Hard Evidence

by John Lescroart

  “That’s nice,” Dorothy said, “everybody needs that.”

  Mrs. Franck nodded. “We just let her come and go. She’s got her own room—well, I guess you’ll see it when we go on up—Karl fixed it up for her especially. Lord knows, one thing this house has is enough rooms. But that’s Karl. He says this house is her house. She’s welcome even if we’re not here.”

  “Is that often?” Jeff asked.

  “Oh, you know, with the boys competing, sometimes she’ll come down on a Thursday or Friday and we’ll all be going off for the weekend someplace—Long Beach or Las Vegas. We come back Sunday or Monday and she’ll have a dinner or something waiting for us. She’s really so great.”

  The Monterey Bay Club had a listing of all the sanctioned weight-lifting events of 1992. On June 20-21, Saturday and Sunday, the Mr. California regionals had been held in San Diego at the Mission Bay Inn.

  Dorothy sat in a booth at the Pelican’s Nest just off the Santa Cruz boardwalk, sipping a Bloody Mary, checking the shine on her new diamond. The rain had picked up again, slanting sheets of water across the bay. Jeff was coming back from the pay telephones. He walked easily with the crutches, barely seeming to need them when he was hot on a lead like this one.

  He slid into the booth and kissed her. “Karl Franck and his mother checked in with Len Hoeffner on Friday evening, June nineteenth. Both were listed as entrants in the pageant.”

  “So Celine wasn’t here?”

  “She might have been. She might have come down on Friday night to see them off. I’m sure there are plane records somewhere, but I don’t think Hardy’s going to need them.”

  “And she was back by Sunday.” It wasn’t a question.

  Jeff nodded. “And so far as the Francks knew or assumed, she was there all weekend. They weren’t even lying, as far as they knew, when they said so. She probably had a nice meal waiting for them when they got home and a story about a relaxed weekend doing nothing.”

  “Except for killing her father.”

  Jeff stared out the window at the rain. “Except, maybe, for that.”

  Hardy had gone down to pick up Frannie and Rebecca. He took them out to breakfast and then swung by their house again for another day’s clothes and baby supplies before dropping them back at her former mother-in-law’s. He probably wasn’t going to be back home all day anyway and he had some nagging notion that things could get dangerous. Maybe that was ridiculous, but he’d play it safe anyway. He’d feel more comfortable if his wife and child were out of harm’s way.

  The other thing he had done was call Andy Fowler, still at Jane’s, and cancel their noon appointment to go over his trial testimony. He told him about Chomorro’s decision not to allow his line of questioning on the “backward” collection of evidence.

  Fowler had been low-key. “Listen, Diz, when you get me on the stand I’ll simply tell the truth. I did not kill Owen Nash and they haven’t proved I did. Their burden, remember. I think it’s a good idea to take the day off, get a little rest.” . . . Take the day off. Sure.

  Now he was closing the Owen Industries security logbook. It hadn’t taken much time. He had reviewed the calls to and from Nash’s office for the two weeks prior to his death. There was one call to Celine, though it was on Monday, not Tuesday, hardly by itself a critical flaw in Celine’s testimony.

  He was sitting at Ken’s desk at his office—the one so much like his own—at Owen Industries in South San Francisco. Farris had come down with his security supervisor—Gary Simpson—at eleven-thirty, then left the two men to find whatever it was Hardy was looking for.

  Simpson sat, legs crossed and bored, across the desk from him. “Okay,” Hardy said, “we’ve got one hit. You mind if we give it a listen?”

  Simpson shrugged and stood up, stretching theatrically. He was a tall man in jeans and a flannel shirt. “That’s what I’m here for.” He motioned with his head. “Back this way.”

  They walked, Hardy following, down the red-tiled hallways and around a couple of corners. The door marked “Security” was oversized, double-locked with dead bolts. Simpson’s office was to the right inside, and there was a small anteroom with two waiting chairs, an end table and a coffee table, and, in contrast to the rest of the building, no plants anywhere. These rooms were much colder than the others. Simpson gestured for Hardy to follow him back.

