The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

Gerson let out a heavy breath. “All right. So. Where did you hear about this so-called planted evidence?”

  Thieu fidgeted in his chair. “Remember, sir? From Sadie Silverman’s statement. Dan Cuneo didn’t believe it, but I thought . . .”

  “Nobody believed it, Sergeant. Nobody suspected planted evidence at Holiday’s.” He shook his head in profound displeasure. “But go on, you were saying.”

  And he did go on, but instead of Gerson’s approval, Thieu sensed a growing impatience and even anger. “The point is, sir,” he concluded, “that in fact these fingerprints from Sephia and Rez do prove that they were there, at Holiday’s. And they flatly deny it. So they could only have been there to plant the incriminating evidence.”

  Gerson crossed one leg over the other, leaned an elbow back against his computer table. “I’m trying to see where you get this, Sergeant. I really am. And maybe I am slightly blinded by my anger at the fact that you took it upon yourself to go investigate these cases that I’d assigned to other inspectors. But”—he held up a hand—“of course if you did find a smoking gun, it would be a different matter. More easily overlooked anyway.”

  “But with respect, sir, this is pretty much a smoking gun.”

  “Maybe that’s what I’m having trouble seeing. You have statements from both Sephia and Rez that they hadn’t been in the Terry/Wills apartment, but you don’t have their fingerprints from that scene.”

  “I didn’t really expect there would be, sir. They went there to kill these guys and either wiped the place down or, more likely, wore gloves.

  “But the fact remains, no prints where they said they’d never been. I fail to understand how this can be compelling to you.”

  “What’s compelling is that their prints were at Holiday’s, where they also deny ever being. They didn’t know I was going to ask that until the tape was already on, so they told a stupid lie.”

  Gerson drew a large and histrionic breath. “Sergeant, these men played poker together at least several times in the past year. They may have had some kind of falling out recently—I don’t know about that—but they certainly shared each other’s company, quite possibly at Mr. Holiday’s house. So now they simply admit that they lied to you. They say they knew Holiday was a murder suspect and didn’t want to be more closely associated with him.” Gerson already had the tape in its case under a paperweight on his computer table.

  “But sir, the bare fact . . .” Thieu paused. “You have to admit this looks a lot like something fishy, at the very least. Sephia and Rez should be thoroughly interrogated. In my opinion,” he added.

  Finally the lieutenant seemed to break through some barrier. He leaned back, let out a long exhalation. “You might be right,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m fighting you so hard on this. Everything you’re saying makes sense. It’s just that this case has been nothing but a headache from day one.” Gerson’s hand, in fact, went to his head. He sighed again. “I’ve got to use the can a minute. Be right back.”

  Thieu came forward, his elbows on his knees, his head tucked. He had of course considered the objections that Gerson had made. Nothing was simple. Okay, so what’s new? The point was, Thieu thought, that any conscientious cop would see enough questions for Sephia and Rez to at the very least jump all over them and move them up to the realm of legitimate suspects in the multiple slayings. If only to avoid the embarrassment and hassle of falsely arresting John Holiday when there were obviously so many other possible interpretations of the evidence.

  But until tonight, just now, Gerson had seemed congenitally blind to these subtleties. He had a suspect and evidence and an arrest warrant, and goddamnit, why should he keep looking at all?

  Now the lieutenant returned, got back in his swivel chair, made some kind of conciliatory gesture. “I apologize for being such a hard-ass about this, Paul. It’s actually nice to have an inspector with this kind of initiative. It certainly wouldn’t hurt to put these two guys in an interrogation room and sweat them on videotape, would it? If they broke . . .” Gerson brightened up, met Thieu’s eyes. “But I would be more comfortable either way if we got Dan and Lincoln on board. Does that sit all right with you?”

  Thieu remembered Glitsky’s admonition that he should go directly through Gerson, without involving the two inspectors of record. But the reaction here had rendered that suggestion moot. If there was going to be any resolution to this case, there was no avoiding Cuneo and Russell now. “Sure. Your call, sir.”

