The Motive

by John Lescroart

  John Strout shambled over while the three of them were eating their lunch at Lou the Greek’s. The medical examiner hovered over the table like a smiling ghost. “Y’all havin’ the Special?” An unnecessary question, since Lou’s only served one meal every day—the Special—always some more or less bizarre commingling of Asian and Greek foodstuffs. Today the Special came under less bizarre, although still passing strange—a “lamburger,” with a bright red sweet-and-sour pineapple sauce over rice.

  Strout peered down at the plates through his bifocals. “As a medical man, I’d recommend caution. You mind, Jeff ?” He slid into the booth next to Elliot, shot an appreciative glance at Frannie, then held out his hand. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  In the middle of a bite, Hardy swallowed. “I’m sorry. John, my wife, Frannie. Frannie, John Strout, who gave such a fine performance this morning.”

  “Thank you,” he said. But the smile faded. “Though I must tell you, Diz, that little primrose path you led me down in there don’t lead nowhere.”

  Hardy put down his fork. “Never said it did, John. But now Mr. Rosen is going to have to talk about it. Might put him off his feed, that’s all.”

  “My husband has a cruel streak,” Frannie said. “It’s well documented.”

  “I’ve seen it in action myself.” Strout was all amiability. “You going after my forensic colleagues, too?”

  “And who would they be?” Hardy asked.

  “You know, the teeth people.”

  “Whoever’s up next, John. I’m equal opportunity at skewering prosecution witnesses. But I’m saving the big show for later.”

  “Who’s that?”

  Hardy smiled. “You’ll have to wait around and find out. Maybe I can get you a special pass to let you back in the courtroom.”

  “Put me on your witness list.”

  “That might do it.” Hardy’s fork had stopped in midair. He chewed thoughtfully for a second or two.

  “He’s thinking cruel thoughts again,” Frannie said. “I can tell.”

  “Dr. McInerny,” Hardy began his cross-examination of Hanover’s dentist. “For how long was Paul Hanover your patient?”

  “Twenty-seven years, give or take.”

  “And in that time, how many X-rays of his mouth did you take?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Usually we do one a year, but if a tooth cracks or . . . well, really any number of other reasons, we’ll do another.”

  “So it’s not a complicated process?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Would you describe the X-ray process for the court, please?”

  Rosen spoke from behind him. “Objection. Three fifty-two, Your Honor.” This was a common objection raised when the relevance of the testimony and its probative value was substantially outweighed by the time consumption, prejudicial effect, or by the likelihood of confusing the jury. “We all know how X-rays work.”

  Braun nodded. “Any particular reason to do this, Mr. Hardy?”

  “Yes, Your Honor, but I’m trying to draw a distinction between how X-rays get taken in a dentist’s office and how he took the X-rays of the male victim’s mouth at the morgue.”

  “To what end?”

  “What I’m getting at, Your Honor, is that if the picture is taken from a different angle in the morgue, or with a different technique, it will look different than a typical office X-ray, and the identification of the victim might then not be as certain.”

  McInerny, apparently in his late fifties or early sixties, carried twenty or so extra pounds on a midsize body. Pattern baldness was well advanced, and what remained of his hair was snow white. But his face looked like it spent a lot of time outdoors—open, intelligent, expressive. Now he spoke up, helpful, but out of turn. “Really, though, that’s not a concern.”

  Braun, surprised at his intrusion, swung her head to look at him. “Doctor,” she said mildly, “just a moment, please.” She looked out at the still-standing Rosen, then came back to Hardy. “I’ll overrule the objection at this time. Go ahead, Mr. Hardy.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor. So Doctor, those X-rays. Is there a difference in the way you take standard diagnostic X-rays at your office, and the way you took them to help identify the victim in this case at the morgue?”

  In his element now, enjoying this chance to explain the intricacies of his work, McInerny first walked through the familiar procedure that took place in his office—the film in the mouth, the big machine, the lead-lined sheet. “But of course in a forensic laboratory setting, such as a morgue, we typically don’t take a picture at all.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Well, because we can simply look at what’s there and compare it to our known sample. Let’s say, for example, you look in a victim’s mouth and have seven fillings, a crown, and a root canal or extraction site, and they’re just where they are in your sample. Well, then, you’ve got a match.”

