Glitsky’s eyes had turned inward. He reached for his empty teacup, sucked at it, put it back on the table.

Hardy was watching him. ‘What?’

The two guys used a vast vocabulary of the unsaid, a shorthand of connection. Glitsky nodded. ‘We got our first woman inspector in the detail, up from vice. Sarah Evans. Very sharp, good, solid person. She got teamed with Lanier and pulled the case.’

‘And she doesn’t think it looks like a suicide?’

‘Your insight never lets up, does it?’

Hardy nodded genially. ‘It’s why people both love and fear me,’ he said. ‘So this Sarah Evans is hot for a righteous murder investigation, and you’re afraid she might be seeing things that aren’t there?’

This time Glitsky’s smile bordered on the genuine. ‘You got it all figured out. Why do you need me?’

‘I don’t. You’re just such a blast to hang out with. But I’m right?’

‘Let’s say you’re not all wrong.’

‘But there was this trauma? Evans noticed the trauma?’

‘And a couple of other things.’

Sarah Evans fancied herself a no-nonsense professional police person, and not too many people would disagree with her. After a decade of hard work she had conquered the perils of the job and the myriad sexual stereotypes of her superiors. Finally she’d attained her personal career goal and had been promoted to sergeant inspector of homicide.

She had spent the weekend working on the death of Sal Russo. From the outset something hadn’t felt right about it to her. She’d sensed that Sal’s apartment was trying to tell her something, though she knew how stupid that would sound if she verbalized it. She didn’t know how to convey the idea to her partner, a veteran male named Marcel Lanier. (A redundancy, she realized, since all veteran homicide inspectors in San Francisco were male.)

Still, the chair in the kitchen in Sal Russo’s apartment had been overturned, there were fresh chip marks in the counter.