The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  Only now, nearly two years after the event, did Frannie see what struck her as the most obvious truth in the world: that Katie may well have started to see her because of an emotional breakdown, but that crisis was probably caused not as much by her concerns over becoming a stay-at-home mom as by the fact that she was involved in an affair.

  It had just begun, or she’d just ended it, or maybe she was smack in the middle of it and feeling guilty. It would not have been the first time that clients had started seeing Frannie because they were misbehaving in their private lives. She believed that basically people started going to counseling for two reasons: confession or absolution, sometimes both. She had always thought that Katie was an exception to that rule, but now she wasn’t so sure.

  Charged with adrenaline at the realization, she rose out of her chair, went over to where her coat hung on one of the pegs behind the door, got her phone, and punched in one of her favorite numbers. “Abe,” she said, “sorry to bother you, but I’ve been thinking about what we all were talking about this morning. I know you and Diz don’t think it mattered if Katie told Hal about her affair, but Diz said it put somebody else in the picture, and that could be a good thing for Hal if we could find out who it is. It’s just occurred to me that I think I know when that whole thing started. I mean, within a few weeks. And if you’ve got that, you’ve got a reasonable window where you can check her phone records, maybe her computer use, something that might identify him, don’t you? How does that sound?”

  32

  BEFORE THE INDICTMENT came down, Hardy called Hal at his home and broke the bad news, suggesting that they meet where Hal could have his last good lunch for a long time to come and where they could talk some strategy. Meanwhile, Hardy told Hal he should get his logistics in order on who would be taking care of the kids. Hardy kept open the very remote possibility that Glitsky’s investigation and his own access to the prosecution’s discovery might lead to an early and positive conclusion, but the smarter move was to prepare for the long haul.

  What he didn’t tell his client—and probably didn’t need to—was that a murder trial, especially one with sensational elements such as Patti Orosco and a million dollars of life insurance, could not be expected to begin in under a year, and that it could easily be two.

  Hardy also did not add that even in the liberal enclave that was San Francisco, any husband accused of murdering his wife who made it all the way to a jury trial would almost certainly get convicted of something—second-degree murder, manslaughter—that would involve significant prison time. Hardy knew but again did not say that Hal’s life as he’d known it was probably over.

  They met at Original Joe’s at Washington Square, one of Hardy’s favorite locations in the city, going back to when it had been the home of the outstanding Fior d’Italia. He’d remained loyal to the physical locale—what wasn’t to like about Washington Square?—when it had been a rather hoity-toity high-end steak house called DiMaggio’s. Now that Original Joe’s had relocated there from its earlier longtime home in the Tenderloin District, Hardy felt that the bones of the building had reclaimed its heart. When Hal suggested the place for his last lunch outside, Hardy’s opinion of him shot up a few degrees, despite the questions about Hal’s connection to his wife’s murder.

  They got a table against a window. Hal wore civilian clothes: brown slacks, a black dress shirt, a well-tailored charcoal sport coat. They ordered a split of carbonara for an appetizer, a couple of veal dishes, and a bottle of Chianti.

  Hal paused in the middle of buttering his sourdough. “How much of a done deal is this thing? The indictment.”

  “The DA called me personally first thing this morning. I’d say it’s going to happen, or I wouldn’t have called you. If it doesn’t, worst case we get a nice lunch.”

  “I didn’t kill her, you know.”

  Hardy nodded. “I’m going with that. How are things at home?”

  “As well as can be expected. Except Katie’s family is already circling. They’re going to want to get time with the kids. But Ruth’s a tiger, and I think, being their dad, I get the final say. Isn’t that true?”

  Hardy temporized. “Depends on how hard they want to fight. They’re the biological grandparents, they’ve got rights they can assert, and they probably would get a good listen, at least for some visitation. While you’re in limbo—and before we get a verdict, that’s where you are—it might be best to contact them and allow them some visitation and hope that’ll keep them from trying to litigate for full custody.”

