The Oath

by John Lescroart

  "Ann!" Kensing pleaded through the door.

  "Mom!" His son, Terry, hysterical. "I'm going out with Dad! You can't stop me."

  "Oh, yes I can!"

  Something slammed into the door.

  "God, Ann! What are you ?"

  More sounds of manhandling. Then, "Terry, get upstairs, you hear me! You girls, too!"

  Kensing grabbed the doorknob, shook it with both hands. "Ann, let me in! Now! Open up!"

  She was herding all of them upstairs, to their rooms. He stood for another moment on the stoop, then ran down the steps and up the overgrown driveway on the side of the house. The back door was locked, too.

  But unlike the front, it had six small glass panes in its upper panel.

  Kensing wished it was the usual cold day and he had a jacket he could wrap around his hand, but all he wore was a collared golf shirt. Still, he had his fist clenched. He had to do it, padding or not. But then he remembered the man last year who'd died after slashing his arteries trying to do the same thing—bled out in six minutes. The instant's hesitation gave him time for another flash of insight that stopped him cold.

  He was already a murder suspect. Even if he had every reason in the world, he'd better not break into his wife's house. But the kids—Ann had lost control, and though she'd never hit any of them before, she might be capable of anything right now.

  He pulled out his cell phone and punched 911, then ran back up front. The dispatcher answered and he gave the address and briefly described the situation. "I'm outside now. I need some help immediately."

  Back up on the stoop, he heard Ann, upstairs, still screaming at the kids. A door slammed up there. Finally, he heard her footsteps on the stairs inside, coming down. Now she was at the door. "Eric," she said. "Eric, are you still there?"

  He didn't say anything. He was pressed against the wall, scrunched down under the sill of the stoop. He knew she wouldn't be able to see him even if she leaned out the front windows. His heart thrummed in his ears. In the distance, he heard the wail of a siren.

  Then he heard the lock tumble, saw the doorknob begin to move. He grabbed and gave it a quick turn, then hit the door with his shoulder. Ann screamed as the force of it threw her backward.

  But she didn't go down.

  Instead, she gathered herself and charged at him. "Get out of here! Get out of my house!"

  He held her arms, but she kept kicking at him—at his legs, his groin. She connected and knocked the wind out of him. His grip went slack for a second. She ripped a hand free and swiped it across his face. He felt the hot flush of the impact and knew she'd scratched him. Raising his hand, he pulled it away and saw blood. "Jesus," he said.

  "Daddy! Mommy!" From up the stairs.

  "Don't!" Ann screamed. "Stay up there!" She never turned around, though, and came again at him. She kept coming, driving him back to the door, then out it onto the stoop. She kicked again at his groin, barely missing, but the kick spun him to one side. Now she charged full force, her fingernails out for his face.

  Blocking her hands, he stepped back defensively. Her forward motion carried her by him. Her foot landed on one of the wet newspapers, which slipped out from under her. With another yell of anguish, she fell. Her head hit the concrete as her momentum carried her forward. She rolled down the steps all the way to the sidewalk, where she lay still.

  The children flashed by Kensing and down the steps. They had just gotten to her, kneeling and keening around her, when a police car, its siren blaring, pulled up and skidded to a stop. Two patrolmen came out with their weapons drawn and leveled at Kensing.

  "Don't make a move! Put your hands up!"

  * * *

  Glitsky and Treya had gotten out of bed late, got a sense of the incredible day outside, and decided on the spur of the moment to drive up to Dillon's Beach, about forty miles north of the city. On the way up, they detoured over to Hog Island for an hour or so and ate oysters every way they could think of—raw, grilled on the barby with three different sauces, breaded and deep fried with tartar sauce. Fortified, even sated and happy, they took the long way north along the ocean—switchback one-lane roads that wound through the dairy farms, the redwood and eucalyptus groves, the timeless and seemingly forgotten settlements of western Marin county.

  It was truly a different world here than anywhere else in the greater Bay Area, all the more magical because of its proximity to the kitschy tourist mecca of Sausalito, the tony, crowded anthill of yuppies that was Mill Valley. On this side of Tamalpais, clapboard main streets with a half dozen century-old buildings called themselves towns. The single sign of life would be twenty Harleys parked outside the only saloon—there was always a saloon. Along the road, they passed handmade signs nailed to ancient oaks advertising live chickens, pigs, sheep. Fresh eggs and milk every few miles.

  Most of it looked slightly gone to seed, and Glitsky had been up here many times when, with the near-constant year-round fog and wind, it had seemed almost uninhabi-table, a true wasteland. Today, in the warm sunlight—it would hit eighty degrees at the beach before they headed back home—the ramshackle and run-down landscape suddenly struck him as deliberate. Lots of hippies from the sixties and drop-and burnouts from the seventies and eighties had settled out here and they didn't want it to change. They didn't want new cars and faux-mansions, but a slower pace, tolerant neighbors, privacy. Most of the time, Glitsky scoffed at that lifestyle—those people didn't have a clue, they weren't living in the real world.

