The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  “But Roake might be the chip in the façade of all of this?”

  “Well, if she is, she’s well defended. But we knew that. What’s new here is her connection to both these scenarios—the Dockside thing and McGuire. Both of them with many of the same players . . .”

  Greene finished her thought. “And both of them relying on her for their alibis. And only her, right?”

  “Correct.”

  “I really like this,” Greene said. “At least, if for nothing else, then as an excuse to look her up and say hi.”

  “At least that.” Marrenas drummed her fingers on the table, then raised her gaze to look straight at Greene. “I’m wondering if those connections alone could be a column. Prime the pump for you to talk to her.”

  “That would work. But it might also put her on her guard. Could you give me a day or two, see what I could stir up by talking to her? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s been several years already, between both the alibis. What’s a couple more days going to hurt?”

  • • •

  GEOFF COOKE HAD been dead now for three years, seven months, and twenty-one days.

  Ron was right, Kate thought. After this much time, nobody—not even her once best friend Beth Tully—was ever going to arrest her or anyone else for his murder. This in spite of Kate’s certainty that Beth had intuited the truth but could never find a shred of evidence to prove it. Because there had been none.

  This was because Kate had always been a world-class organizer, and she had never spent as much time and energy making sure about every detail of a plan as before the one she’d hatched the night that she’d sat with Geoff Cooke in his car in one of the Presidio’s isolated parking lots and—with no hesitation when the time finally arrived—shot him behind his right ear with one of the guns Ron had brought home with him from Iraq.

  She had always gotten along well with Geoff, and had actually been great friends with his wife, Bina, but Beth Tully had been closing in on Ron as the killer of Peter Ash—which of course he was. And if Kate hadn’t been able to somehow shift the blame to Geoff, Beth would have arrested her husband for murder.

  Kate couldn’t let that happen.

  She did not kid herself: the blame for much if not all of it, Kate realized, was hers. She had been the prime mover, giving in to a moment of fantasy and lust and seducing Peter Ash, which six months later had led to Ron’s jealous rage and the actual murder.

  So she carried the weight of Peter’s death with her at all times, as well as Geoff’s. But she had saved herself and her family and, if that were the choice, she’d do it again. In fact, if she only could, she would never have given in to the temptation to sleep with Peter, but again, that was in the past and forever out of her control.

  She and Ron both knew what they’d both done, and there was no way to undo any of it. Now the shared secret bound them in a way that she never would have imagined. They had the never-ending literal power of life and death over each other, and this was a two-edged sword, enflaming the physical passion between them on one day, seeding resentment in their every interaction on another. But whether on any given day they hated or loved one another more, the intensity of the relationship never wavered.

  Sometimes, to Kate, it seemed too much to bear.

  Except she knew that through it all she loved him unconditionally: he was the father of her two children, and they were in it all so deeply together that there could never be an escape.

  Not that she wanted to escape.

  She had killed for him and now he was her life.

  She knew that it was somewhat to assuage her guilt, but also—since she had lost the friendship of Beth Tully—to connect with other human beings, she had taken to volunteering more or less anonymously three days most weeks at the Missionaries of Charity soup kitchen in Noe Valley.

  Now, going on five o’clock and with her shift finished, she was sitting at a tiny table, drinking a latte at the Peet’s coffee shop a few blocks from the kitchen, where she’d spent the day. Much to her surprise and delight, in the past couple of months since Ron had been elected, she had made a new friend—a woman of about her age and background named Patty Simmons. Another mother of two, the wife of a clinical psychologist, and an attorney who had given up her mergers-and-acquisitions practice to be a stay-at-home mom, Patty liked to describe herself as “fun and fancy,” and in fact that was a pretty good description. Happily, Kate found that the two of them could, and wanted to, talk about anything.

  And yet, up until now Kate had avoided dropping the “DA bomb” on her. But today they had started talking about husbands and the stresses of their work in a generic sense, and Kate had reached a level of comfort where she felt it was a good time to bring it up.

  Plus she was still badly rattled by the talk she and Ron had had over their morning coffee the other day, where he’d not only accused her of trying to shut him down just in terms of how he ran his life and his business, but also stuck in the knife further, saying that she was some kind of nag who would never let him forget how much he owed her.

  Since that talk, she’d been living in a state of constant cold fury. She’d gone so far as to fantasize about putting an end to all of this madness, to the way they lived. How? She wasn’t sure. More murders? Another suicide?

  Well, no. Of course not. It hadn’t gotten to that, and if they were lucky, it never would. But still . . .

  She was just wound up. The pressure cooker of how they were living, the reality of their daily life, and on top of that Ron having the gall to imply that she was somehow to blame—that her vigilance for them both was somehow cramping his style . . .

  To hell with that.

  But here, now, with Patty Simmons, maybe she could just talk things out a little—subtly, to be sure—with somebody who would understand.

  And so she told her.

  Patty was raising her café au lait to her mouth and stopped halfway. “Are you kidding me?” she asked, incredulous. “The actual district attorney? Ron Jameson? How can I not have put that together? I must have heard your last name at least once, right? I just never thought you could be that Jameson. I mean, working at the soup kitchen . . .”

