The car peeled out in a spray of gravel.
Holiday was alone now in the Yerba Buena Motel at the corner of Van Ness and Lombard, not even three blocks from Michelle's house. She had come back home last night traumatized and panic-stricken. She was sure that the policemen that had been at his place had followed her home. They both had to get out of there right away. So they'd walked down here, a few blocks, and Michelle had checked them both in under her name.
And now she was gone. She had a deadline for a big article on bonzais for Sunset and she needed to do a ton of research. She told him he should just hang out here in the room and she'd be back mid-afternoon with some lunch. He called Hardy's office three times and redundantly left Michelle's cell phone number each time, but it appeared that his lawyer had taken the day off. The one time he ventured a look out the window, a black-and-white police car had been parked in the lot outside. The next time he looked, it had gone, but the anxiety hadn't.
This was getting bad, he knew. He was going to have to do something. He couldn't just sit here.
When the maid knocked, he let her in and went out across the street and into the convenience store on the corner. At least his picture wasn't on the front page of the newspapers out front today. He bought a quart of milk, a quart of apple juice, six apples, a Snickers candy bar and a copy of the Chronicle. When he got back, the maid had finished.
He drank the milk and ate an apple and the candy bar. He read the Chronicle, was pleased to note on page two that they still hadn't found him, although the search continued. He tried Hardy again, but he still wasn't in.
Finally, he took a clean towel from the bathroom and used it as a tablecloth on the bedside table. He took his gun from his jacket pocket, made sure there wasn't a bullet in the chamber, nor a clip in the handle. After wiping it clean with the towel, he tried the action, sighted down the barrel, squeezed off a succession of phantom rounds. To his surprise, he found that the clip had only four rounds in it, and he opened his box and squeezed in another three, so that it was fully loaded. He worked the action to chamber a round, then dropped the clip and put another bullet in its place.
Finally, he jammed the clip into the weapon.
Loaded for bear.
*****
Thieu didn't get much sleep, but he wasn't accustomed to more than five hours anyway, so it didn't bother him. After he and Faro had finished their dusting at Holiday's, he decided on his own that Dismas Hardy's strategy had if not a flaw, at least a difficulty. Thieu still had to find a way that he could plausibly inject himself into a discussion with Sephia and Rez about their possible presence at Holiday's duplex. That wasn't his case. On the other hand, he had been the responding inspector to the Terry/Wills scene. Any concerns he had about the inviolability of that scene would be completely appropriate.
So at a little before two, he appeared at the Diamond Center and ten minutes later found himself in a small anteroom off the showroom floor, explaining about his problem to the private security guards Sephia and Rez. "So the basic security of the scene is still my responsibility," he lied, "and I know both you guys and"-he looked down at his pad- "and Roy Panos have been helping out Inspectors Cuneo and Russell, isn't that right?"
"Some," Sephia replied. "Mostly that's been Roy, though."
"Yeah. I already got him." Thieu passed over Roy quickly. He didn't want them to ask what he meant by saying he "got" him. "But they mentioned you, too."
Sephia looked to Rez-a question. Then he shrugged. "We just talked to them a couple of times."
"But you never went with them. You never were at Terry's and Will's apartment?"
"Why would we?" Rez asked. "Did anybody say we were? Why don't you ask them, the other inspectors?"
Thieu played innocent. "They're out today interviewing witnesses and they asked me to clear this up. Look, we're trying to get the neighbors and other folks to tell us who had been in and out of there. It's a simple question. Have either of you guys ever been there before?"
Rez looked at Sephia. They both looked at Thieu. "No, of course not."
Now Thieu had them. He pulled out his tape recorder and they couldn't very well refuse to repeat the denial. Then, when he got to the end, he set the hook. "By the way," he said with the tape still running, "have either of you guys ever been to John Holiday's apartment?"