  Gerson turned and punched numbers into the phone. “Hey, is Cuneo or Russell out there? Do you know when they . . . ? Oh. Really? Okay, thanks.” He hung up.

  “Evidently they’re coming in by chopper right now. Five minutes.” The police helicopter, as well as others belonging to the Highway Patrol and even private companies such as Georgia AAA, often landed on the target painted on the roof of the Hall of Justice. “I don’t think I’ve been out of this room all day, Paul. You mind if we get some exercise and meet them up there? I could use the air.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Gerson grabbed his jacket from the peg by his door while Thieu went to get his off his chair. They passed out of the homicide detail and into the hallway, where Gerson turned right and Thieu followed. They went into the Inspectors Bureau, unoccupied at that time of the night, and pulled a key off a hook in a side room. This enabled the elevator to go all the way to the roof. They ascended in a companionable silence.

  “Watch out,” Gerson said, as he stepped over a low sill and out, “it’s gotten a little dark.”

  And indeed it had come to full night, with a chill and biting wind.

  Thieu had his hands in his pockets and shuddered against the cold. With the stiff breeze, he wasn’t surprised that he couldn’t yet hear the thwack-thwack of the helicopter’s approach, but he turned a half circle and looked for it anyway.

  The city was all dressed up. Thanksgiving was still a couple of weeks off, but already the Christmas lights were burning in several locations, some of the hotels, uptown. Taking in the sight, Thieu wondered why he didn’t come up here more often. There was a splendid isolation, especially at this time of night, when the traffic was heavy but mostly unhearable, the stars close enough to touch. He moved a couple of steps toward the low edge of the roof, then started to turn back to ask his lieutenant if he knew from which direction the chopper might be approaching.

  But he hadn’t really begun the turn when a pair of strong hands hit him low in the back. With his own hands stuck deeply in his pockets, he could offer no resistance. “Wait!” was all he could think to say. “Wait!” But his feet hit the bottom of the wall almost before he realized he was being pushed, and there was nothing to stop his body from pitching over into the air.

  Thieu’s last whole thought, in the instant before the falling wiped his consciousness clean of anything but terror, was that Gerson had made that call to the outer office to check on the whereabouts of Cuneo and Russell. He’d talked to someone out there, and then less than a minute later they’d left the office to come up here. But no one had been in the office when Thieu had gone to retrieve his jacket. He should have remembered that, grown suspicious. He should have . . .

  28

  Susan Weiss, McGuire’s wife, was doing her best to cope with the unexpected crisis, but it had thrown her off balance. This—the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law’s family at her three-bedroom apartment in the Haight—was not something she felt equipped for, or trained to handle. She listened to their talk about fleeing from their house after the darkness had become complete, all of them making certain no one was behind them, with an air of disbelief. Was this really happening?

  No one was acting as though the threat to the Hardy kids extended to the McGuire family, to her own children, Brittany and Erica. But even though Susan doubted that Panos knew that Moses and Frannie were brother and sister, she couldn’t get that thought out of her mind. A cellist by profession and a true pacifist, Susan went through the motions of dinner and sl
eeping bags for the cousins and the fold-out couch for Dismas and Frannie with a wary, sleepwalking quality.

  Susan knew the degree of protectiveness that Moses felt for Frannie. Her husband might be a good man with a pure nature, but at heart—and it had always troubled her—he was also a fighter, the veteran of dozens of bar brawls, rugby skirmishes, shillelagh altercations. Moses, like her brother-in-law Dismas, had seen action in Vietnam. Both of them had actually killed people, although she preferred to forget that most of the time.

  Here, though, tonight, that was not possible.

  Rebecca and Vincent wouldn’t be going to their school for at least the next day and perhaps several more. Frannie wasn’t going to her classes, either. After he talked to Glitsky tonight, Dismas would decide if the family needed to go into true hiding. They could get on a plane for somewhere, or at least check into a hotel out of town.

