John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

‘About her work?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe. That’s what I read. It was her work.’

‘That got her killed? That means it probably wasn’t Ron.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe not.’ Canetta shrugged with what Hardy thought was an exaggerated nonchalance. ‘Which brings us back. Maybe Ron knows something.’

‘I wonder if he knows what it is.’

Canetta nodded. ‘Or finally figured something out. If it was her work. Maybe that’s why he ran, if he did.’

Hardy knew next to nothing about gas additives or the wars related to them. His concern was limited to his wife at the moment. But if Canetta needed to air his theories, it wouldn’t hurt to listen. He pushed the play button again.

They’d gotten to Wednesday morning now, yesterday. Dé jà vu as Hardy heard Theresa Wilson’s voice again, from Merryvale. The Beaumont children hadn’t yet arrived at school and she was calling Ron to find out why, where they might be.

Hardy hit pause. ‘So if we assume the kids were at school and got picked up Tuesday, he left right after that.’

Next up was Marie for the second time.

Then the last voice. ‘Hi Ron. You know I told you about this subpoena I got? I’m worried. I’m sure they’re going to want me to talk about you and Bree. We need to get together to keep our stories straight. But don’t call here after about six thirty. I’ll try to reach you again when I can talk. Are you there? Ron?’ The tape went silent.

‘ “Keep our stories straight,” ’ Canetta said into the vacuum. ‘That doesn’t sound very good, does it?’

Hardy turned to him, his voice flat. ‘That was my wife.’

Canetta fixated on Frannie telling Ron that they had to keep their stories straight. To Hardy, the most telling line had been when she told him not to call after six thirty – not to call, that is, after Hardy might be home. Again the truth jolted him – it had been no simple oversight that had kept her from mentioning the subpoena to him. She wanted to keep her relationship with Ron hidden and this realization, though maybe predictable, hit him like a jab to the solar plexus.

But it wouldn’t be smart to share his reaction with Canetta. The point was that there were no hints about Ron’s disappearance on the answering machine. Hardy wasn’t going to locate him, not tonight, and that meant he wasn’t getting Frannie out of jail.

To Hardy, it was obvious that Canetta was consciously resisting the urge to talk about Frannie’s involvement. The sergeant cursorily rearranged a few items on the desk. When he’d stalled long enough, he straightened up, turned around, and cleared his throat. ‘Well, since we’re here, we might as well make sure nobody’s dead in the other rooms. What do you say?’

They walked down the hallway and turned into the first of the bedrooms, a child’s room with a twin bed made up neatly with a white lace bedspread. There was a collection of dolls on the bed and a decent-sized pile of beanie babies in the corner. On the wall, stenciled roses in half-a-dozen colors bloomed on the powder-blue sponge-painted wall.

Canetta walked directly across the room and opened the top dresser drawer. ‘Look at this.’ Hardy came up behind him. Except for a couple of pairs of socks, there wasn’t anything to see. ‘They’re gone,’ Canetta observed. ‘We’d better be, too.’

On the way out, Hardy made sure the front door was locked behind them. The two men rode down the elevator in an awkward silence, then crossed the lobby and stepped outside.

‘What’s your plan now?’ Canetta asked.

Hardy didn’t know. It was late and nothing had worked. He shrugged. ‘Try to find him. See if his kids are in school. If not, tell Glitsky, I suppose. If he’s on the run…’

A silence fell and Hardy sighed.

‘Your wife?’

A nod. ‘They’ve got her locked up at the county jail. The two of them, Frannie and Ron, he told her some secret…’ Again, he just trailed off. It sounded so lame. ‘She told me he’d never let her stay down there if he knew she was in jail, but it was his secret to tell, not hers. She promised him.’

Canetta had no solace to offer. Hardy could see what he was thinking and, worse, didn’t blame him. ‘Well, good luck.’

He drove around for a while, trying to decide whether to visit the jail again, go home and sleep, or wake up a judge. Everything felt wrong. Finally he wound up on Sutter Street, in front of David Freeman’s building, where he worked.

Upstairs in his office, Hardy called and woke up Glitsky at home. The lieutenant agreed that Ron Beaumont’s disappearance – if that’s what it was – increased his profile as a murder suspect. It didn’t help Frannie either. Finally, Glitsky promised that he would get in early tomorrow and talk to Scott Randall, maybe try to pull a string or two at the jail, but he didn’t hold out much hope.

After he hung up, Hardy thought a moment and seriously considered a night raid on Braun’s house, maybe getting David Freeman to accompany him, to make his case to the judge. But he knew he’d only make things worse with any kind of spontaneous act in the mood he was in.

He had to think, develop a plan, stay rational. But the thought of his wife lying on one of the jail cots, surrounded by scum, terrified and unprotected, made this a tall order.

It took very little imagination to see her there, curled under the thin fabric of the institutional blanket. Smells of disinfectant, sounds of desperation. Wide-eyed and sleepless on the unyielding mattress, wondering what she’d done, how it had happened. What tomorrow would bring.

Four days! Hardy suddenly sat upright with the realization. Braun had given her four days. She couldn’t do four days, even in AdSeg. He knew his wife, or thought he did. Four days in jail would cause a lot of damage that would be a long time healing.

He sat trying to come up with something, anything. But it was the middle of the night, and the world was asleep. At a little after one o’clock, he accepted that he’d failed. He wasn’t getting his wife out of jail today. If he didn’t get at least a little rest, he wouldn’t be any good for her tomorrow either.

There was nothing to do but go home.

But his night wasn’t over yet.

His house was a railroad-style Victorian – a long hallway down one side with rooms coming off to the right – about fifteen blocks from the beach, well within San Francisco’s belt of nearly perennial fog. He’d run into the wall of it, and by the time he’d reached his street, his windshield wipers were beating a steady rhythm. Of course there was no available street parking, but tonight he decided to take the risk and left his car in a no-parking zone right around the corner on Clement. He figured he’d be up and out before dawn anyway – most days the parking enforcers didn’t get rolling until well after that.

The house sat between a brace of four-story apartment buildings and was set back maybe forty feet from the curb. Hardy couldn’t see it until he was right in front. As he opened the gate through the white picket fence, he couldn’t see Moses, either, sitting on the darkened porch with his back against the front door. ‘Where is she?’

The surprise of the voice out of the dead night fog almost knocked him backwards. When he got moving again, he didn’t waste any words. ‘Still locked up. Let’s go inside.’

Erin sat in her bathrobe, her feet up under her in the window seat, the blinds closed against the night and the fog. Moses paced in front of the fire’s embers. Ed Cochran snored gently in Hardy’s favorite recliner, so Hardy had pulled in one of the dining-room chairs and now straddled it backwards. After twenty minutes of regaling them with the highlights of his frustrating night, he’d just asked if either one of them had heard Frannie talk about Ron Beaumont, his kids, Bree’s death, or anything that might relate.