Lucy had to laugh, and it felt good for a minute, but then she thought about the three hours she’d spent that morning going through a half dozen rooms at her grandmother’s house, with nothing to show for it except, literally, an aching back. She said as she stretched a bit, “If I end up smacking you, I swear you’ll deserve it.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Oh, my back. My grandmother’s got so much stuff, it’s taking me forever.”

“You need some help with that?”

Are you nuts? Shut up, shut up. “No, that’s not why I said it, merely an observation. The longer you live, the more stuff you collect, I guess.”

Coop, who had grade-A cop radar, wondered why she was doing all that work by herself, but he let it go. The fact was she looked wrung out, not from a hangover from too much wine at The Swarm last night but from grief for her father. The last thing she needed was for him to start questioning her. At least he’d gotten a little laugh out of her, and maybe she didn’t think he was such a loser playboy anymore. He heard himself say, “I told you I’m not a dog when it comes to women.”

She didn’t blink. “We’ll see.”

That was something, he thought. “Okay, like I said, we’re going to San Francisco. Here, let me show you the rest of the photos of Kirsten Bolger, then let’s get packed. Shirley made reservations for the four-o’clock flight to SFO.”

Lucy’s heart leaped when she saw the photos side by side. Kirsten Bolger—was she really the killer? She thought briefly of all the thousands of square feet she still had to search in her grandmother’s house, and the hundreds of books in the study. That all paled in comparison to this. Whatever was in her grandmother’s house could wait. It had already waited twenty-two years; what was a couple more days? Nothing was going anywhere.

She asked, “So, where are we staying in San Francisco?”

“I’ll go butter Shirley up, see if she can’t get us an upgrade from the usual Motel Four and a Half. Hey, what’s the matter?”

“I was thinking about the media.”

“Try not to.”

CHAPTER 15

San Francisco

Friday evening

It was a warm evening in San Francisco, and go figure, Coop thought as he shrugged off his leather jacket. He had to admit shirtsleeves felt nice after the near-freezing temperatures they’d left behind in Washington.

He hadn’t visited San Francisco in four, five years, but he remembered the air, how it usually felt crisp and fresh, didn’t matter if it was foggy or rainy or sunny. He breathed in deep, and the air was as he remembered it—fresh and a little exotic, with a touch of the ocean in it.

Both he and Lucy had brought single carry-ons, and both had their SIGs on belt clips after the usual involved paperwork with Dulles security.

The traffic was heavy on 101 into the city. Every once in a while, Coop leaned out the taxi window to look up at the bit of moon posing brighter in the sky with every minute as the sun was setting. Just beautiful. He and Lucy had plenty of time to discuss their plan of attack on the flight over, and were ready and anxious to get moving.

Coop dialed Inspector Vincent Delion’s cell as Lucy tried to understand some of the Russian the taxi driver was speaking on his cell to his wife. Or girlfriend. She’d taken Russian in school, but it sure hadn’t stuck.

“Yo, Delion here. That you, Agent McKnight?”

“That would be me,” Coop said.

“You got an Agent Carlyle with you?”

“Indeed I do.”

Delion said, “I sure hope you guys are hungry. I’ve gotten no calls from the media, which means no leaks yet, and believe me, that’s a real pleasant surprise.”

Thirty minutes later, Lucy and Coop walked into La Barca, a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street, Delion’s favorite Mexican restaurant in the city, he’d told Coop.

Coop recognized Inspector Vincent Delion immediately. He looked exactly how Savich had described him. “Hey,” he said, “very fine mustache. I’ll bet Hercule Poirot sends you hate mail.”

Delion laughed and gave a loving little twist to the ends of his glistening black handlebar mustache. He knew it was magnificent, a work of art. It was polished to a high gloss, nearly as shiny as his bald head.

“Too bad Poirot’s fiction, and Dame Agatha is dead, or I’ll bet he would,” Delion said with a good deal of satisfaction.

They all shook hands and sized one another up. Both Coop and Lucy recognized the cop in his eyes, eyes that looked ancient, filled with memories of stuff you really didn’t want to know about, eyes that had seen too much over too many years.