A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “For one reason, it’s the thing that makes the most sense. You were involved in robberies with them in college. Yes?”

  Finally, her shoulders gave an inch. “I’ve already told you. I did some bad stuff.”

  “Bad enough for life in prison, Maya? Bad enough to never live with your kids or your husband again?”

  She stared through him.

  “You want to tell me what it was? Just put it out here between me and you. It’s privileged. Nobody else will ever know.”

  “Don’t bully me.” Her words had a sudden calm edge.

  “I’m not bullying you. I’m saying you can tell me anything you’ve done.”

  “What for? So you’d do something different? I don’t think so. I think you’d do all the same things, make the same arguments in court, whatever it is you believe I’d actually done, isn’t that true?”

  Angry now, Hardy did not answer.

  And then suddenly, Maya came at him on another tack. “What you don’t seem to understand is that I’m being punished,” she said.

  “For what? By who?”

  “God.”

  “God.” Hardy felt his anger start to wane, washed away in a wave of pity for this poor woman. “God’s punishing you? Why?”

  “The same reason he punishes anybody.”

  “Because of what they’ve done?”

  She sat mute, facing him.

  “Maya?”

  “If it’s unforgivable, yes.”

  “I thought his forgiveness was supposed to be infinite.”

  She answered in a small voice. “No. Not for everything.”

  “No? What wouldn’t it cover?”

  “How about if what you harm is truly innocent—” Abruptly she drew herself up and stopped speaking.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  Hardy came forward in his chair. “Maya,” he said, “are you talking about something that happened with you and Dylan and Levon?”

  A dead, one-note bark of laughter didn’t break the harsh set of her mouth. “If you even can ask that,” she said, “you don’t have a clue what innocent means.”

  “So tell me.”

  “Like the unborn. That kind of innocent. How about that?”

  That answer called to mind Hardy’s discussion with Hunt about whether the blackmail had been about an abortion early in her life, so he asked her point blank. “Is that it?”

  But she shook her head decidedly no. “I would never do that. Not ever. But I’ve already said too much. The point is that whatever happens, however God decides all this has to go, I’ll deserve it. I’m good with that now. I’m at peace with it.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “I’m sorry about that.” She gestured around them. “About all of this.”

  “I am too.”

  “But . . . so, can we go back to what I was saying before?”

  “What part of it?”

  “Looking for who did this?”

  A black, throbbing bolus of pain came and settled in the space behind Hardy’s left eye. He brought his hand up and pressed at his temple. What was this woman getting at? Hardy could think of several ways to interpret all that Maya had said to him here this afternoon as a kind of confession. And now she was urging him to look for the real murderer.

  Who, he believed, very probably did not exist.

  He looked across at his client’s troubled face and entertained the fleeting thought that she might be legally insane. Should he hire a shrink and do some tests? Would he be negligent if he didn’t?

  The first day of trial had already been too long, too stressful. It seemed to Hardy that he’d been in constant combat since early in the morning.

  And now this.

  He squeezed at his forehead. “Maya,” he said, “are you telling me straight out now that you didn’t kill these two guys?”

  Her eyes widened, closed down, widened again, and to his astonishment, she broke into a genuine, if short-lived laugh. “Of course not.” Leaving it as ambiguous as ever. Of course not, she was not telling him such a thing straight out. Or, alternatively, of course not, she hadn’t killed Dylan and Levon. After which she added in all seriousness, “How could you even say such a thing?”

  Hardy left the jail shaken and confused. When he’d gone in to visit Maya, a February ball of pale egg yolk in the western sky was still dripping its feeble light onto the city. When he came out, his head still pounding, it was full night, and that added to his disorientation. The neighborhood around the Hall of Justice felt more than ordinarily bereft of humanity, but the emptiness seemed to go deeper.

  A cold, hard wind was kicking up a heavy, dirty dust along with fast food wrappers from the gutters. Hardy had a walk of a few blocks ahead of him to get to where he’d parked his car, but when he got to Bechetti’s, the traditional comfort-food Italian place at Sixth and Brannan, he stopped long enough to consider going inside and having himself a stiff cocktail or two—although he knew it was a bad idea when you were in the first days of a murder trial.

  Reason won out.

  But he hung a left and walked a hundred yards down the street and knocked at a purple door set in the side of a gray stucco warehouse and waited about ten seconds in front of the peephole until the door opened and then he was looking at Wyatt Hunt.

  “Trick or treat,” he said.

  Hunt didn’t miss a beat. “I hope you like Jelly Bellies. That’s all I’ve got left.” He opened the door and stepped back. He was wearing black Nike-logo running pants and tennis shoes and a tank-top Warriors shirt and there was a shine to his skin as though he’d been working out. He certainly lived in the right place for it.

  He’d converted an ancient decrepit flower warehouse into a one-of-a-kind environment. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high. The back third he’d dry-walled off into his living quarters—bedroom, bathroom, den/library, and kitchen. Which left an enormous open area, perhaps sixty by eighty or ninety feet, in front. Hardy had been here a few times before but every time was surprised by the fact that Hunt parked his Mini Cooper inside his domicile, just this side of the industrial slide-up garage-door entrance in the same wall as the front door. The other unique feature was the actual half-basketball-court floorboard Hunt had bought from the Warriors the last time they’d upgraded, for the fire sale price of four thousand dollars.