Glitsky wandered around downtown for over an hour, his mind jumping between Hardy's sudden emergency and the odyssey they'd witnessed with Sephia and Rez. He ended up at David's Deli, where he sat at the bar and ordered a pastrami sandwich and a Cel-Ray soda. He checked his watch. He was dying to know, but wanted to give Hardy time to work out the problem. Whatever it was, it seemed serious, but if he'd have wanted Glitsky's company or help, he would have asked in the car.
Again, he looked at his watch. If he bolted down his sandwich, he could get back to the Hall in time still to get in a half-day. He could just say he was feeling better and didn't want to be home if he wasn't really sick. It would be a good example for the troops.
"No," he said aloud. Suddenly he stood up, took off his jacket and hung it over the back of his seat to save his place. At the pay telephone, he called Treya at work, but a different woman answered at her personal number, and this brought a crease to his brow. "I'm trying to reach Treya Glitsky."
"I'm sorry, but she's not in. Is this Lieutenant Glitsky?"
"Yes it is."
"Treya's left for the day, Lieutenant. She left a message if you called that you should get home, or at least call, as fast as you could. And that you should be very careful."
"Call home?"
"That's what she said. She left here in a hurry. She said she'd try and page you."
He hung up, dug in his pocket for some coins as his pager went off, and punched in his home number. "Treya, it's me. Tell me Rachel's all right."
When Treya had her voice under this much control, she was dangerously angry. "She's fine, but I think you'd better come home."
"What is it?"
"I guess you'd say a threat. A threat to Rachel."
"What kind of threat?"
"Just a picture of her. A Polaroid, probably taken yesterday, from what Rita and she were wearing. Rita's holding her on the steps. Somebody circled Rachel in red."
Suddenly Glitsky understood the urgency of Hardy's problem, as well as Frannie's panic. She, too, had gotten a recent Polaroid of her children. The message was unequivocal, its meaning clear. We know where your children are. We can get to them anytime we want. Back off or they die.
27
A fingerprint search is nearly always run first by a computer against a local database of known criminals. In this case, since Thieu had some specific people in mind, he'd asked Faro to hand check the prints they'd lifted from Holiday's and Terry/Wills's places directly against Rez, Panos and Sephia.
Thieu got the results at a little before 3:30 and figured he could make it back uptown easily, even with traffic, and get the news to Gerson before the lieutenant went home for the day. First he wanted to share the news and tell Glitsky, though, so he stopped by the fifth floor, only to discover that his old mentor had called in sick-astounding. Certainly Thieu had never known him to do it when he was in homicide. He had his home phone number, however, and closing the door behind him-no one seemed to be minding the store in Glitsky's absence-he borrowed the phone on the desk to make the call. "Abe? What's the matter? You don't sound so good."
"No. I'm fine, Paul. Maybe coming down the flu or something, that's all. What's going on?"
"What's going on is I got the results on the fingerprints and you were right. Hardy was right. Sephia and Rez were all over Holiday's place. And I have them on tape denying ever being there."
Glitsky sounded weary beyond imagining. Even this terrific news of Thieu's didn't seem to cheer him in the least. "That's great, Paul." He sounded as though he were almost bored by it. "So what are you going to do now?"
"Lieutenant, are you all right?"
"I
don't know." A long pause. "I may not be in for a few days after all. So I assume you'll be talking to Gerson?"
"Sure, showing him the results. It's naked eye stuff, almost. Gerson was my next stop. I'm in your office now."
"Well, you want to do me one last favor?"
"Sure. Anything."
"I want you to leave Hardy and me completely out of it."
"I can't do that, Lieutenant. You were the ones who had the idea. If we get these guys from this evidence, people here, I mean in the department, have got to know it was you."
Glitsky's voice suddenly became far more familiar to Thieu-terse, biting, brooking no resistance. "Paul, I want you to hear me good. People have not got to know it was me. Or Hardy, for that matter. In fact, it's critical-critical, do you understand?-that it look like we had nothing to do with it. Nothing!"
"But…"
"No buts. If you get this into the system now with Gerson, you'll be the hero and you deserve to be the hero. You did all the work."
"I don't care about being the hero, Abe. I don't want to hog your credit."
