John Lescroart - The Motive

Cuneo had opened the little book and now cleared his throat. "… for some reason Mom wanted us all out for the night and told us to stay out and get a pizza or something. But the homework this week is awesome- two tests tomorrow!!-so I told Saul to just drop me off here so I could study. Had to scrounge food since Mom was gone again which is, like, getting to be the norm lately."

Cuneo paused, got a nod from the prosecutor and closed the book.

"And did you later talk to the defendant's daughter about the entry?" Rosen asked.

"I did."

"And what did she tell you?"

"She said she was home alone that night. Her mother was not home." Cuneo skipped a beat and added, gratuitously, "The defendant had lied to us."

Hardy didn't bother to object.

Cuneo's testimony took up most of the afternoon, and Braun asked Hardy if he would prefer to adjourn for the day rather than begin his cross-examination and have to pick up tomorrow where he'd left off today after only a few questions. Like everything else about a trial, there were pros and cons to the decision. Should he take his first opportunity-right now-to attack the facts and impressions of Cuneo's testimony so that the jury wouldn't go home and get to sleep on it? Or would it be better to subject the inspector to an uninterrupted cross-examination that might wear him down and get him back to his usual nervous self again? In the end, and partly because he got the sense that Braun would be happier if he chose to adjourn, and he wanted to make the judge happy, Hardy chose the latter.

So it was only a few minutes past four when he and Catherine got to the holding cell behind the courtroom.

They both sat on the concrete bench, Hardy hunched over with his head down, elbows on his knees.

"What are you thinking?" she asked.

"I'm thinking that I wish you'd have gone home after you talked to your father-in-law."

"I know."

He looked sideways at her. "So how did you hear about the fire?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if you weren't home, watching the news on television, and you weren't, what made you go back to

Paul's?"

The question stopped her cold. "I don't know. I must have heard it on the radio. Maybe I had the radio on… "

"Must have!" Hardy suddenly was sitting up straight and snapped out the words. "Maybe you had the radio on! What kind of shit is that?"

"It's not…"

"You went to the fire, Catherine. You were there, talking to Becker and Cuneo. What made you decide to go there?"

"I… I'm not sure. I mean, I knew about it, of course. You can hear something and not remember exactly where you've heard it, can't you? I was parked outside Karyn's for I don't know how long that night; then I drove all the way out to Will's office, and nobody was there that late, and after that I was just driving around, not knowing where to go. I'm sure the radio was on then, in the car. I must have had it on, and when they announced the fire…" She ran out of words.

"You told both of the inspectors and me that you heard about it on television."

"I did. I mean I remember…"

"You remember what? What you told them? Or what really happened?"

"No, both. Dismas"-she ventured to touch his arm- "don't be this way."

He pulled away from her, got to his feet. "I'm not being any way, Catherine."

"Yes, but you're scaring me."

"I'm scaring you? I must tell you, you're scaring me." He sat down again and lowered his voice. "Maybe you don't understand, but we're looking at something like five hours between when you left Paul's the first time and when you came back for the fire. You've told me all this time that you went to Karyn's house and sat outside and waited and waited for her to come home, just hoping that she'd come home, which meant she wasn't with Will. Now I'm hearing you drove out to God knows where, maybe-maybe, I love that-with the radio on… Jesus

Christ!"

Standing again, turning away from her, he walked over to the bars of the cell and grabbed and held on to them. It took a minute, but finally he got himself under control, came back and sat beside his client. "You know, Catherine, a lot of this-everything we've been through together on this, it's all felt like the right thing because I've taken so much of what you are, who you are, as a matter of faith. You're the first woman I ever loved and I don't want to believe, and have never been able to believe, that you're capable of what you're charged with here."

She started to say something, but he cut her off. "No, let me finish, please. I believed you before when you lied to me about this alibi and said you didn't want me to think you were the kind of person who would spy on her husband. Now I know you are that kind of person and I can accept it and you know what? It didn't even really change how I felt about you. It was okay. Lots of us aren't perfect-you'd be surprised. But more lies are something else again. Lies are the worst. Lies tear the fabric. I'd rather you just tell me you killed them. Because then I know who you are, and we'd work with that."

Catherine's hands were clasped in her lap and her tears were falling on them. "You know who I am."

"An hour ago I would have said that was true. Now I'm going to sit here until you tell me something I can believe."

The silence gained weight as the seconds ticked. Hardy's whole body felt the gravity of it, pulling him toward despair. He turned his head to see her. She hadn't moved. Her cheeks ran with tears. Without looking back at him, she spoke in a barely audible monotone. "I did see it on the television."

He waited.

"I went to a bar. They had a TV over the bar." "What bar?"

"Harry's on Fillmore. I stayed parked outside at Karyn's until it was dark, and when she didn't come home, I knew she was someplace with Will and I just decided… it just seemed that I ought to go cheat on him, too. Pay him back that way. My kids, my girls especially, they can't know I did this. I don't act that way, Dismas. I never had before. But I was in a panic. The life I'd had for twenty years was over. I know you see that."

"I don't know what I see," Hardy said. "Who picked you up?"

"That's just it. I chickened out. I had a margarita and talked to some guy for an hour or so, but… anyway… the fire saved me."

"On TV?"

"Yes."

"You had to go see the fire because it was your father-in-law's house?"

"Right. And only a few blocks away. I had to go." She touched his arm again, this time leaving it there. "Dismas, that's really what happened. It's what I was doing. It's why I couldn't say. You have to believe me. It's the truth."

More tears, this time Frannie's.

Her face was streaked with them as she sat holding Zachary, Treya on one side of her and two-year-old Rachel on the other, all of them on the couch in the Glitskys' living room. Treya, still wiped out, had nevertheless gotten dressed. Rachel was uncharacteristically silent, picking up the strained atmosphere from the serious adults. She sat pressed up against Frannie, holding her little brother's bootied foot in her own tiny hand.

As soon as Frannie had heard the news, she wanted to know what she could do to help. At the very least, she was bringing dinner over tonight. She called her husband at work, telling him to meet her at the Glitskys' as soon as he could get away-something was wrong with their new baby's heart. They might be taking Rachel to live with them for a while if that was needed.

"But he looks so perfect," she said, sniffling.

"I know," Treya said. "It's just that they don't really know very much yet."

"They know it's not aortic stenosis," Glitsky said, but his voice wasn't argumentative. He and the guys-his father, Nat, and Dismas Hardy-were arranged on chairs on the other side of the small room. Glitsky gave everybody a short course on the cardiologist's initial visit, the two possibilities he'd described for Zachary's condition, with the VSD being the best outcome they could have hoped for. "So we're choosing to believe that we're lucky, although at the moment I can't say that it feels like it."