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  MONDAY, FEBRUARY 9

  TED SMALLEY

  The ficus tree in Shar’s office at the end of the pier was dying—which was strange for a fake plant. Leaves cascaded over the armchair by the big arching window overlooking the bay and littered the beige carpet. He picked one up: it felt brittle. Well, silk didn’t last forever; probably it had dried up from too much sun. He’d check into how much it would cost to replace it.

  He knew a fair amount about silk now, since he’d decided to make it his next fashion statement. A crash course on the Internet and a discussion with Derek had informed him it would be an expensive proposition, but it was his last resort. Over the years since he graduated from Penn and moved to San Francisco he’d gone through a retro hippie period (bare feet and shaggy hair); an Edwardian phase (velvet frock coats and jeans); a professorial look (tweed jackets with elbow patches and cords); a grunge stage (torn jeans and ripped tees), a junior executive suit-and-tie shtick (that had lasted only six weeks), a Hawaiian shirt craze (he’d loved it, his longest); and two years of cowboying (Western wear, complete with boots and hat and now growing stale). He’d also made detours into leather, Goth, all-cotton casual, and lurid polyester, but none had lasted long.

  To tell the truth, coming up with new looks was wearying. He continued only because his friends and his life partner, Neal Osborn, expected it of him. Maybe if he liked the silk statement he’d stick with it, or go back to Hawaiian. One thing for sure, he wasn’t reprising grunge.

  He was still standing by the window musing over silk when Shar came in. She looked terrible.

  Not terrible meaning sick, but tired and on edge and slightly unkempt. Of course, until her hair grew out fully, she was bound not to look her best.

  She set her briefcase down on her desk with a thud. Glanced at him and said, “What’re you doing here?”

  No usual pleasant greeting. Wound tight, and it would only get worse as the day progressed. Common sense told him to make a speedy exit.

  Common sense did not prevail.

  “The ficus,” he said, “it’s dying.”

  She snorted, lowered herself—painfully, it seemed to him—into her desk chair. “How can a fake plant die?”

  “The light’s pretty intense. It’s dried up.”

  “So throw the thing out.”

  “I can check on replacement costs—”

  “Ted, that plant was expensive five years ago. This agency is not exactly minting money right now.”

  “Well, what about a real one?”

  She was riffling through the briefcase, not finding whatever she was after. “Who the hell is going to feed and water a plant?”

  “Kendra would be glad to. She’s growing a beautiful orchid on her desk.” Kendra Williams, his assistant—the Paragon of the Paper Clips, he called her, but her skills ranged far and wide.

  “Kendra has better things to do.” She left off rummaging in the briefcase, bowed her head, and folded her hands, began breathing deeply. After a moment she said, “Sorry. Rough morning. I didn’t mean to take it out on you.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “My cat died in her sleep last night. Allie.”

  Allie—the calico that, along with her butterscotch littermate Ralph, Shar had adopted as kittens years ago. They’d been an unwise gift from a well-meaning friend of Ted’s buddy Harry, shortly before Harry died of AIDS. Ted felt a twinge, remembering the little rambunctious furballs and the affectionate adult cats they’d become. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll talk later. You need some time to get yourself sorted out.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Ted moved toward the door, but Shar’s voice stopped him. “Ted, get a real plant, would you? And thank Kendra in advance for tending to it.”

  ADAH JOSLYN

  Okay, she thought, initialing an invoice, that’s the lot of them. Now she could get around to that stack of reports and then review the week’s assignments with Patrick. Desk work she was used to: as a homicide investigator with the SFPD she’d spent a lot of time in the field—grueling time that had taxed her emotions and her very soul. But always there’d been the reports and other paperwork. This job, it seemed like her former one cut in half.

  And she didn’t have to worry about being summoned on an almost daily basis to yet another ugly crime scene.

