The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  They’d convinced him.

  The last time somebody had a big mouth, it hadn’t been him, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t Scerbo. That left Kaz. So Luther was through confiding in the fucking guy who could have gotten him killed.

  Still, he knew he had valuable information. As an eyewitness to a jailhouse murder committed by the chief deputy himself, he could definitely trade his testimony for some kind of deal. Of course, the word of a jailhouse snitch, particularly one who’d already recanted once, wasn’t worth much. But Luther knew more than he’d told anyone: He knew why Foster had killed Tussaint—that the whole thing was related to corruption in the jail. The dope, the selling of privileges, the gambling and enforcement of gambling debts, the whole rotten enterprise. If he told the cops what he knew—names, dates, connections, payoffs—and they dug around, they should be able to find proof.

  All this was potentially lethal stuff, and there was no way he was telling Kaz any of it. Kaz, though, was the only lawyer he had. His only chance.

  Unless he wanted to risk playing the hand himself, call Maria on the number listed on her phony business card, and hope she could put things together fast enough to get him out.

  It was the only play he had.

  If he just had the balls to make the call.

  34

  GLITSKY DROVE OUT past Hal Chase’s home, and kept driving for another two blocks, until he came to the Interior Park Belt. Parking there, he got out and stood staring at the large canopy of eucalyptus in front of him. The trail that Katie’s killer must have taken had been pretty seriously trampled—the cops, the curious—in the days since her body had been found, so it was no trouble to follow it back up into the deeper shade.

  Sure enough, a hundred or so feet up, a tributary trail cut off to the right through the low underbrush. The little path might originally have been challenging to pick up when the body was there, but after all the intervening foot traffic, it might as well have been lit by neon. It was also—and it seemed this must usually be the case—wet.

  Glitsky picked his way through the low brambles until he came to the clearing where the body must have fallen. Here he stopped, turned, looked behind him.

  John Strout, the medical examiner, had told him that the shooter might have been short in stature, and Glitsky had countered that he’d heard the trail was a relatively steep uphill climb. Standing there, he realized that it came nowhere near to reaching the thirty-five- or forty-degree threshold that Strout had talked about. In fact, by San Francisco standards, it would hardly be considered steep at all. The pitch of the canyon steepened significantly on the other side of the clearing, but here at the opening, the first steps in, it was all but flat.

  So the brass-jacketed slug had entered at the base of Katie’s brain and exited at the hairline. Strout’s admittedly nonscientific pronouncement about the bullet’s path seemed right, although, as he’d noted, there were several possible explanations: Katie might have had her head down as she walked, the shooter might have tripped and panicked and shot from below Katie’s neck. There were any number of other possible scenarios, and he was keenly aware that, for an experienced Homicide inspector, all in all, this was an exercise in stupidity. There were at least a dozen quick-to-hand variables that could produce the kind of path that the bullet had taken on its way through Katie’s brain and into one of the surrounding eucalyptus trees. This was something he shouldn’t be wasting a minute on.

  Except for one thing . . .

  And that thing—Strout’s mentioning it as more a likelihood than a possibility—Glitsky should ignore only at his peril. John Strout was an objective guy with vast experience. He dealt in science and numbers, angles and percentages and lab results at the microscopic level. He did not guess very often, and he never guessed when he testified. For him to tell Glitsky that he might want to consider the possibility that the shooter was shorter than Hal’s six feet was remarkably out of character. Strout was speaking in an unguarded fashion to an ex-cop and longtime acquaintance about an instinctive feeling, nothing that he could mention or ever would consider mentioning in court.

  Nevertheless, he had said it. It was, Glitsky thought, what the good doctor believed. He couldn’t prove it, probably wouldn’t even try.

  But there it was.

  • • •

  BACK AT HAL’S house about a half hour later, Glitsky sat at Katie’s computer in the master bedroom upstairs. Below, he was vaguely aware of the constant faint hum of activity of Ruth and the children, punctuated rather too frequently in his opinion by explosions of young toddler pique and impatient snappish adult response. Ruth, Ellen, and even to some extent baby Will working out the kinks in their relationships.

  He wasn’t paying attention to that, though. He was here, at Frannie Hardy’s suggestion, to try to get a line on Katie Chase’s love affair, which was quite possibly going on or had just ended in the months surrounding March 2010. The computer had been turned over weeks before by the officers in Missing Persons, who had Hal’s permission. They had since downloaded and returned it. But they had been looking for more recent activity that might have had to do with her disappearance, and probably they hadn’t paid too much attention to three-year-old records. Fortunately for Glitsky, Hal had given them the computer’s password, which Hal and Katie had shared, and the officers had left the sheet of binder paper containing Hal’s notes, including that password, in the middle drawer of the desk on which the computer sat. As an added bonus, Katie was clearly not paranoid about her security and used the same password for her Facebook account.

