John Lescroart (7 page)

She sat at her desk and he'd pulled a chair around from someplace and straddled it backwards. So they were at about eye level in the small cubicle. “We do have someone in custody, yes.”

“So what does that have to do with me? Or with anything else that might have happened here?”

More hostility. This woman, spooked by the police visit, shattered by a recent murder, didn't want to talk about it. It should just all go away.

“You're right. It may have nothing to do with anybody or anything here,” he replied in his professional tone.

“What could there be? It was some bum, wasn't it? She didn't know him.”

Glitsky's lips tightened. “We're trying to make sure of that.”

“Didn't I read that he confessed?”

“You may have.” The leak on that development hadn't made Glitsky's day, and his face showed it.

“Well? That ought to settle that, don't you think?”

Glitsky crossed his arms on the back of the chair and purposefully looked away. Bringing his eyes back to her, he waited yet another moment. Finally, when he thought she was about to begin squirming, he spoke quietly. “It's my understanding that you and Elaine were close.”

The question deflected some of the anger. Treya bit at her lower lip, then nodded. “Yes.”

“Then it would seem to me that you'd want to cooperate in any way you could with the investigation into her death.”

“I do, but—”

Glitsky cut her off. “Sometimes people confess to things they didn't do.”

“Did that happen here?”

“No.” The lieutenant drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “But even with a righteous confession, we still need to collect all the evidence we can.”

“Why?”

“Because when the killer gets a lawyer, which he will, he'll change his mind and plead not guilty.”

“After he's confessed?”

“It happens. In fact, it always happens. What has he got to lose?”

Treya sat back in her chair, digesting this. “Then what about the confession?”

A grim smile. “Oh, the argument will be that it was invalid. It was coerced somehow. Or the police beat it out of him. Or his memory was impaired. Maybe it was a dream, or he just mixed up what had happened.”

“Mixed up that he
killed
somebody?”

“Yeah. You'd think you'd remember something like that, but you'd be surprised how many people don't after saying they did.”

Abe and Treya's eyes locked in some kind of shared understanding across the small space between them. Not for long, though. Both of them, realizing it, looked away. “So,” Treya said, “you need evidence. Of what?”

This was difficult for Glitsky to explain, for the truth was that he was grasping at straws. It was bad enough that Elaine was dead, but to admit that she'd died in such a
senseless
attack was almost too much for Abe to bear. She couldn't have lived her interesting and committed life, done all she'd done, touched so many people, only to have it all wiped away in a completely random moment as though she were no more important than a bug.

Although, of course, that's exactly what did happen.

But with his own daughter?

He couldn't fit it anywhere, couldn't live with it. At least until he knew more—about Elaine, about her killer,
the intersection where some meaning could be attached to it.

It was important. It was stupid and made no sense. He had to do it.

Again, he met the woman's eyes. “If, for example, Elaine worked at all with the Free Clinic or Legal Aid, if she had any professional contact with junkies . . .”

“Then she might have met with the man?”

Glitsky made a face. “The point is, if Elaine volunteered with any of these people . . .”

Treya was shaking her head. “She did volunteer, do some pro bono work, but not on the streets. She considered those people lost for the most part. If they were going to get back, it was going to have to be on their own. They weren't her issue.”

“So what was?”

“Students. People who were trying to do something with their lives. So she taught moot court at Hastings, for example. She didn't have much patience for professional victims—she always wanted to yell at people to not let themselves get in that habit.” Treya's eyes briefly flickered bright with a rogue memory. “One of her great expressions was that there were only two kinds of people—victims and warriors.”

“I like that,” Abe said. “But maybe Cole Burgess hung out with some students.”

“Law students? I don't think so.” Another shake of the head. “I don't remember ever hearing the name.”

“All right.”

Treya bit at her lower lip again and Glitsky found himself watching her. The swollen, nearly pouting mouth.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

The question startled her. “Why do you want to know that? You can't think I was . . .” She was staring, doe-eyed, in disbelief.

“I don't think anything.” Glitsky hadn't meant to spook her. He softened his voice. “I'm trying to start somewhere, get a timeline of her last hours. It's really routine.”

