John Lescroart - The Motive

"Sure. I talked to her twice already. She called you?"

"She did. It seems we've been doubling up on her. I talked to her yesterday, and then evidently you came by to visit her after we'd talked, she and I?"

He answered warily. "Right. She told me you'd called her."

"Well," Glitsky said, "you won't like this, but she said you came on to her."

Cuneo's face hardened down in an instant. "She said what? How did I do that?"

"You touched her."

"I touched her. Where? Did she say?"

"Arm and shoulder."

"Arm and shoulder. As if I'd remember arm and shoulder. And that was coming on to her?" Then, a different tone. "Is she filing a complaint?"

"No."

"She says I came on to her, but she's not filing a complaint? What's that about?"

"That doesn't matter," Glitsky said. "Did you touch her?"

Cuneo paused for a second. "I really don't remember." "It would be better if you did, one way or the other." "Okay then. No, I didn't." "You're sure?"

"Positive. If I did, maybe passing by her, it was so innocent I didn't even notice."

"So if you did that, maybe by mistake, you're saying she must have overreacted?"

"Either that or just flat lied. It's been known to happen."

"And why would she do that?"

"That's what I'm asking myself, especially if she's not filing a complaint." His fingers tapped a steady beat on the snare drum. Ta da dum, ta da dum, ta da dum. "Maybe I was getting close to something she didn't want to talk about."

Glitsky leaned forward. "Do you remember what that might have been?"

Cuneo drummed some more, thinking about it. "Nothing specific."

"What did you go to see her about?"

"She was a witness who might have remembered something. You know how that is."

"Okay."

The fingers stopped. The silence this time thicker. "Okay what?"

Glitsky hesitated. "If you weren't asking her about anything specific, and didn't call on her for a specific reason-something she said the night before that bothered you, something like that-people might wonder why you went to see her in the first place." He held up a hand again. "Just an observation if the topic comes up again."

Cuneo threw him a long, flat stare. "So what did you call her about, then?"

"I called her because I was hoping somebody in the extended family might know who worked on Missy's teeth, and she was the only contact I had. I lucked out." Glitsky kept his voice calm against Cuneo's clear rage.

"Listen, I'm not accusing you of anything. If you say you didn't touch her, you didn't touch her. If you felt you had to talk to her a second time without a specific reason, that's good enough for me. Good cops have good instincts."

The kick drum went thud.

Glitsky continued. "After she gave me the dentist's name, she talked about her family and money. Things are going to be better for them all after Paul's death."

"How much better?"

"A lot."

Glitsky offered his opinion that Catherine's ingenuous and offhand cataloguing of the benefits of Paul's death mitigated considering her a suspect. So Cuneo would probably be well advised to stay away from her. If any further direct interrogation of her were necessary, Glitsky ought to do it. Cuneo didn't buy the argument. But he wasn't going to argue with the deputy chief, whose visit here had to be intimidation pure and simple.

Instead he said, "If it's my case, how about if I work it and keep you informed?"

"We could do that, but it might be awkward for me with the mayor. She asked me to stay involved. I'm asking you how I can do that and still let you do your job."

"I just told you. How about if I work it and let you know what I get?"

Glitsky put his notepad down. "I'll ask you one more time. Either you tell me how you want to do this or I'll tell you how we will do it. Is that about clear enough?"

After a minute, Cuneo nodded. "All right." He got out his own notepad, flipped a few pages. "You said the mayor might know something she's not telling you. Ask her what she really knows about Hanover."

"All right."

"Then you might see if you run across anything about Missy while you're at it."

"You think she might have been the primary target?"

"She's just as dead as Hanover. And Catherine said the two of them had been fighting."

"About the remodel? Catherine said…"

Cuneo interrupted. "Catherine, Catherine, Catherine."

"Yeah, I know."

"I didn't touch her."

"I never said you did."

A stretch of silence. Then Glitsky pulled a page of newspaper from inside his notebook, unfolded it and handed it across to Cuneo. "That's Paul and Missy three months ago at a party. It's the only picture of her I could find, which I thought was a little weird since Paul's picture was in the paper every couple of weeks. The Chron's even got a head shot of him on file. But nothing on her except this."

"She didn't like to have her picture taken."

"Apparently not."

"Why not?"

"No idea."

Cuneo finally looked at the photograph. "Somebody looks like her, you'd think she'd love to get photographed." He stared another second, emitted a low whistle. "Definite trophy material." Still, he kept his eyes on the picture.

"You see something?" Glitsky asked.

Almost as though startled out of a reverie, he said, "No. Nothing. Just a hell of a waste."

Cuneo left his house about a half hour after Glitsky had gone, and this put him in the city at around 3:30, long before his shift was scheduled to begin. But he figured he wasn't going to be on the clock for a while anyway, not if he wanted to break this case before Glitsky could claim any credit for it.

The Arson Unit had for years worked out of one of the station houses close to downtown. But that station didn't have toilets and changing areas for female firefighters, so to make room for these improvements, the Arson Unit had been transferred to its present location in a barricaded storage warehouse on Evans Street in the less-than-centrally-located, gang-infested Bayview District, far, far south of Market. Inside the cavernous main room downstairs they kept the arson van as well as spare engines and trucks and miles of hoses and other equipment. There was also the odd historical goody, such as

an engine that had been used in the 1906 earthquake and fire, with an eight-hundred-pound, five-story ladder it had taken twenty men to lift.

Becker sat upstairs at a small conference table in a common room outside of his small office. When Cuneo entered, he was turning the oversize pages of some computer printout. Looking up, and without preamble, he said, "Valero gasoline."

"What about it?"

"That's the accelerant." He tapped the pages in front of him. "We had a good-enough sample from the rug under her. We ran a mass spectrometer on it. Valero."

Cuneo drew up a chair. "They're different? I thought all gas was the same."

"Not exactly." He put a finger on the paper. "This was Valero's formulation."

"So what does that tell us?"

"Unfortunately, not a whole hell of a lot. Valero's the biggest gas producer in the country. However-the good news-it's nowhere near the market leader here in the city. And there's a Valero station not three blocks from Alamo Square. Not that our man necessarily bought the gas there, but somebody bought almost exactly two gallons on Wednesday morning. The sales get automatically recorded and we checked."

"Did anybody notice who bought it?"

"Nobody's asked yet."

Cuneo clucked. "I'll go by. I've got a picture of Missy. Maybe it'll spark something." He pulled out his notepad, unfolded the picture and passed it across. "Can you say 'babe'?"

Becker stared at it for a long moment. "This is Missy? She looks a little familiar."

"You know, I thought that, too. You heard it was her, by the way, didn't you?"