The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  Hal chuckled. “It’s possible.”

  “Is your mom going to hate me?”

  “Never. You don’t have to worry about my mom. She loves you.”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “Believe me, after this weekend . . .”

  “All I did was call and ask if she needed some help.”

  “Right, that’s all. And then you came over and stayed the whole time. She and Warren couldn’t have made it through the weekend without you, and you know it. She told me she’d about reached the end of her patience. If you hadn’t called, she didn’t know what they would have done.”

  “They would have found a way, I’m sure.”

  “Maybe, but because of you, they didn’t have to, did they?”

  “I wouldn’t make too big a deal out of it, Hal, really. I was just being selfish.”

  “Selfish?”

  “I hadn’t seen Will or Ellen in forever. All of a sudden I get a chance to spend a whole uninterrupted weekend with them. Are you kidding me? Wild horses couldn’t have stopped me. I love those guys.” She poked gently at his side. “And you don’t have to say they love me, too. I know they don’t, not yet. But they will. I promise.”

  “I know they will. I mean, if you’ve already got Ruth on your side . . .” He drew in a breath. “Do you know how great it feels to have her actually like the woman I love? Do you know how long it’s been since that’s happened?”

  Patti didn’t answer right away. “Well,” she finally said, “I’m glad of that. She’s not the easiest person in the world, I admit, but I think we can get along. I’m going to try. I know that. And there are moments when she can be pretty great. Like when I lost my cell phone this weekend and was having a total meltdown about it, she was so patient and got me to retrace my steps.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t find your phone.”

  “My point is, she calmed me down and was so helpful and nice in a moment when I needed it.”

  “She said it was nothing.”

  “You weren’t here. I was beside myself for a few minutes there, I assure you. I don’t know where I could have lost the darn thing.”

  “That’s why they call it lost,” Hal said. “But the point is, you and Mom and even Warren got along. You know how miraculous that is?”

  “This whole thing,” she said, “feels like a miracle.” She kissed him again.

  “I know,” he said. “It does. As I told Abe tonight, it’s almost enough to give a guy reason to hope.”

  “Now you’re calling him Abe? Do you like him?”

  “I don’t know, like, but I’m feeling pretty good about him. He’s the reason this all worked out.”

  “I guess. But he thought it was possible that I killed Katie.”

  He kissed her. “He’s a cop, babe. That’s how he thinks. Early on, maybe even later on, he thought the same thing about me. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Maybe not, but it felt awful.”

  “It’s his job.” Hal fell silent, then sighed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That deep breathing didn’t sound like nothing.”

  Hal said, “I just wish they were going a little more after Cushing.”

  “For what?”

  “For giving Adam Foster his orders, maybe including the order to kill Katie.”

  “Do you think he did that?”

  “I don’t know. I think it’s possible.”

  “And they’re not going after him?”

  “Abe thinks not.”

  “What’s going to happen to him? The sheriff?”

  “Nothing. He goes riding off into the sunset.”

  “That’s just not right. They at least ought to find out what actually happened.”

  “You’d think so, but Abe says maybe not.” He turned onto his side, propping his head in his hand. “You realize that I can’t go back to work as long as Cushing’s there.”

  “That’s all right. You don’t have to. I mean, money-wise.”

  “Right. But if I don’t go back, isn’t it telling him I suspect he ordered Katie’s death? Maybe I even know it for sure. And if nobody else is investigating, doesn’t that mean I’m the last threat to him?”

  She met his eyes in the dim half-light. “I hate this,” she said.

  Hal reached over and pulled her to him. “I’m not so wild about it myself.”

  58

  THE DISCUSSION WITH Hal Chase wouldn’t shake itself out of Glitsky’s mind, and it was wreaking havoc with his imagination.

  Be happy, he had told himself at the breakfast table as they got Rachel and Zachary ready for school.

