Betrayal (33 page)

Hardy sat back and crossed his legs. “So I take it you had the mom’s case?”

“Right.”

“And you were okay with the coroner’s call?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did you see anything or talk to anybody that made you think it wasn’t a suicide?”

“Generally, no. I mean, her husband had vanished a few months before. She’d made plans to go to Italy this summer, but the general feeling was that that was to try to put the desertion behind her, not to party. Most of her friends, and I talked to a lot of them, described her as devastated and depressed.”

“So what’s her daughter’s take?”

“I think pretty much the usual. Her mother just wouldn’t have done that. That’s not who she was. Then she points to the Europe trip. Hanna—the mom—was evidently pretty frugal. Tight as a drum, Jenna says. She would never have bought tickets to Italy and not used them. She would have killed herself afterward.”

Hardy allowed a small grin. “I know some people like that. Although putting off your own suicide until after you get your money’s worth might be stretching it. And that’s it? That’s the daughter’s reason she thinks it wasn’t suicide?”

“Originally, basically, yes.” Bracco drank some coffee, stared out the window for a moment.

Hardy had the impression he was trying to decide if he should say any more and thought he could help him along. “That’s a lot of disclaimer you’re throwing around. Originally. Basically. Do you have some doubts yourself? Is that why you’re digging here?”

Bracco’s mouth pursed as he continued to wrestle with whatever it was. “It was their rope, she slung it over a beam in the garage, got up on a little step-up ladder, and dropped off.”

“But…?”

Noticing that his coffee was finished, Bracco came forward in his chair and put the cup and saucer on the low table in front of him. Now he looked straight across at Hardy. “None of this worried me too much at the time, you understand. I had three other actives. This one went to the coroner and went away in a couple of days. It wasn’t until Jenna called me back a few days ago that I looked at it again.”

“And?”

“And her neck was broken.” He paused, then made his point more clearly. “Regular slipknot, no hangman’s noose, fifteen-inch fall.”

“You’re thinking she should have strangled.”

“Most people, those same conditions, that’s what happens.”

“But not always? Did you ask Strout?” This was the city’s medical examiner, who’d ruled the death a suicide.

“He says he’s seen a few where the fall and the weight breaks the neck.”

“Well, there you go.”

“Nobody who weighed as little as she did, though. A hundred and five pounds.” Hardy made no response; by itself this was interesting, certainly, but not conclusive. “And then,” Bracco went on, “there was the other thing Jenna didn’t think about originally, but remembers now.”

“What was that?”

“That her mother had decided that Charlie didn’t just disappear. That he’d been killed.”

“Someone in her position,” Hardy said, “that could easily be wishful thinking. That he didn’t leave her, he was taken from her instead. Big psychological difference.”

“Yeah,” Bracco said, “but the main thing is that Jenna says her mom was on a mission to find out who killed her dad and wouldn’t have killed herself in the middle of it.”

“Maybe she got to the end and found he’d really run out on her.”

“I said the same thing to Jenna. She totally disagreed. If her mom would have found that out, even then if she decided to kill herself, she would have left a note for Jenna so at least her daughter would know the truth.”

A short silence settled between the two men. “You’re saying you think it’s not impossible somebody killed Mrs. Bowen.”

“It’s not the kind of thing I’d try to sell to Glitsky. Not on what I’ve got now.”

“You got a motive?”

“You probably won’t love it.”

“Try me.”

“Somebody—the same person—killed the husband, too, and Hanna got too close to finding out.”

Hardy shook his head, suppressed the start of a smile. “A bona fide conspiracy theory. You’re right, that would be a tough sell to Glitsky.”

“That’s why I’d like to find that diary. It would be something real.”

Hardy thought that even if it existed, it still would be considerably less than a smoking gun. Stealing a quick glance at his watch, he decided he’d given Bracco enough time and a good listen. Bracco didn’t wear a wedding ring, and Hardy wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that the daughter, Jenna Bowen, was a pretty young thing. As for him, it was time to get back to work. He started to get up.

But Bracco suddenly came forward. “Anyway, the reason I wanted to see you in person. I’m just saying there might be something else in those files.”

“Some reason Bowen might have been killed, you mean?”

“Right.”