  In the space between the court and his rooms on the other side of the court, he had several guitars, both acoustic and electric, out on stands. Amps, speakers, his stereo system. There was also a desk against the wall with a couple of computer terminals glowing with beach-themed screen savers.

  But Hardy hadn’t gotten too far inside before Hunt called out, “You might as well come out now. I think the jig’s up,” and Gina Roake—barefoot, wet hair, running shorts, blue Cal sweatshirt—appeared from the back rooms, holding up a hand in greeting, a sheepish smile on her face. “Yo,” she said.

  “Yo yourself,” Hardy replied. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. If this isn’t a good time . . .”

  “Half hour ago,” Gina said, no shilly-shallying around, “wouldn’t have been a good time. Now the timing’s fine.”

  “You can still have those Jelly Bellies if you want,” Hunt said, “but I think I’m good for a beer if you’d rather go in that direction.”

  “If you’re going to twist my arm,” Hardy said.

  “I’m starting to think she might actually be crazy.” Hardy, with his beer, was sitting on one of the tan stressed-leather easy chairs in the den—lots of books and magazines, CDs and DVDs, on built-in white shelves and a large TV. “Now she wants us to go after the killer.”

  “Us?” Hunt asked. “With our huge investigating team and unlimited resources?”

  “That’s kind of what I told her,” Hardy said.

  Gina, next to Hunt, said, “I thought she was factually guilty.”

  “Didn’t
she tell you she did it?” Hunt asked. “I thought I’d heard that.”

  “Not in so many words, but she never really denied it, and then she’s been acting all along like if she’s convicted, she deserves it. Not exactly an overt confession, but . . .” Hardy sipped from his bottle. “Anyway, so today she tells me she wasn’t with Levon and Dylan on the robbery either. Though maybe it was another one.”

  “Another robbery?” Gina asked. “A different one?”

  “Again ambiguous, but apparently.”

  “Well, then,” Gina asked, “what would they have been blackmailing her about?”

  “I asked her that. She said God was testing her.”

  That struck Hunt funny. “Not just her,” he said.

  Hardy nodded. “Tell me about it. So then she tells me she can’t believe I think she did this stuff. I mean, here we are almost a half year into this, and suddenly not only don’t we have what she’s being blackmailed about anymore, or what we thought it was, but now she wants us to find who really did these guys.”

  “She’s trying to play you,” Gina said.

  “That’s what I thought too. Maybe still think. I don’t know. But what’s in it for her if she plays me? What? She proves I’m gullible? So what? How’s it help her?”

  Hunt cleared his throat. “This may be the obvious answer, and I’m not a lawyer of course and maybe don’t see the nuances like you two do, but if he or she does exist, and you find whoever it is, doesn’t that get her off?”

  Hardy was sitting forward with his elbows on his knees, and his shoulders sagged. “In other words,” he said, “what if she’s not playing me?”

  Hunt shrugged. “It’s a thought.”

  “Okay,” Gina said. “But why’d this just come up?”

  “Didn’t you tell me Diz brought it up today at trial? The other dude. Maybe it’s the first time she actually thought about that option as something we could do.”

  “Yeah, but here’s the thing, Wyatt,” Hardy said. “You know this whole evidence problem we’re dealing with anyway? Same holds true if there’s another suspect, even a guilty one, hanging out in the bushes. The thing I hate about this, because it’s true, is that Maya’s got not one, but two, great motives. She was at both places. And, I don’t know, if any of us were being blackmailed for ten years, we might have gotten pretty tired of it ourselves.”

  “Definitely,” Gina said, “I would’ve cleaned their clocks a long time ago. And I wouldn’t have left any evidence either.”

  “That’s my girl.” Hunt punched her gently on the leg. “Remind me to destroy those secret videos of us I’ve been taking.” Then, to Hardy, “So what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know. If she’s telling me now, point blank, she didn’t do it, I’m still not sure if I need that to get her off. I just cannot see this evidence convicting her, not in this city.”

  “Well”—Gina was going to add her two cents—“all other things being equal, Diz, I’d normally agree with you. But you’ve got the Kathy and Harlen connection . . .”

  “There’s no evidence about them, either, and that’s—”

  “Wishful thinking,” Gina said. “That is wishful thinking.”

  “What is?”

  “That you’re obviously thinking some evidence standard is going to apply, either to Maya in the trial or to Harlen and Kathy and Maya’s husband on all the forfeiture stuff. But, as you so eloquently noted in your opening today, this is not about evidence. And I’m not just talking the trial, I’m talking the whole megillah. Stier makes the case, even subversively, that the reason there’s no evidence is because Maya’s got friends in high places who have all the means and power to get rid of evidence, and guess what? She goes down. And them sitting there, the mayor, Harlen—nice show of confidence and all—but it’s not helping your client. And it sure as hell isn’t impressing Braun, who undoubtedly and maybe truthfully sees it as intimidation.”

