The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  “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.”

  “Fifteen minutes? It won’t take any time if I don’t let you in. It seemed to me we went over everything already the other night and according to my lawyer, I shouldn’t have talked to you then.”

  “That was before today. Before the fight with your wife.”

  “We didn’t have a fight. Fighting takes two people. She attacked me.”

  “Why were you over there in the first place?”

  “It was my day for the kids. I had Giants tickets. Pretty simple. Look, this really isn’t a good time, all right? Now I’m being a father to my children, who are traumatized and exhausted enough.” Kensing shifted to his other foot, let out a heavy breath. “Look, I don’t want to seem like a hard-ass, Lieutenant, but unless you have a warrant to come in here, good night.”

  In his Noe Street railroad-style duplex apartment, Brendan Driscoll worked at his computer in the tiny room behind the kitchen all the way at the back. In spite of the beautiful day, he’d remained in the shaded, musty, airless cubicle, completely engrossed in his work, since an hour after he’d woken up, at 10:30 in the morning, with the worst hangover of his adult life.

  Now, nearly twelve hours later, he stretched, rubbed his hands over his face, and pushed his chair back away from the terminal. In a minute, he was in the kitchen popping four more aspirin and pouring himself an iced tea when Roger appeared in the doorway.

  “It moves,” Roger said.

  Brendan looked over at him. “Barely.”

  “How’s the head?”

  “The head is awful. The head may never recover. The rest isn’t really that great, either. What’s in a Long Island iced tea, anyway? And how many of them did I have?”

  Roger shrugged, then shook his head. “You told me to stop counting, remember? But I know that was after the third one, when I mentioned it might be smarter to stop.”

  “I should have listened to you.”

  “This is always the case. So,” Roger inquired, “with all the hours you’ve spent atoning for your sins in your cave today, is your penance served?”

  “It isn’t penance I’m seeking,” Brendan said. “It’s revenge.” He went over and pulled up a chair at the kitchen table. “I just feel so betrayed.”

  Roger sat down with him. “I know. I don’t blame you.”

  “That’s my problem. I don’t know who to blame.” He sighed deeply. “I mean, do I blame Kensing, or his stupid wife for making Tim feel like he had to jog every day. That’s what created the opportunity in the first place.”

  “Well, the jogging didn’t kill him, Brendan.”

  “I know. But if he hadn’t gone out…”

  “He wouldn’t have been hit, and he wouldn’t have been at the hospital…. We’ve been through all this already.”

  They had, ad nauseam, Brendan realized. He sighed, then squeezed his temples, wincing from the hangover pain. “You’re right, you’re right. It staggers me, though, that Ross thought he could buy me off and purge my files. Could he really think that I couldn’t see this coming, that I wouldn’t be prepared?”

  22

  Jackman was as good as his word, and on Monday morning, Hardy had two more binders of discovery on the Markham case ready for him when he got to his office.

  He got himself a cup of coffee, settled down at his desk, and opened the first folder. Someone had obviously lit a fire under the transcribers, because already several interviews had been typed up, including Glitsky’s with Kensing, with Anita Tong the housekeeper, Bracco’s with Ann Kensing. He flipped pages quickly. Nothing was tabbed yet—that would be one of his more tedious jobs—but he was satisfied to see much of what he’d hoped and expected: the original incident report at the hit and run; the hospital PM, performed immediately after Markham’s death; Strout’s autopsy findings and official death certificate; the first cut of the crime scene analysis of Markham’s home.

  He’d been at it for over an hour, unaware of the passing of time. His hand automatically went to his coffee mug and he brought it to his lips. The coffee had gone cold. Suddenly he sat up straight with almost a physical jolt. He raised his e
yes from his binder, almost surprised to see the familiar trappings of his own office. For a while there, with the taste of the bitter dregs of coffee on his tongue, caught up in the analysis of evidence, he was a DA again, putting on this case rather than defending it. The feeling was unexpected and somehow unsettling.

  He got up, shaking his head. In front of his desk, he threw a round of darts, then walked over to the window and looked down at Sutter Street. Outside, San Francisco wore its usual workday face after the glitzy and gaudy weekend—street debris kicked up by a good breeze off the bay, an obscure sun fitfully breaching the cloud cover.

