Guilt

by John Lescroart

  The older boys, out doing important end-of-school teenage things, hadn't made it home for dinner. He heard Orel doing his spelling words with Rita, the letters coming out clearly, one by one. No stutter.

  The telephone rang and he dried his hands, picking it up on the third ring, another change for the better. It used to be on one, always.

  At home now, when the phone rang, it wasn't always for him. Girls would call for the boys. Also other guys. For years, Glitsky's greeting had been to growl his name. Now he picked up the receiver and said hello, just like a regular citizen.

  'Abe?'

  'Yeah.'

  'This is kind of a strange call. A voice, as it were, from the strange and distant past. Mostly strange.'

  Glitsky, standing at his kitchen wall phone on this Thursday night, couldn't place it. He knew it, but not well. Whoever it was had his home phone number, so though mostly strange, it couldn't be too distant. Then the tumblers fell. 'Wes?'

  'Very good, Lieutenant. I'd even say excellent. How've you been this fine past year?'

  'I've been good, Wes. What can I do for you?'

  Farrell spent a couple of minutes running down some background on his meeting tomorrow with Christina Carrera. Glitsky listened without interrupting.

  Glitsky had survived the political fallout from the Dooher trial, and over the past year and a half had distinguished himself in his job to the point where he felt relatively secure in it.

  But Dooher was unfinished business. Any mention of him got all of Abe's attention right now.

  Farrell concluded, 'If she's getting ready to walk away from him, I'd like to give her a hand. It looks to me she's gotten to where she knows what he's done, but she still can't face it. She's going to want something more.'

  Glitsky was sitting on a chair at the kitchen table. 'So what do you need from me?'

  'I don't know. I thought you might have come across some evidence since the trial.'

  Glitsky was not unaware of the irony. The defense lawyer who'd convinced a jury that his client was Not Guilty was now asking if they'd turned up any new evidence to convince a colleague that he'd been guilty after all. 'I gave everything to Amanda Jenkins, Wes. When Dooher got off, the investigation ended.'

  There was a pause. 'How about Trang? That case is still open, isn't it, technically?'

  Glitsky admitted that it was, although by now it was what they called a skull case – long gone and all but forgotten. 'Trang hasn't been taking up a lot of my time, Wes. We got called off on that one, you may remember.'

  Farrell felt as though he deserved the rebuke, but he persisted. 'What I'm trying to do,' he said, 'is give her a taste of what you've got, what you had.'

  'And then what?'

  'I don't know. It might save her life.'

  'He threatening her?'

  'I don't know. But I don't know if he threatened Sheila either. Or Trang. Threats don't seem to come with the package.'

  Glitsky knew what Farrell was saying. This man plotted and struck. He wasn't going to telegraph any moves. 'So what do you want?' he repeated.

  'Maybe your file on Trang? I never saw any of that. I don't know what you had.'

  Repeating it got Glitsky's blood flowing. Maybe they could still get this guy. Maybe Glitsky could close the circle once and for all with him. But, as was his way, he kept the enthusiasm out of his voice. 'We had the same kind of circumstantial case we built for the trial. Conflicting witness interviews, a motive that only worked if you knew what you were looking for. We never found the bayonet.'

  'But you were sure? Personally?'

  Glitsky went over the discrepancies between Dooher's version of his phone calls to Victor Trang on the night of his death, the computer files Trang had kept, and the interviews with Trang's mother and girlfriend. 'All of that, taken together – I knew it wouldn't fly at a trial. We needed some physical evidence that put him in Trang's office. The closest we got to that was the cellphone trace. For me, it was enough. The DA didn't agree.'

  'You think it might be enough for Christina?'

  Glitsky considered it. 'I don't see how it could hurt.'

  After Wes has hung up, he walked into the living room where Sam was sitting in the window seat, staring out at the fog.

  'Whoever wrote that stuff about little cats' feet?' she asked. 'This stuff comes in on a steamroller.'

  Wes got to her and looked out the bay window. He could barely make out the lights directly across the street. 'Glitsky says he'll send over some stuff, but maybe not by the morning.'

