The Oath

by John Lescroart

  "I'm glad you brought that up, Dr. Ross." Ash looked like she meant it. "I was hoping that you could give us some insight on the type of disagreements that must have surfaced at Parnassus in light of, say, the Baby Emily case. I should tell you that the grand jury already has a working knowledge of those events. Maybe you could fill in some of the blank spots? Specifically, Mr. Markham's role and reactions of various staff to it. Please begin with Mr. Markham."

  "Are you saying you think his death might be related to Baby Emily or something of that nature?"

  "That's what this inquiry is about, Doctor. Mr. Markham's death." She had moved a few steps closer to him and now, standing while he sat, she loomed as somewhat threatening. "Someone introduced a lethal dose of potassium into his IV. As a doctor, would you agree that it is unlikely that this could have been an accident?"

  Ross didn't know what kind of answer Ash wanted. He wished they would have allowed him to bring his lawyer into the room. He had to rely now upon the truth, and this made him uneasy. "It's always possible to give an improper dose of any drug. If Mr. Markham's heartbeat had become irregular, I could envision the need to administer a therapeutic dose of potassium. It's also possible, though rare, for a drug's concentration in solution to differ from what's on the label."

  He was slightly shocked to find Ash prepared for this. "Of course. Please assume we have the drip bag that held the potassium in this case, and the concentration is correct. Also assume that there is no indication that Mr. Markham's heart, prior to the attack brought on by the overdose, was malfunctioning. So given these assumptions, do you have any explanation for these events other than that this was an intentionally administered overdose?"

  Ross wiped sweat from his upper lip. "I guess I don't see any other possibility. Do you mind if I take off my coat?"

  "Not at all." In half a minute, he was seated again. Ash hadn't lost her place. "So, Doctor, if Mr. Markham was intentionally overdosed—"

  "I didn't say that." Then, amending, "I didn't realize we'd gotten to there."

  At this, Ash turned dramatic. She paused, as though in midthought, and glared down at him. "That's exactly where we are, Doctor. Did you and Mr. Markham have serious disagreements, for example, over policy?"

  Ross lifted his chin in controlled outrage. "Are you joking?" he asked her.

  "About what?"

  "As I take it, you're asking me if some argument about business would have made me want to kill my longtime friend and business partner. I resent the hell out of the question."

  "I never asked that question," Ash said. "You made that leap yourself. But having asked it, please answer." She fixed him with a steadfast gaze.

  He matched her with one of his own. "No, then, nothing. Nothing that even remotely would have made me consider anything like that." He spoke directly to the jury. "Tim was my friend, a close friend."

  Ross forced himself to slow down. A fresh pitcher of water had appeared—maybe it had been there for a while. He poured some into his glass and took a sip. "I need to point out, Ms. Ash, that the medical decision on Baby Emily, though hugely unpopular, wasn't all wrong. Baby Emily did in fact make it to County and to the premature baby unit, where she lived until she was transported back to Portola. I didn't kill her by any means, or even endanger her unnecessarily."

  "But how did Mr. Markham react to all this?"

  "He was all right with it until it became big news."

  "You two did not have words over it?"

  "Of course we did, after it blew up on us. He thought I should have consulted him, that I shouldn't have acted only on business considerations." Again, he directed his words to the grand jury. "We had some heated words, that's true. We run a big, complicated business together, and our roles sometimes overlap. We'd been doing this for twelve years." He made some eye contact, decided he'd be damned if he'd even dignify Ash's insinuation with a further denial.

  * * *

  As they'd been sitting down to the Tuesday lunch group at Lou the Greek's, Treya had made apologies for Glitsky's absence. He'd been called away at the last minute to a murder scene in Hunter's Point. Hardy was convinced that this excuse was an outright falsehood.

  A murder scene at Hunter's Point indeed, he mused. As though they didn't happen every week. Hardy knew that unless some gangbangers had slaughtered themselves and twenty or thirty other bystanders in a daylight shootout involving children, drugs, the Goodyear blimp, and a sighting of the Zodiac Killer, Glitsky the administrator wouldn't need to be called to a "murder scene in Hunter's Point."

  In Hardy's mind, the nature of the excuse had even deeper implications. The mundanity of the explanation, though perfectly plausible on the surface, was in reality so lame that Hardy took it to be a secret yet personal fuck-you message to himself. Murder scene, my ass, he thought. Right up there with "My grandmother died." Or "The dog ate my homework."

  Furious at most of them, but especially at him, Abe was avoiding the group today. It probably hadn't helped when he'd gotten the word this morning that Jackman had directed Strout to go ahead with Wes Farrell's request to dig up his clients' mother. Before they'd sat down, Strout told Hardy that he had called Abe as a courtesy to tell him about this decision. He'd endured an angry earful of Glitsky's opinion on the question, then thanked him for it, and said he'd be going ahead on Jackman's approval anyway.

