The Oath

by John Lescroart

  "Some, I think."

  Glitsky shook his head. "This is very hard to believe. Hardy told me the same thing just last year." He made a caricature of a smile, which his scar rendered grotesque. "But put another page over mine before I finish this article and I'll rip your heart out. Okay?"

  "We need a bigger table."

  He was trying to get back to reading, but stopped again and looked across at her. "Yes, we do. But we'd need a bigger kitchen to hold it, and then where would we be?"

  "Maybe we could knock down a wall here no, I'm serious. And then—" The doorbell interrupted her and she looked at her watch. "Who could that be?"

  "One of the kids forgot something." Abe was up and moving. "Nope," he said. "Business." He opened the door. "Good morning, Darrel. You're up early. Where's Harlen?" Then, "How'd you find out where I live?"

  * * *

  Harlen Fisk had known from somewhere, Darrel explained—politicians always knew—and had pointed the place out to him. So this morning, heading downtown from Seacliff, Bracco had to pass Glitsky's duplex and he decided to stop and maybe save himself the trip back.

  Now as they drove, his lieutenant sat beside him, clearly exercising his patience. "So let me get this straight. You were out in the street in front of Mr. Markham's house until nearly ten last night, then decided it was too late to go in and start asking questions. And why were you going to do that again? Ask questions?"

  "You said it started with the family."

  "That's true."

  "So I was going to talk to them if I could. But a lot of people had come by for condolences and so on and I realized that the family must have had a long hard day, so I thought I'd let them get some rest. It could wait until today."

  "And you were there again by when? Six thirty?"

  "Closer to seven. I figured the kids would still have school and I wanted to catch them if I could. I didn't think any of them were going to sleep very well anyway."

  "But nobody answered?"

  Bracco flicked a glance across the car seat. "Nothing the first time when I just knocked, so I'm thinking they're still sleeping. So I gave it another twenty and rang four or five times and waited." He hesitated. "They were in the house when I left, Lieutenant. Dr. Kensing had just come out from visiting them. I'm ninety-nine percent sure that they went to sleep there. I don't know why they didn't answer. I think I would have woken them up at least."

  Arms crossed, Glitsky merely nodded. He didn't know what, if anything, was going on at Tim Markham's house. He did consider it entirely possible that the household had slept through Bracco's knocking and ringing. He'd seen families of murder victims, physically exhausted and emotionally depleted, sleep around the clock and then some.

  Or they might have decided just not to answer the door to some unknown man at the crack of dawn.

  But on another level, Glitsky was glad to see his inspector showing such initiative, even if it might turn out to have been misdirected. They'd know soon enough.

  It was another clear, cold morning. They parked directly in front of the two-story mansion and walked to the front stoop, an expanse of flagstone broader and wider than Glitsky's living room. Bracco knocked, then pressed the bell, a booming three-tone gong easily audible outside the door. "I don't think they'd sleep through that, do you?"

  Glitsky reached around, pressed the button again. And they waited. After one more try and another minute, Abe told Darrel to stay where he was and went to check around the house. The plantation shutters in the front windows were closed, but through the garage windows, he saw two cars parked where they should have been. Opening the gate through the fence to the backyard, he was struck by the silence, and walked more briskly to the window in the back door. A large dog, apparently asleep on the floor, was visible at the far end of a kind of mud room, and Glitsky knocked forcefully several times. The dog didn't move.

  Jogging now, coming back around to the front of the house, he saw that a woman had joined Bracco on the front porch. He checked his watch and saw that it was just eight o'clock. Slowing down now, walking back up to the stoop, he had his badge out and introduced himself. She was Anita Tong. As he'd guessed, the maid, arriving at work for the day.

  "Were you expecting Mrs. Markham to be home this morning?"

  Ms. Tong nodded. "Mr. Markham just died yesterday. Where would she go?"

  "I don't know," Glitsky said. "I was asking you."

  There was no answer.

  "Do you have a house key? May I see it, please?"

  Nervous now, nodding, she was biting her lower lip. She rummaged in her purse, extracted a set of keys, and dropped them onto the flagstone. "I'm sorry," she said, picking them up. "Here. This one."

  Glitsky turned to his inspector. "Darrel, I want you to stay here. Ms. Tong, you should wait right here, too, with Inspector Bracco. Do you understand? Don't go inside."

  Glitsky then opened the door and found himself in a large, bright, circular foyer. A spacious room opened off to his left and he walked a couple of steps into it and looked around. All seemed in order. Across the foyer, a dining room complete with formal table and chandelier was also as it should be, as was the breakfast nook beyond that.

  Silence, though. Everywhere dead silence.

  He went back through the dining room to the kitchen and hadn't gone a step into it when he saw the woman's body lying on its side, a gun on the floor by her head. Crossing to her in several long strides, he avoided the pool of drying blood and knelt by her for a second. He saw the source of the blood, a hole in the scalp low and behind the right ear. Although there was no doubt, he touched the cold skin of her neck, then pulled out his gun and started to check the rest of the house. Two minutes later, he walked to a wall phone upstairs in the master bedroom and punched in the number he knew best.