  “Ruth’s going to love that.”

  “It doesn’t have to be her decision. In fact, it probably shouldn’t be.”

  “Good luck keeping her out of that loop.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Hardy said. “She’ll have to come around.”

  Hal shook his head. “Not her specialty, I assure you. But she’s the best I’ve got, and she’s absolutely on board for as long as it takes. And she’s not going to want to share. She’s already bonding with both kids, I can see it. It’s like a second chance for her, and she’s not going to blow it this time.”

  “You’re saying she blew it last time? You mean raising you?”

  Hal shrugged. “I don’t blame her. It wasn’t easy for any of us after my dad died. I basically came off the rails, and Ruth didn’t have much energy for me, especially with Warren and all of his problems. She just did her own thing and let me do mine, and that’s probably not the best way to raise a happy, productive kid. Which I was not. And look where it’s taken me.”

  “Being a deputy’s not the worst thing you could be.”

  “It’s a job. It’s got benefits. I’m not complaining, but . . .”

  “But you are.”

  “Well. It’s dangerous work. People don’t talk about that, if they realize it at all. Also, the pay sucks. It’s not the kind of job you dream about for when you grow up. I always thought I wanted something more, you know? I didn’t know what—maybe a lawyer, maybe a real cop, an inspector. But after Dad . . . nothing seemed worth the effort. I’m not blaming Ruth. I mean, she physically took care of me and got me through school, but she was emotionally checked out. And now she wants back in. I’m taking that as a good sign.”

  Their wine arrived, and Hardy sipped and pronounced it fine. The waiter poured the two glasses, and when he was gone, Hal picked up where he’d left off. “Ruth and the Dunnes and the kids, all that’s going to play out the way it does,” he said. “What happens today?”

  Hardy killed a second or two with his wine. “Today,” he said, “if the indictment comes in, you get booked, and after that I think you probably know the drill a little better than I do. The one bit of somewhat good news is they’re putting you in AdSeg.”

  “That’s good? It’s isolation.”

  “It won’t be for you.”

  “No? How’s it not gonna be?”

  “You’ll know your guards. They’ll talk to you, I bet.”

  This seemed to resonate as a probable truth, and Hal nodded. Then he had another question. “Are they going first degree?”

  “The indictment doesn’t allege degree. I don’t think premeditation will be their theory of trial, but we won’t know until we get there.”

  “How about bail?”

  “They’re probably going to allege murder for financial gain—the insurance. That’s a special circumstance, and there’ll be no bail.”

  “Can you argue that I’m not going anywhere?”

  “Sure, and I will. But it won’t do any good. No judge is going to let you out.”

  “What about my insurance money? I could put some of that up.”

  Hardy shook his head. “Even if they don’t allege specials and some judge sets bail, you’re not going to get any of that insurance money until they find you not guilty. The main thing is, a case with this profile, there’ll be no bail at any p
rice. Period.”

  “So I stay in jail? When? Until the trial?” Hal sat back in his seat and turned his head to stare out the window. He whispered, mostly to himself, “What a fucking nightmare.”

  “It is. There’s no denying it.”

  “What do we do?”

  “The big decision is how fast we want things to move ahead.”

  “You mean to trial?”

  “Yep. And you should know the conventional wisdom is that we want to put it off as long as we can.”

  “I don’t. Not if I’m in jail the whole time.”

  “Well.” Hardy paused, grateful that the waiter had returned with their food. He knew that the next few minutes were going to be uncomfortable if not downright ugly, and he wanted to give the tension a moment to dissipate before he started in again on some of the harsh realities his client was facing.

  They waited silently while they both took extra Parmesan grated over their carbonara. The waiter refilled their glasses. Then they took their first bites and reached for their glasses. Hal drank his wine down halfway.

  At last, Hardy talked. “I want to be clear, Hal. I’m not arguing this either way. It’s completely and absolutely your decision, how you want to proceed. But there are a lot of good reasons to want to go slow. You want to hear some of them?”

