A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “So are you.” Hardy sat down next to her. “Has Craig here explained what we’d like to talk to you about in the courtroom?”

  “What I saw, or heard, that morning.”

  “You remember the date, don’t you?”

  “Of course. October twenty-seventh, two thousand seven, to be exact.”

  “Exact is good. We like exact.”

  Her eyes brightened with the adventure. “And two shots. One at six oh eight or nine and one at six ten.”

  “Very good.” He leaned in toward her. “I was hoping to call you to be a witness pretty much right away, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Of course it’s all right with me. That’s why I’m here.”

  “Good. Now, I’ve already heard what you said in your talk with Mr. Hunt, and that will be the basis of your testimony, but if you don’t mind, maybe we could just take a minute here before we go inside and run over some details?”

  “Sure, of course,” she said. “That would be fine.”

  In spite of the glimmer of hope he’d begun to entertain about his motion to dismiss, Hardy wasn’t particularly shocked, nor even greatly disappointed, when Braun came back to the bench and ruled against him, denying his motion in its entirety.

  Still, he was buoyed by his belief that Lori Bradford was going to be an important and powerful witness, offering a completely alternative version of the bare facts of the case. He had given some thought to the phraseology and tenor of his opening questions, wanting not only to get to this witness’s information but to alert the jury to the homicide inspectors’ wily and discreditable ways.

  Now, already having established a solid rapport with her, one that he hoped the jury would recognize as between equals—as opposed to a young man condescending to a senile witness—he began his questioning. “Mrs. Bradford, where do you live?”

  “I live in a second-story apartment on Ashbury Street here in the city, on the west side of the street, right up from Haight. It’s also,” she added, coached by Hardy, “right across the street from the alley that runs behind Bay Beans.”

  “Can you see that alley from your apartment?”

  “The first twenty or thirty feet of it, out the living room and dining room windows, yes.”

  “Now, Mrs. Bradford, do you remember anything unusual and specific about the morning of Saturday, October twenty-seventh?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what was that?”

  “At a few minutes after six o’clock I was in bed in the back of the apartment, but already awake for the day, when I heard a loud report, like a firecracker, although for some reason I remember thinking that it might be a gunshot. So I got up and was in the hallway going to the front windows and then—bang!—there was another one. About a minute later.”

  “And what did you do then?”

  “I got to the window and looked down into the street and across to the alley.”

  “And did you see anything unusual down there?”

  “No. Nothing. It was still pretty dark out.”

  “Did you call nine one one?”

  “Not then. No. There didn’t seem to be any emergency. It was just the two noises. Although, of course, when the police cars started getting there, I realized something must have happened. By then it was too late to call nine one one.”

  “But you did eventually call the police, did you not?”

  “Yes. A couple of days later.”

  “And why was that? The delay, I mean?”

  “Well, mostly because the news reports were all saying that there had only been one shot, and I thought they’d want to know that I’d heard two of them.”

  “You heard two shots?”

  “Yes.” Lori, God bless her, added the word Hardy had recommended. “Definitely.”

  Raising his eyebrows for the jury’s benefit, he went on. “And so you called the police to tell them about this information?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you speak to some inspectors?”

  “Yes. Two of them came by the apartment and we talked about it.”

  “You told them about the two shots, did you?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “And what was their comment about that, if any?”

  “They thanked me and said that the information might be enough to change the entire theory of the case.”

  “I see. And then did you hear from them soon after that?”

  “No.”

  “No?” A pause for the effect. “Not even back in November after they’d arrested the defendant, and they were preparing for the preliminary hearing?”

  “No.”)

  “And not as this case went to trial?”

  “No.”

  “Hmm. When the inspectors did speak to you at your home, did they tell you that they didn’t believe your testimony, or your eyewitness account?”

  “Objection. Irrelevant.”

  “Goes to the witness’s state of mind, Your Honor.” This didn’t make a lot of sense, but Hardy had learned from the testimony of Jansey Ticknor that Braun didn’t have a real good grasp of what this hearsay exception meant. He figured if Stier could use it to get stuff in, he might be able to as well.

  It worked. “Overruled.”

  Hardy asked permission of the judge and then repeated his question. “Mrs. Bradford, did the inspectors tell you that they didn’t believe your testimony, or your eyewitness account?”

  “No. To the contrary, as I’ve said, they talked about it changing the theory of the case.”

  “And yet they never called you back, or served you with a subpoena, or asked you to come down here and testify in court, correct?”

  “Objection. Asked and answered.”

  “Sustained.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bradford. I have no further questions.”

  Stier was on his feet before Hardy was back at his counsel table. “Mrs. Bradford,” he began, “did the inspectors you spoke to ask you if you’d seen anything in the street on the morning of Mr. Vogler’s death?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did you in fact see anything down in the street, or in the alley?”

  “No, as I’ve already said.”

  “Now, as to the noises you heard. Are you familiar with the sound of gunfire?”

  “No. Not particularly.”

  “In your testimony with Mr. Hardy you said that while you were in bed, you heard a report, and this is a direct quote, ‘like a firecracker. ’ Unquote. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, it is. I thought it might have been a firecracker. Or a backfire.”

