The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  They started walking together to where they’d parked their cars. “There was something else,” Glitsky said. “Why I was trying to get you in the first place.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Strout called. Marjorie Loring’s autopsy.”

  “Done already?” This was very fast, but Hardy wasn’t really surprised. Jackman had made it clear that it was a high priority.

  Glitsky nodded. “You were right. She didn’t die of cancer.”

  A wash of relief ran over Hardy—he’d invested more than he’d realized in these results. “So what was it?” he asked. “Potassium?”

  “No. Some muscle relaxers. Pavulon and something chloride. Both of them stop natural breathing. Both would have been administered in the hospital.”

  “Kensing wasn’t anywhere near her, Abe. He was on vacation with his kids in Disneyland. And before you say it, I know this doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Markham. But it does mean something, doesn’t it?”

  Glitsky didn’t need to go over it. “You and I have to talk. You said you got more of these people?”

  Hardy nodded. “Ten more. And that’s just Kensing’s list. I know at least one nurse that has her own suspicions. She might have some names to go with them, although I’d agree with you that one homicide doesn’t mean there are ten of them.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Yeah, I know. I read your mind. But it does mean there’s one of them, and it wasn’t Kensing. But it also wasn’t potassium, which I kind of wish it was.”

  Glitsky looked questioningly at him. “Why is that?”

  “Because if both Loring and Markham got killed the same way, it would be the same person doing it, wouldn’t it?”

  “It might at that,” Glitsky admitted, “but as far as I’m concerned, this is good enough in terms of me and you.” They’d gotten to Glitsky’s car. He stopped by the front door. “I think I owe you an apology.”

  “I agree with you. Was that it?”

  A small chuckle. “As good as it gets.” But surprisingly, he went a little further. “All I can say is that you don’t work with as many defense attorneys as I do. You get a little cynical after a while, even with your friends.”

  This was the sad truth and Hardy believed it. He could argue that he, Dismas Hardy, Abe’s best friend, wasn’t just another defense attorney given to pulling unethical tricks out of his hat just to protect his clients. But he knew that in the world of criminal law this in itself would be a rare and suspect guarantee. Hardy had won at least a couple of lesser cases on technicalities that Glitsky in his cop mode would probably consider some form of cheating.

  Wes Farrell had gotten his boy off the other day when the arresting officer hadn’t made it to the courtroom. For all Hardy knew, Wes had taken the cop out the night before and got him plowed so he’d be too hungover to appear. Beyond that, a true eminence at the defense bar such as David Freeman wouldn’t even blush to do exactly what Glitsky had accused Hardy of. Squeeze a witness by bringing her children into play? Get the coroner to dig up half of Colma? Pretend you needed an emergency tooth extraction on the first day of jury selection? If it helped your client, if it even delayed proceedings for any substantial period of time, it was justifiable. Even, arguably, commendable. Ethically required.

  “So where do we go from here?” Hardy asked.

  Glitsky had no doubt. “Kensing’s list. If there’s an angel of death at Portola, I want to know about it. Meanwhile, Marlene’s going ahead with the grand jury. I got another unpleasant surprise about five minutes before Strout called.” He told Hardy about Bracco’s discovery on the lack of security for the ICU at Portola.

  “So anybody could have gone in? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Bracco seemed to think so.” Glitsky paused. “I don’t want to have two potential killers,” he said. “I really don’t. The idea offends me.”

  “Me, too, but three’s worse,” Hardy reminded him.

  “Three?”

  “Whoever drove the car.”

  Brendan Driscoll talked most of the afternoon to the grand jury. Obviously, he thought someone who hated him had testified before he did. The prosecutor, Ms. Ash, seemed poisoned against him from the outset. He had been planning to talk about Ross and Kensing and Kensing’s damned wife and the others who had made life so difficult at Parnassus.

  Instead, she wanted to know all about his personal relationship with Tim, and this made him very nervous. He’d worked very hard to keep it all low-key—of course, they’d had their disagreements. When you worked so closely with one individual over a long period of time, there was bound to be some friction. But in general they had been an extremely good team.