  Don’t worry, be happy. On his drive downtown after the morning stop at school, he forced the Bobby McFerrin song into the front of his brainpan, following it up with the Beach Boys doing “Don’t Worry Baby.”

  He was going to be happy. There was no reason not to be happy. Hal Chase was out of jail. Three homicides had been solved in one swell foop.

  Abe was, after all, a hero.

  Sometimes, he told himself, the universe just dropped a bunch of good stuff in your lap, and you found you could use all of it, and your problems went away. It had happened when he’d met Treya; when he’d come out of surgery after being shot; when he’d regained consciousness after his heart attack. And it had happened to him Saturday at about the same instant as the .38 bullet had creased its way through Adam Foster’s evil and conniving brain.

  By the time he got to his desk—no applause now—Glitsky had been reminding himself pretty continuously that he had been at the crime scene on Saturday night, along with the CSI team and his Homicide pals, and no one had thought for a moment that Foster’s death had been anything but a suicide. Over the weekend, Abe had followed up with the forensic evidence as best he could, making sure Len Faro got a handwriting analysis from their local expert and ballistics results from the lab in near-record time. Glitsky had actually let out a whoop, scaring his wife and children in the backyard playground, when he’d gotten the news that the Foster bullet and the Katie Chase bullet had definitely come from the same weapon—the one in Adam Foster’s hand.

  And then Abe had gone to Hal’s homecoming party on Monday night.

  Cushing had ordered Foster to take care of Katie, just as he’d later ordered Foster to take care of Solis-Martinez. This was, after all, Foster’s role whenever it became necessary. In the Chase matter, it would have been child’s play for Foster or any one of Hal’s fellow guards, just making small talk, to find out from Hal when he was going to pick up his brother at the airport.

  But . . .

  Glitsky left his desk, took the elevator down to the lobby, bought a bag of peanut M&M’s from the shop, and left the Hall of Justice through the back door leading to the morgue on the right and the jail on the left. No doubt, Burt Cushing was less than a hundred yards away when he passed.

  He’d given up on trying to be happy. Happiness wasn’t happening. Not yet, anyway. Walking under the freeway, picking his way through the parking lots as he chewed his M&M’s, he tried to banish the doubts from his mind. But they would not go away.

  Just because everybody thought Foster was a suicide, did that mean it had to be the case? Was there anything that positively precluded any other interpretation? If not, might an experienced law enforcement person be able to make a murder look like a suicide? Glitsky knew the answer to that.

  Glitsky admired the statement that Cushing had released about Foster’s death, particularly how it neatly framed the discussion so as to divert all suspicion onto Adam Foster as a fait accompli. The chief deputy was so obviously guilty of at least one homicide that he was guilty by extension of everything else that had gone bad at the jail. It broke the sheriff’s heart, but there it was.

  This, of course, took Cushing off t
he hook for all of it. True, Foster’s transgressions under the sheriff’s nose might hurt his reputation as a competent administrator, but this was about the worst he would have to deal with—next to conviction for a murder or two, there was no comparison.

  Somehow, Glitsky found he had turned uptown and was on Fifth near Mission. Close enough, he told himself, to drop in unannounced again on Jeff Elliot.

  Who, it turned out, was in his cubicle, pecking away at his keyboard, eyes locked on his monitor.

  Abe stood unmoving in the doorway, waiting until his presence made itself known. Jeff eventually felt it, looked up and brightened for a quick instant, saved his document, and pushed his wheelchair back from his desk. “Dr. Glitsky. Still basking, I presume.”

  “Mostly. It’s been a good couple of days.”

  “And now you’re here because you’ve got another scoop you want to share with your humble reporter.”

  “Maybe.”

  Elliot straightened himself up. “You’re kidding.”

  “I don’t know. I’m not completely happy about the Foster verdict.”

  “There wasn’t any verdict.”

  “Yeah, there was. There just wasn’t a jury bringing it in. And I know it bothers you, too.”

  “What does?”