  As she pulled the pile of reports toward her she sensed a presence. She looked over her shoulder and saw Ted in the doorway. His fine features were sad, his salt-and-pepper hair and goatee unkempt, as if he’d been clawing at them.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “I am. Shar’s not.”

  Alarm shot through her. “Oh, God, not a relapse—”

  “No. Her cat died.”

  To someone else it might’ve been an anticlimactic statement. But Adah was a lifelong cat lover, had cried on and off for days when her fat old Charley bought it. And she would be similarly devastated if she were to lose either That One and The Other One—abbreviated to One and Other—even though she and Craig had adopted the young tortoiseshells only a short time ago.

  “How’s Shar taking it?”

  “Not well, but she’ll be okay.”

  “Maybe we should suggest she take the day off.”

  “That’s the last thing she needs, being made to feel expendable.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Ted moved out of the doorway, went around the desk, and sat across from her.

  “Shar needs to feel she’s in charge here. She gave up the daily stuff to you—and she wanted to, even before she was shot—but she’s still the boss.”

  “I know that.”

  “Well, a lot of the time you don’t treat her that way. You act as if she’s some… cripple we keep on staff because she needs a job.”

  “What!”

  “That’s what I see, Adah.”

  “Look, she’s handling the appeal on the Andersen case. There’s a lot riding on that, and she knows it.”

  “Because you’ve impressed it on her several times in staff meetings: ‘Are you sure you’re up to it, Shar? Do you need help?’ ”

  Adah replayed the tape in her mind. Ted was right—she’d been just short of patronizing.

  “Cut her some slack, Adah. Like she cut you some when you had that meltdown years ago.”

  God, she didn’t want to be reminded of that time! Assigned as a liaison by the PD to a special FBI task force where she wasn’t welcomed. Alternately bullied and dismissed by the all-male field agents. Finally she’d cracked under the pressure, lashed out, crashed and burned. Shar—and Craig, then the only member of the task force who’d been remotely decent to her—had been her rocks. Afterward she’d pulled herself together and vowed never to let her emotions get the better of her again.

  But her experience had been different from Shar’s, whose occasional lapses into confusion and forgetfulness stemmed from much more serious roots. And it hadn’t helped that since Shar’s return to work, none of the clients who had contracted with the agency presented problems serious or complex enough to intrigue her. The whole point of turning over the administrative work to Adah was so Shar could be free to work on the bigger cases, but none had come their way. No wonder the lapses: she must be bored out of her mind.

  “Okay,” Adah said to Ted. “I hear you.”

  “I knew you would.”

  “Oh, did you? Why?”

  “Because everybody around this place listens to the Grand Poobah.”

  CRAIG MORLAND

  He sent a silly text message to Adah, one of the kind that people in love do: “U R so great. C U 2nite.”

  Then he went along the catwalk to the office of Thelia Chen, the agency’s financial expert, shared with Patrick Neilan, the operative who coordinated the firm’s investigations. Patrick—red haired, freckled, with badly rumpled clothing—was writing on one of his whiteboard flow charts and stealing glances at Thel
ia—a petite woman, with straight black hair that flowed nearly to her waist and exquisite facial features. She was totally focused on her computer screen.

  Patrick, Craig knew, secretly lusted after Thelia, but she came encumbered with a doctor husband and daughters aged seven and ten. And Patrick came encumbered too—a divorced father with sole custody of boys aged eight and nine. Caring for them, plus the heavy demands of his job, had pretty much put a chill on the romance department: every time he met someone unattached whom he was attracted to, she took one look at the Neilan ménage and bolted.

  “Thelia,” Craig said, taking a seat in the spare chair, “I’ve just been going over the Andersen Associates appeals file. It looks solid to me. Do you think there’s anything we’ve overlooked?”

  Andersen Associates was a defense contractor that had been convicted of bilking the government out of nearly ninety million dollars on contracts for rebuilding the infrastructure of Kabul, Afghanistan. Thelia’s initial investigation had revealed the accusation to be suspect; Shar’s deeper inquiry had indicated that the Internet blogger who first published the exposé and a chief witness for the prosecution had colluded in altering evidence for personal gain. The appeal was scheduled for next month.