  But Ash had already heard about the warning memo he’d received from Tim, the personal dressing down he’d endured—Ross must have been the source for that, he thought—and had spent what seemed like a lot of time going over what he’d done at the hospital last Tuesday. Finally, before he could direct her to anyone else who’d had run-ins with Tim, she’d started asking questions about Mr. Markham’s correspondence, his own familiarity with it, especially the decision to bill the city for outpatient services.

  She was clueless, he thought. He’d rather have her looking at other people than at this business decision, which, so far as Driscoll could tell, had nothing to do with anything except the company’s cash flow. But if it distracted her from his own personal issues with Tim, especially during this difficult last month, he supposed he should be happy. He would have preferred to direct her attention to one of his pet enemies, and he tried a couple of times.

  “…the outpatient billing decision was really Mr. Markham’s to make, and he was dead set against it. But Dr. Ross…”

  “…although during the time you’re asking about, Mr. Markham wasn’t able to concentrate on his work the way he liked to because Dr. Eric Kensing’s wife, Ann, was demanding so much of…”

  When he couldn’t get Ash to bite, he finally decided he had to leave it.

  But Jeff Elliot was a different story. Driscoll had already called the reporter yesterday and made an appointment to talk to him after he was finished with the grand jury. When he got out—quite a bit more shaken than he’d expected to be—he walked to the Chronicle’s building, where Elliot was waiting for him.

  Now he had a cup of coffee and had finally gotten comfortable on a chair in the little cubicle. He knew who he wanted to vilify, and had printed out Markham’s letters both to Kensing and to Ross, as well as over a hundred memos to file. These outlined Tim’s ongoing dissatisfaction with both of them on a variety of points. Driscoll was making his pitch that these documents supplied a number of very plausible motives for someone to have killed Tim.

  Elliot flipped through the pages without much enthusiasm. “This is good stuff, Brendan, except that it looks like we’ve got a whole different ball game over there now.”

  Driscoll straightened himself in the chair. Touching the knot of his tie, he cleared his throat. “What do you mean by that? Over where?”

  “Portola. It appears that a lady who died there a few months ago was also poisoned. From what I’m hearing, there may be several more.” He filled Driscoll in on most of what he’d learned to that point. “So needless to say, this casts some doubt over whether Mr. Markham was killed for personal reasons. He might have been just the latest in a series of these drug deaths at Portola, in which case the motives anybody might have had to kill him would be pretty irrelevant. Don’t you agree?”

  “That makes sense, I guess.” Driscoll was sitting back in a kind of shock. For three days, he’d been plotting his revenge on Kensing for all the trouble he’d caused, on Ross for firing him. He thought he’d planned perfectly. Certainly he had a great deal of evidence against both of them. If Elliot would go public with any of it, it might force the board and maybe even the police to act.

  But he hadn’t been able to get his accusations aired either in front of the grand jury or now, here. It was
n’t fair. “So what’s going to happen now?” he asked. “Don’t you want any of this?”

  “Of course. This is great stuff.” Elliot certainly wasn’t faking his enthusiasm. “I just wanted to be straight with you that I might not get to it real soon. But hey, cheer up. Parnassus is going to be news for the rest of the year.” The reporter patted the stack of paper. “This will be good bedtime reading.”

  Brendan had one last question. “So these other deaths at Portola? Do they mean that the police no longer think Eric Kensing might have killed Tim?”

  “I think if nothing else it’s going to give him a reprieve. Why?”

  Driscoll shook his head. “I don’t really know. I think I’d just come to believe that he had actually done it. Certainly he had more reason than anybody else. I guess I’ll just have to adjust.”

  Vincent’s Little League team, the Tigers, practiced only a few hundred yards from Hardy’s house. They’d gotten permission to set up a backstop in an otherwise deserted section of Lincoln Park Golf Course, up against Clement Street. Hardy couldn’t commit the time to be the team’s manager, but he tried to show up as often as he could and help coach. He’d played ball through high school and his son’s love for the game was a source of satisfaction in his own life.

