The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  Andrea was sitting at her own desk, glued to her computer monitor, her fingers moving over the keys. He moved forward a couple of steps and knocked gently on her desk. “Got a minute?”

  Half turning, she nodded. “Certainly.”

  “In my office?”

  “Yes, sir.” With no hesitation—his wish truly was her command—she pushed her chair back, stood up, and crossed in front of him and back into his office. Falling in behind her, he followed her in and closed the door. Stopping, she turned with a smile. “What’s up?”

  “Well”—he lifted, then rolled his shoulders, showing her a bit of a grimace—“I’m afraid it might not fall within your formal job description, but suddenly I’ve developed this crick in my shoulders going up to my neck and I can’t seem to get it worked out. It’s killing me, if you want to know the truth. I’m tight as a drum. I was wondering if you would mind trying to work out the knots a little bit. I could just get into my chair and . . .”

  “Go,” she said, stepping aside, guiding him around her. “I don’t make a big deal out of it here at the office, but back rubs are one of my specialties. So you’ve asked the right person.”

  “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

  “Not going to happen,” she said.

  He went to his chair and, with a slight exaggeration of pain, lowered himself into it.

  She came around behind him. “Cross your arms on the desk and put your head down.”

  He did as directed and felt her thumbs jab expertly into the muscles of his upper back. “There you go,” she said soothingly. “I see what you mean. Tight as a drum is right. That’s it. Just let it go. Tell me if I’m pushing too hard. There you go. Easy now. Just breathe and try to relax. There.”

  • • •

  BETH TULLY HAD a dinner date planned with her daughter, Ginny, but Ginny was late getting home from her classes. This afforded Beth a window of opportunity to reflect on all that was going on, and as she sat in her living room with a glass of white wine, she came under the grip of a realization so strong that at first it made her dizzy.

  The Valdez murder case, from which she and Ike had been so unceremoniously removed, was turning out in all probability to be not so cut-and-dried as it had originally seemed. In fact, Beth and Ike both now believed in an entirely different theory than the one they had begun with.

  Whether they could prove it was another question.

  But the point that had struck her so forcefully was that they had come to their new version of the truth by the simple expedient of continuing to pepper with questions those most closely involved.

  They had discovered no new evidence. They had simply kept prodding the principals—in this case Adam McGowan, Mel Bernardo, and Rita Allegro—and a new truth had begun to emerge from the disparate stories that had come from the mouths of these witnesses. Only by playing those stories back one against the other were they able to better understand where they failed to jibe. And, in fact, what truth they might be hiding.

  Of course, in her many years as a detective, and particularly since becoming a homicide inspector, she had broken the stories of many suspects, usually by presenting them with evidence that contradicted their testimony. Only rarely—if ever—could she remember a time when she and/or Ike had drawn a confession from someone or discovered some new theory because someone else told a different story.

  And there was also the simple reality that murder cases were a commercial product. The Homicide Department was to a large extent judged and budgeted by its success with handling that product. Investigations had their own shelf life; they were not supposed to last forever. This was why, when Beth and Ike had been removed from the Valdez case, neither of them really lost any sleep over it. The issue had been decided; they had an indicted suspect. They would move on to another murder—and God knew they were never in short supply—keep busy, identify suspects, make their numbers. The past cases were closed and that was the end of it.

  Except now, with a successful conclusion expected in the informally reopened Valdez case, she found herself unable to stop her brain’s restless contemplation of the murders of Peter Ash and Geoff Cooke. She reasoned that if her professional time could be spared to revisit the supposedly closed murder case of Hector Valdez, it might be even more profitably used going back and getting some statements from the principals in Ash/Cooke, starting with Kate Jameson.

  Beth knew that after all this time, if she showed up on Kate’s doorstep with some questions, it would be a shock, to say the very least. Asking new or even old questions about Peter Ash and Geoff Cooke would seriously impact Kate’s worldview and by extension her husband’s. Kate might find herself compelled to tell Ron that those murder cases were apparently no longer closed: everyone knew that there was no statute of limitations on murder. And then Ron’s reaction, whatever it might be, could prove instructive.

  Where Beth had let herself become intimidated by Ron’s position and power—essentially believing that, with the slightest of provocations or even none at all, the DA could threaten her job—she suddenly realized that she could wield some significant power of her own by going on the offensive. How, she wondered, could she not have seen this earlier? Ron Jameson would never dare interfere with her job if there was even a rumor that she was investigating him and/or his wife. In fact, the investigation might even serve as a kind of life and/or job insurance.

  She didn’t have to live in fear of him or be anxious about what he might do to her. Rather, she could bring her game to his court and see how he liked that.

  Was she worried, she asked herself, that she would be getting in the face of someone she knew was a murderer? Hardly. She confronted killers every day in her job.

  She heard a key turn in her front door and her wonderful daughter came around the corner into the living room.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hey, sweetie.”

  “What are you looking so happy about?”

  “Am I?”

  “Like you just swallowed the canary. Did something happen?”

  “Not yet,” Beth said, her smile now all but beaming, “but maybe soon.”