  “Well, it’s not something I make a big deal about. DA is just a job, after all.”

  “Is that what he thinks? Your husband? That being DA is just a job?”

  “No. Not at all, really. He views it more as a calling—the whole political thing.”

  “I hate it, no offense,” Patty said. “I could never do anything like that.”

  “Me neither. But Ron thinks he’s on a mission. Put bad guys in jail. Be fair to everybody in the criminal system.”

  “That all sounds pretty good. But you’re going to be disappointed in me,” Patty said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t even vote. Do you hate me?”

  “Not even a little. It’s refreshing, actually. Especially when I compare it to Ron, where sometimes I’m afraid it’s becoming his whole life. Like the only thing he really cares about.”

  “Well, I’m sure he cares about you and your children.”

  “I know he does, but . . .”

  “What? You can say.” She lowered her voice. “Your secrets are safe with me.”

  Kate broke a small smile, then sighed. “It’s just that since the election—oh, what am I saying?—since far longer than that, it’s just been all work all the time. We’ve been on a whopping three dates—play dates, if you know what I’m saying—in the last two months. He never gets home before eight, and more often than not a lot later.” She put her cup down, made an apologetic face. “And listen to poor, poor pitiful me. I’m sorry. I just never get to talk about this stuff.”

  “You can talk about anything with me.”

  “I know. I’m so grateful for that.” She paused. “But it’s just . . . well, things are so different now.”

  “In what way?”

  Kate sighed. “Before, when the kids were
younger, both of them still at home, and Ron was working building up his business, I felt so much that we were doing everything as partners. He’d come to me with problems or strategies at his work, and I’d come to him when issues with the kids came up, and he was always there, part of our gang, going to their games and concerts and debates. We were always in all of it, together. I mean, the priority was always the family, all of us. Which it just isn’t anymore.”

  “Isn’t he still pretty new at the job? Maybe he’s just getting used to it.”

  “I know. I tell myself that was it. He’s just learning the ropes, getting the ship righted, and after that he’ll come back to the way we were. But I’m really not so sure, to tell you the truth. It worries me.”

  “Do you think it might help if the two of you went and talked to somebody?”

  “You mean a counselor? For Ron, who is never wrong? Never. Plus, it would be a negative to the electorate.”

  “Well, maybe, but sometimes it can help.” Patty broke a smile. “Says the wife of the clinical psychologist. That’s my answer for everything. Go somewhere where you can talk things out with a referee.”

  Kate smiled back in return. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea. I’m saying I don’t really see Ron laying himself out there for somebody he doesn’t know to criticize him.”

  “It’s not always like that. Or even mostly, for that matter. It’s just talking, connecting, trying to define the stuff you both want to work on. Keeping these things rational and even logical.” She shrugged. “I know it’s something people have to get used to the idea of. Seeing a counselor. And really, I’m not trying to drum up business for my husband’s colleagues.”

  “I don’t think that.” Kate shook her head. “It’s just that in that scenario I’m afraid I’d wind up sounding like the complaining bitch, resenting her husband’s success, jealous of the time he spends with everybody else, when really all I want is some of it. His time, I mean.”

  “That’s not so unreasonable.”

  “I don’t think it is, anyway.”

  “Well, you know, you don’t have to see somebody else. You might just tell him, counselor or not. He’s probably not even aware of how much he might have changed. Carl and I had a similar thing when he left his first clinic and went out on his own. After maybe half a year of me feeling exactly how you’re describing your situation, I said, ‘Hey! Remember me?’ And it turned out, he did. Although, to be fair, it took him a couple of months.”

  “I’d take a couple of months.”

  “Well, as I say, he might not even know he’s changed his behavior.”

  “Do you think that could really be it?”

  “I think it’s certainly worth finding out.”

  20

  AS WAS HIS wont, Hardy wanted to keep pushing and move things along. He’d always been a big believer in the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, / Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; / Omitted, all the voyage of their life / Is bound in shallows and in miseries.” He thought that if ever there had been a tide at its flood, it was at this moment, with Phyllis poised to work with the two homicide inspectors and a crystal-clear theory—what Hardy believed to be the true theory—of the case, there for the proving.

  But then that pesky human element reared its ugly head.

  For all of her disapproval and dismay over her brother’s purported actions, there still remained the question in the mind of Phyllis as to whether Adam had actually killed Hector Valdez in cold blood. Perhaps unwittingly she had come to accept at least a part of Adam’s bedrock belief that ex-convicts as a general rule didn’t get a fair shake at the hands of police.

  Of course, Adam had told her. Naturally, Tully and McCaffrey thought he’d pulled the trigger. They were programmed to look at him as the most natural suspect, even if there was little or no physical evidence, and even if Celia Montoya had every reason in the world to have killed Valdez and afterward to run.

  The bottom line was that Phyllis needed more time to think about whether she was going to help the police put her brother back into custody, and this time for murder.

