A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “Vogler.”

  “Right. Me and Debra pulled it and here I am out there at seven-thirty or so and there’s no place to park so I double up out on Ashbury—”

  “And you got tagged.”

  “Yes, sir. Again.” He came forward in his chair and placed the parking ticket on the desk. “The thing is, somebody’s gotta talk to them and make them cut this shit out.”

  Glitsky lowered his hands, his mouth expressing distaste.

  Bracco, who’d mentored under Glitsky in his first weeks of homicide duty, knew his lieutenant’s disdain for profanity as well as anyone, and he shrugged. “You know what I mean.”

  Glitsky’s shoulders rose and fell. “How many does this make?”

  “For me? Like six or seven this year. Others guys might have more. I figured I had to talk to you about it.”

  Glitsky linked his fingers on the desk in front of him. “You think this is important?”

  “Yes, sir. I do. Enough is enough.”

  Glitsky nodded. “And what would you have me do?”

  “Well, number one, get these tickets erased. I’m out trying to do my job and I have to stop and fill in this totally bogus form. That’s just wrong, Abe. So I thought maybe you could talk to somebody in traffic and just make it a rule that they can’t tag us like this. Tell ’em that pretty soon it’s going to cut into the time we need for our sensitivity training. That ought to do the job.”

  “Good idea, Darrel. They’re always asking me how I can improve their operation, and now I’ll have something to tell them.” Glitsky scratched at his jawline. “Or, alternatively, of course, you can fill in the form. Or go to traffic yourself and make friends with whoever’s running the place now, plead your case. That might work.”

  Not giving in, Bracco said, “I thought if it came from higher up . . .”

  “Tell you what, Darrel, I’ll mention the issue at the next chief’s meeting, which is in about two hours. I’m sure they’ll give it all the time it deserves. Meanwhile”—Glitsky pointed at the citation—“you hold on to that particular ticket. Call a reporter, maybe Jeff Elliot, have him come down and pitch him a ‘CityTalk’ column.” Suddenly, the lieutenant pushed himself back from his desk and stood up. “I don’t have you yet on the board.”

  Coming around, he went to the Active Homicide whiteboard and wrote the name VOGLER in the victims’ column, then BRACCO/ SCHIFF under inspectors. Finishing, he took a step back over to his desk and rested a haunch on the corner of it. “So where are you on that?”

  “Couple of steps beyond nowhere, but only that.” Bracco filled Glitsky in on some of the basics: the lack of signs of struggle, the backpack full of marijuana, the apparent murder weapon in the alley. “Because of the dope we got a warrant and searched his house on Saturday afternoon. And guess what? The guy had a full hydroponic pot garden in his attic.” Bracco waited for a reaction, a nod, something to acknowledge this discovery. But Glitsky was just staring over his head, his bloodshot eyes vacant and glassy.

  “Abe?”

  “Yeah.” Coming back. “What?”

  “An attic full of pot plants.”

  “Good,” Glitsky said.

  “Yeah, we thought so. To say nothing of the computer records. The guy kept pretty good records on his clients and the wife, common-law, Jansey, didn’t think to delete them before we got there.”

  “So she knew.” Glitsky’s gaze drifted back up to the ceiling.

  Bracco nodded. “Well, yeah. Meanwhile, she, the girlfriend, Jansey, moved out with the kid, back in with her parents, about six months ago for a while.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Just working things out with the relationship, if you believe her, which Debra doesn’t.” Again, since he wasn’t getting anything resembling normal feedback from Glitsky, Bracco waited. After several seconds he went on reporting. “He beat her up. Sir?”

  “Beat her up. Yeah. Go on.”

  “And because of the weed still there in the backpack, we’re leaning toward some other motive besides that, maybe personal. Maybe like she got tired of getting hit. Jansey.”

  Glitsky nodded wearily. “Alibi?”