“Isn't that what the police always say when they suspect somebody? That it's routine?”

Glitsky's mouth turned up a fraction of an inch, another humanizing touch. “Actually, they do, you're right. But I'm not doing that now.”

She sighed heavily. “Sunday afternoon. Here.” At Glitsky's expression, she felt the need to explain and pressed on. “I'm often in on weekends, and she was doing some special master work.”

Glitsky nodded in understanding. This wasn't unusual. A special master was an attorney appointed by the court to help serve a search warrant on material that might be privileged—doctor's records, lawyer's files, psychiatrist's tapes—and deliver whatever was not privileged in the requested records to the court. If the person who had the records was uncooperative, the master would do the actual searching and separate out what could lawfully be seized from the private records of other clients and patients, whose right to privacy was therefore protected from the police.

“And Elaine came back here when she was done with that?”

“Yes.”

“What time was that?”

Treya's face showed her concentration. “I'm not sure, exactly. It was just turning dark, so maybe five-thirty. I was finishing up.”

“And what did she come back here for?”

“Just to leave me some files. Then she was going out for a meeting and then home.”

Glitsky was leaning forward now. This was an unexpected bonus. Treya had talked to Elaine on the last day of her life, within hours in fact of her death. “Did she say who she was meeting, or where?”

“No. I've tried to remember for myself. But she never said. I'm sure. She just said she had a meeting and she'd see me tomorrow. She was always going to meetings.”

“And she didn't seem upset? Did she act as if anything was bothering her?”

Treya hesitated, met Glitsky's eyes again. “It's so hard to say now, knowing what happened. Everything has a different feel. You wonder if you saw something or not.”

“But you think you did?”

She shook her head. “I'm not sure. If she'd come in on Monday, smiling and happy, I never would have given it a thought. I know I didn't think about it when I got home Sunday night. I just thought she was overbooked, like she gets. Got.” The tense shift bothered her, and she stopped.

“It's okay.” Glitsky had to fight the urge to reach over and touch her, offer her some comfort. Instead, he sat back, no threat and no push, and let her find the thread again. “It's okay,” he repeated.

“I know, I know.” Her look was grateful, and she held it on him for an instant. Then she nodded and sighed. “Now I'd say that, yes, something might have been bothering her. She seemed a little . . . detached.” Treya hastened to protect her boss. “But she'd get that way sometimes. She always had a lot on her mind, on her plate.”

Suddenly Treya's expressive face took on a different look—a sudden impatience with all this, an almost angry frustration.

“What are you thinking?” Glitsky asked.

“I'm thinking she didn't know her killer. This is stupid. Her murder wasn't connected to anything. Nobody she knew could have wanted to kill her.” She raised her eyes, a challenge with some barb in it that he didn't quite understand. “You had to know her.”

“I did,” Glitsky replied. “I thought she was fantastic.”

“She never mentioned you as a friend.” Suddenly the barb in her voice was pronounced, unmistakable—all of her protective instincts on display from out of nowhere.

“Well, no, not exactly a friend. I knew her when she worked at the Hall.”

“I knew that. I knew who you were. I was there then, too, as a clerk.”

Glitsky had no response to this, although Treya seemed in some way to hold it against him. He attempted
to get beyond it. “In any event, that's another reason why I'd like to know what she might have been working on. I've got kind of a personal interest as well.”

But if he thought this admission would ally him with Treya, he was mistaken. “So you've kept up on her career since she'd left the Hall?”

He answered guardedly. “A little bit, yes.”

“In a kind of a hands-off way.”

Glitsky raised his shoulders awkwardly. “I guess you'd say I admired her from a distance.” He wondered how suddenly everything had gone so wrong with this interview. “I'm sorry if I've offended you.”

“Not at all,” she said. “You're only doing your job. But Elaine is very personal to me. I know who her friends were and it's a little insulting to pretend you were close to her, too, so maybe I'd tell you more.”

“That wasn't what I was doing.”

“Really?” she asked with ill-concealed disbelief. “Then I'm sorry I got that impression. Perhaps I overreacted.” All business now, Treya cut off further inquiry as she stood, signaling—although it was not her place to do so—that the interview was over. “I'm sure the firm wouldn't object if you got a warrant for her files or to go over her client list. You might find something there that you're looking for.”