  “I love it when she gets all riled up,” Hunt said.

  But Hardy wasn’t in the mood to laugh about it. “So your point is?”

  “My point,” Gina said, “is if you’ve got any chance at all of finding at least a living, breathing human being to introduce as the famous other dude, I’d pull out all the stops trying to find him.”

  “With no evidence?” Hardy asked. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “Well, on that,” Hunt said, “I might have an idea.”

  24

  “There’s nothing to be worried about,” Wayne Ticknor told his daughter Jansey.

  With her bitten-to-the-quick index fingernail she picked at a little dried blob of ketchup on her kitchen table. The digital clock on the stove read 10:17. “That’s easy for you to say, Daddy. You’re not going to be testifying.”

  “True. But they’ve already told you everything they were going to be asking you about, haven’t they? Coached you, even.”

  “I know. But what if they don’t just stick to that?”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe they want to get me on the weed too. I mean, they mentioned that enough. Wasn’t I living off the proceeds? Wasn’t I helping with the business?”

  “I thought they guaranteed they wouldn’t. Wasn’t that part of the deal?”

  “Well, it wasn’t actually a real deal. More like I was just made to understand that if I could help them, they’d help me.”

  “By keeping you out of the dope side of it?”

  “I guess. Yeah. I can’t really deny that I knew about it.” She pouted and blew out a breath. “Or the defense guy? What if once I’m up there he starts getting into stuff about me and Robert? I mean, if people know about that, it’s going to look like we got together pretty soon after Dylan. And then, if they find out it was before too . . .”

  “How would anybody find that out?” her father asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And even if they did, then what?”

  “Then they might start putting it together that Dylan was hitting me. So here’s a guy who’s hitting me that I’m also cheating on. You see what I’m saying? It wouldn’t look good.”

  “Yeah, but, honey, listen. They knew that already and they didn’t charge you or Robert with anything, did they? They charged Maya Townshend. They got her gun.”

  “Okay, but everybody knows Dylan just took that from the shop.”

  “I don’t think the cops do know that, hon. And I don’t think I’d volunteer it.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to volunteer anything.” Suddenly, running on nerves, she stood up, went over to the sink, wet a sponge, and brought it back to wipe and scour the table—the dried ketchup, a few days’ worth of coffee-mug stains, some petrified oatmeal. “It just worries me,” she said. “That’s all.”

  “Well, it’s natural to be worried.”

  She stood there squeezing the sponge. “I just don’t want them to see how good a thing it was, really, Dylan being killed. I know you shouldn’t say that about the dead, but . . .”

  Wayne’s eyes went black. “You can say anything you want about him to me. You know that. He couldn’t have been gone soon enough.” Then, with an outward calm, he went on. “They will never in a million years think that you had anything to do with it. Plus, you’ve got Robert and you saying you were both here the whole morning. You’re not a suspect to anybody, hon. And you couldn’t ever be. So just answer the questions you know the answers to and leave the rest of it alone. How’s that sound?”

  She lowered herself onto her chair, letting out a breath. “It sounds like a plan, Daddy. I’ll just try to keep remembering that.”

  “You do that,” Wayne said, reaching out and putting a hand over hers on the table. “Now, how are you fixed for money lately?”

  She gave him a weak smile. “Okay. I’ve been talking to the insurance guy. I got the feeling they were waiting for Maya to get convicted. When that happens, they won’t have any excuse left not to pay me. So we ought to get t
he check soon after that.”

  “After they convict her? Just to rule you out? He didn’t say that.”

  “Kind of. Not that anybody thinks . . .” She let the phrase hang in the room. “He just says if they’ve got the choice, having somebody else convicted makes it cleaner.”

  “You’d think somebody else getting arrested would be enough.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe not, though.” She pulled her hand out from under his and sat back in her chair, gripping the sponge in the other hand as though it were a tension ball. “I’d bet a lot from what he’s told me that no matter what, they’re going to wait until she’s convicted. On the chance that she might not be convicted, and then it would still be possible that it was me.”

  “It was you who what?”

  “You know. Killed Dylan.”

  “I can’t believe he would actually say that.”

  “Not exactly, no. But it’s what it feels like to me.”

  Her father’s face closed down. He sat square to the table, fists clenched, glowering. “You got the insurance guy’s name? Maybe I’ll go and have a talk with him.”

  But Jansey shook her head. Her father had had a “talk” with Dylan and it hadn’t helped at all. “You don’t have to do that. I don’t think it’s him personally. It’s like the company policy, that’s all.”

  “You might be surprised,” Wayne said. “They tell you it’s company policy and then you find out they’re just trying to get a bonus or brownie points or whatever by denying benefits until the last possible moment and even then some.”

  “Well, Daddy, I don’t think this is like that. He seems like a nice man.”

  “Everybody thought your Dylan was a nice man too.”

  She shook her head. “It’s not the same.”

  “Well, no, nothing’s the same, really. But I bet I could talk your insurance company nice man into rethinking his position, or his company policy, or whatever it is.”

  “I don’t think . . . I mean, I appreciate you trying to help me, but I don’t think I need it yet with the insurance.”