John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

Glitsky had Evans and Lanier in a borrowed office in the vice detail down the hallway from homicide. It was important that the office have a door that could be closed, and Glitsky’s cubicle did not provide that particular amenity. The situation regarding the continuing investigation into Sal Russo’s death was unusual and volatile.

He was taking them through the game plan. When he had finished his first pass, Evans raised a hand and the lieutenant, atypically, took on an amused expression. ‘We’re not in school here, Sarah, you can just speak up.’

She folded her arms back across her chest. ‘I’ve got just one question: what are we supposed to do that we didn’t do last time when they let him go?’

Glitsky nodded; it was a good question. ‘Not much, to tell you the truth. Same stuff, just more of it.’

Marcel Lanier had been around long enough that he got the gist of it the first time. He was sitting in a comfortable chair next to his partner and he looked over at her. ‘Everybody has their guards down, Sarah. Witnesses think there won’t be any charges, so what they saw or heard might not be so threatening. People might open up. The investigation is still open. That’s really what Abe’s saying.’

‘That’s it.’ Glitsky was all agreement.

‘But Russo is still our suspect?’ Especially after last night this was not welcome news.

‘Best and only. He did it.’ Lanier was ready to hit the streets. Glitsky had delivered the message. Time to go to work. But Sarah was still in her chair, arms still crossed over her chest.

‘Is something wrong, Sarah?’ Glitsky asked her.

She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. Yeah, something.’ They waited. ‘I don’t think he did it,’ she said at last. ‘I think we were wrong.’

Lanier began sputtering something, but Glitsky stopped him with a gesture. He set a haunch on the corner of the desk. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I don’t know,’ she repeated. ‘I’m just not sure.’

‘What’s changed since yesterday?’ Glitsky asked. ‘

‘A couple of things.’ She hesitated, then came out with it. ‘I talked to him.’

‘When?’

She told them about the meeting at the softball diamond, leaving out her personal reaction. ‘He came up to me.’ Not precisely true but, she thought, close enough. She was positive he’d been about to approach her when she saw him staring at her. ‘I don’t think he would have done that if he’d killed his father.’

‘Sure he would have.’ This was Lanier’s territory. He’d interacted with a hundred murderers in his career and had not a doubt that he had the psychology down. Whatever it might be, he’d already seen it twice. ‘That’s exactly the kind of shit these assholes try to run on us. We let him out of jail, so he’s untouchable. He wants to know what we know. He’s sucking up to you, Sarah, trying to get under your skin.’

She didn’t believe it. ‘It wasn’t like that.’

Glitsky: ‘What was it like?’

‘There’s wasn’t any sucking up. He barely mentioned it.’

Lanier leaned in toward her. ‘I bet it did sneak its clever little way into the conversation, though, didn’t it?’

She shrugged. ‘He just said he didn’t do it. An afterthought.’

Lanier had seen that too. ‘Ahh, the subtle approach. He barely brings it up after he’s been arrested and spent the day in jail?’ The psychology of that failed Marcel’s litmus test, and he wanted his partner to know it. ‘If you’d just spent your first day in jail and met the person who’d put you there, don’t you think it might be kind of the main thing on your mind? Wouldn’t you want to talk about it just a tiny bit?’

‘Marcel, I think she gets the point.’ Glitsky came back to Sarah. ‘You said there were a couple of things. What was the other one?’

Her eyes fixed on each of the men in turn. ‘I thought about this all night, reread over the file. We don’t really have anything that puts him there.’

Glitsky nodded. This, too, was a valid point. ‘That’s why Drysdale wants the investigation to proceed. He says he needs more to get a conviction.’

‘You mean we shouldn’t have arrested him last time?’

‘Now, wait a minute!’ Lanier wasn’t about to accept that analysis. ‘The guy had already hired a lawyer-’

‘Not in itself a crime,’ Glitsky pointed out.

‘Sure, sure, but still…’ Lanier knew what cops knew, and that was that innocent people – if there were any – didn’t tend to bring their lawyers into the picture until they were charged, until they finally understood that they were in trouble. He continued. ‘Basically, we got an unemployed, selfish kid with a million-dollar lifestyle who needed the money and saw an easy way to take it.’

‘So it’s all the money?’

‘Absolutely. He had the safe combination at his place. That puts him at his old man’s.’

‘Then why didn’t he just pick up the safe deposit key while we were searching his place, put it in his pocket? We wouldn’t ever have found it.’

Lanier shrugged. ‘I give up. Maybe he thought we’d catch him if he tried. Maybe he didn’t believe we’d be so thorough. I’m not saying the guy’s a professional hit man. Maybe he was just nervous.’

‘If it was all about the money, he would have done something to hide it.’ She was shaking her head. ‘It would have been so easy. He couldn’t not have done it.’

The old bromide – that killers needed to tell somebody about what they’d done – wasn’t all false. ‘He wanted us to find it. Call it a type of confession.’

‘He wouldn’t feel the need to confess if it was an act of mercy, if he felt he’d done the right thing.’

Lanier shook his head. ‘Uh-uh. This wasn’t any assisted suicide either. This was murder. That bump under the ear-’

‘Which Strout said could have happened hours before.’

‘No no no. Our boy Graham cold-cocked him from behind with the whiskey bottle, gave him a veinful of morphine, cleaned out the safe, and tiptoed home through the tulips.’

‘So if Sal was cold-cocked, lying still on the ground, and Graham gives shots every day of his life, why was there trauma around the injection site? Why wasn’t it a clean little poke?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe he was scared. He was hurrying. Maybe there was an earthquake. The needle was broke. Maybe he missed the vein. My doctor does every time.’

But Glitsky had listened to enough arguing. ‘All right, all right. This doesn’t matter. I think you had plenty to arrest Russo yesterday. If you keep looking, maybe you’ll find more. You’re authorized to keep looking, that’s all. Make it tight. If the AG wants to move on him, we’ll bring in Graham again. If the evidence points to somebody else, we’ll go after them. Sarah, you got anybody else you’re thinking about?’

She said she didn’t, ‘But Sal still might have killed himself, right? The autopsy didn’t rule that out.’

Glitsky nodded. ‘That’s true.’ He pushed himself off the desk. The meeting was over. ‘And that is precisely the reason that God in Her infinite wisdom invented the jury system.’ He spread his hands, as though blessing them. ‘Which, fortunately, never fails.’

‘Well, at least we had a nice summer, didn’t we?’

Lanier had his jacket buttoned all the way up, his head down in his collar. Next to him Evans, her hands tucked into her own jacket, squinted into the face of the wind and the dust it was kicking up. ‘Where did this come from?’ she asked. They were both walking fast. ‘It just can’t be this cold.’

After their meeting with Glitsky, they’d driven the half mile from the Hall up Seventh Street and pulled into Stevenson Alley, a narrow and grimy, if schizophrenic, line of asphalt and garbage a half block south of the always exotic bus station.