The Fall

by John Lescroart

  •  •  •

  “I THOUGHT WE had a rule about calls before nine o’clock on weekends,” Hardy growled.

  Rebecca ignored him. “Have you seen the paper?” she asked. “CityTalk?”

  “I haven’t seen anything today except the inside of my eyelids. What time is it?”

  “Eight-thirty.”

  “Too early. Call back in half an hour, by which time in a fair world I still shouldn’t be up, though I might be.”

  “Daddy, don’t hang up.”

  “Is CityTalk about me or you?”

  “No. But Uncle Abe’s in it.”

  He blew into the receiver. “All right,” he said. “What?”

  “You’ll see. Read it and call me right back. This could be huge.”

  •  •  •

  IN THE WARM morning, Hardy, Rebecca, and Wyatt Hunt sat in the shade of an umbrella over the picnic table on Hardy’s back deck. Of the five elopers named in the CityTalk column, one was identified as Leon Copes. According to the article, he had been found incompetent to stand trial on a murder charge about four years ago and had spent the next three years in Napa State Hospital. Last December, he’d come down to San Francisco for psychiatric reevaluation and once again been found incompetent, so he should have been ordered back to Napa under a Murphy Conservatorship, but due to a clerical error, he was assigned to a halfway house in the city, from which he apparently walked away sometime within the past several months.

  No one at the picnic table needed to be reminded that Leon Copes had been the boyfriend of Sharla Paulson and, in all probability, sexually abused Anlya Paulson when she was fourteen. And all of the principals on the deck understood that his by no means definite, but very possible if not likely, presence in San Francisco might prove to be an extremely critical element in the murder trial of Greg Treadway.

  “Although, first,” Hardy said, “we’ve got to find him.”

  “Which is, let me guess,” Hunt said, “where I come in.”

  Rebecca gave him a smile. “We were hoping. Any ideas?”

  “I do, actually. Although maybe you want to call your friend Glitsky, and I’ll talk to Devin Juhle and see if between them, plus this column, they can get a fire lit under the regular cops out on the street, watching out for these guys. That’ll spread the net wider than I could. I’m a little shocked Abe didn’t mention this to you earlier, Diz.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “Leon Copes,” Hunt replied. “How could he not have known about the connection to your client? Especially when he found out he was one of these elopers out on the street?”

  “Good questions. But he didn’t do any prep work for the trial. He stopped working the case as soon as they arrested Greg. I’ve got to believe he never heard Leon’s name in connection with it. If he did, there’s no way he wouldn’t have told me. He certainly wouldn’t have let this CityTalk thing run without giving me a pretty serious heads-up. So I’ve got to believe he flat-out didn’t know. And he damn sure doesn’t know where Leon is now.”

  “He could be anywhere,” Hunt said. “If I were him, I’d be long gone.”

  “You, however,” Rebecca said, “probably would not have been twice found incompetent to stand trial.”

  He cocked his head in her direction, broke a grin. “Thanks for that ‘probably.’ That’s a real vote of confidence.”

  “You’re welcome,” Rebecca said.

  “But really,” Hardy asked Hunt, “what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking what The Beck says is right. He’s not going to do what my hypothetical self would do, so he’s probably still in town. This is where he’s from. He knows people here. He’s probably got family, although that’s the first place where the police ought to be looking, so I’ll leave it to them. He’s got to have a place to crash. It’s not impossible that he’s got some kind of job.”

  “Incompetent to stand trial and he could still get work?” Rebecca asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Hunt asked her. “That’s the job description for half the service jobs in town.”

  “Except that he wouldn’t have a need to get a job in this town,” Hardy said, referring—they all knew—to the hundreds of welfare agencies set up all over the city to accommodate the needs of the homeless, the destitute, the abandoned. San Francisco might be the most expensive city in the country in terms of lodging and food prices, but for the truly needy, the unskilled, the unlucky, and the downright crazy, it was a socialist heaven.