Glitsky rarely felt either inept or out of his depth, but now he felt both, and acutely. Perhaps it was a sense of foolishness because he found her so physically attractive and at such an inappropriate time. Whatever it was, he was standing along with her, not willing to risk falling any further in her esteem.

He hadn't gotten anywhere here, and in fact he'd had little confidence that any real evidence was going to come from this quarter. But it had been the only place he could think of to begin, to connect with someone who had known her.

“Ms. Ghent, please.” His shoulders were sagging. He was a pathetic figure—he knew it. Regal, she stopped at the entrance to the cubicle, turned back to face him,
challenging, her arms crossed, her color now high in her cheeks.

“I want you to understand that I'm not looking for specific evidence. I'm trying to get a sense of her work, her life, if maybe there was some reason . . .” Too close to revealing the nonprofessional truth about why he'd come here, he stood mute and helpless.

Treya Ghent gave every appearance of considering his words, but when she finally spoke, there was no sign of cooperation. “I really don't think so, but if anything occurs to me, Lieutenant, I'll let you know.”

This time, it was a dismissal.

A
t high noon, Hardy walked into the small lobby for the segregated jailing rooms at the hospital. It was a depressing and cold room, dimly lit, with high barred windows and a strong smell of antiseptic, sweaty yellowing walls and a couple of battered wooden benches, although no one was using them at the moment. To his left, a uniformed female officer sat at a pitted green desk equipped with a computer terminal and a telephone. She looked up at Hardy's arrival with a kind of relief. He went across to her and stated his business.

“You know he's already got a visitor. His mother.”

It didn't take phenomenal cosmic powers to realize that Jody Burgess had made a poor impression on this woman. Hardy gave her a sympathetic smile. “Her poor baby isn't a criminal, he's sick. There's been some terrible mistake. You can't keep him here and it's all your fault and she's going to sue.”

The officer smiled back at him. “You've been reading my mail.”

“Maybe I can calm her down.”

“Maybe.” She pushed a button on her desk and an instant later another uniformed officer—this one a large white male—pushed open the door at the other end of the room. Hardy thanked her and she gave him a shrug. “Have fun,” she said.

 

When the guard unlocked the door to Cole's room, Hardy understood why seasoned jailbirds might try to pull some kind of scam to get a few days here. It wasn't the Ritz, but it was far better than a shared cell at the jail
behind the Hall of Justice—a private room with a window and a television set, now blessedly dark and silent, suspended from the ceiling.

Cole was propped halfway up in a hospital bed, a clean sheet covering him to the waist. Wearing a standard hospital gown, he might have been any badly beaten-up patient except for the handcuffs which shackled him to the bed's railing. An older, slightly more corn-fed but not unattractive version of Dorothy Elliot sat holding his free hand on the window side of the bed.

“Knock if you have any trouble,” the guard said, and closed the door. Hardy took a step forward and introduced himself—Dorothy's friend.

“Thank God,” Jody Burgess exclaimed, standing up, coming around the bed with a kind of buoyantly expectant expression and both arms outstretched. “Mr. Hardy,” she enthused, “Dorothy told me what you did and I don't know how we'll ever be able to thank you.”

She wore an expensive-looking, baggy, dark green jogging outfit with an unfamiliar logo over the left breast. As she came closer, Hardy noted the carefully applied makeup, dyed blond hair and a lot of baubles, costume jewelry—earrings and bracelets, rings with large colored stones on both hands. He pegged her at sixty-two or -three, going for forty without great success.

“I didn't really do much.” Hardy felt that he had, in fact, done nothing. From what he'd been told, Cole had been here in the hospital by the time Hardy had arrived at the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon. He assayed a polite smile. “They would have gotten to testing your son, Mrs. Burgess, but . . .”

“Don't be so humble. If you hadn't stepped in, Cole would still be over at the jail. They wouldn't be taking care of him like this.” The woman's effusiveness was slightly overwhelming. She grabbed Hardy's hand in both of hers and held it tightly.