  He got back from Colma in time to pitch batting practice. There was no fog here twenty blocks inland. When the team broke down for infield practice, Hardy came off the field and stood next to Abe, who had been watching from behind the backstop. Mitch, the manager, laced one down the third-base line where Vincent snagged it backhand and threw a strike to first. Abe nodded in appreciation. “Your boy’s looking pretty good.”

  Glitsky had called home and told his family to meet him for a barbecue at the Hardys’. So after practice, they stopped in at the Safeway and bought tri-tip steaks and some kind of gourmet sausage, prepackaged potato and Caesar salads, sodas, and a six-pack of beer. Vincent pulled a half gallon of cookie dough ice cream out of the freezer. Glitsky held four flavors of bottled iced tea in two four-packs.

  Hardy stood behind Glitsky and his son and watched as they loaded their goods onto the conveyor belt. It struck him that Louis XIV—the Sun King himself—probably didn’t have this kind of food selection, this kind of weather, that in fact he was living in a kind of golden age and he’d be a fool to forget it. If it sometimes threatened to break his heart, it was a good thing.

  He put a hand on Glitsky’s shoulder, one on his son’s.

  “Rebecca Simms? This is Dismas Hardy again.”

  He thought he heard an intake of breath. Nurse Simms had been straightforward enough last time about not wanting to hear from him again, not wanting any more involvement. He rushed ahead before she could cut him off or hang up. “I know it’s a little late, but I thought I owed you a phone call. Have you seen the news on TV?”

  “No,” she said. “I try not to watch too much TV. I read instead. What news?”

  27

  Jackman got the word out that he wanted them all in his office before eight o’clock the next morning. What the DA wanted, the DA got. Dead silent, Bracco and Fisk stood against the open door. Wes Farrell and Hardy sat on either end of the couch drinking coffee, while Glitsky was in the outer office with his wife. At a couple of minutes after the hour, Jackman arrived, accompanied by Marlene Ash and John Strout. After greeting everyone cordially, the DA went behind his desk, sat, and gave a sign to Treya. She ushered Glitsky inside and closed the door after him.

  Jackman wasted no time on preliminaries. “Diz,” he began, “I hear you’ve got ten more names on this magic list of yours. You’ll be giving that to Abe, I presume.”

  “Yes, sir. Already done. Copies to Dr. Strout. And I spoke to another potential witness last night—a nurse at Portola—who’s going to talk to the people she works with. Dr. Kensing only began his list about six months ago. My nurse witness might have more names.”

  “And that doesn’t include what comes out of the woodwork,” Marlene Ash put in. “I’ve got a feeling that everybody who died at Portola is going to seem fishy to somebody.”

  Jackman nodded in agreement, but he’d considered this.

  “That’s why I’m asking Dr. Strout here to have one of his assistants review what I expect is going to be a flood of requests for exhumations and autopsies. At least that way we’ll make sure some doctor might have thought something was wrong about a premature death before we go ahead.”

  “Good luck with that,” Farrell said. “You’re talking about these folks overruling the PM their own hospital conducted. You’re not going to get a lot of cooperation from doctors who work there. And the administration’s going to be worse.”

  “They’ll have to if we order it.”

  “Sure,” Farrell said, “but we can’t make doctors and nurses voice suspicions if they don’t want to. Or don’t have them.”

  Jackman wasn’t worried about it. “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want a lot of these requests.”

  “But we’re going to get them, from families if no one else.” Ash looked around the room. “We’d better be ready.”

  “All right.” Jackman was ready to move on. “John, why don’t you give us a little rundown of your results yesterday, although I think we’ve all gotten the basic message.”

  The medical examiner laid it all out for them. Mrs. Loring had been killed by an overdose of Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride. They were two muscle relaxants that, especially in the case of someone who is already comatose, might mimic a natural death.