  Hardy, sensing an opportunity, jumped at it. “So you can get a match with only, say, a few matching teeth? Less than a whole mouthful?”

  “Sometimes, of course. Sometimes you don’t have a whole mouthful. But you work with everything you have. In the case of Mr. Hanover, I compared all of the teeth. There was a one hundred percent correlation.”

  “And so you positively identified the victim as Mr. Hanover?”

  But McInerny was shaking his head. “Not precisely,” he said.

  “No? Could you explain.”

  “Sure. I simply verify the match. My dental records match the victim’s. And in this case they did.”

  Hardy, having wasted twenty minutes of the court’s time on this dry well of a cross-examination, realized that he let himself succumb to the luxury of fishing. He’d gotten an unexpected and gratuitous, entirely minor victory of sorts from Strout during the morning session and he’d let it go to his head. He was going to alienate the jury if he kept barking up this kind of tree, to no effect.

  Acknowledging defeat, he tipped his head to Dr. McInerny, thanked him for his time, and excused him.

  The afternoon passed in a haze of redundancy.

  Toshio Yamashiru was, as Rosen took pains to point out, not only the dentist of Missy D’Amiens, but one of the top forensic odontologists in the country. As Strout had told Glitsky so long ago, he had assisted in the identification of the 9/11 victims. He had twenty-plus years of experience not only in general dentistry, but in advanced forensics.

  No doubt prompted by Hardy’s aggressive cross-examination of Dr. McInerny, Rosen went to great lengths not only to establish Yamashiru’s credentials, but also the techniques that he’d used in the morgue and then in his own lab to exactly correlate the various fissures, faults and striations of each tooth in the skull he examined with the dental records of Missy D’Amiens.

  After an hour and forty-one minutes of this excruciatingly boring detail, he finally asked, “Doctor Yamashiru, what was the correlation between the teeth you examined at the morgue and that of the woman whose records are in court, Missy D’Amiens?”

  “One hundred percent.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Completely.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.” Rosen turned to Hardy. “Your witness.”

  Hardy blinked himself to a marginally higher state of awareness and stood up. “Your Honor, I have no questions for this witness.”

  With ill-concealed relief, Braun turned to Yamashiru. “Thank you, Doctor. You may step down.” She then looked up, bringing in the jury, and raised her voice. “I think we’ve had enough for today. We’ll adjourn until tomorrow morning at nine thirty.”

  In the holding cell just behind the back door of the courtoom, Catherine, caged, paced like a leopard.

  Hardy, who’d endured complaints—many justified, he’d admit—about the family since Catherine had gone to jail, felt compelled to try and tolerate another round. Even if he were wrung out and ready to go home—or really, back to the office for a minimum of a couple of hour
s where he would check his mail and e-mail, answer urgent calls from other clients and deal with any other outstanding firm business that needed his input—he had to let her get some of her frustration out. Because if she didn’t blow off steam back here, out of sight, she might do it in front of the jurors, and that would be disastrous. So he let her go on, unaware that with the tensions of the day his own string was near breaking. “I was just so conscious of them all day long, sitting there in the gallery, watching my back, my every breath, I think, and all of them believing I could have done anything like this. How could they even think that?”

  “I don’t think they do.”

  “Ha. You don’t know.”

  “No, I don’t. That’s true.”

  She got to one end of her twelve-foot journey, grasped the bars for a moment, then pushed off in the other direction. “Shit shit shit.”

  “What?”

  “Just shit, that’s what.” She opened her mouth and let out something between a scream and a growl.

  “Hey, come on, Catherine, calm down.”

  “I can’t calm down. I don’t want to calm down. I’m locked up, for Christ’s sake. I might be locked up forever. Don’t you see that?”

  She reached the other end, turned again.

  “Catherine, stop walking. Please. Just for a second.” He patted the concrete bench next to him. “Come on. Sit. You’ll feel better.”