  'You know,' Sam said, 'I was listening to you in there talking to him. What was the moment for you, finally?'

  He didn't have to think for long. 'Diane Price. That diary. When it was obvious that she wasn't lying.'

  She nodded. 'You've still got that, don't you, somewhere in your well-organized files?'

  'I never throw anything out, you know that.'

  She patted his cheek. 'It's one of your many charms.'

  CHAPTER FOURTY SIX

  Christina almost canceled.

  The weather was terrible. Dense fog, forty-mile-per-hour gusts of drizzly wind, temperature in the low forties.

  On top of that, the baby had kicked all night. She'd only slept three hours. She was exhausted.

  Part of her wished she could undo having gone to see Sam yesterday. It put things in motion somehow, made her feel as though she had betrayed Mark. But living with him had become a daily exercise in controlling fear.

  Day-to-day, Mark wasn't acting in a threatening way. He went off to his office – one room and a reception area on the sixth floor of Embarcadero One. He would call sometime in the late morning to check and see how she was feeling. Often he wasn't in the office in the afternoon; she didn't ask where he'd gone.

  He played golf, kept in shape at the squash courts, went to lunch with business acquaintances. His world hadn't ended. To the objective observer, he was back – almost – to his normal, charming, confident self.

  Since their last episode, though, a fault line ran through their lives. She couldn't shake the feeling that Mark had manipulated her to a place where she didn't feel she could refuse to have sex with him.

  Fear.

  She realized that the nebulous worries and doubts had coalesced into real fear. The sex since then had been frequent, impersonal, so rough she was afraid for the baby.

  He was her husband. You had to trust your husband.

  She could leave. If it got any worse, she told herself she would do that. She would protect the baby – that was the greatest imperative.

  But she kept trying to be fair. All of Mark's other friends had abandoned him. Could she join that parade?

  She didn't trust herself, that was the problem. What if she were wrong? This could all be her own paranoia, the rush of hormones, another typical episode in her seemingly lifelong quest to have her relationships fail.

  She always found an excuse, didn't she?

  This was why she couldn't tell her mother, though they talked on the telephone three times a week. She could not bring herself to admit out loud that there was anything wrong in the marriage. She and Mark were happy happy happy.

  She also couldn't afford to let her parents develop any doubts about Mark. She'd worked so hard to convince them that he was innocent. If this marriage failed, it would kill her mother. And Christina would appear a fool to her father.

  So yesterday she decided she'd talk to someone she liked, even though she knew that Sam didn't have anything approaching an objective view.

  And when she'd found out that Sam and Wes Farrell were together, a couple, she let herself revel in the sense that, somehow, she could get the answer. Wes would… but again, what could he do?

  It was a mistake. She knew what Wes was going to say. And once he did, once it got to that stage, there wouldn't be any more excuses. She was having a baby any day now. This was not the time.

  She couldn't do it. She couldn't go. She would just call Wes and cancel and sa
y she'd been having a bad day yesterday. That's what it had been.

  Sitting on one of the stools by the marble counter in the kitchen, she got the number from the phone book and wrote it on the pad by the phone. She punched up the prefix, then stopped and hung up, watching the fog outside. The baby kicked inside her.

  A tear coursed down her cheek.

  Wes had rented a converted shopfront on Irving Street at 10th Avenue. Compared to his old office in North Beach, this one was a high-tech marvel in blond woods and glass block, skylights and decorative plants. He had a full-time, computer literate secretary/paralegal named Ramon. He'd even broken down and decided an answering machine would be appropriate.

  Wes was behind his desk, pretending to be taking notes from the Evidence Code. Christina sat in the teak and leather chair, reading Diane Price's diary. Other than obviously exhausted, Wes thought she looked – big surprise – terrific. She wore jeans, a pair of well-worn hiking boots, a black, heavy sweater with a cowl neck.

