John Lescroart - Damage

“Sure,” Glitsky lied.

“So I had the morgue pry ’em open, and as I’d hoped, we got four just-about-perfect fingerprints, two on each hand. So I had’em run them in the INS database…”

“On a Saturday morning?”

“I got a pal I called in records. So anyway, he loads in the prints and, bingo, up pops Felicia Nuñez.”

“You ever want a job in homicide,” Glitsky said, “just give me a call.”

“I’ll keep it in mind, thanks. But I’m happy where I am.”

“I can see that. Getting to sleep in on the weekends and all like you do.”

“Sleep’s overrated,” Becker said. “You said there were two things?”

“The shoes. Or maybe the shoes.”

“What about ’em?”

“Do we know that the rubber or plastic near her feet came from her shoes?”

“Oh yeah. When you told me last night they might be important, I brought ’em home to my own lab and checked ’em out this morning. They’re the soles from an Adidas tennis shoe, the Honey Low, retails around fifty-five bucks. Size seven, by the way. The top burned away completely.”

The fire scene was on Farrell’s way driving back home from work.

He passed by once without really seeing it, although the yellow police tape must have stuck somewhere in his preoccupied brain, because half a block beyond the apartment building, the location registered. He checked his rearview in a double take, hung a U-turn at the next intersection, and drove back down, parking across the street in a space cleared by the tape.

Glitsky and Jenkins had kept at him for nearly an hour, until in the end he had run out of arguments. Which was not to say he’d made any decision, other than to go home for the afternoon and lie around the house in comfortable clothes before he had to go out this evening and give yet another speech somewhere about something important. Maybe even get in a little sack time with his girlfriend-stranger things had happened.

Now, at a few minutes past noon, the weather had turned foul with a gusty wind blowing around a gauzy drizzle that might as well have been rain. Farrell rolled his window down and looked at the shattered glass in what used to be the windows of the upper left-hand apartment.

Try as he might, he couldn’t get the place to speak to him.

He didn’t go to crime scenes. He was a lifelong defense attorney, and that was a job for the police and the prosecution.

And yet here he was, a prosecutor and top law enforcement person in the city of San Francisco. The job was bunching at him from every direction like an ill-fitting suit.

Although before he’d actually run for DA, he had been notorious for his oft-stated belief that all defendants were factually guilty of whatever crime they’d been charged with, his professional life had always been about getting these people off. Or more commonly getting them a plea bargain they could accept. In the working defense attorney’s world, the objective rarely was to get your client off. Mostly you tried to reduce a charge or a sentence or a bail. Because it happened so infrequently, if at all, no one gave much thought to the idea that a client might actually be innocent.

So the fact that Ro Curtlee probably killed this Nuñez woman didn’t make the impression it might have on Farrell. He’d worked with murderers before as clients. He would probably draw the line at saying that they were nice people in general, but he’d formed a sort of attachment with several of them based on their common humanity. They often had relatives they cared about-mothers, girlfriends, children. They sometimes felt bad about why they’d done what they did. They were not all irredeemable souls.

So the tectonic plate of Farrell’s natural-born inclination and culture was slamming up against that of Glitsky and Jenkins. Talking with them this morning, trying to be accommodating and receptive to their arguments, he could not help but be aware of the Everest looming between them.

To Farrell, the law was a set of inflexible, impersonal, and objective rules that society adopted to settle disputes. There was little room for discretion; what you usually did was what you always did. Morality didn’t much play into it. And the law was specifically not a tool that you used selectively to arrest some people but not others who did the same thing.

Both Glitsky and Jenkins apparently had no trouble being creative within the rules to get Ro Curtlee back into a cell. Farrell believed that if it couldn’t be done in the normal course of business, then by definition it was wrong. And yet Glitsky and Jenkins clearly thought that they had the law and, more important, morality on their side.

And this Farrell knew to be a very slippery slope, and very dis turbing.

While he was losing sleep last night over the degree of responsibility he bore for the release of Ro Curtlee and the subsequent death of Felicia Nuñez, he’d finally come to terms with his conscience because he knew that he had respected the law and applied it fairly. That was what he’d been elected to do. That was his job.

But what about this suggestion that he use one of the legal tools at his command-the grand jury or a preliminary hearing-to get Ro back behind bars? Surely that would be worthwhile, but would it be right? The man had already been convicted of rape and murder, and his successful appeal to the Ninth Circuit never even addressed the actual fact of his guilt for those crimes, which was never really in doubt. And if he had come from a poor family, Farrell knew that he never would have been able to make his $10 million bail, and he would still be in jail awaiting his retrial.

The crux was that Farrell knew that Glitsky had no physical evidence on Curtlee for the Nuñez murder. He had a great motive, true, and probably no good alibi, but Farrell didn’t believe he could charge Ro or go to a grand jury on those issues alone. Forget whether they could adequately prove probable cause-Jenkins was correct that this was an often elastic criterion; evidence or no, her suggestion could work. That would get Ro back into the system, true, and it might keep him in jail until his retrial, or close to it. But it would be cynically playing the system and that was, to Farrell’s mind, where the morality came into it.

Farrell knew he was not a saint. He was flawed in many ways. Ask his ex-wife and his grown and mostly far-flung kids. But he was not a hypocrite. He had sworn to uphold the law as he believed it to be, and that’s what he was going to do, come what may.

Looking back up a last time at the empty shell of Felicia Nuñez’s apartment, he unconsciously set his jaw and put the car back into gear.

Ro Curtlee turned north off Lake and pulled his BMW into a parking spot at the curb of a short dead-end street that, like his own much more high-end block, ended at the Presidio. On both sides of this street, near-identical two-story duplexes sat tight up against one another. A row of garage doors fronted the sidewalk, and next to each garage door, a walkway led first to a side door on the flat at the ground level, and then to a flight of stairs that led to the upper unit.

Ro got out of his car. He was wearing jeans and hiking boots and a heavy green slicker of some kind that he’d buttoned against the weather. His head was bare.

Checking the address numbers on the fronts of the duplexes, he started up the block, walking with a purposeful stride. Down at the end, he found the address he wanted. It was the upstairs unit in the building, and he climbed twelve steps, stood for a moment in front of the door, then rang the doorbell.

A female voice called from inside. “Just a minute!”