  “That’s another thing. They’ve got a boarder living in a room behind their garage. Young guy, med student at UCSF. Robert Tripp. Says he was with her. The kitchen drain was clogged up. He was helping her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, okay, except we’re talking about six-thirty on a Saturday morning.”

  “Pretty early,” Glitsky said.

  “That’s what we thought. Meanwhile, Vogler, the vic, worked all day six days a week.”

  “So Jansey and Tripp are hooked up?”

  “Not impossible by a long shot.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “We talk to him, see if the alibi story holds up. If not, I go back and hit Jansey pretty hard. But on the chance that it’s the weed in some way, Debra’s got the list of clients she’s working through.”

  “He kept a list?”

  “He was an organized guy. Names, cell numbers, average buy disguised as coffee, dates. Of course, proving that this list was his marijuana customers won’t be easy. Nobody’s going to admit they were buying dope.”

  “How many of ’em are there?”

  “Seventy or so. It might take a few days.”

  “So what’d he do, unload this stuff at the coffee shop?”

  “That’s the theory. He managed the place and had it all to himself, seems like.”

  “But he didn’t own it?”

  “No. The owner’s a Maya Townshend. We’re talking to her today, see what she knows, but the staff down there says they don’t know her, she never came in the shop.”

  “If he’s dealing to seventy people, maybe it’s a turf thing.”

  “That might turn up. Oh, and last but not least, Vogler had a record. Robbery back in ninety-six. Jansey says he was just the driver and didn’t even know what his friends were doing, but I pulled up the file and he was not an altar boy. They let him plead to one count, but the smart money says he was already in the life and just ran out of luck.”

  Glitsky took in that information in silence. After a minute, frowning at the effort to stay involved, he looked down at Bracco. “What about the gun on the street, with Vogler?”

  “No idea, Abe, other than it was probably the murder weapon.”

  “Probably? They didn’t run ballistics?”

  “Sure. But it’s our old pal the Glock hex-barrel. Bullet’s consistent with the gun we found. The casing didn’t have enough markings for positive ID. But we got one Glock .40 with a round fired, one bullet from a Glock .40, and one casing from a Glock .40. And we’re running registration today. It’s got a number.”

  “Will wonders never cease?”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Bracco sat back in the folding chair. “So as I say, a lot’s going to hang on Jansey’s alibi, but if it holds up, we’re about at square one.”

  Glitsky nodded and nodded.

  “Sir,” Bracco asked, “is everything all right?”

  Glitsky looked through him, then focused on his inspector. “Fine,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  Twenty-six-year-old Robert Tripp’s one-room studio was a narrow rectangle, about ten by fifteen, tacked onto the back of the garage. It featured a Formica counter with the butcher-block knife holder of a serious cook, every slot filled with high-end cutlery—carving, boning, and filet knives of various sizes, an impressive cleaver, and a sharpening steel. Also a sink and four-burner gas stove. A small shower-, sink-, and toilet-only bathroom in one corner.

  He’d papered the walls with enlarged, full-color details of human body parts from his medical literature. The double bed was made up. A flat-screen television sat on a Goodwill desk below half a wall of Ikea bookshelf packed with CDs, magazines, paperbacks, and some folded clothes. A well-used bicycle hung from the ceiling.

  It was a little after two P.M., and with the predictable volatility o
f San Francisco weather, the weekend’s heat wave had been replaced by an Arctic afternoon, as an early fog had started to drift in just about when Schiff and Bracco had pulled up and parked on the street out front.

  Now the two inspectors sat across from Tripp, in his medical scrubs, at his table in front of the solitary window that looked out onto a small grassless backyard bounded by a weathered brown fence, and with molded-plastic swings and a sliding board play-set erected in an island of tanbark.

  “The disposal was backed up,” Tripp said. “I already told you guys this.”

  “We believe you,” Bracco replied. “We’re trying to get the timing clear, that’s all. You said this was at six-thirty?”

  “Give or take. It was still dark out, so it couldn’t have been much later.”