  But after nearly an hour of checking emails, her Facebook, and other random documents, Glitsky had come away with exactly nothing that looked even remotely promising. Her Facebook wall for those months after Ellen’s birth had been filled almost exclusively with pictures of the new baby, dozens if not hundreds of them, and of the babies of the women who “liked” her photos. Her emails were mostly to her sisters and brother and some coworkers, and none of them contained any hints about her lover, or any indication that she and Hal were having problems. To all outward appearances, they were the glowing new parents.

  Even if he was unlucky finding specific information, Glitsky considered himself lucky to have so much no-hassle access. When he decided to give up on the computer for the day, he went looking for her telephone records. Again, the super-organized, type-A Katie made things easy for him. She had three wooden file cabinets along the wall beside the computer desk, and in them she kept all their household records, in alphabetical order, for at least the past five years and what might have been their entire marriage. Glitsky pulled out the physical telephone bills for the first half of 2010 and, using the reverse-number feature on her computer, once again found nothing suspicious, much less damning. Certainly no string of calls to any one number. The outgoing calls from both this home number and from her cell phone—the same account—were again limited almost entirely to her family members, to her employer’s office, and to the jail where her husband worked. The greatest number of the calls was likely there.

  Glitsky sensed the early onset of dusk and saw that he’d have to leave for the day. He had to pick up his own children and needed to hustle if he was going to make it.

  Downstairs, things had calmed down. Will was in his high chair and Ruth was feeding him while Ellen was the picture of intense concentration, her tongue sticking out of her mouth as she sat at the table across from her grandmother, drawing silently on an Etch A Sketch.

  “How are you doing?” Glitsky asked.

  Ruth turned. “Very good. I was born for this. Ellie and I are getting along splendidly, aren’t we, sweetie?”

  The child raised her head from her creation. “Ellen,” she said, “not Ellie.”

  Ruth rolled her eyes for Glitsky’s benefit. “Ellen then,” she said.

  Ellen said, “What?” and went back to her drawing.

  Th
en, as if suddenly remembering why Glitsky was there, Ruth cocked her head. “Did you find anything?”

  “Zero.”

  “Maybe I’d have heard something or seen something. Were you looking for something specific?”

  Glitsky didn’t want to burden Ruth with the supposition that her daughter-in-law had been involved in an affair. As far as he knew, even Hal didn’t know that. Not yet, anyway. He shook his head. “Just anything that might jump out, and nothing did.”

  She sighed. “Tragic,” she said. “Just so tragic.”

  “It is.” Glitsky let out a breath. “I’m off to pick up my kids at school. Can I get you anything?”

  “I know you’re trying,” she said, “but all I really need is to get my good son back. He did not”—she glanced at Ellen—“you know. About Katie. And no jury is going to find that he did.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. “Call if you need anything or think of something I should look into.”

  “I will.”

  “Bye, then.”

  “Bye.” Then, “Ellie, say goodbye to Mr. Glitsky. There’s a good girl.”

  But Ellen was immersed in her Etch A Sketch and didn’t look up.

  Glitsky said, “That’s all right. She’s got a lot to deal with right now. I’ll see you.”

  When his hand was on the front doorknob, he heard the girl’s voice in indignation: “Hey!”

  “Don’t you ‘hey’ me! You’re not the boss around here, young lady. I’m the boss.”

  “That’s mine! It’s mine! Give it back!”

  “When I want to, and not before, Ellie.”

  “It’s Ellen.”

  “It’s whatever I want it to be. Now settle down and be a good girl for once.”

  Glitsky pulled the door closed gently behind him.

  35

  AT THE JAIL, his former colleagues were giving Hal Chase every courtesy, breaking a lot of the rules to do it, but what the hell. He was still one of them. As soon as they got him in the elevator after he’d been booked, they took off his handcuffs. They couldn’t let him remain in his civilian clothes, but at least the jail jumpsuit fit him.

  The cell on the seventh floor was the same as all the others: ten feet by twelve, with a bare porcelain toilet, a sink, and a bed that was not much more than a mattress laid down over a rectangle of concrete. Someone, though, whether for him or for another segregated VIP guest in the past, had scrounged up a well-used comfortable leather armchair and a small wooden table with a wooden chair to go with it. The bed had a pillow. A makeshift shelf held twenty or so paperback books. The big problem everywhere in the jail was heat—the ambient temperature was around sixty-six degrees—so they’d provided him with two extra blankets and a red and green afghan he could throw over his shoulders. His dinner tray was loaded with double rations of meat loaf, gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, pepper and salt, six slices of bread with packets of real butter. Milk and two chocolate chip cookies for dessert.

  In spite of the terrific Italian lunch he’d had with Hardy at Original Joe’s only five hours before, Hal ate it all, making conversation the whole time with Paul Landry, one of his buds from the shift. There were inmates on either side of him, but he couldn’t see them and vice versa, and for the most part, he was unaware of their presence.

  It was going to be a long haul, he knew, but he was confident he could handle it. He’d been coming to work in this same jail for half a dozen years; even if he was on the wrong side of the bars, he didn’t feel particularly uncomfortable or threatened.