  * * *

  The crime scene investigation team had already been working the house for an hour and now its sergeant, Jack Langtry, was walking across the front lawn to where Glitsky stood with a small knot of medical examiner's people and police. The sun was out, but it hadn't warmed appreciably. Everyone standing around had their hands in their pockets.

  Langtry hailed originally from Australia and was normally a hearty, rugby-type guy in his late thirties. Today his face looked somehow crooked and blotchy and he seemed to lurch from side to side as he walked, almost as if he were drunk. Glitsky separated himself from the general and subdued mass and met him in the middle of the lawn.

  Langtry let out some air and squeezed at his temples with one hand. He kicked at the ground, raised his eyes, looked out at the horizon. "You know one of the things I loved most about this country when I first came here? No restrictions on who can own guns. But I think I'm getting to the point where I'm changing my mind. You put guns in a house with distraught people I've just seen this too bloody often. Stupid sods."

  Glitsky thought he understood what Langtry was implying, but this wasn't a time for guessing. He wanted to be clear on the crime scene investigation unit's position. "What do you think happened in there, Jack?"

  Langtry scratched under the collar of his shirt, looked again at the bright blue sky. When his eyes got back to Glitsky, he was back in professional mode. "It was Markham's gun. We found the registration in the same drawer where he probably kept it, in his office off the kitchen. It was right by her hand."

  "All right. It was his gun in her hand. What's that mean?"

  "By itself, I don't know for sure. The lab might tell us something we don't know."

  "Other than what?"

  "Other than what it seems like."

  Glitsky took a beat. "We playing twenty questions here, Jack, or what?"

  "You were asking them, Abe. You want to know what I think, we can go straight to there. She did them all, then killed herself."

  "Carla?"

  "Was that her name?"

  "Yeah. She killed her kids, too?"

  Langtry seemed to get a little defensive. "You telling me you've never seen it?"


  "I've seen it a lot, Jack. Maybe just not like this."

  "Not like what?"

  But Glitsky discovered he couldn't quite put his finger on what nagged at him about this theory. "I don't know, Jack. Maybe I'm whistling through my hat. Faro come up with anything?" Faro was Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab technician.

  Langtry nodded. "He's still in there. You can talk to him. You wanted my take, it's probably what it looks like. Unless you know something I don't."

  It was a question, and Glitsky shook his head. "Just why? Why the whole family?"

  But this wasn't a hard one for Langtry. "Her husband died yesterday, right? That's what I heard."

  "Yeah. Hit and run."

  "And maybe they were having problems before that?"

  "I don't know. Did you hear that someplace?"

  "No. But it's the profile. You know as well as me."

  "Maybe not," Glitsky replied, though he thought he did. "Tell me."

  Langtry squinted into the sky again, organizing his thoughts. "The world's too horrible to live in. There's too much pain and it all means nothing anyway. So she's sparing them from that. Doing them a favor, maybe."

  Glitsky knew that this was the standard reading. In his career, he'd seen distraught women kill their families before. He'd read or heard about several others. It was always difficult to imagine or accept. But in his experience, those events—terrible though they had been—had a different quality to them, a more immediate and somehow more painful impetus than the simple death of the husband.

  He remembered—years ago now—a family of five who'd escaped from Vietnam. The oldest boy, a young teenager, had died on the boat coming over, and then a few months after they'd arrived, they were packed into a one-bedroom place and one of the Chinatown gangs broke in, took some stuff, and then—possibly angry that the family didn't have more stuff to steal—shot the husband dead. The next day, the mother had suffocated the two young kids, then cut her own wrists.

  He'd seen another young woman in a so-called burning bed case. Her boyfriend had been beating her and finally she shot him in his sleep, then did the same with her baby and herself. About two years ago, a clinically depressed, suicidal woman named Gerry Patecik—for some reason, he remembered her name—overdosed herself and two out of her three kids with barbiturates in milk shakes after her husband walked out and filed for divorce.

  So Glitsky had seen it—the bare fact of murder/suicide wasn't unknown or even terribly uncommon, given its heinous nature. But all the other cases he'd seen or heard about had a certain over-the-edge quality that seemed to be missing here. And he'd never before seen or heard of teenage victims—they'd always been younger children. This was an apparently comfortable family who'd simply lost their father. Tragic, yes—but could Carla Markham have been that close to the kind of complete and utter despair that would seem to be in evidence and still entertain a reasonable crowd here the night before? It was hard to imagine.

  "Goddamnit, Abe," Langtry suddenly said. He turned back toward the house, as though looking to it for some answers. "Goddamn stupid stupid stupid."

