The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  “And he’s somehow tied to the Dockside Massacre?”

  “Yep. Tangentially. One of the victims, apparently, a guy named John Holiday, was one of his clients.”

  “And Hardy was there? At the pier for the shoot-out?”

  “Nobody knows, but if Jameson could prove he was, Hardy’s in big trouble.”

  “So that’s what Greene is looking for, new evidence of some kind against this guy Hardy? After all this time?”

  “Exactly. And just between you, me, and the lamppost, he might get it. At least, he’s looking where no man has gone before.” He looked from one inspector to the other, his eyes flashing with excitement. “But there’s more, children, there’s more!”

  “Hit us,” Ike said.

  “All right. Hardy also filed a recusal motion and civil suit against Jameson for mistreating one of his clients, the sister of Adam McGowan.”

  “Phyllis,” Beth said.

  “You know her?”

  “We arrested Adam,” Ike said. “We ran across her.”

  “So that’s another strike against Hardy. He’s trying to get Jameson disbarred, maybe impeached. It’s plenty ugly out there for both of them. And if he gets Hardy for the Dockside thing, the shit is really going to fly, because there is even more.”

  “Please don’t make us beg,” Beth said.

  “All right. Because you’ve been paying such close attention, guess who Hardy is rumored to be hanging with in all of this?”

  “Hunter Pence,” Ike said.

  “Good guess, but wrong,” Faro said. “Anybody else? Anybody?” At their continued silence, he finally gave it up. “Abe Glitsky. Former deputy chief of detectives. Former head of Homicide.”

  Beth was the first to respond. “That’s a hell of a rumor, Len.”

  “I agree. And let me hasten to add that it is still only a rumor. All parts of it. But if Chet finds evidence also putting Glitsky out on the pier, now we’re talking all-out war. It’s the kind of thing people could get themselves literally killed over.”

  Breathless, Beth could barely talk. “Lord.”

  “Lord.” Faro nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Have mercy.”

  • • •

  THE CRIME SCENE unit still hadn’t arrived, so Ike went off to pick up some hamburgers for lunch. Faro invited Beth to wait in his car with him, out of the wind.

  Beth wasted no time after she got in. “While I’ve got you here, Len, I wonder if I could bend your ear for a few minutes, where you can stop me anytime you want.”

  “Are you asking my permission?”

  “Not really. I figure I’ve got you trapped. If you’re not sick of the topic, I want to talk about the Peter Ash case. Which is also the Geoff Cooke case.”

  Faro shifted uncomfortably. “All I do—all the team does—is collect and analyze evidence, Beth. You know that.”

  “Fine. But I’m guessing you remember the main suspect in Ash before the Cooke suicide changed everything.”

  He blew out a short breath. “Jameson. Of course I remember.”

  “He did it. He killed Ash because Ash had slept with his wife, Kate.”

  “All right.”

  “You don’t believe that?”

  He shrugged. “It’s, as they say, a colorable argument. Give me some evidence to prove it, though, and I’ll be happier. Do you have any evidence at all to keep this thing alive in your head? Anything, I mean, that trumps the wealth of actual, physical evidence we got on Cooke? When you do, I’ll be happy to listen anytime, anyplace. But forgetting Ron for a minute: we’ve got Ash’s blood running in the gunwales of Cooke’s boat; we’ve got casings from the same gun that killed Cooke on the boat as well; we’ve got a suicide note admitting that he killed Ash . . .”

  “That was—”

  Faro held up a hand. “Could have been better, yes. But a man who is about to put a bullet in his head may not act like he would otherwise. What else?”

  “Two of those Tariq guns still in Cooke’s safe, untouched.”

  Faro rolled his eyes. “So he had a third gun and didn’t tell anybody.”

  She slammed her fist up against the dashboard. “No, he didn’t! He didn’t have a third gun. The third gun was Ron’s. Goddamn it, Len. Can’t you see this? This is wrong. The whole interpretation is wrong, and now this killer is the DA of San Francisco and we’re all going to be riding on his back into hell.”

  “That might be, Beth. It might be. Find me anything and I promise you I’ll jump on it with both feet, but in the meantime I’d stick with your partner’s idea: Keep a low profile, don’t make waves. Especially if what you believe turns out to be the truth. You think Jameson’s just going to lie still and let you expose him?” He paused and nodded in understanding but clearly felt there was nothing he could do without his stock-in-trade, which was evidence. “I’d let it go, Beth,” he said gently. “I really would let it go.”

  • • •

  BINA FELT DOWNRIGHT silly with the red wig on. The other stuff wasn’t so bad: the khaki hiking pants and matching shirt from REI, the hiking boots that were such a long way from her usually modest heels. No makeup at all. She had taken out her contacts and wore her glasses.

  Invisible, she thought, and at the very least unrecognizable as who she was, in plain sight.

  She carried the guns and the magazines in Geoff’s old briefcase. When she got to the firing range just off Highway 101, she found parking there to be easy and took a spot just to the right of the entrance.