  “And yet you told Mr. Hardy that you definitely heard two gunshots, did you not?”

  “I did.”

  And here Stier, in his enthusiasm and lack of respect for this witness, made his big error. “So let me ask you this. How could you know they were gunshots?”

  Hardy had asked Mrs. Bradford that very question in the hall and had fervently hoped Stier would be foolish enough to ask it in front of the jury.

  “Well, they were identical sounds. And we know for sure that one of them was a gunshot from the alley across the street, don’t we? That’s when Mr. Vogler was killed, wasn’t it? Right when I heard the shots.”

  Rule Number One, Hardy thought—you talk to every single witness yourself, every single time. Hardy saw Stier’s shoulders slump as some of the jurors came forward and the import of this testimony hit home. He turned hesitantly toward the panel, stopped, came back to the witness. He finally said, “But can you say for certain that the second sound was in fact a gunshot, and not a backfire, or even a firecracker?”

  She thought about this for a second. “I can say for sure that the two sounds were exactly alike. If the first one was a gunshot, the second one was a gunshot. And vice versa.”

  Stier decided to quit before he made it worse. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Lori Bradford got up from the witness chair. “And they really did sound like gunshots,” she added with a beli
evability and sincerity that cemented her complete defeat of The Big Ugly.

  The three partners—Hardy, Farrell, Roake—and Wyatt Hunt were at the Freeman Building after the close of business, gathered around the large round table in the Solarium considering options. The overhead lighting was on full against the encroachment of the misty darkness that gathered outside the glass panes. A bottle of red wine stood open on the table, although Gina’s choice was her Oban and Hunt, next to her, was having an Anchor Steam.

  Hardy was running out of time if he wanted to get any sort of “other dude,” Paco or anyone else, into the consciousness of the jury. Before Ruiz had been killed, he’d half planned to call him as a witness both on the Paco question and to counter the allegations that there had ever had been anything romantic going on between Dylan and Maya. But now, of course, that option had been foreclosed by events.

  Other witnesses for Maya’s defense were few, if any, and far between. This was why Hardy had grabbed so desperately at Lori Bradford. At least here was a real bone for the jury to gnaw at. Nothing in the prosecution’s case contemplated or explained a two-shot scenario, and that fact, if taken as fact, created a glaring hole if any jury member cared to look hard in that direction. But since there was no second bullet, nor casing, nor even gun for that matter, there was no guarantee, nor even a likelihood, that this would happen.

  And as for Maya, her alibis were flimsy and unsupported. Nobody had seen her either kill anybody or not kill anybody. And there were still the huge and unresolved questions of why she had been at both murder scenes. The time, in Dylan’s case, and the location, in Levon’s, pretty well eliminated any consideration of the idea that she’d simply been in the respective neighborhoods. She’d gone to both places on purpose, apparently summoned—or setting up—the victims. And if she hadn’t gone by to kill them, then why?

  “I’ve got to call her,” Hardy said. “Let the jury hear her story.”

  “Maybe I’m missing something,” Gina said, “but what is her story? I mean, does she even have any explanation for why she was at these places?”

  “Dylan called her, and then Levon called her.”

  Gina sipped her drink. “And she just went? No reason? When was the last time she’d even seen Levon?”

  “I know,” Hardy said. “It’s weak.”

  “Weak’s one word for it.” Farrell leaned back in his chair. “You might just want to go to argument. I mean, the theory is that they’ve got to prove something and you don’t.”

  Hardy reached for his glass. “I’d just like to give ’em something, anything at all.”

  “Well,” Hunt said, “there was Lori.”

  “And God love her,” Hardy replied. “But two shots kind of goes nowhere without another story to go with them. And that I don’t have.”

  “How about Glitsky?” Hunt asked.

  Hardy had informed them all of his lunchtime deal with Abe, but like everything else about this case, it was looking like anything Abe could bring to the party was going to be a day late and a dollar short. “We’re supposed to talk again tonight, but if he had anything live and pressing, I think I’d have heard.”

  “Maybe you could call the homicide guys Abe put on Ruiz,” Gina offered. “Talk about another weed-related murder at BBW, this one while Maya’s in jail and couldn’t have had anything to do with it. There’s an element of doubt. Something else going on, at least.”

  “That’s an actual thought,” Hardy said. “Although Abe would have me killed if I called his guys in the middle of this.”

  “Yeah, but at least you’d be killed by professionals,” Farrell said, “so it wouldn’t hurt much.” He went on. “Braun wouldn’t let it in anyway. Ruiz is six months removed from our victims here. That’s a tough sell.” He took a healthy drink of red wine. “I’m back to closing argument. You’ve just got to argue that there’s no evidence. That’s all you can do.”

  “Well, not to get picky,” Gina said, “but there is evidence. There’s Maya’s gun, her fingerprints on it, fingerprints on Levon’s doorknob.” She shrugged. “It’s not much, granted, but it’s hard to explain away. Any other jurisdiction in the state, given the motives, I think she goes down. Here, maybe you’ll get your one juror, but on argument alone, I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”

  “Well, on that cheery note.” Hardy tipped his wineglass up and pushed himself back from the table. “I’m on all my phones all night if anybody gets any ideas.”

