The Motive Read Online Free Page B

morning—Thursday—Treya, seventeen days late, had taken the home pregnancy test, and it had been positive. Her husband invariably left their duplex by 7:00 A.M. ,so he’d already gone in to work when she found out. She worked in the same Hall of Justice as he did, as personal secretary to San Francisco’s district attorney, Clarence Jackman, but though she’d now been at her job for the better part of three hours, she hadn’t worked up the courage to call Abe and tell him.
    They’d avoided pretty much all discussion of whether they’d have more children after Rachel, but Treya didn’t feel as though she’d been sneaky with this latest development. They both knew they were doing nothing to prevent it. Surely that was a sign of Abe’s tacit approval.
    But she wasn’t completely sure.
    While watering the plants in Jackman’s outer office, which doubled as a no-frills reception area for the DA’s appointments, she caught sight of herself in the wall mirror and realized that she’d been biting her lips and had scraped her lipstick off, top and bottom. Stepping closer to the mirror, she saw traces of it on her teeth. Nerves. She had to call Abe and let him know right now. She had just finished scratching the lipstick off and was returning around the front of her desk to do just that when Dismas Hardy, Jackman’s eleven o’clock and Abe’s great friend, knocked at the side of the open hallway door. And the phone rang.
    “If that’s for me, I’m in training for a marathon and can’t be disturbed,” Hardy said.
    Treya shot him an amused and tolerant look and reached over the desk to pick up the phone. “DA’s office.” She came around the desk and sat in her chair, frowning. “No,” she said, “what about her?” Treya listened for another moment, then shook her head. “I haven’t heard a thing, and nobody’s called Clarence about anything like that. Yes, I’m sure. Do you want me to ask Diz? He’s here.”
    Hardy looked over in some surprise.
    Treya held up a finger, listened, then spoke across to him. “Kathy West”—the mayor, on her job now for about five months—“wants to see Abe. He wonders if you might have heard about anything going on at City Hall?”
    “Just the rumor that she was firing him, but I don’t believe it.”
    Treya spoke into the phone. “He hasn’t heard anythingeither.” She listened. “Okay. Well, whatever it is, I wouldn’t worry. No, I know. Good luck.”
    She hung up, and realizing that she hadn’t told her husband her own news,
their
own news, she bit at her lip again.
    “Are you all right?” Hardy asked.
    “I’m fine. Just a little distracted.
    “Well,” Hardy copped Billy Crystal’s old
Saturday Night Live
accent, “it’s not how you feel but how you look, and dahling, you look mahvelous.” When Treya didn’t react, Hardy went sober. “Is Abe really worried? Are you?”
    “I don’t think so. He’d just rather be prepared whenever it’s possible.”
    “You’re kidding? Abe?” Then: “I do wonder what Kathy wants, though.”
    “Whatever it is, it’s got to be important, don’t you think? She wanted him ASAP,” she said. “And in person.”
    Kathy West had been a city supervisor for six terms and, during the last couple of years before her election to mayor, had been a regular at Clarence Jackman’s informal “kitchen cabinet” meetings, held most Tuesdays at Lou the Greek’s bar and restaurant, located just across the street from the Hall of Justice. Glitsky—and Treya and Hardy, for that matter—were also members, so there was a history of goodwill and mutual respect between the deputy chief and the mayor.
    Nevertheless, Glitsky did not feel free to sit down and relax in her office, but stood at ease in the center of her rug.
    Nor did Kathy West come out from behind her large and ornate desk. Through the open double windows behind her, downtown San Francisco shimmered mostly white as the fog burned away. Small-boned and