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processed into a program, you’re telling me I’ve got to go around you, is that it? Maybe a judge? Get a writ?”
    Glitsky stared over his desk. “You do what you’ve got to do.”
    “I intend to.” Hardy paused. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
    “It’s possible.” The lieutenant looked through him. “Talk to you.”
    The visit was over.
     
    Glitsky’s conscience was a mangy dog gnawing at his insides.
    After Hardy left, he remained sitting behind the desk in the dim confines of his office for over an hour, until the quality of the light shifted. Outside, it had come to dusk.
    He rose, went to his door, opened it and looked out into the homicide detail. The workday had ended, but the door to the interrogation room was still closed. He heard voices behind it. Ridley still had Elaine’s killer in there.
    He surveyed the detail. The old school clock over the watercooler said it was six-fifteen. Wearing headphones, head down over his desk, Marcel Lanier moved his lips and jabbed corrections with his pencil as he ran his interview tape and proofed it against what the transcriber had typed. Paul Thieu, who already knew everything anyway, had his nose in a book with what looked like Cyrillic script on the jacket—he was working a Russian mafia-related homicide and Glitsky thought he probably wanted to conquer the language before the case got too far along.
    Neither of the inspectors looked up.
    Nobody had messed yet with his door, either.
    He closed it behind him and pushed in the lock. Flicking on the light, he got in his chair and pulled out his junk drawer, lifted out Elaine’s picture. He couldn’t look at it for long. He realized that his daughter wouldn’t exactly be proud of how he’d handled things so far. But he’d told himself, when he’d given Ridley his marching orders, that this was an instance of bad things happening to bad people. Karma.
    Now he was trying to sell himself on the idea that it wasn’t as though he’d been actively complicit in torture, but it wasn’t easy. Though it truly had been Glitsky’s intention to “sweat” the young man in the interrogation room, this might be cruel but it wasn’t unusual—homicide inspectors did it frequently. Under the stressful conditions in that closed-up space, a suspect occasionally would waive his rights to an attorney, or tell a story that he’d later wished he hadn’t. Once in a while, as in Burgess’s case, he would even confess under conditions that might not qualify as legally coercive.
    But now he realized that it had gone on long enough. He’d better go and tell Ridley to end the interrogation, get the suspect in the system. Burgess had killed Elaine. There was no doubt about that, and it was important that no screwup create a hole he could slither through.
    He stood, grabbed his leather jacket, opened his door again. If Ridley had gotten the impression because of Abe’s obvious hostility to Burgess that the suspect should be sweated beyond human endurance, Glitsky would have to try and correct that. There was an important difference, he knew, between wishing pain and suffering on someone and making him experience it.
    It was called civilization.

3
     
    S harron Pratt, the district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco, sipped a preprandial newfangled cocktail concocted from gin and chocolate liqueur and served in a tall blue martini glass. Perched on a high stool at one of the financial district’s power restaurants, Sharron cut an elegant figure in her tailored blue suit. She wore her hair shoulder length and made no effort to hide the gray that had once lightly peppered and now dominated it. Lightly made up—a touch of mascara and a subtle shade of lip gloss—she was very easy to look at. Rimless bifocal eyeglasses added a few years to her true age of forty-four, but behind them, green-flecked eyes sparkled youthfully. Her wide mouth animated her face, the plane of her cheeks was well defined, her skin