  Inside, she filled out the form to get on the range and handed her driver’s license to the clerk, who, as she had hoped, didn’t check it against the information she had written on the form, but merely put it behind the counter to be returned when she paid her bill and left. She had a moment of panic when the clerk showed so much interest in the magazines because he seemed to be able to tell that the guns hadn’t been fired in a long while. He should really check them out, maybe clean them a bit, before letting her go back into the shooting area.

  But it was nothing: just a friendly guy.

  She told him that her husband had recently died. He hadn’t used the guns in several years, and now, with him gone, she thought it would be smart to be proficient with the weapons for her own protection. You couldn’t really ever be too careful.

  She never mentioned the guns’ provenance in Desert Storm.

  When she was ready, and because she’d told the clerk that she hadn’t done any shooting at all for quite a while, he gave her a little list of things to remember: Wear the ear protection at all times; don’t ever point the gun at anybody, even for an instant; don’t forget to rack the first round into the chamber, because it wouldn’t fire if you didn’t; watch out that you didn’t get pinched by the recoil; use two hands when firing.

  Cake. She’d done all that dozens of times.

  This time, though, the whole experience had a surreal quality. Was she really here, doing this? Her migraine had not returned over the last two days.

  Putting on her ear protection, she slammed the magazine into the butt of the gun and remembered to rack the first round.

  Stepping up to her shooting lane, she held the gun with both hands extended at the target and pulled the trigger.

  Bang!

  Even with the headphones, the gunshot was louder than she remembered from when she used to go shooting with Geoff, and packed much more of a kick. She knew what they were talking about when they reminded her to watch out for getting pinched.

  Bang! She breathed out in a rush, settling into the rhythm of the so-called double tap: two shots in quick succession, recommended in all the reference books as the preferred method of firing if you wanted to make sure that your target would be well and truly dead.

  Bang! Bang!

  Bang! Bang!

  35

  AT 5:45, HARDY sat behind the desk in his office talking to Beth Tully on the firm’s landline. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said. “Chet Greene did what? And how did you find out abou
t it?”

  “Len Faro came by a crime scene we were working today down at Holly Park, and we just got to chatting because of the coincidence of this apparent connection between the Valdez case and the Dockside Massacre ten years ago.”

  “And what is that, exactly?”

  “Well, apparently, at least what Greene wants to get at, is you.”

  “Me? What about me? How can there be any connection to me?”

  “Evidently you had a client who was killed there?”

  “Sure. John Holiday.”

  “So it’s true?”

  “Absolutely. This has never been a secret. John apparently went down there to turn himself in to Barry Gerson on a murder rap he was facing. He did that on his own and against my advice, which you won’t be surprised to hear happens all the time.”

  Beth was silent.

  After a long moment Hardy said, “Did he supposedly find any evidence that I had been there? And the answer to that has to be no, since I wasn’t. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard rumors about this over the years, of course. But I had half a dozen people at the office who testified at the time that I’d been here working all that day. David Freeman, my partner, had just been killed, for God’s sake. We were all shell-shocked, sitting around with our hearts broken. Why did I want to be down at that pier with a recalcitrant client? I had other things on my mind that day. I don’t know how those rumors even got started, much less how they still have enough legs to spark another investigation. What did Greene think he was hoping to find?”

  “According to Faro, something to tell Ron Jameson about, evidence-wise, to threaten your credibility, probably because of those motions you’re waiting on.”

  “He’s grasping at straws, Beth. He’s not going to find anything because there’s nothing to find.”

  Beth sighed into the phone. “Well, good. But I thought you should know that this was going on. I also wanted to tell you that it’s not just you, either. Evidently, Abe is somehow in the mix as well.”

  Alone in his darkened office, Hardy closed his eyes against a rush of adrenaline. “Wow,” he whispered into the mouthpiece. “And how, again, are they justifying all this?”

  “I’m thinking that they hope they’ll get their justification later if they find something while they’re fishing. Then, after the fact, everybody agrees it was good that they looked, right?”

  “But only if they find something, which they won’t.” Planting the seed just in case, he added: “Unless they plant something incriminating. But they’re still left with all the witnesses who swear we were with them. I’m talking Abe, too. We’ve been through this drill before, you know. He was with my other partner, Gina, at David Freeman’s apartment, picking out a suit for his funeral. Nobody’s ever had anything that puts him anywhere else. Like down at the pier. And you know why? Because he wasn’t there, either.”

  “That’s good to know. But I thought all this was something you ought to know about. Jameson and Greene are seriously looking to get you and Abe compromised at least, maybe even arrested.”

  Hardy forced a chuckle. “Well, I’d say there’s little to no chance of that.”

  “That’s good to hear. But still, be careful.”

  “Always,” Hardy said. “And you too.”

  “I will.”

  • • •

  THURSDAY NIGHT, AND Treya was working late, still getting settled at her new workstation outside Wes Farrell’s office. Both of the Glitsky children were at different friends’ homes for dinner, so Abe was alone at home, half dozing on the living room couch, when the deep gong of the doorbell slapped him all the way awake. Getting to the door, he checked the peephole, saw a familiar face, and opened up.

  Hardy wasted no time with pleasantries. “In these troubled times,” he said with some asperity, “you might consider leaving your phone turned on.”

