With all the stress he was under, nobody could blame him.
He just didn’t want the hassle of explaining to Kate if she did decide to go there for lunch that day, but the odds of that, he knew, were slim. If it came to having to explain, he could always just tell his wife that he needed to get out of the claustrophobic office and he’d invited Andrea along to coordinate his schedule and organize their respective workloads. It would all be vague enough to be true and she might not completely believe it, but it would play.
He had always, after all, been faithful to her up until now. She was the one who’d had the dalliance with fucking Peter Ash that had changed everything. He felt that if he went ahead and allowed himself to have a little extracurricular fun, she should shower him with the same understanding and forgiveness that he’d given her when he’d realized what she’d done back then.
In fact, if anything, truth be told, she owed him. Even if he got physically involved with Andrea . . .
But they weren’t quite at that point. Not yet, anyway. There was ultimately deniability there because nothing overt had happened. They were just two working colleagues having a platonic date for lunch.
But the possibilities and the risk added a certain piquancy to the whole feel of the day. And what the hell, he told himself. Kate ought to cut him some slack. He’d earned a little quality time.
• • •
ANDREA WAS VALUABLE as a secretary because she had a keen eye for detail. In his office, after they’d finished going over his calendar for the next week or so, he proffered the invitation and she told him that she would love to go out and have a nice restaurant lunch with him. It would be a nice way to break up the day, and she was at his service, but . . .
“I think we’d be wise if we didn’t drive down there together, Ron.” This was the first time she’d called him by his first name. “People see us both get out of the same car and you never know where that’s going to lead. You are a pretty recognizable face, you know. As you should be. But we need to be hyperaware of appearances, don’t you think? You don’t want to get tongues wagging.”
“But why should they? We work together. If anybody asks, we just say we’re talking about our work over a nice meal. People have business lunches all the time. There’s nothing remotely salacious about it.”
The smile she gave him carried a multitude of messages, all of which he found exciting. This discussion really was a private game they were playing. She knew exactly what he was talking about and was telling him that they should not kid themselves: this was a date. The cover story was a working lunch. But she knew that they were not in fact taking any work with them. This was an escalation in their relationship, and she gave him every indication that she was in on the game and on board with it.
“I just think it would be smart to be careful,” she said.
Speaking of details, when he got to Sam’s, he should remember to mention that he’d like a different booth from his usual, which had a small brass plaque inscribed Ron & Kate, First Fridays. That would certainly dampen the mood with Andrea.
And so he found himself alone in the alternative booth he’d reserved, waiting for his secretary. He was drinking an experimental martini with Hendrick’s gin and a few drops of St-Germain, an elderflower liqueur in place of vermouth, which he found surprisingly delicious.
He’d told Stefano to be on the lookout for Andrea and to deliver her right back to the booth when she arrived. He couldn’t miss her: she’d be the prettiest woman who came in the door, period.
Meanwhile, would Stefano please pull the curtain closed and let him enjoy his drink in peace?
• • •
CHET GREENE KNEW that he was being a pest, but couldn’t help him-
self.
He didn’t have any driving duties with the DA today, so first thing in the morning he’d showed up at the main evidence locker down by the police lab at Hunters Point. The workers there didn’t seem to have the same sense of urgency that he felt, and it had taken him the better part of an hour to get his hands on the physical files relating to the Dockside Massacre, then another hour or so to personally connect with the DNA expert, Philip Nguyen, who explained to him that, unlike the fingerprint situation, in those days they didn’t have a computerized DNA database, so they couldn’t match DNA unless they had a comparison sample from somebody they wanted to check. Which Chet didn’t have.
And even if he had a sample of, for example, Dismas Hardy’s or Abe Glitsky’s DNA to check against the blood sample, Nguyen could not possibly get around to his requested analysis for at least a couple of days.
And never if he didn’t get some of Hardy’s or Glitsky’s DNA for comparison.
This was, after all, a pretty darned old case for there to be any real hurry. If Chet could bring him some samples, he’d get to it when he got a little time.
The fingerprint expert, whose name tag read Pat Daly, was marginally more cooperative, although she, too, was less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic.
It didn’t really help matters that, after the initial round of fingerprint analysis back when the case was new, the casings—all 137 of them!—with either no traces at all or unidentified fingerprints, had been unceremoniously dumped back into a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. (The fingerprints that had originally yielded identifiable prints had their own bag.) The cards with the actual lifts from the various casings were all in file folders.
Pat Daly explained that this meant she would have to go through these one by one. Chet shouldn’t feel like he had to wait around for the results. She could call him when she (eventually) got through them, if she had any results to share with him.
But this didn’t fit in with how Chet was feeling. He was down here now, they had the casings, he’d wait here for something to shake out. After two more visits back to the front window to check on how things were coming along, Pat Daly finally let him come back to her workstation, with its computer with its database and her microscope.