  He realized that it wasn’t just the mnemonic tug of the coffee. The truth was that he was in prosecutor mode. To prove his client’s innocence, it inexorably followed he must show that someone else had killed Tim Markham and presumably his whole family, as well. That left him only one mandate—find that person and the evidence to convict.

  It was ironic, he knew, that he’d ever become a defense attorney in the first place. He wasn’t drawn by nature to stand up for the accused. On the justice versus mercy continuum, he always came down for justice. After he’d gotten out of the marines and Vietnam, he walked a beat as a cop for a few years. Then he’d gone to law school thinking he’d make a career taking bad people to trial and putting them behind bars—that had been his whole orientation, in work and in life. If a previous DA hadn’t fired him over office politics, he had little doubt he’d still be down at the hall working with Marlene and for Jackman. And though by now he’d been on the defense side long enough that he had grown used to it, part of him still longed for the purity of prosecution.

  The law, as David Freeman was fond of saying, was a complicated and beautiful thing. And, Hardy thought, never more so than in this: while a not-guilty verdict did not always mean your client was factually innocent of committing the crime for which he or she had been charged, on the other hand a guilty verdict meant that he or she was. When Hardy the defense attorney got a client off with a good argument or some legal legerdemain, there was of course some satisfaction that he’d done his job, earned his pay. But only rarely did it compare to the soul-affirming righteousness he had sometimes felt when he’d convicted a truly evil miscreant and removed him or her from society.

  He sat back down and took another sip of the cold coffee. His eyes went back down to his binder.

  Here were interviews with several nurses at Portola. A quick perusal told him that Bracco and Fisk had done some basic footwork, which might save him some time. He noticed, though, that they didn’t seem to have identified anyone who had been present at or about the time Markham had died. He flipped more pages, but found no sign of this essential and fundamental information.

  He looked up again, staring angrily at nothing into the space in front of him. His jaw was tight, his eyes hard.

  Jackman was keeping his end of their bargain. He had sent him the discovery folders, all right, but they obviously weren’t complete. Hardy didn’t think this was an accident, but he didn’t see Jackman’s hand at work withholding his evidence. He saw Glitsky’s.

  Bracco and Fisk had gotten into the office late in the day because, over Bracco’s objections, Fisk insisted that they keep trying to find some kind of lead on the car. So first they’d gone door to door in the neighborhood again, catching a few people who hadn’t been home a week ago, although coming away with about the same results. No one had seen the accident or noticed the car speeding away. Next—Fisk was at the wheel today—he’d driven Bracco crazy by making the rounds of his old hit-and-run connections: several body shops on Lombard, Van Ness, in the Mission. He’d put them on notice last week. Now he was following up.

  One of them actually had a late sixties green Corvair in the shop, brought in late yesterday afternoon, damage to the right front bumper and the hood. The owner claimed his brake had released itself on one of the city’s famous hills and he hadn’t remembered to curb his wheels. The car had rolled twenty feet or so and hit a tree, a branch of which had then fallen on the hood. The owner of the shop, Jim Otis, had been planning to call hit and run sometime today, and certainly before he did any repair work on the vehicle.

  But a quick spray with luminol pretty much eliminated the car from contention. Luminol was a nearly foolproof agent for revealing the presence of blood—even trace amounts, even after a washing—and there was none on the Corvair. Still, Fisk dutifully took down the owner’s name and address. Before this was over, he vowed, he’d find out if he had an alibi for 6:30 last Tuesday morning.

  Now, after lunch and under Glitsky’s direction, they were finally on their way back to Portola for more interviews. The lieutenant had reviewed their work from Friday and now wanted to know about the two other doctors who’d been in the ICU last Tuesday. He also wanted the exact chronologies of people coming and going as far as the nurses at the ICU station could remember.

  But it wasn’t turning out to be as simple as they’d hoped. Different ICU nurses had come on duty with the new week. Of the two that had been on duty when Markham and Lector had died, Rajan Bhutan had transferred to labor and delivery and was in the midst of a traumatic childbirth. Connie Rowe, assigned to general floor duty, was out at lunch.

