John Lescroart - Nothing But The Truth

‘And do what?’

‘And tell a DA named Scott Randall anything he wants to know.’

Ron took a seat on a low leather couch. Hardy, still pumped up, remained standing. ‘My understanding,’ Ron said, ‘was that you were going to wait until tomorrow. Then Frannie was free to tell anything, everything. And the children and I would be gone.’

He clipped out the words. ‘Yep. That was it.’

‘But?’

‘But now she’s not sure she can do it.’

‘Why not? I’ve…’

Hardy raised his voice. ‘It’s not you, god damn it! It’s not anything you forbid or allow. It’s her.’ He shook his head, reining in the emotion, and got his voice under control. ‘The way she sees it, as soon as she tells them your situation, your kids suffer. They’ve got to move and start over.’

‘But that’s not Frannie’s doing.’

It still galled Hardy to hear this man refer to his wife so familiarly, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He bore some of the responsibility for that himself. ‘No,’ he said, ‘and as soon as they indict you, which is tomorrow, it’s going to happen anyway.’

‘So what’s her problem with it?’

Hardy suddenly felt stupid holding the gun. Tucking it back into his belt, now invisible again under his jacket, he stepped across to a wingback chair and sat on the edge of it, across from Ron. ‘She doesn’t see it as a problem,’ he said. ‘She’s willing to trade a few more hours in jail, to give me a few more hours…’ He stopped.

‘To find who killed Bree?’

Hardy leaned forward and eyed him coldly. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘To find who killed your sister.’

Ron didn’t give it up right away. He put on a quizzical expression, as though he really didn’t understand what Hardy had just said. ‘You mean my wife. Bree.’

‘I mean Bree all right,’ Hardy replied. ‘But she wasn’t your wife. She was your sister.’

For the third time since they’d arrived, a cable car rattled by outside on Mason, shaking the floorboards of the apartment. The conductor had a heavy hand with the famous bells, too.

Ding ding ding ding ding!

Glitsky had always been under the impression that sounds were muffled by heavy fog, but this clanging, certainly, was an exception to it. He decided it must affect only the lower register.

The shaking under him increased and for an instant the lieutenant thought it might be a real earthquake. Thorne’s work area was a desk in his living room, up against the front window overlooking the street. Glitsky had been going through a stack of computer printouts, and now pushed the ergonomic chair back a couple of inches, ready to bolt for a doorway if things began to fall around him. ‘It’s hard to believe that people pay real money to live with this experience.’

On the couch behind him, Jorge Batavia patiently lifted another page of printed matter from a suitcase he’d placed on the coffee table. He scanned it quickly, and set it on the pile of rejected paper next to him. ‘It’s new-age therapy,’ he said. ‘Every fifteen minutes you get to wonder if your building is going to fall down.’ The sergeant put aside another page. ‘You think you’re going to die four times an hour, you squeeze what you can out of every minute. Your life experience is enriched.’

The shaking had stopped, punctuated by a last burst of clanging. ‘Good theory.’ Glitsky pulled forward again, and went back to his stack of paper.

There was also a computer on the table, but Glitsky didn’t dare even turn the thing on. He thought there was a reasonable likelihood that the thing was booby-trapped, so he had placed a call back to the Hall to have one of the cyber-specialists come down and unplug it, then bring it downtown for examination.

It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough to look at. Thorne put out a prodigious amount of paper, and Glitsky and Batavia had been at his hard-copy files for almost an hour.

Batavia and Coleman had been checking in at homicide after Glitsky had returned to the office with his newly signed warrant. He had asked Batavia to accompany him on the search of Thorne’s place while Coleman went to talk to Jim Pierce again about his activities on Saturday night.

While Glitsky and Hardy thought they might be closing in on Damon Kerry – perhaps through some agent of Baxter Thorne - Coleman and Batavia had moved Pierce up a notch or two on their possible suspect list. This was mostly because a review of the business calendar he’d provided for them had revealed another questionable alibi – a two-hour gap after Bree’s funeral, during which he’d had lunch alone at a crowded Chinese counter restaurant. This was when someone had killed Griffin, and made it three out of three for Pierce’s squishy alibis. That in turn piqued the inspectors’ curiosity.

But Glitsky had developed a personal hard-on for Thorne. As Hardy had pointed out, even a tenuous connection to the weekend’s water poisoning at Pulgas was going to make life very difficult for Mr Thorne. If they found any tie-in to Bree Beaumont, it would even be worse.

Between him and Batavia, they’d already done a thorough job on the kitchen, the waste baskets, and garbage cans. In the bedroom, there was nothing in or taped under any of the drawers of the dresser or night table, nothing tucked between the box spring and the mattress.

Glitsky went to the computer table while Batavia checked the bedroom closet and found shoes and hanging clothes and the suitcase filled with propaganda. Batavia brought the suitcase into the living room, but thus far, they’d found nothing at all – no longhand drafts or fragments of the damning press release, no final or proof copies, no printing or copying bills.

The rest of his records were similarly disappointing. His bills and check register revealed nothing unusual – phone, electric, rent, credit card payments. If he hired operatives, he kept no records of them here. There weren’t any random keys. Apparently he didn’t own a gun.

When Glitsky could free up another inspector or two, by Christmas, he intended to do a similar search on the offices of FMC, although he’d believed that his best hope on Thorne was an unexpected search of his apartment.

But maybe he was wrong.

After another few minutes, he heard Batavia move behind him. ‘Well, that was a slice.’ Glitsky turned around and saw the sergeant returning the large stack of pamphlets, letters, and other reading material back into the suitcase. ‘All of these are older. Weeks, even months. Nothing on Pulgas.’

He closed the suitcase and stood up. ‘I’ll keep looking.’

Glitsky heard a key in the front door. He pushed the chair back and stood up as a short, well-dressed man appeared in the alcove. He wore a hat with a small feather in it, gloves, and a tweed overcoat. Behind him stood the building manager who’d let Abe into the apartment and then, apparently, called Thorne at his work.

The dapper man stared at Glitsky with a dead expression, then transferred it to Batavia as he entered the living room from wherever he’d been. His tone was completed uninflected. ‘What is the meaning of this outrageous intrusion?’

‘You’re Mr Thorne I presume.’ Glitsky had his search warrant in his pocket. He extracted it and held it out to the man, who glanced at it contemptuously, making no move to examine it. Glitsky shrugged and in a few words introduced himself and explained the basic situation. ‘I’m afraid,’ he concluded, ‘that I’m going to have to ask you to leave the premises while we continue here.’

Thorne didn’t even blink. ‘No, sir. I refuse to do that. I’ve called my attorney and he’ll be here shortly and put an end to this.’ He was taking off his overcoat, hanging it on a peg in the alcove, planning to stay.