  “That it turned out to be all Foster. Which conveniently leaves out Burt Cushing, who, you might remember, was the guy you wanted all along.”

  Elliot squinted down. He scratched at his beard, both sides. “I’m listening.”

  “It’s a work in progress,” Glitsky said, “and off the record at this stage. I just wanted a set of ears.”

  “You got ’em.”

  “This is what I’m thinking about. First, the gun. We don’t know where it came from, period. Could have been Foster’s, could have been Cushing’s, could have been mine, for that matter.” Glitsky held up a hand. “It wasn’t. The question remains, if Foster knows he’s going to kill himself, why not take his own trusty service weapon?”

  “Because with the one he used, he confesses to the Chase murder?”

  Abe raised his eyebrows. “Really? Pretty subtle. But let’s go on.” He came inside and lowered himself onto the cubicle’s only chair. “Let’s say Cushing calls Foster on Saturday and tells him the jig is up. Cushing himself is going to roll over on Foster. The evidence is piling up on Tussaint. His own guards are going to turn. Old Burt doesn’t have a choice, and he’s sorry, but that’s the way it’s got to go down.” He waited. “You see my problem?”

  “You don’t think his reaction is to kill himself?”

  “Do you?”

  “Now that you say it, it is a bit of a reach,” Jeff said.

  “At least a reach,” Glitsky said. “If it were me, I know I wouldn’t kill myself. I’d go on the offense and try to take it to Cushing, cut some deal with some prosecutors, either that or kill him instead. But instead Foster shoots himself? Again, really? Why?”

  “It must have seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  Ignoring that, Abe cocked his head. “I’ve got nothing that eliminates suicide. The whole thing was, pardon the word, perfectly executed. Cushing invites him down to this out-of-the-way place so they can speak freely without fear of being seen or recorded. He hops into the passenger seat in Foster’s car, pulls a gun, and tosses Foster the notepad and tells him to write his note. The second he’s done, before there’s any more discussion, Cushing pops him, leaves the gun in his hand, and takes off.”

  Elliot digested this for a moment. “You’re saying that Cushing killed Katie Chase, too.”

  “Very good, Jeff. Maybe his original plan was to do both Katie and Hal together, but then when Hal wasn’t home . . .”

  “Why wouldn’t he have waited for him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Katie told him Hal was coming back with his brother, and that started to get too complicated. Besides, if he got rid of her, that alone plugged the potential leak. Plus, she knew him. She would have let him in, no problem.” Abe shrugged. “I admit I don’t have all the details worked out. But Cushing is every bit as plausible as Foster, maybe more.”

  “Except you don’t have anything that proves it wasn’t suicide?”

  “That, in a nutshell, is it.”

  Elliot drummed his fingers on his wheelchair’s arm. After a minute, he asked, “Where’s the pencil? Where’s the notepad that he wrote the note with?”

  “Good,” Glitsky said, but then shook his head. “He could have written it anywhere before he got in the car. So, no good.”

  “No, he couldn’t have. I mean, yes, if it was suicide, he could have written the note at his home or anywhere, but not under your Cushing scenario. If it was Cushing, it had to have happened in the car.”

  “Neither proves anything. If Cushing took the pencil away, or if it wasn’t there to begin with . . . it doesn’t fly.”

  “All right.” Elliot sighed, thought another second or two, brightened again. “How about GSR?” Gunshot residue. “If Foster didn’t actually shoot the gun . . .”

  This time Abe nodded. “That’s a good call. I’ll ask Crime Scene about it. But in that close an environment, probably everything’s got GSR all over it. Anyway, the gun was in his hand, and that puts GSR on his hand whether he fired it or not.”

  Another small silence, both of them thinking. Finally, Elliot asked, “Do we know what Burt said he was doing Saturday night? I mean, a fund-raiser or something public . . .”

