Damage

by John Lescroart

  Contact.

  All the kids having dispersed to the television room at the other end of the house, the adults found themselves sitting around the Novios’ now-cleared dining room table, everyone drinking Frangelico out of snifters.

  “You really think he still cares?” Chuck was asking.

  “He’s done ten years in the slammer,” Michael said. “That’s a long time to think about getting back at who put you there.”

  Chuck sipped and nodded. “It’s also a hell of a long time to hold a grudge, don’t you think?”

  Michael shrugged. “I don’t think there’s a statute of limitations on grudges.”

  “Yes, but,” Kathy said, “it seems to me that these Curtlees did what they did back when all this was fresh in their minds and Ro just recently convicted, but now that he’s out of prison, who cares about anybody who helped send him there? You’re not a threat to him anymore.”

  Janice threw a look at her husband across the table. “That’s what I told him, too.”

  Michael looked from one sister to the other. “And I hope you’re both right. But even if you are right about his parents, there’s still Ro himself.”

  Chuck was shaking his head. “I don’t see that. He’s not going to do anything except be a good boy while he waits for his new trial.”

  Michael swirled the liqueur in his glass. “I don’t think so. He can’t be a good boy. He doesn’t know how.”

  “Michael,” his wife said, “how can you know that?”

  “I can know it because I heard him testify at his trial. I mean, here’s this serial rapist on the witness stand trying to convince us that he was in fact in a normal relationship with the woman he killed. They were having consensual sex. What was the big deal?”

  “Maybe they were,” Kathy said.

  “They were not, I promise. She’s eighteen, just off the boat, scared to death, and she’s living under his roof on a work visa that the Curtlees can pull anytime they want. Then Ro wants to have sex with her? So whatever it was, it wasn’t consensual.”

  “Still,” Chuck said, “it might not necessarily have been rape, right? I mean, she could have been coerced, but felt she had to.”

  “Chuck,” Kathy said, “that’s still rape.”

  “I’m just saying, maybe not technically, legally.”

  Michael nodded. “Don’t tell that to the other two ex-housekeepers who testified. Who said that Ro had a thing about them keeping their shoes on.”

  “That’s just weird,” Kathy said.

  “Why did he have them do that?” Chuck asked.

  Michael shook his head. “Nobody knows. He’s a nutcase. But they both said it.”

  “And this means?” Chuck asked.

  “It means Ro’s guilty as hell if Dolores Sandoval was naked except for her shoes. And she was. So it wasn’t consensual sex. It was a rape and then when she started screaming, he had to shut her up. There’s no other way to interpret it.”

  “What about the other two women?” Kathy asked. “The ones who did testify?”

  “What about them?”

  “I mean, what did he say about them, their testimony?”

  “He just said they were lying. He’d never had sex with either of them, much less raped them. He was just being set up. Why? Who knew? By whom? He didn’t know. There was just a lot of prejudice out there in the world against people who had money.”

  “But,” Chuck came in again, “my point is, Michael, this guy Ro isn’t going to come after you. You’re no part of his new trial, right?”

  “Right. If the new trial ever happens.”

  “Well, even if it doesn’t, what kind of threat are you to him?”

  Michael nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I think I am. Why would he come after you? You’ve been put in your place after last time. You’re not trying to get him thrown back in jail. I’d be surprised if he knew or cared if you were still alive.”

  Janice added, “I think Chuck’s right, here, Michael. We don’t have to worry about them anymore. They took their best shot at you, and it wasn’t enough.”

  “But pretty darn close,” Michael said. “Pretty darn close.”

  4

  At 5:05 on a Friday afternoon almost three weeks later, the man who ran San Francisco’s homicide detail picked up the telephone at his desk within the first half of the first ring. At the same time, he pulled his pad over in front of him, tucked the phone at his ear, and grabbed a pen. “Glitsky.”

