John Lescroart - Guilt

Supporting scaffolding had already been erected around the two downhill buildings, but Sam's, from the look of it, might be beyond salvage. The front corner appeared to have caved in completely, and the entire house listed forward as though waiting for one more tiny aftershock to send it toppling.

My God! he thought. That was Sam's room. She was in there!

Farrell walked up to one of the blue-uniformed policemen who were keeping the crowd from getting too close to the unstable structure. 'Excuse me. I know somebody who lives in that building. Do you have any news about the tenants?'

The cop turned around, his eyes sympathetic. 'Have you tried the hospitals? Maybe I'd start there.'

Wes nodded mutely, then stood another minute, struck again by the power of moving earth. 'Excuse me,' he repeated. 'Do you know if anybody died in these buildings?'

The cop shook his head, commiserating, conveying the worst. 'I'd check the hospitals,' he said again.

Once Sheila Dooher admitted that her husband had owned a bayonet – although it was no longer in the garage – Glitsky thought that getting his search warrant would be easy.

He filled out his new one and brought it down to this week's duty Judge, Martin Arenson. But Arenson, like everyone else, was cleaning up from the earthquake. He'd handed off his magistrate assignments to another Municipal Court Judge, Ann Connor, and she hadn't been particularly receptive to Abe's version of probable cause. She'd refused to sign the warrant, which put him in a bind, since once one Judge in the Muni Court declined to sign a warrant, no one else there would touch it.

Glitsky did have another option – one he'd used in emergencies in the past. He could go to Superior Court and get a sealed warrant from one of the Judges on the Senior Bench. He was fairly well known in Superior Court since most trials he attended were for homicides. And he was anxious to move quickly, before Dooher had a chance to hide or ditch anything else.

'But the wife can't testify against him.' Judge Oscar Thomasino had the search warrant in front of him on his clean desk, awaiting his signature. He'd listened to Glitsky's tale and wasn't close to sold on more probable cause. 'And am I wrong? I don't see anything pointing to this man, except your questionably legal search.'

'She let me in, Judge.'

Thomasino waved a hand. Sixty-ish, he wore his gray hair brush cut. He had thick slab of a face, a swarthy, liver-spotted complexion, and a reputation as a judicial hardass.

It was Friday night and he had been going home after a grueling week of earthquake-related delays, but Glitsky had caught him at the back door and tried to guilt him back inside. He'd come, but out of duty, not guilt, and now he wasn't disposed to be cooperative, and he treated Glitsky to his bushy eyebrow trick – up and down over the glare. No words.

'I don't need her testimony, your honor,' Glitsky repeated. 'I just need what might be in the house.'

The Judge smoothed his hands over the grain of his desk. 'Abe, this is a prominent man, not some lowlife from the projects, not that as a matter of law that makes any difference, of course. And you're telling me you didn't find out anything incriminating from the phone records?'

Glitsky more or less agreed, but tried to sweeten it by riffing around it for a couple of bars. Thomasino stopped him. 'I don't see this one, Abe.' The Judge straightened up in his chair, considering something, then decided to come out with it. 'You know, Abe, this business of coming to Superior Court when Muni turns you down is tricky. I know you've got good instincts; you might even be right. But what I see here, I don't have enough. Connor didn't either.'

'Judge…'

Thomasino held up his hand again. 'I understand you can't go back to Muni, not now. But you've got to get me a little more. If you find it, come by the house, I'm around all weekend. I'll sign off. But I need something I can point to. Do you even know where he was on the night in question?'

'He was killing Victor Trang.'

A face, the eyebrows. 'Okay. But what does he say?'

'He says he went to the driving range, then came back to his office and worked late.'

'Well, if he did that, maybe somebody saw him. Or didn't.'

'That may be.'

'Well, good luck,' the Judge said. 'Have a nice weekend.'

Glitsky was damned if he was going to find himself a picture of Mark Dooher and go trotting with it out to the city's driving ranges, showing it to employees and asking if they specifically remembered seeing him a week and a half before. If he thought that course of events would produce any results, he might have considered it, but he believed what he'd told Thomasino. Dooher had been killing Trang that night, not hitting golf balls.

But the bottom line was that he didn't have the signed warrant and couldn't go looking where he stood a chance of finding, so what the hell else was he going to do?

Pondering, he was standing in the downstairs lobby of the Hall, by the elevators, hands in his pockets, oblivious to the passing throngs checking out for the weekend.

'Too much lemon in your tea, Abe?' Amanda Jenkins, the Assistant DA who'd shared Levon Copes with him, had moved out of the flow of humanity and, amused, was looking up at him. 'That expression – I just sucked on a lemon – it's so you.'

'It so happens I did just suck on a lemon.' He held up the unsigned warrant. 'But what's really made my day is Thomasino's call on this.'

Jenkins snatched it away and scanned it quickly. 'This looks good to me. House, car, office, personal effects. What's the problem?'

'You'll notice the good Judge didn't sign it. My first choice for perp appears to be a pillar of the community, so he's got a higher probable cause threshold than lesser mortals.'

'Ah, democracy.'

'Ain't it grand? I don't have any evidence, so I can't get permission to look for evidence.'

'It's a beautiful system,' Jenkins agreed. 'So what do you have? You got anything? You must have something.'

Glitsky started to tell Amanda what he did have – his hunches, the settlement background, the discrepancy between Trang's women's story and Mark Dooher's, the hazy alibi, the bayonet that had mysteriously – and apparently recently – disappeared, and finally the one search warrant Thomasino had signed off on, for Dooher's phone records.

'They don't by any chance include a earphone, do they?'

'Yeah. But so what?'

Jenkins's normally stern visage cracked. Her eyes lit up with excitement, with the thrill of the chase. 'You got time to take five, get some coffee? All may not be lost.'

The downstairs cafeteria was nearly deserted, cavernous and echoing with the cleanup workers' efforts. Glitsky and Jenkins brought their paper cups over from the long stainless steel counter and were sitting down across from one another at one of the fold-up tables. Amanda was already rolling with it, explaining the new technological investigating-tool breakthrough that had been discovered as a by-product of the cellular phone network. 'You never heard of it,' she enthused, 'because I don't think anybody's ever used it to find out where someone was. Normally, they use it to track where somebody is, right now.'

She could see Glitsky still wasn't clear on the concept. 'Abe, you remember that big kidnap/ransom thing in Oakland last year? Okay, the kidnapper, he's calling the victim's family every five minutes, making ransom demands, changing the drop point, making sure there's no trail, the usual. So guess what? He's using his earphone, and one of our guys remembers an article in one of those magazines we all throw away. He gets a brainstorm. He calls the phone company, asks if there's any way they can tell, even roughly, where a cell call originates. You know how it works?'