  “It gets demoralizing, asking these guys for alibis. But I’ll check if it was something public. What I’d really like is something to positively eliminate the suicide first. Otherwise, I’m just howling at the moon.”

  “Well, I wish you luck.” Jeff rocked back and forth a little in his wheelchair. “It would be too sweet if we could bring all this back to that asshole and take him down, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, it would. I’ll keep thinking on it.”

  “Somehow, Abe, I thought you might.”

  59

  DUE TO THE sense of urgency surrounding the ballistics test on the past Sunday morning, Len Faro had spent a good deal of time at the police lab in Hunters Point. Aside from being the snappiest dresser on the police force—today he was in about five grand worth of Brioni—he was punctilious about his evidence, especially the chain of evidence. In a perfect world—the one he tried to inhabit—once he took an item into custody, it remained under his constant guard, either in his personal possession or, eventually and more likely, in the city’s evidence locker, until he needed to produce it again at trial. That way, when he was called to testify at court—and he always was—he could swear under oath that every item introduced as an exhibit had been under his personal and uninterrupted control from the moment it had been discovered until its appearance in the courtroom. On the flip side, anything that did not meet these criteria would not be admitted. So no one was planting any bogus evidence on his watch, thank you.

  It made Faro nervous enough for regular police officers, even those under his direct command, to have access to this stuff; today, with someone like Abe Glitsky, with whom he had a long and cordial history but who no longer worked for the Police Department, he had his defenses on full alert. Not that he really thought Glitsky might plant or remove anything, but why take the chance?

  So when Abe had stopped by to ask permission to review the evidence in the Chase and Foster matters, Faro had volunteered to drive him down—he had some stuff on a new case to drop off, anyway—and together they could see what Abe needed or thought he needed to see.

  Now they sat at a large table in an air-conditioned room adjacent to the evidence locker. Both of them wore latex gloves. On the table were two medium cardboard boxes, and in front of the men was a good-sized pile of Ziploc bags of various sizes. Everything taken from the car and from the body of Adam Foster.

  Glitsky’s
first close look had been at the gun, followed by the slugs. He also examined the blown-up copies of photographs of the ballistics test, which, to his experienced eye, made the report’s conclusion unambiguous. The same weapon had fired both bullets. Foster’s fingerprints were the only ones on the weapon, and their positioning was absolutely consistent with the theory that he’d fired the gun himself. Further, Glitsky’s understanding about gunshot residue turned out to be correct—Faro told him that they’d checked Foster’s hands first thing, and there was plenty of the stuff on his right hand to verify that he’d been holding the gun and pulled the trigger.

  Though he wasn’t certain what, if anything, it might mean, Glitsky brought up Jeff Elliot’s question about the pencil and paper; Faro and his techs had found neither in the car. The car was pretty darn spotless inside and out. Glitsky remembered the showroom shine he’d noticed and picked up a Baggie containing a business-card-sized bit of cardboard with the words “$1 Discount Off Your Next Carwash—Cable Car Washers. Good until . . .” An ink stamp had printed out the date “December 21.”

  “Where did this come from?” Glitsky asked.

  Faro glanced at the card. “That little covered cubbyhole between the front seats.”

  “Anything else in it? Coins, CDs, anything?”

  “They’d be here if they were.”

  “I know, Len, just making sure.”

  “There is,” Faro added, picking up another Baggie, “this little trash bag. Same carwash.” He read the logo. “ ‘A clean car lasts longer.’ I’m not sure of the veracity of that statement.”

  “Sounds like false advertising to me. Somebody ought to sue ’em.” Abe stared at the card for a few more seconds. “Do we know when he got the wash?”

  “Actually, we do. It was Saturday.”

  “How’d you get that?”

  Faro wasn’t entirely successful hiding the pleasure of his accomplishment. “I called them yesterday and asked them about that date. You get a week between washes if you want to save a buck. December twenty-first is next Saturday. So he got his wash on the fourteenth. Saturday.”