  “No might about it,” Farrell interrupted. “Nobody thought a thing about it until Diz gave me her name and told me I’d be smart to look. I was even planning to sue the hospital over negligent care and didn’t have any suspicion she’d been murdered.”

  Strout went on with his explanation. These drugs were extremely powerful, and always administered in IVs. Beyond that, since Mrs. Loring had been bedridden in the ICU, there was no real possibility that she’d taken pills orally in an effort to end her own life. She wouldn’t have had access to them. The conclusion was that Strout was calling this homicide “death at the hands of another.” In other words, some degree of murder.

  “But no potassium?” Glitsky wanted that nailed down.

  “Not any. No.”

  A silence settled in the room, and Jackman broke it. “It seems to me that the salient point here is not so much the type of drugs that may have been used in these two deaths. And I don’t want to speculate ahead of the facts on potential future discoveries we might make. But more than the difference in drugs, the common feature of these two homicides is that somebody seemed to know, or believe, that Portola rubber-stamped their postmortems, when they were done at all, especially in the more obvious cases.”

  “I checked into that a bit,” Strout volunteered. “Seems the cutbacks they’ve been livin’ with have left them very short in this area. Hospital PMs, as a rule, aren’t very thorough anyway. These guys were barely goin’ through the motions. They don’t even have a forensics specialist on staff anymore. Instead, they run only basic scans out to their lab—”

  “If they even take it that far,” Farrell said.

  Strout bobbed his head. “I would agree that it might not always happen.”

  “So what are the standard scans, John?” Hardy asked.

  “It can vary,” Strout said, “but basically we’re talkin’ money and levels of complexity. You’ve got your A-scan, which is set for alcohol and some of your common drugs—aspirin, cocaine, and so on. Generally, you find a cause or possible cause of death at one level—say you’ve got toxic levels of cocaethylene, which is cocaine and alcohol, at the A-scan—then you stop looking. But if you want to keep goin’, the B-scan’s set for a slew of other drugs. Anyway, each level of scan gets more expensive. So if you got a cause of death at the zero-scan level, most folks stop there.”

  “And that’s what you think happened here, with Mrs. Loring?” Jackman asked.

  Strout nodded
genially. “That’s my best guess. Nobody looked too hard. They looked at all, somebody would’a seen ’em.”

  “Once you got a cause of death, did you stop, too, John?” Marlene asked him. “Or did you take it beyond there?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I sure did. She had her chemo agent and some morphine for the pain. I got her records when I called for the body, and she was self-medicatin’ with morphine in the hospital. But nowhere near a fatal dose of anythin’ else.”

  “But if she was self-medicating,” Farrell asked, “that means she was fairly coherent, doesn’t it?”

  “It could,” Strout agreed. “She knew when she was hurtin’, and when it got bad enough, she hit the button for a dose of morphine.”

  “Which is premeasured, am I right, John?” Ash asked him. “And time-release controlled?”

  “Right. No way she overdoses herself, if that’s what you’re sayin’.”

  “So she wasn’t in any kind of coma?” Hardy had for some reason imagined she was. Somehow the fact of her consciousness made her death all the worse. “You’re telling us she was alert and somebody just came in and killed her?”

  “I don’t know ’bout that, Diz. She might’a been sleepin’ at the exact time. But otherwise, in terms of was she in a conscious state? I’d have to say pretty much yeah.”

  Everyone seemed lost in private thoughts. The DA simply moved his head up and down, up and down. Finally, he stopped. “Mr. Farrell, I want to thank you for coming to this early call. I expect we’ll be hearing from you in the near future. I appreciate your cooperation.”

  It took Farrell a moment to realize that Jackman was telling him to leave. When it clicked in, he was gracious about it, thanking the DA for thinking to invite him, then Strout for his efforts and Hardy again for his.

  Strout spoke up, as well. “If you don’t need me, Clarence, I got a feelin’ I’m lookin’ at a busy day, and I’d best get on with it.”