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Except that he hadn’t almost murdered me, he had murdered me. The gun misfiring didn’t change that. He’d put it to my head, he’d said, “Lay still, you old fuck,” meaning lay still forever, you old fuck, and he’d pulled the trigger. Clear intent, cause and effect. I was still alive but he’d murdered me last night.

Then there was Emily. If I’d let her go inside the house with me, or if she’d gotten out of the car too soon and he’d spotted her, he’d have shot her dead, too. A ten-year-old kid, and he’d have executed her without hesitation or compunction. Kill one, kill two — kill three.

Take things slow, think carefully before acting, maintain perspective... yes. Stay out of the investigation, let the cops handle it? No. He murdered me, he might have murdered my little girl. How could I stay out of it?

Nobody answered the bell in Annette Byers’ apartment. On the mailbox marked 1-A, L. Timmerman, was a Dymo label reading “Bldg Mgr”; I rang that bell. No response there, either. I tried the other apartments, found one woman home, but she hadn’t seen Byers yesterday or today, nor anyone answering Jay Cohalan’s description.

I drove around the neighborhood, looking for her MG. Gone. Nor was Cohalan’s Camry anywhere in evidence. It was possible the two of them were on the run, or maybe holed up someplace together. And just as possible that the Daly City cops had located them, or Cohalan at least had gone in voluntarily when he learned of his wife’s death. I had no real reason to suspect the pair anyway, without a definite link between one or both and Baldy.

Saturday-afternoon quiet in the office. I sat at my desk with the paper file on the Dain-Cohalan case spread out in front of me. Tamara kept all our records on computer disk, but in deference to my technophobia, she printed out all pertinent information as well. I kept the printouts for open investigations and those for closed ones dating back six months in my old file cabinet.

Possibilities were what I was looking for — names, details, anything worth checking on. There were two. Annette Byers had not been Cohalan’s first extramarital fling, according to what his wife had told me, and my investigation had turned up one other name: Doris Niall, a programmer with a dot-com outfit in his office building. That was before I’d confirmed his relationship with Byers, so I’d had Tamara do a little digging on Ms. Niall. She had a brother who’d been in and out of trouble since he turned sixteen — half a dozen arrests for drug-related offenses, tours in the juvenile detention center and the San Francisco county jail. Steve Niall. Present activities and whereabouts unknown.

The other possibility was a Byers connection. When she’d been busted for selling meth, she hadn’t been alone; also arrested in the sting was one Charles Andrew Bright, age 28. She’d got off with little more than probation, but Bright had been slapped with a felony conviction that had gotten him a year as a state minimum-security guest. His relationship with Byers wasn’t clear, and I hadn’t bothered to clarify it because it hadn’t seem relevant at the time.

I looked up both Steve Niall and Bright in the phone directories for San Francisco and half a dozen other Bay Area cities and counties. No listing for either man.

All right. Tamara. I rang the number of the apartment she shared with her cello-playing boyfriend. Nobody home. I left a message to call me as soon as she came in, car phone or home phone. With her computer skills and contacts, it shouldn’t take her long, even on the weekend, to track down some of the available data on Niall and Bright. And maybe get a line on what the Daly City cops had turned up so far; she had a friend, Felicia Jackson, who worked in the SFPD’s communications department.

And meanwhile?

Deliver the file to the Daly City cops... except that after my little run-in with Erdman I had no intention of rushing it out there. I considered other options. Only one had any appeal, the one that called for direct action and held the best chance, slim as it was, for a lead to Baldy.

The bottom drawer of my desk is a catchall for miscellany. I rummaged around in there until I found the pick gun somebody had given me years ago. Eberhardt? I seemed to remember it had come from him when he was still with the SFPD, confiscated from a hot-prowl professional burglar and delivered to me as a birthday joke. Some joke.

A pick gun is a homemade tool that has a hand grip, a trigger, a lockpick for a barrel, and a little knob on top that you twist to adjust the spring tension. Insert the lockpick and pull the trigger, and the pick moves up and down at a rapid speed; when you have the tension just right, it bounces all the pins in a cylinder lock at once. It’s a lot faster than using hand picks and tension bars to release the pins one at a time, but less reliable. It doesn’t work in all locks, deadbolts and most newer varieties, and like Baldy’s revolver last night it has a tendency to jam. Most professional burglars refuse to use one. I had never used this one or any other myself; I’d kept Eberhardt’s little present as a souvenir, not a functional business tool. I’m not the kind of detective who believes in illegal trespass, except in extreme circumstances.

Like mine, now.

When you’re hunting your own murderer, anything goes.

8

On the way out California I stopped at a neighborhood hardware store and bought a can of 3-in-1 oil. The pick gun had gone unused for so long it needed lubrication. I helped myself to one of the free shopping papers from a rack at the storefront, spread it open on the car seat. A couple of shots of oil, then I tested the trigger action, pick movement, and tension knob. Still a little balky. I gave it another squirt, wiped off the excess, tried it again. Seemed to work okay then, but whether or not it would get me into Annette Byers’ building and her apartment was still problematical.

I was on Locust Street, scouting for a parking place, when the car phone buzzed. Tamara. I made myself listen patiently to her expressions of concern, delivered the appropriate responses, then told her what I wanted her to do.

She said, “How come you don’t trust the cops to find this bald guy?”

“It’s not that I don’t trust them. They’ve got their resources, we’ve got ours — we might be able to turn up a lead before they do. Besides, I shouldn’t’ve held on to that damn money in the first place, no matter what the client wanted. I feel responsible.”

“For the woman’s death? Might’ve happened anyway.”

“And it might not have.”

“Not your fault.”

“I know that, but I still feel responsible.”

Three-beat. Then, “You sound like a man with an agenda.”

“Meaning what? That this is personal? Damn right it is.”