  She didn’t stop walking. “I’ve been sitting all day.”

  He sighed, let the words out under his breath. “Christ, you can be a difficult woman!”

  She stopped and looked at him. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “No, Catherine. How could I be mad at you? I make a simple request for you to sit down so you’ll feel better and, because I’ve been working all day every day for eight months already on your behalf, of course you completely ignore what I want and continue to pace. This makes me happy, not mad. And why? Because I need the abuse. I thrive on abuse, if you haven’t noticed.”

  “I’m not abusing you.”

  Hardy had to chuckle. “And I’m not mad at you. So we’re even. You continue pacing and I’ll just sit here, not being mad, how’s that?”

  She stared down at him. “Why are you being this way?”

  “What way? Calling you on your behavior? Maybe it’s because how you behave in the courtroom is going to have an effect on the jury.”

  “Okay, but we’re not in the courtroom now.” Some real anger crept into her tone. “I’ve been behaving well in there all day and now, if it’s all the same to you, Dismas Hardy, I’m a little bit frustrated.”

  “Well, take it out on me, then. I’m a glutton for it. Here.” He got to his feet. “I’ll stand up, be your punching bag. Go on, hit me.”

  She squared around on him as though she actually might. Hardy brought a finger up to his chin, touched it a few times. “Right here.”

  “God, you’re being awful.”

  “I’m not. I’m facilitating getting you in touch with your inner child who wants to hit me. You’ll really feel better. I swear. This is a real technique they teach in law school.”

  In spite of herself, she chuckled, the anger bleaching out of her, her face softening. “I don’t want to hit you, Dismas. We can sit down.”

  “You’re sure? I don’t want to stem your free expression.”

  She lowered herself to the concrete bench. “It’s just been a long day,” she said.

  He looked down at her. “I hate to say that it’s only the first one of many, but that’s the truth. We ought to try to keep from fighting. I’m sorry if I pushed you there.”

  “No. I deserved it. I pushed you.”

  “Well, either way.” Hardy put his hands in his pockets, leaned against the bars behind him. “This is worse for you, and I’m sorry.”

  They were in a cell in an otherwise open hallway that ran behind all of the courtrooms. Every minute or so, a uniformed bailiff or two would walk by with another defendant, or sometimes an orange-suited line of them, in tow. The place was lit, of course, but in some fashion Hardy was dimly aware that outside it was close to dark out and still cold. Down the way somewhere, quite possibly in an exact double of the cell in which they sat, but invisible to them, they both could hear someone crying.

  “She sounds so sad,” Catherine said. “It could be one of my daughters. That’s what I’m missing the most. The kids.” She took a deep breath. “It’s bad enough now, with them having to deal with all that high school nastiness, with their mother in jail, what they must be going through day to day. But what I really agonize about is how it’s going to affect them in the long run, if I wind up . . .” She stared at her hands in her lap.

  “That’s not going to happen,” Hardy said. “I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Down the hall, they heard the crying voice suddenly change pitch and scream, “No! No! No!” and then the clank of metal on metal. From out of nowhere, at the same instant, their bailiff opened the courtroom door at the mouth of their cage. “You want dinner, we better get you changed,” he said.

  Wordless, Catherine hesitated, let out a long sigh. Then, resigned, she nodded, stood up and held out her hands for the cuffs.

  18

  The pediatric heart specialist at Kaiser, Dr. Aaron Trueblood, was a short, slightly hunchbacked, soft-spoken man in his mid- to late sixties. Now he was sitting across a table from Glitsky in a small featureless room in the maternity wing, his hands folded in front of him, his kindly face fraught with concern.

  Treya had been a trouper. They got to the hospital well before nine o’clock that morning, and after eight hours of labor, Glitsky breathing with her throughout the ordeal, she delivered an eight-pound, two-ounce boy they would call Zachary. Crying lustily after his first breath, he looked perfectly formed in all his parts. Glitsky cut the umbilical cord. Treya’s ob-gyn, Joyce Gavelin, gave him Apgar scores of eight and nine, about as good as it gets.