  “If we’d missed anything, their lawyers would’ve caught it. How come you’re concerned with Andersen?” Chen asked, not taking her eyes off the monitor.

  “Adah asked me to prep on it, in case Shar can’t handle the testimony.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Well, she conducted her investigation over a year ago. Before she was shot.”

  “And?”

  “Adah thought she might not make the most reliable witness.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes she’s not as quick as she used to be. And she forgets details.”

  Thelia swiveled to face him, removing her round glasses and looking severe. “There’s nothing wrong with her memory or grasp of the facts, Craig. And the reason she’s not always quick is that she tires easily.”

  “Right. Adah’s afraid she could get rattled on the stand, lose it—”

  “I doubt that’s going to happen. She’ll be fully prepared and rested.”

  “I don’t know. Adah was thinking maybe I should take over her testimony. Or you should.”

  “Shar’s the one who did most of the work. I only provided preliminary data. And you weren’t involved at all. The judge wants to hear from the primary investigator.”

  He couldn’t think of an immediate response.

  “Anyway,” Chen went on, “it’s not Adah’s call. An executive administrator doesn’t make decisions like that. If anyone other than Shar should, it’s Patrick.”

  He looked up from his chart and raised his hands. “I just keep track of where things’re going. I don’t assign which people should do them.”

  “If you ask me,” Chen added, “you and Adah are trying to usurp Shar’s responsibilities. I’ve heard a lot of negative talk around here about how she’s not the woman she used to be. And in some ways she isn’t: she has emotional as well as physical problems to overcome. But she’s making great progress and is perfectly capable of handling this testimony.”

  “Why’re you so sure of that? You haven’t been with the agency very long. You don’t know her the way Adah and I do.”

  Chen’s eyes narrowed; they looked much like Adah’s when she was taking Craig to task for some transgression.

  She said, “My husband, Keith? You know he’s a neurologist at UC Med Center.”

  Craig nodded.

  “After Shar was released from Brandt she went to him for a second opinion on how she was doing. He confirmed everything Dr. Saxnay at the Institute said. She only has to believe in herself, and she’s going to be fine.”

  “But does she believe?”

  “It’s up to those of us who care for her to make sure she does.” Chen turned back to her computer.

  Why did he feel like a kid who’d been chastised for something he hadn’t done? Craig looked at Patrick, who shrugged.

  He got up and left the office. Despite Chen’s opinion, he planned to continue to familiarize himself with the Andersen Associates file.

  SHARON McCONE

  Mick’s e-mailed report on Piper Quinn and Melinda Knowles was in my in-box at around ten-thirty. The note appended to it said he was sorry for not transmitting it sooner, but he’d had a late breakfast meeting with a client and then wanted to verify a few facts after coming into the office. The delay was irritating, but I didn’t express that in my return note. No use taking out my grief for Allie on others. Besides, Mick had worked on the weekend.

  What he’d found out was intriguing.

  The basic facts about Piper were unsurprising. Born in Denver to Catharine and James Quinn, both deceased. Mainly raised in Homewood, a suburb of Oklahoma City. An only child. Graduated Homewood High School and the Academy of Computer Graphics in Santa Cruz. Sole proprietor, Quinn Graphics, San Francisco.

  Nothing there I wouldn’t have guessed, and the deceased parents and lack of siblings told me why no relative had come to see her at Brandt. I turned to the next page of the detailed report. Piper had been married six years ago to Ryan Middleton, a marine stationed at Camp Pendleton in Southern California; the couple had made minor news because their wedding had been sparked by winning a cruise to Mexico in a supermarket-opening raffle. They lived together intermittently for two years, then Middleton was deployed to Iraq. A year ago, Piper had petitioned for a divorce, citing irreconcilable differences.