Eventually freeing his hand, he cast his eyes beyond
her, to the suspect. He had to work to keep his tone neutral. “And you're Cole. How are you doing?”

Jody popped right in, answering for her son. “He's going to be fine, just fine, aren't you, Cole?” Protectively, she was moving back toward the bed.

“I don't know, Mom. I don't know if ‘fine' really covers it.” The young man's voice was deep with a raspy quality and a slight but recognizable defect in enunciation. Hardy knew the latter could be simple fatigue, but more likely it was the telltale slur of long-term drug use. “Another day in that cell,” he said, shaking his head. “I don't know.”

“They were going to let him die,” Mrs. Burgess offered. “They just wanted him to suffer.”

Hardy shook his head, told her a white lie. “I don't think so,” he said. “Not intentionally anyway. They don't do that.”

“Then why . . . ?”

“They process a lot of people every day at the jail. This was just one of the times somebody fell through the cracks. The good news is we found out soon enough.” Hardy saw that he was going to have to talk through Jody and didn't know how long he was going to have the patience for it. He addressed himself directly to Cole. “So they've got you on methadone?”

“It's kicked in, yeah.”

Again, the mother. “It's to help with the withdrawal pains. The idea is to lessen the dose so his body gradually—”

“Mom!”

She stopped, clamping her mouth tight with a pained expression. “I'm sorry. I just want Mr. Hardy to understand . . .” Her voice trailed off.

“He's probably got the idea.” To Hardy. “Right?”

“Some.” He softened his inflection, gave her another reassuring smile. “Mrs. Burgess.” A pause. “Jody. I'd like a few minutes alone with Cole if you don't mind.”

It hurt her anew, but there was no avoiding that. Her
worried gaze fell on her son, came back to Hardy. “Of course, sure, I understand.”

But she didn't move until he prompted her. “Just knock at the door and the guard will come and let you out. We won't be too long.”

 

“She's all right, really,” Cole said when the door had closed behind his mother. “She's trying to help.”

But now, suddenly, with the innocent mother out of the room, Hardy abruptly abandoned chitchat mode. He might have wanted to spare some of her feelings, but he felt no similar compunction toward her son. Moving down to the foot of the bed, he rested his hands on the railing, looked Cole hard in the face, spoke with a flat deliberateness. “Tell me what happened the other night.”

The change in tone met its mark. The young man inhaled sharply, shifted his eyes from side to side, finally focused on the sheet in front of him. “It was bad.”

Hardy gave it a second, then reached over and slapped the bed next to Cole's foot.

Startled, Cole looked up. Hardy's expression made him take another deep breath, which he let out slowly through puffed cheeks. “I mean, I was in bad shape. It was cold as hell, man. I remember that. I hadn't scored all day.”

“Why not?”

“I had to get some money. I thought I might go and hit up Mom, but then”—he sighed again—“then the cramps started to come on, so I didn't want to go all the way out where she lives.”

“Where's that?”

“Like Judah, out in the Sunset. I score at Sixteenth and Mission. It was too far.”

“So you decided to mug somebody instead?”

“No! It wasn't like that.” Hardy gave him no reaction so he felt pressed to explain further. “Look, my last score must've been heavily cut, okay? I mean, I was shaking
already, cramping up, you know? It was like midnight. I'd scored a couple of pills but they weren't doing it. I had to do something.”

Hardy waited.

“So I lucked out. One of the bums was crashed with his cart . . .”

“His cart?”

“Shopping cart. In this spot, I don't know exactly where, south of Mission I think. Anyway, he was passed out and had most of a whole bottle of bourbon by his head, just lying there. So I lifted it. I needed
something,
you know?”

“He let you take his whiskey?”

“No, he was out already. I lifted it.”

“You didn't hit him and take it?”

“Come on.” Cole actually appeared offended at the question. “Nothing like that.”

“How about the gun? Did you threaten him with that?”

“I didn't have any gun.” His brow darkened for a minute. “Not then.”

“Did you get it from him, too?”

“No.” Then: “I don't think so.”

“You don't think so,” Hardy repeated. But he had no choice but to accept it for now. “All right, then what?”

“Then I guess I drank most of it. The bottle.”

“Where were you then?”

