Hardy 10 - Second Chair, The

by John Lescroart

  Salarco was concentrating, the perfect witness who wanted to recall the exact truth. And with no one to object if Hardy led him back to the scene, to his state of mind. "Sí," he said. "I am there."

  "Okay." Hardy had memorized the sections. "Last time we talked, you said you heard a scream, the girl scream."

  "Sí."

  "And then the first noise you heard— a bump, you called it— where you said you could feel it in the floor, as though something heavy had dropped downstairs."

  Salarco was paying careful attention. He had stopped bouncing Carla, put one of his fingers into her mouth, a pacifier. His face took on a faraway look.

  "Is that about right?" Hardy asked. "The first noises, then, were a scream, then a bump?"

  A nod.

  "Now the next noise, the second one. You said it sounded like something crashing with glass breaking." Anna, Hardy noticed, had stopped cutting her vegetables, although she didn't turn around.

  "Yes. I hear that," Salarco said. "The glass breaking. Okay."

  Hardy threw another quick glance at Anna. She hadn't moved a muscle. "Finally," he said, "the last one was a boom again. You didn't say it sounded like somebody slamming the front door under you. You said it was the door slamming."

  "Sí. Okay."

  "You mean yes? That's what it was?"

  "Right. Yes."

  "So would you now describe any of those sounds— try to remember exactly if you can— would you say any of those sounds could have been a gunshot?"

  A spark of surprise, or perhaps it was something else— recognition of a mistake? pure fear?— shot through Salarco's eyes. He licked his lips. The youthful face suddenly aged.

  "It's all right," Hardy said. "You've never testified that they were. You've said what you've said, and people assumed. Now I'm asking you. Were they gunshots?" He was sure for a moment that he'd spooked him by springing an unseen trap. And he couldn't afford to lose Salarco's cooperation. If that happened, Andrew would be tried as an adult and probably convicted. Hardy, himself, might never know the truth of what happened downstairs that night.

  He had been subliminally aware of the television in the next room— in English— throughout the entire course of his questions so far with Juan. And now, needing to somehow redirect the energy and keep these witnesses talking, he had to take a chance. "Mrs. Salarco?"

  Her shoulders tightened; then she sighed and she turned around. "Sí?"

  "Wouldn't you say that's about right? The way your husband described the noises? Did any of them sound like gunshots to you?"

  She didn't even have to think about it. "No. I never thought about that before, but there was no sound of any shots. Just the other sounds." She turned to her husband. "Cariño? Sí? Es verdad?"

  He nodded and seemed to take some strength from her. Taking a breath, he came back to Hardy. "When I sit back and listen, I cannot say any of the noises sounded like shots."

  The relief almost made Hardy dizzy. Not only had he gotten the critical admission, but they'd both put it on tape. Now, instead of being the prosecution's star witnesses, the Salarcos' testimony would work if not to exonerate Andrew, then at least in his favor.

  Anna came over, picked up the baby and stood holding it, leaning against her husband.

  "Your English is very good, Mrs. Salarco," Hardy said.

  She wasn't happy or, at the moment, proud of it. "Three years," she said. "Juan and I— me?— we try at home."

  "And pick up a little here and there on TV?"

  She flashed a glare into the living room, went and placed the baby gently back into her playpen.

  Hardy let them get used to the change in the dynamic. He took a sip of his beer, then spoke to both of them. "As I said before, I'm not with the INS. I will do nothing to involve you with them, no matter what you say or do. If they come to me with any questions about you at all, I won't answer them. The only person I'm interested in is Andrew. I'm starting to believe he may not be a killer."

  "But I . . ." Juan stammered. "It was him. I saw him with these eyes."

  "Yes, you did," Hardy said. "In fact, you saw him twice. Once when you went downstairs the first time to complain, the second time when he came back after you'd called nine one one. Isn't that right?"

  "Yes. But there was also the other time."

  Hardy clucked, folded his arms, sat back a moment. He picked up his beer as a prop. He didn't want to risk alienating Salarco for good, but he had another point to drive home, perhaps more critical than the first. And to get to it, he had to expose something much worse than Salarco's gunshot misperception, or lack of precision.

