The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  "My car's not stupid," Hardy replied. "In fact, now that I think of it, it's smarter than some of my clients."

  "Go ahead, Diz. Make a joke of it. I don't think it's funny." McGuire put a spoonful of caponata on some focaccia and stuffed it into his mouth. "These guys really piss me off."

  "I intuited that." Hardy was working on his newfound calm. He put his injured hand on Frannie's knee, shot her his craggy grin. "We're a little angry ourselves, tell the truth."

  "But you don't go breaking his windows," she said.

  "Then you're just like he is."

  "Sorry, li'l sis, but no you're not." Before Vietnam had killed the scholar he'd been as a young man, McGuire had earned a doctorate in philosophy at Berkeley. "There's one tiny little difference."

  "No. There's no difference. And don't 'li'l sis' me!"

  "All right, strike the 'li'l sis,' but don't give me that 'no difference' bullshit."

  Hardy's efforts to defuse the sibling fireworks weren't working. The area at the back of the Shamrock was small enough to begin with—maybe ten feet across and twelve deep—and McGuire's voice reverberated off the close walls, drowning even the jukebox.

  "There's a fucking huge difference. And you know what it is? They started it! How 'bout that for a concept?" He pointed at his sister, his brow knit, his eyes dark. "They did it to you first. You don't think that makes a fundamental difference, you're dead fucking wrong."

  "Easy, Mose," Hardy said. "We're just talking, okay?"

  McGuire whirled on him. "What do you think that was?

  You see anybody throwing a punch here? I don't think so.

  But don't tell me we're just like them, 'cause that's just plain bullshit. We're nothing like them."

  But Frannie was evidently much more accustomed to McGuire's outbursts than even Hardy was, and he'd seen a lot of them. She got up and sat down next to her brother, put an arm around him. "And people wonder where I got so feisty," she said. She kissed him on the cheek. "Okay, you're nothing like them. Just promise me you won't go shoot out anybody's windows."

  Not completely mollified, McGuire came forward heavily.

  He grabbed for his scotch, picked it up, then put it back down and sat back. After another moment, he leaned over and kissed his sister. "I wasn't going to shoot them," he said. Smiled. The fight was over. "I was thinking maybe a slingshot," he said.

  14

  The call came into homicide at 4:38 A.M. As soon as he heard the tentative identifications, Paul Thieu thought he knew what he had, but for his own reasons, not the least of which was pride in his work, he proceeded in his own ordered, methodical fashion. He had to get to the scene and make his own determination first.

  Gerson wouldn't thank him for a call at this time of the morning anyway. If the crime scene was anything like what it promised to be from the dispatch—double homicide or possibly homicide with suicide—the CSI team wouldn't even have gotten a good jump by the time it was reasonable to call the lieutenant.

  In the cold, dark morning, Thieu left the Hall of Justice through the front doors. A couple of black-and-whites were parked on Bryant just down the steps—the dim light of cigarettes visible in the front one. Thieu didn't want to waste even the few minutes it would take to walk to the back lot and get his assigned Ford Taurus. He walked up to the driver's window and pressed his badge up against it.

  The window came down in a fog of smoke and coffee.

  "Sorry to interrupt your coffee break, officers, but I've got a very hot homicide eight blocks away and I'd like to be there ten minutes ago." He slapped the roof of the car.

  "How fast can you make this thing go?"

  Sirens screaming all the way—Thieu saw no reason why commandeering a squad car couldn't include an element of fun—they dropped him at his address in under five minutes.

  Two other squad cars were already parked in the street, but there was no sign yet of the coroner's van or any of the CSI people.

  The building had no aspirations to stand out among the other worn and tawdry four-story structures on the block.

  With its common entrance, yellowing paint and graffiti in a hundred hands and colors, the apartment house squatted all but anonymously amid its identical neighbors, each more depressing than the next. Inside, Thieu knew, the apartments would also be more similar than not, every one squalid. Stained ancient mattresses with no coverings, broken furniture without upholstery, bare walls and sagging wallpaper hanging in sheets no one ever thought or cared to remove. In every kitchen, dirty dishes would lie piled in the sinks and on every flat surface, the stoves would be buried in grease and carbon, the refrigerators nearly living with mold. The stench of the rooms—of tobacco, urine, alcohol, vomit, decay and musk—would, Thieu supposed, never come out.

