Betrayal (31 page)

“It is. I’m doing the appeal.”

“Ahh. So you’re the guy who comes in after the battle to shoot the wounded.”

“I hope not. I’ve reviewed the transcripts. So far, from what I see, I’m not inclined to go with incompetence of counsel.”

“That’s magnanimous of you. Though in all honesty that trial wasn’t one of my finer moments, I’m afraid. But what are you going to do when your client won’t plead? I know I could have gotten him a manslaughter, and he could be out by the time he’s forty. Now…” He shook his head. “Anyway, when I heard it was about Scholler, I thought you were coming here as a courtesy to tell me in person that I’d fucked it up and that was the basis of your appeal.”

“Nope.”

“So what are you thinking? The PTSD?”

Hardy nodded. “The judge shouldn’t have kept it out. My call is that Ninth Circuit judges are going to fall all over themselves spinning this thing when it gets in front of them. Scholler had a legitimate disability of some kind that the jury couldn’t hear about? And he did, right?”

“Oh, yeah. We had the experts. The diagnosis was cold.”

“Are you kidding me? And the judge didn’t let it in? How could it not be relevant and admissible?”

“How indeed?”

They both, of course, were familiar with the notorious liberal slant of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which had made countless rulings on the admissibility of extenuating circumstances in murder cases, such as childhood abuse, dysfunctional parenting, or exposure to violence on television. If PTSD being ruled inadmissible didn’t get their attention, Hardy would eat his bar card.

“Well.” Hardy held out his hands, palms up. “Need I go on?”

“Not to me,” Washburn said. “I do think that PTSD’s the best play, though that just might be my own self-interest talking. I’ve kicked myself a hundred times over some decisions I made in that case. If I were doing the appeal, I might go for incompetent counsel.”

“What would you have done differently?”

“Well, fought harder with Evan to take a plea, is the main thing.” Washburn focused on an empty space in the air between them. “Done more with the Khalil murders, maybe, although God knows what that would have been—I spent fifty grand on my private eye and he got nothing remotely usable. Then—this was my favorite—I got halfway through my own chief medical witness when I realized that his testimony, if anything, helped the prosecution. But the main thing, as I say, would have been a plea.”

“But he wouldn’t take one.”

“Adamant. He didn’t remember doing it and wasn’t going to say he did. Period.”

Hardy shook his head. “Dumb.”

Washburn shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he thinks he probably didn’t do it.”

“What do you think?”

The old man waved that off. “I never go there.”

Going for levity, Hardy put on half a grin. “Even for fun?”

“Never, nohow, no way, ever.”

“I can’t stand a man who won’t express his opinions.”

“No. Me neither.” Washburn sat all the way back on the couch. “But the poor fucking guy. You met him yet?”

Hardy nodded. “I went down there last week.” A beat. “I bet he’d take that plea now.”

“Yeah, I bet he would.” Washburn had already given Hardy about twenty minutes of his time, call it two hundred dollars’ worth, although he wasn’t charging him for this visit. Still, time was money and if there was no business to be done between these two men, Washburn would not make any until Hardy left. “So. How else can I help you?”

“I was hoping to pick your brain a little.”

“How little?”

“Six to eight hours over the next month or so.”

Washburn came forward again. “My professional courtesy rate is two hundred.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Hardy said. “I don’t know how much time you have right now, and I don’t want to impose…”

Washburn held up a hand and looked over at the grandfather clock that stood sentinel where the windows met the bookshelves. It was quarter to four. “I’m comfortable going till five,” he said. “Feel free. Pick away.”

A
MONTH
into his new old job, his second hitch as head of San Francisco’s homicide detail, Lieutenant Abe Glitsky walked alone down the fifth-floor hallway and turned into the small room—itself bisected by a counter—that served as the unit’s reception area. It was five-twenty, and both of the clerks stationed here had left, probably gone home for the day. Glitsky, after his initial disapproval, was getting used to the idea of hourly employees putting in their time and going home. While he’d been deputy chief of inspectors over these past few years, he’d always felt it odd that even the clerical jobs were so personal—you got in early and you stayed until your boss went home because if you didn’t, someone else might get close to him and then you might not rise in the bureaucracy when he did. Or she, of course.

