On a fogbound, windswept and blustery Thursday in early March, six weeks to the day after Jackman dismissed the charges against Catherine Hanover and Braun ordered her released from jail, Glitsky was doing his own driving. He was not in uniform. Instead he wore a pair of dark, heavy slacks and a blue dress shirt and his new Glock.40 automatic in his shoulder holster. When he got out of the car, he'd cover the weapon with his all-weather jacket.
The night before, he'd checked out another city-issued Taurus, and this morning he'd gone against the traffic over the bridge to the East Bay and taken Interstate 80 east. Now, just beyond American Canyon Road outside of Vallejo, he encountered a blanket of some of California's Central Valley fog-he'd heard of "tule fog" but hadn't before experienced it. For his money, the stuff put its more notorious San Francisco counterpart to shame.
Never mind the fog that rolled in over the city for six months out of the year off the Pacific. This, he thought, was the real deal. Every year, he knew, it was responsible for multivehicle wrecks and double-digit fatalities from Redding to Bakersfield, Fairfield to Auburn. Visibility was under a hundred yards, and Glitsky got into the slow lane and decreased his speed to thirty-five, which still felt too fast. But on his left, cars continued to fly by at twice his speed, each on the tail of the vehicle in front of it. Three times people in the slow lane had come up on him hell-bent for leather from nowhere out of the whiteness, disappearing back into it as they swerved to avoid him, honking all the way, flipping him off.
Idiots.
Glitsky wasn't in a hurry and even ifhe was, this wasn't the time or the place. He'd get where he was going when he got there, and that would be soon enough.
The reason for his reluctance was that he wasn't completely certain of the wisdom of his intended actions, and the more time he took before they became irrevocable, the more comfortable he'd remain. He might even give himself enough time to change his plan entirely. But he didn't think so.
On the D'Amiens matter, and the Hanover murder- they were one and the same-he'd decided to stay on in the role of prime mover in whatever events unfolded. The smart move, the professional approach, he knew, would take him out of the loop. He should leave it to the local jurisdiction in the valley now, or to the FBI. Each had an equally strong claim to supervise and carry out the apprehension of Missy D'Amiens.
But almost a year ago Kathy West had asked him to take a watchdog role in the case. He'd been unable to prevent Cuneo from end-running around him, getting an indictment on a woman who was almost undoubtedly innocent. Then the trial-with all of its tabloid stupidity, vulgarity and waste-had led to the renewed currency of the conspiracy theory. Cranks came out of the woodwork and insisted on involving him, Hardy and his client, the mayor, possibly even Chief Batiste and District Attorney Clarence Jackman as players in every problem plaguing the city, from potholes to a rise in the rate of auto theft. And for every one of his good "coconspirators," the charges and innuendoes had been, and in some cases remained, a huge burden-always personally, always politically and sometimes in business terms as well.
But for Glitsky and Hardy, specifically, the charge held an even greater threat. For they both had conspired. Yes, there had been defensible reasons, even compelling ones. But they were conspirators, and while the word was bruited about, they were both in constant, if not to say imminent, danger of being discovered. Even at this remove in time.
And all of it, Glitsky believed, on some level, was his fault. He'd been intimidated by Cuneo, who'd unwittingly played on Glitsky's own deepest fear that someone would discover his role in the shoot-out that had killed a police lieutenant. He'd been outmaneuvered by both the inspector and Rosen; then during his investigation while the trial went on he'd been plain outthought by his best friend. At every turn of this case, at every opportunity to make a difference, Glitsky had failed.
A murderer had killed in the jurisdiction for which he held the ultimate responsibility. And that person was still at large.
After a lifetime of service, Glitsky was finally in a position of real authority as the Deputy Chief of Inspectors. But the entire Hanover affair had destroyed much of his own self-esteem. Far more importantly, he knew that it had sullied his reputation among the Police Department's rank and file, and perhaps also at higher levels. He felt it every day in many ways large and small-a silence when he entered a room, a failure to meet his eyes, invitations for anniversaries and retirements that somehow never got delivered to him.
He was afraid now that his ascension to upper management had turned him into what he swore he'd never become-a functionary, a bureaucrat, Peter-principled out at his position. If he didn't get back the respect of his people-from below and from above-his tenure at the top would remain in a hollow holding pattern. He would achieve nothing great-neither revolutionary change for the better nor even simple efficiency. His earlier promise would forever be perceived as a chimera; his promotion a function of the conspiracy, nepotism and cronyism. His future only a slow slide into retirement, when he would become a forgotten and pitiful full-pensioner, a father of grandfather age, unable to keep up with his young children, or even his wife.
The fog thinned somewhat and he punched it up to fifty, passing Vacaville now-enormous malls and outlet stores lining the freeway for miles on both sides. Housing developments all on top of each other. He didn't get out here to the valley very often, but the growth seemed all out of proportion somehow. When his first set of kids had been younger, he'd driven this road many times on the way up to ski the Sierra, and it had all been farmland back then, really not too long ago. Fifteen, twenty years? And all of it gone now? Isn't this where California was supposed to grow its crops? What were they going to use for land when the rest of it was all covered up and built over?
Keeping his mind from confronting the real issue. Missy D'Amiens.
The first glimpse. The Tuesday after the dismissal. Hardy picks him up at the Hall.
Glitsky putting on his seat belt, Hardy greeting him. "You said we're going somewhere?"
"We are. Glide Memorial. I wouldn't have bothered you except it's Hanover and you might have questions of your own."
"I'm all over it. You gotta love a field trip." "You will."
The soup-kitchen dinner was over by 5:30 most nights, but some people stay around making sandwiches to give out for the next day. Glitsky stands at the door a minute until an older gray-haired black man looks up, puts down his knife, wipes his hands and comes over.
"Lieutenant Glitsky?" Using the civil service rank Glitsky had given him. He sticks out his hand. "Jesse Stuart."
"Rev. Stuart, thanks for meeting with me. This is Dis-mas Hardy. He's interested because he defended the woman charged with killing Missy."
Rev. Stuart doesn't much care-his life is feeding starving homeless people. White men in suits don't figure much in the picture. But he's polite. "So what can I do for you?"
"I'd like to go over a little of what we talked about earlier today. About Missy."
"Sure. I looked it up in the meanwhile, and it was like I said. She started coming in to help out about four years ago now. She was a regular, couple of nights a week, for most of a year, then slowed down. Eventually stopped altogether. Some do."
"And Dorris? No last name?"
The minister smiles. "None I ever knew. She was just Dorris."
"I'm sorry,"Hardy says, "but who's she?" "A regular here 'til last year."
"Last May, right?" Glitsky says, throwing Hardy apregnant look.
"Right. I remember because she came in on my birthday and brought me a flower. So Dorris stopped on May tenth. Didn't never come again."
"Did you report her missing?" Hardy asks.
Stuart doesn't try to show that he thinks this is a dumb question, but a hint of it leaks out. "No, sir. We try to feed as many as we can, but we don't keep tabs on 'em."
"But you didn't think it a little strange that she just stopped?"
"No. Happens all the time. People come and go." Glitsky steps in. "Did you know anything about her? Where she lived? Who with?"
"She didn't live anywhere, or she lived anywhere. Say it any way you want. She usually came in alone, though. Sat by herself if she could. But didn't make nothin' out of it. She was friendly enough to me, and a good talker if you got her going. Actually pretty educated. Did some college one time."
"How old was she?" Glitsky asks.
Stuart shrugs. "Thirty, fifty, somewhere in there. Mostly she was hungry."
"And she and Missy became friends?" Glitsky, getting to it.
"I wouldn't say that exactly. Sometimes they'd sit together, that's all. Then one day she comes in, I'm talking Dorris now, and she's all smiling, showing off her teeth all clean and fixed up. You know the clinics don't generally do dental, so somebody asked and she said she had an angel. That was all. That's really all I remember about it. Nothing connected to Missy herself. It was just another little miracle like happens all the time here."
Hardy's is all game face. He's got his own teeth clenched hard in his mouth, his lips set. Glitsky thanks the reverend and they walk outside together.