  Schiff, sitting back from the table with her legs crossed, canted forward a bit. “And Jansey felt okay coming over to knock at your door at that hour?”

  The young man lifted his shoulders and let them fall. A couple of days’ stubble darkened his cheeks and the bloodshot brown eyes said he hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep; that combination lent a few years to an otherwise young face. “I was already up, studying. That’s all I do, every waking hour, is study. Anyway, she probably saw the light was on.”

  “She couldn’t fix the disposal herself?” Bracco asked.

  He shrugged again. This seemed to be his default mannerism. “Ben. You know Ben? Her kid? He had a stomachache. He woke her up and told her about it right after his dad left for work. He’d been trying to do the dishes they’d left in the sink or something and then it overflowed and he left the water running. The place was a mess. The kid was a mess.” He broke a smile. “It was a messy morning. Jansey was freaking out a little. That’s all it was.”

  “And this was before she heard about Dylan?” Schiff asked.

  “Of course.”

  “What was she wearing?” Bracco asked.

  “When?”

  “When she knocked on your door.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. Jeans, I think, maybe a T-shirt. Why?”

  Bracco came back with another question of his own. “So she was dressed? Shoes? Socks? A jacket?”

  Tripp frowned. “Of course she was dressed. Why wouldn’t she be dressed?”

  Schiff supplied the answer. “If she’d just gotten woken up by her son and there was disaster going on below, she might have just thrown on a robe or something.”

  Tripp shook his head, impatient. “I just told you I didn’t remember exactly what she was wearing. I thought it was jeans and a T-shirt. That’s what she usually wears.”

  “You wouldn’t have noticed,” Bracco asked, “if she was in a robe? Maybe you were used to seeing her in a robe.”

  Tripp sat back and crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means maybe you were used to seeing her in a robe.” Bracco came forward in his chair. “What is your relationship with her?”

  “With Jansey? We’re friends.”

  “Friends with benefits?”

  “You mean am I sleeping with her? No, I’m not. Did I like her getting hit by Dylan? No to that one too. Did she come over here to talk about Ben or her life sometimes? Yep.”

  Schiff took over the questioning. “Did you know Dylan well?”

  The topic shift slowed Tripp down. “To talk to. He was my land-lord. He didn’t treat Ben or Jansey right, but that really wasn’t my business. I can’t say I’m brokenhearted to see he got killed. He put on a good act, but he wasn’t really that nice a guy. Jansey’s going to be better off without him.”

  “So.” Bracco, elbows on the table, asked, “So you were already up when Dylan went to work Saturday morning?”

  “I don’t know when Dylan went to work. But if it was after four, I was wide awake, in here studying until Jansey came to the door.”

  “And that was about six-thirty, you said?”

  “I said I didn’t know the time for sure. Only that it was still dark.”

  After the inspectors left, Tripp followed them outside to make sure they were leaving. When the car started up and headed down the street, he walked to the back door, opened it, and walked inside. “Jan!”

  In a minute she was in the hallway coming toward him and then she was in his arms. They held each other for a long moment until finally Tripp pulled out of the embrace. “At the very least,” he said, “they suspect. They asked me directly about us, but I said no, we were just friends. And how are they going to prove otherwise?” Looking back behind her, he went on. “So from the resounding silence I’m guessing they finished up there too.”

  She nodded. “They got it all, every leaf, every bud, every seed.”

  “Jesus.”

  “It’s okay, actually,” she said. “I can always start up again when this has all blown over. I’ve been thinking maybe it would be better if I didn’t go back to it at all. The inspectors took all the records, all the buyers, so I’d have to start completely from scratch. And you know they’ll be watching the house . . .”

  “I doubt that. They’ve got better things to do, Jan. I mean, when they’re done with this case. They’re not coming back here to check your attic again.”

  She nodded. “You’re probably right, but even so. It’s no way to make a living. Maybe I’m just starting to realize that now, living in fear all the time that you’re going to get caught.”

