John Lescroart - The Motive

"Probably killed small, cute, furry animals."

"At least."

"But you still haven't told me about Catherine." "That's because, truly, I haven't decided. The main thing is, I don't think it's likely they're going to charge her. Cuneo's just rattling her cage." "But if they do?"

"Charge her?" He turned to her. "I wouldn't take it if it would make you uncomfortable."

"It's not just me. There's this whole Cuneo thing. I know Abe's definitely worried…"

"But Abe worries for a hobby."

"Okay, but he's got a reason this time. Cuneo could make a big mess for both of you. If anything about that day ever comes out…"

"Actually," Hardy said, "that's one of the reasons the nasty side of me is almost hoping they go ahead and charge her and try to make a case with this lousy evidence."

"What reason is that?"

"Cuneo. Unless he strikes gold-or Hanover's blood on Catherine's stuff-he's got a weak case he's rushing in on. Abe says he's a sloppy investigator. That's just who he is. So depending on how fast and loose he decides to play, give me a chance to get him on a witness stand and I'll bet I can do some serious damage to his basic credibility as a cop. At least enough so nobody would be inclined to go on a wild goose chase after me and Abe on his say-so. I'd almost look forward to the chance."

Frannie sipped at her coffee. "Ifyou turned her down, how much would it cost the firm?"

Hardy considered for a minute. "High-profile murder trial? Three to five hundred thousand, maybe more. Plus, maybe, referrals."

"So do you want to do it?"

"We're not there yet. Maybe we won't get there. But really, as I said, if you've got a problem with it…" "Then I'm an insecure bitch."

"Not at all. It's completely legitimate that you'd be uncomfortable. Me and Catherine went together for three years. That's a significant chunk of time. Obviously, as I've already told you, there's still a connection. There'll always be some connection."

"And she's still attractive." Not a question.

He nodded. "She's very good-looking. But, you know, we've already done the fantasy thing with you and me this morning. I'm yours, you're mine. Like that."

"Yes, but here's a case where you can help someone you care about who you think is probably innocent and make half a million or more dollars in the bargain, and at the same time you'd get to professionally destroy someone who's out to get you and Abe. How can I ask you not to take it?"

Hardy put his coffee cup down, reached over and pulled his wife close against him. "You say, 'Diz, I'd just prefer you let someone else take this one.' "

"I'm not going to do that."

"Well, that is your decision, Flaversham." Hardy quoting a longtime household favorite line from Disney's The Great Mouse Detective. "And I haven't made my own decision yet, either."

"You can't turn her down if she needs you." "Somebody else could defend her." "But who as well as you?"

"Well… "

"But between us," Frannie added, cutting him off, "it is a little scary."

Just off the main lobby in Hardy's Sutter Street offices, the Solarium conference room contained a proni-sion of greenery-rubber trees, ferns, dieffenbachia. One of the associates had even brought a redwood tree in a two-hundred-gallon pot; thriving, its trunk was a foot thick and its boughs scraped the glass ceiling.

Now, after he and Frannie had continued their morning date with an early lunch, cell phones off, at Petit Robert, Hardy sat in one of the sixteen chairs that surrounded the immense mahogany table in the center of the room. Waiting for him on his arrival at the office were three urgent calls from Catherine Hanover-the first when the police had come early in the morning to serve a subpoena for her to appear tomorrow to testify in front of the grand jury, the second when Cuneo had arrived personally to deliver another search warrant at her house, and the third in a barely controlled, I need help right now hysteria, similar in tone to the first call he'd gotten from her on Saturday night. He called her right back and told her to get down to the office as soon as she could. She was barely coherent. Her voice had been choked and hoarse-"I'm sorry. I can't seem to stop crying."

Hanging up, he put in a call to Abe's pager. He wondered what, if anything, had happened on Sunday, or maybe Saturday, with the results of the first search warrant. Had the lab in fact uncovered significant evidence?

Clear on what he next wanted to do, Hardy forced himself to take a moment before he did it. Every action he took now as Catherine's de facto lawyer moved him closer to the decision he hadn't yet consciously made. But at each small incremental step, he didn't seem to be able to stop himself. Of course he would call Catherine back after her three urgent calls. What else could he do? Of course he would page Glitsky and try to discover what the police had come up with. On some level, he felt he didn't really have a choice. But up until now, his moves had been small and personal. What he contemplated next was larger and more public. He wanted more certainty about his commitment before he moved.

Whether it was more hangover from the guilt he'd felt at the way he'd had to drop her so long ago or a testament to the bond they'd once forged together, he couldn't deny that between him and Catherine there remained a strong personal connection. They'd come of age in the same culture-it had been immediately clear to Hardy on Saturday night at her house, when they'd easily fallen into a comfortable familiarity, even with the hard questions. The plain fact was that she'd been his first love, and the person he'd become could not bring himself to abandon her when she needed him so badly. Even as he recognized that she might-he told himself it was an infinitesimally small chance-even now be playing him. Because she knew she could.

But that, he told himself, was her fate, her karma. Hardy himself had no choice but to be true to his own character, and to trust that she would not betray him.

Finally, telling Phyllis to interrupt him if Glitsky called, he rang up the district attorney's office, where he talked to the relatively new chief assistant district attorney, Craig Bellarios, about the grand jury subpoena. There was really only one question Hardy needed to have answered, and that was whether his client-his client!-was considered a "target" of the investigation, i.e., a suspect, as opposed to a witness.

Bellarios, who didn't know Hardy very well, wasn't the most forthcoming man on the planet. He told Hardy that he couldn't predict what the grand jury would do, and that it was always wise to be prepared for any eventuality. Thanking him for nothing, Hardy asked and did learn the name of the presenting prosecutor-Chris Rosen-and called him next, but he was out.

He sensed a stonewall and it tightened his stomach. If things had gotten to this juncture already, he had no choice but to tell Catherine to plead the Fifth Amendment before the grand jury and to refuse to talk anymore to the police. And in the terrible catch-22 of the legal game, once she adopted that strategy, though technically she'd still be a witness, in the eyes of the prosecution she would have moved a long way toward becoming the target of the investigation.

Now, with his legal pad and another cup of coffee on the table in front of him, Hardy was cramming with a single-minded attention, reviewing all the notes he'd taken at Catherine's on Saturday night. Feeling her presence as soon as she entered the lobby, he looked up, stood and walked over to the Solarium door. "Catherine."

If she'd been crying, there was no sign of it anymore, other than maybe an added luminosity to her eyes. She wore a well-tailored khaki-colored pantsuit. Hardy was thinking that he was glad she'd chosen demure even as she turned toward him to reveal a light tangerine garment with a lace top, a sweep of decolletage underneath the jacket. An elegant chain of malachite beads encircled her neck and rested in the deep hollow of her chest. He realized that she'd had her breasts enlarged.