The Oath

"Yep."

"And it's a coincidence? That's your professional take on it?"

"Probably. It often is, as I mentioned this morning."

"Except when it isn't. Lots of things happen that never happened before."

"Not as often as you'd think," Glitsky replied. This time, the pause was lengthy. "But you've answered my question. I just wanted an opinion from the average man on the street."

"You'll have to call somebody a little dumber than me, then," Hardy said, "but I'll send you a bill anyway."

Jeff Elliot's call turned out to be about the same thing, but he wasn't interested in Hardy's coincidence theory, dismissing it even more definitively than Glitsky had with one line. "You don't murder somebody with a car, Diz, not when guns cost a buck and a half and knives are free."

"I'd bet it's been known to happen, although Glitsky says not, too."

"See? And even if it has, it also has been known to snow in the Sahara."

"Is that true? I don't think so. But if it is, it proves my point."

A sigh. "Diz? Can we leave it?"

Hardy was thinking that all of his friends had lost their senses of humor. He didn't really think it was probably a murder, either, but it was interesting to talk about, and so much else wasn't. "Okay, Jeff, okay. So how can I help you?"

"Actually, you can't. This is just a mercy call, see if you'd like to take the rest of the day off, which I noticed at lunch you might be in the mood for."

"That obvious, huh?"

"I'm a reporter, Diz. Nothing escapes."

Hardy looked down at the massive pile of paperwork on the floor by his desk-his own and other lawyers' briefs, which were anything but. Memoranda. Administrative work that he'd been neglecting. Billing. A couple of police incident reports from prospective clients. The latest updates of the Evidence Code, which it was bad luck not to know. He had an extremely full workload at the moment. He was sure he ought to be glad about this, although the why of it sometimes eluded him.

Elliot was going on. "I'm thinking the shit's got to be hitting the fan over at Parnassus. It might be instructive to swing over and check things out. See if anybody'll talk to me and maybe I'll get a column or two out of it. So what do you say? You want to play some hooky?"

"More than anything," Hardy said. "But not today, I'm afraid."

"Is that your final answer?"

He pulled some of the papers over in front of him, desultorily flipped through the stack of them. A trained reporter like Elliot, if he'd been in the room, would have recognized some signs of weariness, even malaise. Certainly a lack of sense of humor. Hardy let out a heavy breath. "Write a great column, Jeff. Make me feel like I was there."

It wasn't the kind of thing Glitsky was going to talk about with any of his regular professional associates, but he couldn't keep from sharing his concerns with his wife.

Jackman let Treya take a formal fifteen-minute break sometimes if she asked, and now she and Abe stood in the outside stairway on the Seventh Street side of the building, sipping their respective teas out of paper cups. An early afternoon wind had come up and they were forced to stand with their backs against the building, the view limited to the freeway and Twin Peaks out beyond it.

"And here I thought you brought me to this romantic spot so we could make out in the middle of the day."

"We could do that if you want," Glitsky told her. "I'm pretty easy that way."

She kissed him. "I've noticed. But you were really thinking of something else?"

He told her about Markham, how intensely uncomfortable he was with coincidences, and Markham 's death fell squarely into that category. "But I wasn't lying when I told Diz that probably it wasn't an intentional homicide. That was the voice of thirty years' experience whispering in my ear."

"But what?"

"But my other guardian angel, the bad one, keeps on with this endless, 'Maybe, what if, how about…"'

"You mean if somebody ran him down on purpose?"

He nodded. "I'm trying to imagine an early-morning, just-after-light, lying-in-wait scenario, but I can't convince myself. It just couldn't have happened in real life. Well, maybe it could have, but I don't think it did."

"Why not?"

She was about the only person he ever smiled at, and he did now. "How good of you to ask. I'll tell you. The first and most obvious reason is that the driver didn't finish the job. Markham lived nearly four hours after the accident, and if he hadn't been thrown into the garbage can, he might have pulled through it. The driver couldn't have known he'd killed him. If he'd pla

"Sweet," Treya said.

"But true." He went on to give her the second reason, the one he'd given Hardy. A car was a stupid and awkward choice as a murder weapon. If someone were going to take the time to plan a murder and then lie in wait to execute it, with all the forethought that entailed, Abe thought even a moron would simply buy a gun, which was as easy if not easier to purchase, far more deadly, and simpler to get rid of than any vehicle would be.

"Okay, I'm convinced. He probably wasn't murdered."

"I know. That's what I said. But…"

"But you want to keep your options open."

"Correct. Which leads me to my real problem. Did you get the impression at lunch today that my friend and your boss Clarence Jackman is going to get considerable political heat around anything to do with Parnassus? The death of its CEO isn't going to hide out in the Chronicle's back pages and then disappear in a couple of days when it isn't solved."

"No, I don't think so," Treya agreed.

"So who gets the case, which is definitely a homicide and might conceivably be, but probably isn't, a murder?"

Treya had been living with the problems within the homicide detail and had a good sense of the dilemma. In the normal course of events, Abe would never have anything to do with this case. It was a hit and run. Someone from that detail would be assigned to locate the vehicle, they probably wouldn't, and that would be the end of it. Now, because he had Fisk and Bracco, he'd have to give the case to them-in fact, he already had. If he tried to pass it to one of his veteran inspectors, first his guy would be insulted and laugh at him; then the mayor and the supervisor would demand his head, and probably get it.

And then if-wonder of wonders-it turned out to be a real-live, politically charged, high-profile murder after all, he'd have given it to his two rawest players, who would probably screw it all up, and that would not only infuriate Jackman, it might harm the district attorney's relations with the police department for a good portion of this administration.

"I'd say you've got to let the new boys keep it."

"That's what I've come to myself. But it's lose-lose."

"Luckily," she said, touching his cheek gently, "with all the practice, you've gotten so good at those."

But he had Fisk and Bracco back in his office at the end of the day and gave them the best spin he could put on it. "…an opportunity to give you guys some quality time. You do good on this, people here might be inclined to think you might turn into good cops after all." He paused, and purposefully did not add "and not just political stooges."

Darrel Bracco was as he'd been this morning, and as he always was in here-standing almost at attention behind the chair where his partner sat. "We never asked to get moved in here, Lieutenant. Neither one of us. But we did jump at the chance. Who wouldn't?"