  “Again,” Hunt said, “that’s for the real cops to check.”

  “If that’s the case,” Rebecca said, “I have to say I’m a little concerned about their motivation to find him.”

  “Whose motivation?”

  “Well, Devin’s and even Abe’s. And by extension everybody else.”

  Hunt frowned. “I don’t see that. Why wouldn’t they want to find him?”

  Hardy spoke up. “Because the minute Leon Copes is found anyplace in the city, he becomes part of the mix in Treadway. Think about it. This guy raped Anlya when he was living with her family. If nothing else, that automatically makes him a threat to her.”

  “Also,” Rebecca added, “it makes her a threat to him. If she sees him someplace, if he confronts her.”

  Hardy picked up the thread. “So what The Beck is thinking is that if we can get any small part of that into the trial, just get this whole mess in front of the jury, make Leon out to be the phantom mugger, I don’t care, it’s got to be a huge negative for Braden, and if you lump that in with the Honor Wilson statement, I don’t know how the jury could not have a doubt, and that doesn’t even count the judge.”

  “Bakhtiari put Braden on notice last time,” Rebecca said. “He hates how sloppy this investigation has been.” She was thinking, however, that this was an almost unbearable complication in her representation of her client.

  On the one hand, Bakhtiari was unlikely to let her throw out a bunch of accusations about Copes raping Anlya and escaping from his halfway house. She would have to have witnesses, evidence, and some indication that Leon had a connection to the crime and was not, for example, working at a convenience store in Louisiana when it happened.

  On the other hand—here it was again!—if she asked for a mistrial in order to investigate these things, Bakhtiari would have to give it to her, but her relationship with her client would likely become untenable. No competent attorney could fail to ask for time to investigate this turn of events, even if her client objected.

  And she wasn’t talking about a few weeks when Greg would have to cool his heels in jail while they prepared for the retrial. With all of the complications that had arisen since the trial began—the Utlee connection and now the Leon Copes development—the investigations could not fail to take less than a year and possibly longer, maybe substantially longer. If she thought that Greg had been adamant before about not spending any more time in jail than he absolutely had to, now—looking at a year minimum—she could not imagine he would consider the alternative.

  Rebecca realized that she wasn’t the one spending every night in a jail cell. Greg’s state of mind, especially with this new information, was that her job was to get this stuff in front of the jury, after which they would have no choice but to acquit him. If she’d do her job competently, he’d be free again in a matter of days, this horrific ordeal behind him.

  And if she couldn’t do that . . .

  She knew that if she got him a mistrial, it would be the last thing she would ever do in the case. Greg would fire her the moment the motion was granted.

  It would be a hell of a way to end her representation of a client in her first major case.

  •  •  •

  AT ALMOST THE same moment, Phil Braden—who was as familiar with the name Leon Copes as anyone—was on the phone with his boss, Wes Farrell.

  “Yes, sir,” he was saying. “I realize that you’re the one who got the whole ball rolling about these elopers . . . Of cours
e I think . . . Yes, in general you’re right. These people should not be on the street. They need to be locked back up. Yes. Be that as it may, there is not anything in the record of this case that justifies introducing Mr. Copes into the proceedings at this stage. But if we allocate our limited police resources to a full-scale manhunt that locates him within the city limits, that’s exactly what they’ll try to do . . . Well, that’s what I’ll argue, but the judge has given every indication . . . All I’m saying is that a call to Devin Juhle or even to the chief . . . Of course if he’s innocent I don’t want to convict him, but he’s not innocent, as we know . . . All right, I just think it’s worth considering. Thank you . . . Pardon? The foot? Oh, fine. Getting better every day.”

  •  •  •

  ABE GLITSKY DID not like to mix up his professional and personal worlds. Only a very few of his colleagues and—when he had been head of Homicide—inspectors knew his address. Those favored few knew better than to drop by unannounced at his home unless on a matter of great import. Consequently, he never expected work to come calling at home. So when he checked the peephole and saw Rebecca Hardy standing there, he immediately realized that she was here on business—what else could it be?—and it took him half a beat to get his head around it.