This time, Hardy let his grin blossom. “You know how many big moving boxes we’re talking about here, Inspector? Something like forty-five or fifty to go. Last time I checked, when he disappeared Charlie Bowen was covering two hundred and thirty-two active files, of which we’ve offloaded about eighty so far.” He softened his tone. “Which is not to say we won’t come upon something that looks fishy somewhere down the line, and if we do, I promise you’ll hear from us. From me. But I think you’re talking the original needle in a haystack.”

Chagrined, Bracco sat back and nodded. “Yeah, I can see that. Well…” He pushed himself up to his feet.

Hardy, rising himself, said, “If you get anything specific attached to some probable cause, you could always subpoena the files and have a special master go through them.”

“I could do that, but I don’t have any idea what I’m looking for.”

“Well, there’s that.” Hardy brightened. “Except the diary.”

“Right. Except the diary.”

“I’ll get somebody working on that before you hit the street.”

“I appreciate that,” Bracco said, extending his hand. “Thanks again for your time.”

Hardy nodded. “And we find anything on the other matter, you’ll be the first to know. But as I told Glitsky, I wouldn’t hold my breath on any of this.”

Bracco broke a small smile. “I never do.”

H
ARDY HAD A SPY
in Redwood City.

His old law school buddy Sean Kelleher worked as an assistant district attorney in the same building as Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille and told Hardy that she wasn’t calendared for any trials and should be in or about her office for the whole day. As soon as Bracco had walked out of his office, Hardy had made the day of Michael Cho, one of his paralegals, by assigning him to start looking through the boxes of Charlie Bowen’s files for a woman’s diary. Then he’d picked up the phone and called to make double sure about Mary Patricia, told Kelleher he owed him one, and hightailed it down to his garage.

Ten minutes later, top down on his S2000, Hootie blaring from his car’s speakers, Hardy cleared Candlestick Point and twenty minutes after that was parking in the courthouse lot twenty-five miles south. If San Francisco had been warm and pleasant all day, Redwood City, in the mid-eighties, was positively balmy. As he brought the roof back up over the convertible, he found himself humming out loud. He felt like a different person from the stoop-shouldered slug who’d attracted the attention of the possibly-not-crazy elderly woman at the corner of Seventh and Mission that morning. The lunch with Frannie, her receptiveness, maybe the start of the next phase of their lives together after the unexpected hollow emptiness of the recent one.

The little dance he was doing around Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille was not frivolous. He thought it so likely as to be certain that she would not consent to a regular scheduled appointment with him. After all, he was the man who was trying to undo all of the hard work she’d put in on what was to date still one of the most successful moments of her career. In fact, he considered it not impossible that even his planned ambush of her would be rebuffed. Certainly, there was no reason, other than professional courtesy, that she need feel compelled to see him. He wasn’t kidding himself. He knew who he was. He was the enemy.

When he arrived in Redwood City, he called Kelleher, who came out and walked him past the receptionist into the offices in the back. He had a cup of coffee and shot the breeze a little and then asked Kelleher to point him toward the lair of Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille.

Her door was open and Hardy stood for a second in the hallway, trying to take her measure. Younger-looking than he’d expected, with a very appealing profile, she was sitting forward in her chair, her elbows on her desk, one hand playing with a loose tendril of blondish hair, apparently reading. Her feet, shoeless, were tucked back under her chair. It was a Friday-afternoon scene similar to one he’d seen a thousand times in the legal world—the alone, as opposed to lonely, time every good lawyer needed to keep up on facts, to study cases, to stay current on changes in the law, to recharge.

Part of him hated to bother her.

The rest of him stepped forward and knocked softly on her door. “Excuse me.”

She turned to face him, her expression just short of querulous. Yes, it said, he was interrupting her. But she could be serene about it. The petulance gave way to a mild curiosity. “Can I help you?”

“I think so.” He pointed to the name on her door. “If you’re Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille.”

“That’s me.”

“That’s some name.”

“Tell me about it. Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking. Mississippi and all of New York.”

“Pardon?”

She straightened up in her chair, put her hands behind her lower back, and arched herself briefly. Getting out the kinks or showing off the merchandise. “Nine syllables,” she said. “Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille. Mississippi and all of New York. Imagine having to ask people to say ‘Mississippi and all of New York’ every time they wanted to address you by name. You’d never talk to anybody.” She broke a nice smile. “People call me Mills. Who are you?”

Hardy came forward and introduced himself.

“Dismas?” she asked.

“Dismas.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a Dismas.”

