Betrayal by John Lescroart

abreast of him. Now he looked over at her, in her T-shirt, jeans, and sandals. “Hey.” Low-key.
    “What are you doing?”
    “Just sitting here. Enjoying the night.” She seemed to need more explanation and he gave it to her. “I was a little wound up earlier. I thought I’d decompress a little before braving the roads again. I thought you’d be asleep by now.”
    “No,” she said. “I was wound up too.” Pausing, she let out a small breath. “I read Evan’s letters. I think he’s still confused. I know I am.”
    “About what?”
    “Us. Me and him. What I’m going to do.”
    “What do you want to do about Evan?”
    “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be confused, would I? I haven’t been fair to him either. I should write and tell him what I’ve been feeling.”
    “And what is that?”
    “That maybe we still have a chance if he’s willing to try to get through all this stuff. But that has to be in the future, when he gets back, if he does get back. I can’t commit again until then, till we see what we’ve got. Does that sound fair to you?”
    “I’m not an unbiased source,” he said. “It sounds to me like you just said you weren’t committed to him.”
    “We broke up five months ago, Ron.” She took in a breath. “What were you really doing out here?” she asked.
    “I was enjoying the night, the smells, the absence of gunfire.” He looked up at her. “I was also hoping you might not be able to sleep and you’d see me down here, and that you’d come down and that I’d see you again. Maybe walk you back to your door.”
    After a second, she said, “You could do that.”

[6]
     
    I N S AN F RANCISCO, Deputy Chief of Inspectors Abe Glitsky entered the homicide detail at nine-thirty on the following Monday morning. Darrel Bracco, one of Glitsky’s early protégés, looked up from the report he was writing and almost spilled his coffee standing up to attention, saluting, yelling, “Ten-hut!”
    Glitsky felt the scar through his lips straining against the rare urge to smile. In the end, as usual, the smile never appeared. Some inspectors in the room looked up, of course, though nobody else went military on him. But Bracco was still on his feet, expectantly. He evidently had some knowledge of why the head of homicide, Lieutenant Marcel Lanier, had summoned the deputy chief. “Marcel told me to keep an eye out for you, sir. I was just warning him that you’re here.”
    Glitsky stopped. “On the off chance that he’s misbehaving in some way?”
    “You never know,” Bracco said. He fell in beside Glitsky, then nodded at another inspector, a woman named Debra Schiff, who looked up and was getting to her feet while Bracco went on. “Schiff was in there with him with the door closed for an hour already this morning. To look at her, you’d never know she was a screamer.”
    Schiff, gathering some stuff from her desk, nodded at Abe and replied in a conversational tone, “Bite me, Darrel.”
    Glitsky kept walking, Bracco and Schiff behind him. At Lanier’s open door, he knocked. The lieutenant was on the phone, feet up on his desk, and waved everybody in. His new office upstairs was at least twice as large as the cubicle he (and Glitsky before him) had inhabited one floor below. There was room for as many as half a dozen people in front of his desk, with four chairs folded up against the back wall with its “Active Homicides” blackboard. Glitsky unfolded one of the chairs and let the other two inspectors grab theirs.
    “I understand,” Lanier was saying into the phone. “Yes, sir. That’s why I’ve asked Abe to come down and get briefed. No”—he rolled his eyes with the tedium of it all—“I realize we don’t want to…” He moved the telephone away from his ear and Glitsky could hear a voice he recognized as Frank Batiste’s, the chief of police. So whatever this was about, it had some profile already. “Yes, sir,” Lanier repeated in the next pause, “that’s the idea. I