  21

  HARDY FINALLY DECIDED to go ahead and file the motion for recusal against Ron Jameson that he’d written over the past week. All along, he had thought that there was little chance that the motion would prevail, but that wasn’t the point: the filing alone, he thought, might put the district attorney off his feed for a while, and that at the very least might give the man pause before he tried to pull his bullying bullshit on other defendants.

  It was a cold and clear Friday morning, and rather than mail the motion Hardy decided to walk the half mile or so from his office down to the Hall of Justice, where he would file the motion himself.

  That process—essentially handing a few pages to a clerk behind a window—took him the better part of an hour, the wheels of justice at every level continuing to grind exceeding slow. He didn’t know after all these years why this still had the ability to surprise him. Maybe because it had been so long since he’d done any kind of grunt work himself; he also wanted to believe that bureaucratically things must have improved. But this seemed to be a vain hope, at least this morning.

  Out on the front steps, his breath forming vapor clouds in front of him, he hesitated for a few seconds before shrugging, making up his mind, and crossing Bryant. He didn’t have any plan or expectation about what if anything he’d run into down the stairs to Lou the Greek’s, but he could use a cup of hot coffee in any event, and you just never knew.

  He stopped inside the doors and for a few seconds let his eyes adjust to the dimness. The place had its usual half dozen morning drinkers at the bar to his right, but all of the floor tables were empty. At the farthest-back corner booth, though, he recognized a familiar face and made his way through the empty room.

  “Any room in there where an old guy can sit and rest his weary bones?”

  Devin Juhle looked up at him in mild surpri
se, then slid over. “Hey, Diz. What brings you down here?”

  “I had a recusal motion on our esteemed DA that was burning a hole in my pocket. It suddenly felt like a good day to go file it.”

  “You’re going ahead on that?” Beth asked.

  Hardy nodded. “I just did.”

  “That ought to liven things up over at the Hall,” Juhle said.

  Hardy wore a tight little smile. “It might at that. Stir the pot a little.” He nodded across the table at the two inspectors. “Meanwhile,” he said, “I’m not interfering with official police business, I trust.”

  “Not egregiously,” Beth replied. “We’re just about to head out to talk to Rita from El Sol again in the Valdez case. If that doesn’t work out too well with her, we were talking again about the odds of getting Phyllis to wear a wire.”

  “Probably not much better than they were yesterday,” Hardy said, “but still worth trying. I can talk to her if you want, but last time she seemed to think you guys were after Adam because he was an ex-con.”

  Ike grunted. “We’re after her brother,” he said, “because he killed Valdez.”

  Beth put a hand over her partner’s. “I think we’re all pretty much on the same team here. It’s just a matter of breaking the stories, which ought to happen soon.”

  “Let’s hope,” Juhle said. “Although that’s going to open its own can of worms with the DA.”

  “Probably,” Beth said.

  Hardy put in his two cents. “Not necessarily a bad thing.”

  Juhle grunted. “Easy for you to say.”

  • • •

  EVEN DURING THE five years or so when she’d been defining herself as a full-time novelist, Gina Roake never stopped coming into her office for at least a few hours. Her goal was to put down a page of fiction every day, which, she knew, would result in a finished book every year. She hadn’t exactly broken through commercially on any of her books to date, and the last offer from her publishers had been, she felt, just short of insulting, so she’d turned it down. Since that refusal, her agent hadn’t landed another deal, so she was in limbo.

  Which didn’t mean that she had stopped writing. She still loved the process, coming in to work, making stuff up. Maybe she’d self-publish the next one.

  This Friday morning she was in early, working on a new character based on her former law partner, lover, and (for about a day) fiancé, David Freeman. Although part of her felt that borrowing traits from a real person she’d actually known was somehow cheating, it also gave her the opportunity to reimagine her time with him and to tap into the emotions of the times they’d spent together.

  She had long ago learned, when she was writing, to lock the door to her office against the intrusion of secretaries, paralegals, or associates who might wander in and catch her with tears running down her cheeks.

  As they were this morning.

  Her intercom buzzed and her secretary, Ally, told her that an Inspector Chet Greene from the DA’s Bureau of Investigations was there and wanted to see her. He did not have an appointment.

  “Did he say what this is about?”

  “No.”

  The name was vaguely familiar to her, and in any event her personal policy was to cooperate with law enforcement whenever possible—always remembering that sometimes it wasn’t—so she said, “I need a couple of minutes. Please ask him to wait and I’ll ring you right back when I’m ready.”

  After first logging off her computer, she hung up, then dug out a Kleenex. Standing, she crossed over to her wet bar and threw water in her face, dabbing at her eyes. Well, she thought, at least she hadn’t been outright sobbing. She looked in the mirror and declared herself fit to receive guests. Returning to her desk, she picked up her phone and told Ally to send the inspector back.

  She recognized him right away as the guy who’d put the handcuffs on Phyllis here at the office a few days ago. Still, she greeted him cordially enough, shook hands, and asked him to take one of the comfortable upholstered chairs that made up her seating area, and she sat down across from him. “So, Inspector, how can I help you? I’m afraid that if this is about Ms. McGowan, you’re going to want to talk to Mr. Hardy, who is her attorney.”