"She paid Dorris to establish the dental records," Hardy says. "She knew she was going to kill her."
"Maybe not when she made the deal to get Dorris's teeth fixed," Glitsky says. "Maybe just setting it up in case she ever needed to."
Glitsky knew that Davis, California, was the home of one of the campuses of the University of California, but that was about all he knew of it. He'd never before stopped in the more or less upscale college town, which was located about ten miles southwest of Sacramento. The fog had lifted and now a drizzle surrounded the car, steady enough to keep his windshield wipers on intermittent swipe.
Leaving the freeway, deep in thought, he made an inadvertent wrong turn until a sign for a surgery clinic next to a sushi place struck him as so incongruous that it shook him out of his reverie, and he realized he'd come the wrong way and turned around. Heading back toward downtown, he waited in a surprisingly slow and lengthy line of traffic. Ten minutes later, the reason for the delay became clear. Some genius of a small-town city planner had evidently decided it would be a good idea to have the five lanes of the freeway overpass funnel down into a narrow, two-lane tunnel /underpass beneath an old railway line. But Glitsky was a longtime resident of San Francisco to whom traffic delays were an everyday fact of life. If he let traffic bother him, he would have had a nervous breakdown or psychotic episode years ago. There was a light at an intersection up ahead of him, just in front of the tunnel, that had already cycled through red twice. It wouldn't be long, another few minutes at most. He'd just wait it out.
It's one week after the dismissal, five weeks ago to the day, and FBI Special Agent Bill Schuyler sits with Glitsky down -stairs in one of the half-hidden back booths across from the Hall at Lou the Greek's. It's way after hours, going on nine at night, and Glitsky hasn't yet been home. Everything he is doing with the Hanover matter, and all week he's been at it, has been transpiring outside the realm of his daily work.
The two men have had a professional relationship for more than six years. But it's never easy with overlapping jurisdictions, different procedures and priorities. Feds and locals weren't like oil and water. More like oil and oranges. This is about to become clearer than ever. Schuyler says,
"Yeah."
Glitsky, hands around his mug of hot tea, nods. He's not surprised by the admission so much as by the sudden current of anger that courses through him. "You're telling me you knew?"
"I didn't know, personally, myself, but yeah, somebody in the bureau knew."
"And whoever it was didn't think it might be worth mentioning, say to the cops investigating a double murder?"
Schuyler isn't going to fight about it. "Nope. She was dead. We checked ourselves and she was gone. What difference would it make?"
"It might have made a small difference to the woman who spent eight months in jail accused of killing her."
"Not my problem. Neither is this. I inquired into it as a favor to you and got what you wanted. I don't see what's your beef, tell you the truth. She was connected into witness protection, okay. That's what you asked. Then somebody else apparently killed her. So?"
"So maybe the killer was who she was being protected against."
"It was determined that wasn't the case."
Glitsky presses the skin at his temples, runs his finger over the scar through his lips. "It was determined…"
"That's what they told me." Schuyler doesn't move a muscle. His hands are clasped on the table in front of him. He may know Glitsky somewhat as an individual, but this is not a personal conversation on any level. It is bureau business.
"So what was the protection about?"
"That's 'need to know.'" Then, softening somewhat. "So I don't know."
"Any way to find out?"
A shrug.
"And what about now, when it appears she's alive?" "That I did ask. Seems she fooled us, too." "So she's really gone?" "That's what I heard."
"Why would she do that? Shake your protection if it was working?"
Schuyler shakes his head. "No idea."
Glitsky wills himself to speak calmly. "Let me ask you this, Bill. Your personal opinion. Would somebody in the bureau have helped her with this?"
"With what?"
"Getting away."
After a minute, he nods. "It's barely possible, I suppose, but not if it involved killing Hanover and another citizen and then torching the house."
"But you do agree that it must have been her?"
"It's possible. I don't have an opinion. Officially, she's still dead."
"She's not dead. There's no body."
"Okay, you've only known that for a week. Before that, she'd been dead for ten months. In the system, she's still dead."
This isn't Glitsky's war. Besides, dead or missing, the official call doesn't matter to him. "Do you know who her connection was?"
A flare goes off in Schuyler's eyes. He does a favor for Glitsky and the guy wants to go around him, higher up? "Negative," he says. "And they wouldn't tell me if I asked."
"Need to know again?"
"That's how we do it." Schuyler, truly pissed off now, starts to slide out of the booth.
Glitsky reaches out a hand, touches his arm, stops him. "She's alive, Bill. I intend to find her, but I need something to work with. I need to know who she is."
"Put in a request." He gets out of the booth. "If anybody wants to talk, they'll call you."
Glitsky came to believe that the only realistic possibility of tracing Missy D'Amiens had to be through the very large sum of money she'd stolen. She wouldn't want to carry it around in cash. She would have to put it somewhere, if only for safekeeping. So on the day after his meeting with Schuyler, he had made some inquiries with the local branch of the Department of Homeland Security and had finally been put in contact with the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. He didn't hold out much hope that the financial search would yield any results, since he'd already learned that Missy's Social Security number was inactive due to her apparent death. But he had nothing else to pursue.
As a law enforcement officer, Glitsky had the authority to initiate what they called a Section 314(a) request, under that numbered provision of the Patriot Act. At the same time, he petitioned the attorney general of the United States, indicating that the person he was investigating in the Witness Protection Program had been charged, according to 18 U.S.C. Section 3521 et seq., with "an offense that is punishable by more than one year in prison or that is a crime of violence."
The 314(a) request, originally intended to monitor the financial dealings of suspected terrorist groups, had in fact become primarily a tool to identify money laundering. There was, Glitsky knew, a host of problems with this approach-privacy issues, First Amendment questions, the basic problem of government interference with the lives of private citizens-but they were not his problems. Not now. And beyond that, the approach seemed somewhat backward. But to his astonishment his research turned up the fact that banks and most other financial institutions-even in post-9/11 America-didn't try very hard to verify the identity of their customers.
In California and several other western states, banks hire a private company to validate addresses and maintain databases on driver's license information, for example. But these verifications only concern themselves with whether the information is properly formatted. That dates of birth are made up of a month, a day and a year, for example. Or that residence addresses are not, in fact, business addresses. Or that there are nine digits in the SSN, broken in the right places-although inactive SSNs due to death are flagged.
Most unbelievably to Glitsky, banks did not even have to try to verify whether a given Social Security number matched a name. Instead, they would open an account with a valid SSN or business tax ID number and accept an accompanying driver's license or other form of ID. If the driver's license had your picture on it, with the name Joe Smith, and it seemed like a valid license, then the bank would take your SSN and list the account under Joe Smith. There was no system in place to identify fraudulent or fictitious names by comparing them to SSNs, or for tying all of this various identification information together.
The 314(a) procedure is straightforward, simple, low-tech. Every two weeks the government compiles a hardcopy list, usually with between fifty and two hundred names, of the government and law enforcement requests and sends it by fax or e-mail to every financial institution in the country. Each one of these institutions, within two more weeks, then must provide information on whether it maintains or has maintained accounts for, or engaged in transactions with, any individual, entity or organization listed in the request. If a match is found, the bank must notify FinCEN with a "Subject Information Form."
And when Glitsky had gotten that form forwarded to him as the requesting party, submitted to FinCEN by Putah Creek Community Bank in Davis, California, he had gone to District Attorney Clarence Jackman in great secrecy. Only Jackman, the judge who'd signed the warrant and Glitsky's wife knew that he had obtained a search warrant for the records referenced in the report.
Downtown Davis was arranged in a grid with lettered streets running north/south and numbered ones east/ west, and Glitsky had no trouble finding the Putah Creek Community Bank at Third and C. It was a small corner building, about half the size of Glitsky's BofA branch in San Francisco. He drove by it, continued on to Fifth and turned right. About a mile farther on, outside the downtown section, he navigated an unexpected roundabout and pulled into the parking lot of a low-rise building that looked new. As an armed on-duty officer from another jurisdiction, he needed to check in with the local police not only as a courtesy, but to try to avoid any of those complicated misunderstandings that sometimes cropped up when dark-skinned men carrying concealed weapons encounter uniformed patrolmen. Glitsky didn't expect anybody to hold a parade in his honor, but it couldn't hurt to have the locals know that he was in town. He
knew that he might also need to make arrangements for support and logistics.