  In a bit under an hour, though, the euphoria of the successful delivery gave way to a suddenly urgent concern.Dr. Gavelin had the usual postpartum duties—the episiotomy, delivering the placenta and so on—during all of which time Zachary lay cuddled against his mother’s stomach in the delivery room. The doctor released mother and baby down to her room in the maternity ward, and Glitsky walked beside the gurney in the hallway while they went and checked into the private room they’d requested, where the hospital would provide a special dinner and where he hoped to spend the night. After making sure that Treya and Zachary were settled— the boy took right to breast-feeding—Glitsky went down the hall to call his father, Nat, to tell him the good news and check up on Rachel, who was staying with him. Everything was as it should have been.

  When he came back to Treya’s room, though, she was crying and Zachary was gone. Dr. Gavelin had come in for a more formal secondary examination of the newborn. But what began as a routine and cursory procedure changed as soon as she pressed her stethoscope to the baby’s chest. Immediately, her normally upbeat, cheer-leader demeanor underwent a transformation. “What is it? Joyce, talk to me. Is everything all right?”

  But Dr. Gavelin, frowning now, held up a hand to quiet Treya and moved the stethoscope to another location on the baby’s chest, then another, another, around to his back. She let out a long breath and closed her eyes briefly, perhaps against the pain she was about to inflict. “I don’t want to worry you, Treya, but your little boy’s got a heart murmur,” she said. “I’d like to have one of my colleagues give a listen and maybe run a couple of tests on him. We’ll need to take Zachary away for a while.”

  “Take him away! What for?”

  The doctor put what she might have hoped was a comforting hand on Treya’s arm. “As I said, to run a few tests, shoot some X-rays. Maybe get a little better sense of the cause of the murmur. We’ve got a terrific pediatric cardiologist....”

  “Couldn’t you just do it here? Have somebody come down . . . ?”

  “I don’t
think so. We’ll want to do an X-ray and an echocardiogram at least. And then maybe some other testing.”

  “What kind of testing?”

  “To get a handle on what we might be dealing with, Treya.”

  “But you just said it was a murmur. Aren’t murmurs fairly common?”

  “Some kinds, yes.”

  “But not this kind?”

  Dr. Gavelin hadn’t moved her hand, and now she squeezed Treya’s arm. “I don’t know,” she said gently. “That’s why I want to have a specialist look at him.”

  And then, somehow, by the time Glitsky got back from his phone call, Zachary was gone.

  Sometime later, the volunteer maternity staff people wheeled in the special dinner that had been ordered for this room and seemed confused that the baby wasn’t with the parents, who were both on the bed, silent, clearly distraught, each holding the other’s hands. They didn’t even look at the food. Finally, when the orderlies came back to remove the untouched trays, Glitsky decided he had to move. He didn’t have any idea how long he and Treya had been sitting together waiting, but suddenly he had to get proactive. He needed to get information. Like, first, where was his son? And what exactly was wrong with him?

  He told Treya that he’d be back when he’d learned something, and walked out into the hallway. He at once had recognized Gavelin and an older man approaching, heads down in consultation. One of them must have looked up and seen him, because without exchanging too many words, it seems that they decided that Joyce would go back in to talk to Treya, and the other doctor—the stooped, sad and kind-looking one—would break the news to Glitsky.

  Too worried to argue the logistics—why weren’t they seeing him and Treya together?—he followed Trueblood into the tiny room, but they weren’t even seated when Glitsky said, “When can I see my son?”

  “I can’t tell you that exactly.” Glitsky recognized something in Trueblood’s voice—the same sympathetic but oddly disembodied tone he’d used numerous times before, when he had to inform relatives about the death of someone in their family. He knew that your words had to be clear and carefully chosen to forestall denial. You were recounting an objective fact that could not be undone, painful as it was to hear. At that tone—by itself—Glitsky felt his heart contract in panic’s grip. Trueblood’s next words, even more gently expressed, were a depth charge in his psyche. “I’m sorry, but this may be very serious.”