  He opened the door with a full and genuine smile—after all, he loved this young woman—and gave her a hug and a buss on the cheek. “How’s my favorite almost-niece?”

  He invited her in, and they went out the back door to say hello to Treya, who was sitting with another woman while kids cavorted on the playground set. Rachel and Zachary needed their hugs and a quick catching-up, too, but five minutes later, they were back in the living room, Rebecca on the couch and Abe in his favorite reading chair. “So to what,” he asked, “do I owe this pleasure?”

  She started to give him the short rundown and got as far as “I don’t know if you know, but before he got arrested for homicide, Leon Copes lived with Anlya Paulson’s mother. And, not exactly by the way, he molested Anlya during that time.”

  Abe, who’d been sitting back taking in the narrative, came forward, his head cocked with interest. “Leon Copes? You’re saying Leon lived with Anlya and molested her? You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not. I saw the name in CityTalk this morning and—”

  “This is huge.”

  “That’s what I thought, too. So you really didn’t know?”

  Glitsky frowned. “How could I have known? This is the first time I’ve heard of Leon in connection with Anlya. Wes Farrell took me off that case as soon as your guy got arrested. If I’d known about this, I would have told somebody, I promise. You, for example. Devin Juhle. Maybe your dad. Somebody.”

  “I know you would have. More important right now, we don’t know where Leon is, do we?”

  “No.” He thought a moment. “But I’m guessing you’d like to find out.”

  She nodded. “It might be helpful.”

  Glitsky chuckled. “Sounding almost too much like your father. ‘It might be helpful.’ Meaning that you would kill small children to find out where he is.”

  “Only a few of the very worst ones. And painlessly. But yes, we’d like to find him. And my dad was thinking since you’re the guy who’s on record for trying to locate these elopers, you might have a lead or two.”

  “I wish I did. But the paper’s only been out a few hours, and it’s the weekend. I don’t see anybody jumping on this till Monday at the earliest.”

  “Well, maybe. Wyatt’s going to talk to Devin Juhle today, but we realized that . . .”

  When she finished explaining, Abe was nodding in agreement. “You’re right. Why would Devin want to supply you with another possible suspect when you’ve got one on trial? If Leon just turns up, okay, they’ll bring him in because they have to. Otherwise, these guys have been AWOL for years, some of ’em. What’s another couple of weeks? In spite of CityTalk, I don’t see any heat under it.”

  “We didn’t, either. That’s why we thought we’d come to you.”

  Glitsky’s lips turned up in amusement. “And why is that?”

  “Because these guys are your babies. You’ve claimed them. So you’ve got a reason to be looking for each and every one of them. If Leon Copes happens to be the first one you focus on, who’s going to know or care? Whereas, by contrast, if Juhle sends his troops out looking, and he might not, it wouldn’t surprise me to hear the four other guys are out in front of Leon.”

  Glitsky clucked. “My, my,” he said. “Whence this cynical streak?”

  She smiled back at him. “I’m thinking you can guess, Uncle Abe.”

  “I’m thinking I can. That parental-influence thing has a long reach.”

  “It does, yes. But in this case, I’m not being cynical. I know the prosecution side never believes this, but the evidence doesn’t prove that Greg Treadway killed Anlya, and if that’s true, it means somebody else did.”

  “And out of the whole universe, with nothing like any new evidence, or nothing putting him anywhere near where it happened, you think that person was Leon Copes?”

  “I think it’s a pretty darn amazing coincidence that he gets out of jail, and within six months, the girl he molested is killed. I think that needs to be looked at carefully, that’s all. And we can’t even begin to do that until we find him.”

  “So you want me to go behind the backs of my peeps?”

