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Wife number one was Sandra, the mother of their daughter, Caitlin. She’d died inside their two-car garage in 1994, hanged herself. The second Mrs. O’Malley, Lorelei née Breen, murdered yesterday at age thirty-nine, had been arrested for shoplifting in ’98. Fined and released.

I did the same drill on Alice and Jake Daltry, and reams of information scrolled onto my screen. Jake and Alice had been married for eight years and had left twin boys, age six, when they were slaughtered in their yellow house in Crescent Heights. I pictured that cute place with its sliver of bay view, the abandoned basketball, and the child’s sneaker.

Then I focused back on the screen.

Jake had been a bad boy before he married Alice. I clicked down through his rap sheet: soliciting a prostitute and forging his father’s signature on his Social Security checks, for which he served six months, but he’d been clean for the last eight years and had a full-time job working in a pizzeria in town.

Wife Alice, thirty-two, had no record. She’d never even run a light or backed into a car at the supermarket.

Still, she was dead.

So what did this add up to?

I phoned Claire, and she picked up on the first ring. We got right into it.

“Claire, can you dig around for me? I’m looking for some kind of link between the O’Malley murder and those of Alice and Jake Daltry.”

“Sure, Lindsay. I’ll reach out to a few of my colleagues around the state. See what I can find.”

“And also could you look into Sandra O’Malley? Died in 1994, hanged herself.”

We talked for a few more minutes, about Claire’s husband, Edmund, and a sapphire ring he’d given her for their anniversary. And we talked about a little girl named Ali who could channel pigs.

When I hung up the phone, I felt as if I were breathing air of a richer kind. I was about to close down my computer when something caught my eye. When Lorelei O’Malley went to trial for boosting a twenty-dollar pair of earrings, a local lawyer by the name of Robert Hinton had represented her.

I knew Bob Hinton.

His card was still in the pocket of my shorts from the morning he had mowed me down with his ten-speed.

And as I remembered it, the guy owed me a favor.

Chapter 54

BOB HINTON’S OFFICE WAS a shoe box of space on Main Street, nestled between Starbucks and a bank. Taking the chance that he might be in on a Saturday, I pushed open the glass door and saw Bob sitting behind a large wooden desk, his balding scalp bent over the San Francisco Examiner.

He jerked his head up and his arm flew out, knocking over his coffee and spilling it across his newspaper. I saw the picture on the front page just before it became a coffee-sodden mess. It was a close-up of a fair-haired boy in a wheelchair.

Sam Cabot. My own little nightmare.

“Sorry, Bob, I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”

“You have nothing to be s-s-sorry for,” Bob said. He adjusted his pink-framed glasses and pulled some paper napkins out of his desk drawer to blot the spill. “Have a seat. Please.”

“Thank you. I will.”

Bob asked me how I was getting along in Half Moon Bay, and I told him I was managing to keep busy.

“I was just reading about you, Lieutenant,” he said, mopping the front page of the paper with a wad of napkins.

“There are no secrets in a nanosecond world,” I said with a smile. Then I told Bob that I’d become interested in the homicides that were going on a few miles from my door and wondered what he could tell me.

“I knew Lorelei O’Malley,” he said. “Represented her on a case. Got her off with a wrist slap,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “I know Ben only slightly. People are saying he must have had something to do with Lorelei’s death, but I can’t see him killing Caitlin’s stepmother. The child was so traumatized by her real mother’s suicide.”

“Cops always look at the spouse first.”

“Sure. I know. I’ve got friends on the force. I grew up in Half Moon Bay,” he explained, “and I started practicing here right after law school. I like being a small fish in a small pond.”