John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

Nash did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was a whisper, as though wrung from the depths of him. ‘No, you can’t anymore, Celine. That’s done. That’s over. It’s come terribly close to ruining both of our lives. It can’t go on -’

A strident laugh. ‘I suppose you won’t see me, your own daughter.’

‘I’ll always see you, Celine. Whenever you want. Just not, not that way…’

‘I want one chance, Daddy.’

‘Hon -’

Almost screaming now, somehow without raising her voice. Then the throbbing voice again. ‘Please. Please, Daddy, I just need to see you.’

‘It won’t -’ Nash began.

‘If it doesn’t, I’ll leave it. I promise.’

Resigned. ‘When?’

‘Whenever you want. Wherever you want.’

A final pause, then Nash’s voice, thick. ‘I’ll call you.’

Jeff Elliot’s call was on Hardy’s answering machine at his office at home. Celine may have been in Santa Cruz at some point during the weekend, but neither Len nor Karl nor his mother could verify she’d been there on Saturday, since regardless of what they had told or implied to Glitsky, they hadn’t been home themselves.

The assistant district attorney in charge of sexual crimes was a woman named Alyson Skrwlewski. Hardy had barely known her, though he guessed that by now she’d have heard of him.

‘I just have a quick general question if you don’t mind.’

She considered a moment. Like most of the D.A.‘s staff, she wasn’t disposed to do any favors that would hurt a prosecution case. And even if she was inclined to be helpful, the situation – Hardy calling her this way on a Sunday afternoon – made her uncomfortable. ’Let’s hear the question first,‘ she said, ’then I’ll tell you whether I can answer it.‘

‘I guess I want to know is what are the most common manifestations of father-daughter incest?’

‘Well, I guess that’s general enough. I can talk about that. What do you want to know?’

‘Everything I can, but specifically, when the victim grows up, is she likely to do anything differently than other women who haven’t had that experience?’

‘Not when, if she grows up, you mean. Suicide would be high on the list.’ Hardy let her think. ‘Her relationships are going to stink, probably. She’ll be an enabler, maybe let her husband abuse her own daughter. That’s if she wants a husband.’

‘They don’t marry often?’

‘Oh, no, not that so much. I mean, this is almost too general. Every case is different. It’s just such an all-encompassing, terrible situation – they might marry five times, finding the so-called right mix of somebody who abuses them and babies them. It sucks.’

Hardy agreed, but she wasn’t telling him anything that might help him. ‘What about backgrounds?’

‘What about them?’

‘Anything you might expect to see more than in someone else?’

‘You mean with the victim, or the father?’

‘Both, I guess.’

‘Well, there’s some evidence that if the father didn’t interact immediately, normally, with the victim in the first years of her life, he’s more likely to be sexually attracted to her. If he never changed a diaper, never burped her, and so forth, the incest taboo doesn’t kick in.’ She sounded apologetic. ‘Hey, that’s a fairly new theory and pretty unprovable. With the women, at least there’s more data.’

‘What do they do?’

‘Well, a surprising number of them try to burn down their houses. No one really seems to know why, besides some obvious symbolic stuff, but arson is often in the profile.’

Hardy felt the hairs rise on his arms.

Skrwlewski continued. ‘And then, of course, there’s the prostitution, but everyone knows that.’

They all go into prostitution?‘

‘No, no. Not so much go into that life – although, of course, many do – but more have some isolated experiences. Their self-image is so low, they don’t feel attractive, you know. Yet they know men want them, daddy did, and they can take out their hostility by making them pay. It all gets pretty twisted around.’

‘Sounds like it.’

‘I guess some people don’t react as badly. But you’ll almost always get the manipulation, using sex for something else, the love substitute.’

Hardy’s stomach was a knot. He sat at his desk with his arms folded across his chest. Outside his window, the wind had died down and there were a few breaks in the clouds.

He had all the proof he needed for himself. But there was the same problem that had dogged the murder of Owen Nash from the outset – the lack of physical evidence.

Celine’s conversation with her father, provocative and revealing as it had been, never named a date, didn’t so much as mention the Eloise . It also hadn’t mentioned May, but Celine could argue with absolute credibility that she had simply been mistaken as to the day when she’d talked with her father about him meeting May on the boat. She had the one talk with him at his office, then another one later in the week – he said he’d call her, didn’t he? – and she’d gotten the two mixed up.

The Santa Cruz people being away didn’t necessarily mean she hadn’t been there. It meant her alibi was weaker – almost undoubtedly false – but by itself it still didn’t put her on the Eloise on Saturday.

Other hints came back to him. He remembered Celine telling him she’d only been a member of Hardbodies! for six months – in other words, from about the time she’d stopped working out on the Eloise when Owen had started seeing May regularly. Surely the headbands on the boat -never claimed by May – had been Celine’s. So had the lifting gloves, one pair of which she’d no doubt worn when she had fired May’s Beretta.

As with Andy Fowler and May Shinn before him, there was no apparent physical link tying Celine Nash to the murder of her father.

He had been right, though he took little satisfaction from it – Owen Nash had been killed by a jealous woman. But the woman had been his own daughter. And if he had been sexually abusing his own daughter since – he supposed – their trip around the world together when she’d been six years old, or even earlier, he certainly deserved whatever punishment she could give him. He knew she had done it, and now he knew why. More accurately, he knew she had done it because he knew why.

He thought of his own adopted baby girl, then tried to imagine the immense physical and psychological damage Owen Hash’s abuse had visited on his own daughter, and suddenly he found he had lost any desire to see Celine punished – she had been punished enough, hadn’t she? She’d never get out from under the private stigma, never away from the pain.

Deep down, he didn’t even blame her.

But, though punishment might not be his motive, he still had to prove it to clear Andy Fowler, and Celine was nobody to underestimate. Earlier in the morning he had sent Frannie and Rebecca away, deriding himself for considering that Celine might be dangerous. Now he was glad that he had.

She had shot and killed her father. She hadn’t blinked at, and had in fact done her best to bring about, the false accusation of May Shinn. From the gallery she had daily watched the slow skewering of Andy Fowler, his once-distinguished career in ruins. She had clearly been prepared to take Hardy’s marriage down with her to get him off her scent.

Hardy still had Andy Fowler to defend.

The trial would have to go on. Pullios couldn’t let it go now and without a smoking gun, Hardy’s accusations of Celine at this stage would come across as rank courtroom shenanigans – it might at last get him the long-promised contempt citation from Chomorro.