  Behind his desk was a walk-in vault, and Hardy waited while Simpson unlocked and opened the desk, pushed a series of buttons inside a drawer, then did the same thing on a panel next to the door to the vault.

  “High-tech,” Hardy said.

  Simpson half turned. “Well, we’re in the business. We ought to keep up on state of the art.”

  The door opened inward. Hardy had envisioned a bunch of drawers filled with tapes, but again was confrontedwith an array of buttons and lights—more state of the art. Simpson sat at a console featuring innumerable LEDs and three computer terminals.

  “What’s your number, there, on the left column, for the call you want?”

  Hardy, still carrying the thin logbook, opened to the page. He read out the six-digit number and Simpson entered it on the board. There was a brief wait, then a click.

  “You’re lucky,” Simpson said. “This date gets automatically erased in two days.”

  “You want to override it so it doesn’t do that?”

  “Sure, no sweat.” He pushed a few buttons. “Okay,” he said, “you ready?”

  Hardy was surprised at the sound of Owen Nash’s voice— somehow less authoritarian than Hardy had imagined— raspy but consciously softened, Hardy thought, as though he were speaking to a child.

  “I know you’re unhappy with me,” he said, “but don’t hang up, please.”

  A longish pause. The digital sound reproduction was superb—Hardy could hear Celine’s breathing become more rapid.

  “All right,” she said evenly, “I won’t hang up.”

  “We have to see each other,” Nash said. “We need to talk about this.”

  “No. I don’t want to see you about this. I want you back—”

  “It’s happening, Celine. It’s going to happen.”

  A breathy silence.

  “It can’t, Daddy, it just can’t. What about me?”

  “You’ll be fine, honey. I still love you.”

  “You don’t.”

  Now it was Owen’s turn to take a beat. “I’ll always love you, honey. We just can’t go on . . . the way we have. I’ve changed. It’s different—”

  “Because of her.”

  “No, not just her. Because of me. Maybe she’s made me see it, but the change is mine, it’s my decision—”

  “I won’t let you make it.”

  “Celine . . .”

  “I won’t, Daddy. She can’t do this—she can’t have you—”

  “It’s not her,” he repeated. “It’s me. And I have made the decision.”

  “I’ll change your mind. I know I can.” Suddenly there was a deeper, insinuating tone. It was unusual enough that Simpson turned around to look at Hardy. “You know I can.”

  Nash did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was a whisper, as though wrung from the depths of him. “No, you can’t anymore, Celine. That’s done. That’s over. It’s come terribly close to ruining both of our lives. It can’t go on—”

  A strident laugh. “I suppose you won’t see me, your own daughter.”

  “I’ll always see you, Celine. Whenever you want. Just not, not that way . . .”

  “I want one chance, Daddy.”

  “Hon—”

  Almost screaming now, somehow without raising her voice. Then the throbbing voice again. “Please. Please, Daddy, I just need to see you.”

  “It won’t—” Nash began.

  “If it doesn’t, I’ll leave it. I promise.”

  Resigned. “When?”

  “Whenever you want. Wherever you want.”

  A final pause, then Nash’s voice, thick. “I’ll call yo
u.”

  Jeff Elliot’s call was on Hardy’s answering machine at his office at home. Celine may have been in Santa Cruz at some point during the weekend, but neither Len nor Karl nor his mother could verify she’d been there on Saturday, since regardless of what they had told or implied to Glitsky, they hadn’t been home themselves.

  The assistant district attorney in charge of sexual crimes was a woman named Alyson Skrwlewski. Hardy had barely known her, though he guessed that by now she’d have heard of him.

  “I just have a quick general question if you don’t mind.”

  She considered a moment. Like most of the D.A.’s staff, she wasn’t disposed to do any favors that would hurt a prosecution case. And even if she was inclined to be helpful, the situation—Hardy calling her this way on a Sunday afternoon—made her uncomfortable. “Let’s hear the question first,” she said, “then I’ll tell you whether I can answer it.”