  But no one else seemed bothered by his absence. They'd barely gotten settled before the conversation had gotten into full swing. David Freeman had started with a few comments about the Parnassus situation, how prescient they'd all been last week. Before too long, half the table had chimed in with one comment or another. Eventually, they got to Jeff Elliot's first column on Malachi Ross, which led Jeff to ask Marlene Ash if she'd talked to Ross yet and, if so, how he'd fared before the grand jury.

  She'd smiled, glanced at Jackman, and sipped her iced tea. "No comment, I'm afraid, even if we're off the record here."

  "Ross and Markham were close personal friends is what I hear," Hardy said. "Never a cross word between them." He shot a look at Treya across the table from him. "Kind of like me and Abe."

  But Elliot thought he knew where the story lay. "Let me ask you this, Marlene," he began. "Diz thinks they are close personal friends, yet I have heard that they disagreed on just about every decision either one of them made over the past couple of years—Baby Emily, Sinustop, formulary issues, you name it."

  Marlene Ash sipped her iced tea. "I can't talk about it, Jeff. It's the grand jury, get it? I'm not even saying who I talked to. You want to think it was Ross, you go ahead."

  "It was today, though, right? The grand jury still meets Tuesdays and Thursdays?"

  Gina Roake joined in. "Anybody else here for repealing the First Amendment?" But the words were innocent banter, lightly delivered. "She can't talk about it, Jeff. Really. Even to an ace reporter like yourself."

  "And far be it from me to try to make her." Elliot shook his head, truly amused at the games these lawyers played, and apparently even took seriously. He flashed a smile around the table. "However, for our own edification, Dr. Ross has a secretary, Joanne, who told me when I called that that's where he was. I don't think she's been let in on the top secret part."

  "She talked to you," Roake asked incredulously, "after what you did to her boss last week?"

  Elliot nodded soberly. "She might have gotten the impression that I called to apologize or something."

  As Freeman and Jackman fell into a more serious discussion about last week's issue—the possibly fraudulent outpatient billings—Hardy leaned over and spoke quietly to Elliot. "How'd you hear about Sinustop?"

  "Same way I found out Ross was at the grand jury. I'm a reporter. I ask. You'd be surprised. People talk."

  "Not as surprised as you'd think. I've talked to a few people myself. Have you found anything on Kensing's list?"

  Elliot gave the high sign and stopped as Lou came around and described today's special, which involved eggplant, tofu, squid, and s
ome kind of sesame oil–based sweet-and-sour sauce. Really good, he promised, maybe even a culinary breakthrough, although those weren't the exact words he used.

  When they'd all ordered the special, since there was no other choice, Lou moved to another table, and the buzz resumed at Jackman's. Elliot leaned back toward Hardy. "But about those unexplained deaths? I know one thing is true. It's a definite rumor."

  Hardy's face fell. Was Jeff ahead of him on checking out the names on Kensing's list? Maybe he'd discovered that eight of the others had died, like James Lector, of natural causes. "What do you mean?" Hardy asked.

  "I said that wrong, I think. Calm down." Elliot put a hand on Hardy's sleeve. "I don't mean it's only a rumor, as in there's no truth to it. What I mean is it's a rumor, a lot of people are talking about it. If I could find a few more items like that, I'd like to patch them all together and get another column, but there's no story there yet. I've talked to some people at Portola, but nobody has even one small factoid. It sucks."

  "What about our friend Ross?"

  A shrug. "I did him already, you might recall. And after that, it's pretty much a one-note samba. Ross and Mother Teresa don't share a common worldview, but other than the fact that he's greedy, heartless, and rich, I can't seem to get another column inch out of it."

  "I may have something for you. Pay attention."

  Hardy then directed his attention across the table. "John." He raised his voice so Strout could hear him. "I almost forgot."

  He took an envelope from his pocket and passed it across. "Do me a favor. Next time I give ten-to-one odds on anything, remind me about this one."

  As Hardy had intended, this little show engaged everyone's interest. He'd originally planned the move as a way to make his case indirectly to Glitsky. If he could draw the group into a discussion on the Lector autopsy without having to labor over it, Abe might come to see that Hardy's position wasn't entirely self-serving, that it wasn't a lawyer's cheap smoke screen, either, that the idea had merit on its own and had been worth pursuing. Now, though, he realized that he could make a similar impression on Treya and trust that it would get back to Abe through her. For the truth remained—if he couldn't get Glitsky working on his side, he would almost certainly never completely clear his client's name.

  Also, though still raw with anger, he wasn't inclined to lose his best friend over his job. He already had sacrificed enough to his career.

  To the chorus of questions, Hardy replied that it was merely the payment of a debt of honor. "I felt strongly that James Lector had been killed at Portola, as Tim Markham had been, although maybe not in the exact same way. And I put my money where my mouth was."

  Jackman and Freeman disagreed as to whether this was noble or idiotic, but the discussion did give Hardy the opportunity to segue into Wes Farrell's situation with Mrs. Loring, which had been his other intention all along.

  Elliot, he noticed, started taking notes.

