Nothing but the Truth (4 page)
This was so different from their usual obscene or ironic greeting that it raised Glitsky’s red flag. “What’s the matter?”
Hardy told Abe to hold a minute, then stood up with the portable phone, and told Rebecca and Vincent he was talking to Uncle Abe—adult stuff—he was just going into the living room for a little privacy. He’d be right back. They should keep eating their snacks.
“Frannie’s running about three hours late,” he whispered from the front of the house. He cast his eyes up and down the street out front. No Frannie.
“Three
hours
?”
hours
?”
“I thought you might check around.”
Hardy’s casual tone didn’t camouflage much for Glitsky. He knew what his friend meant by check around—accidents, hospital admissions, or the worst, recently dead Jane Does.
“Three hours?” Glitsky repeated.
Hardy looked at his watch, hating to say it. “Maybe a little more.”
Glitsky got the message. “I’m on it,” he said. Hardy hung up just as Vincent let out a cry in the kitchen.
The Cochrans—Big Ed and Erin—were the parents of Frannie’s first husband, Ed, who was the biological father of Rebecca. Their son had been gone a long time now, but Ed and Erin still doted on their granddaughter and her brother, Vincent. They loved Frannie and her husband. Hardy and his wife, with no living parents between them, considered them part of the family.
Now, after getting the word about Frannie’s absence, they had come to Hardy’s house. Erin was shepherding the kids through their homework at the kitchen table, trying to keep their minds engaged. Hardy and Ed were making small talk, casting glances at the telephone, waiting.
Hardy was on the phone before the ring ended. It was Abe Glitsky with his professional voice on. “She back yet?”
Hardy told him no, endured the short pause. “Okay, well. The good news is nobody’s dead, not anywhere. I checked Alameda, Marin, Santa Clara”—the counties surrounding San Francisco—“and it’s a slow day on the prairie. Barely a fender-bender. No reports of anything serious. Nothing in the city at all.”
Hardy let out a long sigh. “So what now?”
“I don’t know. We hang. She’ll—” He stopped. Glitsky, who’d lost his own wife to cancer a few years before, wasn’t one for stoking false hopes. “She driving the Subaru?”
“I’d guess so. If she’s driving.”
“Give me the license and I’ll put it out over the dispatch, broaden the net.”
“All right.” Hardy hated the sound of that—broaden the net. It was getting official now. Objective. Harder to deny, even to himself.
Where was his wife?
3
Earlier that morning, Scott Randall was hosting an informal bull session with some law clerks in his tiny cubicle of an office on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. Even his most ardent admirers among these clerks would admit that Scott was the near embodiment of well-dressed, post-gen-X arrogant disdain. But none of them viewed this as a negative. Indeed, the trait had allowed Scott, though only thirty-three, to rise to homicide prosecutor in the DA’s office, an eminence to which they all aspired.
This morning Scott had a theme, and he was rolling. “Listen up,” he told the acolytes. “You are looking at someone who has gotten convictions on his first three murder cases—and I don’t need to tell you how difficult that is in our compassion-driven little burg.” No false modesty for Scott Randall.
“But do you know what those three convictions have done for my career? Or what the same kind of cases will do for yours?” The question was rhetorical, and he breezed ahead. “Zero, zilch,
nada
. You know why? Because no one cares about the people in them. Look.” He held up a finger. “One, a motorcycle gang brawl over one of their common-law women; two”—another finger—“a drug dealer killed by an addict he’d tried to cheat; three, a bum stabbed after he’d stolen another bum’s grocery cart. This is not stuff over which newspaper readers salivate, believe me.”
nada
. You know why? Because no one cares about the people in them. Look.” He held up a finger. “One, a motorcycle gang brawl over one of their common-law women; two”—another finger—“a drug dealer killed by an addict he’d tried to cheat; three, a bum stabbed after he’d stolen another bum’s grocery cart. This is not stuff over which newspaper readers salivate, believe me.”
One of the young men spoke up. “So what do you do?”
“I’ll answer by way of an example. I think you’ll all have heard something about the murder of Bree Beaumont. ” He reached for a manila file that sat atop his desk, from it extracted a couple of eight-by-ten glossy photographs, and held them up.
“Exhibit A, on the left,” he began—Scott spoke a precise legalese even in private—“is a picture of the deceased. Bree Beaumont, very pretty, a player in the big-money oil business. Also married, two kids, and”—he paused for effect—“rumored to be dating Damon Kerry.”
This was a trump that had been kept from the media, and Scott enjoyed the reaction. “Perhaps our next governor, that’s right.”
Scott raised the picture in his right hand. “Exhibit B is Bree Beaumont’s body lying in the enclosed patio area underneath her penthouse apartment, where she landed after a long fall. As you’ve read in the papers, there were shards of glass in Bree’s hairline. They didn’t find glass where she landed, none in her apartment. So someone conked her on the head and threw her over. She was six weeks pregnant too.”
Scott cocked an eyebrow. He had their interest. “This is high-profile, career-making stuff. You can’t let these cases get away and if they start to slide, you’ve got to go proactive.”
The first male clerk spoke again. “How is it getting away?”
“It’s been four weeks, and our friends in the police department don’t have a suspect. After that amount of time, the odds say they never will. That’s how.”
One of the female clerks checked in. “But they must be looking? Isn’t it just a matter of time?”
