John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

Along the right wall, some hunting prints hung over an exercise area – a stationary bike and some barbells. Then another doorway, leading to another bathroom, was slightly ajar. Finally, coming back around to where they stood, there was a comfortable-looking stuffed leather chair with matching ottoman, another reading lamp, and a Bombay & Company lion’s claw table which seemed to double as a writing desk, with its brass lamp, large green blotter, and ship in a bottle.

‘I like it,’ Hardy said. ‘I could use a room like this.’

‘You don’t feel it?’

Hardy took another second or two. ‘I don’t feel anything, Abe, except that this is a great room. I want a room like this.’

‘That’s my point,’ Glitsky said. ‘Every guy wants a room like this. You know why? This is a guy’s room.’

He crossed to the closet and pulled aside one of the paneled doors. Hardy was a step behind him and found himself looking at several suits, coats, shirts, a tie rack. On the floor were a dozen or more pairs of shoes, neatly arranged – dress, tennis, sandals, slippers. Glitsky nodded as though he’d found what he expected.

He walked to the other end of the closet and slid that door back. It was far less crowded. Glitsky started flicking the few hanging items aside. ‘Two dresses, three skirts, and four sweaters,’ he said, then went into a squat, reached around on the floor, arranging. ‘Three and a half pairs of women’s shoes, not to mention three more dresses on the floor. How in the world did even Carl miss this?’

‘Maybe he found something else that caught his attention and got him killed first.’

Glitsky stood slowly, grimacing, a hand on his back. ‘How do you get this old?’

‘Stubbornly refuse to die?’

Glitsky broke a small smile. ‘Words to live by. Bathroom?’

‘No, thanks, I just went.’

The smile vanished as mysteriously as it had come. ‘Hopeless,’ Abe said, and pushed open the bathroom door. Compared to the spaciousness of the master bedroom, it wasn’t much more than a utilitarian closet – six by eight feet with a double-hung window over a blue tiled sink, a towel rack with one orange towel, a toilet with the seat up. Significantly, Hardy thought, there was no tub, only a glassed-in shower.

Hardy reached around and opened the medicine cabinet, which was nearly empty – bottles of Tylenol, Nyquil, some Band-Aids, razor blades. ‘Lots of couples have different bathrooms.’

‘Happy ones don’t have different bedrooms, though,’ Glitsky replied. ‘I’ve done research. It’s a true fact.’

Glitsky was moving again, and Hardy tagged along. They passed back through Ron’s room and stopped at the dresser, which Glitsky opened with the same basic results – a few articles of women’s underclothes in two of the drawers. But four of the drawers out of six were packed, even overpacked, with Ron’s clothes – jeans, junk, polo shirts and T-shirts, sweaters, socks and underwear. When Glitsky closed the last drawer, he straightened up. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘you could take a million pictures of this room, and I bet the scene guys did, and you wouldn’t see any evidence of a crime.’

‘I don’t either. So they lived in different rooms, so what?’

‘This, to you, isn’t some evidence of marital conflict?’

Hardy shrugged. ‘It doesn’t mean he killed her. Besides, Frannie said they were having troubles.’

‘Don’t remind me. It does make me wonder, though,’ he said, ‘just how she got pregnant.’

Immersed in paper at the desk in Bree’s office, Glitsky was going through the hard copy file, folder by folder – propaganda by the armload on what Hardy thought must be every imaginable side of the additive issue. Legislative reports, news clippings, executive summaries from various think tanks, media alerts. MTBE, ethanol, reformulated gasoline. It ran the gamut from copies of faxed pages to four-color advertising pieces, from page fragments to small booklets.

‘Fascinating stuff,’ Glitsky said. He was going fast, to Hardy’s eye ignoring everything that wasn’t personal in Bree’s personal files, laying a slush pile of Bree’s professional work on the desk to his right, behind him. Hardy made some noise that might have sounded like asking for permission, got a grunt in reply, so grabbed a handful and walked out into the hallway, where he folded it all up and tucked it inside his jacket.

He then returned to Bree’s room.

Further evidence that Ron and Bree had lived separate lives, all right. Her bed was smaller, a double. It had a bright floral comforter and flounced pillows that matched. Even now, a month after her death, a woman’s scent of perfume and powder hung subtly in the air. Her bathroom was done in light salmon tones and was three times the size of Ron’s, with an oversized tub and make-up table, as much a woman’s bathroom as Ron’s was a man’s.

Back in the bedroom, Hardy stood at the bookshelves – floor-to-ceiling built-ins that covered half the back wall. Possibly it shouldn’t have surprised him after what he’d heard about Bree the ugly duckling from Damon Kerry, but the entire bottom shelf was filled with paperback romance novels. Next up was a half shelf of paperback commercial fiction, then a couple of shelves of hardbound literary fiction – almost entirely by modern women writers. Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Gates, Barbara Kingsolver, Laurie Colwin, Amy Tan – a scientist with good literary taste, Hardy thought. Then a surprise – what looked to be a full set of Tony Hillerman. So Chee and Leaphorn had been in her consciousness, too. Maybe helping to spark the idealism that had driven her so strongly in her last months.

On the top shelf, though, at the end of the large section on travel books, next to a new copy of What To Expect When You ‘re Expecting , was the one Hardy thought he recognized and knew he wanted. He took the oversized book down and brought it over to the small reading chair next to the bed.

Her high school yearbook. Passages 81, from Lincoln High in Evanston, Illinois.

There were the usual autographs: ‘To the smartest girl in the world.’ ‘Chemistry would have beat me without you.’ ‘Who needs boys when you’ve got brains?’ ‘Lab rats rule!’

And then, from one of her teachers, the one Hardy needed: ‘To Bree Brunetta, my best student ever!’

He quickly turned through the seniors and found her – Bree Brunetta. Without the maiden name, he never would have been able to find, much less recognize, the ravishing Bree Beaumont from the uninspired and formal cap-and-gown photograph.

Bree Brunetta, at seventeen, had been slightly overweight with dark unkempt hair, bangs down over her eyes, braces, clunky glasses. The ugly duckling indeed, Hardy thought. There was a recent picture of Bree with the kids next to the bed and he looked at the smiling face with the shining blond hair, the cheekbones, the perfect mouth – it was hard to reconcile the two images.

He flipped through the rest of the book quickly. Bree had been an active and seemingly well-rounded student, a member of the Debating Society, the Science Club, the Chess Club. She played clarinet in the band and was the ‘features’ editor of the student newspaper. She was voted the Smartest Girl.

Hardy happened to notice one other detail, one of those cruel high-school moments that scar a kid for life. Bree was voted ‘least likely to get a date with Scott lePine,’ the Most popular Guy, Best-looking Guy, and Most Likely to Succeed. Whichever kids dreamed up that category must have thought it was hysterical. Hardy guessed Bree wouldn’t have thought so.

There were some letters on three-ring binder paper folded over in the back, and he was just opening one when he heard Glitsky’s steps coming quickly down the hallway. He folded the letters back and put them with the literature into his inside pocket as well. Then he closed the book as Glitsky appeared at the door to Bree’s room. His eyes had a haunted look. ‘I just got beeped. I’ve got to go,’ he said.