The chief, Matt Wessin, came out and greeted him in the lobby. Ten or more years Glitsky's junior, Wessin exuded health, competence and vigor. The shape of his body indicated that he worked out for a couple of hours every day. His hair bore not a streak of gray either on top or in the clipped military mustache. The face itself was as smooth and unlined as a boy's. But he was every inch a professional cop, first talking privately to Glitsky about the situation in his office, then bringing him into a small conference room to brief a small team of detectives and a couple of patrolmen who he assigned to temporary detail.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he began. There were two women in the room, a lieutenant and a sergeant. He made the introductions, then continued. "By now, you've all had a chance to look over the fax pages that Deputy Chief Glitsky sent down yesterday. He's got some more show-and-tell today, mostly a couple more pictures of the woman he's hoping to locate here in town, although she may already be gone. As these pages indicate, it appears that she's closed up her post office box. She may also have simply abandoned her safe-deposit box, which is down at Putah Creek Community Bank, but the upshot is that her address, if any, is a mystery. I'm going to pass these new pictures around and invite you all to look at them and then review for a minute who we're actually talking about. This isn't something we hear every day, I know, but in this case, I'd take it to heart. She should be considered armed and extremely dangerous.
"She got the deposit box under the name Monica Breque, although she has previous aliases, which include Michelle, or Missy, D'Amiens. If you'll open the files in front of you, you'll see…"
It's two and a half weeks ago, just after lunch on a Monday afternoon.
Glitsky made his 314(a) request more than three weeks ago and hasn't gotten any response yet. An hour ago, Zachary was cleared for a month without the need for more testing, and the dour and cautious Dr. Trueblood even allowed himself what looked like a genuine and even optimistic smile.
Glitsky gets back to his office at the Hall ofJustice in the early afternoon. He greets Melissa, spends a minute giving her the good news about Zachary, then turns left out of the reception area, passes through the small conference room adjacent to it and into the short hallway that leads to his office, where he stops. His door is closed.
When he left for the doctor's appointment three hours ago, he'd left it open. He almost goes back to ask Melissa if she'd locked up for him while he was gone, but then realizes that it's probably nothing. Maybe some cleaning staff, somebody leaving a note, not an issue. So he opens the door.
Inside, on one of the upholstered chairs in front of
Glitsky's desk, in a relaxed posture, slumped even, with his legs crossed, is a man he's never seen before. He's wearing a business suit and looks over at Glitsky's entrance. "You might want to get the door," he says.
Glitsky doesn't move. "Who are you?"
"A friend of Bill Schuyler's." There's no threat in the soft-spoken voice. He points. "You mind? The door?"
Never taking his eyes off him, Glitsky complies. The man returns the gaze for a second, then stands up. He is probably in his forties, tall, slim and pale, half bald with a well-trimmed tonsure of blond hair. He's already got his wallet in his hand and opens it up, flashes some kind of official-looking identification. "Scott Thomas," he says. "You've been making inquiries about Missy D'Amiens. Do you really believe she's still alive?"
"I do. I don't think there's any doubt of it. Are you FBI?"
A small, tidy, almost prim chuckle. "No, I'm sorry. CIA."
Glitsky takes a beat. "I understood she was in witness protection."
"She was. We put her in it, farmed it out to the bureau." Another ironic smile. "The company isn't allowed to operate domestically."
"All right," Glitsky says. "How can I help you?"
"Maybe we should sit down."
"I'm okay on my feet."
Thomas's mouth gives a little twitch. The man clearly isn't used to being gainsaid. His orders, even his suggestions, get followed. His eyes, the pupils as black as a snake's, show nothing resembling emotion. "It might take a minute," he says in a pleasant tone. "We'll be more comfortable." He sits again, back in the easy chair, and waits until Glitsky finally gives up, crosses behind his desk and lowers himself into his chair.
"I want to tell you a story," Thomas says. In the next hour, Glitsky hears about a young woman, born Monique Souliez in 1966 in Algiers. The sixth child and youngest daughter of a very successful French-trained surgeon, she, too, was schooled in France. Linguistically talented, she traveled widely during her vacations-within Europe over several summers, Singapore another, San Francisco, Sydney, Rio. But she came from a well-established and very closely knit family, and when her formal education was completed in 1989, she returned to Algeria, where she took a job in junior management at the local branch of the Banque National de Paris and soon fell in love with a young doctor, Philippe Rouget.
In 1991, she and Philippe got married in a highly visible society wedding. This was also the year in which a party of some moderate but mostly radical Islamists called the Islamic Salvation Front, or FIS, won a round of parliamentary elections for the first time. This victory prompted Algeria's ruling party, the National Liberation Front (FLN) to outlaw the FIS, and this in turn led to the first violent confrontations between the FLN and the FIS, confrontations that within a year had grown into a full-scale civil war.
Monique and Philippe were not particularly political. True, they both came from the upper classes and socialized almost exclusively within that circle. But mostly they kept to themselves and to the strong Souliez extended family of doctors, engineers, professional people and their educated, sophisticated, well-traveled relatives. The young couple themselves were contented newlyweds doing work that they felt was important and that would go on regardless of who was in power. After Monique became pregnant, their personal world became even more insular, even as the civil war escalated throughout the country and all around them.
Idealistic and unaffiliated with any of the warring factions, Philippe volunteered when he could at both emergency rooms and makeshift clinics that treated both sides. Sometimes these weren't clinics at all, but calls in the night, wounded and dying young men at their doors.
The slaughter, meanwhile, continued unabated until the government finally took the conflict to another level. Anyone suspected of FIS sympathies would simply disappear amid rumors of mass graves and torture. The government issued weapons to previously noncombatant civilians, and this led to a further breakdown in order, with neighbors killing neighbors, with armed bands of simple thieves creating further confusion and havoc. On the rebel side, a splinter organization that called itself the Armed Islamic Group, or GIA, began a campaign of horrific retaliatory massacre, sometimes wiping out entire villages, killing tens of thousands of civilians. Favoring techniques such as assassinations, car bombings, and kidnapping-and then slitting their victims' throats-they brought a new definition of terror to the conflict.
Philippe and Monique considered leaving the country, of course. They had a baby, Jean-Paul, to protect now. The rest of the family would understand. But the rest of the family wasn't fleeing. This was their home. They and their civilized counterparts in similar predicaments believed it their duty to stay. And Philippe and Monique came to feel the same way. They would be the only hope for the country when the fighting stopped, as they believed it eventually would.
But it didn't stop in time for Philippe and Jean-Paul.
Pounding on their door in the middle of the night, a twenty-man squadron of government security forces broke into their home. Informants had told authorities that they'd seen Philippe working on the GIA wounded. He was, therefore, with the GIA. They dragged him from the house, knocking Monique unconscious with rifle butts in the street as she screamed and fought and tried to get them to stop. When she came to, Philippe was gone, the door to her house was open and nearly everything in it was destroyed. Jean-Paul's broken body lay in a corner of his bedroom with his dismantled toys and slashed stuffed animals littering the floor around him.
Here Glitsky holds up a hand. "Iget the picture." He pauses, explains. "I'm not in a good place to hear stories about dead babies right now."
Thomas, jarred out of his narrative, narrows his obsidian eyes in impatience or even anger. Then he checks himself. Glitsky suddenly gets the impression that he knows about Zachary. It's unnerving.
"Sure," Thomas says. "Noproblem." He gathers himself, picks up where he left off. After the government thugs killed her husband and her son, Monique became transformed both by her need for vengeance and by her passionate hatred for the government, and particularly its so-called security units. Within a month of the twin tragedies she'd endured, she went underground and joined one of the revolutionary brigades.