Scott conceded that sometimes it was. “But in this case, the original inspector, Carl Griffin, was working solo and got himself shot to death—apparently unrelated— just a few days after Bree was killed. The new guys, Batavia and Coleman, haven’t found anything, and it doesn’t seem like it’s bothering them. And until they bring us a suspect, we’ve got no job.”
Scott let them absorb the facts for a moment. “So if you’re me and you want this case, I mean you really want this case, what do you do?”
This was the kind of information the clerks came here to lap up. They were rapt as he continued. “I’ll tell you what I
did
do. I went to Ms. Pratt”—San Francisco’s district attorney, Sharron Pratt—“and told her,
promised
her, that if she gave me my own investigator, I would bring the case before the grand jury to get an indictment.”
did
do. I went to Ms. Pratt”—San Francisco’s district attorney, Sharron Pratt—“and told her,
promised
her, that if she gave me my own investigator, I would bring the case before the grand jury to get an indictment.”
The second young woman spoke up. “How?”
Scott flashed a grin. “I’m glad you asked that question, Kimberly. And here’s the answer: The grand jury is your friend. You know how it works—no defense lawyers allowed, no judge in the room. You present your case to twenty average citizens and do it without worrying too much about legalities. If you’re not brain dead, you get your indictment.”
“But if the police don’t have a suspect, who do you call as witnesses?” Kimberly asked.
“Everybody I can think of, including Kerry, his campaign manager Al Valens; Jim Pierce, this Caloco oil vice president who was Bree’s old mentor. Then I go after the personal connections—and remember that no matter what else might be involved, murder is usually personal.
“So I subpoena Bree’s husband, Ron, Ron’s friends and friends of friends, her professors, colleagues, lab partners. Somewhere I’m betting I’m going to pull a break.”
“So it’s a fishing expedition,” the first clerk commented. “But we’ve always been told not to—”
Scott was brusque. “Forget the garbage they taught you in law school. Here’s Real Life One-A. There’s lawyers who win in front of juries, they’ve got careers. All the others wind up pushing paper or crunching numbers. Your choice. So I’m going to take this murder of Bree Beaumont and get my name on the marquee. The grand jury’s my vehicle. I’m riding it and taking no prisoners.”
Scott’s eyes were bright. “This time next week, mark my words, this case is front burner. And it’s mine.”
Scott had served his witness, a Mrs. Frannie Hardy, at her home on the previous Friday. The subpoena had instructed her to call if her time on the witness stand presented a conflict or hardship. If that had been the case. Scott would have rescheduled—he’d done so with several other witnesses. If Mrs. Hardy had called, he would have told her how long he expected her to be on the stand, what kinds of questions he was likely to ask.
Scott had no indication that the witness had ever met Bree Beaumont. He got her name from Ron, Bree’s husband, who’d said that he and Mrs. Hardy had been having coffee together on the morning of Bree’s death. So she was Ron’s primary alibi and as such Scott wanted to talk to her. But it wasn’t going to be the Inquisition. Frannie Hardy was not a suspect. If she’d called to discuss anything, Scott would have reassured her.
But no call.
So this morning, when Mrs. Hardy had arrived late at the grand jury room, ten minutes after it had gone into session at nine-thirty, Scott had already begun talking to James Pierce, a senior vice president and Caloco’s community relations officer. He had worked closely with Bree before she’d left the company and had known her since she’d been recruited from Cal. If there were any bones in her closet, Scott thought Pierce would know where they were hidden.
Ironically, Scott’s initial plan had been to take Mrs. Hardy before Pierce, thinking that hers was probably going to be a much shorter questioning—Scott hadn’t wanted to hang her up for the whole day. But when she hadn’t been there on time and Pierce had, that was too bad for her—she’d brought it on herself.
So now Scott was going to let Mrs. Hardy sweat it out. No, he’d told her during a break in Pierce’s testimony. He didn’t know how long it would be until he got to her. No, she couldn’t come back another day. He trotted out his favorite phrase. This was not a parlor game. This was a murder investigation.
“I know all about murder investigations,” she told him. “My husband’s an attorney, too.”
“Then you know how serious this is.”
Mrs. Hardy did not seem convinced. “I know how important you all think it is,” she said mildly. “Look, Mr. Randall, I’m just trying to find out how long this will be. I’ve got to pick up my children at school. If I’m not going to be out of here by one o’clock, I’m going to have to make some phone calls.”
“I think that’s a good possibility,” he said with conscious ambiguity.
She didn’t think it was too important, did she? Well, she’d find out.
As it developed, he began with her just before noon. She had just decided to make her phone calls when Scott called her to testify. She thought it couldn’t be too long. She’d have plenty of time. There was no need to call.
After he administered the oath that she tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, Scott had her identify herself, and then started right in. “Mrs. Hardy, were you acquainted with the deceased, Bree Beaumont?”
“No. I never met her.”
“But you did know her husband, Ron?”
“That’s correct.” Mrs. Hardy was sitting at a table in the front of the room, facing the twenty jurors. Now she looked up at them and explained. “Ron is the full-time parent in their family, so we saw each other mostly at school and other child-related events.”
“And how long have you known him?”
“I don’t know exactly. A couple or three years.” Another explanation to the jury. “He’s kind of an honorary mom. We tease him about it.”
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