful time long before that with the city's medical examiner.

John Strout worked on the ground floor behind the Hall of Justice, in the morgue and its accompanying rooms. When Glitsky got there, somebody in the outer office buzzed him inside and he crossed through the clerical desks and knocked at Strout's door. Getting no answer, he turned the knob, stuck his head in.

Behind him, one of the clerks said, "He's probably in the cold room."

Glitsky nodded his acknowledgment and kept going, closing the door behind him. The office was good-sized by city bureaucratic standards, perhaps twenty by thirty feet, with a large, wide window facing the freeway on the end behind Strout's desk. During his dozen years as head of the homicide detail, Glitsky would have occasion to come down here several times a month-certainly at least once a week. But now, struck by an unfamiliar clutter, he stopped in the middle of the office and suddenly realized that it had probably been close to five years since he'd set foot down here. Or since he'd had any substantive discussion with the good doctor.

In the interim, he noticed, Strout had continued to indulge his proclivity for the bizarre, if not to say macabre. He'd always kept a couple of shelves of unusual murder weapons-a bayonet, two different fire pokers, a baseball bat, an impact shotgun intended for sharks-and medieval torture implements out on display. But now he'd acquired what looked to Glitsky like a small museum. The centerpiece was an ancient garroting chair-complete with its red silk scarf for ease of strangulation (or maximum pain) hanging from the beam in the back-that he'd given pride of place directly in front of his desk. A large glass-enclosed case featured an impressive collection of knives and other cutting and slashing implements, brass knuckles and spiked gloves. One whole side of his desk was covered with hand grenades and other apparent incendiary and explosive devices of different design and vintage. Strout had the obligatory skeleton, of course, but instead of its old place standing next to the morgue cold room entrance, the bones now sat in an easy chair, legs crossed comfortably, apparently enjoying a volume of the Compendium of Drug Therapy.

Suddenly the door to the cold room opened. Strout, long and lean, still in his white lab coat, albeit smudged with black and reddish brown, broke a genuine smile. "Doctuh Glitsky." He spoke with a familiar baritone drawl, bending from the waist in a courtly bow. "It's been a hound's age."

Glitsky extended a hand. "How are you, John?"

"Old and in the way, if you must know. But if they're fool enough to let me keep on doing what I do down here, I'm fool enough to let 'em." Strout was a few years on the other side of retirement age, but showed little sign of slowing. He looked Glitsky up and down. "But God, man, y'all are looking fit. Anybody tell you you're supposed to start showing your age sometime? It's like to give the rest of us a bad name."