  It turned out to be a good time to entertain these doubts. The two cops were not working tonight. Both of them were busy with their own family stuff, to which Hardy grudgingly acknowledged they were entitled. Meanwhile, they might not even get to Phyllis the next day. Tully told Hardy that they had plans to take another crack at Rita, all alone, tomorrow, and might not even need whatever else Phyllis could supply.

  Beyond that, Tully was not enthusiastic about the strategy of putting a wire on Hardy’s secretary: not only was there great personal risk to Phyllis in pursuing that course of action, but Tully felt that Phyllis would not be able to pull off the deception with her brother. He would read something in her attitude and/or body language and would either close up or go on the attack, neither of which would move the investigation forward. And might, in fact, shut it down altogether.

  No, Tully thought, their best shot was to use Phyllis’s information all right, but use it as leverage against not Adam but Rita, who might very well freak out when she heard about another version of events that afternoon at El Sol, a version that named somebody else, or maybe even her, as the shooter, which meant that Rita was at least an accomplice. Under those circumstances, did Rita want to stick with what she’d originally said, or tell the truth and trade her new testimony for a deal with police?

  Tully could get Rita to crack. Now.

  So, like it or not, flood tide or not, Hardy was on hold.

  Now he was sitting at a barstool in his kitchen, drinking away his frustration with a double Maker’s Mark manhattan, regaling his wife and daughter with all of these details that were keeping things from moving forward. With a hard police press, he really felt that Adam McGowan could be in jail and his sister’s case dropped by tomorrow or next Monday at the latest. It was all doable and so right there. What was everybody thinking?

  When he stopped to tip up his glass, Rebecca walked the few steps over to where he sat and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “If I’m ever in trouble,” she said, “I’d want you to be my lawyer. Just because nobody cares as much as you do.”

  Frannie piped in. “Except, Beck, you’re never going to be in trouble.”

  “No, of course not. But if I were . . .”

  “I don’t care what your mother says. I’d fight to the death defending you,” Hardy said.

  Rebecca leaned over and planted another quick kiss on his cheek. “See?” she said. “To the death yet.”

  “How gratifying to know,” Frannie said. “Although that would leave me in a bit of a lurch, would it not? With my beloved husband dead and all.”

  “It probably wouldn’t come to it,” Hardy said, “in the real world. Since the Beck isn’t ever going to do anything wrong in the first place, either.”

  “Still,” Frannie said. “What if she’s unjustly accused? Then she’d have to go to trial and you’d have to defend her to the death.”

  “I think,” Hardy replied, “we’ll just have to hope that that won’t happen.”

  “I’ll add it to the list of things I pray for every night.”

  Hardy asked his wife, “You pray every night? I didn’t know that.”

  “Most nights, anyway.”

  “What are you praying for?” Rebecca asked.

  “The usual stuff: world peace, end of hunger, cure for cancer, no more racism. And now I’ve got to add the part about you not getting falsely accused of some capital crime so that your father has to defend you to the death.”

  “And how are those working out? The prayers.”

  “Actually, when you put it like that—focusing on the results—not so good.”

  “You know, given the track record,” Rebecca said, “maybe I don’t want to be on that list after all. Of what you’re praying for, I mean. Maybe you could kind of just generally hope I don’t get arrested.”

  “You’re
right,” her mother said, “that might be marginally better.”

  “Whew,” Hardy said in mock relief, “I’m glad we got that settled.”

  • • •

  ONCE IN A while, Ron Jameson felt that he caught a sense of what it would be like to actually be God. He’d gotten it today during his talk to the K of C, what with the steady rain of applause and the all but unbridled approval of the large crowd of successful men who had hung on his every word.

  They loved him, loved his message—ambiguous though it might have been—loved the power he unapologetically exuded. He, in turn, was nothing short of magnanimous, sharing his thoughts, vision, and persona with them.

  It hardly mattered what he was actually saying. What mattered was the connection between him and his audience. In that environment he could, in many senses, do no wrong.

  And it followed then that whatever he had done to get him to this place, it would not have been wrong, either. Without pondering it too critically, he felt that at these times the rules of normal men simply didn’t apply to him. Ron was part of them, the regular folks, but also above them in some fundamental way. He had the answers that they wanted; he had the solutions that could only be delivered by a strong and unwavering hand.

  Up in his office after his driver-investigator Chet Greene had dropped him off, he loosened his shirt and untied his tie, told Andrea that he was not to be disturbed for any reason, and dropped off to sleep on the leather couch.

  At 5:30 he woke up refreshed, then used the restroom and splashed his face with cold water. Returning to his desk, he reached for a couple of folders in his in-box, but after he opened the first one, his attention wavered in the wash of glory that overcame him.

  He was sure of it: this was how God felt.

  People waited on his every move. They parsed his words for their true meaning. They wanted nothing more than to gain his approval, in minor to major ways. The world—his world—in truth revolved around him.

  Closing the folder, he put it back in his in-box, then got up and went around his desk. Walking across to the door, he stood still a few seconds, considering. What the hell, he thought. He could do whatever he wanted; that was all there was to it. He reached out and opened the door.