John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

When she was speaking to these guys, she called all suspects ‘fucks.’ She knew, as all of them knew, that anybody who got all the way to arrested was guilty. They had done something bad enough to eliminate them from society forever. Therefore, she would start the process of making them nonpeople. They were fucks, starting here in Homicide. And fuck them.

‘Slow night, Bets.’ Griffin put his donut down.

‘So who’s got the Nash thing?’ She held up her folded newspaper. ‘Front-page stuff.’

The cops looked at each other and shrugged. ‘Sounds exciting.’ Griffin was most interested in his donut. It wasn’t his case. End of story. ‘I must have missed it.’

‘I think Glitsky might have gone down there,’ Block said. ‘You can look on his desk.’

It was on top of the stack of papers on the corner of Abe Glitsky’s desk. There wasn’t much more than the manila folder with the name NASH in caps on the tab. Inside, Glitsky had started writing up the incident report, but hadn’t gotten far. There were no photos yet, either from the discovery scene or the coroner’s office.

Pullios closed up the folder, took a post-it and wrote a note asking Glitsky to call her as soon as he got in.

Hardy, awakened by Rebecca at five-thirty, had gone out running in the clear and already balmy dawn. Down Geary out to the beach, south to Lincoln, then inside Golden Gate Park back to 25th, and home. A four-mile circle he’d been trying to keep up since getting sedentary in March.

Now, near eight, he sat in his green jogging suit, taking his time over Frannie’s great coffee. She sat across the kitchen table from him, glancing at sections of the paper when she wasn’t fiddling with the baby, who was strapped into a baby seat on the table between them.

‘And this was a baby shark,’ he said. ‘Imagine what a twenty-footer would do.’

‘I think they made a movie about that.’

Hardy made a face at her as the doorbell rang, followed by the sound of the front door opening. ‘Don’t get up, commoners,’ Glitsky called out, ‘I’ll just let myself in.’

The sergeant wore a white shirt and solid brown tie, khaki slacks, cordovan wing tips, tan sports coat. Entering the kitchen, he stopped. ‘Taking fashion tips from dead guys?’

‘Hi, Abe,’ Frannie said.

Hardy pointed to the stove. ‘Water’s hot.’

Glitsky knew where the tea was and got out a bag, dropped it into a cup, came over to the table. He looked again at Hardy. ‘Oftentimes, I’ll go see a body and the next day decide to wear exactly what it had on.’

Hardy shrugged. ‘It was next up in my drawer. Am I supposed to throw it away?’

‘If anybody ever asks if your husband is superstitious, Frannie, you should tell them no.’

Hardy explained it to her. ‘Owen Nash was found in some sweats just like these. Abe thinks the streets are infested with sharks that are going to start a feeding frenzy over people in green sweats.’ Hardy lifted the front of his sweatshirt away from his body. ‘Besides, this is different. There ain’t any holes in this one.’

‘Major difference.’ Abe nodded and sipped his tea. ‘So tell me everything you know.’

Hardy and Glitsky went back into the office, where Hardy had the notes he’d taken after talking with Ken Farris. Abe sat at the desk while Hardy threw darts.

‘Who’s this guy in Santa Clara? Silicon Valley.’

‘I don’t know. Farris said he’d tell me if we needed it.’

‘I need it.’

‘Yeah, I thought you would.’

Glitsky kept reading, taking a couple of notes of his own. ‘He went out with this May Shinn on Saturday?’

Hardy pulled darts from the board – two bull’s-eyes and a 1. He was throwing pretty well, a good sign. ‘We don’t know that for sure. Farris says he was planning on it.’

‘But no one’s talked to her?’

‘Right. That’s her number there at the bottom. You’re welcome to give her a try.’

Glitsky did. He held the receiver for a minute, then hung up. Hardy sat at the corner of the desk. ‘You didn’t want to leave a message? Ask her to call you?’

‘I’d love to, but nobody answered.’

‘No, there’s a machine. I heard it.’

Glitsky thought a minute, then dialed again. ‘Okay, last time was four, I’ll give it ten.’

The sun reflected off the hardwood floors onto the bookcase. Hardy walked over and opened the window, a reasonable action only about ten days a year. The view to his north, up to Twin Peaks and the Sutro Tower, was blocked from his office by Rebecca’s room, but overhead, the sky was clear. Hardy could see Oakland easily. The air smelled like grass, even out here in the concrete avenues.

‘Nope,’ Abe said behind him. ‘Ten rings. This listed? Where’s she live? Where’s your phone book?’

She wasn’t listed. Without going into it too closely, Hardy said he’d gotten the number from Farris. ‘So she’s home, I’d guess,’ Abe said. ‘At least she unplugged her machine in the last couple days, right? You going to work today dressed like that?’

Hardy allowed that he would probably take a shower and get dressed, and moved toward his bedroom, Abe following. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t get too red hot about this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, the body turns up yesterday, but Nash was probably dead on Sunday, we go on that, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay, today’s Friday. One week, assuming he went down on Saturday.’

‘And after four days…’ Hardy knew what Abe was saying, understood the statistics. If you didn’t have a suspect within four days of a murder, the odds were enormous that you’d never get one.

‘All I’m saying is don’t get your hopes up.’

Hardy stripped off his shirt. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got Mr Silicon Valley and you got May Shinn if you can find her.’

‘If she didn’t go swimming with Owen Nash.’

‘Then who unplugged her answering machine?’

‘I know, I know. I’m an investigator. I’ll investigate. I also thought we’d check out the boat.’

‘No, the boat’s clean.’ Hardy told Abe about his visit on Wednesday night.

‘You brought along a forensic team, did you?’

Hardy shut up and went to take his shower.

The case of The People v. Rane Brown was not going to be an easy one.

Back in late March, at around ten at night, two officers in a squad car cruising under the freeway heard a man calling for help. Turning into the lot, they saw one man down on the ground and another man going through his pockets. When he saw the cops, the suspect took off. The man on the ground was yelling, ‘Stop him! That’s the guy!’ The officers followed the running man as he turned into one alley, then another, a dead end. Getting out of their car, they proceeded cautiously down the alley, guns drawn, flashlights out, until they came upon a man crouched between two dumpsters.

This man turned out to be Rane Brown, a 5’8“, 135-pound, nineteen-year-old black male with four priors for mugging and purse snatching. When apprehended by the officers, he was wearing a black tank top and black pants that matched the clothes of the man who’d run from the scene. The officers found a.38 Smith & Wesson handgun under the dumpster next to Rane. The gun was registered to a Denise Watrous in San Jose.

What made the case especially difficult was that when the officers returned to the scene, the purported victim had disappeared, having evidently decided that the hassle of pursuing justice in this imperfect world was simply not worth the trouble.

But there was Rane Brown in custody, and the police didn’t particularly want to let him go and mug someone else.

So Hardy was in Department 11 with Judge Nancy Fiedler this Friday morning, trying to prove a robbery and knowing that he didn’t have a prayer of winning.