John Lescroart - Damage

Amanda Jenkins felt about as attractive as a turnip.

She hadn’t slept more than three hours at any stretch since she’d heard about Matt, and the past weekend-in spite of the apparent closure and cosmic justice represented by the deaths of the Curtlees and their butler-had been more grueling still. She had dated him for more than a year, but she had never met Matt’s parents or his three sisters or his older brother. Nevertheless, on Saturday she’d been included in the extended family for the huge funeral Mass at Saints Peter and Paul at Washington Square, and then the burial down in Colma, after which she’d been seated between his mother, Nan, and his sister Paula at the reception at Fior d’Italia.

That had gone on until seven or so, and then she and Nan-by now her best friend-had gone out on an old-fashioned roaring drunk around North Beach, where they hooked up with some other assistant DAs and cops who’d also been at the funeral. In spite of the alcohol, or maybe because of it, she woke up before dawn yesterday, Sunday, and cried pretty much nonstop until the late afternoon, when her crushing hangover finally began to fade after a two-hour doze. She had moderated the drinking somewhat last night, ate some Chinese at home and then didn’t fall asleep again until three A.M.

So when she got to the police lab at nine thirty, she knew she wasn’t at or even near her physical peak. Still, you had to play the cards you got dealt, and she knew that her aces were her legs, so it would be foolish not to play them. She wore her shortest miniskirt, dark green, under a severely plunging green pullover sweater. And three-inch heels. Checking herself in her mirror before she went out, she was reasonably certain that nobody was going to spend much time noticing the pallor of her face, the sag in her cheeks, the red in her eyes.

She’d handed in the request early Saturday morning, to one of the CSI guys, who promised he’d take it out to the lab as part of their general delivery. Glitsky had been right and there had been no legal issue at all with serving a search warrant at the Curtlee mansion. Amanda was still there, going on two o’clock in the morning, when they found the safe in Eztli’s room and broke into it. What they found inside brought to six the number of handguns in the house-the Curtlee/Eztli murder weapon, the gun under Eztli’s armpit, an S &W.357 in his safe, and three other pistols in another unlocked safe in the headboard of the Curtlees’ bed. Four of the weapons were.40 caliber and could have been the weapon used to kill Matt Lewis.

For some reason, Amanda had become fixated on getting all the details right about Matt’s murder. She thought she knew that Ro had killed him, but somehow it had become very important to her to make absolutely sure, if only so that it might help her better understand, although to understand precisely what was something she could not have elucidated.

From Linda Salcedo’s statement, the murder weapon in Friday night’s massacre had been Ro’s personal gun, so what Amanda had requested was that the lab conduct a ballistics test with a bullet from that gun against the bullet that had killed Matt. Since she’d marked it as high priority and rush, she’d hoped to have it by first thing Monday morning, assumed that someone would have pulled some overtime to get it.

When she’d called at eight, hoping to get some results, they hadn’t even started yet. When she got the name of the ballistics tech, Vincent J. Abbatiello, and realized that it was a guy who sounded on the phone to be about in his late twenties, probably straight if he was a cop, she’d reached for her miniskirt.

Now Abbatiello had invited her back with him, showing off the still relatively new lab in the department’s Building 606 facility in Hunters Point Naval Shipyard with ill-concealed pride. This was an enormous and modern structure, a far cry from the tiny and cramped lab of the past. Amanda oohed and aahed her way along with him, and by the time they reached his area, what she wanted was his first priority.

Given that no one had seen fit to get to it over the weekend, Amanda was amazed at how little time it took. The lab really had modernized its capabilities, and the shooting and computer analysis of ballistics results took no more than five minutes per test, including shooting the gun and retrieving the bullet to test against the standard.

Fighting her nerves and the residual alcohol, the tension while she waited on the first test-with Ro’s gun, a Smith & Wesson Military and Police semiautomatic 9 mm-was nearly unbearable. She sat next to the microscope that Abbatiello used and while he calibrated the machine, she had to lean over, her hands over her stomach. And the result of this first test was obvious, although not in the way she hoped. It was clearly a mismatch.

“Oh God,” she said to Abbatiello. “How could that be?”

“It’s all right. We got three more tries.”

They got it on the second one.

Glitsky was down on the third floor in Amanda’s office, leaning back against one of the counters with the door closed behind him. “Doesn’t mean it wasn’t Ro,” he said.

“But it was this guy Ez’s gun. I mean, it was in his safe. It’s registered to him. He’s got a carry permit. And while we’re at it, tell me, would you, how in the world does that happen? How’s a guy like this get a carry permit?”

“He’s a citizen, right? Naturalized, but even so. He works in security. He’s got no criminal record. But mostly, Cliff Curtlee is behind him pulling strings with just a tiny bit of influence. No problem.”

“So here’s the problem with that. I don’t see him letting Ro shoot his gun. I don’t know if I see anybody letting Ro even hold a gun, much less shoot it. He might point it back at you and pull the trigger just for jollies.”

“He might.” Glitsky chewed his cheek. “Any of Ro’s prints on the gun itself?”

“No.”

“Any of this other guy?”

“Several.”

“Hm.”

“So what’s it mean, Abe? If Ro didn’t shoot him…”

“For what it’s worth, I think Ro probably shot him.”

“I know. But what if he didn’t? I mean, then what would that have all been about?” She was back on the verge of tears.

Glitsky couldn’t offer much in the way of solace. “Look,” he said, “whoever actually pulled the trigger, Ro was responsible for it. He’s responsible for all of this.”

Glitsky’s vitamin D overdose, if that’s what it was, had worn off completely by the time he stopped in front of Darrel Bracco’s desk out in the middle of the homicide detail. His inspector was filling in an administrative report of some kind, engrossed in it, when Glitsky put a haunch on the corner of his desk, sat, and said, “I don’t even want to start to tell you how much I don’t want to ask you this question.”

Bracco looked up. “Then don’t.”

“Yeah, but here’s the deal. This morning I come in to work and the world is a rosy place. Ro Curtlee is out of our hair forever. All of his cases are closed. There’s a high degree of certainty about all of this, right?”

“Right. As in none.”

“Right. So then Amanda Jenkins gets into work this morning and she’s been down at the lab doing ballistics on the bullet that killed her boyfriend.”

“Okay.”

“Actually not so okay. That bullet didn’t in fact come from Ro’s gun. It came from the bodyguard’s gun.”

Bracco clasped his hands behind his head. “Doesn’t mean Ro wasn’t shooting it.”