  “You’re not going behind anybody’s back. If somebody thinks you’re stepping on toes and calls you off, okay, you tried. But if you’re just following up on where these five guys might have gotten to, you’ve already announced that to the whole world. Then, if you find Leon Copes first—”

  Glitsky held up a hand. “I get the concept.”

  “So what do you say?”

  “I say, and it won’t surprise you, I’m going to do my job.”

  She beamed across at him. “That’s all I ask. Thanks, Uncle Abe.”

  36

  WYATT HUNT WASN’T thrilled to be working on the most beautiful Saturday of the year. He and his wife, Tamara, already had their windsurfing gear all bundled up and ready to go when they’d gotten a little physically distracted over breakfast. And so they hadn’t yet left their home when Rebecca called and told him they had an emergency and needed him right away and probably for the rest of the weekend. Since Hardy & Associates was the source of much of Hunt’s income, he had no choice.

  The meeting at Hardy’s house had been informative and instructive, but Hunt’s later phone call to his good pal Devin Juhle was not. Juhle had given every indication that he’d been thoroughly briefed about the Leon Copes matter. As head of Homicide, he had and would have no official interest in locating him. His inspectors, as always, were all working on active homicide investigations and had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue escaped or eloped inmates. He was surprised that Hunt would ask.

  Now Hunt was knocking at a door on a block that made even this picture-book day seem tawdry and bleak. The benign sun on the Hardys’ back deck had revealed a different side of its personality and now seemed to bake down remorselessly on desiccated or grassless front yards. Heavy iron bars covered each door and downstairs window in every dwelling.

  Hunt had been to similar places many times. During his CPS years, he had carried children from houses like these while a parent cried or cursed or threatened. He had never met Anlya Paulson, although he’d liked her brother on sight, but seeing that they had both come from this environment, he felt a surge of empathy and sadness.

  And anger.

  The metal door stayed shut after the woman opened the inner one. Inside, the house was all shuttered up, well beyond dim. Invisible. He could barely see her outline through the heavy black mesh that separated them.

  “Sharla Paulson?” he said.

  “Who’s askin’?”

  “My name is Wyatt Hunt, and I’m a private investigator trying to locate Leon Copes.”

  “What you want him for?”
>
  “I’m not supposed to say, although I’m authorized to tell you that he would probably consider it good news.”

  “Money? Who’s he know got money?”

  “I’m really not at liberty to say. Or even if there is money involved. We’d just like to locate him.”

  “You with the police?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a private investigator. If you’d like to see my license . . .” He took out his wallet, opened it, and held it up.

  She opened the outer door enough to glimpse his identification. And for him to get a look at her. She was not an unattractive woman, although at the moment she was unkempt, with wild hair and no makeup—and perhaps a bruise under her left eye. She was barefoot, in black pants and a Harley-Davidson T-shirt.

  “It would be worth Leon’s while to get in contact with me. If I could leave a card . . .” He passed it through the crack in the door. “So,” he said, “Leon.”

  “Leon ain’t here no more.”

  “I understand that. But this is the last regular address we have for him, and we thought someone here would know where he might have gone.”

  She didn’t respond.

  Hunt pressed on. “I wondered if he tried to stay in touch with you at all.”

  “He was no good to my baby, Anlya. Then he killed a man in a fight and they put him up at Napa.”

  “Yes. But we have him coming back to the city after that.”

  Again silence. Then, “He got spells, that’s all it was.”

  “Spells?”

  “You know. Something goes off inside his head. He don’t mean nothing by it. That’s why they wouldn’t give him no trial and just locked him away. He ain’t a bad man.”

  “But you and he broke up?”

  “That’s because after Anlya . . . He couldn’t be in the house with her no more. It wasn’t really his fault, but she got so she couldn’t be around him.”

  “Are you saying it was her fault? What happened between them?”

  “He didn’t mean it, is all, like she thought. He woulda stopped. He did stop. But she couldn’t get over the one time, and she needed him to go, so wasn’t really nothin’ I could do. Wasn’t her fault. Wasn’t his. Just happened. So what could I do?”