At this time, the rebels still lacked a strong organizational structure or even a cohesive political platform. They were united in seeking to overthrow the current administration and replace it with an Islamic state, but there was no central command, or even a consensus on what type of Islamic structure the country would eventually embrace if they were victorious. The typical cell consisted of a loosely confederatedgroup of between ten and twenty-five individuals. Most of these were Islamic, of course, but many Christians and even some Europeans were drawn to the cause in the way Monique had been-by the government's brutality or by simple hatred of individuals in power. Many, too, joined the rebels because they hated France, which supported the FLN and its military-dominated regime.
The details ofMonique's next couple of years were sketchy, but it was clear that she had become affiliated with one of the cells. She may or may not have actually participated in many raids and ambushes-the accounts varied-but she certainly became comfortable with a variety of weapons and took part in planning and funding operations, especially against security details such as those that had killed her family.
But as the government's ongoing campaign continued to decimate the rebels' numbers, the individual cells were forced to congeal into more cohesive and ever more secretive units. The GIA, effectively beaten as an army, had to abandon the pitched street battles that had marked the civil war stage of the conflict, although they continued to assassinate, to bomb and to kidnap. The government, for its part, waged what began as a successful torture campaign against captured prisoners who were suspected of GIA affiliation. Increasingly marginalized, the rebels countered with an effective tool to guarantee the silence of its captured operatives. If a captive talked, his or her entire family would be killed. Not just husbands and wives and children, but fathers, mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, uncles, aunts and cousins, to the third degree.
The most celebrated of these slaughters occurred in 1997. The government arrested a nineteen-year-old boy named Antar Rachid on suspicion of taking part in the carjacking and assassination of a minor Algiers municipal official. Three days after Rachid's arrest, government security forces raided the downtown cafe out of which Rachid had operated, in the process killing three other GIA soldiers and confiscating a large cache of automatic weapons, cash and ammunition from the hidden room in the cafe's cellar. Obviously, they broke Rachid with torture and he talked.
Here Glitsky speaks again. "How many of his relatives did they kill?"
"I was getting there." The number seems to slow down even the phlegmatic Thomas. He takes a breath, tries to sound matter-of-fact. "One hundred and sixty-three. Raids in Algiers itself and in thirteen villages over the next couple of days. Gone before they knew what hit 'em. After that," Thomas says, "captured suspects stopped talking and started dying in jail."
In 1999, Algeria finally got a new civilian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and he offered amnesty to rebels who hadn't been convicted of rape or murder or other heinous crimes. Along with about eighty-five percent of the rest of them, Monique returned to civilian life, moving back in with her father and mother, going back to work at the bank. But she'd proven herself a valuable organizer and strategist to the GIA, and they weren't ready to abandon her. It wasn't the kind of organization where you simply walked out-Rachid's experience, and many others similar to it, made that crystal clear. It was like the mob. It doesn't matter if you were arrested, or if you tried to leave on your own… you are never out.
"But by now, I'm talking 1999," Thomas continues, "things have really begun to change over there. A new faction called the GSPC splits off of the GIA, and though they're still hitting government and military targets, they swear off civilian attacks within the country. After all the killing of the past years, this has a lot of grassroots appeal. The GIA leadership doesn't see it that way, but they're losing influence and, more importantly, members. And funding. They need to do something dramatic to call the faithful to them. This is jihad now, not just revolution. The will of Allah will be done, and even if fellow Muslims are killed, it is acceptable because they all become martyrs." Thomas pauses again. "The GIA decides they are going to blow up the biggest elementary school in Algiers. Six hundred kids."
"Lord, the world." Glitsky's elbow is on his desk. His hand supports his head.
"But Monique won't help them. She can't go there. It's too much."
Glitsky snorts a note of derisive laughter. "A saint, huh?"
"In some ways, she was, actually." Thomas shifts in his chair. "But now she's got an even bigger problem. On the one hand, she hates the government and what it stands for. But on the other, she can't let the GIA go ahead with this bombing. But if she tells anybody, if she betrays her cell, she knows what happens next. Her family disappears, all of it. She's seen it happen not just to Antar Rachid and his family, but maybe half a dozen other times.
"She's got four brothers and a sister, all of them married with kids. Her mother and father, both still young enough to be working. Her mother comes from a family of five, her father's the oldest of four. She's got about forty-five cousins." Thomas comes forward, finally showing a hint of urgency. "They're all dead if she talks. There's no doubt about it. Meanwhile, she's in on the planning. If she refuses, she's with the enemy. She can't show a thing."
Glitsky, nodding, appreciates her problem. "So she comes to you guys."
"She comes to me, personally. I'm stationed over there at the time. My cover is I'm with the visa section at the embassy, but she's been underground for four years and she's figured that out. I do some banking at her branch and she approaches me one day, tells me her story.
"The only way she figures she can do it is if she appears to be killed in the raid on the planners. If I'd help her appear to die, she's got information on a major planned terrorist attack. Remember, this is pre-9/11, but the Cole had already happened, the African embassies. It might have been a trap, but the bottom line is, I believed her. And it turned out it was all true. They raided the cell and found the explosives, and the government announced that Monique Souliez was one of the rebels killed in the raid."
"And Monique became Missy D'Amiens?"
"That's right."
Glitsky sits in silence for a minute. "So why are you here now, with me?"
"I thought you needed to hear the story." "Why is that?"
"Maybe so you'll understand where she's coming from. She's a quality person. Maybe the best thing would be to leave her alone, wherever she is. More than anything else, she's a hero."
But Glitsky doesn't even begin to accept this. "More than anything else, she killed two people in my town. I can't leave her alone."
"That might not have been her."
"No? I'll entertain other suggestions if you've got them."
"It could have been GIA." Glitsky snorts. "Here? They found her here?" But Thomas keeps on with it. "It's not impossible. You know the guy they arrested at the Canadian border with explosives bound for LAX? He was GIA. They're still very much active. They're not going away."
"Maybe so," Glitsky says, "but they didn't befriend some homeless woman so they could establish phony dental records for her."
Thomas takes in the truth of that. It costs him some. But he tries another tack. "If she's exposed, they kill her family, even now."
"I would hope they wouldn't do that." The words say it all. Thomas hears them clearly. This, his personal mission, has failed. But he tries one more argument. "I'd ask you to think of what she's been through. It's so different over there. She hasn't lived in the same world as most of us do. If she did kill these two people, I know it was to save her family. Two deaths against sixty. That's the kind of choice she had to make all the time back home. It must have seemed like the only option she had." "Maybe it did," Glitsky says.
But he doesn't give him any more. After a last moment of silence, poor lovesick Scott Thomas gets up out of his chair, walks to the door, opens it and, like the spook he is, vanishes.
Inside the Putah Creek Community Bank, three tellers sat ready to work the windows, but there weren't any customers. A couple of other employees were huddled over a desk behind the screened work area-muffled voices that seemed to be talking gossip, not banking. Out front, a matronly-looking middle-aged woman raised her head at the entrance of Glitsky and Matt Wessin. With a nervous smile, she rose from her seat behind a shiny, empty desk.
Glitsky, in his all-weather jacket with a gun in his armpit, hung back a few steps while the chief extended his hand to the woman. Obviously, the two were acquainted-small town. "Traci," he said, "this is Deputy Chief Glitsky from San Francisco police."
"Yes, we talked a couple of days ago." More handshakes.
And Wessin went on. "He's told you, I believe, that he's
got a warrant to view the records of one of your accounts, and also the contents of a safe-deposit box linked to the same account. Do you remember a match in a 314(a) form you sent in a couple of weeks ago? Monica Breque?"
"I do. I think it's the first one we've had out of this branch, but I'm afraid I don't remember her. When I saw the name on the 314 form"-she turned to Glitsky-"and then when we talked the other day, I tried to remember something about her, but nothing came to me."
Wessin said, "Maybe one of these will help." He produced from the folder he carried several likenesses that Glitsky had brought up with him, including not only the glossy of the Chronicle photo, but also several of Hardy's snapshots from the Hanover family albums. Now Traci examined the pictures slowly, one by one. When she'd gone through them all, she shook her head. "I'm afraid I don't know her at all. And we pride ourselves on personal service, knowing our customers on sight by name."