A shrug. “Just around. I don't know. I was hurtin'. I mean,
hurtin',
you hear me?”

“For the record, Cole, you're not breaking my heart. How'd you get up to Maiden Lane?”

But the lack of sympathy had its price. “I don't know, man. Maybe I levitated, huh? Maybe I took the Monorail.”

Hardy straightened up. “You think this is funny, huh? You're looking at the rest of your life behind bars and you're getting wise with me?”

“Hey.” Cole went to hold up his hands in a gesture of
innocence. The handcuff on his left wrist brought him up short. “I'm just saying I don't remember getting uptown. I drank the booze. I got loaded. I walked around, tried to keep warm. Maybe I'd run into somebody I knew, I don't know. Maybe score some ‘g.' ”

“ ‘G'?”

“God. Smack. You know, heroin.”

“And pay for it with what?”

Cole shook his head miserably. “I don't know. It didn't happen anyway.”

“So what did happen? Did you see Elaine come out of some building? Or just walking alone? What?”

“Elaine?”

Hardy's temper flared. “Elaine Wager,” he snapped, but then checked himself, got his voice under control. “The woman you've confessed to killing. Elaine Wager.”

“What about her?”

“I asked when you first saw her.”

“I don't really remember, you know? I told the cops this.”

“Why don't you just tell me, too? What's the first thing you
do
remember?”

“The gun. In my hand.” Cole made eye contact. “Like, there it was.”

“Where?”

“Well, I mean it was there on the street and I picked it up. Anybody'll give you money for a gun, right?”

“So you remember picking up the gun? And then what?”

He closed his eyes, shook his head. “I've been through this already. Then I guess leaning over her.”

“You guess? What do you mean, you guess? Did you see her walking? Did you come up behind her? Or was she already on the ground?”

Cole's face was taut with the effort at recall. “I must have blanked it.”

“What does that mean, you must have blanked it? Are you saying you blanked on pulling the trigger?”

As though trapped in a cage, the young man looked from side to side for an exit. “Well, I mean I had the gun, then I was leaning over her and saw all the gold, the necklace, then her purse and the other stuff.”

Hardy's hands were white on the bed's railing. “You don't remember firing the gun?”

“No.”

“Ever?”

Cole gave it some thought, then shook his head no. “But the cop said it was common, blanking the moment. Like people in car wrecks don't remember the last minute before.”

“What cop?”

“The guy who questioned me. Black dude. Banks, I think his name was.”

Hardy tore his eyes from the pathetic young man and looked through the barred window to the gray afternoon outside. Traffic was stopped in both directions on the freeway. Rows of boxlike apartment buildings clung to a dun-colored hill. He wasn't going to find any solace in the view, and after Cole's last words, he needed some. “But Cole,” he began quietly, “listen to me. You confessed to killing her.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“But you don't remember stalking her? Firing the gun?”

“No, none of that. But I must have.”

“Why do you say that?”

Cole stared down at the sheet covering him. “I shot the gun. They tested my hands. I shot the gun.” He brought his eyes up to Hardy. “So I must have done it. And by then I couldn't hold out anymore anyway.”

“Hold out on what?”

This got an exasperated rise out of him. “Hey, come on, what are we talking about?”

“Elaine Wager's death, Cole. How about that?”

But he was shaking his head. “No, man. We're talking ‘g.'They got me in that room and I'm coming down hard.
I'm dying!
You understand? Then Banks tells me he'll see he gets me something as soon as I say I did it. So I told him.”

“That you killed her?”

“Yeah.” He shrugged. “But hell, I would have told him I'd shot Kennedy if that's what he wanted to hear.”

 

The chief assistant district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco did not have a big office. In fact, Gabriel Torrey's office was the same size as the other third-floor offices which were shared two to a room by the rank and file assistant D.A.'s. The big difference was in the furnishings—a sofa and matching armchairs of exquisitely soft leather, built-in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, plantation shutters, twin original Tiffany lamps, a Persian rug over the hardwood floor Torrey had installed. And, of course, there was also the Desk—a large, custom-crafted, beautifully finished cross section of redwood burl from an old-growth stand of trees that had been clear cut in the late 1970s.