John Lescroart - Betrayal

"You're building the whole thing on a bunch of ifs. You see that, don't you?"

"Well, not all of them are ifs. Scholler didn't kill the Khalils, for example. That just didn't happen."

"That doesn't mean Nolan did."

"No. That's true." Hardy rubbed his palms together. "But let's say that a homicide professional such as yourself had a hunch somebody had been killed, even if there was no body and no evidence. How would you go about finding out if you were right?"

Glitsky didn't hesitate. "I'd trace his last days, his last hours if I could."

"So do you know anything about Bowen's? Last days? Last hours?"

In the light from the bulb over the back door, Glitsky turned to his friend. His face, partly in shadow, with its hatchet nose and the whitish scar coursing through both of his lips, might have been some kind of terrible tribal mask, fearsome and powerful. "I don't know anything about Bowen, period, Diz. As far as I'm concerned, he's a missing person."

Hardy sat, musing. He wasn't here to argue.

An animal scurried through the brush on the Presidio's grounds.

"Your man Bracco came by my office today too," Hardy said. "On this Bowen thing."

"Charlie?"

"No, the wife."

"Right," Glitsky said. "He wanted this alleged diary."

"He did. But he also had a few other concerns that had just come up." Hardy went into it in some detail, Bracco's discoveries that the very light Hanna Bowen had broken her neck in a relatively short fall without a hangman's noose, that she'd come to believe her husband had been murdered. Bracco also apparently did not think it inconceivable that Charlie Bowen had been murdered, and that it might have had something to do with one of the cases he'd been working on.

"I told him," Hardy concluded, "that Charlie had a couple of hundred cases and identifying any one of them as connected with murder was going to take a bit of doing."

"But now," Glitsky said, "you're starting to think it might be Scholler."

"I don't know if I'd go that far yet. I wouldn't try to take it to the bank, but there's starting to be a hell of a lot of questions, don't you think?"

After a minute, Glitsky nodded. "It's interesting," he said. "I'll go that far." Then, "You want me to do anything?"

Hardy shook his head. "I don't know what it would be, Abe. Bracco's already on it, even without the diary. Since you trained him, he's probably doing that last-hours-and-last-days thing with Mrs. Bowen. Maybe he'll come up with something."

"If Darrel finds something that leads back to Charlie, Diz, and he starts to look like a homicide, I'll jump all over it."

"That'd be good. I'd appreciate it." Hardy fell into a silence again.

"What are you thinking?" Glitsky asked after a minute.

"Nothing."

"Yeah, but it's a loud nothing."

Hardy took a breath. "I was just wondering if it was possible that the FBI knew who killed the Khalils and didn't say anything about it because it was part of a bigger case."

Glitsky looked over at him. "I missed a segue here. I thought we were talking about the Bowens."

"Now we're talking about the FBI. But it's still Scholler."

"Guy gets around."

Hardy shrugged. "It's a complicated case. But part of it is how much the FBI didn't tell the DA. Or even if they had another suspect they forgot to mention."

"Whatever it is," Glitsky said, "you'll never know."

"But you think it's possible they'd deliberately withhold that kind of evidence?"

"As my father would say, 'Anything's possible.' If it's the FBI, I'd go a little further. Nothing is impossible."

"They'd screw up a murder case on purpose?"

"Not every day, certainly. Not usually. But for the right reason…"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Say maybe the guy's a valuable snitch. Or he's a mole in a terrorist group." Glitsky snapped his fingers. "There you go. He's giving the Feebs good information on a terrorist cell, I bet they wouldn't blink if he killed his girlfriend on the side. Say 'national security' to these guys and anything goes."

"You think?"

Glitsky chewed his cheek. "Would I bet on it in this case? Maybe not. Do I think it's ever happened? Definitely, and more than once."

And if it happened here with the Khalils, Hardy thought, perhaps Charlie Bowen hadn't figured it out in time as he was preparing his appeal. Maybe the Khalils had seen him-justifiably-as a threat, a loose cannon who wouldn't hesitate to accuse them of murder if it would help get his client off. And if they had, or if one of them had, in fact, murdered Ron Nolan…

"Okay, then here's another angle you might want to put in your pipe and smoke," Hardy said. "Moses is of the opinion-again, based on nothing, but still, he's not dumb-he thinks that Nolan killed the Khalils because it was his job. They were Iraqi, and he worked for this company that does a lot of business in Iraq. Allstrong Security, which is evidently-"

But Glitsky put a hand on his arm, stopping him. "Allstrong Security?"

"Yeah, headquartered here and in-"

"I know where they are, Diz. I know who they are." Unconsciously, he tightened his grip on Hardy's arm. "Nolan worked for Allstrong? How could I not have heard about that?"

"Maybe because it's a small detail about a trial in another county three years ago. Could that be it? And why would it have mattered, anyway?"

But Glitsky, a muscle working in his jaw, was inside himself, putting something together. He let go of Hardy's arm, staring ahead of himself into the darkness.

"Abe? Talk to me."

Slowly, he began to spin it out, as though to himself. "I'd bet my life it's close to the same time frame, something like three years ago, right? But I'll check that."

"What?"

Still, Glitsky hesitated. "We had a homicide here in the city of a guy who'd been over in Iraq working for Allstrong. His name, if memory serves, was Arnold Zwick. Somebody snapped his neck in an alley down in the Mish. Left his wallet on him."

"All right. And this means…"

"No, wait. The same weekend, a day or two later I think, three more guys, all together, all muggers with sheets, turn up dead on the street in the Tenderloin. Two of 'em with their necks broken."

"Three broken necks?"

"That's what we said. Batiste thought it might be a serial killer starting out, but nothing else happened. No clues, no suspects. Eventually it all just went away."

"So what was the deal with Allstrong?"

"Nothing, really." Glitsky still trying to process his memory. "We never found anything, anyway. The investigation never went anywhere."

"But?"

"But witnesses told us Zwick seemed to be rolling in cash before he got killed. But we never found any of it, except a couple of hundred in his wallet. Debra Schiff thought he'd embezzled it from Allstrong in Iraq, then split. They were getting paid mostly in cash back then. Her theory was that Allstrong sent somebody back over here to find Zwick, make an example of him, get the money back. But as I say, we never got a lick of proof."

"And now you're thinking…"

"I'm not thinking anything yet. Except maybe Moses might not be all wrong about Nolan."

Hardy sat, elbows on his knees, mulling over this new information. "Let me ask you this, Abe. You've got friends in the FBI, right?"

Glitsky hit a one-note chuckle. "Local cops like myself don't have what you call bosom buddies in the FBI, Diz. But I know a few guys, yeah."

"Maybe you could ask them a couple of discreet questions?"

"About this Khalil case?"

Hardy shrugged.

"And what," Glitsky asked, "makes you think they'd tell me anything at all about that? Especially if they've kept something about it hidden all this time?"

"Well," Hardy said, "I know the two agents who were involved in my case. Maybe you could just put in a good word and see if they'd talk to me."