John Lescroart - Damage

“Right. If the new trial ever happens.”

“Well, even if it doesn’t, what kind of threat are you to him?”

Michael nodded. “Maybe you’re right.”

“I think I am. Why would he come after you? You’ve been put in your place after last time. You’re not trying to get him thrown back in jail. I’d be surprised if he knew or cared if you were still alive.”

Janice added, “I think Chuck’s right, here, Michael. We don’t have to worry about them anymore. They took their best shot at you, and it wasn’t enough.”

“But pretty darn close,” Michael said. “Pretty darn close.”

At 5:05 on a Friday afternoon almost three weeks later, the man who ran San Francisco’s homicide detail picked up the telephone at his desk within the first half of the first ring. At the same time, he pulled his pad over in front of him, tucked the phone at his ear, and grabbed a pen. “Glitsky.”

“Lieutenant.” The female voice was metallic and without inflection. “We’ve got a female body at a probable arson fire scene at four twenty Baker, nearest cross street is Oak. Apartment number six. Fire is contained. Arson’s taking jurisdiction, but local squad units, precinct captain, CSI, and paramedics are en route.”

“Roger that.” Glitsky was writing down the essentials. “I’ll get a team rolling out there. Four twenty Baker, number six.”

“That’s it.”

Hanging up, Glitsky pushed back from his desk.

Fifty-seven years old, he stood six foot two and weighed 210 pounds. During college, he had been a tight end for San Jose State at the same weight. Though his eyes were blue, his skin was dark, his nose prominent and slightly hooked. His father, Nat, was Jewish; his mother, Emma, long deceased, had been African American. His short Afro had by now gone mostly gray. A thick scar bisected his lips top to bottom at an acute angle. Today, as most days on the job, he wore civilian clothes-black cop shoes, dark blue khaki slacks with a thin black belt, a light brown ironed shirt, and black tie. No one had ever called him a snappy dresser.

On a whiteboard hanging on the wall directly across from his chair, he daily kept track of the twelve inspectors in the detail-their assignments and active cases. Today, that board was filled. It had been a busy winter for homicides in San Francisco.

Glitsky was around his desk, heading for the door out to the large room that held the inspectors’ desks, when he stopped for a moment to glance at the whiteboard. He knew it by heart, of course, but now it struck him anew. Each of Glitsky’s six homicide teams and his one solo inspector were currently working at least two murders. He needed more people, but what with budget issues, he knew he was lucky to not have had his staff cut by the morons, sycophants, and cretins who controlled these things.

His second wife, Treya, had worked since she’d met him, to no avail, to persuade Glitsky to try to temper somewhat his default expression, a flat, deathless, and menacing stare. He wasn’t interested; the look had served him well at work, even if it sometimes terrified small children, even his own. Glitsky thought this was a reasonable trade-besides, it didn’t hurt children to have a bit of a healthy fear of their father. Glitsky’s large intelligent brow jutted over intense blue eyes. When he was thinking or daydreaming or actively scowling-all regular occurrences-the scar between his lips stood out in relief.

When people weren’t calling him a snappy dresser, they often at the same time weren’t calling him a sweetheart.

By the time Glitsky made it out to the fire scene through rush hour traffic, dusk had just about settled into night. This is not to say that it was dark in the immediate vicinity. Between the flashing red and blue police-car lights, the lamps on the firemen’s helmets, the streetlights, and the kliegs from the several TV vans that had converged on the block, the place was lit up like a movie shoot.

Glitsky parked in the middle of Baker Street next to one of the fire trucks. Getting out of his city-issued car, he caught a gust of bitter, cold wind, heavily laden with the smell of smoke. He flashed his badge and signed into the scene with the cop who was controlling access to the area.

A man wearing a white fire helmet, the incident commander, stood talking with another man in civilian clothes on the sidewalk in front of a stoop that led up to a three-story Victorian.

As Glitsky walked over to check in with them, his shoes squished in the still-wet street. Stopping to zip his heavy leather jacket up against the cold, he noticed that several pairs of uniformed precinct cops were standing around by their squad cars, aimless. He was tempted to go over and personally motivate them to get back in their cars and on patrol, where they were supposed to be, working. But indulging this fantasy, he knew, would only come back to bite him-hard-ass homicide lieutenant lording it over the serfs, taking his job too seriously.

But that he had the fantasy at all served as a wake-up call: He was seething. The feeling had snuck up on him full-blown. It was a Friday night and he should by now be home with his wife and children. He didn’t resent the overtime, never had, but he did when the idiocy of the bureaucrats and politicians gave him no choice-when he didn’t have enough staff or the budget to get the job done, so he had to step in and do it himself. And he knew that he could have simply assigned an already overworked homicide team to take this case, but that wasn’t leadership, and it wasn’t his style.

Fifty feet on down the street, somebody was giving an interview to one of the TV stations, and that had attracted its own small crowd. Looking up at the obvious site of the blaze, Glitsky saw that the fire itself was out; teams of firemen were rolling up hoses, sweeping the gutters, cleaning up. Moving forward, Glitsky crunched along over debris and broken glass. Closer now, he recognized the incident commander in the white helmet as Norm Shaklee and the man with whom he was talking, the city’s chief arson inspector attached to the Bureau of Fire Investigations, Arnie Becker.

Putting his anger in its secret place, he arranged his face and said hello to the men, both of whom knew him and greeted him cordially.

And then Becker said, “So they’re sending out the big guns on homicides now?”

Glitsky kept it loose. “I sent myself. I was the only one in the office.” He shrugged. “What are you going to do? So what do we have?”

“Pretty definitely arson. Started on the third floor, luckily, and even better luck, the neighbor across the hall smelled it early and called it right in. There’ll be water damage and the usual mess, but the residents can probably move back in in a week or so. We only got a total loss on the one apartment out of six.”

“What about our victim?”

“We don’t know too much about her yet. The apartment was rented by a woman named Felicia Nuñez.”

Glitsky’s brow clouded briefly. “Do I know that name?”

Becker shrugged. “I’d bet there’s more than one of them. It’s common enough. Anyway, that’s probably who she is, but we don’t know that absolutely, and nobody’s going to identify her from what we got up there, that’s for sure. We’ll probably have to wait for dentals.” Becker’s eyes, which in his career had already seen it all, went a little dull. “You should know that whoever set the apartment on fire, set her on fire first. It looked like she was probably naked or close to it when he poured whatever it was on her genitals and lit her up. And it spread from there.”

“So. Rape?”

“Probably, I’d guess. And I’d imagine he killed her first, although that’ll be the ME’s call. That and how he did it. Nobody heard any screams or struggling, and there were people right below and across from her in the building. We may never really know about the rape. I’d be surprised if they get DNA from her. She’s burned up pretty bad.”