Damage

by John Lescroart

  The ancient doctor scratched at his white hair. “I know y’all been talking about rape an’ hopin’ to pick up some DNA, but the Nuñez woman was too burnt for any analysis whatever. Wasn’t anything like fluid left to test. And Durbin, best I can tell, there wasn’t any rape at all. Although I did, I told Arnie here this morning, I did find that she had a dose of chlamydia. The bottom line is that there’s nothin’ I can point out proves either one of’em was raped at all. So I wouldn’t be comfortable putting that in your MO.”

  “What about the chlamydia?” Farrell asked. “Would she have been contagious?”

  “Yeah, but even if it got passed on to Curtlee, there’s no provin’ it came from her. So what’s that get you?”

  Amanda Jenkins cleared her throat. “If I may?” she said. “How about if we think about the one trial that Ro’s had? I mean, there was no question about evidence in that case. We had the two witnesses solid, and his DNA with his victim.”

  “Yeah,” Farrell said, “but he’s already been tried, convicted, and appealed out on that one. You can’t punish somebody for winning an appeal by recharging him with something more serious.”

  “Of course. But how about if you take it from a completely different angle? Tell the grand jury that you’re joining that first case, Sandoval, with these later two. So you’re not upping the charge in Sandoval, which is the legal objection. And why are you joining the cases, then? Because the first one is the motive for the others. So now you’ve got multiple murder, and that’s a special circumstance, and that’s no bail. And that way—I really like this, Wes—you also make a neat end-run around the sixty-day issue. If his attorneys press for trial, they’re shooting themselves in the foot because we’ve got him again cold on the first one.”

  Farrell, swinging his feet as he contemplated, sat with the idea for a long moment. “It’s good, Amanda, but I still think we’re on some pretty shaky legal grounds.”

  “Not really. If we tried charging the Sandoval rape again, definitely. But we’re not. So the specials this time out aren’t murder/ rape, but multiple murder. And if we’ve got the evidence to convict him on one, and we do, that’s all we need.”

  Farrell, clearly warming to the general idea, still wanted more specifics. “So how exactly do I sell it to the grand jury?”

  “That these are all connected? Aside from the fact that it’s pretty self-evident on its face, you just tell them, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Janice Durbin was a suburban housewife. She wasn’t robbed, she didn’t have any known connection to gangs or to drugs. Who else in the world would want her dead except Ro Curtlee, and what was his motive? Revenge on her husband, pure and simple.’ ”

  Really into it now, Amanda looked around the room and found herself selling it to everyone. “You remind the jury that their standard of proof isn’t reasonable doubt, but merely probable cause. Could any one of them really believe that Mrs. Durbin getting killed right now was just a coincidence? Did they want to live with that? No, even though there’s ten years between them, these murders are obviously all connected, so obviously that it can’t be ignored. And more murders are going to keep happening, with who knows how many other victims, until Ro is back in jail.”

  Farrell, nodding easily now, finally said, “I think so. I think that might work.” He looked around. “Anybody else have anything to add?”

  Vi Lapeer spoke up for the first time. “It would be better if this didn’t leak.”

  “I hope,” Farrell said, “that goes without saying.”

  “Sorry.” Lapeer’s smile was tight and unyielding. “In Philadelphia, sometimes that wasn’t always so clear.” Now she turned to Glitsky. “I’d try to get your investigations on these two new cases assigned to an event number”—this meant that the investigations would have an unlimited budget from the city’s General Fund—“but I’d have to get His Honor to sign off on that, and we can’t go there. So given that that’s not going to happen, do you have enough personnel, Abe?”

  “I could move people around, maybe assign out overtime,” he said, “but who’s going to pay for it?”

  “How about if you go over budget, you don’t get dinged? On my guarantee.”

  “Thank you,” Glitsky said. “I’ll find some troops and put them on it.” He turned to Farrell. “So what’s our time frame on this?”

  Farrell shrugged, looked over to Jenkins. “Amanda?”