  Why, I wondered? Well, the marriage had been long-distance from the first and then he’d undertaken a second tour of duty in the Middle East. Those conditions more than constituted a breakdown in the relationship.

  It was a moot point, because Middleton never returned the divorce papers. And seven months ago, he and two other marine officers were killed by a suicide bomber outside an office building in Mosul, the country’s third-largest city and a turbulent stronghold for Sunni insurgents. His flag-draped coffin joined the steady stream of those coming back to be buried in military cemeteries across the nation—in his case, Holy Cross in Colma, south of San Francisco. His wife was still in the Brandt Institute at the time and unable to attend the interment. The final notation in his service jacket was that his personal effects had been shipped to Piper.

  No wonder she didn’t like to talk about the past.

  I skimmed through the rest of the report, mostly backgrounding on Piper’s accident, nothing I didn’t already know, then turned to the one on Melinda Knowles.

  She didn’t exist. At least in relation to Piper.

  Lots of Melinda Knowleses across the country, but none in Homewood, Oklahoma. None of her approximate age in the entire state. I shut my eyes and reviewed my conversation with her:

  “I’m from a little town near Oklahoma City. You wouldn’t know of it.”

  “The town where Piper is from?”

  “… If she’d stayed home, this awful thing never would have happened to her.”

  Yes, Knowles had represented herself as being from Piper’s hometown. I flipped back to the report on Piper: no mention of an aunt living in Homewood or anyplace else. I sent a quick e-mail to Mick, thanking him and asking him to dig deeper on Knowles and get preliminary background on Ryan Middleton, then left the office.

  I wouldn’t wait to see if Piper made it to rehab today. I’d check on her now.

  As I went past Ted’s office, he called out, “Three messages from your mother, one from John.”

  I kept going.

  Fortunately I could catch the N-Judah streetcar at a close-by stop on the Embarcadero. As I sat, watching the bayside morph to downtown and then the Castro district and into the suburban-feeling inner Sunset, I reflected that there must be a better way to get around town than the Muni. And what if a case demanded I go out of town? How could I possibly do that and still maintain my independence?

  I couldn’t.

  Ther
e must be a solution—and I would find it.

  I got off the streetcar at Ninth Avenue and walked the two blocks to Piper’s apartment building on Tenth.

  The first thing I noticed was that the wheelchair ramp was gone. Strange: she still had occasional need for it. Then I saw that the front door was again off the latch. This wasn’t a high-risk neighborhood, but the residents’ security precautions seemed irresponsibly lax. I went in, crossed to Piper’s door. It, too, was ajar. I moved through it.

  Into an empty apartment.

  No Chinese prints on the walls in the hallway. No furniture grouped around the gas-log fireplace. No dining table. Not even indentations where the furniture had stood on the carpet. The odor of fresh paint was in the air. I went to the kitchen and found the cabinets and refrigerator empty, the stove and oven shiny clean.

  From there I moved to the closed door off the living room. A narrow bedroom, empty. The closet contained nothing. I checked the shelf, found only a wire hanger jammed into a far corner. The next door opened onto a bathroom with nothing in the over-the-sink medicine cabinet or linen storage. The last door led to what must have been Piper’s office; multiple heavy-duty power outlets indicated so, but there was no sign of recent occupancy.

  It was as if she’d never lived here.

  Never existed.

  I reached down to touch the carpet. Dry, but my fingers came away smelling sweet—a faint floral aroma. That explained the lack of indentations from the furniture: someone had recently done heavy-duty cleaning as well as painting here.

  I began to prowl, looking for some trace of Piper.

  But there was nothing except for the hanger in the closet.

  It had been less than seventy-two hours since I’d seen her. This makeover had been clean, fast, and efficient. Why?

  I went out to the vestibule and checked the mailboxes; no labels on any of them. Upstairs I rang the bell of the second-floor apartment. No reply there. Same on the third floor. I was somewhat winded from the climb, so I sat down on the top step and phoned the agency, asked for Adah, and explained the situation.