She wasn’t doing it in the most efficient way. First, she was separating the cards into two piles: the lifts that she thought could be entered into the computer, and the partials that she decided would have to be checked by hand, assuming there was someone to check them against. But she was including the previously identified latents. Chet gently pointed out that this was an extra and unnecessary step, since he was only interested in the others, the unknown prints or partials.
With a sigh of almost biblical proportions, Daly acknowledged that he was right.
It was slow going. Sometimes five to seven minutes per lift card.
Chet was pretty sure that if he tried to rush her it would only succeed in slowing things down.
• • •
ALTHOUGH HE HAD a full load of legal work on his desk, Hardy decided on more or less the spur of the moment that he was going to take the afternoon off. He was, after all, the managing partner of a successful law firm, and if he couldn’t take a couple of hours to play hooky, what was the point?
Glitsky, being retired, had every afternoon off if he wanted to take it, and Hardy’s suggestion that they take the thirty-minute ferry ride over to Sausalito struck a chord.
Now the two of them stood on the stern deck looking back over the wake as it churned up the bay behind them. They were just passing Alcatraz, basking in its own tiny ray of sunshine.
“This was a good idea,” Glitsky said. “I ought to get out here on the water more often.”
“Everybody ought to do that. In fact, they should make it a law. Mellow everybody out.”
“A law that forces everybody to mellow out?”
“No. They’d mellow out by themselves once they started cruising around on the bay. You’d only need the law if people didn’t want to do it on their own.”
“Then you make it against the law not to cruise around on the bay?”
“That’s the idea, but it wouldn’t have to be every day. A few days a week ought to do it.”
“To cruise or not to
cruise?”
“Cruise.”
“To keep everybody mellow?”
“Exactly.”
“What if everybody didn’t want to be mellow? What if people wanted to be intense and uptight and cut you off in traffic and work hard on stuff?”
“I’d feel sorry for them, but maybe they could get a special exemption. Except the people who cut you off. They should be locked up and possibly executed.”
“That’s a little harsh, wouldn’t you say?”
“People would get used to it.”
“Getting executed?”
“No, having to ride on the ferry. It’d be good for almost everybody.”
“It’s the ‘almost’ I’m worried about. What about if you get legitimately seasick?”
“On a little ferry ride like this?”
“Could happen.”
“Rarely if ever, and if it did, we could write up an exception for those poor souls.”
“Another law.”
Hardy shrugged. “Looks like. But without them, you must admit, it’s chaos.”
“How about this?” Glitsky cast him a sidelong look. “Everything doesn’t have to be a law. Did you ever think about that as a possibility?”
“Not too often. I can’t imagine why I would. I’m a lawyer, in case you haven’t been paying attention. The law is my life. Laws are good.”
“Well, good laws are good, I’ll give you that. Bad laws, not so much. Why are we talking about the law again, by the way? Remind me.”
“It’s such a good time?”
“Nope,” Glitsky said. “I’m pretty sure that’s not it.”
• • •
THEY HAD MOST of an hour to kill before the return trip on the ferry, and now they walked along the Sausalito waterfront. Although the fog still lay like a thick blanket out on the bay where it was blowing in under the Golden Gate, the sun had followed them directly over from Alcatraz and now within this minuscule microclimate it was downright balmy.
“I don’t know if asking Schuyler down was a mistake,” Glitsky was saying. “He’s a good guy and I thought it might be worth a try. I just knew that Tully going out and shaking the bushes on her own would be a problem.”
“Not to sound negative, since that’s mostly your job, but she’s going to have a problem anyway, Abe. She wants to take Jameson down, and I don’t blame her. Hell, I want to help her, which is why I agreed to meet with her last night. And you two as well, I might add, though I did feel a bit ambushed.”
“Well, sorry about that, but if there’s something to find on these murders—evidence-wise—I’ve got to believe the FBI has a better shot of coming up with it than one semi-compromised homicide inspector, and by that I mean Tully. But a better shot doesn’t necessarily mean a good shot. Especially after three years.”
“That’s a lot longer than four days,” Hardy said. He was referring to the truism among law enforcement that after four days, if a homicide wasn’t solved, it probably never would be.
Glitsky stopped and looked over the water. “I wonder if we could be more proactive.”
“I think we’re already in that category. Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, you’ve got your legal stuff, which is a step or two in the right direction, especially if you get a good ruling. But I’m thinking more if I got involved.”
“How would you do that?”
“Well, I’m nothing, right? I have no official standing to interview anybody. And nobody can fire me. So what’s to stop me from going out and talking, for example, to Kate Jameson . . .”
“Under what pretext?”
“No pretext. Straightforward. ‘Here are some discrepancies in your story—oh, and by the way, your husband’s story—that I’d like to ask you about.’ ”
“And why would you do that? She’d slam the door in your face.”
