Guilt

Filling up.

Now he was washing the dinner dishes, looking out his open back window into the Presidio National Park. A glorious evening, the sky above dark blue, almost purple. The day's remaining light had a peculiar reddish glow. Fog over the ocean.

The older boys, out doing important end-of-school teenage things, hadn't made it home for dinner. He heard Orel doing his spelling words with Rita, the letters coming out clearly, one by one. No stutter.

The telephone rang and he dried his hands, picking it up on the third ring, another change for the better. It used to be on one, always.

At home now, when the phone rang, it wasn't always for him. Girls would call for the boys. Also other guys. For years, Glitsky's greeting had been to growl his name. Now he picked up the receiver and said hello, just like a regular citizen.

'Abe?'

'Yeah.'

'This is kind of a strange call. A voice, as it were, from the strange and distant past. Mostly strange.'

Glitsky, standing at his kitchen wall phone on this Thursday night, couldn't place it. He knew it, but not well. Whoever it was had his home phone number, so though mostly strange, it couldn't be too distant. Then the tumblers fell. 'Wes?'

'Very good, Lieutenant. I'd even say excellent. How've you been this fine past year?'

'I've been good, Wes. What can I do for you?'

Farrell spent a couple of minutes running down some background on his meeting tomorrow with Christina Carrera. Glitsky listened without interrupting.

Glitsky had survived the political fallout from the Dooher trial, and over the past year and a half had distinguished himself in his job to the point where he felt relatively secure in it.

But Dooher was unfinished business. Any mention of him got all of Abe's attention right now.

Farrell concluded, 'If she's getting ready to walk away from him, I'd like to give her a hand. It looks to me she's gotten to where she knows what he's done, but she still can't face it. She's going to want something more.'

Glitsky was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table. 'So what do you need from me?'

'I don't know. I thought you might have come across some evidence since the trial.'

Glitsky was not unaware of the irony. The defense lawyer who'd convinced a jury that his client was Not Guilty was now asking if they'd turned up any new evidence to convince a colleague that he'd been guilty after all. 'I gave everything to Amanda Jenkins, Wes. When Dooher got off, the investigation ended.'

There was a pause. 'How about Trang? That case is still open, isn't it, technically?'

Glitsky admitted that it was, although by now it was what they called a skull case – long gone and all but forgotten. 'Trang hasn't been taking up a lot of my time, Wes. We got called off on that one, you may remember.'

Farrell felt as though he deserved the rebuke, but he persisted. 'What I'm trying to do,' he said, 'is give her a taste of what you've got, what you had.'

'And then what?'

'I don't know. It might save her life.'

'He threatening her?'

'I don't know. But I don't know if he threatened Sheila either. Or Trang. Threats don't seem to come with the package.'

Glitsky knew what Farrell was saying. This man plotted and struck. He wasn't going to telegraph any moves. 'So what do you want?' he repeated.

'Maybe your file on Trang? I never saw any of that. I don't know what you had.'

Repeating it got Glitsky's blood flowing. Maybe they could still get this guy. Maybe Glitsky could close the circle once and for all with him. But, as was his way, he kept the enthusiasm out of his voice. 'We had the same kind of circumstantial case we built for the trial. Conflicting witness interviews, a motive that only worked if you knew what you were looking for. We never found the bayonet.'

'But you were sure? Personally?'

Glitsky went over the discrepancies between Dooher's version of his phone calls to Victor Trang on the night of his death, the computer files Trang had kept, and the interviews with Trang's mother and girlfriend. 'All of that, taken together – I knew it wouldn't fly at a trial. We needed some physical evidence that put him in Trang's office. The closest we got to that was the cellphone trace. For me, it was enough. The DA didn't agree.'

'You think it might be enough for Christina?'

Glitsky considered it. 'I don't see how it could hurt.'

After Wes has hung up, he walked into the living room where Sam was sitting in the window seat, staring out at the fog.

'Whoever wrote that stuff about little cats' feet?' she asked. 'This stuff comes in on a steamroller.'

Wes got to her and looked out the bay window. He could barely make out the lights directly across the street. 'Glitsky says he'll send over some stuff, but maybe not by the morning.'

'You know,' Sam said, 'I was listening to you in there talking to him. What was the moment for you, finally?'

He didn't have to think for long. 'Diane Price. That diary. When it was obvious that she wasn't lying.'

She nodded. 'You've still got that, don't you, somewhere in your well-organized files?'

'I never throw anything out, you know that.'

She patted his cheek. 'It's one of your many charms.'

CHAPTER FOURTY SIX

Christina almost canceled.

The weather was terrible. Dense fog, forty-mile-per-hour gusts of drizzly wind, temperature in the low forties.

On top of that, the baby had kicked all night. She'd only slept three hours. She was exhausted.

Part of her wished she could undo having gone to see Sam yesterday. It put things in motion somehow, made her feel as though she had betrayed Mark. But living with him had become a daily exercise in controlling fear.

Day-to-day, Mark wasn't acting in a threatening way. He went off to his office – one room and a reception area on the sixth floor of Embarcadero One. He would call sometime in the late morning to check and see how she was feeling. Often he wasn't in the office in the afternoon; she didn't ask where he'd gone.

He played golf, kept in shape at the squash courts, went to lunch with business acquaintances. His world hadn't ended. To the objective observer, he was back – almost – to his normal, charming, confident self.

Since their last episode, though, a fault line ran through their lives. She couldn't shake the feeling that Mark had manipulated her to a place where she didn't feel she could refuse to have sex with him.

Fear.

She realized that the nebulous worries and doubts had coalesced into real fear. The sex since then had been frequent, impersonal, so rough she was afraid for the baby.

He was her husband. You had to trust your husband.

She could leave. If it got any worse, she told herself she would do that. She would protect the baby – that was the greatest imperative.

But she kept trying to be fair. All of Mark's other friends had abandoned him. Could she join that parade?

She didn't trust herself, that was the problem. What if she were wrong? This could all be her own paranoia, the rush of hormones, another typical episode in her seemingly lifelong quest to have her relationships fail.

She always found an excuse, didn't she?

This was why she couldn't tell her mother, though they talked on the telephone three times a week. She could not bring herself to admit out loud that there was anything wrong in the marriage. She and Mark were happy happy happy.

She also couldn't afford to let her parents develop any doubts about Mark. She'd worked so hard to convince them that he was innocent. If this marriage failed, it would kill her mother. And Christina would appear a fool to her father.

So yesterday she decided she'd talk to someone she liked, even though she knew that Sam didn't have anything approaching an objective view.

And when she'd found out that Sam and Wes Farrell were together, a couple, she let herself revel in the sense that, somehow, she could get the answer. Wes would… but again, what could he do?