John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

She was biting her lip, thinking hard. Finally, it seemed to come to her. ‘It was the afternoon. Thursday or Friday, though, I can’t be sure.’

Hardy pointed down at the sign-in document again. ‘Do you remember if it was right after this man, Ben somebody, came in? You signed him in, too, at twenty minutes to five.’

She pondered for another long moment. In his desperation Hardy gave her a hint. ‘No one else signed in on Friday. Mr Russo would have been the only one that day. Does that seem right?’

The poor woman was on the verge of tears. Another glance at her boss, Ms Reygosa, didn’t help. Alison was trying to give Hardy the information he wanted, give him the right answer, but she didn’t know exactly what it was.

Hardy pressed further. ‘You said you thought it was the afternoon, Alison. Did it feel like it was after three o’clock? Mr Russo went to work at three on Friday.’

Suddenly her face cleared, and she let out the deep breath she’d been all but holding for five minutes. ‘Oh, yes, then, it must have been Thursday afternoon. Thursday, I’m sure of it. Near the end of the day.’ She pointed down at the sheet. ‘Maybe we should write it in now that we know?’

Since the inspectors had already copied the original of this document, Hardy – gently – allowed as how that might not be an inspired idea. They should just leave it as it was.

Hardy’s errand at the bank had, he thought, been supremely worth it.

As it turned out, the Haight Street branch did erase their tapes on a ten-day cycle. Hardy got his copies and spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching television in his living room, the front door of the bank as people came and went. After getting his bearings he got so he could fast-forward until someone appeared in the doorway, stop the tape, determine it wasn’t Graham, and move on. In this way he got through viewing three days of the most boring video he’d ever watched in a little over five hours.

Perhaps it wasn’t conclusive, but at least once he’d seen his copies, he had a good argument that Graham Russo hadn’t entered this bank from the time of his father’s death on Friday until he was arrested on Wednesday morning. If a jury believed this, then it would indicate that Graham did not kill his father to get the money. He already had the money and the baseball cards before his father was dead.

During the same viewing period, Hardy’d had no trouble identifying Evans and Lanier when they’d come in to check the safe deposit box.

Glitsky, Assistant AG Art Drysdale, and San Francisco coroner John Strout sat around the latter’s desk in his office behind the morgue. All around them Strout’s collection of murder weapons under glass, from medieval torture devices to guns and knives, lent a humorous, macabre air to their surroundings, but the three men weren’t joking now. Between them they had assembled the foundations for hundreds of murder cases, and yet their respective roles were not necessarily complementary.

Glitsky and Drysdale – the cop and the prosecutor – viewed themselves as true allies. They found and interpreted evidence with the mutual goal of proving that a particular person had committed a crime. They did different work, but it was toward the same end.

Strout, on the other hand, jealously guarded his independence and his objectivity. He was a scientist. If his discoveries helped Glitsky and Drysdale – and they often did – then so be it. But he had no ax to grind. He did not consider himself a lawman, an officer of the court, anything like that. His job was to rule on cause of death. Speculation did not enter into it, nor did politics. If he didn’t know, he said he didn’t know, and vice versa.

At this moment, behind his desk, Strout’s normally unflappable Southern style was being put to the test. Drysdale had decided he wanted to be sure he had Strout’s support in calling the homicide of Sal Russo a murder, and he’d enlisted Glitsky to come down as moral support.

‘Now, Art, that’s just simply not going to happen. I am not about to change an opinion without different evidence, and to be honest with you, I’m just a bit offended that you thought I might.’

But Drysdale had his game face on. Dean Powell – the attorney general – had told him what he wanted in the best of all worlds, and if it were gettable, Drysdale was going to get it. Strout’s feelings would heal. ‘You’ve already called it a homicide, John-’

Strout was holding a hand up. ‘Well, that’s just plum inaccurate, Art. I did not say it was a homicide. I called it a suicide equivocal/homicide, which is not the same thing. It means I can’t say for sure that Russo didn’t kill himself.’

‘Mr Powell thinks that’s splitting hairs.’

Strout removed his wire-rimmed spectacles. ‘Well, Mr Powell can hire himself another pathologist and get himself another opinion, but he’s already got mine, and it’s stayin’ the way it is.‘

Glitsky thought he would try to calm the waters. ‘You know Art doesn’t mean to insult you, John. He’s asking if there’s anywhere this can bend, that’s all. Okay, it could have been suicide – we accept that-’

‘Well, thank you all to hell, Lieutenant.’

Glitsky ignored him. ‘But isn’t there anything that militates against it? Makes it a little more likely somebody killed him?’

‘The bump, for example.’ Drysdale had studied the autopsy report carefully. He had years of experience, and to him it read like a murder. Someone had whacked Sal to knock him out, then administered the fatal dose of morphine. It was open and shut.

Unfortunately, other scenarios were possible. Maybe not as probable, but medically feasible. It made him short tempered.

Strout kept his glasses off, but sat back in his chair, elbows on its arms. ‘The bump was caused, as I mentioned, by a blow to the head, which is not inconsistent with the deceased banging it on the table as he fell down.’

Drysdale didn’t buy that at all. ‘That would have meant he fell backwards, John. How could he fall backwards unless somebody pushed him? There was no hair on the table. He didn’t hit the table. He got hit by the whiskey bottle.’

Strout made a gesture at Glitsky, who reluctantly spoke up. ‘The bump didn’t even bleed, Art. It’s not inconsistent that it didn’t take any hair-’

Betrayed by his ally, Drysdale bit out the words. ‘Not inconsistent, not inconsistent! You fellas got a tape loop going down here?’

Strout impatiently explained some more. ‘There was sufficient edema – which, as both of you know, is swelling – to allow for the flow of blood for a half hour or more.’ He turned his palms up. ‘He was alive, Art. The blow to the head didn’t kill him. I can’t even say for sure it knocked him out. If it did, it wasn’t for more than a few seconds.’

‘Long enough to give him the shot.’

Strout shrugged. ‘I can’t say. Maybe.’

Drysdale’s face had gone red, and he sat back in his chair, unbuttoned his shirt, pulled at his tie. In his own office he let off tension by juggling baseballs, but there wasn’t anything to juggle here except hand grenades, and he wasn’t going to go grabbing at them. For all he knew, they were live.

There was a short silence, broken by the screech of rubber and colliding metal on the freeway outside Strout’s window. All the men got up to gawk. The coroner raised the blinds. They couldn’t see the freeway through the fog, and it was less than fifty yards away.

They all stayed standing by the window. Nothing had been said, but the anger, somehow, had dissipated.

‘Y’all just plain aren’t gonna prove it couldn’t have been suicide,’ Strout began. ‘I’ve heard you say it a hundred times, Abe. You can’t prove a negative. It might be y’all want to concentrate on why it could have been a homicide.’