“Well, it would take the heat off Beth, for one thing. Maybe let Kate think I’m working for you and somehow my interest is related to how her husband treated Phyllis or how he’s going to handle her trial, if it comes to that. If he could back off on those charges, we could stop asking these pesky little questions about the murders they’ve committed. However she reacts to those kinds of threats—or how he reacts, for that matter—could be pretty instructive. Even if she refuses to talk, that could be instructive.”
“If he backs off on Phyllis, then he’s guilty?”
“Something like that.” Glitsky raised and lowered his shoulders. “Just thinking out loud, but this guy needs to be in prison, not the DA’s office. And while we’re at it, don’t think for a minute that he’s not keeping a keen eye out for rumors about you and me, too.”
“I don’t know about—”
Glitsky held up a hand. “I’m just saying it might be time to get on the offensive around this guy and keep him scrambling if we can.”
33
BINA COOKE WOKE up from her afternoon nap with a migraine. She’d been suffering from them with some regularity ever since she got the word that her husband had killed himself. That was a little over three years ago and nothing she did seemed to make any difference.
This situation, she had come to believe, had come from an inability to obtain what they called closure. Even after all this time, it was inconceivable to her that her beloved Geoff had taken his own life, and no amount of grief counseling—and she’d had plenty—or therapeutic hikes with girlfriends or hysterical breakdowns had in any way made the stark truth of his death any more manageable.
He was gone forever.
Closure remained elusive because no matter what anybody said, Bina believed with all of her heart that Geoff had not committed suicide. Someone had killed him. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, the San Francisco police, and particularly Inspector Beth Tully, had first bought into the idea that Geoff had killed himself, which Bina had rejected out of hand for several reasons, not the least of which were the purported suicide note—an email, for God’s sake, in which he called her Bina instead of his usual Bean—and the question of whether he would have held the gun in his right hand. Impossible, she thought.
But perhaps most conclusively, he could not have shot himself with either of the Tariq semiautomatic pistols he’d brought home from Desert Storm. Those guns—both of them—remained in their safe here in the house.
They were there, locked up, even now. Therefore, he had not used one of them to kill himself.
Bina knew as an absolute certainty that Geoff had brought home two and only two of these souvenirs. They’d had at least a dozen discussions about them, about whether he should keep them, whether he should surrender them to the city’s gun abatement program, whether they were anything he wanted to be reminded of.
But the main point was that he’d only brought home two of them.
The other person who’d done the same thing—brought home two of these esoteric foreign-made handguns—was their ex-friend and Geoff’s former law partner Ron Jameson, now the district attorney of San Francisco.
Two guns.
Now one of Ron’s guns was presumably where he’d tossed it after killing Peter Ash, at the bottom of the bay, and the other—the one found in Geoff’s car after it had killed him—was in the evidence lockup as the suicide weapon.
So, Bina had reasoned at the time, Ron had to have been Geoff’s killer. He’d killed both Peter Ash and her husband using one of these Tariq weapons for each. It was the only scenario that made any sense. The only one that took any account of the guns.
But then Beth Tully had discovered that Ron had a perfect alibi for the time of the murder. No fewer than six of his colleagues had testified that he had been continuously in their presence in the conference room of his law firm.
Ron could not have done it. But could he have had it done? And if so, by whom? Who could he trust enough?
That reality—so unbelievable and yet apparently true—had so taken the wind out of Bina’s sails that she had essentially shut down her critical faculties abou
t who had been the murderer. She didn’t really care anymore who had done it.
What mattered was that Geoff was dead. If Ron hadn’t killed him, then it must have been one of any number of his colleagues for a million possible reasons, and then the search for Geoff’s murderer—Tully’s job—would be exhausting and possibly futile police business. The search might, in fact, never end. For anyone involved, closure might never come.
And that is what seemed to have played out.
Until yesterday.
Until last night, when she’d met up with a clearly fearful Beth Tully at Gaspare’s. And Beth had calmly laid out her solution, the only possible solution, to the mystery.
Kate.
In some ways, she was always the most obvious choice, except that from Bina’s perspective, and probably Tully’s as well, that had been flatly impossible. Neither of them had to even think about it to conclude that they had to eliminate Kate as a possible suspect. Kate, after all, was their friend. She was a good person, a doting mother, a gentle soul, absolutely incapable of violence, especially the murder of someone she’d cared about.
And yet Tully now had no doubt. She had had no doubt for a long time.
Kate.
Bina opened her eyes in the dark room.
The migraine had suddenly passed.
Gingerly, she swung her legs out of the bed and turned to sit up. Standing, she crossed over to the drapes and pulled them open and found herself looking down over the cottony top of the bank of fog that was still pushing its way inland. Above it, her house still basked in the late-afternoon sunshine.
Fingers at her temples, she blinked at the brightness, but she experienced no aura at the periphery of her vision, no strobe-like beams delivering bursts of pain. Suddenly, she realized, all was clarity.
Kate, she thought. Of course. Kate.
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