Fatal

by John Lescroart

He rang again, heard the chime again, waited, then knocked tentatively. “Beth?”

  No answer.

  His watch said 7:06.

  He waited until 7:30, then double-checked his cell phone to see if she’d texted him, or even called—maybe he’d left the phone on vibrate and he’d just missed her.

  But no, nothing. He sighed and placed the roses on the welcome mat before walking back across the street to his truck.

  PART TWO

  NOVEMBER 11–NOVEMBER 13

  12

  IKE MCCAFFREY SAT DOUBLE-PARKED ON Funston, his flashing bubble lit up on the roof of his city-issued Plymouth. He’d picked up a couple of go-cups of green tea and a bag full of pork bao from Tong Palace, the dim sum place down the street on Lake, then texted his partner that he was five minutes away. He’d meet her in the street in front of her place.

  But she hadn’t made it down yet by the time he showed up. That didn’t bother him. She moved slowly all the time now, albeit getting more mobile by the week. But he knew that the fact that she was moving at all was in the realm of divine intervention.

  Outside, it was about as cold as it ever got in San Francisco, a bright and sunny mid-November Wednesday morning, but in his warm car, redolent with the terrific smell of the Chinese buns fresh out of the oven, he halfway felt he could be content to wait all morning.

  After all, being late wasn’t going to matter to the body they were going out to see.

  She appeared at the landing by her front door, and he leaned over a bit in his seat, surreptitiously, to watch her start navigating the stairs.

  Slowly.

  Under normal circumstances, there was zero chance that Beth would have been cleared for duty in the condition she was in. Theoretically, every cop on duty has to be able to chase a miscreant through backyards and over fences. And Beth could barely walk.

  But in the wake of the total chaos that had surrounded the terrorist attack last May—six months earlier—SFPD had gone to all hands on deck. There was work for anyone who had a pulse. And cane or no, they were glad to see Beth. A few weeks ago, she had ditched one of the canes before the doctor had really recommended it. In fact, he’d flat out forbidden it—she’d been hit, after all, in both legs, and her doctor believed that neither one of them was ready to bear the full weight of her body on its own. But that, Ike knew, was how Beth was. Tough. She now stood at the top of the stairs, and he saw her hesitate. Then, tucking her cane under her arm and taking hold of the railing with both hands, she stepped down, lowering her second foot in a separate movement. One step, pause, bring the other foot down next to the first one.

  She’d done this three times when, raising her eyes, she must have just seen their car parked waiting for her because she straightened up, took her left hand off the banister, grabbed the cane with it, made her plant, and dropped a foot onto the next step.

  One at a time.

  It took her most of a minute, after which he leaned over and pushed at the passenger door. She pulled it all the way open and grinned over at him. “Oh my God,” she said. “It smells like heaven in here. You got pork bao!”

  * * *

  The usual caveats surrounding the treatment of a dead body did not apply in this case, primarily because this was pretty obviously not where the crime had occurred. The 911 call had come in just after dawn, when it was still almost dark and in any case in full shadow under the huge, the simply enormous, overhanging rocks that had planted themselves eons ago in the sand below the Cliff House Restaurant. John Morgan, the sixty-four-year-old striped-bass fisherman who’d made the call, at first thought it had been a seal that had washed up, but something about the coloring had looked wrong even from a distance, and as he got closer, it was plain that it was a person with some clothes still clinging to him—what was left of a long-sleeved sweatshirt, most of a pair of casual khaki pants.

  The techs had pulled the body from the water and up onto the hard sand beyond the surge waterline, and this was where Ike and Beth now stood, hands in their pockets, looking down on the badly damaged corpse. The man’s shoes and socks were gone, as was most of the left foot, pieces of his arms and legs and most of his face. He did wear a wedding ring, which had somehow escaped the carnage. The left-hand thumb also appeared unscathed, which meant they could soon have a fingerprint, and probably an identification.

