John Lescroart - Damage

“Sí?”

“Abe Glitsky, San Francisco homicide,” he said. “Homocidio . Comprendo?”

Behind the man, the small living room was well lit. Two young boys stole glances at Glitsky around their father’s legs. Glitsky caught a glimpse of a woman sitting on the couch who appeared to be holding a toddler on her lap, and now hearing Glitsky’s name, she stood up and came into the light. “Roberto. It’s all right,” she said. “I know him. Let him in.”

She offered Glitsky a small bath towel to dry his head and his face and hung his soaking-wet jacket on the back of a chair over a heating duct. The house was pin neat, bare bones, and warm, the windows cloudy with condensation. Glitsky sat down across from her, sideways to Roberto, at the Formica table just off the living room. She had the toddler back on her lap, while the father ordered the young boys to sit quietly on the couch, which they did without a word of resistance. To Glitsky, there seemed to be enough tension in the room to spontaneously combust.

“I’m so glad I found you,” Glitsky began.

She forced a polite smile. “It’s good to see you, too. Is there a problem?”

“Well.” Glitsky’s relief at seeing her alive and unharmed was substantial. “There may be. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but Ro Curtlee has been released from prison.”

She glanced-a warning?-at her husband, then pulled the toddler in closer to her, her arms encircling her, bouncing her on her knee. She shook her head no. “How did that happen?”

“He appealed the guilty verdict and they’re going to give him a retrial. In the meanwhile, they let him out on bail.”

“Why did they do that?”

“There’s no good answer to that. The point is, they did. So you haven’t heard from him?”

“No. Why would I have heard from him?”

“He might want to talk you out of testifying against him again. Because if he has a new trial, we’re going to need you to give your testimony again.”

“But I have already done that, last time.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Doesn’t that count anymore? What I said?”

“Yes. But it will be more persuasive if you tell it to a jury again.”

“I am sorry,” she said. “But I do not think I can do that another time.”

Glitsky, of course, never thought this was going to be easy. “I can understand how you feel that way,” he said. “But it’s come to the point now where you are the most important witness from the last trial if we are going to hope to put him back in prison.”

Gloria looked again at her husband, whose eyes had never left Glitsky, and who hadn’t moved a muscle since he’d sat down. “How has it come to that point? What about the other witnesses? What about Felicia?”

Glitsky took in a quick breath and came out with it. “Felicia is dead.”

Gloria crossed herself, her lip quivering.

“She was in a fire,” Glitsky said.

“Since Ro got out of prison?”

A hesitation, then a nod. “Yes.”

“He killed her.”

“Maybe. That’s not impossible.”

Suddenly Roberto spoke up. “She cannot do this again,” he said. “That is all.”

“Well, I’m afraid that’s not all, sir. I’ve been trying to locate Gloria for almost a month. Now that I’ve found her, all of you, I’d like to put her-and now your family-into a witness protection program until the trial.”

“No. We cannot do that,” Gloria said. “I did that last time when I was alone, but now we have jobs, a life, as you see. I can’t just disappear again.”

“It would only be until you testified, like last time.”

“And when would that be?”

“August, at least. Maybe later.”

She almost broke a smile at the absurdity of the request. “No,” she said. “I am no threat to him, and he is no danger to me if I don’t testify. So I will not. It is simple.”

Glitsky all at once felt a chill settle on him, and he shivered against it. He did not want to bring undue pressure to bear on this woman, but she had to realize the danger of her situation. “Do you know how I found you here?” he asked her, and when she shook her head no, he went on, “We put a tracking device-a GPS unit-on Ro’s car. He drove down to this street today and stayed here nearly two hours.”

Roberto and she shared another blink of a look. “I was not here,” she said.

“You didn’t see him? He didn’t talk to you?”

This time Gloria’s glance at her husband conveyed a true message: Don’t say a word. “No,” she said. “I will simply call his parents and tell them I won’t testify. He will not come back.”

Glitsky held his hands clasped tightly on the table in front of him. He became aware of the tension in them and consciously willed them to relax. He didn’t want to snap or become argumentative, positions from which there’d be no extrication. He met Gloria’s eyes, tried to soften what he knew was the harsh set of his features. “He came by here this afternoon and threatened your children, didn’t he?” he said in an even tone. “Isn’t that what really happened?”

She was not even remotely skilled as a liar. After her eyes went wide, she looked over to her husband for help, who couldn’t manage much more than a what-can-you-do shrug. Finally she shook her head several times, much too quickly. “I just told you.”

“Yes, you did. You told me he didn’t do anything like that.” Glitsky leaned in toward her. “Was that the truth?”

Again, she silently begged her husband to step in, but either he couldn’t read the signal or he didn’t know what to do with it. Her eyes went across the room to the two boys sitting on the sofa. She wrapped her arms more protectively about the toddler on her lap. At last, she shook her head again. “I did not see him,” she said. “I don’t know why he was parked here.”

Glitsky lowered his voice to an all-but-inaudible whisper. “I don’t want to alarm your children, Gloria, but I think he came down here to kill you just like he killed Felicia Nuñez. And then when he saw you had children, he had a better idea.”

She just stared at him.

“He needs to be back in prison,” Glitsky said, “so that he won’t be able to hurt anyone else.”

“He will not hurt my children if I don’t testify,” she said. “There would be no reason.”

“How do you know that?” Glitsky asked. “How can you be sure of that?”

“Please. It is no use.” She lifted her chin and met his eyes. “I just know.”

Driving back up to the city on the Bayshore Freeway, the car’s heater blasting away and his windshield wipers swishing at top speed, Glitsky tried to console himself with the fact that at least now he had a name and address for Gloria Serrano and that other, more persuasive souls in the DA’s office might convince her that she needed to testify again against Ro. That might still happen, he thought, especially once they got him back into jail and he was no longer a direct threat to her children.

His mind kept returning to the question of how Ro had located Gloria so quickly, and again it returned to the old familiar theme of the city’s stupid police budget. He was sure that Ro’s success was a function of his ability to hire private investigators who could use private and in some case downright illegal methods to locate missing persons, or persons who wanted to be missing. He was working himself up into a fine lather about it as his cell phone chirped on the seat next to him.

Seeing the name Wes Farrell on the screen, he dispensed with the preliminaries. “Tell me we got the indictment.”