  “Why not?” Hal’s hold on civility was slipping.

  Hardy paused, then started in. “First, this is a red-hot case. Coming down here, I swung by the Hall, and they’ve pretty much blocked off all of Bryant Street to accommodate the news vans, like fifteen of them. Which means somebody leaked the grand jury news to the media. Emotions are going to be running high, everybody’s going to know or think they know all the facts, there’s going to be political pressure on everybody from the DA to the mayor to bring you to trial and see justice done. Justice in this case means they find you guilty.”

  “The jury doesn’t have to buy in to any of that.”

  “No, they don’t, in theory. But they’re humans, and they do. Fact of life, get over it. And then we’ve got the purely logistical considerations. Do we want to stay here in the city or go for a change of venue because of all the publicity? We need time to consider that, maybe do some polling. If we go slow, we get more time to prepare. In this case, more time to assign more help and maybe find out who actually did it. The prosecution might lose track of their witnesses—”

  “What witnesses?” Hal interrupted, exploding. “Do they even have one witness? And what would that person be a witness to?”

  “Okay.” Hardy put up a restraining hand. Diners at a few of the nearby tables were looking over at them. “Easy now. The two Homicide cops, at least. The coroner, the Crime Scene people, the lab folks, maybe Katie’s friends or family. Believe me, they’ll have witnesses. Over time, those witnesses might move away, or forget their testimony, or mix it up with another case, or even die. Lots of things can happen over time.

  “But”—and here Hardy paused for emphasis—“the main thing that going slow gets us is keeping you away from a verdict, which might come back not guilty. Juries are nothing if not unpredictable, and it might not. You want to keep even the remotest possibility of a verdict as far away from the here and now as you can. Once you’re found guilty, you’re in a different world, and it’s a world of hurt.” Hardy pointed down at Hal’s plate. “Eat something. It’s too good to let it get cold.”

  Hal absently picked up his fork and began to twirl his pasta. He brought it to his mouth, chewed, and swallowed. “What about going fast?” he asked. “And what is fast, by the way? How soon can we get this trial started?”

  “Sixty days from your arraignment.”

  “Okay, how is that better? I’m thinking off the bat that I want to go that way.”

  “Maybe you do,” Hardy replied. “We know that the DA’s got a weak case on evidence alone, and we don’t give them much time to find anything else.”

  “There isn’t going to be anything else. Not that implicates me.”

  “Of course.” Hardy had to admire Hal’s consistency. “But beyond any evidentiary issues, they barely have time to work out their theory of the case. If they want non-cop expert witnesses—don’t ask about what—they’ll have a hard time rounding them up on short notice. Same goes for lab results. Even if they’ve completed the work on everything they collected. At the very least, it puts a ton of pressure on everybody to get everything done, and that makes for mistakes. For you, if you get off, you’re out of jail that much sooner.”

  Hal started to say something, then held up while a busboy cleared their plates and the waiter set down their entrées. When they’d both moved off, he said, “Bottom line, everything I’m hearing sounds like the smart approach is to push forward. No?”

  Hardy bought some time with a bite of veal, a sip of wine. “It doesn’t give us much time to investigate alternatives, or hire our own experts and check lab work they’ve done. That’s one major drawback. The other one—the main one, really—is that if the jury does come in with a guilty verdict, everything’s different from then on out.”

  “Different how?”

  “Instead of being a suspect and presumed innocent, once the foreman says ‘guilty,’ you’re a convicted felon. Your rights are different, many of them gone, and pretty much forever. Even if we come up with new evidence afterward, unless it’s a total slam-dunk, like DNA or a confession, nobody’s going to be in a hurry to get you out of prison. Any appeal, on any grounds at all, will take its own sweet time working through the system. I’ve seen it take years. One of my own clients”—Hardy held up his hand as if taking an oath—“honest to God, four years. He eventually got out. But four years! Gone out of his life. I don’t want to see that happen to you. I’d rather put off the verdict as long as I possibly can and hope we find the actual killer or else something pretty damn exculpatory.”