  Now it was way past bedtime and still her girls sat spellbound on the floor, caught up in their cousins’ fear and excitement. Suddenly, through no fault of Susan’s, here was her whole family involved in a world of threats and violence, of intrigue and terror. She couldn’t help herself, couldn’t stop a great wave of resentment from washing over her. At her husband for insisting that they all come here, at Dismas and Frannie for agreeing. And now Dismas had gone off to discuss the situation with Glitsky, and Moses was back at the Shamrock.

  Susan went to the kitchen, where poor Frannie was rinsing dishes and piling them in the dishwasher. Busing a few more dinner items from the table over to the sink, Susan fell in next to her, and shortly found she couldn’t sustain any resentment toward her sister-in-law. Frannie, too, moved in a slightly robotic fashion, as though the strain of all this was just too great to contemplate, and Susan’s heart went out to her.

  Frannie finished rinsing a plate, then put it back down on top of the others, turned off the water and hung her head. Susan put an arm around her. “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  Frannie sighed. “That maybe we’re going to have to move after all.”

  “Where to?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Away from here. At least for a while. I can’t imagine ever letting the kids go back to that school. Or really, to the house for that matter.”

  Susan understood what she was saying—she’d of course seen the Polaroid that Dismas had brought with him in a Ziploc bag. The two kids were at the gate in front of their house, knapsacks on, leaving for school, Frannie behind them a little out of focus. Whoever shot the picture couldn’t have been more than thirty feet away. A red circle enclosed both of the children’s torsos, smack in the crosshairs.

  It was an image that would live with Susan for a long time. “Maybe,” she said, “it really is just trying to get Dismas to stop working on this case.”

  Frannie turned the water back on, reached for the already rinsed plate. “He’s already called their lawyer. But what if it’s not who he thinks?” She shuddered. “I just see the man who took the picture sitting in his car right there, Susan. Close enough to touch. Except next time not with a camera. God.” Suddenly the shuddering seemed to gather in on her and her shoulders were shaking. She brought her wet hands up to her face and covered it completely.

  Susan tightened her arm around her sister-in-law. She could think of nothing to say.

  Nat Glitsky’s one-bedroom made Abe’s duplex feel like the Taj Mahal by comparison. As the Hardys had done, Abe and Treya decided that they’d feel safer, for this night at least, somewhere other than their homes. They, too, waited until it had gotten dark. They, too, watched for following headlights on the way over, making sure there were none.

  Now all the adults were in the postage-stamp living room while Rachel slept next to grandpa’s bed. Abe sat hunched over, all knees and elbows, on the end of the coffee table. His face was set and expressionless, his eyes dark and forbidding. After much discussion with Treya and his father, he’d decided to call the station cops. Hearing who he was, they’d bumped it up to the station captain, who’d come over from his home, and the duty sergeant.

  “All right.” At this point, Hardy felt he’d take any sign of cooperation. “At least that’s some action. What did they say?”

  Glitsky shot him down. “Basically, they weren’t too interested. Wasn’t that your impression, Trey?”

  “That might be overselling it,” she said. Turning to Hardy. “They couldn’t have cared less is more like it.”

  “And you showed ’em the picture? Told ’em the whole story?”

  “Of course.”

  Hardy sat forward, using only the front two inches of a wooden chair Nat had brought in from the kitchen. “How could they not care? What’s it going to take?”

  “It’s probably a prank,” Treya said bitterly. “This kind of stuff happens all the time.”

  “All the time? They said that?”

  “Not those exact words. They seemed to expect Abe to take it that way and were a little uncomfortable that he didn’t.”

  “Even after I pointed out to them that I had been a cop for a while myself and really didn’t run into something like this every day. Or even every year.”

  “What’d they say to that?”

  “Nothing. They didn’t care enough to argue. But more to the point,” Glitsky added, “what would we like them to do? So I told them. Go rattle some cages. We know who it was.”

  “But let me guess. They said they’d do passing calls at the school and your house. More than that would need to come from downtown.”

  “You’ve been reading his mail,” Treya said.

  Nat, who’d been sitting, listening to all this at the end of the couch, suddenly piped in. “What I don’t see is how they don’t care. ‘Nothin’ happened,’ they say. I go, ‘Nothin’? Look at this picture. This is a threat on my granddaughter’s life! Something like this happened to you, what would you do?” He threw up his hands. “They look at me like I’m an old man, like I got nothing left up here.”