  “So how much are you getting from the insurance?”

  “Three hundred. That’s at least a few years. I could do something else.”

  “I’m sure you could,” he said. “Anything you wanted, probably.”

  “And you wouldn’t care?”

  He laughed quietly. “Jan, I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to make money hand over fist. You’re going to be able to do anything you want.” He drew her back into him. “So where’s our little Benjamin now?”

  “He’s still at my mom and dad’s.”

  “So we’re actually alone? What are we waiting for?”

  6

  Maya Townshend’s home was a big cut above average even in its very prestigious location. Behind a sculpted rose garden the residence rose four stories on the large northeast corner lot of Green and Divisadero. Behind it the escarpment dropped off precipitously down to the Marina, which meant that all of Maya Townshend’s back and west-side windows—all forty-six of them—had killer views of the bay, the rust-red Golden Gate Bridge, the Marin headlands.

  It was a multimillion-dollar property, and standing out in front of it, Bracco whistled. “There’s more money in coffee than I thought.”

  Schiff stared at the immensity of the house, shaking her head. “This isn’t coffee money, Darrel. Unless she also owns Starbucks. But in that case Bay Beans West would have been a Starbucks, right? No way she wouldn’t have gone for the brand name.”

  It was closing in on one o’clock, the schizophrenic temperature back up near seventy. Above them, high clouds drifted in the blue. A fitful breeze, barely strong enough to ruffle Schiff’s hair, hinted of another change in the weather, but for the moment it was nice.

  The ornately carved door had an eight-toned ring.

  “Lord, we thank thee. We bow our heads.”

  Schiff turned to him. “What?”

  “Those bells. The song that goes with it. Lord, we thank thee. We bow our heads. You watch,” he said. “She’s Catholic.”

  “Maybe, but the Ferry Building, you might not have noticed, plays the same song.”

  “Maybe it’s a Vatican plot.”

  Before Schiff could come back with a suitable wisecrack, the door opened to an attractive dark-haired woman in her early thirties who dressed as though she’d never heard of the Haight-Ashbury, or blue jeans, for that matter. In fact, she wore a grown-up, upscale version of the uniform for a Catholic girls’ school—a plaid skirt over a white shirt under an argyle sweater. Her hair curled under at the shoulders. Green eyes, flawless skin.

 
; Bracco and Schiff hadn’t specifically told her when, or even if, they’d be coming by. Schiff had talked to her by telephone briefly over the weekend and said that the police might like to interview her sometime about Dylan Vogler and the business she owned, but she’d purposely refrained from making an appointment. There was the possibility that Maya wouldn’t be in when they came to call, of course, but that downside was more than offset by the chance to catch her before she’d talked to a lawyer or given too much thought to what she might want to tell the inspectors.

  “Hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”

  Bracco had his ID out. “Police inspectors, ma’am. Homicide. We wonder if we might have a word. On the Dylan Vogler matter.”

  “Sure. Of course.” She stepped back, maybe unable to come up with an excuse on the spur of the moment why this wasn’t a great time—and invited them inside, through a large square foyer with a thirty-foot ceiling.

  Schiff stopped, agog at the panorama through the enormous windows. Apparently her reaction wasn’t that unusual.

  Maya stopped and presented the view as though it belonged to her. “I know,” she said. “We’re very fortunate.”

  “You must be selling a whole lot of coffee,” Bracco said.

  Maya’s contralto laugh was unforced. “Oh, this doesn’t come from BBW. This is all Joel, my husband. He’s in real estate. The coffee shop is really more or less a hobby for me, to keep me busy.”

  Schiff came at her with a casual tone. “I understand you don’t spend much time there.”

  Maya nodded. “Yes, that’s true, very little. But I do most of the books, approve the ordering, sign the paychecks, that kind of thing.” She shrugged apologetically. “It might not be really true, but I feel like I’m somewhat involved. It’s good to have something keeping you busy besides the kids and outside of housework. Maybe you know.”