  "That other time is what I wanted to talk about," he began. "The time after the door slammed downstairs, when you and Anna jumped up from the couch and looked out the window and saw somebody turn around on the walkway out by the street."

  "It wasn't 'somebody,' " Juan said. He pushed back a little from the table, straightened himself in his chair, his back stiff now, and crossed one leg over the other. He'd picked up on Hardy's direction, and didn't like it. "It was the boy. Andrew. I saw him."

  Afraid of losing him, Hardy twirled his bottle, took a beat. "I'm not saying you didn't, Juan. If you saw him, you saw him, and that's the end of it."

  Salarco nodded, an abrupt bounce of the head. Suddenly impaciente with all this, and equally afraid of where it might go. When he picked up his bottle and drank, Hardy seized the opportunity. "It's just that when we talked the other night . . . I've got a copy of the tape right here if you'd like to hear it . . . but I also wrote down exactly what you said." He took the folded sheet of yellow paper from his shirt pocket, opened it, and spread it out in front of them. "Here. Listen: 'Anna goes to this window, here, and I am behind her, and there is the boy running away. He stops under the light there, and turns, and Anna starts to put the window up to . . . to scream at him I think, but then Carla starts again with crying.' " That's what you said, Juan. Isn't that how you remember it?"

  Salarco put his bottle down and stared out through the curtains.

  Hardy pressed him. "The reason it's so important, Juan . . . the reason that this particular identification is so important . . . ," he brought Anna into it with his eyes, "is that there's little doubt that the person that both of you saw out the window was the person who had killed Mr. Mooney and the girl. Very little doubt."

  Salarco pouted, his visage frankly dark now. "It was Andrew," he said.

  "I'm not arguing with you. It may have been Andrew. Certainly it looked like Andrew, with the same cowled sweatshirt he was wearing that night. But listen to what you said in your own words. You said Anna went to the window, and you were behind her."

  "Sí."

  "So you weren't at the window exactly, were you? Could you have been maybe a couple of feet behind it?"

  No answer.

  "Then the boy runs down the walkway," Hardy kept up his pace, measured yet urgent. "He stops for a second under the light, and turns. This is the moment that you see him. He's under the light, he turns, the cowl over his head . . ."

  Hardy looked to Anna, who stood transfixed.

  "This is when Anna goes to put the window up, to yell at him. She's angry, you're angry, and just at this second, your baby starts crying again. You're behind your wife, who is standing at the window, trying to pry it open, and suddenly your baby screams, and you turn, cursing and swearing, and go back to her."

  "Yes," Salarco said softly. "Yes. That's how it was."

  "Well, then," Hardy said. "If you were behind your wife, a few feet back from the window, and she was standing in front of it, trying to get it open, and the boy with the cowl sweatshirt over his head was thirty feet away, in only the dim light from one of the street lamps, please tell me how you could possibly have seen his face?"

  Salarco stared at a spot in the middle of the table, not meeting Hardy's eyes. Finally, he looked up. "I'm sorry, señor, but it was Andrew," he said.

  26

  Monday afternoon, Lanie
r told Glitsky that this would be a good time to come down and talk to the troops. With the rash of killings lately, Lanier felt overwhelmed. It was bad enough when it was the usual gangbanger mayhem and carnage, but when regular citizens got killed, it felt to him like another matter entirely. And regular citizens were taking an especially serious hit over these past two or three weeks, first with Elizabeth Cary, then Boscacci, and now this Executioner and his two victims last Friday.

  Hanging up with Glitsky, Lanier stood, stretched and walked out into the inspectors' area. The desks of his twelve people were placed back to back, in team pairs, and over the years a line of metal filing cabinets had slowly grown like a vine out from one of the walls so that it now nearly bisected the space, isolating the inspectors area from the lieutenant's office. Even so, over the past half hour, Lanier had been aware of inspectors drifting back in for their paperwork, or simply to get the decks clear for tomorrow.

  Now, he got himself a cup of coffee in the main room. He hadn't yet taken his first sip when Glitsky showed up. In another minute, eight homicide cops stood or sat casually around the partnered desks of Dan Cuneo and Glen Taylor.