  Hal chewed his meat, thinking about it. “Meanwhile, I’m in a cell.”

  “True. As I say, it’s your call.”

  Hal put down his fork. “Do you think they could really convict me?”

  “If they can indict you? I’d have to say yes.”

  “That is just so wrong.”

  “It is.” Hardy went to cut another bite of his lunch when his cell phone rang. He saw the number and said, “I need to get this. Hey, Abe, talk to me.” He listened, said, “When?” Listened some more, then punched off, holstered his phone, and looked across at his client, his face clamped down. “The indictment just came in. We’ve got till three-thirty to get to the jail.”

  33

  ON HIS BUNK, Luther Jones sneaked another look at the false business card that Maria Solis-Martinez had given him. The card said she was Maria Castro with the Yerba Buena Medical Group. It said she was an LVN, whatever that was. He felt that just having that card was a risk, but he couldn’t make himself throw it away.

  That phone number might be his way out of here.

  Ever since his meeting a few days before with Maria, Luther had been perplexed and on edge. Every bone in his body warned him that he was being set up and that as soon as he rolled over on Adam Foster as the man who killed Alanos Tussaint, he himself would meet with an unfortunate jailhouse accident.

  But he’d been over it and over it, and it still didn’t make sense.

  What he couldn’t figure out was why Adam Foster would go to the trouble. Did he mean to test Luther? Make sure that even in the face of temptation, he wasn’t going to talk? Why would Foster want to do that? Did he doubt that Luther would keep quiet? Luther didn’t want him thinking that even for a minute.

  Luther was worried enough that Adam Foster knew his name, knew his cell number, made it a point to come by every single day on his rounds and give him a cold nod with a colder smile, as though saying, “I’m watching every move you make.” Luther knew that Foster was indeed aware of everything he did, either on
his own or through the deputies.

  Which probably meant, since Foster had spies everywhere and knew everything, that he also knew the truth about Maria. He definitely knew that she’d come to see Luther. The question was what Foster believed about her.

  It seemed that Foster could believe one of three choices: Maria Castro was a nurse of some kind who was helping out at the infirmary. If Foster believed that, there was no danger to Luther.

  Second choice, Maria was with the DA’s office. In that case, Luther thought, he would already be dead.

  The third choice was that Maria was—somehow—a snitch for Foster. This last one didn’t make any sense to Luther. Why would he bring in an outside party to double-check his own work? There was no need. Foster had delivered his message, his death threat to Luther if he talked, with absolute clarity. Luther could think of no reason on earth for Foster to want to test him. If he thought Luther needed testing, he would kill him. Simple as that.

  So choices two or three resulted in Luther being dead.

  And then it followed—didn’t it?—that since Luther wasn’t dead, the first choice must be the right one. Hard though it might be for Luther to imagine, Foster seemed to believe in Maria’s phony cover as a nurse. If that were true, and Maria was what she said she was, a DA with a real offer that would get him out from under the watchful, never-blinking eye of Adam Foster, why wasn’t Luther taking her up on it?

  He wished he could ask his defense attorney, Kaz Eames. The problem there was that Luther didn’t trust Kaz, and with reason. He had a strong hunch about how things had gone wrong the first time he’d gone for the DA’s deal, and he didn’t want a replay of those events.

  When he’d first told his defense attorney, Kaz, that he had seen Adam Foster beat Alanos, Kaz had arranged an interview with Homicide. At that meeting, the cops had taped his statement and he’d shown them some of his cards. The next step should have been a formal offer of immunity from the assistant DA, Tom Scerbo, in exchange for Luther’s statement, and he was waiting in his cell for that offer when instead, Adam Foster had shown up with a couple of his goons. That team had been most persuasive—talking to Luther with his head in his cell’s toilet—in outlining all the reasons why he did not want to testify about what he’d seen.