  When homicides are reported, the sergeant from the local precinct is supposed to come out and maintain security at the sight until an inspector from the homicide detail arrives. In this case, things were working as they should and Sergeant R. Penrose, from his name tag, out of the Tenderloin Task Force was standing, talking to another uniformed patrolman at the building's entrance. Out of the wind, inside the open doorway.

  Thieu introduced himself and noted the look of relief on Penrose's face—the scene wasn't his direct responsibility anymore. Thieu pegged him at about his own age, mid-thirties, but a kind of rigid nervousness made him seem younger. "This is Officer Lundgren," he said. Although Thieu was anxious to get inside, he knew it was smarter to get everything from the beginning. "He and his partner out in the car there, they got the original complaint."

  In this part of town, complaints to the police were decidedly unusual, so this in itself piqued Thieu's interest. "Who complained about what?" he asked.

  "The landlady." Lundgren pointed into the half-shadow behind him where a small Asian woman, dressed now in a heavy overcoat, hovered by the stairway. "Mrs. Chu. Her English isn't so good, but evidently she was trying to sleep and—"

  "Excuse me, Officer," Thieu said, stopping him. He turned to Sergeant Penrose. "Maybe I will see if I can just talk to her for a minute, please."

  Penrose nodded. If he was surprised, he didn't show it.

  He motioned to Mrs. Chu to come forward. Thieu was not a tall man, but Mrs. Chu didn't reach his shoulders. She looked to be about sixty years old, and as she emerged from the shadows, Thieu took in her threadbare coat, the thin, short gray hair, a pair of red Converse tennis shoes.

  She, too, like Penrose, exuded wariness.

  That was it, Thieu was thinking. Everybody here looks spooked.

  He addressed her in Mandarin, in which he was fluent, and at the familiar sounds, she relaxed slightly. She told him that she'd been watching television (not in fact trying to sleep as Officer Lundgren had volunteered), trying to drown out the loud radio from directly below her. Usually the tenants down there were quiet and polite, but tonight it seemed they were partying. They came in a little after midnight—yes, she thought, several people, at least three but maybe more—and first thing had turned on the radio, very loud. She couldn't hear her television over the blaring radio. But noise was a fact of life in the building, and people tended not to get involved. (Thieu knew that interrupting "parties," that is, drug use or sex or both, was a typical cause of violence in the Tenderloin.) Besides, one of the men downstairs was very big and she did not want him to become mad at her, so she put it off a long time.

  But eventually, about an hour ago, she needed to sleep and so came down and knocked.

  But no one answered, although the radio kept on and on. Finally, she called the police and they ...

  Thieu thanked Mrs. Chu and turned back to Sergeant Penrose. "I'd better go in. I expect the coroner and crime scene investigation unit any time. I'm afraid you're not going to be getting much sleep, Sergeant. Sorry."

  "I think it's going to be a while anyway," Penrose said.

  "Every time I close my eyes, I ..." He stopped, motioned toward the closed door. Again, that spooked quality. He
reached out and touched Thieu on the arm, a dramatic gesture under any circumstances, and not at all coplike.

  "Prepare yourself," he said. "It's bad."

  Dawn ambushed him.

  One minute Thieu was opening the door to the apartment, flipping on the light against the blackness outside, thinking not only that it wasn't bad, it was incredibly well-kept—the flowers, the polished surfaces, a sense of order and cleanliness, to say nothing of the matching furniture, high-end magazines, framed prints on the faux-painted terracotta walls. A minute later, he stood squinting up at blue sky through the back window that opened on an alley.

  In three plus hours, he hadn't grown appreciably inured to the sight of the carnage behind him in the bedroom.

  He'd been wrong about the CSI team hardly getting a jump before it was time to call Gerson. They were getting close to finished. Already they wanted to remove the bodies, but much as it sickened him to refuse, that's exactly what he did. After a long while working here, someone had opened both the back windows and the front door and the temperature in the apartment now barely made it into the forties, although it felt like one hundred degrees to Thieu.