  “I guess I want to know is what are the most common manifestations of father-daughter incest?”

  “Well, I guess that’s general enough. I can talk about that. What do you want to know?”

  “Everything I can, but specifically, when the victim grows up, is she likely to do anything differently than other women who haven’t had that experience?”

  “Not when, if she grows up, you mean. Suicide would be high on the list.” Hardy let her think. “Her relationshipsare going to stink, probably. She’ll be an enabler, maybe let her husband abuse her own daughter. That’s if she wants a husband.”

  “They don’t marry often?”

  “Oh, no, not that so much. I mean, this is almost too general. Every case is different. It’s just such an all-encompassing, terrible situation—they might marry five times, finding the so-called right mix of somebody who abuses them and babies them. It sucks.”

  Hardy agreed, but she wasn’t telling him anything that might help him. “What about backgrounds?”

  “What about them?”

  “Anything you might expect to see more than in someone else?”

  “You mean with the victim, or the father?”

  “Both, I guess.”

  “Well, there’s some evidence that if the father didn’t interact immediately, normally, with the victim in the first years of her life, he’s more likely to be sexually attracted to her. If he never changed a diaper, never burped her, and so forth, the incest taboo doesn’t kick in.” She sounded apologetic. “Hey, that’s a fairly new theory and pretty unprovable. With the women, at least there’s more data.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Well, a surprising number of them try to burn down their houses. No one really seems to know why, besides some obvious symbolic stuff, but arson is often in the profile.”

  Hardy felt the hairs rise on his arms.

  Skrwlewski continued. “And then, of course, there’s the prostitution, but everyone knows that.”

  “They all go into prostitution?”

  “No, no. Not so much go into that life—although, of course, many do—but more have some isolated experiences. Their self-image is so low, they don’t feel attractive, you know. Yet they know men want them, Daddy did, and they can take out their hostility by making them pay. It all gets pretty twisted around.”

  “Sounds like it.”

  “I guess some people don’t react as badly. But you’ll almost always get the manipulation, using sex for something else, the love substitute.”

  Hardy’s stomach was a knot. He sat at his desk with his arms folded across his chest. Outside his window, the wind had died down and there were a few breaks in the clouds.

  He had all the proof he needed for himself. But there was the same problem that had dogged the murder of Owen Nash from the outset—the lack of physical evidence.

  Celine’s conversation with her father, provocative and revealing as it had been, never named a date, didn’t so much as mention the Eloise. It also hadn’t mentioned May, but Celine could argue with absolute credibility that she had simply been mistaken as to the day when she’d talked with her father about him meeting May on the boat. She had the one talk with him at his office, then another one later in the week—he said he’d call her, didn’t he?—and she’d gotten the two mixed up.

  The Santa Cruz people being away didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t been there. It meant her alibi was weaker—almost undoubtedly false—but by itself it still didn’t put her on the Eloise on Saturday.

  Other hints came back to him. He remembered Celinetelling him she’d only been a member of Hardbodies! for six months—in other words, from about the time she’d stopped working out on the Eloise when Owen had started seeing May regularly. Surely the headbands on the boat—never claimed by May—had been Celine’s. So had the lifting gloves, one pair of which she’d no doubt worn when she had fired May’s Beretta.

  As with Andy Fowler and May Shinn before him, there was no apparent physical link tying Celine Nash to the murder of her father.

  He had been right, though he took little satisfaction from it—Owen Nash had been killed by a jealous woman. But the woman had been his own daughter. And if he had been sexually abusing his own daughter since—he supposed—their trip around the world together when she’d been six years old, or even earlier, he certainly deserved whatever punishment she could give him. He knew she had done it, and now he knew why. More accurately, he knew she had done it because he knew why.

  He thought of his own adopted baby girl, then tried to imagine the immense physical and psychological damage Owen Nash’s abuse had visited on his own daughter, and suddenly he found he had lost any desire to see Celine punished—she had been punished enough, hadn’t she? She’d never get out from under the private stigma, never away from the pain.