"Forget my credit. I've already got way too much profile around this case as it is. You've got enough now, with this, that from here on out it's by the numbers. With any kind of hustle, these guys should be under a lot of heat. I don't want them to come back on us. So no me, no Hardy. Just good police work did these guys in. And that's all that did it, okay?"
"Okay." Thieu didn't like it. "If it were me, though, I'd at least want to remind the people who'd accused me, make them eat a little crow."
"I don't care about that. I really don't. I'm payroll, remember?" A silence, then, "You still don't get it, do you?"
"No, sir. I'm sorry, but I don't."
"All right. I guessed you've earned the real reason." Suddenly, Glitsky's tone changed again. It became nearly intimate, quietly intense. "They've threatened my family, Paul, my daughter. Same with Hardy, his kids. It's what you'd call a credible threat. So I don't want them to think we did this. In fact, I want them to think we didn't. After they're in prison for life plus a hundred, maybe then we can go back and gently remind some people on our side that we might have had something to say. But as far as the public needs to know, I'm done. Hardy's done. We were done before you even started thinking about fingerprints. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Just get this to Gerson direct. Don't go through Cuneo and Russell."
"That was my plan."
"It's a good one. You've still got time today, I see. Go."
Thieu looked out Glitsky's one window. The sun had just set, but he might just get lucky and find Gerson still at the job.
"I'm gone," he said.
Behind Gerson's closed door, Thieu had been sitting now for over twenty minutes and still couldn't believe he was hearing this. The lieutenant had, at first, been reasonably enthusiastic, listening to Thieu's explanation of how his earlier suspicions at the Terry/Wills scene-the shoe, the plethora of convenient evidence-combined with the suspicion of planted evidence at Holiday's…
"What suspicion of planted evidence? Have you been talking to Glitsky?"
"Lieutenant Glitsky? No, sir. I haven't talked to anybody. This is just me."
"Just you?"
"Yes, sir."
"Who got these prints for you?"
"That was Len Faro, but he was just dusting. He had no idea what it was all about. And nobody at all knows about this taped statement. Not a soul."
Gerson let out a heavy breath. "All right. So. Where did you hear about this so-called planted evidence?"
Thieu fidgeted in his chair. "Remember, sir? From Sadie Silverman's statement. Dan Cuneo didn't believe it, but I thought…"
"Nobody believed it, Sergeant. Nobody suspected planted evidence at Holiday's." He shook his head in profound displeasure. "But go on, you were saying."
And he did go on, but instead of Gerson's approval, Thieu sensed a growing impatience and even anger. "The point is, sir," he concluded, "that in fact these fingerprints from Sephia and Rez do prove that they were there, at Holiday's. And they flatly deny it. So they could only have been there to plant the incriminating evidence."
Gerson crossed one leg over the other, leaned an elbow back against his computer table. "I'm trying to see where you get this, Sergeant. I really am. And maybe I am slightly blinded by my anger at the fact that you took it upon yourself to go investigate these cases that I'd assigned to other inspectors. But"-he held up a hand-"of course if you did find a smoking gun, it would be a different matter. More easily overlooked anyway."
"But with respect, sir, this is pretty much a smoking gun."
"Maybe that's what I'm having trouble seeing. You have statements from both Sephia and Rez that they hadn't been in the Terry/Wills apartment, but you don't have their fingerprints from that scene."
"I didn't really expect there would be, sir. They went there to kill these guys and either wiped the place down or, more likely, wore gloves.
"But the fact remains, no prints where they said they'd never been. I fail to understand how this can be compelling to you."
"What's compelling is that their prints were at Holiday's, where they also deny ever being. They didn't know I was going to ask that until the tape was already on, so they told a stupid lie."
Gerson drew a large and histrionic breath. "Sergeant, these men played poker together at least several times in the past year. They may have had some kind of falling out recently-I don't know about that-but they certainly shared each other's company, quite possibly at Mr. Holiday's house. So now they simply admit that they lied to you. They say they knew Holiday was a murder suspect and didn't want to be more closely associated with him." Gerson already had the tape in its case under a paperweight on his computer table.