  “Lieutenant.” The female voice was metallic and without inflection. “We’ve got a female body at a probable arson fire scene at four twenty Baker, nearest cross street is Oak. Apartment number six. Fire is contained. Arson’s taking jurisdiction, but local squad units, precinct captain, CSI, and paramedics are en route.”

  “Roger that.” Glitsky was writing down the essentials. “I’ll get a team rolling out there. Four twenty Baker, number six.”

  “That’s it.”

  Hanging up, Glitsky pushed back from his desk.

  Fifty-seven years old, he stood six foot two and weighed 210 pounds. During college, he had been a tight end for San Jose State at the same weight. Though his eyes were blue, his skin was dark, his nose prominent and slightly hooked. His father, Nat, was Jewish; his mother, Emma, long deceased, had been African American. His short Afro had by now gone mostly gray. A thick scar bisected his lips top to bottom at an acute angle. Today, as most days on the job, he wore civilian clothes—black cop shoes, dark blue khaki slacks with a thin black belt, a light brown ironed shirt, and black tie. No one had ever called him a snappy dresser.

  On a whiteboard hanging on the wall directly across from his chair, he daily kept track of the twelve inspectors in the detail—their assignments and active cases. Today, that board was filled. It had been a busy winter for homicides in San Francisco.

  Glitsky was around his desk, heading for the door out to the large room that held the inspectors’ desks, when he stopped for a moment to glance at the whiteboard. He knew it by heart, of course, but now it struck him anew. Each of Glitsky’s six homicide teams and his one solo inspector were currently working at least two murders. He needed more people, but what with budget issues, he knew he was lucky to not have had his staff cut by the morons, sycophants, and cretins who controlled these things.

  His second wife, Treya, had worked since she’d met him, to no avail, to persuade Glitsky to try to temper somewhat his default expression, a flat, deathless, and menacing stare. He wasn’t interested; the look had served him well at work, even if it sometimes terrified small children, even his own. Glitsky thought this was a reasonable trade—besides, it didn’t hurt children to have a bit of a healthy fear of their father. Glitsky’s large intelligent brow jutted over intense blue eyes. When he was thinking or daydreaming or actively scowling—all regular occurrences—the scar between his lips stood out in relief.

  When people weren’t calling him a snappy dresser, they often at the same time weren’t calling him a sweetheart.

  By the time Glitsky made it out to the fire scene through rush hour traffic, dusk had just about settled into night. This is not to say that it was dark in the immediate vicinity. Between the flashing red and blue police-car lights, the lamps on the firemen’s helmets, the streetlights, and the kliegs from the several TV vans that had converged on the block, the place was lit up like a movie shoot.

  Glitsky parked in the middle of Baker Street next to one of the fire trucks. Getting out of his city-issued car, he caught a gust of bitter, cold wind, heavily laden with the smell of smoke. He flashed his badge and signed into the scene with the cop who was controlling access to the area.

  A man wearing a white fire helmet, the incident commander, stood talking with another man in civilian clothes on the sidewalk in front of a stoop that led up to a three-story Victorian.

  As Glitsky walked over to check in with them, his shoes squished in the still-wet street. Stopping to zip his heavy leather jacket up aga
inst the cold, he noticed that several pairs of uniformed precinct cops were standing around by their squad cars, aimless. He was tempted to go over and personally motivate them to get back in their cars and on patrol, where they were supposed to be, working. But indulging this fantasy, he knew, would only come back to bite him—hard-ass homicide lieutenant lording it over the serfs, taking his job too seriously.

  But that he had the fantasy at all served as a wake-up call: He was seething. The feeling had snuck up on him full-blown. It was a Friday night and he should by now be home with his wife and children. He didn’t resent the overtime, never had, but he did when the idiocy of the bureaucrats and politicians gave him no choice—when he didn’t have enough staff or the budget to get the job done, so he had to step in and do it himself. And he knew that he could have simply assigned an already overworked homicide team to take this case, but that wasn’t leadership, and it wasn’t his style.

