John Lescroart - Betrayal

Chagrined, Bracco sat back and nodded. "Yeah, I can see that. Well…" He pushed himself up to his feet.

Hardy, rising himself, said, "If you get anything specific attached to some probable cause, you could always subpoena the files and have a special master go through them."

"I could do that, but I don't have any idea what I'm looking for."

"Well, there's that." Hardy brightened. "Except the diary."

"Right. Except the diary."

"I'll get somebody working on that before you hit the street."

"I appreciate that," Bracco said, extending his hand. "Thanks again for your time."

Hardy nodded. "And we find anything on the other matter, you'll be the first to know. But as I told Glitsky, I wouldn't hold my breath on any of this."

Bracco broke a small smile. "I never do."

Hardy had a spy in Redwood City.

His old law school buddy Sean Kelleher worked as an assistant district attorney in the same building as Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille and told Hardy that she wasn't calendared for any trials and should be in or about her office for the whole day. As soon as Bracco had walked out of his office, Hardy had made the day of Michael Cho, one of his paralegals, by assigning him to start looking through the boxes of Charlie Bowen's files for a woman's diary. Then he'd picked up the phone and called to make double sure about Mary Patricia, told Kelleher he owed him one, and hightailed it down to his garage.

Ten minutes later, top down on his S2000, Hootie blaring from his car's speakers, Hardy cleared Candlestick Point and twenty minutes after that was parking in the courthouse lot twenty-five miles south. If San Francisco had been warm and pleasant all day, Redwood City, in the mid-eighties, was positively balmy. As he brought the roof back up over the convertible, he found himself humming out loud. He felt like a different person from the stoop-shouldered slug who'd attracted the attention of the possibly-not-crazy elderly woman at the corner of Seventh and Mission that morning. The lunch with Frannie, her receptiveness, maybe the start of the next phase of their lives together after the unexpected hollow emptiness of the recent one.

The little dance he was doing around Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille was not frivolous. He thought it so likely as to be certain that she would not consent to a regular scheduled appointment with him. After all, he was the man who was trying to undo all of the hard work she'd put in on what was to date still one of the most successful moments of her career. In fact, he considered it not impossible that even his planned ambush of her would be rebuffed. Certainly, there was no reason, other than professional courtesy, that she need feel compelled to see him. He wasn't kidding himself. He knew who he was. He was the enemy.

When he arrived in Redwood City, he called Kelleher, who came out and walked him past the receptionist into the offices in the back. He had a cup of coffee and shot the breeze a little and then asked Kelleher to point him toward the lair of Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille.

Her door was open and Hardy stood for a second in the hallway, trying to take her measure. Younger-looking than he'd expected, with a very appealing profile, she was sitting forward in her chair, her elbows on her desk, one hand playing with a loose tendril of blondish hair, apparently reading. Her feet, shoeless, were tucked back under her chair. It was a Friday-afternoon scene similar to one he'd seen a thousand times in the legal world-the alone, as opposed to lonely, time every good lawyer needed to keep up on facts, to study cases, to stay current on changes in the law, to recharge.

Part of him hated to bother her.

The rest of him stepped forward and knocked softly on her door. "Excuse me."

She turned to face him, her expression just short of querulous. Yes, it said, he was interrupting her. But she could be serene about it. The petulance gave way to a mild curiosity. "Can I help you?"

"I think so." He pointed to the name on her door. "If you're Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille."

"That's me."

"That's some name."

"Tell me about it. Sometimes I wonder what my parents were thinking. Mississippi and all of New York."

"Pardon?"

She straightened up in her chair, put her hands behind her lower back, and arched herself briefly. Getting out the kinks or showing off the merchandise. "Nine syllables," she said. "Mary Patricia Whelan-Miille. Mississippi and all of New York. Imagine having to ask people to say 'Mississippi and all of New York' every time they wanted to address you by name. You'd never talk to anybody." She broke a nice smile. "People call me Mills. Who are you?"

Hardy came forward and introduced himself.

"Dismas?" she asked.

"Dismas."

"I don't think I've ever met a Dismas."

"You're not alone. He was the good thief on Calvary, next to Jesus. Also, he's the patron saint of thieves and murderers."

"Good for him. I'm proud of him. I've always wanted to be patron saint of something, except I understand first you've got to be dead, and that's got limited appeal." Mills swung in around to face him. "So, Dismas, how can I help you?"

"Well, speaking of appeal, I wanted to ask you for a few minutes of your time to talk about the Scholler case. I'm doing the appeal."

The mildly flirtatious personality dropped off her like the calving of a glacier, leaving only the cold, flat ice behind. "I have nothing to say about that. I won the case. I don't think there are any legitimate appealable issues."

"You don't think PTSD should have been let in?"

"If you've read the transcripts, you know I argued against just that and prevailed. That was the right call. And now, I'm sorry, but I'm in the middle of-"

"You spoke to Charlie Bowen. I'm only asking for the same courtesy."

"Charlie Bowen made an appointment with me and we set ground rules."

"I'll go with ground rules," Hardy said. "Same as Charlie's."

"Do you even know what they were?"

"It doesn't matter. I'll agree unseen."

"There's a desperate offer." She folded her arms over her chest. "Look, Mr. Hardy…"

"Dismas."

"Mr. Hardy, please. I don't want to be a hardass, but I'm not going to talk to you about Evan Scholler. He was guilty and I got him convicted and I hope he rots away in prison. That's all I've got to say, all right? Please."

Hardy counted five of his heartbeats. Of course, there always had been the make-an-appointment-and-set-ground-rules option, but he'd never before had a conference like that produce anything of real substance. If you wanted your soda to fizz and bubble, you had to shake it up.

But now he was looking at turning around and driving back home, facing a weekend with absolutely nothing to chew on and work with. The words and the idea came out of his mouth before he was aware that he'd thought of them. Anything to keep her talking with him. "How about if I don't talk about that case at all?"

She cocked her head, still wary. "Then what exactly would we be talking about?"

"Charlie Bowen."

"What about him?"

"Anything he might have said to you before he disappeared."

That stopped her. She combed her hand through her hair, made a face at him that could have meant anything, looked down at her desk, back at Hardy. "Why do you want to do that?"

"He disappeared while he was working on this appeal. Before I get too far with it, I don't want to have the same thing happen to me."

She shook her head, chortling. "Don't be ridiculous. He'd barely started even the preliminary work. I don't think he'd even finished the transcripts when I talked to him."

"So what did you talk about?"

"He wanted to review the evidence that hadn't been used at the trial. To see if I had any working papers not included in the defense discovery. Stuff like that. Just to make sure the record was complete while he was going ahead. Housecleaning."