  But today at the beach he was watching what he would have normally called a cliche´ of an aging hippy. A man about his own age, early fifties, was weaving some spring flowers into his little girl's hair. Glitsky found himself almost envying him, the simplicity of this life. The woman with him—the girl's mother?—was another cliche´. Her hair fell loose halfway down her back. She had let it go gray. She fingerpicked an acoustic guitar and would sing snippets of Joni Mitchell as the words occurred to her. It was possible, Glitsky the cop thought, that they were both stoned. But possibly not. Possibly they were blissed out on the day, very much like he and Treya.

  "A chocolate chip cookie for your thoughts." She sat next to him, blocking the sun from his face.

  He was stretched out on his side on their blanket in the warm sand. "Cookie first." He popped it whole into his mouth and chewed it up. "Thank you."

  "Now thoughts," she said. "That was the deal."

  "You don't want to hear my thoughts. They're scary."

  "You're having scary thoughts here?"

  "I like it here. I'm almost completely happy. That's scary."

  "Comfort and happiness are scary?"

  "They don't last. You don't want to get used to them."

  "No, God forbid that." She reached a hand out and rubbed it over his arm. "Forgetting, of course, that you and I have had a pretty decent run together these past few months."

  He put a hand over hers. "I haven't forgotten that for a second. I didn't mean us."

  "Good. Because I'm planning on making this last a while."

  "A while would be good. I'd vote for that."

  "At least, say, another nineteen years."

  "What's ninet ?" Glitsky stopped and squinted a question up at her.

  "Nineteen years." She spoke with an undertone of grave concern. With an age difference of nineteen years between them, the question of whether they should have their own child someday had nearly split them up before they'd gotten engaged. Glitsky had already done what he called "the kid thing" three times. He was finished with all that, he'd informed her.

  It was one of the hardest things she'd ever done, but Treya told him if that were the case, they had to stop seeing each other. She wasn't going to use the issue in a power play to get or keep him. If parenthood wasn't something he wanted to go through again, she understood completely. He was still a fine man and she loved him, but she knew who she was, what she wanted.

  For some time Glitsky had lived with her decision, and his own. Then one day he woke up and
realized that he had changed his mind. Her presence in his life was more important than anything else. He could not lose her—nothing could make that happen.

  But now that once-distant someday had arrived, and Treya was biting her lip with the tension of whether or not her husband would accept the reality. "I don't think children have as good a chance if they're raised in a home where the parents aren't comfortable and happy, so I think we really ought to keep that going at least until the baby's out of the house and on its own. Don't you?" Trying to smile, she gripped his hand tightly in both of hers and met his eyes. "I was going to tell you last night when we got home, but then your inspectors were there, and by the time they left it was so late ." Her tremulous voice wound down to a stop.

  He stared back at her for a long beat, his expression softening by degrees into something akin to wonder. "Why do you think it took us so long?" He brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them. "It sure wasn't for lack of trying."

  21

  Four hours later, Glitsky was sitting on his kitchen counter, trying to maintain a professional tone when he felt like screaming. He was talking on the wall phone to one of the deputy sheriffs from San Francisco General Hospital. The deputy had called homicide about this lady who'd been arrested and brought to the hospital earlier in the day with a broken ankle and a concussion. She couldn't seem to stop talking about her husband being the murderer in the family, so why was she the one who was in jail? The deputy figured that if anything about this woman involved murder, he ought to bring it to somebody's attention. But when he'd called homicide, nobody had any idea what he was talking about, so they gave him Glitsky's home number.

  "What do you mean, they arrested her? They didn't arrest him?"

  "The husband? No, sir. Not that I can tell. They didn't bring him here, but maybe he wasn't hurt." When healthy people got arrested in the city, they went to the jail behind the Hall of Justice. If they needed medical care of any kind, SFGH had a guarded lockup wing, and that's where her arresting officers had taken Ann Kensing.

  In ten minutes, Glitsky had tracked down the home numbers for both of these guys, and one of them—Officer Rick Page—had the bad luck to answer the phone. Even over the wire and without benefit of his terrible face, Glitsky's tone of voice, rank, and position conspired to reduce the young cop to a state of panic. He ran his words together staccato fashion, repeating half of what he was trying to say. "It was, it was a nine-one-one DD, domestic disturbance. When we got there, we got there and the woman was on the ground, surrounded by her kids. Her children."

  "And the man?"

  "Well, he, he was bleeding from his face, pretty bad where she cut, cut him."

  "Cut him? With what, a knife?"

  "No. Fingernails. Scratched, I meant scratched him, not cut. On his face. He was up some outside stairs when we got to the scene. Me and Jerry—my partner?—we pulled up and both drew down on him."

  "On him?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "But then you arrested her? Even though she was the one more badly hurt, is that right? How did that happen?" Glitsky's anger and frustration were still fresh, but he had calmed enough to realize that he wasn't getting what he needed from Officer Page. He toned his voice down a notch or two. "You can slow down a little, Officer. Just tell me what happened."