  Fifty feet on down the street, somebody was giving an interview to one of the TV stations, and that had attracted its own small crowd. Looking up at the obvious site of the blaze, Glitsky saw that the fire itself was out; teams of firemen were rolling up hoses, sweeping the gutters, cleaning up. Moving forward, Glitsky crunched along over debris and broken glass. Closer now, he recognized the incident commander in the white helmet as Norm Shaklee and the man with whom he was talking, the city’s chief arson inspector attached to the Bureau of Fire Investigations, Arnie Becker.

  Putting his anger in its secret place, he arranged his face and said hello to the men, both of whom knew him and greeted him cordially.

  And then Becker said, “So they’re sending out the big guns on homicides now?”

  Glitsky kept it loose. “I sent myself. I was the only one in the office.” He shrugged. “What are you going to do? So what do we have?”

  “Pretty definitely arson. Started on the third floor, luckily, and even better luck, the neighbor across the hall smelled it early and called it right in. There’ll be water damage and the usual mess, but the residents can probably move back in in a week or so. We only got a total loss on the one apartment out of six.”

  “What about our victim?”

  “We don’t know too much about her yet. The apartment was rented by a woman named Felicia Nuñez.”

  Glitsky’s brow clouded briefly. “Do I know that name?”

  Becker shrugged. “I’d bet there’s more than one of them. It’s common enough. Anyway, that’s probably who she is, but we don’t know that absolutely, and nobody’s going to identify her from what we got up there, that’s for sure. We’ll probably have to wait for dentals.” Becker’s eyes, which in his career had already seen it all, went a little dull. “You should know that whoever set the apartment on fire, set her on fire first. It looked like she was probably naked or close to it when he poured whatever it was on her genitals and lit her up. And it spread from there.”

  “So. Rape?”

  “Probably, I’d guess. And I’d imagine he killed her first, although that’ll be the ME’s call. That and how he did it. Nobody heard any screams or struggling, and there were people right below and across from her in the building. We may never really know about the rape. I’d be surprised if they get DNA from her. She’s burned up pretty bad.”

  Glitsky swallowed against his revulsion. “And nobody saw an assailant?”

  “Nothing, Lieutenant. Nobody saw a thing. I’ve got a crew working the neighborhood, but we’ve already talked to everybody in the building and the guy was lucky or careful, or both, and seems to have just disappeared. It’s a pisser.”

  “Tell me about it.” He turned to Shaklee. “Are my crime scene people here?”

  The incident commander nodded. “I sent ’em up. Faro and his gang. But from what Arnie here has been telling me, they’re going to have their work cut out for them.”

  “What else is new?” Glitsky looked up at the black holes where the upper story windows had been. Flashlight beams crisscrossed one another in the darkness. He drew a heavy breath. “You mind if I go up now?”

  The incident commander has absolute control over access to a fire scene, which was why Glitsky asked. Now Shaklee nodded and turned to his partner. “If Arnie’s got no objection.”

  “No,” Becker said. “In fact, I’ll go with you.”

  5

  Abe and Treya Glitsky had planned on going out to an early movie that night, but he hadn’t gotten home from the arson murder scene until nearly nine, so that got ruled out. Still, they had Rita, their housekeeper, staying late to babysit anyway, so they decided they’d just go out and drive around until fate led them to a destination, which in this case happened to be David’s on Geary. Not really so random, if one knew Glitsky’s love of Jewish delicatessens like Treya did.

  Now Glitsky’s eyes were focused out across the counter, far away from the liverwurst and onion on pumpernickel the waitress had just set down in front of him. “I know I know that name,” he said.

  Treya was just picking up her hot pastrami and Swiss on rye, and the half she held was far bigger than she could get into her mouth in one bite. So she stopped midway. “Maybe one of your old paramours?”

  “None of my paramours were old. In fact, now that I think of it, you are my oldest paramour ever. And even you’re not that old.”

  “Well, thank you, I think. Did I mean ‘former’ instead of ‘old’ and by chance misspoke? Imagine my chagrin.”

