He dropped Christina's in on top.

'Okay,' he said, 'you're in the hopper. Next it goes to the committee.' He reached out a hand and touched her sleeve. 'After this it gets pretty objective, Chris. We'll just have to see what happens.'

All that to drop her envelope in a box! She had been finessed.

Christina was so angry that she didn't even feel her reaction until she'd kissed Joe goodbye by the elevator banks and ridden the twenty-one floors back down to the lobby that opened on to Market Street. There, she stopped still, her heart suddenly pounding.

Though it was short notice, Victor Trang had been only too happy to come down for an afternoon meeting with Mr Dooher, who was representing the Archdiocese.

As usual, Trang wasn't exactly loaded down with litigation and he was heartened by the almost immediate response represented by Dooher's call. Also, late in the day, he welcomed the excuse to leave his one-room office in the darkened back corner of a turn-of-the-century building near the Geneva Avenue off-ramp of the Junipero Serra Freeway – as bleak a setting as San Francisco offered.

As soon as possible, would he like to come downtown to the no-doubt elegantly appointed twenty-first floor of the One California Building and discuss this matter? Why, yes. He allowed as to how he could find the time.

He'd only brought the matter up with Dooher on the previous Thursday, and thought that this quick a reply boded well for an equally quick settlement, which was why he was in the game.

Mark Dooher wasn't drinking anything, but his secretary came in and served excellent French roast coffee in an almost-translucent white china cup with a thin band of gold at the rim. Trang was sitting before a mahogany coffee table on an Empire-style couch, looking across Dooher's spacious office and out through the floor-to-ceiling windows.