  Or at least, he didn’t feel threatened until he was settling down in his leather chair after dinner with Nelson DeMille’s novel Night Fall—Hal was a big John Corey fan—and somebody knocked on the bars. He looked up to see his chief deputy, Adam Foster, looking down at him. Closing the book, he got right to his feet and saluted.

  Foster returned the greeting. “You mind if I come in?”

  “I don’t think I get to choose.”

  “True that,” Foster said, not without humor. In a minute, he’d unlocked the door and come inside, then closed the door behind him, two big men in a small place. Hal sat himself on the mattress and motioned to the leather chair, which Foster settled into. “So, how are we treating you? You comfortable?”

  Hal gestured at his surroundings. “Presidential suite. No complaints. The food’s better than I make at home.”

  “Still, the situation sucks.”

  “No argument there. I didn’t kill Katie, Adam.”

  “Nobody here thinks you did, Hal. You got any ideas who might have?”

  The inmate shook his head. “If I did, I would have told somebody, I promise.”

  “You don’t think your girlfriend . . . ?”

  “No.”

  “Just sayin’. You could point at her, make ’em look that way.”

  “I don’t want to do that. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good. It could never come out, ’cause she didn’t do it, either.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “No question.”

  “What’s your lawyer say?”

  “Not too much. He seems to think it’s a good idea to put off going to trial for as long as I can. But nice as the accommodations are here, I don’t think I want to hang out in this room for a year or more.”

  “No. You probably don’t.” Foster cast his eyes about the small space. He blew out a breath in apparent frustration. He lowered his voice so it couldn’t carry to any of the adjoining cells. “And do I have this right? Your lawyer is working with Glitsky?”

  Hal nodded, then also spoke more softly. “They’re old friends. He’s been an inspector half his life. Maybe he’ll find something.”

  “Yeah. Well, the thing is . . .”

  Hal waited him out for a moment before asking, “What?”

  Foster took his time, choosing his words with care. “He talked to Burt at your place, you know. After the burial. He seemed kind of interested in this story your wife’s brother was telling.”

  “Daniel’s a jerk.”

  “Maybe, but still. Glitsky’s at the goddamn grave site asking Burt about stuff he’s heard about what’s going on here at the jail, as though maybe he thought it had something to do with your wife’s death.”

  “How could that be?”

  “I was hoping maybe you could tell me.”

  Hal shook his head. “That’s just trying to pin another so-called motive on me, as if they need another one. I was shutting her up because she was going to blow the whistle on what I’d told her about some things that happened here? I’m sure. What would that get me? Beyond that, what would telling her get me?”

  “Plus, you know that nothing’s happened here. We—you and me—were in San Bruno when Tussaint fell down.”

  “No. I know that. I never said anything else.”

  “That’s the funny thing, Hal. You see what I’m saying? It sounded to Burt like maybe you’d gone and told your wife some stories about your work, stuff that’s gone down here.”

  “I didn’t do that.”

  “Somehow Glitsky was on to it.”

  “I don’t know what that’s about.” Even in the chill room, Hal felt a film of sweat blossom around his forehead. “I never mentioned anything to Glitsky. I swear to God.”

  Suddenly, Adam Foster had moved himself up to the front edge of the leather chair. He had his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped between his legs. “That’s the way we want to keep it, Hal. You understand me?”

  “I’ve always understood that, Adam.”

  “How do you think your brother-in-law got the idea?”

  “I told you. He’s a jerk. He’s a lawyer, too, you know. Maybe he heard the rumors we’re always dealing with and decided to play with them.”

  “Well, that makes Burt nervous. Me? It just makes me u
nhappy.”

  “There’s nothing to it. Nothing that came from me.”

  “You never talked to your wife about what goes on at work?”

  “Not that kind of stuff.” Hal swallowed, his throat suddenly parched. He got up, crossed two steps over to the sink, ran some water over his hands, splashed his face, cupped a mouthful, then wiped his face with the small hand towel. He turned back to his interrogator, sat down on the bed again, cleared his throat. “Adam. I swear to God. That’s all I can say.”

  “Okay.” Foster reached out and touched Hal’s knee. Gave him a tight smile. “Just crossing my i’s and dotting my t’s, you know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay, then.” Foster started to get up, checked himself, settled back down. “One other thing. I mean, it goes without saying, but I’ll feel better if I just come out with it so there’s no . . . misunderstanding.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “If they convict you—not saying they will, but it’s always a possibility—you’re going to be looking at some serious prison time. You know that and I know it. In the face of that, you might be tempted to cut some kind of deal with the DA, maybe trade some testimony for a sentencing break. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I’d never do that. That’s not who I am, Adam. You ought to know that.”

  Foster shrugged. “That’s who you are now, Hal. But people go through changes, get some different ideas. Think about saving their own skins. And all I’m telling you is that this would be unwise.” He held up a hand as Hal started to object. “No, no. I know you’re not thinking anything like that now. But the temptation might come along, and it would be a bad idea if you couldn’t resist it. A long time in prison is better than some alternatives. I know you know what I mean.”