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Satanic Santa case. What was it they called you—Supercop? She was impressed.”
    Gurney grimaced. Several possible responses collided in his head, all canceling each other out.
    Hardwick seemed encouraged by his silence. “She’d love to meet you. Oh, did I mention? She’s drop-dead gorgeous, early forties but looks about thirty-two. And she made it clear that money wasn’t an issue. You could pretty much name your price. Seriously—twohundred dollars an hour would not be a problem. Not that you’d be motivated by anything as common as money.”
    “Speaking of motives, what’s in it for you?”
    Hardwick’s effort to sound innocent instead sounded comical. “Seeing justice done? Helping out a family that’s been through hell? I mean, losing a child’s got to be the worst thing in the world, right?”
    Gurney froze. The mention of losing a child still had the power to send a tremor through his heart. It was more than fifteen years since Danny, barely four at the time, had stepped into the street when Gurney wasn’t looking, but grief, he’d discovered, was not an experience you went through once and then “moved on” (as the idiotic popular phrase would have it). The truth was that it came over you in successive waves—waves separated by periods of numbness, periods of forgetfulness, periods of ordinary living.
    “You still there?”
    Gurney grunted.
    Hardwick went on. “I want to do what I can for these people. Besides—”
    “Besides,” Gurney broke in, speaking fast, forcing his debilitating emotion aside, “if I did get involved, which I have no intention of doing, it would drive Rodriguez batshit, wouldn’t it? And if I managed to come up with something, something new, something significant, it would make him and Blatt look really bad, wouldn’t it? Might that be one of your perfectly good reasons?”
    Hardwick cleared his throat again. “That’s a fucked-up way of looking at it. Fact is, we got a tragically bereaved mother here who isn’t satisfied with the progress of the police investigation—which I can understand, since the incompetent Arlo Blatt and his crew have rousted every Mexican in the county and haven’t come up with so much as a taco fart. She’s desperate for a real detective. So I’m laying this golden egg in your lap.”
    “That’s great, Jack, but I’m not in the PI business.”
    “For the love of God, Davey, just talk to her. That’s all I’m asking you to do. Just talk to her. She’s lonely, vulnerable, beautiful, with big bucks to burn. And deep down inside, Davey boy, deep downinside there’s something wild in that woman. I guarantee it. Cross my heart and hope to die!”
    “Jack, the last thing I need right now—”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re happily married, in love with your wife, yadda, yadda, yadda. All right. Fine. And maybe you don’t care about a chance to reveal Rod Rodriguez finally and absolutely as the total asshole he really is. Okay. But this case is
complex.
” He gave the word a depth of meaning, made it sound like the most precious of all characteristics. “It’s got
layers
to it, Davey. It’s a fucking onion.”
    “So?”
    “You’re a natural-born onion peeler—the best that ever was.”

Chapter 3
Elliptical orbits
    W hen Gurney finally noticed Madeleine at the den door, he wasn’t sure how long she’d been standing there, nor even how long he himself had been at the den window facing the back pasture that ran up toward the wooded ridge behind the house. To save his life, he could not have described the pasture’s current pattern of blazing goldenrod, browning grasses, and wild blue asters at which he had appeared to be gazing, but he could have come very close to reciting Hardwick’s telephone narrative word for word.
    “So?” said Madeleine.
    “So?” he repeated, as though he hadn’t understood the question.
    She smiled impatiently.
    “That was Jack Hardwick.” He was about to ask if she remembered Jack Hardwick,