Backfire

“You’re easy, Aunt Eve,” Emma said, and gave her a fat kid grin.

“Yeah, your music is my downfall.”

Sherlock hugged her. “You’re eleven years old, Emma. You’ll make everyone weep when you have more life under your belt.”

—

Molly arrived at nine o’clock to take the children home. Savich brought down Cal and Gage, both deeply asleep, one draped over each shoulder. He saw Molly speaking quietly to Sherlock. Molly even managed a smile. Excellent. Then it was his turn.

An SFPD black-and-white was parked across the street to follow Molly home.

Sherlock asked, “What were you talking to Molly about, Dillon?”

“Ramsey was more lucid this evening. He described the Zodiac to Molly again.” He cupped his wife’s face in his big hands. “Cheney will find it. Now, I don’t think I woke Sean up when I fetched Cal and Gage, but he’s got ears like a bat; we should check on him again.”

Russian Hill

Friday night

It had been a lovely evening, Eve thought, as she unlocked the front door of her condo on Russian Hill, only a ten-minute drive this time of night from the Sherlock home on Mulberry in Pacific Heights. She couldn’t get over Agent Sherlock playing the piano like that. She pictured Agent Savich—no, Dillon, he’d told her—his eyes never leaving his wife’s face. He said that after you shared a dinner of barbecued pork spareribs and finger licking, only first names sounded right. “But you’re a vegetarian,” she’d said to him. “You didn’t eat any of those delicious ribs.”

He said, “Licking your fingers is the operative image here.”

Eve wondered what Harry had thought of the odd evening—an FBI agent playing Bach, and no talk of who had tried to kill Ramsey. When she’d mentioned that to Dillon, he’d said only, “Don’t you think your brain does better when it gets to stir a different kind of stew for a bit?”

Good people, she thought, full of life, so much of it. Some people seemed to have more of life in them than others, and that included Sean, brought downstairs after dinner, beaming at all of them in his Transformers pajamas.

She saw Harry in her mind’s eye, frankly astonished when Emma had played Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Then he’d closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the chair cushion as he listened to Sherlock play that incredibly sad second movement.

She heard a noise, something close, something dangerous—she jerked around, her hand going to the Glock at her waist. Harry said, raising his arms, palms toward her, “Don’t shoot me. It’s only ten o’clock. I thought we should talk. Sorry to alarm you, I thought you saw me following you here.”

Her heart was pounding. She couldn’t make him out clearly, but she recognized his voice. “I can’t believe I didn’t hear you sooner. I can hear ants nesting. I never noticed you behind me, and here you were driving that hot Shelby.”

“How can you protect Judge Hunt if you don’t pay more attention to who’s on your tail?”

He got her, curse him. “Yeah, you’re right, but that’ll be the last time. Talk would be good. Come on in. I’ll put on some coffee. So it’s only ten o’clock? What does that have to do with my shooting you?”

“No shooting until after midnight, that’s the rule.”

“Haven’t heard that one. I think it’s smart to talk about the case.”

“So what do ants sound like when they’re nesting?”

She grinned at him over her shoulder as she unlocked the door to a small lobby with a black-and-white tiled floor, black mailboxes set against a stark white wall, and a half-dozen palm trees in green and blue pots stationed in the corners. She waved him in. “The elevator’s a 1920s job that creaks and groans all the way up. Scares most people, but I love it. Still, I prefer to walk up. Keeps yummy things like spareribs from making a home on my thighs.” They walked steep, wide stairs to the third and top floor.

“I’m on the end.” The corridor was wide, covered in a red carpet splashed with cabbage roses that should have made Harry bilious. Instead he found it curiously charming. She stopped in front of a blue door, unlocked it, and stepped in. She flipped on the light, waved him in.

Eve’s living room wasn’t what Harry was expecting, although he wasn’t quite sure what that would be, since he’d only met her earlier in the day. Maybe a black leather sofa and chairs and lots of gym mats on the floor? No, the living room was light, airy, filled with color. There was a view of the city through the big windows and a sliver of a view of the bay. He followed her to the kitchen, streamlined but softened with fresh flowers in a vase on the two-seater kitchen table, herbs in small pots lining the windowsill over the sink. It was painted a soft yellow.