  “If I drop everything else, I can present most of it next week, that is a week from tomorrow. Or you could, Wes, if I brought you up to speed.”

  “It’s your case,” Farrell said.

  “All right.” Jenkins, clearly pleased, let out a breath of relief. “I’ll need every witness I can get, both from Ro’s trial and from the ongoing investigations. If all goes perfectly, maybe we can hope for an indictment two weeks from tomorrow.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Arnie Becker said. “That long? He could wipe out half the city in that time.”

  Jenkins threw him a look. “Maybe, but that long would basically be a world record for speed, Inspector,” she said.

  “In the meantime,” Lapeer said, “I can keep it out of the homicide budget and authorize putting someone on him twenty-four/ seven.”

  “I’ve already done that,” Jenkins said.

  This was news to Farrell. “You did?”

  “Well, he volunteered, actually. Matt Lewis. One of our inspectors,” she explained to Lapeer. “Matt thought I might be a next possible target and wanted to keep an eye out. And it wasn’t twenty-four /seven. Just his shift and then maybe a few hours at night.”

  “He’ll want some backup, then,” Lapeer said.

  “That would help,” Jenkins said.

  Farrell surveyed the room briefly. “All right,” he said, “it looks like we’ve got a workable plan with a reasonable timeline. Longer than I’d like in a perfect world, but probably the best we can do. Amanda, since you’re going to be presenting to the grand jury, why don’t you take point coordinating all these efforts with what you’re going to need. Couple of weeks, with any luck, we’ll get this animal back where he belongs before he can do any more damage. I want to thank you all again for ...”

  A knock on the door interrupted him, followed immediately by Treya from the outer office. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but Abe, somebody hunted you down and there’s an urgent call for you out at my desk.”

  20

  In the decade or so that it had been since he’d last shot anybody, Eztli had almost forgotten the pure adrenaline rush and pleasure of violent action, of simple pure killing. He didn’t realize how much he’d missed it, having to make do over the years with the vicarious thrills of gamecock or dog fighting. Now, the taste of blood still fresh in his mouth, it was as though he’d been sensation deprived, weaned slowly, methodically, and successfully off his drug and then reintroduced to its power and its beauty.

  In ways he didn’t try to understand, he knew that Ro was somehow the source of this drug. Before Ro had gotten out of jail, Eztli had been marking time, comfortable and secure, with the Curtlees. And then, suddenly Ro appeared at the home with his energy and fearlessness, and Eztli, riding around with him, catching the high-tension vibe of the younger man, had in the past days woken up from what felt like a long sleep. Ending in the climax of the gunshot to the man’s head this afternoon. Ro, perhaps even unwittingly, had been the catalyst, the gateway to the drug.

  And Eztli was going to protect that source.

  Now at around nine o’clock, he was sitting in his car alone, parked across the street from Buena Vista Park in the Upper Haight. Wes Farrell lived in a medium-size Victorian home just down the block that Eztli and Ro had checked out—the address compliments of one of Denardi’s private investigators—as one of Ro’s first excursions after he’d gotten home. Farrell, Eztli knew, was going to be the key to whatever happened with Ro—and Farrell was weak and indecisive.

  He could be controlled, and much more effectively than with Cliff and
Theresa’s carrot-and-stick, relatively subtle approach.

  The trick, Eztli felt, was to see the man in his natural environment and determine where, when, and what kind of pressure to bring to bear on him to control his decision-making. What Eztli had said to Ro was true—Farrell was his best friend. It really wasn’t in Ro’s, or Eztli’s, best interests to eliminate Farrell, to take him entirely out of the picture. No, Farrell needed to be part of any equation that could keep Ro permanently out of prison. He would be crucial to that.

  Eztli simply had to make him understand the seriousness of the situation. So far, Farrell had mostly stood aside and let things happen, and the Curtlees’ influence had carried the day. But eventually he was going to have to make a decision—to prosecute Ro or to let the matter drop. Eztli did not want him confused as to the proper choice.

  So he had to get to know him a little more. See where the pressure points were.

