John Lescroart - Betrayal

This opened up an entirely new strategic element.

Hardy and Washburn both keenly understood the situation. If in fact the FBI had interviewed witnesses in the Khalil killings and did not supply either the witnesses or the testimony, or both, to the prosecution, which the prosecution was then mandated to turn over to Evan's defense, it was highly possible that they were looking at a Brady violation. The added beauty of the situation was that Mills didn't even have to know about the withheld evidence. The FBI was legally construed to be part of the prosecutor's team and Mills was responsible for turning over that evidence whether or not the FBI told her about it.

Of course, proving not only that the FBI had held back evidence but also that the withheld evidence was likely to undermine confidence in the guilty verdict against Evan Scholler was another problem.

But Hardy would face that when he came to it.

For the moment, the Brady possibility, if he could get it off the ground by finding an FBI witness or two that hadn't made it into the Scholler record, meant that he could file a writ of habeas corpus with declarations and get it in front of the court of appeals in relatively short order. The court of appeals could then remand it back down to Redwood City, probably back to Tollson's courtroom, where-if they were hearing new evidence-anything might happen.

Washburn tapped Hardy's knee, snapping him from his reverie. "It's still going to be a long shot proving the evidence is exculpatory," he said. "Essentially you'll have to prove somebody else other than Evan might well have killed Nolan. Which, I must tell you from bitter experience, is a tough nut." He lowered his voice. "It might even be contrary to fact."

"Maybe not," Hardy said. "It might be enough for the court if I prove that somebody else had a reason to."

The old lawyer shook his head. "That, I'm afraid, is wishful thinking."

"Not at all. If there was another plausible suspect the jury didn't get to hear about…"

Washburn frowned. "And the FBI, which withheld it last time, and which is immune to state process, is going to hand it over now? How are you going to make them do that?"

"I don't know," Hardy said. "It's a work in progress."

Hardy drove back up to the city on the 280 Freeway, got off on the ocean side of town at Nineteenth Avenue, and, at a couple of minutes after the official beginning of the cocktail hour, walked into the front door of the bar he partly owned, the Little Shamrock. Moses McGuire, his brother-in-law, out of rehab now this past year or more, was behind the bar at the far end by the beer taps. To Hardy, he looked impossibly fit, although maybe it was simply the fact that he'd lost thirty pounds and cleaned up his appearance along with his bloodstream.

Perennially shaggy and long-haired, often bearded, McGuire had cultivated more or less the look of a biker or a mountain man since his twenties-which is to say for nearly forty years. Faded, often tattered blue jeans and some crummy T-shirt seemed as much a part of his personality as his justly fabled temper, his casual disdain for convention, his fondness for altered states of consciousness.

Down at the end of the bar today, passing the time with a pretty young woman, he might have been a mid-forties banker on his day off. The still-full head of salt-and-pepper hair was short and neatly parted, the mustache trimmed in an otherwise closely shaved face. He'd tucked the tails of his blue dress shirt into a pair of khakis. He'd had his nose broken often enough in bar fights that Hardy thought he'd always look a bit battered, but today his eyes were clear, his skin nearly devoid of the capillary etching that had been a regular feature of his face in the heavy drinking days that had comprised the majority of his adult life.

As a sometime bartender and part-owner, Hardy could have gone around the bar and helped himself to whatever he wanted, but occasionally you got back there and found you couldn't easily get yourself out, and tonight was supposed to be the first of his new Date Nights with Frannie, and he didn't want to start it off on the wrong foot. So he pulled up a stool and gave McGuire a casual nod, which brought him right on down.

"What's the word, Counselor?"

"Hendrick's, over. One onion."

"That's four words, and I've got cucumber."

Hardy nodded. "Even better. And while you're pouring, I've got a question for you."

"Hazel." McGuire didn't miss a beat. "Although some people think they're more green. But I'd call them hazel. Kind of a bedroom hazel." McGuire grabbed a glass, threw in some ice, reached up behind him to the premium gin row, and brought down the round dark bottle of Hendrick's gin. After a quick free pour to an eighth of an inch below the rim, he cut a fresh slice of cucumber and dropped it on top. "Santé," he said, placing it on the cocktail napkin he'd laid down on the bar. "Okay, what's your real question?"

"It's a long one."

McGuire scanned the length of the bar and around the corners of the room, none of which were very far away. The Shamrock was a small, neighborhood place that had been in its same location at Lincoln and Ninth Avenue since 1893. The grandfather clock against the wall behind Hardy had stopped during the Great Earthquake of 1906 and nobody'd set it running again since. The pretty girl had gone back to her friends by the dartboards, and all of the other twenty patrons seemed comfortably settled at the bar or on the couches in back. "That's all right," McGuire said. "The crowd's pretty much under control."

On the drive up from Redwood City, after he'd wrestled with some of the problems raised by the Brady violation issues, Hardy had returned to the question that he still hadn't answered, and that, in his and Washburn's enthusiasm for Brady, they'd inadvertently let drop. So, after filling in his brother-in-law on some of the background-with a doctorate in philosophy from UC Berkeley, McGuire's ability to grasp facts and concepts had always been impressive even when he was in the bag; now that he was sober, it was formidable-Hardy came out with it again. "So, the question is, why did Nolan kill the Khalils?"

"Piece of cake," McGuire said. "It was his job."

Hardy drank off some of the rose-scented gin-he'd come to love this stuff. "Just like that, his job?"

"Sure. He's a SEAL, right? He's a trained assassin. You remember the SEALs in 'Nam. Shit. Killers. And now he's working for this security company in Iraq?"

"Allstrong."

"Right, Allstrong."

"But he was a recruiter over here, Mose, hiring people. No way was he doing wet work."

"Right. I'm sure. With his background? No way he wasn't, if it was needed."

"And why would it have been needed with the Khalils?"

"I don't know. Not enough information. But they were Iraqi, n'est-ce pas ?"

"Yep."

"Well, then, you check it out, I bet you find they have family or something over there and they were somehow getting in the way of Allstrong's business."

"So they kill the father over here?"

McGuire nodded. "Sending a message."

"Pretty long distance, wouldn't you say?"

"The father was probably running the business from over here. Cut off the head, the body dies. This isn't brain surgery, Diz. All this didn't come out at the trial?"

"None of it did."

"Why not?"

"Well, the easy answer is that everybody on the prosecution team thought my guy had been the killer, and the motive was mostly personal, about him and Nolan."

"But you think it was Nolan?"

"I'm beginning to."

"And you're thinking, then, that this stuff about him ought to have been in the trial?"

"Precisely."

"Hmm. Let me think about it." He walked down the bar and saw to a couple of drink orders. Shooting himself a club soda from the gun, he came back down to Hardy. "Okay," he said, "I've got it all figured out."