John Lescroart - A Plague of Secrets

The problem was, he knew that she’d done something. Something damn serious, about which she obviously was carrying an enormous load of guilt. And he also knew, or thought he knew, what she’d been blackmailed about-robberies or perhaps worse that she must have committed with Dylan and Levon. So unless she’d committed murder in the course of one of those…

Whoa, he told himself. Therein lies the path to madness. But then he thought, why not? They’d come this far. And he came out with it. “Maya, yes or no, were you involved in the robbery that got Dylan and Levon sent to prison?”

She straightened her back. “Nobody can prove I was.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

She hesitated. “No.” A beat. “Not that one.”

“So that is in fact what the blackmail was about?”

She didn’t answer, turned her face to look at the wall.

“I ask,” Hardy pressed on, “because you should know that unless you committed murder or some other heinous crime during one of these robberies, you can’t be charged with anything. Anything else, and the statutes of limitations have tolled.”

Her eyes came back to him. They bore a shine that he thought might presage tears. “Why are you so sure they were blackmailing me?”

“For one reason, it’s the thing that makes the most sense. You were involved in robberies with them in college. Yes?”

Finally, her shoulders gave an inch. “I’ve already told you. I did some bad stuff.”

“Bad enough for life in prison, Maya? Bad enough to never live with your kids or your husband again?”

She stared through him.

“You want to tell me what it was? Just put it out here between me and you. It’s privileged. Nobody else will ever know.”

“Don’t bully me.” Her words had a sudden calm edge.

“I’m not bullying you. I’m saying you can tell me anything you’ve done.”

“What for? So you’d do something different? I don’t think so. I think you’d do all the same things, make the same arguments in court, whatever it is you believe I’d actually done, isn’t that true?”

Angry now, Hardy did not answer.

And then suddenly, Maya came at him on another tack. “What you don’t seem to understand is that I’m being punished,” she said.

“For what? By who?”

“God.”

“God.” Hardy felt his anger start to wane, washed away in a wave of pity for this poor woman. “God’s punishing you? Why?”

“The same reason he punishes anybody.”

“Because of what they’ve done?”

She sat mute, facing him.

“Maya?”

“If it’s unforgivable, yes.”

“I thought his forgiveness was supposed to be infinite.”

She answered in a small voice. “No. Not for everything.”

“No? What wouldn’t it cover?”

“How about if what you harm is truly innocent-” Abruptly she drew herself up and stopped speaking.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Hardy came forward in his chair. “Maya,” he said, “are you talking about something that happened with you and Dylan and Levon?”

A dead, one-note bark of laughter didn’t break the harsh set of her mouth. “If you even can ask that,” she said, “you don’t have a clue what innocent means.”

“So tell me.”

“Like the unborn. That kind of innocent. How about that?”

That answer called to mind Hardy’s discussion with Hunt about whether the blackmail had been about an abortion early in her life, so he asked her point blank. “Is that it?”

But she shook her head decidedly no. “I would never do that. Not ever. But I’ve already said too much. The point is that whatever happens, however God decides all this has to go, I’ll deserve it. I’m good with that now. I’m at peace with it.”

“Well, I’m not.”

She lifted her shoulders in a small shrug. “I’m sorry about that.” She gestured around them. “About all of this.”

“I am too.”

“But… so, can we go back to what I was saying before?”

“What part of it?”

“Looking for who did this?”

A black, throbbing bolus of pain came and settled in the space behind Hardy’s left eye. He brought his hand up and pressed at his temple. What was this woman getting at? Hardy could think of several ways to interpret all that Maya had said to him here this afternoon as a kind of confession. And now she was urging him to look for the real murderer.

Who, he believed, very probably did not exist.

He looked across at his client’s troubled face and entertained the fleeting thought that she might be legally insane. Should he hire a shrink and do some tests? Would he be negligent if he didn’t?

The first day of trial had already been too long, too stressful. It seemed to Hardy that he’d been in constant combat since early in the morning.

And now this.

He squeezed at his forehead. “Maya,” he said, “are you telling me straight out now that you didn’t kill these two guys?”

Her eyes widened, closed down, widened again, and to his astonishment, she broke into a genuine, if short-lived laugh. “Of course not.” Leaving it as ambiguous as ever. Of course not, she was not telling him such a thing straight out. Or, alternatively, of course not, she hadn’t killed Dylan and Levon. After which she added in all seriousness, “How could you even say such a thing?”

Hardy left the jail shaken and confused. When he’d gone in to visit Maya, a February ball of pale egg yolk in the western sky was still dripping its feeble light onto the city. When he came out, his head still pounding, it was full night, and that added to his disorientation. The neighborhood around the Hall of Justice felt more than ordinarily bereft of humanity, but the emptiness seemed to go deeper.

A cold, hard wind was kicking up a heavy, dirty dust along with fast food wrappers from the gutters. Hardy had a walk of a few blocks ahead of him to get to where he’d parked his car, but when he got to Bechetti’s, the traditional comfort-food Italian place at Sixth and Brannan, he stopped long enough to consider going inside and having himself a stiff cocktail or two-although he knew it was a bad idea when you were in the first days of a murder trial.

Reason won out.

But he hung a left and walked a hundred yards down the street and knocked at a purple door set in the side of a gray stucco warehouse and waited about ten seconds in front of the peephole until the door opened and then he was looking at Wyatt Hunt.

“Trick or treat,” he said.

Hunt didn’t miss a beat. “I hope you like Jelly Bellies. That’s all I’ve got left.” He opened the door and stepped back. He was wearing black Nike-logo running pants and tennis shoes and a tank-top Warriors shirt and there was a shine to his skin as though he’d been working out. He certainly lived in the right place for it.

He’d converted an ancient decrepit flower warehouse into a one-of-a-kind environment. The ceiling was probably twenty feet high. The back third he’d dry-walled off into his living quarters-bedroom, bathroom, den/library, and kitchen. Which left an enormous open area, perhaps sixty by eighty or ninety feet, in front. Hardy had been here a few times before but every time was surprised by the fact that Hunt parked his Mini Cooper inside his domicile, just this side of the industrial slide-up garage-door entrance in the same wall as the front door. The other unique feature was the actual half-basketball-court floorboard Hunt had bought from the Warriors the last time they’d upgraded, for the fire sale price of four thousand dollars.

In the space between the court and his rooms on the other side of the court, he had several guitars, both acoustic and electric, out on stands. Amps, speakers, his stereo system. There was also a desk against the wall with a couple of computer terminals glowing with beach-themed screen savers.