"She might have had a bit of a French accent, if that's any help," Glitsky offered.
She stopped shaking her head. "A French accent? Now that rings a bell. And she started here last May, we said? That would have been me if it was a new account, too. I'm sorry." Traci looked back down at the pictures. "I just don't have any memory of someone who looked like this. I do remember the accent, though. Is it all right if I show these to the staff?"
Five minutes later, one of the tellers admitted that, like Traci, maybe she'd seen the woman, or someone who looked like her. If it was the same person, though, the hair was certainly different, and she doubted if she'd been wearing the same kind of tailored, high-end city clothes she fancied in the pictures. "But all the same, I'd bet it's her. Great face."
"So she still comes in here?" Glitsky asked.
"I don't know," Carla said. "I wouldn't call her a regular."
"Can you think of what was different about the hair?"
The teller closed her eyes and gave it a try. "Maybe it was short, and not so dark, but I can't really be sure." She checked the picture again. "But I've seen her. Definitely."
This was reasonably good news, but didn't get them anywhere, so Glitsky and Wessin went back to the manager's desk and got to the account records themselves. Missy, or Monique, or Monica, did not use her checking account to write checks. She had deposited a hundred dollars to open the account on May 17, and hadn't touched it since.
This gave Glitsky a sense of foreboding that he tried to ignore. "Let's take a look at the safe-deposit box," he said.
They all walked into an old-fashioned vault with a heavily reinforced door, its inner workings and tumblers open to the lobby. Traci had a set of the bank's master keys for one of the locks and she'd called in a locksmith to drill out the other one, which needed the customer's key. In short order, she was taking the box from its space in the wall. She placed it on a table in the center of the vault. It was one of the larger boxes-a foot wide, eighteen inches long, four inches in depth. It only took another few seconds to get it open.
Unwittingly, Wessin whistled under his breath.
The stacks of money-fifty- and hundred-dollar bills-was what caught the eye first, but then Glitsky noticed what looked to be a rogue bit of tissue paper stuck against one side of the box. He picked that up first and opened it in his hand. It was, of course, the ring, with the stone actually larger than he'd pictured it. Wrapping it back up rather more neatly than it had been, he put it on the table next to the box. "I guess we ought to count this next," he said.
Tuesday, two days ago, early afternoon in Jackman's office with the door closed behind him and thick, rare slabs of sunshine streaking the floor over by the windows, the wind screaming outside. Jackman is in his oversize leather chair behind his desk, his fingers templed at his mouth. Treya, on the second day of her first week back at work after Zachary's birth, stands guard with her back against the door.
Glitsky is looking on while the DA reads the 314(a) form. "I just got this thing and wanted to run it by you."
"I don't understand how this can be," Jackman says. "Didn't you tell me her Social Security number came up deceased?"
"When I checked six weeks ago, yes. But if she opened this account within a few weeks of the Hanover fire, say, or even sooner than that, the computer wouldn't have caught up with her yet."
Treya says, "She's a banker, sir. She knew it wouldn't." Glitsky adds. "She's done this before, remember. Established an identity in a new town withginned-up docs. Undoubtedly she knew they don't check names against socials. If nobody ever thought to ask, and nobody has now for ten months, she's golden. What she didn't know about were the changes since 9/11."
Jackman asks, "So what name is she using now?" "Monica Breque."
"I bet people call her Missy," Treya says. "I wouldn't be surprised."
Jackman straightens up in his chair. "We need to get her in custody. Have you talked to the Davis people? Police."
"Yes, sir, a little. And there is still a problem-I talked to the manager at the bank and got a local address that seems not to be hers. It's not fictitious. It's just not where she lives. They sent some officers around to check right away, and it was somebody else's house entirely. So we don't know where she is."
Jackman isn't too fazed by this. "It's a small town. Somebody'll know where she lives." "I'll be following up on that."
"I thought you might be." Jackman hesitates. "Abe." He talks quietly, but he's firm. "Why not have them work on the follow-up, the Davis police? Have them bring in the FBI if they want. It's a banking matter, so it's federal. And she's a protected witness. And when they find her and surround her and place her under arrest, then have them bring her down here for her trial when they're done with her. You've found her. You don't physically have to bring her in."
Glitsky is standing in the at-ease position between his wife and the DA. He wouldn't be at all surprised if they both had the same opinion of what he should do now, but he is not going to be drawn into this discussion. Instead, he nods in apparent assent. "Good point," he says.
Three hundred and fifteen thousand, four hundred dollars even.
It took them nearly an hour to count it twice and be sure. Traci left the two policemen to the work. Toward the end of it, Wessin seemed to become a bit impatient, checking his watch several times, and Glitsky learned that he was to be the speaker at a Rotary event at noon. Glitsky had loosened up by now and had become nearly voluble. He told Wessin he should have known that the chief would have some public event he needed to attend-half of Glitsky's own life was administrative stupidity and public relations. Both men agreed that if people knew, they'd never want to move up through the ranks. Even so, they both understood the importance of Wessin's speaking gig and picked up their speed. When they finally finished, Wessin still had fifteen minutes.
They called Traci back in to lock up the box again and insert it into its proper location. A next-to-worst-case scenario for Glitsky-after the possibility of her escaping again altogether-would be if they could not locate the woman in a day or two of canvassing shopkeepers and neighborhoods and had to assign a full-time person to keep watch in case she went to the bank for some cash.
But he had hopes that it wouldn't come to that. Already this morning, Wessin's task force had gone out into the town and onto the university campus, armed with their photographs. Two officers were going to the post office-they had what they hoped was a current alias, and if she'd ever gotten so much as a gas bill under that name, they could find where she lived. The French accent would stand out, as would the face. All talk of small town aside, though, the population of the greater area during the school year when college was in session was something in the order of a hundred thousand souls. If she were consciously laying low-and her years as a rebel in Algeria had certainly prepared her for that-they could miss her for a very long time, perhaps forever. And that's if she were still here at all.
Although the money argued that she was.
Glitsky and Wessin-by now they were Abe and Matt-were standing on the sidewalk outside the bank. The drizzle had let up along with most of the wind, and though the streets were wet and it was still overcast, patches of blue were showing in the sky above them. "People will be checking back in at the station after lunch, Abe. I could drop you back there now if you'd like. Or you could grab a bite downtown here. It's not San Francisco, but there's a couple of places to eat."
"I'll find 'em. You don't have a Jewish deli, do you?"
"No, but if you want deli, Zia's is pretty damn good Italian. It's on the next block, on the way to where I'm going to talk. You want, I'll show you."
It was a sad but true fact of Glitsky's life that since his heart attack and the never-ending battle with cholesterol, he rarely ate sandwiches anymore, especially freshly sliced mortadella and salami and all those great nitrates with cheese and vinegar and oil on a just-out-of-the-oven sourdough roll. But he was having one now, enjoying it immensely, washing it down with San Pellegrino water, thinking he liked this low-rise, not-quite-yuppified town, even as he wondered where the black people were.
With the improving weather, a steady stream of mostly young people-students, he surmised-passed in front of him where he sat outside on the sidewalk. He saw as many per-capita Asians as there were in San Francisco, and Hispanics, and from the evidence a thriving lesbian community-in fact, ethnicities and minorities of every stripe seemed well represented here, but there was nary a black person. What, he wondered, was that about? More than anything else, he found it odd, out of sync with the world he inhabited.
It was clouding up again as he was finishing his sandwich and his drink, and he went back inside the crowded little deli to discard his bottle and napkins. He looked at his watch. He wasn't due to meet Wessin for another twenty minutes, so he stopped for a moment to look at the display of imported Italian goods around the shelves. Maybe he'd pick up some eggplant caponata for Treya, or roasted red peppers, and surprise her. They hadn't had much romance in their lives since Zachary's birth, and now she was already back at work after the maternity leave. He should really get her something. He never thought to surprise her. He ought to change that. In fact, he should bring her presents more often, he was thinking, let her know how much she was appreciated.
Appreciated? He silently berated himself for the understatement. He way more than appreciated her. In four years, she had become the center of his life. Some days he felt she had given him the gift of feeling again, when it had for so long been dormant.