  Lanier wasted no time. "I know all of you are busy with your own cases, and a couple of you are on the Boscacci force, but in light of these Executioner killings, Deputy Chief Glitsky thought it might be helpful to do some brainstorming. Abe?"

  Glitsky looked over the inspectors' faces, realizing with some surprise that most of them had never worked personally under him. Of the assembled group, only Sarah Evans and Darrel Bracco had been homicide inspectors while he'd run the detail. Of the other four— Belou, Russell, Glen Taylor and Dan Cuneo— two were almost complete unknowns. The other two, Cuneo and Russell, had actually investigated Glitsky in the weeks before last year's shoot-out. It was common knowledge that they still weren't among his fans. So it was not as congenial a group as Glitsky might have hoped.

  Still, he needed their cooperation. "First, I'm only here because Marcel asked me to come down. I've been working with a small team on the Boscacci killing, and frankly, we haven't made much progress. Marcel tells me it's basically the same situation with these Executioner hits, although we've got the ballistics match, that connection between the victims. My question is whether there's another one."

  Sarah Evans spoke up. "Nothing's leaping out at us, sir. The elderly woman, Edith Montrose, lived alone, and has no local survivors, although a son and a daughter have both flown in from out of state for the burial. Neither of them had ever heard of the other victim, Philip Wong. And Mr. Wong's wife, Mai Li, didn't know Montrose."

  Evans's partner, Darrel Bracco, added his voice. "We're close to eliminating robbery, too. We wouldn't know for sure with the Montrose woman, but Mai Li hasn't found anything missing. Both of them look like, pardon the phrase, executions."

  "Am I missing something?" This was Dan Cuneo, sitting at his desk, playing some imaginary bongo drums between his legs.

  "What's that, Dan?" Lanier asked.

  The inspector stopped drumming. "Well, you've got this Boscacci thing on the one hand, and the two executions on the other." He turned to Glitsky. "Aside from the fact that we've got very little on any of them, I don't see any connection at all."

  "I don't either," Glitsky said. "But along with no connection, I see total evidence of two slugs. No witnesses, no prints, no forensics, no motives, no nothing. Am I wrong?"

  "No, sir," Evans admitted, speaking for the rest of them.

  "This spark any ideas for anybody?" Glitsky asked.

  "Does what spark any ideas?" Cuneo asked. "Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'."

  "Wait a minute," Belou stepped out from behind her partner, Russell. "We do have another open case with that profile."

  "Hell, Pat," Cuneo said, "I've got about a dozen myself if you want one."

  "Yeah," Lanier interjected, "but are any of them citizens?"

  "Elizabeth Cary was," Belou said.

  "Yes, she was." Glitsky filled in for those who didn't know. "Couple of weeks ago now, Elizabeth Cary, a middle-aged, white housewife, was gunned down at her front door, one bullet in the heart. The shooter left no sign except a nine-millimeter casing."

  "Was there a slug?" Cuneo asked.

  Belou shook her head. "No. Through and through, then through the drywall and stucco out the back of the house. We had CSI look for a whole day. They couldn't find it."

  "So we don't know if it was this Executioner or not?" Russell asked.

  "Right," Glitsky said. "He left us nothing. Now my question to all of you is: why does this sound familiar?"

  "Excuse me, sir." Cuneo had straightened up in his chair. "So you're saying you think because we got nothing on these separate cases, that they're related. With respect, that seems like a stretch." He got agreeing nods from at least Russell and Taylor, and went on. "It's like saying beer isn't water, and milk isn't water, therefore beer is milk."

  "I realize that." Glitsky, knowing what he'd come down here to propose, was prepared to remain unruffled. "And of course it's a good point. But on the other hand, since we've got nothing on these four homicides in this past fortnight, maybe the only way we'll catch a break is to go outside the box. We can expect this Executioner to hit again, and until he's kind enough to leave us a clue, maybe we ought to work with what we've got."

  "Which," Evans said, "I thought was nothing."

  "No, Sarah, not quite," Glitsky said. "We've got only the ballistics connection if we're looking at the Twin Peaks killings. But if we go on the assumption, first, that Boscacci may have been an Executioner victim . . ."