In another few steps, he was in his office—a small room stuffed with file cabinets, crammed with a large flat working desk, windows high enough in the wall along the right to allow in a bit of natural light but that afforded no view of Bryant Street down below. Coming around the desk, Glitsky glanced up at his bulletin board of active homicides—nine of them today, about average, crimes committed in the past month or so on which his inspectors were still working. Settling into his chair, he sat back and wondered anew if his request for what amounted to a voluntary demotion had been a mistake.

He’d been on the job for more than a month now, and besides some of the personnel issues that had been and continued to be a bit troubling, he found that, much to his surprise, he somewhat missed his large official office with its bookshelves and plaques and wall decorations, its brace of leather chairs for important visitors, its reception area that discouraged passersby from stopping in to say hello. The deputy chief’s office was that of an Important Man, and while he had occupied it, Glitsky often had not felt, at base, like he belonged there. Now, as head of homicide, he still had what he believed to be an important job, but it was mostly an invisible one. Could it be, he’d been wondering, that he’d grown accustomed to being in the public eye, to having his opinion matter to others, to being consulted by the chief and even the mayor about important civic issues?

He kept telling himself that he was in a period of adjustment to the new surroundings, that was all. Change itself was never easy. But two or three times already, he’d entertained the thought that maybe he’d made yet another mistake in a recent history of poor career choices.

And there was no getting around it. These new digs were different and they made the whole job, once so familiar, feel different. First, this office was physically separated from the inspectors’ room. When the detail had been on the fourth floor, the internal windows in the lieutenant’s office looked out over the crowded room that held the desks of the troops. Here, even if his new office had internal windows, which it didn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to see the inspectors, since the computer room was in the way. Inspectors could and did come and go, they never had to pass his door, and Glitsky might never know they’d been around.

The good news was that, barring emergencies, Glitsky’s own hours had stabilized. As deputy chief, he’d considered it his duty to set an example of rigor, discipline, and enthusiasm, and he’d made it a point to be at work at seven-thirty. At the other end of the day, department meetings, press conferences, and public appearances often kept him out until nine, sometimes later. His weekends rarely were his own either. Deputy chief wasn’t a job; it was a life.

And Glitsky was at a juncture—the crux of it, really—his desire in life was to be with his wife, Treya, and their two young children, Rachel and Zachary. The last couple of years, since Zack had been born, had been something of a strain. Treya worked as the secretary for San Francisco’s district attorney, Clarence Jackman. She was at her desk at nine and left at five. There had been weeks while Glitsky had been deputy chief that they’d basically only gotten to speak to each other in this building, the Hall of Justice.

Now, having made sure that his desk was cleared, Glitsky was getting ready to check out for the day. He went out his door, closing it behind him. Passing through the empty computer room, he entered the inspectors’ area and saw that fully eight of the fourteen homicide inspectors were in the room. This was unusual, since most of the time, these people were out interviewing witnesses, assessing crime scenes, building cases, and working out rebooking details and/or charges with assistant DAs.

Darrel Bracco looked over and raised a hand in greeting—at least one person in the unit apparently okay with the new status quo. As the vibe of Glitsky’s presence passed through the room, other inspectors looked up. Glitsky caught a few nods from veterans who went back to their conversations and coffee, was ignored by a couple of others.

This was the way it had been since he’d come down here, his people misunderstanding his reappointment to homicide, wondering if in reality he was some kind of spy sent down by the brass to shake up the detail, screw up their jobs.

Glitsky hoped that this was simply the effect of change on his people, and that it, too, would shortly pass. But until it did, he wasn’t having a good time. Getting up to Bracco’s desk, he summoned a neutral tone. “I’m out the door, Darrel. Anything happening I might want to know about before I go?”

Bracco thought a minute, then shook his head. “Nothing new, Lieutenant,” he said. “Slow day on the prairie, I guess.”