Maybe some chocolate? A box of Baci, or "little kisses"? Too romantic? What was too romantic? What kind of concept was that?
Carefully replacing the roasted red peppers and the little jar of relish so they wouldn't fall, he went over to the cash register where they kept the boxes of candy and was reaching out to pick one up when the woman behind the counter waved and cheerily called out, "Au revoir, madame."
An answering chirp of "au revoir" came from the doorway and Glitsky whirled to catch a glimpse of female profile as she walked out the door and turned left up the street. The candy forgotten now, his mind completely blank, he stood for a long instant frozen in his steps.
He wasn't completely sure. Whoever she was had become blond now, hair cropped so short that it nearly appeared crew cut. He'd only glimpsed her briefly, and the first impression-after the shock of recognition itself- was her youth. This could not be a thirty-nine-year-old former terrorist and killer. This was an anonymous student, possibly in graduate school, wearing very little if any makeup and sporting maybe a piercing through her eyebrow.
He didn't exactly have to fight his way out of the little shop, but if he didn't want to push people over and cause a scene, he had to be careful. By the time he'd come out onto the sidewalk, she was already at the corner crossing, walking away from him.
His mind racing, he fell in behind her. He had his pager on his belt, but had left his cell phone in his car back at police headquarters-they were only going down to the bank and then back on a quick errand, and he'd had no reason to think he'd need it. He did have his gun, but the sidewalk was, if not packed solid with humanity, at least well traveled-twenty or more people shuffled and strolled and simply walked in the space that separated them.
Reluctant to close too much of the space between them, he overruled his early inclination to try to make an arrest alone in the midst of these people. He knew nothing about her own preparations or readiness in case of trouble. She herself might well be the embodiment of that old cliche-armed and extremely dangerous. He could not risk provoking anything like a hostage situation. He also had no idea how she would react if he tried to place her under arrest by himself. The sight of a black man with a gun in a strange, curiously white-bread town might cause the citizenry to react unpredictably. Even if he flashed a badge, there might be enough craziness to allow a young screaming woman to get away in the startled crowd.
He had to get a plan. He had to get a plan.
Half a block further on, she stopped to look in a shopwindow and it gave him a chance to close the gap. Already he was within the same block, close enough to study her. He had lived with the photographs of her now for six weeks, that face from any number of angles, that face with a wide range of expressions. A car honked on the street behind him and she turned to look, and any doubt melted away.
He had found her!
She wore oversize tan overalls and sandals with no socks. On top, an overlong sweater in a washed-out green hid any intimation of the form beneath. She was any dowdy, even slovenly student, unconcerned about her appearance. Without the casually overheard French good-bye, Glitsky might have stood next to her in the deli-probably had been standing next to her-and he would have missed her entirely.
She brought a hand to her mouth. Biting into some kind of pastry, perhaps a cannoli, from the deli, she leaned over slightly to keep the crumbs from falling on her. Then she began walking again. Glitsky stepped into the doorway of the magazine store where she had slowed down and watched as she crossed over diagonally in the middle of the block. A few raindrops hit the pavement and she looked skyward, threw her pastry into a corner trash can and picked up her pace.
He was going to lose her if he didn't move.
But when he crossed behind her and got to the corner, she was still within the block. Stopping under the shelter of a building's overhang, she seemed to be checking her reflection in the bank's window, then brushing crumbs or the rain from her clothes. With another glance at the sky, she started up again, walking away from downtown.
They crossed what Glitsky recognized as Fifth Street and after that entered a residential neighborhood with small stand-alone houses on tiny lots. The foot traffic, here only three blocks from downtown, was nonexistent, which obliged him to extend the distance between them. He ran the slight risk of losing her, but he didn't think he would.
In any case, he had the feeling that this was her general neighborhood. She had come out for a snack or for lunch and now was walking home.
He could, of course, rush her now. With no other pedestrians about, he could put her on the ground if need be and place her under arrest. But he was most of a full block behind her, and there would be very little possibility of surprise. And if she did notice him coming up on her, and was in fact armed, it could become needlessly ugly very fast. Better, and it looked as if the opportunity would soon present itself, would be to remain unseen and unnoticed behind her and let her get home. Then he would have her address, after which he would immediately get to a phone and call for backup.
And the arrest would be done according to Hoyle.
She crossed another larger street-Eighth-then turned right and left and into the driveway of a parking lot in front of a two-story stucco apartment building. Jogging, Glitsky managed to reach the driveway in time to see her disappear into the next to last downstairs unit.
He checked his watch. Wessin would have finished his talk and would be waiting by his car, wondering where Glitsky was, but he could do nothing about that now. All he needed was the unit number, and he didn't even, strictly speaking, need that. He knew it was the second from the end unit on the ground floor. But he wanted to know for certain when he called it in. It would be bad luck to get it wrong and have a bunch of eager patrolmen, guns drawn, come crashing through the door of some piano teacher.
He stood now in a steady light rain at the outer entrance to the open asphalt parking lot. It was a small enough area, with hash lines marking spaces for each of the eight apartment units, and occupied at the moment by three well-used cars, none of them models from the current millennium.
In number three, where she'd gone, a light came on in the window. He took a few steps into the lot, getting some relief from the rain under a tree.
He still had the option to take her now, by himself. Under any pretense or none at all, he could simply knock at her door and wait until she opened it. Why would she suspect anything? She'd been living here, apparently unmolested, for ten months now, and her life must have settled into some kind of a routine.
But he would be wise not to take her too lightly. She'd had years of experience in the terrorist underground of Algeria, and in that time had learned who could say how many tricks to elude capture or incapacitate authorities when capture was a synonym for death. And truth be told, though it galled him, he was not sufficiently prepared for an arrest. Even if she had no weapon at her disposal, he had no handcuffs, and no way to restrain her except at the point of a gun, which might turn out to be a limited option if he wasn't prepared to shoot her out of hand.
He had to get to a phone. He thought it unlikely that having just returned home, she would leave again, especially in the rain. He wondered if one of the cars in the lot was hers. Maybe the apartment belonged to a friend and she was visiting, not living there.
He had to move. He could lose her if he waited until every possible contingency had been covered.
But she was right here! He stood under the tree, torn by indecision, mesmerized by the light in her window. Had a shadow just moved in the room? He moved a few steps to his left to get a better view. The rain fell in slow, steady vertical drops. A little harder now in front of him, suddenly audible above him in the leaves of his sheltering tree.
He had to move.
The familiar snick semiautomatic's round being chambered sounded very close to his ear. The woman's voice from behind him was quiet and assured, with no trace of panic or even unusual concern. "I have a gun pointed at the back of your head. Don't turn around. Don't make any sudden movements. Keep your hands out in front of you where I can see them. The only reason you're still alive is that I need to know who you're with." "San Francisco police."
"Walk toward the apartment house, second door from the left."
"Are you going to shoot me?" "If you don't walk, yes."
Glitsky moved forward, out into the rain. He heard her footsteps now behind him and marveled that she could have come up behind him so quickly without a sound or a warning.
"Stop," she said when he reached the door. "Turn the knob and kick the door all the way so it swings open." Following her instructions to the letter, Glitsky stood in the threshold. "Now walk into the middle of the room and link your hands on the top of your head."
He did as he was told, heard her come in behind him and close the door. "Now turn around." The orders continued, specific and organized. "Take your right hand only-slowly, very slowly-and unzip your jacket all the way. Thank you. Get it off, easy, slowly, and drop it to the floor behind you. Step away from it. Now!"
She held the gun steadily in one hand. Glitsky noted how comfortable she looked with it and, at the same time, how nearly unrecognizable she'd made herself. The haircut was not so much short as chopped unevenly. With no lipstick or other facial makeup, and with the silver post through her bleached white eyebrows, she had adopted the look of an all but marginal figure, anonymous. By looks alone, she was a kind of lost-looking older and pathetic waif, a spare-change artist from whom people would naturally tend to avert their eyes.
