The Rule of Law

by John Lescroart

  Please tell my children that I love them.

  I am writing this letter in longhand, in my own hand-writing, so there won’t be any question about its authenticity. Just so there’s no ambiguity, this is a confession to murder and a suicide note.

  I want you to know that you were right about everything. I’m sorry that we had to stop being friends. Maybe if you had not been a cop, I could have just told you, as I’m telling you now. But I felt like I had to protect Ron and that you wouldn’t understand that.

  Forgive me.

  Forgive me for seducing Peter Ash and starting this whole horrible cycle. Ron is not stupid and he found out what I’d done. Because he is a complete narcissist, he couldn’t stand the idea that I’d been unfaithful to him and he plotted to kill Peter because he was jealous.

  He probably should have killed me instead. I started it.

  But no matter what, I couldn’t let Ron be charged with Peter’s murder—it would ruin our family and the lives of the kids. And suddenly I saw another way out.

  Forgive me for killing a really good man, Geoff Cooke. As you know, it was Ron’s gun that killed him, although apparently no one else except you believed that.

  Geoff did have only the two Tariq weapons from Desert Storm. They are probably both still in their safe at their house. Bina would know.

  Of course, we never handed Ron’s guns in to the abatement program. One of them he dropped into the bay after he shot Peter, and the other is in the police department’s evidence locker on Geoff’s death.

  After all I had done to save ourselves, our lives, and our marriage, today I discovered that Ron was betraying me. With his secretary. Could it be more of a pathetic cliché? Can he think so little of me? Whatever it was that I thought we had together, whatever bond we had created, all of it was a lie. He deserves to die. And I can’t bear to live. Not anymore.

  Forgive me for causing you and the rest of the world so much trouble. It would probably have been better if I’d never been born.

  Your once best friend,

  Kate Jameson

  BINA SAT ON one end of the large red-leather couch in her well-appointed living room. “What are you telling me?” she asked. “What do you mean, Kate killed herself?” But of course this was a rhetorical question. There could be no other meaning but the plain truth. “When?”

  Beth, no longer working in Homicide but, because Kate’s letter had been written to her, very much in the loop, sat on the other end of the couch. “Today,” she said. “A few hours ago. She shot Ron before she turned the gun on herself.”

  “You’re saying she killed him?”

  “He’s dead, yes.”

  Bina’s hand covered her mouth. “Oh my God.”

  “She also confessed in writing that she shot Geoff and made it look like he killed himself.” She leaned over toward Bina. “The main takeaway here is that your husband didn’t kill himself. Definitely now, without any question.”

  Bina brought her hand up to her eyes, wiped at the tears that were forming. “I never thought he did, you know. Never. He would never have done that to me. To us.” She stared across at Beth. “Why did she do it? I mean, why now?”

  “Apparently, Ron was having an affair with his secretary and Kate found out about it. After all she’d done for him—putting her own life on the line to frame Geoff and get Ron off the hook for Peter Ash’s murder—she just couldn’t take it anymore. He was betraying her after all she had done for him? That, finally, was enough. She couldn’t forgive it anymore. In any event, it’s going to be all over the news tonight, and I thought I’d give you a heads-up. Are you going to be all right?”

  “Yes.” The simple reality was kicking in. When she spoke, it was in a half whisper, almost to herself. “In fact, I’m probably better than I’ve been over the past few years. Knowing for sure, that is. Not that it will bring Geoff back, but knowing he didn’t leave me . . .”

  “That would be good to know.”

  “It is. I can’t tell you.” She dabbed at her eyes again. “And Kate is dead, too?”

  Beth nodded.

  “I hope this doesn’t sound terrible, but I’m glad.”

  “I think that’s forgivable. She got herself all turned around.”

  “I thought about killing her myself, you know. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but I was going to go to her house and shoot her dead with one of Geoff’s Tariqs.”

  “When were you going to do this?”

  “Maybe as early as tomorrow.”

  Beth sat stock-still.

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “No, I do believe you.”

