Cindy strummed some other chords on her guitar. Hardy thought Cindy was cute. Nice. But no Frannie. Not close. Most of the other people Frannie’s age struck him as way younger than he was, which of course was true, but in Frannie’s case he never thought about it. Cindy, with her turned-up little nose and her guitar playing, seemed more a contemporary of the teenagers who were playing frisbee out across the lawn than a twenty-five-year-old woman.
Hardy leaned back down on Frannie’s lap. “You’re right,” he said. “Look where we are.”
Cindy played another song, and Hardy, drowsy, closed his eyes. He felt Frannie put her hand on his chest where the Yosemite logo was, probably thinking about Eddie. He pushed that out of his mind. He was here and Cindy was right. Never mind originality. Que sera sera, Hardy thought, but it meant something different for him. No doubt Cindy… maybe Frannie too… thought Jackson Browne was an oldie-how about Patience and Prudence doing ‘Que Sera Sera’ on the Hit Parade? Hardy had only been four or so but he remembered that…
When he opened his eyes, Cindy had gone. The frisbee game had stopped. The breeze had died down.
“Hi,” Frannie said.
“Did I sleep?”
“About an hour.”
“Where’d Cindy go?”
“Back home. She says good-bye.” She put both her hands under his head and lifted. “You want to get up? I’m a little stiff.”
“You could’ve woken me, you know.”
Frannie stood and stretched her back. “I don’t think you’ve been getting very good sleep these past few nights. Couldn’t hurt to catch up a little.”
“I can’t believe it. I never do that.”
Frannie shrugged, gathering up the blanket. “Well, you did.”
“I hope I didn’t hurt Cindy’s feelings.”
“She liked you a lot.”
“Why? What did I do? Fall asleep. Kvetch about her songs.”
Frannie stopped her picking up and faced him. “Dismas. You are yourself. No games. You do what you do, not trying to make any impression. It’s just who you are. And I think you’re great. You should know that.”
“Okay.”
“And now you’re embarrassed.”
Hardy leaned back against a tree. Frannie’s eyes were bright green under her shining red hair. Although looking at her no one would have concluded that she was pregnant, she had filled out so that Hardy could hardly see the frail girl he’d caught when she fainted at Eddie’s graveside.
“You’re the one,” he said. “I’m very proud of you.”
She knew what he was talking about. Her eyes seemed to shine with the threat of tears, but she held them back, scrunching her nose up and forcing a smile. She walked up to him, put her arms around him and hugged him hard. “You go and pack your sorrows,” she said. “Trashman comes tomorrow.”
He felt something turn over inside of him. He looked out through the trees, trying to decide what it was.
“A body?”
“Well, something very close to a body.”
“That’s dead.”
“Yeah.”
Pico Morales shook his head. Pico was the curator of the Steinhart Aquarium, also located in Golden Gate Park, and Hardy had dropped Frannie off at the Japanese Tea Gardens and gone over to see his friend, who worked every day but Sunday. They stood now in the glow behind the tanks in the tropical fish section. In the tanks fluorescent reds and blues and yellows and greens floated against the glass or darted from rock to rock. On the other side a steady stream of people filed by, hypnotized.
“I don’t have any ideas,” Pico said.
“Come on, Peek, seawater is your life.”
“But bodies aren’t.”
They moved down a couple of tanks. “What I need is just something that would act like a human body in seawater. That would float the way a body would.”
“A rubber mat, something like that?”
“I don’t know. Wouldn’t something like that, on the surface, catch some wind? And that would affect it.”
Pico made a note on a clipboard attached to one of the tanks.
“What do you see?” Hardy asked. Both of the men were squinting into the tank.
“That angel fish, see under its eye, that little spot? It bears watching, is all. We’ve been getting these cancers lately, maybe fungus. I don’t know what it is. We’re analyzing our tropical water.”
“You have different water?”
Pico straightened up. “You’re the one who said it. Seawater is my life. It might be anything. Second-generation problems if we got a goddamn cyanide batch. Who knows?”
“Cyanide?”
Pico was moving to the next tanks. “The tropical hunters, Diz,” he said. “A lot of them use cyanide over the reefs.”
“But doesn’t cyanide kill the fish?”
“It does. Breaks my heart. Another hundred years we might not even have any reefs left. I’m not kidding. The cyanide kills the coral too. But”-he held up a finger-“but a few of the hardier little devils make it, and they fetch a small fortune, which is why it keeps getting done.”
“And you buy your fish from these guys.”
Pico looked at him. “You think we’d support that shit? We are very picky about our suppliers, but some fish get through the cracks. At least maybe they do. We see some pink-eye in an angel fish, it makes me wonder.”
They came out to the room Hardy was most familiar with, just off Pico’s office. A huge circular concrete tank sat four feet off the floor, three-quarters filled with seawater. In that tank Hardy, Pico and a small group of other volunteers had spent many hours walking around with great white sharks. A great white shark can’t breathe if it isn’t moving through water, and these giants had almost always been hauled in traumatized near to death from being caught and taken on fishing boats. Every one had eventually died, but it remained Pico’s dream to have the first great white shark in captivity in his aquarium.
The two men pulled themselves up and sat on the concrete lip of the pool. Pico took a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lit up. “But bodies,” he said, “you know what a human body is, essentially? It’s a big bag of seawater.”
“I think it’s your poetic side I love the best,” Hardy said.
“It’s true. Chemically, it’s like ninety-seven percent the same thing.”
“Okay.”
“So a body floating in seawater would be like part of the water. Fresh water, depending on air in the lungs and how much the tissue had become waterlogged or whatever, the body would move up or down, but in salt water, the specific densities are so close it would always float. You could spray dye on the water and watch where it goes, and that’d tell you the same thing.”
Hardy kicked his feet against the concrete. “Nope. Same thing as a rubber raft, where the wind or a passing boat might change the course. It’s got to float, but not on the surface.”
Pico said, “Aha,” and jumped down onto the floor.
“What?” Hardy followed him into his office.
Pico reached behind the door and pulled down one of the wetsuits that hung there. They were always there-the volunteers used them when they walked the sharks.
“The closest thing to a body is a body. Put this on, go and hang in the water and see where it takes you.”
How did things get so complicated? Glitsky was thinking. He was driving south on 101 past Candlestick Park, on his way out of the city and out of his jurisdiction to interview an ex-cop with only the slightest connection to any active case. He shook his head. Flo was right-he cared too much. He had to turn over every rock to make as sure as he could he at least didn’t get the wrong man…
One of his first cases… Haroun Palavi, in the country about seven months, importing rugs from Iran, had killed his wife and the in-laws living with them. Neighbors had heard them all screaming at one another for weeks. When Glitsky questioned Haroun he had no alibi-he’d been in his warehouse working alone. There were no other plausible suspects. Haroun’s fingerprints were all over the murder weapon, which he’d tried to explain by saying that he’d come in and just picked up the gun he’d found near his wife’s parents. He was scared. He thought the killer might still be around.