But she never took her eyes from him. "Hold your left arm straight out like I'm doing. Okay, now with your right, thumb and first finger only, lift the gun out of the holster and put it on the floor. Stand." She raised her own gun to his chest and Glitsky thought she was going to execute him. But she extended her arm instead and said, "Back up. More."
The backs of Glitsky's knees hit the couch and he heavily, awkwardly, went down to a sit on the piece of furniture. She got to his gun, picked it up, put it into the pocket of her overalls. "Pull both of your pant legs up to your knees. All right, you can let them back down. Now hands back on your head. Link them." Neither eyes nor gun ever leaving him, she went to the open kitchen area, six feet away, and pulled a metal chair over onto the rug in the center of the room. She sat on it, facing him. "What's your name?"
"Abe Glitsky."
"You're with the San Francisco police?" "Yes, I am."
"You need training in how to follow people. You're no good at it."
"I'll keep it in mind next time," he said.
But she didn't follow up on that, a conversation line that he thought might humanize him, which in turn could perhaps give her pause as she was deciding whether or not to kill him. Although to protect her identity and her family, he knew that she would have to.
But she simply said, "It's about Paul, then. "
"And Dorris." Glitsky would keep her talking if he could, even if he had to bait her. "You remember Dorris?"
She moved her shoulders in a kind of shrug. "Dorris had to be. In the world, there are millions of Dorrises who have uses and then become expendable. I wish it hadn't been necessary." Almost as an afterthought, she added, "I thought I was done with killing. But no one will ever miss her. She didn't matter."
"And what about Paul?"
"We won't talk about Paul. In fact, there is nothing more to say." Her eyes went to the gun in her hand.
"But there is." He was staring at the gun's barrel. If it moved, he would try to jump her, and probably die trying. But maybe they weren't quite to that point yet. "I don't understand what happened," he said. "You had a life together. You were going to get married."
Shaking her head as though to ward off the thought, she snapped out the words. "I loved him." Then, matter-of-fact. "I loved him."
"But you killed him?"
"I killed him. That's what I do. I betray people and then kill them. Or someone else does."
Glitsky risked unlinking his hands, lowering them slowly onto his lap. "Why?"
"Because I have no choice. He gave me no choice. I begged him please."
"Please what?"
"Please not to let them… how do you say? It's not exactly the right word. Investigate him." "For what?" "For the nomination."
Glitsky's every nerve pulsed with urgency. He knew that if he was to have a chance at life, he would have a split second to recognize his moment and seize it. But part of him settled to a stillness with this information. "You mean the cabinet post?"
"With the government, yes."
"And they needed a background check?"
"The FBI, yes. But don't you see? He didn't need it, the post. He had position and power and money and love. He didn't need it. I begged him not to let them even start."
"Because once they started on him, they'd get to you."
She nodded. "They would have to. I was his fiancee, soon his wife. They would have to background me, too."
"You could have left him. Wouldn't that have been better?"
"Of course, if it would have been possible. You think I would not have done that? But it wouldn't have done any good. I was too close to Paul. They would still have needed to check me."
"But the FBI already knew about you. You were in witness protection."
"Yes? So? The people checking me and Paul were a different department." She hacked in disgust. "They could do nothing. I asked them. They would not. They said they could contain it."
"Did you try to tell them it was life and death?"
"Ha! Of course. The CIA in Algeria knew that, but the FBI didn't believe it, or didn't care. I didn't matter. It's government, don't you understand? Where-how do you say?-the left doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and doesn't wash the other even if they could. And the FBI doesn't answer to the CIA."
"So they would have found out who you were and gone public with it?"
"That's what they do. Not on purpose, certainly. Very discreetly, of course. Need to know, high security. Like every junior congressman and tabloid journalist in Washington. And their wives. And their whores. And anyone who would trade the information for something they wanted."
"And you believe that word would have gotten back to Algeria that you were still alive?"
"Don't you understand? There is no way that it wouldn't have. It was too valuable a secret to keep. Who could have a million dollars and not spend any of it?"
Suddenly her expression changed. Glitsky tensed on the couch, focused on the gun, ready to spring. But she didn't move the gun. Canting her head to one side, she went still, eyed him inquisitively. "How do you know about that?"
"Because I know who you are, Missy. Or Monique."
She stared at him, hung her head for a heartbeat, but not long enough to give him an opening. When she looked back up, her face had set into a mask of conviction. "Then that is your death warrant," she said, and started to move the gun.
Glitsky put his hands up in front of his face, but didn't make another move. "It's too late," he said. "I've told the police here. It's already public."
"You're lying! If you worked with the police here, they'd be with you now."
"Call your bank then. Ask them if I was there this morning with your police chief."
She rested the gun on her knee. "You've been to the bank?"
"To your box, Missy. Three hundred thousand dollars and Paul's ring. I told your story to the district attorney in San Francisco and got a warrant. The affidavit's under seal, but it's only a matter of time. Everyone will know it by tomorrow. If you kill me, they may know it by tonight."
Outside, they heard the rain suddenly falling with a vengeance.
Monique, Michelle, Monica, Missy put a hand up to her forehead and pulled nervously at the stud over her left eye. "They will murder my family. Don't you understand that?"
"I'm sorry," he said, and he meant it. "But it can't be undone."
The two of them sat about eight feet apart. The one light by the front window flickered with the freshening wind, the power of the deluge. The gun was on her leg, but she was no longer pointing it at him. "What is your name again?" she asked.
"Abraham."
"My parents. I cannot let…" She choked on the rest.
"Maybe we can contact the CIA…"
"And what? What do they do in Algeria? Ask their Muslim brothers for mercy for someone who betrayed them? Don't you see? There is no mercy so long as I am alive."
Glitsky had come to the front of the couch and was now sitting slightly forward, in a relaxed posture, with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped in front of him. "Missy," he said. "I'm going to stand up now."
She immediately gripped the gun in both of her hands and pointed it at the center of his chest.
His eyes locked on hers. "You've had enough of killing to protect your secret. That's over now. The secret is out."
"It isn't. You're lying."
His voice was calm and reasonable. "I'm not lying. You know that."
A long pause. Then a longer pause. "You said you were tired of killing, but that you had to do it. But killing me now will accomplish nothing. So I'm giving you another minute to think it over, then I'm leaving. Shoot me or not, run or stay, it's over. You know that."
He gave her the promised moment to think. Then he stood.
"Don't come any closer!"
"Now I'm going to walk around you."
"No! Don't you move! I'll kill you, I swear to God
I will."
"I don't think you will," he said. "It wouldn't accomplish anything."
He was moving up to where she sat, giving her a wide berth. She stood up, too, and took a step back. Going slowly and smoothly, never stopping, he leaned over to pick up his jacket; then putting it on, he continued past her, feeling the gun trained on him at every step, until his back was to her now and there was nothing to do but reach for the doorknob and pray that he was right.
Never looking over his shoulder, he closed his hand around the metallic orb and gave a yank, then stepped out into the downpour and pulled the door closed behind him.
Half an hour later, eight Davis city police cars were parked in the streets surrounding and in the parking lot in front of the apartment building. The rain had resumed its regular steady drifting. The police switchboard had received three calls from the immediate neighborhood in the past twenty minutes reporting what sounded like a gunshot.
But no one was disposed to take unnecessary chances. The policemen had gone door-to-door in the apartment building, rousting the six students who lived there, getting them out of harm's way. Matt Wessin used the bullhorn and informed Missy that she was surrounded by police and had sixty seconds to throw out her weapons and give herself up.
When the minute was up and there had been no response, Abe Glitsky held up a hand to Wessin and his men and, all alone, walked across the few open feet of parking lot to the front door. He stopped for an instant, drew a breath and gathered himself before he pushed.
Slumped over to her right, the terrorist, the killer, the lover, the martyr was on the couch where he'd been sitting not so long before. Glitsky took a step into the room. His chin fell down over his chest. Always professional, still and always an exception to the rule, Missy D'Amiens had shot herself in the head.
In a moment, Glitsky would turn and nod to Wessin and the routines would begin. He tried to imagine some other way it could have gone, something he might have done differently.