  “Well, no. It’s not about her.” He cracked a thin perfunctory smile and pressed on. “Actually, Mr. Jameson has assigned me to revisit some of our cold cases and see if we could profitably open some of those investigations and get them resolved one way or the other.”

  Gina sat back in her chair, her tears forgotten, her face closing down. “And you’re here to talk to me about one of those?”

  “Two, actually.”

  “Two? These were cases I defended, I presume?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Well, then, exactly how was I involved?”

  Greene blew out a quick pulse of air. “Frankly, in both cases, you provided alibis that impacted the prosecution.”

  “What does that mean exactly: ‘impacted the prosecution’? What were these cases?”

  “Well, one of them, the first one, never got to trial.”

  “Really? So you’re saying there wasn’t enough evidence to take it to trial?”

  “No. There was a ton of evidence. Hundreds of rounds of casings and bullets and five bodies. As I’m sure you realize by now, I’m talking about the Dockside Massacre.”

  “You’re implying that I had something to do with that?”

  “I am. I’m talking about the fact that you and Lieutenant Glitsky each alibied one another for the time of those shootings.”

  Gina cocked her head. “Really? And when was this, again, exactly?”

  “You don’t remember that?”

  “What?”

  “What you told police about that at the time.”

  “I don’t know anything about the Dockside Massacre other than what I’ve read about it over the years. At the time, though, if I remember correctly, I was mourning the death of Mr. Freeman and I can’t say I was thinking about too much else. My understanding and my memory was that the shoot-out was some Russian mafia situation over blood diamonds or something of that nature. How in the world do you put me in the middle of that—or anywhere near it, for that matter? It’s absurd. You’re essentially calling me a murderer, do you realize that?” Gina stood up. “I think, Inspector, that it’s time for this interview to be over. Unless you’ve got a warrant of some kind. Otherwise . . .”

  “You don’t want to hear about the other case you figured into?”

  “Not really, unless—”

  Greene interrupted her. “I’m talking about Moses McGuire—your partner’s brother-in-law—and about your alibi for the afternoon of the murder he committed.”

  “That’s because he didn’t commit any murder. A jury found him not guilty, Inspector. That’s how we do it here in this country. And that makes it not a cold case but a closed case. I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Mr. Jameson’s seriously got you out looking to tie me to these two cases? And yet you don’t present me with even the smallest show of new evidence in either case. If this isn’t pure harassment, I don’t know what is.”

  “It’s actually a courtesy where Mr. Jameson is prepared to make a deal for immunity in your case—”

  “Immunity from what?”

  “Getting charged with murder, along with Hardy and Glitsky and McGuire.”

  “McGuire’s already dead, Inspector. You’re a little bit behind the curve.”

  “If you’d just—”

  “I don’t want any part of it. And I need you to get up and get out of my office before I call the real police—and don’t think I won’t—to get you out of here.”

  Greene got to his feet. “You’re making a huge mistake.”

  “Nothing like the one you’ve already made. Now get out! Now. Get out.”

  • • •

  “NO, REALLY?” HARDY said.

  “Yes, really.” Gina sat with one hip on the corner of her office desk. “I am still in a state of shoc
k, if you want to know. I mean, how far can they push this without any evidence?”

  “I want to say ‘Nowhere,’ but when you throw the rules out the window . . .” Hardy shrugged his shoulders. “In the normal course of events, they couldn’t do a goddamn thing. But we all saw the way they moved on Phyllis, which had nothing to do with what they really had on her. They just wanted to piss in our beer.”

  “And now they’re doing it again.”

  “I see it,” Hardy said. “Imagine if the guy had lost the election, if this is his magnanimous self as a winner. I think he wants to wipe this firm off the face of the earth. And I don’t know what we can actually do.”

  “Do you want to add this to your recusal motion?”

  “What? What do we want sanctions for? Interviewing a witness? Offering her immunity? Nothing wrong with any of that. Except for how it might play in terms of our business in real life. If he’s going to put these innuendos out there . . .”

  “A lot more than innuendos.”

  “Okay. I won’t fight you there. A lot more.”

  Gina’s intercom rang and she picked it up. “Send him on down,” she said.

  Half a minute later, Wes Farrell was with them, and two minutes after that he had hoisted himself onto the other corner of Gina’s desk and was shaking his head in anger and disbelief. “Not to sound like an egomaniac,” he said, “but this is all my fault. It’s all because of me. I’ve got to bail on you guys and get you out of the line of fire.”

  “That’s no solution,” Hardy snapped back. “Then he just wins. And it wouldn’t work anyway. That would just embolden him.”

  “Maybe,” Wes said, “or maybe we just live to fight another day.”

  “That whole ‘fight another day’ argument doesn’t exactly sing for me, Wes.”

  Gina nodded. “Me neither.”

  “Well, I appreciate the loyalty and show of support,” Wes said, “but I thought that me joining up with the firm would be lucrative and fun, and now it’s looking like a whole lot of neither.” He looked over at Gina. “He actually accused you of murder?”