Damage

by John Lescroart

  To Farrell, the law was a set of inflexible, impersonal, and objective rules that society adopted to settle disputes. There was little room for discretion; what you usually did was what you always did. Morality didn’t much play into it. And the law was specifically not a tool that you used selectively to arrest some people but not others who did the same thing.

  Both Glitsky and Jenkins apparently had no trouble being creative within the rules to get Ro Curtlee back into a cell. Farrell believed that if it couldn’t be done in the normal course of business, then by definition it was wrong. And yet Glitsky and Jenkins clearly thought that they had the law and, more important, morality on their side.

  And this Farrell knew to be a very slippery slope, and very dis turbing.

  While he was losing sleep last night over the degree of responsibility he bore for the release of Ro Curtlee and the subsequent death of Felicia Nuñez, he’d finally come to terms with his conscience because he knew that he had respected the law and applied it fairly. That was what he’d been elected to do. That was his job.

  But what about this suggestion that he use one of the legal tools at his command—the grand jury or a preliminary hearing—to get Ro back behind bars? Surely that would be worthwhile, but would it be right? The man had already been convicted of rape and murder, and his successful appeal to the Ninth Circuit never even addressed the actual fact of his guilt for those crimes, which was never really in doubt. And if he had come from a poor family, Farrell knew that he never would have been able to make his $10 million bail, and he would still be in jail awaiting his retrial.

  The crux was that Farrell knew that Glitsky had no physical evidence on Curtlee for the Nuñez murder. He had a great motive, true, and probably no good alibi, but Farrell didn’t believe he could charge Ro or go to a grand jury on those issues alone. Forget whether they could adequately prove probable cause—Jenkins was correct that this was an often elastic criterion; evidence or no, her suggestion could work. That would get Ro back into the system, true, and it might keep him in jail until his retrial, or close to it. But it would be cynically playing the system and that was, to Farrell’s mind, where the morality came into it.

  Farrell knew he was not a saint. He was flawed in many ways. Ask his ex-wife and his grown and mostly far-flung kids. But he was not a hypocrite. He had sworn to uphold the law as he believed it to be, and that’s what he was going to do, come what may.

  Looking back up a last time at the empty shell of Felicia Nuñez’s apartment, he unconsciously set his jaw and put the car back into gear.

  8

  Ro Curtlee turned north off Lake and pulled his BMW into a parking spot at the curb of a short dead-end street that, like his own much more high-end block, ended at the Presidio. On both sides of this street, near-identical two-story duplexes sat tight up against one another. A row of garage doors fronted the sidewalk, and next to each garage door, a walkway led first to a side door on the flat at the ground level, and then to a flight of stairs that led to the upper unit.

  Ro got out of his car. He was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a heavy green slicker of some kind that he’d buttoned against the weather. His head was bare.

  Checking the address numbers on the fronts of the duplexes, he started up the block, walking with a purposeful stride. Down at the end, he found the address he wanted. It was the upstairs unit in the building, and he climbed twelve steps, stood for a moment in front of the door, then rang the doorbell.

  A female voice called from inside. “Just a minute!”

  Ro waited.

  The door opened and he was facing an attractive black woman who was almost his own size. “Yes. Can I help you?”

  Ro could not believe she simply opened the door and greeted him. If she’d looked through the peephole, he’d missed it. And there was no chain to offer even token resistance if he decided he was going to get himself inside.

  He thought that this was either supreme confidence or idiocy.

  She was wearing a purple sweat suit and tennis shoes. Just beside her, holding her hand, a young girl of about five or six stood looking up at him with an appraising and confident air that Ro thought she might have lifted wholesale from her father’s playbook.

  Ro gave the daughter a fast glance and a quick, shallow smile and then brought his eyes back to the mother. “I was hoping to talk to Lieutenant Abe Glitsky,” he said.

  “He’s not home right now,” she said. “I expect him in the next couple of minutes.” For a tantalizing second, Ro got the impression that she was considering inviting him in to wait. Instead, she backed up a half-step and put her hand on the edge of the door, as though preparing to slam it, although nothing changed in her eyes, which remained friendly, inquisitive. “If you’d like to come back, maybe in a half hour or so, you’ll probably catch him.”

  “That’s all right. I’m sure I’ll run into him downtown and I’ll talk with him then. I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop by unannounced and hope to reach him at home, the way he did with me last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Right.” He gave her a smirk. “If you wouldn’t mind telling him that Ro Curtlee stopped by, I’d appreciate it.”

  This time the woman’s eyes narrowed and her face went slack. Instinctively she moved farther back away from him, pushing her child partially behind her as she did so. Her hand tightened on the edge of the door. “What are you doing here?”

  It was all the reaction of fear and anger that he’d hoped for.

  “Really just telling your husband that I know where he lives, you know. Like he did with me.”

  She pulled the door around in front of her. “You’d better leave right now,” she said. “You’ve got no business coming here.”

  With an exaggerated expression of disappointment, he said, “And just when we were all getting along so well.” He pointed down at the little girl. “That’s a real pretty little daughter you’ve got there.”