  “The clerk, I’d bet,” Glitsky said, “was named Julio Gomez. Twenty-four years old when he died in ninety-five. The place was Ocean Liquors.”

  Glitsky, going out of his way to stop by Hardy’s home, had interrupted his friend’s seemingly unending perusal of his trial binders, and now, just past nine o’clock, they stood in the kitchen waiting for the microwave to beep for Glitsky’s tea.

  “Was there an investigation back then?”

  “No,” Glitsky said sarcastically. “Homicide just decided not to look into this particular murder. It seemed like too much work.” A beat. “Of course we opened an investigation.”

  “And?”

  “And we closed it about a month later.”

  “No suspects?”

  “Not a one.” He pulled an envelope from his inside jacket pocket. “I copied the file and brought it around for you, though as you can see, it’s a little thin.” Then, gesturing back to the dining room where Hardy’s binders were spread out on the table, “Not that it looks like you need much more reading material. I gather that’s your case in there.”

  “What there is of it.” The microwave’s timer sounded and Hardy crossed over, took the cup out, and handed it to his friend. “Santé. How about witnesses?”

  “Witness. One. You can see him in there. Old Asian guy, coming out of a bar across the street, twelve-thirty on a Tuesday night. And the fog was in, evidently heavy. Plus, he’d had a few. Anyway, he heard the shot, saw somebody run out of the store, get in a car, then take off.” He pointed down at the envelope. “It’s all in there.”

  “Yeah, but, so a driver? More than one guy? Two guys waiting in the car?”

  “He doesn’t say. And I know what you’re thinking, that this is your Paco.”

  “It could be. Is this the only liquor store shoot-up in those years?”

  “No. There were actually six of them, homicides. But believe it or not, we got four of the guys, all solos, although to be fair, two of ’em got shot themselves by guys they shot behind the counter, which made it a little easier. The other one was a woman, never caught. That left whoever killed this guy Gomez. Maybe your Paco, after all.”

  Hardy nodded with satisfaction. “That’s pretty thorough. You ought to do this stuff for a living.”

  Glitsky blew over his tea. “I’m motivated. But none of this ancient history is helping much with Ruiz.”

  “You haven’t got anything?”

  “Well, we’ve talked to most of the workers at BBW. That’s going to go on for a while. But so far, not much, just everybody shocked that Ruiz could have been involved in drugs.”

  Hardy chuckled. “I can imagine. But none of this helps Maya either.”

  “I never thought it would.”

  Sitting at his dining room table, having already scrutinized his binders all the way through again until he was nearly blind, Hardy accepted a kiss on the cheek from his wife at around ten-thirty and told her he’d be up in a while.

  “This is going to be over soon, isn’t it?” Frannie asked.

  “One way or the other, a day or two.”

  “That’d be neat. I’ve been thinking it really wouldn’t be so bad having a husband again.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s why I’ve stayed married to you. To have a husband.”

  “I know.”

  She kissed him again. “I’ll probably still love you.”

  “Good. That’d be good.”

  But in reality barely hearing her, kissing the air in front of her face, reaching
for another pass at one of the binders.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  He closed the black binder and stood. Going back into the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator, closed it back up, cricked his back, and saw Glitsky’s envelope on the counter. This Gomez killing thirteen or fourteen years ago wasn’t his case, Glitsky had given him the summary, and even if it had been Paco, so what? So he’d left the envelope and gone back in to try one last time to find something in his binders.

  Standing at the counter, he pulled out the half dozen or so pages—incident report, copies of some pictures of the deceased, autopsy, ballistics, two pages of testimony from Mr. Leland Lee, pretty much as Glitsky had described it.

  More nothing.

  He started through the pages again, his routine, more slowly this time. Eyes burning, he forced himself to read every line.

  Wait a minute. Wait.

  He turned back to first the autopsy, then the ballistics report. The bullet that had killed Julio Gomez was a .40-caliber. A handwritten, barely readable scrawled notation by an unidentified ballistics lab worker read: “Probably Glock .40. Ballistics markings unidentifiable.”

  Okay, he had to make some assumptions, but they seemed warranted. And what other choice did he have anyway? Somehow these long-ago and near-invisible events and relationships, he was sure, were at the heart of the case that had consumed his life for the past six months. It was all about, perhaps not Maya at all, but certainly Dylan and Levon and the mysterious Paco.

  Back at the computer in his family room he suddenly realized that although Hunt and Chiurco had looked into them, he himself had never really pursued any of the details in the robbery that Dylan and Levon had been convicted of.

  And why should he have? It was, at best, tangential to Maya’s situation, and again in the far distant past.

  But now he suddenly realized what he should have considered a couple of days ago, when he’d first become aware of the existence of Paco—that if there had been a trial back then, or even a plea bargain, there would have been both witnesses for the prosecution and possibly friends for the defense, friends and witnesses whose association with Dylan and Levon might have extended back beyond when Maya had met and hung out with them, back when Paco had been in their crowd, and as a real human being, not a nom de guerre.