  “I have considered it. I concluded that I didn’t want to. And I’m retired, as in not working anymore, so who’s going to stop me? In fact, isn’t that the whole point of being retired? You don’t have to do stuff.” He stepped back to let Hardy in. “And what is so troubled about these times, other than the usual?”

  “You want the short version?”

  “Sure. Should we sit down?”

  “Might as well.”

  They did, Glitsky in his reading chair in the front room, and Hardy across the way on the sofa.

  “So,” Glitsky said, relaxing back into the chair. “I’m listening.”

  When Hardy finished several minutes later, Glitsky was sitting forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. The scar through his lips shone on his dark face. His brow was furrowed, his blue eyes nearly hidden under the deep scowl. “Is it never going to end?” he asked.

  “Apparently not.”

  “Did Beth say where the good Inspector Greene was looking to find this purportedly new evidence on the pier?”

  “No. But there’s only one place he could have.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Has to be casings or DNA,” Hardy said. “Those are really the only possibilities. Weren’t there a few hundred casings left out there?”

  “At least.”

  “And they never came back to us on any of them.”

  “Right.”

  “I’m thinking Greene must have gotten the idea from that ‘CityTalk’ column. They got McGowan’s fingerprints off the casings on his murder weapon. Maybe he came up with the idea that there might be prints they’d missed the first time around because they weren’t in the old known-criminal database, if you remember that.”

  Glitsky’s lips went up a centimeter, almost all the way to a smile. “Of course I remember. Although I wiped my ammunition when I loaded, so it wasn’t an issue for me.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think I did. Or Gina, for that matter.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” Glitsky said.

  “But I do. If they take another pass at all the lifts from those casings, who knows what they’ll come up with? Fingerprints, as you know, being oil-based, they don’t go away.”

  “I’m vaguely aware of that. But that issue has been taken care of.”

  “I don’t see how—”

  Glitsky held up a hand. “Diz! Trust me here. Fingerprints aren’t a problem anymore. I have it on the highest authority.”

  Hardy looked at his friend for a long moment. “You sneaky bastard,” he said at last, with real admiration in his voice.

  Glitsky inclined his head an inch in acknowledgment.

  “So what about DNA?”

  “Unless they know who they’re trying to get a match with—like, for example, you or me—realistically, that’s probably not happening.”

  “I got cut on the hand, you know. It bled pretty good.”

  “Honestly, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s possible, of course, but I’m predicting they’re not getting a swab from me or you. Right?”

  “Okay, so what else could it be? Greene must think he’s on some kind of hot trail.”

  “I don’t know. Better men than him have tried to tie us in on this and had no luck. But I admit, it’s worrisome. I don’t see Jameson backing away from any of this just because of lack of results on his first round of looking.”

  “I don’t, either. So . . . you know what you said yesterday about going on the offensive a little more with this guy? I think it may be time.”

  “It might be at that. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking about your friend Bill Schuyler. I think it might be the time for Jameson to understand that he himself is the target of an active FBI investigation into the murder of Peter Ash who, P.S., he actually did kill. Schuyler gets him to lie under oath about what he did with his guns—whether or not he can prove it’s a lie yet—suddenly the heat goes way up under him. There’s a real danger of him getting arrested at any time. At the very least, he’s going to be distracted from trying to put us out at Pier 70.”

  Glitsky chewe
d at the side of his cheek. “Yeah, okay, but what about Beth Tully?”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, in a perfect world, we didn’t want to expose her as the source of Schuyler’s case, remember? That’s why we had him going around and talking to other witnesses first so Jameson would think that they’ve been building a case against him for a while with no reference to Tully.”

  “Yeah, I remember all that.”

  “And?”

  “She’s a big girl, Abe. And the prime mover on Jameson. I say we call her and let her make the decision. If she’s on board, Schuyler moves in close for the hit.”

  • • •

  “ARE YOU KIDDING me?” Beth asked them both. She was on the speaker on Hardy’s cell. “I’m the one who’s been pushing this thing forward all along. You want to go after the son of a bitch now, you are totally welcome and you have my complete blessing.”

  “Okay,” Glitsky said. “But we don’t want to downplay this. It could be dangerous. As in physically dangerous.”

  “Hey, guys,” she said. “This just in: I’m a cop. I work homicide. Everything I do is physically dangerous. Thanks for calling with the update, but I say let’s rock and roll. I’ll take care of myself. Got it?”

  “We got it,” Hardy said. “Thank you.”

  “No worries,” she said. “Keep me informed.”

  She hung up and Glitsky said, “I love that woman.”

  36

  RON JAMESON’S INTERCOM squawked at 9:36 and Andrea, her voice somewhat shaky, said, “There’s an FBI Special Agent Bill Schuyler here to see you, sir.”

  “Does he have an appointment?”

  “No. He says it’s official business.”

  “Well, I’ve got some official business, too. I’m supposed to be where at ten thirty?”

  “The Mission Rotary, sir. Inspector Greene is picking you up in a half hour.”

  “Yes, well, please tell Mr. FBI that you’d be happy to make an appointment for him, say Monday or Tuesday next week, and I’ll be happy to talk to him then.”

  “I will.”