  At this, the door slammed on him, and from behind it he heard, “I’m calling nine-one-one.”

  “You don’t have to bother,” he said through the door. “I’ll be long gone.”

  He started back down the stairs toward the street and his waiting car.

  Glitsky was sitting in Jenkins’ cluttered office on the third floor, drinking a cup of tea and filling her in on Becker’s information—the positive ID on Nuñez, the soles of the Adidas—when Treya’s call came in on his cell. As he listened to the sound of her voice—quivering beneath the controlled, low-pitched, and calm recital of events—he realized how close to panic she was, how proximate the danger had been.

  Without realizing it, he stood up and paced from the door and back to the desk while the scar between his lips grew more pronounced, an angry white line. He lowered a haunch onto Jenkins’ desk and with his free hand pulled at the skin of his face.

  “Abe?” Treya asked into the extended silence.

  “I’m here. Is he gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I saw him drive away.”

  “And you’ve got both the kids with you?”

  “Right. We’re all okay. A little shaky, that’s all.”

  Glitsky let out a breath. Another one.

  “Abe?” she asked again.

  “Still here. Thinking.”

  “You want to come home? That would be good. Rachel wants to say hi to you.”

  Before he could object, he heard his daughter’s voice. “Hi, Daddy. Mommy’s upset. Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine. But that man who came to the house. He’s not a good man.”

  “You should arrest him.”

  “I know. I think that’s what’s going to happen. Are you okay now?”

  “Just worried. For Mommy. He really scared her. Are you coming home soon?”

  “Real soon. Can I talk to your mom again?”

  “Okay.”

  And then Treya: “Hey.”
<
br />   “Trey, I’m sending a squad car by.”

  “No. I don’t think we need ...”

  “We’ll negotiate about that when I get there. But meanwhile, I’m sending some men if for nothing else to take a report. I’ll be right behind them. But when they knock, check the peephole and make sure it’s really them first, okay? And keep the dead bolt on until then.”

  “I never thought, with Ro . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Glitsky said. “You got away with it once. Now we know. We check the peephole, huh?”

  “All right. We’ll be waiting for you.”

  “I’ll be home in half an hour. You just keep everybody close till then.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I won’t. I love you.”

  “I love you, too. Get home soon.”

  “I will.”

  When he closed the phone, he looked over at Jenkins. “You heard that.”

  “Ro came by your house?”

  “Yes, he did.” His shoulders sagged with the weight of this latest burden. “He made a point of saying that Rachel was a pretty little girl.” Glitsky’s eyes went to the corners of the room, then back down to Jenkins. He let out a breath and shook his head.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “About what you’d expect. Blow his head off.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you, but you’d probably get caught and go to jail.”

  “Somebody’s got to stop him.”

  “There’s another way.”

  “It couldn’t be better than popping him.”

  “No. Better for you though. Arrest him.”

  “Wes didn’t seem too hot on that idea.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t have anything to charge him with then. And now we do.”

  “What?”

  “Threatening an executive officer. That’s you. Or any member of your family. Penal Code sixty-nine or four twenty-two, take your pick. Both felonies.”

  “Is that true?”

  Glitsky should have been used to attorneys knowing sections of the Penal Code by heart, but every time he ran up against it, it impressed him. Jenkins, unoffended, spun in her chair, closed her eyes, and said, “Sixty-nine: ‘Every person who attempts, by means of any threat or violence, to deter or prevent an executive officer from performing any duty imposed upon such officer,’ blah blah blah. And here’s four twenty-two: ‘Any person who willfully threatens to commit a crime which will result in death or great bodily injury to another person, with the specific intent that the statement’ blah blah ‘is to be taken as a threat,’ and this is the good part, ‘even if there is no intent of actually carrying it out, which, on its face and under the circumstances in which it is made, is so unequivocal, unconditional, immediate, and specific as to convey to the person threatened, a gravity of purpose and an immediate prospect of execution of the threat, and thereby causes that person reasonably to be in sustained fear for his or her own safety or for his or her immediate family’s safety,’ et cetera.”

  “You’ve got a good memory,” Glitsky said.

  Jenkins shrugged. “Comes with the territory. You can’t remember stuff, don’t go to law school. Anyway, I think we go for four twenty-two.”

  “What about Wes?”

  “Wes said if we got something real, he’d charge it. And that’s what our boy just gave us. I’ll be your witness to the fact that right now you are in a state of sustained fear for your safety and your family’s. Is that about true?”

  “True enough.”

  “There you go. So it’s textbook. And it’s a felony. Plenty to get him back inside.”

  Glitsky shifted himself off the desk. “Then what am I sitting around here for?”

  “You’re sitting around waiting for me to clear this with Wes. He’s going to want you to get a warrant. And in fact, he’ll want somebody else to take this. He’ll think you’re too close. I could call Matt and I’m sure he and a couple of his buddies would jump all over the opportunity. Now you’re supposed to ask me who Matt is.”

  Glitsky stood by the door. “I think I vaguely remember, but I’m afraid that this has got to be a police matter, Amanda. This is a serious guy who threatened my family. He’s going into custody as soon as I can get him there.”