“You’re not alone. He was the good thief on Calvary, next to Jesus. Also, he’s the patron saint of thieves and murderers.”

“Good for him. I’m proud of him. I’ve always wanted to be patron saint of something, except I understand first you’ve got to be dead, and that’s got limited appeal.” Mills swung in around to face him. “So, Dismas, how can I help you?”

“Well, speaking of appeal, I wanted to ask you for a few minutes of your time to talk about the Scholler case. I’m doing the appeal.”

The mildly flirtatious personality dropped off her like the calving of a glacier, leaving only the cold, flat ice behind. “I have nothing to say about that. I won the case. I don’t think there are any legitimate appealable issues.”

“You don’t think PTSD should have been let in?”

“If you’ve read the transcripts, you know I argued against just that and prevailed. That was the right call. And now, I’m sorry, but I’m in the middle of—”

“You spoke to Charlie Bowen. I’m only asking for the same courtesy.”

“Charlie Bowen made an appointment with me and we set ground rules.”

“I’ll go with ground rules,” Hardy said. “Same as Charlie’s.”

“Do you even know what they were?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll agree unseen.”

“There’s a desperate offer.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Look, Mr. Hardy…”

“Dismas.”

“Mr. Hardy, please. I don’t want to be a hardass, but I’m not going to talk to you about Evan Scholler. He was guilty and I got him convicted and I hope he rots away in prison. That’s all I’ve got to say, all right? Please.”

Hardy counted five of his heartbeats. Of course, there always had been the make-an-appointment-and-set-ground-rules option, but he’d never before had a conference like that produce anything of real substance. If you wanted your soda to fizz and bubble, you had to shake it up.

But now he was looking at turning around and driving back home, facing a weekend with absolutely nothing to chew on and work with. The words and the idea came out of his mouth before he was aware that he’d thought of them. Anything to keep her talking with him. “How about if I don’t talk about that case at all?”

She cocked her head, still wary. “Then what exactly would we be talking about?”

“Charlie Bowen.”

“What about him?”

“Anything he might have said to you before he disappeared.”

That stopped her. She combed her hand through her hair, made a face at him that could have meant anything, looked down at her desk, back at Hardy. “Why do you want to do that?”

“He disappeared while he was working on this appeal. Before I get too far with it, I don’t want to have the same thing happen to me.”

She shook her head, chortling. “Don’t be ridiculous. He’d barely started even the preliminary work. I don’t think he’d even finished the transcripts when I talked to him.”

“So what did you talk about?”

“He wanted to review the evidence that hadn’t been used at the trial. To see if I had any working papers not included in the defense discovery. Stuff like that. Just to make sure the record was complete while he was going ahead. Housecleaning.”

“He didn’t mention any personal conflicts?”

“No. If I recall, the meeting lasted under the hour. We didn’t get too close.”

“But he was going ahead with the appeal?”

“Of course. That’s why we were talking at all.”

“He didn’t seem nervous or overly concerned with his safety?”

“Why would he be? The bad guy was already in jail.” Shaking her head as if to clear away that thought, she went on. “I hate the appeals process, you know that. They ought to give our side an appeals process if we lose a case—try the scumbags again until we get ’em and put ’em away.”

“Y
EAH, THAT’S
M
ILLS,”
Washburn said. “She’s a bit of a zealot, but she’s also only the second person in thirty years to whip me in court, so she’s got my respect.” Hardy had thought it was late enough in the day that there would be a good chance he’d find Washburn at the Broadway Tobacconists, and he was right.

Now they sat in a cloud of cigar smoke in the back of the unpretentious little store. Except for Greta, the female proprietor, they had the place to themselves, a situation—Washburn assured him—that would change in the next hour, when his acolytes and his girlfriend would appear from their various offices to drink “from the vast fount of my knowledge.”

Not entirely sure Washburn was poking fun at himself, Hardy said, “Well, whatever time you and I get together here, it’s on the clock.”

“Goes without saying.” Washburn savored his smoke, drawing on it, exhaling another plume. He twirled the cigar around between his lips, then dipped the unlit end into a small glass of amber liquid which, from the bottle next to it, was Armagnac. “Sure you won’t join me?”

“Thanks, but then I’d just want a little nip of your nectar, and I’m going to be driving.”

“Probably wise. So how can I help you today?”

