John Lescroart - The Hearing

'No. I've tried to remember for myself. But she never said. I'm sure. She just said she had a meeting and she'd see me tomorrow. She was always going to meetings.'

'And she didn't seem upset? Did she act as if anything was bothering her?'

Treya hesitated, met Glitsky's eyes again. 'It's so hard to say now, knowing what happened. Everything has a different feel. You wonder if you saw something or not.'

'But you think you did?'

She shook her head. 'I'm not sure. If she'd come in on Monday, smiling and happy, I never would have given it a thought. I know I didn't think about it when I got home Sunday night. I just thought she was over-booked, like she gets. Got.' The tense shift bothered her, and she stopped.

'It's OK.' Glitsky had to fight the urge to reach over and touch her, offer her some comfort. Instead, he sat back, no threat and no push, and let her find the thread again. 'It's OK,' he repeated.

'I know, I know.' Her look was grateful, and she held it on him for an instant. Then she nodded and sighed. 'Now I'd say that yes, something might have been bothering her. She seemed a little… detached.' Treya hastened to protect her boss. 'But she'd get that way sometimes. She always had a lot on her mind, on her plate.'

Suddenly Treya's expressive face took on a different look – a sudden impatience with all this, an almost angry frustration.

'What are you thinking?' Glitsky asked.

'I'm thinking she didn't know her killer. This is stupid. Her murder wasn't connected to anything. Nobody she knew could have wanted to kill her.' She raised her eyes, a challenge with some barb in it that he didn't quite understand. 'You had to know her.'

'I did,' Glitsky replied. 'I thought she was fantastic.'

'She never mentioned you as a friend.' Suddenly the barb in her voice was pronounced, unmistakable – all of her protective instincts on display from out of nowhere.

'Well, no, not exactly a friend. I knew her when she worked at the Hall.'

'I knew that. I knew who you were. I was there then too, as a clerk.'

Glitsky had no response to this, although Treya seemed in some way to hold it against him. He attempted to get beyond it. 'In any event, that's another reason why I'd like to know what she might have been working on. I've got kind of a personal interest as well.'

But if he thought this admission would ally him with Treya, he was mistaken. 'So you've kept up on her career since she'd left the Hall?'

He answered guardedly. 'A little bit, yes.'

'In a kind of a hands-off way.'

Glitsky raised his shoulders awkwardly. 'I guess you'd say I admired her from a distance.' He wondered how suddenly everything had gone so wrong with this interview. 'I'm sorry if I've offended you.'

'Not at all,' she said. 'You're only doing your job. But Elaine is very personal to me. I know who her friends were and it's a little insulting to pretend you were close to her too, so maybe I'd tell you more.'

'That wasn't what I was doing.'

'Really?' she asked with ill-concealed disbelief. 'Then I'm sorry I got that impression. Perhaps I overreacted.' All business now, Treya cut off further inquiry as she stood, signaling – although it was not her place to do so – that the interview was over. 'I'm sure the firm wouldn't object if you got a warrant for her files or to go over her client list. You might find something there that you're looking for.'

Glitsky rarely felt either inept or out of his depth, but he now felt both, and acutely. Perhaps it was a sense of foolishness because he found her so physically attractive and at such an inappropriate time. Whatever it was, he was standing along with her, not willing to risk falling any further in her esteem.

He hadn't gotten anywhere here and, in fact, he'd had little confidence that any real evidence was going to come from this quarter. But it had been the only place he could think of to begin, to connect with someone who had known her.

'Ms Ghent, please.' His shoulders were sagging. He was a pathetic figure – he knew it. Regal, she stopped at the entrance to the cubicle, turned back to face him, challenging, her arms crossed, her color now high in her cheeks.

'I want you to understand that I'm not looking for specific evidence. I'm trying to get a sense of her work, her life, if maybe there was some reason…' Too close to revealing the non-professional truth about why he'd come here, he stood mute and helpless.

Treya Ghent gave every appearance of considering his words, but when she finally spoke, there was no sign of cooperation. 'I really don't think so, but if anything occurs to me, Lieutenant, I'll let you know.'

This time, it was a dismissal.

At high noon, Hardy walked into the small lobby for the segregated jailing rooms at the hospital. It was a depressing and cold room, dimly lit, with high barred windows and a strong smell of antiseptic, sweaty yellowing walls and a couple of battered wooden benches, although no one was using them at the moment. To his left, a uniformed female officer sat at a pitted green desk equipped with a computer terminal and a telephone. She looked up at Hardy's arrival with a kind of relief. He went across to her and stated his business.

'You know he's already got a visitor. His mother.'

It didn't take phenomenal cosmic powers to realize that Jody Burgess had made a poor impression on this woman. Hardy gave her a sympathetic smile. 'Her poor baby isn't a criminal, he's sick. There's been some terrible mistake. You can't keep him here and it's all your fault and she's going to sue.'

The officer smiled back at him. 'You've been reading my mail.'

'Maybe I can calm her down.'

'Maybe.' She pushed a button on her desk and an instant later another uniformed officer – this one a large white male – pushed open the door at the other end of the room. Hardy thanked her and she gave him a shrug. 'Have fun,' she said.

When the guard unlocked the door to Cole's room, Hardy understood why seasoned jailbirds might try to pull some kind of scam to get a few days here. It wasn't the Ritz, but it was far better than a shared cell at the jail behind the Hall of Justice – a private room with a window and a television set, now blessedly dark and silent, suspended from the ceiling.

Cole was propped halfway up in a hospital bed, a clean sheet covering him to the waist. Wearing a standard hospital gown, he might have been any badly beaten-up patient except for the handcuffs which shackled him to the bed's railing. An older, slightly more corn-fed but not unattractive version of Dorothy Elliot sat holding his free hand on the window side of the bed.

'Knock if you have any trouble,' the guard said, and closed the door. Hardy took a step forward and introduced himself – Dorothy's friend.

'Thank God,' Jody Burgess exclaimed, standing up, coming around the bed with a kind of buoyantly expectant expression and both arms outstretched. 'Mr Hardy,' she enthused, 'Dorothy told me what you did and I don't know how we'll ever be able to thank you.'

She wore an expensive-looking, baggy, dark green jogging outfit with an unfamiliar logo over the left breast. As she came closer, Hardy noted the carefully-applied make-up, dyed blonde hair, and a lot of baubles, costume jewelry -earrings and bracelets, rings with large colored stones on both hands. He pegged her at sixty-two or -three, going for forty without great success.

'I didn't really do much.' Hardy felt that he had, in fact, done nothing. From what he'd been told, Cole had been here in the hospital by the time Hardy had arrived at the Hall of Justice yesterday afternoon. He assayed a polite smile. They would have gotten to testing your son, Mrs Burgess, but-'

'Don't be so humble. If you hadn't stepped in, Cole would still be over at the jail. They wouldn't be taking care of him like this.' The woman's effusiveness was slightly overwhelming. She grabbed Hardy's hand in both of hers and held it tightly.