"But sir, the bare fact…" Thieu paused. "You have to admit this looks a lot like something fishy, at the very least. Sephia and Rez should be thoroughly interrogated. In my opinion," he added.
Finally the lieutenant seemed to break through some barrier. He leaned back, let out a long exhalation. "You might be right," he said. "I don't know why I'm righting you so hard on this. Everything you're saying makes sense. It's just that this case has been nothing but a headache from day one." Gerson's hand, in fact, went to his head. He sighed again. "I've got to use the can a minute. Be right back."
Thieu came forward, his elbows on his knees, his head tucked. He had of course considered the objections that Gerson had made. Nothing was simple. Okay, so what's new? The point was, Thieu thought, that any conscientious cop would see enough questions for Sephia and Rez to at the very least jump all over them and move them up to the realm of legitimate suspects in the multiple slayings. If only to avoid the embarrassment and hassle of falsely arresting John Holiday when there were obviously so many other possible interpretations of the evidence.
But until tonight, just now, Gerson had seemed congenitally blind to these subtleties. He had a suspect and evidence and an arrest warrant, and goddamnit, why should he keep looking at all?
Now the lieutenant returned, got back in his swivel chair, made some kind of conciliatory gesture. "I apologize for being such a hard-ass about this, Paul. It's actually nice to have an inspector with this kind of initiative. It certainly wouldn't hurt to put these two guys in an interrogation room and sweat them on videotape, would it? If they broke…" Gerson brightened up, met Thieu's eyes. "But I would be more comfortable either way if we got Dan and Lincoln on board. Does that sit all right with you?"
Thieu remembered Glitsky's admonition that he should go directly through Gerson, without involving the two inspectors of record. But the reaction here had rendered that suggestion moot. If there was going to be any resolution to this case, there was no avoiding Cuneo and Russell now. "Sure. Your call, sir."
Gerson turned and punched numbers into the phone. "Hey, is Cuneo or Russell out there? Do you know when they…? Oh. Really? Okay, thanks." He hung up.
"Evidently they're coming in by chopper
right now. Five minutes." The police helicopter, as well as others belonging to the Highway Patrol and even private companies such as Georgia AAA, often landed on the target painted on the roof of the Hall of Justice. "I don't think I've been out of this room all day, Paul. You mind if we get some exercise and meet them up there? I could use the air."
"Sure. Why not?"
Gerson grabbed his jacket from the peg by his door while Thieu went to get his off his chair. They passed out of the homicide detail and into the hallway, where Gerson turned right and Thieu followed. They went into the Inspectors Bureau, unoccupied at that time of the night, and pulled a key off a hook in a side room. This enabled the elevator to go all the way to the roof. They ascended in a companionable silence.
"Watch out," Gerson said, as he stepped over a low sill and out, "it's gotten a little dark."
And indeed it had come to full night, with a chill and biting wind.
Thieu had his hands in his pockets and shuddered against the cold. With the stiff breeze, he wasn't surprised that he couldn't yet hear the thwack-thwack of the helicopter's approach, but he turned a half circle and looked for it anyway.
The city was all dressed up. Thanksgiving was still a couple of weeks off, but already the Christmas lights were burning in several locations, some of the hotels, uptown. Taking in the sight, Thieu wondered why he didn't come up here more often. There was a splendid isolation, especially at this time of night, when the traffic was heavy but mostly unhearable, the stars close enough to touch. He moved a couple of steps toward the low edge of the roof, then started to turn back to ask his lieutenant if he knew from which direction the chopper might be approaching.
But he hadn't really begun the turn when a pair of strong hands hit him low in the back. With his own hands stuck deeply in his pockets, he could offer no resistance. "Wait!" was all he could think to say. "Wait!" But his feet hit the bottom of the wall almost before he realized he was being pushed, and there was nothing to stop his body from pitching over into the air.
The First Law dh-8 Page 36