  He knew it was time to call Gerson, but he checked his watch anyway and made sure. Turning around, he resolved to go outside for a moment—he wanted to get out of this room—and patch into the detail from one of the squad cars, or maybe the coroner's van. He stepped carefully to avoid the blood, tried again without much success to avert his eyes from the horrific tableau.

  But before he'd made it out of the room, Lennard Faro stopped him. Faro was the crime scene specialist. Thin and intense, he had recently begun sporting a soul patch under his lip which he called his bug. Both of his ears were pierced, the right one twice. He wasn't yet thirty years old, yet in his profession believed that he had seen everything.

  Even the almost unfathomably grisly scene here today failed to elicit any response, and Thieu found himself wondering if it was all simply a defense. He knew that he, himself, came across as very professional, and knew the reality behind that guise. Maybe Faro was simply better at it than he was—but even if it was your job, Thieu didn't think most humans could handle the butchery they had here without reacting viscerally.

  But Faro seemed to be holding up. Certainly better than Thieu was. He and Thieu had both spent the previous night crawling around the driveway where Matt Creed had been shot, so when the specialist had first arrived, he greeted Thieu with the old, "We've got to stop meeting like this."

  But that was before he'd seen the bodies.

  Now, having seen them, his voice held a suitable gravity, but no real sign of personal revulsion. Suddenly Thieu realized what it was—Lennard Faro wasn't spooked. And it was hard not to be. "So we got a refrigerator here, Paul.

  You still wanna leave 'em where they be?"

  "I do," Thieu said. "I'm going out to call Gerson on it right now. Couple more hours isn't going to hurt them, I don't suppose."

  Faro cast an unfeeling eye back at the room. "No. They'll keep. But the team's going to want to wrap it up, and—"

  Seeing Thieu's expression—anger and resolve—he stopped.

  "I'm just saying it's two nights in a row now. People get tired they don't do as good. We got the place sealed off.

  We come back early, say. Or bring out the day team to tag and bag. What do you say?"

  Thieu knew that he could appear peremptory. He forced a smile, pointed to the front door. "Let's go out a minute, get some air, okay?" By the time they had reached the front door, finally out of sight of the bedroom, Thieu found he could control himself much more easily.

  Turning back to Faro, he spoke with an easy assurance, even sympathy. "I hear what you're saying, Len, but I think in this case, it'd be helpful if your team stayed around just awhile longer, at least till the lieutenant's here to let you go."

  "You think Gerson's gonna be coming down here?"

  Faro, clearly, didn't envision that possibility. "That would be a first, wouldn't it?"

  Thieu didn't comment on that. "What I think is that whether or not he comes down himself, it's very likely he's going to assign this case to Cuneo and Russell, which is what he did with Creed last night." Faro's hand went to his bug as he processed this. "I'd bet you anything that this one's part of that, which is part of Silverman. So if you don't mind, I think it'd be helpful if you guys were around to answer questions when the new guys get here. Probably in fifteen minutes or less. Plus," he added, "they need to see it."

  Faro's face suddenly went slack. "Nobody needs to see that," he said.

  Thieu felt a wash of something like relief. He decided to speak. "You know, Len, I'm glad to hear you say that. I thought it rolled right off you."

  Faro pulled at his bug, shook his head slowly side to side.

  "Nope," he said.

  When Thieu reached Gerson on the phone, the lieutenant as expected wasn't enthusiastic about coming down and checking out the murder scene himself, but he wasted no time at all with his administrative duties. Upon learning that the victims were Clint Terry and Randy Wills, the two chief suspects in both the Creed and Silverman homicides, he told Thieu—again, if he didn't mind and with other suitable disclaimers—that it sounded like efficiency would be better served if Cuneo and Russell were assigned to this homicide as well as the other two. He told Thieu that the two inspectors were running a little late getting into the office this morning since they were stopping at the lab for some ballistics results before reporting in. But Gerson would call dispatch and send them directly to the crime scene just as soon as he got off the phone with Thieu.