  Barefoot with alligator shoes in hand, Lennard Faro—the city’s always well-dressed head of Crime Scene investigations—came up to the homicide inspectors and wished them good morning, then told them that he was on his way back downtown. He was already too cold and there wasn’t much to be gleaned from this location. Clearly, judging from the shape the body was in, the victim had been in the water for at least a couple of days, perhaps longer.

  “Any sign of what killed him?” Beth asked. “He drown?”

  “We haven’t mentioned that yet?” Faro replied. “Sorry about that. No, maybe he drowned. The ME will tell us that soon enough, but it doesn’t really matter because if he did, it was after he got himself shot in the chest.” They moved down nearer to the body and Faro leaned over and pointed to a perfectly circular indentation just to the right of the man’s left nipple. “Miracle if it didn’t go through the heart,” he said. “There’s a pretty clean exit wound in the back, too, probably a jacketed bullet, certainly not a hollow point. I’m guessing something north of a nine millimeter or forty caliber.”

  “Any reports of missing persons?” Ike asked.

  Faro shook his head. “I haven’t heard. I figured we’d let you guys get on that stuff.”

  “Somebody will notice he’s gone,” Beth said. “If he’s still married, especially.”

  “You’ll know soon enough. The fingerprints alone . . .”

  Beth nodded. “I hear you.”

  “So.” Faro tempered his brusque tone to one of sympathy. “How are you doing, Inspector? That’s a long walk down here in heavy sand.”

  “And back,” she said. “But I’m fine, if still just a little banged up. I should be dancing by Christmas.”

  “That’d be Christmas, next year,” Ike put in.

  “Well, whatever,” Faro said. “I’m glad to see you back up and around. I heard it was pretty close.”

  Beth shrugged. “They always say that when there’s a lot of blood. It fools people. But I appreciate the thought. In truth, I was one of the lucky ones.”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” Faro said.

  “It sure is.” She took a last glance at the body. “Well, we’ll get moving on this right away, Len. Have yourself a good one.”

  “You, too.”

  Halfway across the beach, on the way back to their car, both of them slogging slowly through the deep dry sand, Ike said, “You know the other thing that fools them? When there’s a lot of blood and all?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Arterial bleeding. That whole spurting thing. People get all fooled and think it’s serious.”

  “Nah. Who needs those details? Just makes people feel sorry for you.”

  “And we wouldn’t want that, would we?”

  She threw him a sideways glance. “I won’t dignify that. Oh, and by the way . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s not Christmas next year. It’s Christmas, this year. Dancing, I mean.”

  * * *

  They checked Missing Persons upon their arrival downtown and struck out. Nobody was wondering about a missing adult male.

  Then the fingerprint came back, a positive identification, delivered to their office in under three hours. The murder victim was Peter Ash, a lawyer with the firm Meyer Eldridge & Kline, offices in Embarcadero Two.

  At Beth’s desk in the open bullpen area where she worked, her fingers flew over her keyboard and when they stopped, she was frowning. She also must have made some kind of unconscious sound, because her partner looked up from his desk across from hers.

  “What up, dog?” he asked her.

  “This is a little u
nusual. This guy Peter Ash has been missing at least two, maybe as many as three or four days, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, so he’s got a full-time job. His driver’s license says he’s local. And nobody’s bothered to note or comment on or question his absence over the last few days?”

  Ike shrugged. “Maybe he was supposed to be traveling. Maybe he disappears with regularity and people who know him don’t worry about it anymore. Maybe nobody wants to appear panicked, and they’ll give him a few more days before they report anything.”

  “Maybe.”

  “That’s what I said. Three times even. I could probably come up with more if you give me thirty seconds.”

  “I’m sure you could. And they’re all possibly true, Ike, but it makes me wonder. Meanwhile, we need to go check out where he lives. Lived.”

  “I had a feeling you were going to say that next.”

  “Mind meld,” she said. “It’s what makes us such a good team.”

