Guilt

Thieu didn't have to consult his notes. A graduate of UCLA in police science, crew-cut and clean-shaven, he represented the increasingly new brand of San Francisco cop. He wore a light green business suit and a flamboyant red and green silk tie that somehow worked. 'His mother, his girlfriend, one of his clients.'

'And how long was he missing?'

'This was in the first day, before it even got to us.'

'Three people in the first day? This was a popular guy.'

'Well, evidently that's a question.'

Glitsky, driving slowly, flicked him a glance.

'I looked into it a little, did some background before he got filed officially as an MP.' A missing person. 'Something the mother said about a lawsuit this guy was working on.'

'Which was?'

'Well, evidently he was well known, but not particularly liked – except by his mom and girlfriend.'

'Why not?'

'Why not what?'

'Why wasn't he liked?'

'Oh. Well, appears the guy was a politician in the Vietnamese community here. Glad hand, big smile, full of shit.' Thieu looked over at Glitsky, checking for his reaction, which was not forthcoming. He was watching the road. 'That's not me speaking ill of the dead. It's what I've heard.'

Glitsky was paying attention to Mission Street. They were now at the light on Geneva, which wasn't working. Traffic was a mess. The fog made it worse. Darkness was closing in fast.

So Thieu kept chattering. 'Anyway, seems this guy Trang was always showing up at parties, gatherings, weddings, funerals, giving his card to everybody… a real nuisance.'

'I think I met him,' Glitsky said, straight-faced.

'Really? You met Trang?'

Another sideways glance. 'Joke, Paul. Not really.'

Momentarily taken aback, Thieu slumped a little in his seat. Glitsky, perhaps oblivious to his passenger's distress, said, 'The heck with this,' and pulled his flasher out, putting it on the roof, turning on the siren. In five seconds, they were through the intersection, rolling. 'So what did his mother say?'

Glitsky's rhythms put Thieu off his own – he'd lost the thread of what he'd been saying. 'About what?'

'About some case he was working on that made you think there might be trouble, which as it turns out there is, if you define trouble as getting yourself killed, which I do.'

'Well, apparently Trang was suing the Archdiocese of San Francisco for a couple of million dollars or something…'

'What for?'

'I don't know. Not yet. The mom said he was over his head, and knew it, but it was a big case. He was scared, she said.'

'Of what?'

'I don't know. Just playing at that level, I think. The mom seemed confused about the Church and the Mafia and thought getting mixed up with one was like the other.'

Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard worse theories. So he was scared. Did he get any threats anybody knew of, the mother knew of? Anything like that?'

'No.'

'Well, there's a help.'

As was often the case, Glitsky was the first of the Homicide team to arrive. The body had evidently been discovered at around 4:15 p.m. by someone from Trang's weekly cleaning service, who, undoubtedly not wanting to call attention to his immigration status, had gone back to the main office and reported it to management. After suitable discussion, the company had called the police. Squad cars from Ingleside Station had confirmed the stiff.

Since they had a tentative identity for the victim, Glitsky had made a courtesy call to Missing Persons and asked if they had an outstanding MP named Victor Trang. Which had alerted Paul Thieu, who'd asked if he could tag along.

A couple of squad cars were parked in front of a squat, faceless, depressing building on a side street off Geneva. Two uniformed officers stood shivering four steps up in a little semi-enclosed portico, smelling of urine and littered with newspaper and broken glass. Identifying himself and Thieu, Glitsky asked them to wait until the coroner and the Crime Scene Investigators arrived.

Then he and Thieu opened the door and entered the building.

Inside, two bare bulbs illuminated a long hallway, in which three doors were staggered on opposite sides. At the far end, the other two officers and either another plainclothes cop or a civilian stood in a tight knot, whispering. Glitsky was aware of his and Thieu's echoing, hollow footfalls on the wooden floors.

Though the other doors in the hallway were wood-faced, pitted and stained, with the lacquer peeling off, this one's top half was of frosted glass, upon which had been etched the name Victor Trang and under it, in script, Attorney At Law.

'He had that door made special,' the civilian said. His name was Harry something and he lived upstairs and said he managed the place.

Poorly, Glitsky thought.

Harry did have master keys for the building – the uniforms had located him as soon as they'd set up. It was a minor miracle, and Glitsky was grateful for it. 'Must of cost him a thousand bucks, the door.' Harry was trying to be helpful, talking to be saying something.

Glitsky ignored him and turned to Thieu, to whom the likely presence of a dead person was having the opposite effect than it was having on Harry. Thieu had stopped chattering. 'You ever do this before?'

'No.'

'You might want to wait then.'

Steeling himself- it was never routine – Glitsky opened the door, flicked on the light. Fortunately, he thought, it had been cold in the office. Even now the room was chilly, but he could detect, before he saw anything, the distinctive smell. Something was rotting in here.

In Glitsky's experience, real-life crime scenes tended to be prosaically ordinary, rarely capturing the vividness, the sense of evil and foreboding so favored by cop shows and B movies. This one, though, Victor Trang's office, came close.

Trang had evidently blown all of his appearances money on his door. Once inside, the office reverted to the form of the rest of the building and neighborhood. The long desk was an eight-foot slab of white-washed plywood – in fact, Glitsky realized, it was another door, perhaps the original. At an L to the desk, a table held a computer and printer, the phone and answering machine.

The walls were a fly-specked shiny beige which might once have been white, and they were absolutely bare – not a calendar, not a picture, not even a post-it. Behind the desk, a dark window, without blinds or curtains, was a black hole. There was an off-green couch along the side wall, a wooden library chair with a pillow seat, a folding chair set up facing the desk.

Slowly taking it in as he moved, Glitsky walked around the folding chair. Had it been set up for an appointment? Was it always where it was now?

He stopped. The chair behind the desk had been knocked over – he could see it now up against the back wall.

The body rested along the length of the desk in an attitude of repose, almost as though – no, Glitsky realized, exactly as though – it had been placed there. Carefully laid down.

Trang had been wearing an off-white linen suit, and now it was striped with red, in neat rows. There was a large bloodstain in the center of the chest, but it was roughly circular – it hadn't run down the front of his shirt. Therefore – strangely – it hadn't bled much until Trang was already on the floor.

Glitsky stood looking for a moment, letting it all sink in. He would wait until the coroner arrived, until he'd read the forensic reports, but his impressions were coalescing into a certainty. He knew what the red stripes were. It chilled him.

The killer had used a knife, then had held Trang up in some death embrace, holding him up, maybe for as long as a minute, leaving the knife in, perhaps twisting it toward the heart. Then, with his victim good and completely dead, he'd laid him down carefully on the floor, finally pulled out the knife, then calmly wiped the blade off on Trang's suit – two or three swipes at first glance.

Glitsky had been a cop for twenty-two years, in Homicide for the last seven of them. From the evidence of what he was seeing here, he thought he might be looking at the most cold-blooded, up-close and personal murder of his career.