  “It wasn’t you, Dad,” Abe said. He came back to Hardy. “And it wasn’t even that they didn’t believe me, which was kind of a relief after the past few days. It was just, ‘Hey, we can send the picture down to the lab, but after that, what?” ’

  “Yeah, but my favorite part,” Treya said, “is the captain starts telling us about dope-sellers in the projects, who threaten the families there. ‘You don’t let us do our thing here, you get in our way, we’re going to kill you and your kids, get it?” ’

  “And this teaches us what?” Hardy asked.

  Treya’s mouth formed a kind of smile, though she wasn’t amused. “The actual message got a little lost in the telling, I think. But we should realize people get threatened all the time.”

  Abe picked it up. “And we of all people ought to know that cops can’t really prevent crime from happening. We can only clean up after it.”

  “Great. I’m thrilled to hear it,” Hardy enthused. “So in the meanwhile, what do we—and by ‘we,’ I’m not talking society in general, I mean ‘us’—what do we do?”

  “I called Clarence,” Treya said, “and the good news there is that I think he’s come around to believing you both, finally. He’s really worried about this.”

  “Good for him,” Hardy snapped. “Better late than never. What’s the bad news?”

  “Same as usual,” Glitsky said. “What’s he supposed to do now? What can he do? He’s not unsympathetic, but so what? He hopes whoever it is doesn’t kill anybody.”

  “Me, too.” Hardy’s fuse was just about burned all the way down. “And it’s not some unknown whoever. It’s Panos.”

  “Wade?” Glitsky asked. “Or Roy? Or Sephia and Rez? Or somebody else on the payroll we don’t even know about?”

  Hardy knew what he was saying. He shook his head in frustration, finally raised his eyes. “I called Kroll, you know. Told him I was out of the lawsuit. It was over.”

  “What’d you say about Holiday?”

  “Nothing. And he didn’t as
k. Why?”

  “Because I’m not involved in your lawsuit, whatever some people might have thought. So if that was it, the lawsuit, there’s no reason to threaten me.” He took a long breath. “On the other hand, if either of us is still looking to get at the truth behind these murders and this finally gets homicide to rethink Holiday, who’s that leave?” Glitsky nodded. “That’s what they’re warning us off. Both of us.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s my client. What do they think I’m going to do, give him up?”

  “I think it’s crossed their minds you might.”

  Hardy’s hard stare went around the room. “I can’t do that.”

  “No one here is asking you to,” Treya said, “but he’s not Abe’s client.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Glitsky straightened his back. “I’m not trying to clear Holiday. I’m letting the law take its course from here on out.”

  Hardy snorted. “Our friend, the law.”

  “Sometimes it might be. I talked to Paul Thieu late this afternoon. I apologize. With all this madness”—he gestured around him—“I never told you. He went last night as we recommended and found some Sephia and Rez prints at Holiday’s. Then he got a statement from them saying they’d never been there.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Hardy pumped a fist. “I knew it! So he’s off?”

  Glitsky temporized. “Maybe. If Gerson does the right thing. It’s possible. But the point is I told Paul that no matter what, I was out of it. No credit, no blame, no nothing. I’m done.”

  “If they’ve got Sephia and Rez at John’s, we both are.”

  “I repeat,” Glitsky said, “maybe. I’d hold off on the party until I got the official word. I’d feel better if I heard that these guys were already behind bars. In any case, even if they pull our guys in, they still might be a long way from dropping any charges against Holiday. I’d be tempted to keep a low profile if I were you.”

  Hardy left Nat’s place at 10:30. He called Frannie from there and Susan, who was still awake, told him that his emotionally drained and exhausted wife was asleep on the fold-out. Hardy, no less depleted, was nonetheless wired and would not be able to sleep even if he had a truckload of valium on board. But a black and tan or two might do the trick. He told Susan he was stopping by to see her husband and might not be home until the bar closed. Nobody should worry. Things might be looking up.