  Deep down, he didn’t even blame her.

  But, though punishment might not be his motive, he still had to prove it to clear Andy Fowler, and Celine was nobody to underestimate. Earlier in the morning he had sent Frannie and Rebecca away, deriding himself for considering that Celine might be dangerous. Now he was glad that he had.

  She had shot and killed her father. She hadn’t blinked at, and had in fact done her best to bring about, the false accusation of May Shinn. From the gallery she had daily watched the slow skewering of Andy Fowler, his once-distinguished career in ruins. She had clearly been prepared to take Hardy’s marriage down with her to get him off her scent.

  Hardy still had Andy Fowler to defend.

  The trial would have to go on. Pullios couldn’t let it go now and without a smoking gun, Hardy’s accusations of Celine at this stage would come across as rank courtroom shenanigans—it might at last get him the long-promised contempt citation from Chomorro.

  “The key is my only hope, Abe. She’s got to have the key.”

  Glitsky had listened patiently, for him. He interrupted only about every ten seconds, tired of Hardy’s meddling, not liking to hear that Celine’s alibi—the one he had provided—was suspect.

  “Now it’s Celine?” he asked at last. “Too bad Nash didn’t have a dog. After Celine’s trial we could indict the dog.”

  “Come on, Abe. I’ve run it all down for you. We need a warrant. If she’s got the key, if it’s at her house . . .”

  Glitsky stopped him. “Big deal.”

  “It proves she could have gone to the Eloise on Thursday morning.”

  “Proves she could have. Please, this one time, give me a break, Diz. It doesn’t prove anything. It’s just another theory. You know that’s how they’re going to see it.”

  “That’s why we need the physical evidence. The key. With my testimony—”

  “If anybody believes you.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “Because, my friend, it is in your own best interests to make up something like this. Like the gun not having been there when you looked on Wednesday night.”

  “It wasn’t there, Abe.”

  “I’m not saying it was. The issue here, as always, is proof. And I’m
telling you how it’s going to look. Can you think of any judge in the city who would issue a search warrant on this?”

  Hardy was silent.

  “Okay, how about in all of America?”

  “All right, all right, I understand, Abe. But I’m telling you, Celine did it. I’m telling you why. What am I supposed to do about that? There’s no way Andy Fowler’s going down for this.”

  “I hate to tell you this, ol’ buddy, but you want my opinion—he is unless you get him off.”

  62

  Coming in a little after nine, the size of the crowd in the gallery was daunting. Hardy wondered if someone had leaked the news that his witnesses might not be appearing, that they’d be moving right along to Andy’s testimony, then closing arguments and jury instructions. The verdict might even come in today, and the media wanted to be there.

  His witnesses had been subpoenaed, though, and they were on hand: Glitsky in a coat and tie; Glitsky’s lieutenant, Frank Batiste; Ron Reynolds, his polygraph expert; Art Drysdale sitting next to Chris Locke himself. Hardy wasn’t too surprised to see David Freeman, down for the show. Celine was sitting in her usual spot by the aisle.

  Abe, he realized, had been right. His job had never varied. He had to convince the jury that the evidence did not warrant a conviction. He had come up with an idea to get to Celine if he had to—he might have to prove that she was guilty in order to get Andy off—but he didn’t want to confuse the two issues.

  Andy, in a dark blue suit, entered with Jane. Still hurt and angry at Hardy for the grilling he’d given her on Saturdayabout her relationship with Owen Nash, she didn’t come through the rail as she usually did.

  Fowler, however, seemed to have forgotten Hardy’s outburst at him on Friday about his stance, the transparency of his attachment to May—and sat down calmly at the defense table.

  From his vantage now, certain that his client had not killed anyone, Hardy was more equable about the judge’s attitude and appearance, much of which was, he decided, a brave front. This was an innocent man. He could seem to remain above it all if he wanted, if it made him feel better.