  “I even had a disguise. I didn’t necessarily want to get caught, but really I didn’t care what happened to me. As long as I could punish her, since it didn’t seem like anybody else was going to, even though after our talk at the pizza place, there wasn’t any doubt that she’d killed Geoff. So I figured that punishing her would fall to me. You can’t just let a person shoot somebody you love and then walk away. I really would have done it.”

  “I believe you. And that makes me doubly glad you’re not going to get that chance.”

  “Me too, thank God. Me too.”

  • • •

  PHYLLIS SAT RAMROD straight on the first few inches of the chair in front of Hardy’s desk. “So what are you telling me?” she asked. “Are they dropping my case?”

  “Not immediately, but I’m filing a motion to dismiss as soon as I can get it written and I’m guessing that the new administration, the new DA—whoever that turns out to be—is going to want to distance the office from the chaos of the past couple of weeks, which would include your case. There’s really no point, to say nothing of any political advantage, in pursuing it.”

  Phyllis sat quietly for a few seconds. “You know,” she said, “I never thought poor Celia actually killed Mr. Valdez. She just needed help getting out of town, like so many of the other people I’d been working with. That was the point to me. I probably would do the same thing again under the same circumstances.”

  “That’s because you’re a saint, Phyllis.”

  She barked out a one-note laugh. “Hardly that. Or a hero of any kind, either. I’m not trying to help criminals escape. But so many truly innocent people are being treated so unfairly. I had a young woman last week, for example . . .”

  Hardy held up a hand. “Wait a minute. You’re still actively doing this?”

  She nodded, as though surprised by the question. “Of course. The problem isn’t going away. If anything, it’s getting worse.”

  “Okay, but—”

  This time she raised her hand to stop him. “No. Listen. This woman—Rosa, twenty-three years old—came here to the US with her mother from El Salvador when she was three. She’s perfectly fluent in English and has a nursing degree from UOP. She works at Kaiser here in town. Did you know they had an ICE raid there last week? At Kaiser! And picked up eight undocumented DACA kids. Fortunately, she was on a different shift and they missed her in the sweep.

  “And I really shouldn’t call them kids,” she went on. “These were all working young adults. Skilled, English-speaking, taxpaying, sometimes home-owning young adults. I mean, really? Working at Kaiser? And these people pose a risk to our society and ought to be deported?

  “But in any event, Rosa had to get out of here or get picked up and sent back to El Salvador, where she knows exactly nobody. Now she’s trying to get to Montréal or maybe somewhere farther west in Canada, but first she had to get out of the city immediately, so I drove her up after work to a supposedly safe house in Vallejo. Fingers crossed. But I’m going to keep doing this as long as they need me to. Just so you know. I mean, if it’s going to affect the charges against me. I don’t want to get you or the firm in trouble.”

  “I’m not worried about me and the firm. Or you, for that matter. Especially if we get some stability in the DA’s office.”

  “Do you think that will happen?”

  �
��Well, more than we’ve had lately, anyway. As you say, fingers crossed.”

  Phyllis sat back in her chair and cocked her head, birdlike, as though she was about to say something.

  “What?” Hardy prompted her.

  “Just that it’s all so fragile, isn’t it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Life. The way things work. A few little changes and suddenly things start to fall apart. It doesn’t feel like the same rules we all grew up with, does it?”

  “Still close, one hopes,” Hardy said. “But you’re right. It’s damn fragile.”

  • • •

  BY ITSELF, A sitting DA’s violent death would have caused its share of political turmoil and fallout in San Francisco, but the fact that Ron Jameson was also revealed to be a murderer who had killed his colleague Peter Ash set off alarms all over the place, most notably in the office of Mayor Leland Crawford.

  In that environment, it suddenly became bad form to be perceived as Jameson’s close ally, and clearly the best strategy to limit the damage would be to find a scapegoat who could shoulder the lion’s share of the blame.