  Glitsky hated the profanity but he empathized with Langtry's fury. Four people were dead in the house, the woman and her three teenage children, shot in their beds upstairs. With the death of Tim Markham yesterday, this made an entire family wiped out in twenty-four hours. "I hear you, Jack," he said. "You got anything else I need to know?"

  "Nah, it's all peaceful as a bloody tomb in there. It is a bloody tomb. Christ."

  At that moment, a woman from the CSI team appeared in the doorway, carrying the rag doll body of the Markhams' dog, a large and beautiful golden retriever. Glitsky watched as, sagging under the weight, she crossed the flagstone stoop. Langtry took a step toward her, said, "Carol," and got stopped by her glare. Crying silently, she didn't want any help. At the curb, she placed the lifeless form in the back of one of the ambulances still parked there, then walked over to one of the patrol cars and sat down inside, closing the door behind her.

  Glitsky laid a quick fraternal hand on Langtry's shoulder as he passed him, then went up across the lawn and through the front door.

  * * *

  Inside, he found Lennard Faro, the crime scene lab specialist, standing by the sink in the kitchen. Dark and wiry, with a thin mustache and a tiny gold cross in his earlobe, he had his arms and legs crossed in an attitude of casual impatience. The photographer was taking pictures and he seemed to be waiting until he finished up.

  Glitsky stopped for a second at the entrance to the kitchen, took another glance at Mrs. Markham's body, then joined Faro at the sink. "Jack Langtry tells me she shot the gun," he said.

  Faro turned his head sideways. "Maybe. There it is. Close enough."

  The gun lay on the floor, about a foot from Carla's right hand. "She right-handed?" Glitsky asked.

  A mirthless chuckle. "You'll have to ask her."

  Glitsky thought he deserved that. "Why don't you tell me what you know? Keep me from asking more stupid questions."

  Faro took a beat, then straightened up. "You mind if we get out of here? The view pales after an hour or two." He crossed the kitchen, back out to the grand dining room, then into the foyer, where the front door was still open, fresh air coming in. "Okay. The gun's a twenty-two revolver, holds six slugs, although we've recovered only five casings, which fits. As I see it, she started upstairs with her son."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It's the only one she tried to silence. The shot was through the pillow."

  "Okay. Then what?"

  Faro pointed upstairs. The dining room was expansive and open, its ceiling over twenty feet high, with a large skylight at the roof. Midway up, around the sides of the room, a banister marked the walkway to the rooms on the second story. "The next room over, at the end," Faro said, "is where the girls slept. Twins. It looks like she went in there next. No point in trying to silence the first shot, so she probably just did it quick."

  "Then went downstairs and killed herself?"

  Faro corrected him. "The dog first."

  Suddenly the niggling detail he couldn't place earlier when he'd been talking with Langtry struck Glitsky. Even if Carla Markham thought the world too cruel for herself and her children, why would she shoot her dog? Certainly not to spare it the pain of going on. Much more typical would have been a note leaving the pet in the care of a relative or close friend.

  "Sir?" Faro asked. "Did you say something?"

  "Just talking to myself, Len. How about her own wound?"

  "Back of the ear, right side, which fits again. But no exit wound, so I can't hypothesize about the trajectory. Strout ought to get all that."

  "I'm sure he will," Abe said. "But let me ask you this, Len. You're going with Jack on murder/suicide, I take it?"

  But the analyst shook his head. "We're not done here by a long shot, sir. I don't see anything that rules it out, let's put it like that. It looks like she fired the gun. No sign of any struggle anywhere." He raised his shoulders, let them down. "But I don't know. You got a better idea, I'll look anyplace you want."

  "I don't know if it's a better idea," Glitsky said, "but I'd ask Strout to double-check for the trajectory and find out if she was right-handed." With his own right hand, Glitsky pointed to a spot at the back of his right ear. "It seems a little awkward, don't you think?"

  * * *

  Harlen Fisk had been dispatched out from downtown and had joined his partner here at the house, where Glitsky had assigned to them the task of interviewing Anita Tong. Now the lieutenant joined the three of them, who had gathered around the table in the breakfast nook.

  The maid was still visibly shaken. When Glitsky had first come outside after discovering the bodies, she'd all but collapsed onto the stoop upon hearing the news, which had seemed incomprehensible to her. For the first several minutes, she kept returning to the same questions, then arguing with the answers.

  What did he mean, dead? Glitsky must have been wrong. He didn't me
an that they were all dead, did he? They couldn't all be dead, that wouldn't be possible. Not Ian, at seventeen the eldest child. He was too big, too strong and competent, almost a man now. Certainly, he would have heard someone coming into his room and woken up, wouldn't he? Was Glitsky sure he saw both of the girls, Chloe and Siggy? Maybe he hadn't. He might want to go back up and check again. Someone could still be alive.

  Anita Tong was a petite and well-spoken woman. She'd been part of the Markhams' household for seven and a half years. They were her only employers. She lived a couple of miles south in the Sunset District, and worked in the house five days a week—Mondays and Tuesdays off—from 8:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M.