  When Farrell dragged himself back into his home at nine thirty that Monday night, he could not ever remember being so tired. Somewhat to his surprise, the house was completely dark. Well, he wouldn’t blame Sam if she had decided to go out to have dinner somewhere by herself or even with one of her friends. He’d been terrible company lately.

  Tonight he hadn’t called her to tell her he’d be late, hadn’t even thought about it in the hurricane of emotion and upheaval that had swept through his office at the news that Matt Lewis had been found shot to death in his car out in the Fillmore district. Amanda Jenkins breaking down, inconsolably wedged between grief and guilt, John Strout, Treya, and Farrell himself administering to her while Glitsky and Becker headed out to the crime scene. Lapeer herself, the chief of police, had gone down to the magistrate on duty to try to get whoever it was to sign off on a search warrant for the Curtlee home, since no one had the tiniest doubt as to who was responsible for Lewis’s death.

  Farrell flicked on the light by the front door and in a second he heard the familiar click, click, click of Gert’s nails on the hardwood floor as she came padding out of the kitchen to meet him. She’d probably been sleeping in her bed in there, and now he reached down and petted her. “Where’s your mom?” he asked, putting down his briefcase, turning on more lights, heading for the refrigerator.

  The answer came in the form of a note she left him on the kitchen counter:

  “Wes—Sorry if this seems abrupt, but we both know I’ve been thinking about taking a little time off from us for a while now. You not calling or making it home tonight, after all of our discussions about just keeping on communicating with one another ...

  “Anyway, it was a wake-up call telling me that I should actually do something, rather than just taking things as they come and building up resentment against you. If I was choosing to stay around here and just keep taking it, whose fault is that? So I’m going to be staying over at Marianne’s house for at least the next few days and I’d appreciate it if you’d leave me my space so I can think about what comes next for us. I don’t know, maybe you won’t want me back once you get used to me being gone, either. You’ve got to admit we haven’t been having much fun lately. I’m not really much of a politician’s wife, or even girlfriend, I’m afraid. I just don’t seem to have much of a stomach for it. The compromises, the deals, Ro Curtlee, all of it.

  “I do still love you—I do—and I’m fine. But I don’t know if I can live anymore, or want to, the way we’ve been lately. Sam

  “P.S. Gert has had dinner, but probably needs a walk before bed. If you want, you can leave her at the Center during the days, and I’ll drop her back here at night, if you’re going to be around. Just let me know.”

  Farrell let himself down on one of the kitchen chairs, laid the note on the table in front of him. Gert had put her head on his leg and he scratched the top of it absently.

  After some time had gone by—he had no sense of how much—Gert started nudging his leg and whining. Moving like a zombie, Farrell put her leash on her and retraced his steps back to the front door, and then out into the night.

  The street that his house was on mostly encircled the park, and he and Gert had a regular route they walked in the morning and before bed where she took care of her business. The park itself, now in the dark, was its usual open expanse of nothingness, and suddenly tonight, as he walked around its periphery, Farrell in his numbness gradually became aware of an ominous something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  Stopping, he looked out into the park’s center. Several of the lights in the street all around were out, and he couldn’t for the life of him remember if they’d been working over the past few days. Ahead of him, there were no lights at all, either in the park or on the street. At the end of the leash, Gert started in with a high-pitched whining. Farrell walked on a few more steps, then stopped again.

  He stood completely still for a minute or so. There was no sound at all in the street, not any movement that he could see. Finally he whispered down to his dog, “Come on, girl. Back we go.”

  But Gert, with hair standing up now down the center of her back, strained at her leash, growling low and harsh, and now barked at something out in the invisible distance.

  Keeping a tight rein on her, Farrell moved up next to her head and petted it. “Come on now, come on.” Pulling her around, heeling, back toward his house.

  When they got back inside, he closed and locked the front door behind him. He took off Gert’s leash and started to go back again into the kitchen. As a matter of course, whenever he did this, Gert would tag along next to him. But this time, she turned back to the front door and another low rumbling came out of her.