  “I don’t suppose we can just let the pros do it. Break the news that he’s dead, too.”

  “We are the pros, Ike.”

  “I knew you were going to say that, too.”

  “Come on,” she said. “We’ve got his address. Let’s roll out of here.”

  “Now?”

  “As opposed to when?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Say after we get a warrant?”

  Beth made a face. “Who’s the warrant duty judge today, Sommers?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Look. Even if he’s back from lunch, which is unlikely, and even if he’s sober, which is impossible, do we want to kill this whole afternoon sitting in his courtroom until he gets tired of playing video games in chambers and deigns to review our affidavit?”

  “I’m guessing you don’t.”

  “Correct. And neither do you. So the warrant duty changes over at six. Let’s go do a knock and talk now and hope whoever catches the duty then is less inclined to waste our time.”

  * * *

  Peter Ash’s current driver’s license address turned out to be apartment number 4 on the second floor of a three-story, six-unit building at Grove and Masonic, in the shadow of the University of San Francisco. As soon as they hit the block, both of the inspectors felt it was unlikely that this was the primary residence of a big-time downtown lawyer, but they rang the outside bell and waited on the stoop anyway, got no answer, and were just turning to head back to their car when a heavily bundled-up young woman with a backpack stopped in front of them. She held a set of keys in her mittened right hand and backed up a step, as though perhaps the two serious-faced adults made her nervous.

  “Can I help you?” she asked tentatively.

  Beth gave her a tight smile, dug in her purse, and flashed her identification. “Maybe you can. We’re police inspectors looking for Peter Ash, in number four. He lives here, right?”

  “Peter? Yes. But wouldn’t he be at work this time of day? What did he do? Is he in trouble?”

  Ignoring her questions, Beth asked, “Would you mind telling us your name, please?”

  “Sure. Monica Daly.” She pointed at the mailboxes. “I’m in number one.”

  “Do you know Mr. Ash well, Monica?”

  “Not really. I mean, to say hi to. But we don’t party with him or anything.”

  “We?”

  “The rest of us. We’re students, the whole building. He’s like, old, so he kind of sticks out, you know. But otherwise, he seems okay. He buys for some of the guys if they ask him.”

  “Buys?” Ike asked.

  “You know,” she said, “beer and stuff. Liquor. Not everybody here is twenty-one. But he’s cool, he doesn’t worry about that stuff.”

  “The law, you mean?” Ike asked.

  She let out a little laugh. “Well, that law anyway.”

  “Has he lived here for long?” Beth asked.

  “I don’t know, really. Since I got here anyway, but that’s only a few months. So what did he do, anyway? What did you want to talk to him about?”

  * * *

  Monica Daly turned out to be the only student at home in the Grove Street apartment building in the middle of the day. And without a warrant, they weren’t going to get a look inside the victim’s apartment. Not that day, at least.

  So Beth called back to her office, and they got a previous address for Peter Ash, where he’d lived before he moved to the apartment on Grove. Of course, they should have checked for previous addresses before they left downtown, just as they probably should have gone to Judge Sommers and gotten a search warrant for Ash’s apartment, even if they’d had to wait for it. But as with any fresh murder, they’d been in a hurry. Enough time had already passed since the crime had taken place, and the Rule of Forty-Eight was that after two days, the odds of finding someone’s killer approached zero.

  Movement, even in the wrong direction, sometimes felt like progress.

  Ash’s former residence turned out to be a large dark brown bungalow on Paloma Avenue in Saint Francis Wood. He’d resided down here in the Wood Hood for seventeen years before he’d moved out. Both inspectors knew that was about as clear cut a sign as you could get that Peter Ash had been either divorced or was in the process of getting there.

  They pulled up on the wide, empty street and parked directly in front of the address. A flagstone path bordered with wilting impatiens and pansies on one side and a low but overgrown hedge on the other bisected a wide lawn that was clearly at least a few weeks past due on its last mowing. More visible signs of a marriage on the rocks.