  Asking Fisk if he’d mind holding the fort for a few minutes while he took care of some business, Bracco left his partner to wait for her and went back upstairs. When he got back to the ICU nurses’ station, he introduced himself for a second time to the female nurse sitting at the console. When he asked, she explained that her shift partner was in with one of the doctors while he made his rounds. They’d both be back out shortly if he needed to talk to either of them.

  But after making sure that the doctor was neither Cohn nor Waltrip, whom he did want to speak to, Bracco told her that what he really needed was a few minutes at a quiet spot—would she mind if he went to sit in the waiting room just down the hallway there?

  A middle-aged couple sat miserably holding hands and whispering on one of the couches. Bracco took the upholstered chair near the hallway, where he could see both the entrance to the ICU and the nurses’ station. Sure enough, the other nurse emerged with her doctor in a couple of minutes. After a brief conversation in the middle of the hallway, the doctor left the nurse and turned to come this way, while the nurse returned to the station with her partner.

  Standing up as the doctor entered the waiting room, Bracco went back into the hallway. One of the nurses—he didn’t know which one—still sat at the console, facing away from him, working at a computer terminal. The other was nowhere to be seen.

  He crossed the hall and in ten steps was at the door to the ICU. A wired-glass pane afforded a clear view inside the room. He saw nothing but beds. A last look at the typing nurse, a glance toward the waiting room—no one was visible. In an instant he was inside.

  He checked his watch and moved. Forcing himself to an almost leisurely pace, he walked the periphery marked by the beds, stopping while he counted to five—the most he could bear—at each one. The entire circuit took him forty-eight seconds.

  Again, he checked the door’s central windowpane. Then he pushed at it, was back in the hall, and let it close behind him.

  At the nurses’ station, he cleared his throat and the same woman he’d originally spoken to turned from her work at the computer. “Did your partner come back out yet? I notice that a doctor just came into the waiting room. I was wondering if she’d come out with him?”

  The nurse smiled at him. “I think she may have just run to the bathroom for a minute. She ought to be right back.” She, too, glanced down the hall to where the doctor had gone. “When she does, it might be a good time for those questions you said you had for us.”

  “That’s what I was just working on back there.” He motioned to the waiting room. “As it turns out, I don’t think I’m going to need them after all. But thanks for your time. Sorry to have bothered you.”

  “No problem,” she said. “Anytime.”

  Downstairs,
Bracco learned that Connie Rowe had returned from lunch and that she and Inspector Fisk had gone back to the cafeteria where they could talk without too much interruption. By the time he sat down with them, Fisk had started. They sat kitty-corner to one another and the tiny tape recorder was on the table between them. Praying that Fisk had remembered to turn it on, Bracco pulled up his chair.

  Q: You know Inspector Bracco? From last week? Ms. Rowe was just telling me about her partner, Rajan is it?

  A: Rajan Bhutan.

  Q: What about him?

  A: Well, as I was telling Inspector Fisk, it’s nothing really specific. The way the shifts break, I only wind up working with him in the ICU about ten times a year, but it seems as though every time he’s on, something bad happens.

  Q: Do you mean somebody dies?

  A: No, not just that. People are always dying there because they’re usually critical when they come in. But

  I haven’t worked a shift with Rajan without incident in at least the last year. I don’t mean to speak badly of him, but…it’s just really creepy. He’s really creepy, just skulking around, never talking to anybody really.

  Q: Do you think he had anything to do with Mr. Markham’s death?

  A: I don’t know about that. That’s such a strong accusation. But then when you all came in on Friday and started asking us questions, and you notice he barely said a word? Didn’t it seem that way to you? And he knows how the shifts work as well as anybody. And what happened that day. Who was there.

  Q: Ms. Rowe, excuse me for butting in, but when Inspector Fisk asked you if you meant that people died in the ICU when Rajan was on, you said ‘not just that,’ isn’t that right? What did you mean by that? Not just what?

  A: Not just dying.

  Q: But that, too.

  A: Yes, but as I say, a week doesn’t go by without that.