  "Yes, sir. First, he's—the guy, Kensing—we checked back with the dispatcher when he told us and it was true, he's the one who called in the nine-one-one. He was locked out of his house and was worried his wife was going to hurt his kids. He said he needed help."

  "I'll bet." Glitsky was thinking that Ann Kensing was smart to lock him out. "But you got there and what?"

  "Well, the first thing, she was on the ground, on the sidewalk at the bottom of the stoop. There were steps, you know, going up to the house. The husband was still at the top, just standing there. Three kids were down with her, screaming bloody murder. We didn't know—it could have gone any way from that situation, sir. So we both pulled our pieces and approached the suspect, who at that time we thought was the guy."

  "And how was he?"

  "Cooperative, scared. He wanted to go and see how his wife was, but we had him freeze. He had his hands up and didn't move a muscle, which was good. From what we see so far, we're taking him downtown at that point."

  "Okay," Glitsky said. "What changed that?"

  After a short hesitation, Page started again. "The main thing was, I talked to him. The first thing he said, I mean he's reaching for the sky and bleeding like a pig out of his face, and the first thing he does is thank me for getting there so fast."

  "He thanked you?"

  "Yes, sir, which makes it like the first time I've ever had that in a DD. You know what I'm saying?"

  Glitsky did know. Usually, by the time the police got involved in a domestic dispute, the gentler social amenities, especially extended to the cops coming to break up the fight, weren't in the equation anymore. "Go on."

  "Anyway. So Jerry was with the wife, trying to get the kids to calm down. He, the guy, Kensing, asked if he could sit down on the step and I said no way, turn around, the normal drill and go to cuff him. At which point, one of the kids, the boy, he starts coming up the stairs and he's going, 'What are you doin' to my dad? Leave my dad alone. It wasn't him. It was Mom.'"

  "The kid's saying that?"

  "Yeah. And Kensing's cool. He's going, 'It's all right, Terry.' The kid. 'He doesn't know what happened.' Meaning me, you know. But I'm not letting the kid get near him." This, of course, was standard procedure because irate parents—especially fathers—who see jail time in their immediate future have been known to take their own children hostage in an effort to avoid it. "So I get in front of him and call for Jerry, who's gone back to the unit to put in a call for the paramedics. By this time, the wife's sitting up, holding the two girls. There's some citizens—neighbors—coming out to look. Time to put up my piece, which I do."

  "Okay."

  "Okay, so it's all slowing down. Kensing's cuffed and he asks can he turn around, slow, and I let him, and he tells his kid just stay put, don't worry, it's all going to work out. He tells me, calm as can be, that he's a doctor. He can help his wife. But I'm getting a funny feeling right about now anyway."

  "About what?"

  "About it's mostly always the guy, you know, sir. Doing damage."

  "I know."

  "But this guy. He's almost relaxed. Nowhere near the usual rage. He says she just slipped and I'm goin', 'Sure she did,' but he says, 'Look,' and nods down to this mark on the landing, where it's pretty obvious at least somebody slipped. A wet newspaper. And the kid goes, 'It's true. I saw her. She just slipped. He didn't touch her.'

  "So I'm thinking, Shit, now what? I mean, we get to a DD and somebody's going downtown, right? I mean, usually the guy, but no way are we leaving without one of them. It's a real drag coming back two hours after everything was patched up fine with the lovebirds, except then one of them shoots the other one. You know what I mean?"

  "I hear you," Glitsky said.

  "But what am I going to do? I walk Kensing down the steps and put him in the back of the unit, locked up, and this time one of the neighbors comes up—I got her ID and everything, if you want to talk to her—and she tells me the same thing. She saw it all—Kensing was completely defensive, never hit her, she scratched him, came at him again and slipped." Page took a breath. "So Jerry and I have a little powwow and break up the two daughters and ask them about it—same story, it's the wife all the way. And by this time, the ambulance is here. The wife's groggy and can't walk on one foot. Plus she's going to need stitches in her head. So Jerry and I decide she goes, the guy stays home." In the course of the long telling, Page's voice had grown in confidence. Now he spoke matter-of-factly. "I don't know what else we could have done, Lieutenant. Four witnesses pegged the wife. The guy didn't do anything wrong."

  Glitsky was tempted to ask Page if he realized that the man he hadn't arrested was the prime suspect in a homicide investigation, but
why would the officer know that? And what point would it serve? And now for a while at least, Ann Kensing was safe. Unhappy and hurt, but safe. He'd take that. "So he's at her house now with the kids?"

  "I don't know, sir. He might be at his home address, which I've got. Would you like to have that?"

  "I've got it," Glitsky replied. "Maybe I'll go have a word with him."

  * * *

  "Sorry about not letting you in, Lieutenant, but I've got my children in here. They've seen enough cops for the day. One of 'em's already asleep and the rest of us are watching videos. It's been a long day."

  "I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions. It won't take fifteen minutes."