  Before they reached the front door, they could hear the sound of a vacuum cleaner inside. Ike waited for Beth’s slower gait to get her to the front door, and when she’d come up next to him, she nodded and he pushed the doorbell. A deep gong echoed from inside, the noise from the vacuum ceased, and in a moment the door opened about six inches until the chain stopped it.

  “Yes? Can I help you?”

  Ike took the lead, flashing his ID. “We are inspectors with the police department. Are you Mrs. Ash?”

  “No. I go by Jill Corbin now, but Peter Ash was my husband. Or is, until the divorce is final. Is he all right?” Through the door, they could see her put her hand over her heart. “Oh my God. You said ‘police’? Is he dead? He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I’m afraid he is,” Ike intoned. “We’re very sorry.”

  Standing behind Ike, Beth made a mental note that Jill had immediately assumed her husband was dead rather than injured or in an accident or anything else.

  Jill stood on the other side of the door, making little mewling sounds—Beth considered moments like these the absolute worst part of her job. After a few seconds, she leaned in. “Jill—Ms. Corbin—could we please come in for a minute?” Giving the grieving something to do, no matter how slight, sometimes helped them get through the first horrible seconds.

  The door closed, the chain rattled behind it. The door opened all the way.

  Jill was medium height and build. Her dark hair stopped just below her shoulders. She might have been pretty under normal circumstances—she appeared to have good skin and regular features—but both of her eyes and the top of her nose were swollen and bruised as though she’d taken a serious beating in the past few days. Stepping back from the door into the foyer, she held her right hand up to her mouth in what seemed almost a caricature of grief.

  Mute sorrow.

  The vacuum cleaner stood by itself on the hardwood floor in the archway that led into the large living room, which was now well lit by the cold afternoon sun through the picture window.

  Beth closed the front door behind them.

  Without a word to the inspectors, Jill turned. She took a few steps into the living room, then lowered herself onto a wing chair. Beth and Ike took seats on the facing couch.

  Jill wore faded blue jeans, white tennis shoes, and a tan USC sweatshirt, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Eventually, she came back to the inspectors. T
hen, as though settling something in her mind, she asked Beth, “What happened to him? Can you tell me?”

  “We haven’t gotten the medical examiner’s report, but we are looking at the possibility that somebody killed him.”

  “What do you mean? Do you mean murdered him?”

  “We don’t know that,” Beth said. “Not for certain. The body was in the bay, but he might have been injured before he went into the water.”

  “Well, then, maybe it was an accident? Oh my God, do you think he might have committed suicide?”

  “It’s not outside the realm of possibility,” Beth said. “Why? Do you think he was suicidal?”

  Jill shifted her gaze over to Ike and again came back to Beth. It was almost, Beth thought, as if she wondered why these inspectors were really in her house. She drew in a breath, her hands clasped on her lap, then exhaled as her expression went almost completely blank.

  “Jill,” Beth prompted her.

  She looked across, met Beth’s gaze. “He’s really dead? This really is the end, then.” She brought her hands up to her forehead, seemed to press into them.

  “The end?” Ike asked. “The end of . . .”

  She lowered her hands. “Everything. Every thing. Us.” Meeting Beth’s eyes again, she got her voice under control. “I can’t believe this. Peter is just dead? Just like that. That’s it?”

  Beth nodded and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “You mentioned the possibility of suicide,” Ike said. “Do you think that was something he’d be capable of?”

  Jill shook her head. “I really don’t know what he was capable of anymore.”

  “Anymore since when?” Ike asked her.

  “I don’t know exactly. This is going to sound a little weird, but since he changed.”

  “Changed in what way?” Beth asked.

  “In every way imaginable. It was just like he woke up one morning and was a different person. One day he was a good husband and father and lawyer, then, suddenly, he just wasn’t anymore.”

  Ike came forward on the couch. “When was this?”