  He decided that Sam had been right about Dooher not beating her, though perhaps, Wes thought – non-Nineties insensitive jerk that he was – in some ways it might have been better if he had. He knew Christina was strong, intelligent and aware enough not to accept anything overt of that nature. If Dooher hit her, she'd be gone.

  But Dooher wasn't overt. That was his thing.

  He could tell when she finished the first half of the diary – where Diane was going out with Dooher the next night and she 'couldn't wait'. He imagined his own face had taken on the same confused expression.

  She looked up at him. 'It just ends.'

  'Keep reading,' he said.

  When she got to the next entry – the only other one – she sat still for a long time. Then she flipped the final pages, closing her hands over them finally, staring at the floor or somewhere just above it. She was finished.

  He spoke carefully, quietly. 'I don't think she wrote that as a publicity stunt for the trial. I think that's genuine.'

  Christina's head was bobbing, as though she were conferring with herself. 'Something happened,' she agreed.

  He didn't push. 'Anyway, I thought you should see it.'

  'Why didn't you show me this during the trial?'

  A good question. He wasn't proud of himself and it showed on his face. 'My first reaction was that if you read this, you wouldn't be as effective if you had to cross her. So it was need to know. Then, after Flaherty bailed on us, I knew we weren't going to do character, so Jenkins would never get a chance to call her. It became moot.'

  'But not for me, Wes. It must have been obvious I was getting involved with Mark. If I'd seen this…'

  'You wouldn't have believed it,' he said. 'You would have called it a forgery or a fake of some kind. Think about it.'

  Silence.

  'You remember that Mike Ross never caved under my pretty intense attack? You know why? Because he knew what he'd seen. He was facing Mark's tee and saw a lot of air where Mark should have been if he'd been there, which he wasn't.'

  She took a breath, blew it out hard.

  'You want to meet this woman, Diane – talk to her? I know her pretty well by now. There's nothing flaky about her. Mark raped her.'

  The tears started again, without sound or movement of any kind. He figured it was as opportune a time as any. 'I've got to tell you something else, Christina.'

  Her gaze came up to him, expressionless.

  'On the day of Sheila's funeral, after everyone else had gone home, Mark and my ex-wife had sex on the floor in the living room of your house. So much for the grieving husband.'

  She took it calmly, as she had the rest, nodding. In shock.

  Wes's intercom beeped softly. He picked up his telephone. 'I said no interr- who?' He sighed. 'Okay, send him back.'

  Farrell stood by the door, holding it open.

  Glitsky appeared in the hallway. 'Sorry I didn't call, but I went in early and down to Records, found the file and had an appointment out here anyway. You said you needed it sooner, so I thought it would save time to run it by.'

  Farrell took the file, gesturing him inside. 'I believe you know Christina.'

  She had tried without great success to fix her eyes. Glitsky, trained investigator that he was, saw the blotched mascara, the redness. 'Am I interrupting?'

  Shaking her head no, Christina looked up at him. 'I don't know what to do,' she said. 'What's that file? Is that about Mark?'

  'It's about Victor Trang.' Farrell had the file in his hand and was moving back to his desk. 'But if the Lieutenant's got five minutes, he can probably do the short version.'

  It took more like a half-hour. Glitsky had pulled over the other wingchair from across the room and sat kitty-corner to Christina while Wes perched himself on the end of his desk. When he'd finished, Abe spread his hands. 'So unless you want to believe that Trang was laying this elaborate scam on his mother and girlfriend, creating bogus records in his own file that matched the exact times of real calls he got from Dooher, all the while knowing for a fact that he had turned down Flaherty's six hundred thousand dollar offer in the hopes of getting more…' He trailed off. The conclusion was inescapable.

  'You're saying Mark killed him, too?' The eyes had dried by now, had taken on a glassy look that Glitsky had seen in survivors of hostage situations. In a sense, maybe that's what she'd been through, was going through still.

  He nodded. 'That's what I believe, yes. There is one other thing – you ought to know. It wasn't brought out at trial.'

  'Okay.'

  'There were very distinctive stripes in blood on both Victor Trang and Sheila Dooher. You can compare the crime-scene shots. The killer of both of them wiped the blade on their clothes. And remember Chas Brown?'