  * * *

  But Jackman wasn't letting Hardy off without some kind of a warning. They were standing on the corner of Seventh and Bryant just after lunch, waiting for the light. Jackman had held Hardy back under the guise of telling him an off-color joke about Arkansas vasectomies. These were quite common, it seemed, and involved a can of beer, a cherry bomb, and the inability to count to ten without using your fingers. When Hardy finished laughing, he found that they'd hung back enough now to be alone at the curb. Jackman was good with jokes because he never laughed at his own punch lines. No part of him was laughing now. "I did want to make one serious point, Diz, if you can spare another minute."

  The switch in tone was abrupt enough to be surprising, and Hardy's expression showed it. "All right," he said. "Of course."

  "Due to the nature of our deal, I've been working under an assumption that I've taken to be true, but—Marlene mentioned this to me last night, just before I decided to okay your request for John's second autopsy—"

  "That wasn't me, sir. That was Wes Farrell. It's his client."

  "Diz." The voice was deep, nearly caressing. Avuncular, Jackman laid a hand that seemed to weigh about thirty pounds on Hardy's shoulder. "Let's not go there."

  Hardy thought these were as impressive and effective a few syllables as he'd ever heard. "Sorry," he said, and he meant it.

  "As I was saying"—Jackman's hand was back in his pocket, they were strolling now in the crosswalk—"I've been working under the assumption that we are sharing our information. We're giving you our discovery, and you in turn are giving us your client's cooperation before the grand jury when he gets there. But beyond that, I would hope you're also giving us—giving Abe, specifically—whatever information you uncover that doesn't implicate your client."

  They walked a few steps in silence. Hardy finally spoke. "He's not been in much of a listening mood lately."

  "I realize that, but I'd appreciate it if you'd keep trying."

  "That's been my intention. But the deal was that my client would talk to the grand jury, not a bunch of cops in a small room with a videotape machine."

  "I take your point. But Abe seems to be skating toward the erroneous conclusion that somehow we're all conniving to circumvent due process." They'd reached the steps of the Hall of Justice and stopped walking. Jackman was frowning deeply. "I'm extremely sensitive to this issue. To even the appearance of it."

  "Has Abe actually said that?"

  "No. But he doesn't like being ordered not to arrest someone."

  "With respect, Clarence, that's nothing like what you did. You admitted when we cut the deal that you probably didn't have enough for a conviction, even with the so-called confession. And now he doesn't even have that."

  "Which, I need hardly point out, is the latest complaint."

  Hardy nodded. "He's in a complaining mood, Clarence. He thinks I saw the opportunity for emotional blackmail and took it. Which, I need hardly point out, kind of pisses me off. I didn't and wouldn't do that, and Abe of all people ought to know it."

  "Well, one of you big boys is going to have to find a way to settle your differences. And meanwhile, Marlene would probably like to be kept informed of what you've discovered, whether it comes through Abe or not. You've obviously got a few things going on. These autopsies, for example. And as an aside, let me say that as a courtesy, and in keeping with our spirit of mutual cooperation, it might have been appropriate to call them to our attention a bit sooner." He waved off Hardy's apology before it began. "It doesn't matter. That's water under the bridge. But don't forget that I've gone out on a limb here, especially with the chief of homicide, on this call to let Strout go ahead. I'm hoping these unusual exercises have a point, that your client isn't going to do something stupid, or go sideways and refuse to talk at the grand jury. That would make me feel foolish."

  "That won't happen, Clarence. But I can't stand here and tell you I've got another suspect who's any better than Kensing. The good news is I have some who aren't much worse."

  Jackman took this news mildly. "Then you need to get Abe looking at them."

  "That's my fondest dream, Clarence. Honest. Other than Wes Farrell's autopsy paying off."

  "With what?"

  Hardy's face showed his apprehension. "At this point, Clarence, almost anything."

  They said their good-byes and Hardy watched Jackman's back disappear into the building.

  A press of humanity was hanging out on the steps, grabbing smokes or snagging last-minute legal advice, or simply ebbing and flowing from the hall itself. A couple of enormous Great Danes were chained to one of the metal banisters. Everyone who passed gave the two dogs a wide berth as they slept on the warm stone—due to the recent death of a young woman by dog mauling, the popularity of man's best friend in the city was at an all-time low. At the far end of the steps, a young Chinese couple was having lunch on either side of a boombox that blared with Asian rap.

  The smell of bao—those delicious buns of sticky dough and savory barbecued pork—made him suddenly realize how hungry he was. Lou's
special today may have broken new culinary ground, but most of the table hadn't evolved to the point where they could appreciate it. Hardy hadn't eaten more than three bites.

  When he'd given Jackman enough time to disappear, Hardy went inside himself and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Glitsky wasn't in his office. Hardy walked out into the hall and punched a number into his cell phone.

  Two rings, then the mellifluous tones. "Glitsky."

  "How's Hunter's Point?"

  "Who's this?"

  "Take a stab."

  A beat. "What do you want?"

  "Five minutes. Where are you really?"

  "Department twenty-two."

  This was a courtroom on the third floor. If anything at all had been going on in it, Glitsky would have turned off his phone—not to do so would incur the wrath of judge Leo Chomorro. So the courtroom was dark or in recess and Glitsky was in hiding.