“Well, this is odd, but it came to me when I was trying to get to Mills. I didn’t even see a draft of Charlie Bowen’s appeal brief in the file, so I’m assuming he hadn’t gotten to it. I’d also been assuming that he was going to go with the PTSD. But now I’m wondering if he’d mentioned anything about that to you.”

“What?”

“What he was basing his appeal on. Especially if it wasn’t PTSD.”

Washburn sat back, drew on his cigar, held the smoke. “Actually,” he said, “you raise a good point.” Another pause while he dipped the cigar again in the Armagnac. “You know, he seemed to think that it might be more fruitful to attack the competency of the local constabulary as well as the FBI.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, the Khalil murders.” Turning the cigar between his lips, Washburn sat back, pensive. “I mean, here you had two murders intimately connected with the Scholler case—there was no question of that—and a blatant assumption that Evan had committed them with the frag grenades and so on. But the DA never charged him with those murders. You see the issue?”

Hardy saw it plainly, and it struck him as unusually powerful. “So the police and the FBI never questioned anyone else?”

“And, on one hand,” Washburn added, “why would they? They had a suspect they could convict, and may as well send him down for one murder as for three, without the risk of losing on the other two.”

“You mean they never questioned anyone else about the Khalil murders?”

“I assume they must have, a few people anyway. But certainly not everyone they could have.” He took in a huge lungful of the pungent air. “You’re forgetting, though, and I wonder if Mr. Bowen did as well, that you can’t base your appeal on evidence that isn’t discussed in the record. The Court doesn’t know anything that the court reporter hasn’t taken down.”

“I’m not forgetting that,” Hardy said, “but then who killed the Khalils?”

“Well, if you believe Evan, Ron Nolan did.”

“Did you believe Evan?”

Washburn seemed to be considering it for the first time in a long while. “You know, now that you mention it, yes, I think I do. Evan just didn’t smuggle small arms and grenades out of Iraq as souvenirs. He was only over there a matter of weeks. In the brief time he had there, he couldn’t have both found a source for these things and arranged to find a way to send them home. Especially when you consider he was airlifted out of there unconscious and with no warning. I’d be surprised if he got out with his own socks, much less all this hardware.” He studied his cigar’s lengthy ash. “No,” he repeated, “it beggars belief. That just didn’t happen.”

“So where did that stuff in Nolan’s closet come from?”

“It must have been from Nolan himself, wouldn’t you think? He could move about a lot more freely, and he had both more time and a lot more contacts than Evan ever did.”

Hardy sat back in his chair, his elbow on the armrest, his hand resting over his mouth, in deep thought. “Okay,” he said in a faraway voice, “let’s go with Nolan killing the Khalils for a minute. I don’t want to jump too far ahead of ourselves here. Can we take that as fact?”

After a small hesitation, Washburn nodded. “I do.”

“All right, then, here’s the million-dollar question. Why did he do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was there any speculation you heard?”

Washburn shook his head, now troubled by this as well. “Somehow that just never became part of the discussion, did it?” Asking himself. He turned to face Hardy. “Even when everyone was taking it for granted that Evan had killed them, I don’t remember anyone stopping to examine the why of it too closely.” He drew on his smoke. “I think there was more or less an assumption that it was something that had happened in Iraq that we would never find out about. Maybe it was something personal or maybe he just hated Iraqis in general for what they had done to him. And at the same time he could frame Nolan for the murders and eliminate his rival for Tara. It was a great opportunity to kill two birds with one stone if you happened to be a psychopath, which some people thought Evan was.”

“But nobody asked the hard questions?”

“Apparently not.”

“Even though the FBI was all over this thing?” It wasn’t really a question. “Does that strike you as the FBI we all know and love?”

Clearly, Washburn, too, had caught the bug. His eyes were alight with possibility. “If Nolan did in fact kill the Khalils,” he said contemplatively, “then certainly anyone in the Khalil family—Iraq being the tribal culture that it is—would have had not just a motive but an obligation to kill him.”

Hardy, low-watt electricity running through him, leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “What do you think are the odds that the FBI never talked to any of the Khalils?”

“Zero. And yet now that you mention it, all the interviews we got were from the Redwood City police. And it was a pretty perfunctory job.”

“So you’re telling me the FBI would have relied on the locals to talk to witnesses in a potential terrorism case? I don’t think so.”

Washburn nodded and nodded. “Son of a bitch,” he said, unmistakable glee in his voice. “You’re talking
Brady
.”