John Lescroart - The Mercy Rule

‘Of course we want to help Graham any way we can. Are we allowed to come and visit him at the jail? Where did he go this last week, do you know? When is he being… what’s the word, arraigned?’

‘That’s the word. Tomorrow morning, nine A.M., but these things aren’t very exact in terms of time,’ he explained, understating considerably. ‘If you’re there at nine-thirty, Superior Court, Department Twenty-two, you won’t miss it. We can meet after that.’

‘I’ll be there,’ she said. ‘My husband too.’

‘Fine,’ Hardy replied. ‘I’ll be the one in the suit standing next to your son.’

Lanier and Evans had spent the afternoon going door to door in Hunter’s Point, questioning the residents who lived near one of the neighborhood’s busiest intersections, wondering whether any of them had noticed the fusillade of eighty shots from at least three different weapons last Thursday night that had killed two teenagers and wounded four others, broken sixteen windows, and set off alarms in five of the street-front businesses.

Mostly, nobody had seen or heard a thing. Thursday? No, Thursday be pretty quiet most times.

Sarah had been in the game a long time, so this didn’t surprise her. But it did make her angry. Between them, she and Marcel had located and interviewed a grand total of three witnesses who had seen the car drive up and fire randomly into the crowd gathered on the corner. But it had been dark, and there was no telling the make or model, or the color or size or sex of the driver or other occupants, if any.

‘What really gets me’ – Sarah was a few minutes into milkshake therapy at the closest McDonald’s – ‘is they treat it like it’s a natural disaster, some act of nature. Nobody’s fault, it just happens.’

Since this was the essence of police work, it didn’t seem to faze Marcel, who’d walked the walk through dozens of similar incidents. ‘I don’t know why they make these things so thick. I cannot get a drop out of this straw. You think if I went back and told ’em I was a cop, they’d add some milk or something?‘

‘Here’s a wild concept, Marcel – you could use a spoon. See? Just like I’m doing. But doesn’t it make you crazy?’

He put the shake down and lifted his shoulders. ‘The thing is, Sarah, nothing that happens is anybody’s fault. Things just happen to people. So you called it – it’s a natural disaster.’

‘But somebody did this, Marcel. Somebody drove up and shot these kids-’

‘Hey, don’t you go losing sleep over these poor kids. Somebody in that crowd had guns on ’em. That’s a guarantee.‘

‘And so you shoot at the whole crowd?’

‘And miss,’ Marcel said. ‘Don’t forget that part. You are not a true gangbanger if you actually hit any part of the person you go to take out. You only hit bystanders. It’s kind of like the unwritten rule. Maybe an inside joke. I’m not sure which. I’m going to go get a spoon.’

When he came back to the table, Sarah was staring at nothing, eyes glazed. Marcel slid in. ‘What now?’

‘Nothing.’

Lanier spooned some milkshake. ‘Look, Sarah. You want some free advice? Probably not, but here it is. You can’t worry so much. You take all this too seriously.’

‘Thanks, but I wasn’t thinking about this anymore. I’m thinking about Graham Russo.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean. Graham Russo is in jail. That means we’re done with him until he goes to trial. What are you thinking about?’

Wondering how much she could say, she stirred at her shake. ‘There’s something going on we don’t know. There has to be.’

‘This is always true,’ Lanier said. ‘But a lot of what’s going on doesn’t have squat to do with our jobs.’

‘This does. Look, they ask us to go find everything we can to make sure Russo’s not the wrong guy and give us three days to do it? So we don’t find it in three days it doesn’t exist?’

Marcel was dipping his spoon, his brain reluctantly engaged. He nodded. ‘Essentially.’

‘Okay, now we’re six days down the road. Tosca tells you about a power struggle that Sal’s smack in the middle of, and I learn that there’s at least some chance he was holding a big bag of cash on the day he’s killed. So what do we do with this information? You’re telling me you believe it doesn’t relate?’

Lanier shrugged. ‘Even if it does. So what?’

She just stared at him.

‘Do you really think the attorney general of the state of California would bail on this now after sticking his neck so far out? There is no chance. I know Dean Powell. He used to work here. And Soma? Jesus. These guys could get an affidavit signed by two dozen eyewitnesses that Graham Russo was in New York for the week all around Sal’s death and they’d say then he must have killed him by phone.’

Sarah sat back, drummed her fingers on the table. ‘I mink we ought to tell Abe. Cover ourselves, if nothing else.’

‘And what’s he going to do?’ Lanier gave up on his milkshake, pushing it aside. ‘Look, they got the grand jury to indict Russo already. He’s in jail. Anything but a smoking gun in somebody else’s hand – and maybe not even that – it’s not going to matter. From now on the evidence talks.’

‘Except what we’ve found since Friday-’

He was shaking his head. ‘None of it’s evidence. It’s all “maybe” and “what if.” ’

‘Sure, but there’s a hell of a lot of it. Any other case we’d still be looking around, see what we found.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well?’

He took a moment. ‘Well, this case we don’t.’ Lanier shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is.’

Sarah knew that, in general, Lanier was right. That was the way it was. They were in police work and it got ugly and intense. You took a position and you held it against the odds if you needed to. Above all, you did not criticize other cops.

If a person wanted touchy-feely, there were lots of other places to look for work. Because Sarah had come to believe that one suspect in her entire career was innocent, this did not make her a bad cop, a weak link. She’d prove that anytime she needed to. Abruptly she stood up. ‘Hey, Marcel,’ she said, ‘suck that up. We’re going back to the Point.’

Sarah had spent a lot of time at Hunter’s Point in the course of her career. It was a rough place where over eighty-five percent of the adult population had either committed or witnessed a violent crime. At the McDonald’s she suddenly realized that if they cruised the streets for a while in the neighborhood, she could find some somebody here she could break. And sure enough, there was Yolanda, coming out of one of the boarded-up establishments.

Marcel pulled up and Sarah was out of the car, badge out.

‘Hey, I didn’t do nothing. What you comin’ at me for?‘

‘Just get in, Yolanda. We’re going to talk.’

Now she had the twenty-year-old woman in the backseat of their unmarked car. Marcel was in plain sight on the corner, not fifteen feet away, but they weren’t going to good-cop, bad-cop this witness. Sarah was going to get some answers herself.

‘I saw you at the jail the other day, didn’t I, Yolanda? You were visiting Damon down there again, weren’t you? How is Damon?’

Damon Frazee was a goateed weight-lifter who occasionally did some mayhem on citizens, as he had a couple of weekends before – a friendly little bar fight with a knife or two. Unfortunately, Damon was looking at life in prison now under California’s three-strikes law. If convicted it would be his third violent offense and he would be gone from Yolanda forever. Sarah figured she could work this to her advantage.

‘Framed,’ Yolanda mumbled. ‘Damon got hissef framed.’