  Cuneo nearly jumped out of his chair. "Wait wait wait! You're really losing me here, sir. You're saying maybe the Executioner killed Boscacci? Next is Kennedy maybe, too, huh?"

  Lanier came to Glitsky's defense. "No one's denying it's a reach, Dan."

  "If we had anything else at all to follow up on the Executioner's victims," Glitsky said, "I wouldn't waste anybody's time talking about this. But the fact is, we don't have anything."

  "And nothing with Boscacci either," Cuneo said.

  Glitsky: "Not quite. We believe it's likely he was shot with a silenced weapon. In fact," he turned to Lanier, "that's why we need to have the lab reexamine the slugs from Twin Peaks."

  "They already ran ballistics," Lanier said. "And the Boscacci slug was deformed so they couldn't cross-check."

  "I know," Glitsky said. "I'm not talking about ballistics." He talked to the group. "Boscacci's slug had a fairly distinctive scuff. Sometimes, if a silencer isn't fitted properly, it scuffs a slug as it leaves the barrel, and normal ballistics wouldn't pick it up, especially if the slug is deformed. But," he added, "they get a visual match with the Twin Peaks's slugs, maybe we're in business."

  "So these are pro jobs," Taylor said.

  "Maybe," Glitsky said. "In any case, it would be worthwhile to find out if anybody in Twin Peaks heard a gunshot. Or," he turned to Belou, "near Mrs. Cary's home?"

  "Yeah, but so what?" Cuneo asked. "Every witness says they heard nothing, which is the answer every time I ask anything. They didn't hear nothin', they didn't see nothin', as far as they can recall if their memory serves them at that particular point in time they were out of the area code if not the hemisphere when the incident occurred. Then what? We're going to consider that some kind of positive evidence?"

  Glitsky remained calm. "At least positive enough so that the ATF will supply us with people who bought silencers. These we interview and try to find some connection between any one of them and any of the victims. At least it's doing something, instead of just waiting for another strike."

  "And meanwhile," Taylor said, "when the Executioner does hit again, then what?"

  "Then, if he leaves us anything at all, we move on that, of course. But until we've got something better, we've got to eliminate other options, the best one being that a silenced weapon has killed four people instead of two."

  "And," Lanier said, "we can know the answer to
that by, say, tonight, if we all go out and canvass now, when witnesses are likely to be home."

  Evans chuckled softly. "That was subtle, Marcel."

  Lanier smiled all around. "Thank you. I like to think it's the key to effective management."

  "So we're approved on the overtime?" Russell asked.

  This was always a thorny issue. Lanier hesitated, looked over to Glitsky, who nodded. "Put it all on the event number," he said.

  "One more thing," Cuneo said. Everyone turned to him. "When we started talking about Boscacci, you said, first, you were going on the assumption that he was one of these Executioner victims. Was there something else?"

  A muscle worked in Glitsky's in his jaw. "I said first?"

  "I believe so. Yes, sir."

  Another minute. "Sorry," he said, "it's gone."

  * * * * *

  When Hal and Linda North came out of their son's guarded room at the hospital, Wu and Hardy were there in the hall to meet them. After Wu introduced Hardy, Linda smiled and said, "Dismas? Wasn't that the name of the good thief on Calvary?"

  Hardy forced a smile. He didn't feel remotely friendly. "That was him," he said. "Not too many people know that. He's also the patron saint of murderers."

  Linda tightened, drew herself up. "Andrew isn't a murderer."

  "No, ma'am, he isn't."

  Hal spoke up. "After all we've been through on that score, it's good to hear somebody say that. So you're telling me we've got a chance?"

  "Don't get me wrong. We've got some tough days ahead, but there's some reason for guarded hope. There have been some developments in your absence. Besides, of course, this suicide attempt." He fixed them both with flat eyes.

  Linda read his look. "You probably think we're horrible to have gone away, don't you?"

  "It doesn't matter what I think," Hardy said. "Maybe I wondered a little."

  "About what?" Hal stepped protectively in front of his wife. "About what?" he repeated. "Us going south?"