John Lescroart - Hard Evidence

Which is what transpired. After a fairly stern lecture by Judge Fiedler on the advisability of producing some evidence before wasting the court’s time on this minor and unprovable transgression, she had granted the motion to dismiss and Rane Brown was a free man.

Hardy and the two arresting officers had been waiting by the elevator when Rane and his attorney came up and joined them. Everybody headed to the first floor, and Rane was in high spirits.

‘Man, you give me a turn when you walk in that courtroom,’ he said to Hardy.

‘Why’s that, Rane?’

‘You know, the man here’ – he cocked his head toward his attorney – ‘he tole me you ain’t got no witnesses, no victim, like that. So I be thinkin’ everything’s cool and you walk in and I thinkin‘ you the victim.’ He smiled, broken teeth in a pocked face. ‘I mean, you get it? You look just like the man I rob.’

Hardy stared at Rane a moment, letting it sink in. He saw the two cops that had arrested him, one on either side of him. Hardy allowed himself a small smile.

‘You’re telling me I look like the victim you just got let off for?’

Rane was bobbing his head. ‘Exactly, man, exactly.’ He just couldn’t believe the resemblance.

Hardy looked from one officer to the other. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ he said, ‘we just got ourselves a confession.’ The elevator door opened and Hardy stepped out, blocking the way. ‘Take this guy back upstairs and book him.’

‘The boat was out when you got in? And what time was that?’

José and Glitsky sat on hard plastic chairs by the doorway to the Gateway Marina guardhouse. José was about twenty-five years old, thin and sinewy. He wore new tennis shoes with his green uniform, a shirt open at the neck. The day had heated up. Even here, right on the water, it was over eighty degrees.

‘I got here six-thirty, quarter to seven, and the Eloise , she was already gone.’

‘And nobody signed her out?’

‘No. They s’pose to, but…’ He shrugged.

‘Were there any calls on the intercom, anything like that?’

‘You remember Saturday? It was like nothing, maybe two boats, three go out. If anything had happen, I remember.’ José stood up and got a logbook from the counter. ‘Here, look at this. Air temp forty-eight, wind north northeast at thirty-five. Small craft up from the night before.’

‘So nobody was going out? What about the other boats? The ones that went out?’

José tapped the book. ‘These I write down.’ He ran a finger over the page until he got where he wanted. ‘The Wave Dancer , she goes out at ten-thirty, back at two. Then Blue Baby , she just clear the jetty’ – pronounced ‘yetty’ – ‘then turn aroun’ and come back in, like one-fifteen. Rough Rider leaves about the same as Blue Baby , like one-thirty. They no come back in on my shift.‘

Not bad, Glitsky thought. Every new witness didn’t double his work, it squared it. Here were only three boats to check, and maybe he could leave out the Blue Baby , Possibly one of them had seen the Eloise . If Saturday had been a day like today, clear and calm… He didn’t want to think about it. He started writing down names.

A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway. ‘Sergeant, the lab team is pulling up.’

As soon as he’d left Hardy’s that morning Glitsky had arranged to have the Eloise placed under the guard of a couple of officers. He stopped off downtown for an easily obtained search warrant, not even dropping into his office. After he and Forensics had gone over the Eloise , a prospect about which he entertained no great hopes -they’d cordon it off with crime-scene tape. But the boat was the place to start – it was more than probable that Nash had at the very least been dead on the boat and dumped from it. From there, he’d see where the trails led.

José was next to him as he greeted a team at the gate to the slips, and the six men walked out in the glaring sun to the end of Dock Two. José opened the cabin for them, then Glitsky dismissed him.

Abe went below, taking a moment to let his eyes adjust to the relative darkness. As the room became visible, one of the forensic team on the ladder behind him whistled at the layout. They went to work.

It was a tough call because they were looking for anything and nothing. Two men were on deck above, starting at the bow and coming back. Glitsky and two other guys were below, but there wasn’t much evident there either. No sign of any struggle.

Glitsky started in the main cabin, just poking around, looking. He wasn’t a forensics man. He would let them go over the fabrics and rugs and smooth surfaces. Whatever he was looking for would have to be obvious. But not too obvious, he thought, or Hardy would have seen it.

All of the cabinets were secured, both in the main cabin and in the adjoining galley. He opened each one, moved a few things around, closed it back up. Moseying back to the master suite, he noted the made bed. He considered calling back to remind his guys to bring the sheets in, but thought better of it. They would do that automatically.

To the right of the bed there was a wooden desk, shaped to the bulkhead, its surface cleared. He tried one of the side drawers and found it locked. The center drawer, however, slid open easily, and, with it open, the other drawers came free.

But it was slim pickings. The gutter to the center drawer contained pens and paper clips, several books of matches from various restaurants, a couple of keys on a ring that Abe assumed fitted this desk, rubberbands and a handball from the Olympic club. The flat back part of the drawer appeared to be completely empty, but reaching his hand back, Glitsky found two stale, crumbling cigars. The top side drawer, the slimmer one, was filled with lots of different colored sweatbands, which seemed to go with the exercycle and dumbbells on the other side of the bed. The bottom side drawer was empty.

On the other side of the bed was a rolltop desk, its cover down. He rolled back the oak top. There were probably twenty-five cubbyholes above the desk’s surface, most of them containing pieces of paper, some of them rolled up, some folded over. A general catchall. Glitsky pulled out a piece at random and found a shopping list. Eggs, cheese, spinach, orange juice. Sunday brunch, he decided. Another paper, also at random, read ‘W. re Taos/reschedule.’ That was all. Glitsky put the two pages back where he’d gotten them. Forensics would take them back downtown if they found any other evidence that Nash had been killed here.

The center drawer looked much like the other one -matches, cigars, pens and pencils, junk.

He pulled open the upper right drawer, expecting to find more headbands. At first glance this looked to be another functional drawer, but when Glitsky pulled the drawer out a little further, he saw a nickel-plated.25 Beretta 950 lying on top of what looked like a collection of folded-up navigational charts.

Just then one of the forensics men on deck called below. ‘Sergeant, you want to get up here? I think we got us some blood.’

It was close to noon on what was already the hottest day of the year and, naturally, the air conditioners were on the blink. There were no windows in the courtrooms in San Francisco’s Hall of Justice. Fans were set up on either side of the bench in Judge Andy Fowler’s courtroom, Department 27, and they did move the air around. Unfortunately the temperature of the air getting moved was ninety-one degrees.

The whir of the fan blades also upped the decibel level. Nearly uniform in size, twenty-five by forty feet, with high ceilings and no soft surfaces except the minimal padding on the seats of jurors, judges and witnesses, courtrooms were, under the best conditions, loud and uncomfortable.