“I guess so.” Glitsky did a quick scan of the room. He didn’t want to seem to be checking on anyone. In fact, he wasn’t, but that didn’t mean people might not think he was. “See you tomorrow, Darrel.”

“Yes, sir,” Bracco said. “Have a good one.” Glitsky had turned and gone two steps when Bracco spoke again. “Wait a sec, Abe. I just remembered. There was something you might want to put back on your board.” This was the active homicide board in Glitsky’s office. Usually, once a name left that board, it stayed off forever, either because a suspect in the case had gotten arrested, or because the trail had gone too cold to waste the inspectors’ time anymore, or if the only eyewitness fell terminally ill with lead poisoning, or if, for any of a zillion reasons, the case wasn’t being actively worked anymore.

“Back on the board?”

“Yeah. One of my old ones. Bowen. But it’s been closed since before your time. We can get to it in the morning. Here, I’m writing myself a note so I won’t forget.”

“How ’bout if I just walk back in there and write it back up?”

Sheepish, Bracco nodded, getting to his feet. “That would probably work too. I didn’t want to keep you if you were leaving.”

“How long can it take?” Glitsky asked. “B-O-W-E-N, is that right? Five letters. Shouldn’t take me more than a few minutes.” He was already back at his door, turning the key in it. “So what’s the case?”

“Hanna Bowen. Finally ruled a suicide by hanging.”

Glitsky turned and faced his inspector. “What? She unhang herself?”

“It’s more like I promised the daughter that I’d take another look at it. She can’t seem to get her arms around it. That her mom killed herself, I mean.”

“Okay. But the coroner ruled suicide? And you’re going to help this daughter how?”

“I know it’s a long shot, Abe, but the girl’s still torn up. You know all the classes we take that tell us to be sensitive to the victim’s pain, and all that. I figure what can it hurt, and it might help her.”

“What, though, exactly?”

“Well, evidently the mother kept a diary. Or the daughter—her name is Jenna—Jenna thinks her mom might have kept a diary and she asked me if I could try to find it.”

“And do what with it?”

“See if it gave us any reason to think her mom’s death might have been a homicide.”

Glitsky boosted himself back onto his desk. “This was your case originally?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything point to homicide back then? When was this?”

“Maybe early February, and not really, no. Except that Jenna had such a hard time with accepting that her mother would do that.”

“Well, God knows we’ve seen that before, Darrel. Not that I blame her. Your mother goes that way, you don’t want to believe it. Maybe you honestly can’t believe it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

“I know. I told her I’d look, that’s all. No promises.”

“For this diary?”

“I don’t know, Abe. That might not be all. I worked the case pretty hard when it was live. There were other elements at the time. Well, to be honest, mostly one other element, but it seemed worth checking out, although at the time I couldn’t get anything on it.”

“What was that?”

“The dad, Charlie. He disappeared last summer. That’s supposedly why the wife killed herself.”

“What do you mean, disappeared?”

“I mean poof, gone, vanished. No trace. Jenna thinks he wouldn’t have just disappeared either. She thought he might have been killed.”

“By who? Why?”

“No idea.”

“Very strong, Darrel. So she thinks her father was killed, too, and that it’s somehow connected to her mother’s suicide?”

“Not suicide. She doesn’t buy suicide. She thinks her mother was another homicide.”

“Two homicides.” Glitsky sat with it for another few seconds.

Bracco made a face. “The daughter lost both parents in the same year. If the diary turns up…” He shrugged. “Who knows. We might get something.”

“So where are you gonna start?”

“I suppose I’ll meet her and go through all the evidence again. Then maybe get to the father’s files, which I never really looked into last time.”

“What files?”

“His work files. He was a lawyer. Maybe it was something he was working on.”

“What was?”

“The reason he was killed.”

Glitsky scratched for a second at the corner of his mouth. Bracco had always been an enthusiastic cop, but he’d gotten promoted up to homicide originally because his father had been a driver to a former mayor, and sometimes his lack of experience showed. “You realize, I know, Darrel,” Glitsky said, “that most middle-aged guys who disappear…I’m assuming this Charlie Bowen was middle-aged?”