But it had all been ordained and set in motion long before he'd been involved. He was lucky to have escaped with his life, when so many others had not.
That was going to have to be enough.
On a sunny Saturday evening a couple of weeks into April, Hardy was driving with his wife, top down on the convertible, on the way to Glitsky's. A week before, he'd come across a CD of Perry Como's greatest hits, and since then had been alienating everyone close to him- especially his children-with his spontaneous outbursts into renditions of "Papa Loves Mambo" and "Round and Round" and others that were, to him, classics from his earliest youth, when his parents used to watch the crooner's show every Sunday night. Now, as his last notes from "Hot Diggity (Dog Ziggity Boom)" faded to silence along with the CD track, Frannie reached over and ejected the disc.
"You really like that guy, don't you?"
"What's not to like?"
"I know there's something, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's just that he's before my time."
"Perry? He's eternal. Besides, you don't hear polkas often enough nowadays. If you did, the world would be a happier place. I'm thinking of trying to find an Okto-berfest record so we can have more of them on hand at the house."
"The kids might kill you. On second thought, I might kill you."
"No. You'd all get used to it. Pretty soon all their friends are coming over for polka parties. You're the hostess wearing one of those cute Frau outfits. I can see it as the next big new thing." He broke into a snatch of the song again.
"Dismas."
He stopped. After a moment, driving along, he turned to his wife. "Okay, if polka isn't going to be your thing, do you want to hear an interesting fact?"
"I live for them."
"Okay, how about this? The 'zip' in ZIP code? It stands for 'zone improvement plan.' Did you know that?"
She cast him a sideways glance. "You've been reading that miscellany book again."
"True. Actually, my new life goal is to memorize it."
"Why?"
"So I'll know more stuff." "You already know too much stuff." "Impossible. I mean, the 'zip' fact, for example. Zone improvement plan." He looked over for her response. "Wow," she said.
"Come on, Frannie. Did you know that? Don't you think that's neat to know?"
"No, I do. I said 'wow,' even. Didn't you hear me?"
"It sounded like a sarcastic 'wow.' "
"Never."
"Okay, then." They drove on in silence for a moment.
"Zone improvement plan," Frannie suddenly said after half a block. "Imagine that."
Hardy looked over at her, a tolerant smile in place. "Okay, we'll drop it. But only because there's yet another unusual and interesting fact you may not know, and probably want to."
"More than I want to know about what 'zip' stands for? I can't believe that."
"This dinner tonight at Abe's? He asked me what kind of champagne to buy."
"Abe's drinking champagne?"
"I got the impression he intended to."
"Wow. Not sarcastic," she added. "When's the last time you saw him drink anything with alcohol in it?"
"Somewhere far back in the mists of time. Certainly not in the past few years."
"So what's the occasion?"
"I don't know. But it's got to be a good one."
Hardy found a spot to park within a block of Glitsky's house, and figuring he'd won the lottery, pulled his convertible to the curb. Setting the brake, he brought the top back up, turned off the engine and reached for the door handle. Frannie put a hand on his leg and said, "Do you mind if we just sit here a minute?"
He stopped and looked questioningly over at her. "Whatever you want." He took her hand. "Is everything all right?"
"That's what I wanted to ask you." "If everything was all right with me?"
"Yes."
"You mean with us?" "Us. You. Everything."
He stared for a moment out through the windshield. He squeezed her hand, turned toward her. "Look at us right now. Look at where we are. It's a good place."
"Not if you're unhappy in it."
"I'm not unhappy. I wouldn't trade this, what I've got with you, for anything. What's got you thinking this?"
"It just seems you've been… distant, especially since the trial, now that you've stopped seeing her every day."
He said nothing.
"It makes me wonder if what we have isn't enough for you."
"Enough what?"
"Enough anything. Excitement, maybe. Fun. It's all kid stuff and routines and bickering sometimes."
"And you think Catherine was more fun? That it was fun at all?"
"You want me to be honest? I think you loved every minute you spent with her."
This was close to the bone. Hardy chose his words with some care. "That's not the same as wanting to be with her now. It seems to me that the way this marriage thing works is you keep making a choice to be in it every day."
"Even if it makes you unhappy?"
"But it doesn't make me unhappy, not at all. To the contrary, in fact. And here's an unfashionable thought: Unhappiness is a choice. And it's one I don't choose to make." He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. "What I want is what we've already got. But I guess I'm not communicating that too well, am I? For which I apologize. Really. Maybe you ought to leave me for making you worry."
"I would never leave you. I don't even think about it."
"Well, you know, I never think about leaving you. Ever. We're together, period. The topic's not open for discussion. We've got our family and our life together, and nobody has as much fun together as we do ninety-nine percent of the time. I wouldn't trade it for anything."
A silence gathered in the closed-in space and finally Frannie sighed. "I'm sorry I need reassurance once in a while."
"That's acceptable. I'm sorry if I've been distant."
"I'm sorry you're sorry." She squeezed his hand. "Between us, we are two sorry campers, aren't we?"
"Apparently." He caught her eye, broke a trace of a grin. "Two sorry campers on their way to break bread with People Not Laughing."
"Sounds like a good time. Should we go on up?"
As one, they opened the doors of the car and stepped out into the warm evening. The neighborhood in early dusk smelled of orange blossoms, coffee and the ocean.
People Not Laughing was in his kitchen with a cold bottle of Dom Perignon held awkwardly in his hands. He'd already struggled first with the foil wrapper, then with the wire, and now he was looking at the cork as though it was one of life's profound mysteries.
"Don't point it at your face!" Hardy said. "They've been known to just blow off and take out the random eyeball."
"He's not used to this," Treya said, somewhat unnecessarily.
"So how do you get it off?" Glitsky asked.
Hardy reached for the bottle. "Why don't you just let a professional handle it? My partner will attend the window."
"The window?"
Frannie bowed graciously, crossed to the window over the sink and threw it open. Hardy turned to face the opening. "Now, one carefully turns the bottle, not the cork, and…" With a satisfying pop, the cork flew out the window into the warm evening. "Voila."
And then the glasses were poured and the four adults stood together in the tiny kitchen. "If I might ask," Hardy said, "what's the occasion? Frannie's guess is you're pregnant again."
Glitsky let out a mock scream.
"Read that as a no," Treya said simply. "But I'll propose the toast, okay? Here's to former homicide inspector Dan Cuneo. May his new position bring him happiness and success."
Hardy looked at Glitsky. "What new position?"
"He just got named head ofsecurity for Bayshore Auto-tow. Marcel called me this morning and thought I'd want to know. Cuneo's out of the department with a big raise and great benefits."
"How did that happen?" Hardy asked.
"Well, you might not be surprised to hear that his stock in homicide fell a bit after Hanover, Diz. He felt that people were starting to look over his shoulder when he picked up new cases. They even made him take a new partner whose main job seemed to be to keep him in line. I guess he saw the writing on the wall."
"Yeah, but I'd heard he was up for the Tow/Hold gig way back when, not Bayshore."
"Right, but it's the same job. If he's qualified for one, he can do it for anybody."
"It's the qualified thing I'm thinking about. If he was known to be in such low standing in homicide…"
Glitsky's face was a mask. "I heard Harlan Fisk might have put in a good word to Bayshore on his behalf."
"But Harlan…"
"Kathy West's nephew Harlan, remember." "Okay, but why would he…?" Hardy asked. Treya jumped in. "You can't blame Cuneo for wanting out of homicide. They obviously didn't want him anymore. Now this new job gets him off the force and everybody's happy."
"So it's over," Hardy said.
Glitsky nodded. "He was essentially through when you finished with him in court, Diz. But now he's not just through. He's really, truly gone."
"That really does call for a toast," Frannie said.
But Hardy had a last question. "I'm just wondering how it happened. I can see Kathy passing the information along to Harlan, but how would she have heard about an opening like that?"
A glint showed in Glitsky's eyes. He shrugged with an exaggerated nonchalance. "Somebody must have told her," he said. Without further ado, he raised his glass. "Well, dear and true friends, here's to life. L'chaim!"