  She nodded. 'Thomasino wouldn't let him testify?'

  'Yeah, him. His story – the guy in Vietnam, Andre Nguyen? The first interview we did with him, he volunteered that your husband told him he'd wiped his bayonet blade off on Nguyen's pajamas. It's the same M.O. You can believe me or don't, but it's as true as anything gets.'

  Wes went on with the double-team. 'One last thing, Christina, and I'm glad Abe's around to hear it. I've gone back over this case now nine ways from Sunday, and it was all by the book. All the reasons Mark gave us why Glitsky was somehow out to get him – we were just primed to believe them. We got sold a bill of goods.'

  Christina wasn't much in the mood for a lecture on how the justice system worked or didn't. On how she and Wes had been less than ept. She pulled down her sweater and got herself to her feet. 'I want to thank both of you for your time,' she said.

  It was a dismissal. She was picking up her purse, grabbing her jacket from the peg next to the door.

  'If you decide to leave him,' Wes said, 'go someplace he won't think to look. And let us know, would you?'

  She nodded, although she didn't really seem to be in agreement. She was inside herself. Throwing them both a last ambiguous expression, she went out the door.

  Farrell was back on the corner of the desk. 'So what's she going to do?'

  Glitsky shrugged. 'I believe her exact words were that she didn't know. If she's got brains, she'll get out.'

  'I don't think brains is the problem. This was something I had a pretty hard time with myself, and she's pregnant with his baby. Thinking about it doesn't seem to help.'

  'Well, I hope it helps a little. I would hate to get another call about one of Dooher's wives.' If Glitsky knew anything, he knew about murderers – the first killing was the hardest and if you got away with it, the second was easier. And if you got away with that…

  But the topic rattled Wes and he stuck with it. 'Why would he do that – kill Christina?'

  'I don't know,' Glitsky said. 'Maybe he won't.'

  'But you think he might?'

  Standing, Glitsky thought it was time for him to go. He didn't like dealing in hypothetical. His job did not begin until something had actually happened. Until then, speculation wasn't much more than a parlor
game. But he didn't want to alienate Farrell – he might need him, after all. For the time being at least, they were on the same side, and Glitsky had the germ of an idea. 'Yeah, I think he might.'

  'But why?'

  'Why did he kill Nguyen, or Trang, or his wife? He didn't have to do any of those people, did he? So what's that leave? I'll tell you – he likes it. He likes tormenting you with it, he likes rubbing my face in it, he likes living with the fact that he's done it. Most of all, though, you want my take? He likes the moment.'

  Farrell's shoulders were slumped, his hands clasped in his lap, and he nodded, agreeing. 'The funny thing is, I've seen him that way. You'd think I'd have figured it out.'

  'Seen him what way?'

  'I mean hurting people – his kids, Sheila, waiters, anybody. Those moments when he was in the middle of hurting somebody, you could tell there was some level at which he liked it. But afterwards he'd be so sorry, go back to the charming act.' He shook his head, disgusted with himself. 'Really, all you had to do to stay Mark's friend was never to get in his way. Don't cross him. Let him have whatever he wanted. Which between the two of us wasn't a problem. We wanted different things.'

  Glitsky moved toward the door. 'Well,' he said, 'you know now.'

  Farrell took up the Trang file. 'You want this back? I don't think Christina needs it.'

  'No. It's a copy. Why don't you look through it? Maybe your sharp attorney's eye will see something we missed. Although I doubt it.' He grabbed the doorknob.

  'Abe.' One last thing. 'Really. Is there anything we can do about her? I've got the same instinct as you do – let the thing work itself out, but Sam wants to help. She's not going to let it go.'

  Glitsky shrugged, glad it was Farrell's problem, his girlfriend's problem. 'Here's the deal, Wes. He'll either leave her alone or he won't. I can't do anything until he does.'

  'I hate that part,' Farrell said.

  'If it's any consolation,' Abe replied, 'it's not my favorite either.'