John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

Bracco sat back on the couch. “Maybe not. I don’t know. But we could talk about this all night and never go anywhere. As opposed to what we do know.”

“Which is what?”

“Well, keeping it simple, let’s assume that Levon hung out with Maya in college. We’ve been thinking that Vogler was blackmailing Maya, so let’s call that a fact too. What does that say to you?”

“She’s the connection, back when they were all in school.”

“That’s what I see.”

“She didn’t own the coffee shop then.”

“Yeah, okay. So the blackmail didn’t start then. It wasn’t until she had money.”

“Maybe she was paying Levon, too, somehow.”

“And then he finds out Vogler’s been killed and suddenly he’s a little uncomfortable.”

“No, he’s a lot uncomfortable.” Bracco sat with his thoughts for a moment, then suddenly came forward, stood, and went over to a lamp table across the room where he’d left some small Ziploc evidence bags and other stuff from Levon’s pockets, including his cell phone. As a matter of course he and Schiff were going to go through the recent history of calls received and made, which were automatically logged, but they’d both thought they’d wait until the next morning when people would be awake. Now, though, he picked up the phone, turned it on, and brought it back over to where he’d been sitting. “I love these things,” he said. “Remember what a hassle it used to be to get phone records on people? Days, weeks, subpoenas. Now, push a button, bingo. Ah, here we go.”

The very first number in Levon’s recently made calls menu was a 415 area code that struck Bracco as familiar. He took out his own cell phone and ran down his own recently called menu until he came to the same number.

“It looks like Levon got uncomfortable enough to call somebody we know,” he said.

Debra Schiff wasn’tthe only person feeling some responsibility for setting events in motion that had apparently and very suddenly gotten out of control. At three A.M., Dismas Hardy still hadn’t gotten to sleep.

He’d come down for the first time after an hour’s tossing in bed, made himself a warm Ovaltine, gone into his front room, and rearranged the caravan of glass elephants that trekked across the mantel over his fireplace.

Sitting in his reading chair with the lights off, though, he’d convinced himself that really he had had no choice. All he’d done was send his own investigator team out to try to pry loose one of his client’s secrets. He would need to do that, to have that information, if he was going to help her in her defense.

Should it come to that.

Which-pretty obviously-was looking more probable every minute.

Just before Hunt had received the call from the police at Levon’s place and called Hardy with the news, he’d learned from his own employee Craig Chiurco that the same Levon Preslee that Hunt had already identified as a friend of Maya’s during their time at USF was the guy who’d been arrested with Vogler in the robbery they’d committed at about that same time.

Chiurco had gone out to Levon’s apartment in Potrero in the late afternoon, but no one had answered his knock-he might have already been dead. Chiurco was in the process of reporting back to Hunt, planning to track the potential witness down either later that same night or in the next day or so to question him, when the call had come in from Inspector Tallant with the news of Levon’s death.

As soon as Hardy heard this, it had immediately become clear that if Maya did not have an alibi-and of course no one knew even the approximate time of Levon’s murder-she was going to be even more squarely in the sights of Bracco and Schiff as a suspect not just in this latest crime, but with Vogler as well.

Part of Hardy wished that Wyatt hadn’t been so forthcoming with the police when they’d called him. But then again, what else was he supposed to do? They already had the message he’d left on Levon’s phone-that he was working for the lawyer who was representing Maya Townshend. He couldn’t very well deny that, and once the police recognized her name, along with any connection whatsoever to the dead man, she was going to assume a higher profile, and there was nothing at all he could do about that.

The Ovaltine finished, Hardy had gone back up to his bedroom and tossed for another hour and change, his mind ping-ponging willy-nilly between Maya and her husband and Jerry Glass, then Bracco and Schiff, and Glitsky and Zachary, and Wes Farrell and then back through the litany in a different order. Everybody either in trouble or making it, or both.

Until finally he got up again, grabbed a robe, and padded downstairs. The rain still fell heavily onto the skylight, drumming away. He went back up to the front of the house and settled himself down in his reading chair in the dark.

He couldn’t afford a sleepless night. He had a feeling he was going to get a call from his client in the very early A.M., was somewhat surprised that he hadn’t gotten one already. But maybe she didn’t know yet about Levon.

Or maybe she knew all too well.

And at this thought-the actual admission of it to himself as a possibility-all of Hardy’s random imaginings about the troubles of his friends or those making trouble for them coalesced into a tiny pinpoint of something that suddenly felt like a certainty.

Whether or not she was in fact a killer, he was sure that Maya was involved as some kind of active participant in all of this. In both the deaths of Dylan Vogler and of Levon Preslee.

And it was starting to seem that regardless of what Hardy chose to do, and however cooperative Maya was with the police, she could be arrested for both murders.

Still sleeping in his reading chair up at the front of his house, the rain and wind pounding at the bay window three feet from his right hand, Hardy never heard the telephone ring. And now suddenly here was his wife first touching his shoulder, then shaking him gently. “Dismas.” Opening his eyes, everything out of focus, he saw her standing there in a bathrobe, the receiver in her hand, concern writ large on her features. “Maya Townshend,” she whispered.

Straightening up, his neck cricked with a stabbing pain, it took him a few more seconds to get his bearings. All right, he was still downstairs, must’ve fallen asleep trying to figure…

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

Hardy cleared his throat. “No, of course not.” What the hell time was it anyway? He glanced outside, where the heavy storm clouds kept it looking like half-night. “This is just my precoffee voice. Don’t mind it. How can I help you?”

“They’re here again.”

“Schiff and Bracco?”

“They’re unbelievable, these two.”

“I don’t know. I find myself believing in them lately. What do they want?”

“Apparently they’ve got a search warrant. They want to look through the house. Joel’s furious, of course. We haven’t even finished breakfast, and the kids are all upset. I don’t know who’s going to take them to school now.”

In fact, Hardy heard children crying in the background. “What time is it, actually?”

“Ten after seven. They got here at seven sharp.”

Hardy knew that this was a bad sign. Generally speaking, police were not permitted to serve warrants in the middle of the night. In fact, search warrants were not valid for service between ten P.M. and seven A.M. unless a judge specifically found evidence that justified the extreme intrusion into someone’s home. Absent an emergency, judges were reluctant to issue such a warrant. They would do that, of course, if there was cause to believe that a suspect would destroy evidence or flee under cover of darkness. So the fact that they’d waited until seven-the first allowable minute without that extraordinary finding-was ominous.