  But Glitsky couldn’t do anything about Ro until he knew where his suspect was. And more specifically that he was not still skulking around his own home. Treya had watched Ro apparently walk away, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t still parked nearby, perhaps waiting for Glitsky to show himself on his street, an easy target for ambush.

  So he called the precinct house downstairs at the Hall and requested a team of patrolmen be sent to his home ASAP, where they would remain with Treya and the kids until Glitsky’s arrival. On the way there, the team was to keep a lookout for a purple BMW Z4 parked in the neighborhood and report immediately to Glitsky if they saw one.

  Glitsky had a patrol woman place a call to the Curtlee home. She identified herself as a clerk concerned with his bail bond and said that she needed to speak to Ro about his status at his earliest convenience. When Ro picked up with a “what the fuck is this about now?” the patrol woman told him she just needed to confirm his resident address, and having accomplished the call’s primary objective, which was to determine if Ro was back home, she hung up.

  Glitsky, still in a high and glowing rage, left her office at the word and, out in the hallway, broke into a jog.

  There are three ways that law enforcement officers can make a valid arrest in California, and Glitsky had had a great deal of experience with all of them.

  In the first instance, the grand jury issues an indictment. The court issues a warrant and a couple of officers are assigned to arrest the suspect and deliver him or her to the jail. In the second case, investigators conclude that they have enough evidence to satisfy the probable-cause requirement, and they bring this evidence to a magistrate (one of the rotating superior court judges), who then signs off on an arrest warrant, after which, again, a couple of officers go out to effect the arrest. The third type, the so-called no-warrant arrest, is both the most common and the most challenged because it almost always includes an element of subjectivity—an officer or team of officers makes a unilateral decision that the suspect must be taken into custody immediately for any number of reasons, usually because he was caught in the act, but perhaps to stop him from committing another crime or to keep him from fleeing the jurisdiction.

  Glitsky didn’t know offhand who was the presiding magistrate on this Saturday afternoon, but he did know two other things for sure: that the magistrate might be Sam Baretto, who would be very unlikely to sign off on a warrant; and that Ro Curtlee needed to be in jail right now. These were two possibly irreconcilable scenarios, and the second one, in Glitsky’s mind, was nonnego tiable.

  So by the time he was on the elevator heading down to the lobby, Abe had made up his mind. Because of the overt threat to his own family, he believed he had plenty to justify a no-warrant arrest. Wes Farrell had already promised him that if he had anything substantive to bring Ro in on, the DA’s office would back him up. Besides, in police work—as in so many other endeavors—it was always better to ask for forgiveness later than for permission before.

  His duty was clear and Glitsky was going to do it.

  On reflection, Glitsky knew Jenkins was right that it would be hard for him to make the arrest himself. He was just too close to the case. He also knew he couldn’t go into any suspect’s house without an arrest warrant, even for a felony. But what he could do was put a bunch of officers in surveillance around the house who would nail Ro Curtlee the first time he set foot outside.

  It only took him a couple of minutes to explain the situation and to pick up two pairs of uniformed patrolmen and another squad car from Southern Station, the precinct that worked out of the ground floor of the Hall of Justice. They would take the initial shifts around the Curtlee home until Glitsky could call in some of the detectives from night investiga
tions to take over the surveillance.

  Now the five policemen had pulled up and parked at the curb down the street from the Curtlee home, Glitsky in his city-issue and his troops behind him in their black-and-white patrol cars with the wire mesh between the front and back seats.

  They got out of their cars and gathered near Glitsky’s back bumper. The light drizzle continued and in the late afternoon limited visibility to about fifty yards. The weather didn’t seem to bother or even much register with any of the men.

  Glitsky liked the trim of these youngsters—solid guys, all probably under twenty-five, pumped up and eager to be working with the head of homicide. They all looked like they worked out with some regularity. The biggest white kid—his name tag read DALY—stood with his arms folded across his chest. His partner, Monroe, lean and dark black, kept his hands in his jacket pockets and shifted his weight from foot to foot, loose and easy. The two others might have been their cousins. All the men wore their belts—guns, batons, and handcuffs. Glitsky, in plainclothes, had no patrolman’s belt, just his service weapon in a shoulder holster underneath a dark brown Gore-Tex jacket.

  “What if he doesn’t come out?” Daly asked.

  Glitsky’s mouth turned up a fraction of an inch, anticipating a smile that never quite materialized. “We wait till he does. The man’s going to jail.”

  The patrolmen exchanged a glance, galvanized by the thought of real action.

  “Oh,” Glitsky added, “and there may be a butler, large gentleman, who has a carry permit and might want to make this an issue. He interferes in any way, we restrain him and bring him downtown as well, clear? No chances with either of these guys.”

  “Yes, sir,” the four men said in unison.

  “All right. Let’s go.”

  Glitsky sent one of the squad cars beyond the house to the end of the block so that if Ro came out, whether he turned left or right, there would be someone to cut him off. In their enthusiasm, the officers in this car turned on their overhead flashing lights to drive the fifty yards down the street. Glitsky flinched. At least, he thought, they didn’t turn on their sirens.