  “Imagine it,” Glitsky said, “but she wasn’t a former paramour. She’s just in my brain—her name, anyway—rattling around. Felicia Nuñez.”

  “She’ll show up.”

  “Her and Christmas.” Glitsky bit into his sandwich, chewed with a distracted air. “Sorry,” he said after he’d swallowed. “I know the rule is no work on dates.”

  “So you’re sure she’s work related? The one you used to know, as opposed to the homicide victim you saw tonight?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Well, I’ve bent the no-talking-about-work rule on occasion,” she said. “I can give you one.”

  “I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I want to talk about work in general. In fact, I’m pretty sure I don’t. Starting with the fact that I’ve got no inspectors free to handle this latest case, so I’ve got to go down and do it myself on a Friday night when we’ve got a date planned. That’s the kind of thing, I start talking about it, I could get myself worked up. And I’m betting this won’t be the last homicide we see before too many of the others get cleared, so this is just an ongoing problem that’s only going to get worse because of the incredibly misguided priorities of the idiots who get elected in this city. And why don’t they seem to learn?”

  “Good,” Treya said. “You really don’t want to talk about that. I can tell.”

  “I don’t.”

  “I know. So we’ll leave that part out. So, now, how about Felicia Nuñez?”

  “The current one or the one I think I remember?”

  “Maybe she’s both. Maybe you arrested her before?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I remember people I’ve arrested.”

  “Okay, then, maybe she was a victim?”

  Glitsky, his sandwich forgotten, was shaking his head. “Arnie Becker says it’s a common name, but I don’t think that’s it.”

  “Maybe another cop, maybe somebody you interviewed for a job? Or, how about this? On a case, maybe a witness?”

  Suddenly Glitsky’s head went still. He brought his hand up to his mouth and covered it, his startling blue eyes scanning the corners of the ceiling.

  Treya knew to leave him alone. He’d picked up the scent. “Oh dear Lord,” he half whispered through his fingers. Glitsky rarely used profanity, and only then under the greatest duress, and his calling upon the Lord in this context underscored the degree of his concern.

  “What is it? Abe?”

  He lowered his hand with an exaggerated calm. “Ro Curtlee.”

  “No.” This was a name she didn’t want t
o hear, since it was so thoroughly continuing to roil the waters at the DA’s office. “What’s she got to do with him?”

  “She was a witness against him at his first trial and was going to be one of the central witnesses at the next one. But now obviously she isn’t going to play much of a role, being dead and all.”

  Treya finally said, “This is just going to cream Wes.”

  “I’ve got to call him.”

  “Maybe Ro didn’t have anything to do with this Felicia Nuñez,” Treya said.

  Glitsky, already punching numbers into his cell phone, rolled his eyes.

  In the middle of a speech he was giving at the Immigrant Resource Fair on Valencia in the Mission District, Wes Farrell felt his cell phone buzz at his belt and silently cursed himself for bringing the damn thing with him at all. He didn’t need distractions from the work at hand, and he didn’t think of himself as one of the great natural orators of history, in any event. Nevertheless, this speech, he thought, was a pretty good one about something he truly cared about—protecting crime victims in San Francisco’s immigrant community.

  “What we’ve got to avoid,” he was saying, “is the appearance and, even more important, the reality, that immigrant crime victims do not fall under the protection of law enforcement. If you’re the victim of a crime in San Francisco, the status of your immigration is not, repeat, not going to be a factor. A visit by this city’s police enforcement arm is not a visit from the U.S. government’s immigration agencies.”

  In the meeting hall of the Centro del Pueblo, the crowd broke into applause. Farrell, pumped up by the response, hazarded a glance over at his girlfriend, heartened to see that she was taking part in the ovation. He and Sam hadn’t yet figured out how his new job was going to fly within their relationship, and he’d take any sign he could that it could still work out. The past few weeks—from the day of Ro Curtlee’s bail hearing forward—had been chilly between them, and maybe this applause marked the beginning of a thaw.