  Which he did shortly, leaving Thieu and Faro standing out in the street by the coroner's van. But when Thieu started explaining Gerson's decision about Cuneo and Russell to Faro, the crime scene specialist stopped him before he'd gotten very far. "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. You want to run that by me again? You're telling me those guys in there, they were suspects in the Creed thing?"

  Thieu nodded. "Yeah, and them plus a third guy named Holiday for Silverman."

  Faro pulled at his bug. "So the theory is what?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, you just told Gerson this homicide was related to Creed and Silverman, so he's sending over Russell and Cuneo, right?"

  "Right."

  "So what's the relation?"

  "The relation is that they're suspects in both those murders."

  But Faro was shaking his head. "They killed Silverman.

  Then they killed Creed. Now they're both dead. And this guy Holiday, he's the only one left?"

  "Yeah, looks like. Which makes him ..." Thieu cocked his head. "What's the problem, Len?"

  Faro took a long beat deciding what he'd say. Finally, he said, "This might be a hell of a coincidence, okay, and we're trained to hate and mistrust them, but they happen.

  My take is that this isn't any of that—Silverman and Creed, I mean. It's completely unrelated."

  "It can't be. These are the same guys."

  "Be that as it may, I've seen a half a dozen of these."

  "Like this? Not like this." Thieu motioned toward the apartment. "Like that?"

  Faro's head bobbed down, then up. "Spittin' image, or close enough. This is a pickup gone bad. I'd bet my badge on it. Which might close Silverman and even Creed, okay, except maybe for this other guy, Holiday, but these stiffs here, this case—they ought to stay with you."

  "With me? In what way with me?"

  "Your case. They've got nothing to do with Cuneo and Russell's other work."

  Thieu rubbed his hands together against the cold. "They do if ..."

  "Nope. Not unless you think Holiday did this, which I'm betting he didn't. You're thinking he did?"

  "I didn't know. I just assumed he must be in it somehow.

  He fits."

  "A falling out among thieves, something like that?"

  "Something like."

  Suddenly Faro shivered. "Jesus, it's cold. I'm going to go tell
the team we're hanging fire another hour or so. Send 'em out for coffee." He fished in his pockets, brought out his keys, pointed. "That's my car over there, the brown one." He flipped the keys to Thieu. "Get the heat going, would you? Have a seat. I'll be right back."

  Thieu was still pondering the pickup gone bad theory when Faro opened the door and slid into the passenger seat. "So where were we?"

  "This should stay my case."

  "That's it. And hey, no offense to Dan and Lincoln, nothing personal. It's just that their theory don't hold."

  Thieu crossed his arms, hugging himself. It hadn't warmed up much. "So what's yours?"

  "What happened? Easy. The two vics in there went out to party last night and found some guy who wanted to play, so they brought him back here. You see some of that powder on the bureau? Ten to one it's coke, maybe heroin or crank, one of those. So they're getting a lot high and a little kinky, maybe one of 'em's already naked—I'm thinkin' the big guy ..."

  "That's Terry. Why him first?"

  "We'll get to that. But see if this don't play. So Terry's tied up in the chair just like he is now, maybe they're playin' a little with him and the two other guys—well, the guy they picked up and the one he thinks is the girl ..."

  "Wills."

  "Yeah, whatever, so those two start to get it on. Then the pickup guy reaches down and—whoops!—gets a handful of surprise."

  "Wills isn't a woman."

  "He sure isn't. Not even a little. So the perp goes ballistic—the coroner will tell us exactly what he did next, but my guess is he strangled Wills, maybe knocked him around a little first. But he's still flying on whatever drug they're doing and completely out of his mind now with being fooled. His masculinity, if you want to call it that, is all fucked up. Except he really knew all along. Plus he's just killed Wills with Terry tied up sitting there watching him. What's he gonna do? He's in a rage and completely freaked. He's got to get out of there, but first there's business. So maybe he's gone to the bathroom since he's been there, seen the straight razor Wills shaved his whole body with. He goes back in there ..."