John Lescroart - A Certain Justice

'He cut it on a door,' she said. 'The glass broke.'

'Well, that's what he told us.' Marcel was jockeying for position on the stoop, stepping up now behind Banks. 'But the thing is, we went back – well, actually, my partner Ridley here did – he is kind of thorough, kind of like Colombo, remember him? Always that "uh, just one more thing." Drives us all crazy sometimes but there you go. Anyway, how the arm got cut… You mind if we come in? It is definitely not warm, and you look a little chilly yourself.'

Accompanied as it was by a glance downward, Lanier was being more antagonistic than he sounded – Patsy McKay's nipples were protruding like gumdrops, poking at the thin fabric of the tank top.

'Why don't you go put on a shirt, hon,' McKay said. 'You guys got a warrant or we can talk right here. What about my arm?'

But Patsy didn't leave, so Banks spoke over her. 'About your arm is that your cousin Brandon Mullen said you both cut yours falling through your sliding back door and when I was by here yesterday I happened to notice that the door isn't broken. You get it fixed right up? Got a receipt for the repair?'

But Patsy was shaking her head. "That was at Brandon 's, not here.'

Banks half-turned, glanced at Lanier. ' Brandon said clear as a bell that you both came back here to have your own private wake for Mike Mullen. To Petey's, is what he said.'

McKay moved forward. 'First-'

'Shh.' Patsy held a hand out, spoke gently but firmly to her husband. 'Hush now.' Back to the inspectors: 'I had a bad headache. They kept waking me up so I asked them to please go over to Brandon 's, which is what they did.'

Banks begged to differ. ' Brandon said they came here.'

'They came here first . Then they went there. Why don't you go ask him again? We'll even go over there with you. Petey didn't do nothing wrong. We got nothing to hide.'

Brandon Mullen was home and acted for all the world as though he had been expecting them. He lived in a lower duplex on 22nd Avenue in the Richmond District, five blocks from the McKays. The sliding glass doors that led to his tiny patio were brand new. And why, yes, inspectors, he did just happen to have a receipt right here for it – two days ago, isn't that right, signed and all? Reardon Glass and Screen.

'I'm going to go bust some chops.'

'Can't do it, Rid.'

They were sitting outside of Brandon Mullen's place, waiting – for nothing. Marcel had the driver's side window down, his elbow on it. 'McKay told Brandon about you coming by his house. Somebody put it together about the window.'

'The wife.'

'Maybe. Anyway, they figured they better break some window.'

'I already figured that out. Thanks.'

'You want to go talk to Reardon of Reardon Glass and whatever the fuck else it is?'

'See if he made the repair yesterday or two days ago, the date on the invoice? No. I don't think he'd be honest with us.'

'I'm shocked. A good Irish Catholic boy?'

'Welcome to police work,' Banks said. 'Shocks abound.'

Working by himself, Carl Griffin took another tack.

He knew he wasn't going to get squatola from any of the other good ol' boys – O'Toole, Mullen, McKay, Shea – the black Irish pulling close round their own men.

His first thought had been to try the emergency rooms at the various local hospitals, but one or two calls had disabused him of that notion – with the city's upheavals, the emergency rooms were, if anything, more swamped than the Hall of Justice, and there weren't many people with the time, inclination or memory to be of much help.

So – methodically, doggedly – he started cross-working a map and a telephone book, phoning every private doctor's office within a two-mile radius of the Cavern Tavern, identifying himself as a homicide inspector and asking if any of the doctors had seen anything remotely resembling a knife wound during the last three days.

Doctors' records were not protected by the evidence code in criminal investigations. In fact, in some cases – such as incidents with gunshot wounds or sexual assaults – doctors were mandated to report to authorities.

It was at the tail end of an eggplant parmesan submarine sandwich. Griffin had parked his beefy frame at his desk in the homicide detail. Leaning back, the heels of his black brogues on the pitted desk, he balefully contemplated the new jail, the slice of clouds and blue above. He was on 'E.' Flipping the pages labelled 'Physicians,' he realized he had another five pages to go.

This was Carl Griffin's brand of police work – you did it by the numbers, you were not inspired, you slogged it out, and eventually, if you covered everything, once in a while you hit it. He considered going to the end of the listings and started backward from 'Z.' But then, he knew, the one he'd left off on at 'E' would turn out to be the jackpot. So he dialed the number for 'Epps.'

Miss Manners would have disapproved of the last bite he took of his sandwich. The telephone was ringing in his ear and when it picked up he had to swallow without chewing and for a fleeting instant thought it wasn't going to go down, that this was his last moment.

'Hello, doctor's office,' the voice repeated.

He swallowed again – saved – and cleared his throat. It turned out that Dr Epps was having her own lunch in the coffee room and she listened without speaking while he gave his spiel. 'Since when was this?' she asked when he had finished.

'Tuesday night.'

'Just a minute.'

Griffin was suddenly elated he hadn't jumped to 'Z.' She was back on the line. 'I had a rather severe Achilles tendon slash that I sewed up on Wednesday morning. The patient was a young man who said he'd gotten tripped up, then fallen over a shovel in his backyard, one of those freak accidents, but I don't think it was a shovel – '

Griffin waited.

'The wound looked like a suture cut – clean and straight.'

'I see. And did you mention this to him?'

'I asked about it, yes. But he said, no, it was a shovel. Brand new, never used, edge like a knife. He didn't blink and I guessed it was possible. I sewed it up.'

'How old was the man?'

'Just a second. Colin Devlin. Twenty-four. Do you want his address?'

The waiting area of the bowels of the San Francisco morgue, on the other side of the heavy door that leads to the examination room, was drab and windowless. Plastic yellow chairs, sagging with age and perhaps the accumulation of grief, hugged the shiny light green walls. The two plastic rubber trees no longer looked remotely real, but no one had removed them, no one had noticed. The people in this room were thinking of other matters.

As the assistant district attorney handling the Arthur Wade homicide, Elaine Wager had been called down to the morgue by John Strout, San Francisco's coroner, to go over the forensic report, which, due to the crushing workload over the recent days, had been a little slower coming than usual.

Knees pressed together, hands clasped in her lap, Elaine waited in the anteroom. Strout had told her when he had called upstairs that it would be at least an hour, but she had picked up her folders and gone down immediately, content to be in hiding.

She had spent a good deal of time in the morning fighting herself, keeping busy doing background work on her suspect – his friends, workplace, history. Anything to avoid thinking of Chris, of what had happened… The police had forwarded to her the name of the woman who had provided Kevin Shea's name in the first place – Cynthia Taylor – and, while she had picked up very little in the way of evidence that would be useful in court, the picture of the man had begun to emerge.

According to Ms Taylor, Shea was a half-step up from white trash. He came from a broken family somewhere down south (which fitted perfectly with what he'd done, she thought). He was one of those hangers-on at SESU, drifting from class to class, drunk a lot of the time. Though Ms Taylor believed he worked part-time in some kind of telemarketing ('no way he could hold a real job'), he also bragged about using the GI bill to buy his booze, didn't have any friends to speak of, although he'd had a relationship with one of Ms Taylor's friends for a couple of months, and now appeared to have hoodwinked that hapless victim into becoming his accomplice in escaping. Ms Taylor had ended the interview with the statement that she thought he was 'really dangerous, unstable. You never know what he's going to do.'