The Oath by John Lescroart

than anything,” Hardy said. “But not today, I’m afraid.”
    “Is that your final answer?”
    He pulled some of the papers over in front of him, desultorily flipped through the stack of them. A trained reporter like Elliot, if he’d been in the room, would have recognized some signs of weariness, even malaise. Certainly a lack of sense of humor. Hardy let out a heavy breath. “Write a great column, Jeff. Make me feel like I was there.”
     
     
     
    It wasn’t the kind of thing Glitsky was going to talk about with any of his regular professional associates, but he couldn’t keep from sharing his concerns with his wife.
    Jackman let Treya take a formal fifteen-minute break sometimes if she asked, and now she and Abe stood in the outside stairway on the Seventh Street side of the building, sipping their respective teas out of paper cups. An early afternoon wind had come up and they were forced to stand with their backs against the building, the view limited to the freeway and Twin Peaks out beyond it.
    “And here I thought you brought me to this romantic spot so we could make out in the middle of the day.”
    “We could do that if you want,” Glitsky told her. “I’m pretty easy that way.”
    She kissed him. “I’ve noticed. But you were really thinking of something else?”
    He told her about Markham, how intensely uncomfortable he was with coincidences, and Markham’s death fell squarely into that category. “But I wasn’t lying when I told Diz that probably it wasn’t an intentional homicide. That was the voice of thirty years’ experience whispering in my ear.”
    “But what?”
    “But my other guardian angel, the bad one, keeps on with this endless, ‘Maybe, what if, how about…”’
    “You mean if somebody ran him down on purpose?”
    He nodded. “I’m trying to imagine an early-morning, just-after-light, lying-in-wait scenario, but I can’t convince myself. It just couldn’t have happened in real life. Well, maybe it could have, but I don’t think it did.”
    “Why not?”
    She was about the only person he ever smiled at, and he did now. “How good of you to ask. I’ll tell you. The first and most obvious reason is that the driver didn’t finish the job. Markham lived nearly four hours after the accident, and if he hadn’t been thrown into the garbage can, he might have pulled through it. The driver couldn’t have known he’d killed him. If he’d planned to, he would either have backed up over him or stopped, got out of the car, and whacked Markham’s head a few times with a blunt object he’d been carrying for just that reason.”
    “Sweet,” Treya said.
    “But true.” He went on to give her the second reason, the one he’d given Hardy. A car was a stupid and awkward choice as a murder weapon. If someone were going to take the time to plan a murder and then lie in wait to execute it, with all the forethought that entailed, Abe thought even a moron would simply buy a gun, which was as easy if not easier to purchase, far more deadly, and simpler to get rid of than any vehicle would be.
    “Okay, I’m convinced. He probably wasn’t murdered.”
    “I know. That’s what I said. But…”
    “But you want to keep your options open.”
    “Correct. Which leads me to my real problem. Did you get the impression at lunch today that my friend and your boss Clarence Jackman is going to get considerable political heat around anything to do with Parnassus? The death of its CEO isn’t going to hide out in the Chronicle ’s back pages and then disappear in a couple of days when it isn’t solved.”
    “No, I don’t think so,” Treya agreed.
    “So who gets the case, which is definitely a homicide and might conceivably be, but probably isn’t, a murder?”
    Treya had been living with the problems within the homicide detail and had a good sense of the dilemma. In the normal course of events, Abe would never have anything to do with this case. It was a hit and run. Someone from