  “Hey, easy now,” he said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.” But holding her by the collar, he opened the door again and took a quick look outside at his benign street upon which nothing moved.

  After he finally got Gert calmed down, doing her business out the back stairs in their tiny backyard and then lying back down on her cushion in the kitchen, Farrell went over to the liquor cabinet and pulled down a bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. He free-poured himself most of a juice glass full, threw in enough ice cubes to take the liquid to the rim of the glass, then drank it all off in a gulp.

  This—losing his woman and imagining threats on empty streets—was not by any stretch what he had bargained for when he’d run for DA. In his heart, he didn’t really think that he was that serious a person. He had some verbal skills and he got along reasonably well with people from most walks of society, but he’d never considered himself to be a leader of men. He had originally been talked into running for DA with the thought that he’d bring a measure of enlightenment to the law enforcement community within the city. From his perspective as a lifetime defense attorney, he had believed that there was in fact often a problem with cops using more force than was justified. He thought that police often overstepped their mandates with immigrants as well as many of the other assorted minority populations in town. And by the same token, he’d represented a host of people who had made mistakes and, no question, were not angels—but through a mixture of glib humor and just the right amount of backbone, he had never felt in danger from most of these miscreants.

  Well, there had been one. Mark Dooher had been Farrell’s best friend for years. A fellow attorney, but inhabiting an entirely different stratosphere from Farrell’s, Dooher had been counsel to the Archdiocese of San Francisco, among a host of other high-end clients. When Dooher’s wife was killed in a home invasion, the overweening, overreacting police—Abe Glitsky, in point of fact—had launched what Wes took to be a vendetta against his friend, eventually bringing him to trial charged with his wife’s murder. Farrell had taken on his defense, and in a brutal and grueling trial against Amanda Jenkins, had won an acquittal. That trial, moreover, marked the beginning of Farrell’s rise to prominence in the city’s legal community.

  The only problem was that Mark Dooher—pillar of the community, wonderful father and husband, legal face of the Archdiocese—had, in fact, been guil
ty of killing his wife. And also guilty of raping a woman while he’d been in college. And killing another man with whom he’d been selling drugs in Vietnam. And gutting with a bayonet another young attorney with whom he’d been in litigation.

  And then he had tried to kill Farrell, too.

  Now, with Ro Curtlee, Wes felt that he was once again up against a true sociopath who might have given Mark Dooher a run for his money. He’d been out of prison for less than a month and he’d almost undoubtedly already killed three people, including Farrell’s own investigator. And no one, apparently, seemed to be able to stop him. Vi Lapeer had volunteered to put a watch on him around the clock until the grand jury could issue an indictment against him, but she wouldn’t have had time to do that yet today. Ro could be out there on Farrell’s street right now, sitting in a car, lying in wait. He might break in here and light the place on fire.

  One thing seemed certain—Ro was committed to staying out of jail. It seemed obvious to Farrell that he’d prefer to die resisting arrest—look how he’d fought with Glitsky and his two men—than go back to prison. So he wasn’t afraid of anything. He would attack any and every person whom he wanted to punish or who threatened his freedom. Felicia Nuñez, Janice Durbin, Matt Lewis. Gloria Gonzalvez, wherever she was. And to that list Farrell felt he could confidently add Amanda Jenkins, Glitsky, and his family.

  And himself.

  Glitsky turned the keys—first the dead bolt, then the regular lock—in his front door as quietly as he could. It was sometime after midnight. Inside, he untied his shoes and slipped out of them, then picked them up and went around the corner to his small living room, where Treya stood up from where she was sitting on the couch and said, “Thank God you’re home. If you could spare one, I could use a hug.”

  She stepped forward into his arms. Held him as tightly as she could. He dropped his shoes onto the floor and she felt something give in him and she reached up behind him and pulled his head down to the crook of her neck. He let his head rest where it was, heavy, and she could feel the thick, strong muscles in his neck letting go of the tension in them. After another moment, his arms came up around her, too, pressing her against him, so hard she almost, for a second, couldn’t breathe.