  In his press conference the day after the murder-suicide, Mayor Crawford could not give high enough praise to the efforts of homicide inspector Beth Tully, who had never wavered in her search to identify suspects in two murders, one of whom was the DA himself, and the other an ex-convict, Adam McGowan. Inspector Tully’s tireless and gutsy approach had earned her the enmity of Jameson and also of the chief of police Vi Lapeer, and had resulted in her being removed from the Homicide Detail—along with her lieutenant, Devin Juhle, and her partner, Ike McCaffrey.

  As soon as the mayor had learned the true facts, he took immediate steps to reinstate those three stellar members of the police department, and to dismiss the administrative hearings that they were all facing, clearly because of the personal vendetta waged by Jameson and Lapeer.

  The mayor would also be looking into Chief Lapeer’s connection with Ron Jameson’s campaign and with his administration since his election. Without calling for Lapeer’s outright dismissal at that point in time, he opined that it might not be too early to begin talking about instigating a search for a new police chief, one without the stain of complicity with a corrupt DA sullying that person’s record.

  • • •

  IT WAS TEN days after the murder-suicide, and the former chief assistant district attorney, a career prosecuting attorney named Amanda Jenkins, now sat behind the enormous tabletop desk in what had been the office of Ron Jameson. When the mayor had approved her assignment as district attorney, he had told her that, barring any truly egregious shenanigans, she was going to keep her hands on that job until the next election. What the city needed was a calm, firm, professional hand running the office without hysteria or a political agenda.

  Now, Jenkins looked with a practiced prosecutorial eye at the lanky frame of one of her inspectors, Chet Greene, sitting across from her. Chet all but exuded political agenda, having explained already to her in this interview that not everything Ron Jameson did had been wrong.

  In fact, in his opinion, damn little if anything had been wrong.

  Chet wasn’t even remotely convinced that Mr. Jameson had in fact killed Peter Ash. Who was to say, he argued, that Ron’s wife, Kate—an experienced murderer who had clearly admitted to killing Geoff Cooke—hadn’t also killed Peter Ash? After all, she had successfully framed Cooke for the same thing. What was to stop her from casting the blame on her husband in her suicide note and then killing him so that he would never even have a chance to offer his own defense?

  Ron Jameson was a good man, even a hero. He would never have killed anybody.

  But in the meantime—the real reason for this meeting—Jenkins was about to give Inspector Greene more bad news.

  She shook her head in what she hoped was a sincere show of disappointment. “I know it must seem compelling,” she said, “but it—”

  “It’s totally compelling,” Chet interrupted. “It absolutely proves that Hardy was at the pier. He needs to explain that if he can, at the very least.”

  “I don’t know why he’d have to do that. Do we know when he was there, Chet? Do we know it was the day of the massacre?”

  “He was there.”

  Amanda broke a thin smile. “I’m not saying he wasn’t, Chet. It’s entirely possible. What I’m saying is that your DNA match doesn’t really prove it one way or another.”

  “Well, then, that’s why we need to interrogate him. Hard.”

  “Except that you’ve already told me that the evidence file is hopelessly corrupted.”

  “That was because Glitsky took it out of the evidence lockup and I’m betting he tampered with the bullet casings.”

  “You’re betting? I don’t think betting cuts it here, Chet. And if he tampered with the bullet casings, who’s to say some DNA—Hardy’s or Glitsky’s or somebody else’s—didn’t get tampered with by someone else, maybe even planted back in the file. And maybe whoever that was, that tamperer, forgot to sign it out.” She moved some papers around on her desk, then met his eyes and spoke quietly. “You know, Chet, it seems like ever since I’ve been here in this office, there’s been this recurring rumor that Hardy and Glitsky were part of the Dockside Massacre thing. If you want my opinion, it’s because something in the cop mind-set—forgive me—recoils at the idea of a defense attorney being pals with a cop. If that’s happening, the two of them must be up to something no good.

  “I think it’s time we put this thing permanently to rest. As a lifetime prosecutor, I can guarantee you there’s not a judge on the planet who is going to admit evidence from that locker, especially once you explain your tampering allegation.”

  “But I—”

  She cut him off. “You can’t have it both ways, Chet. Either it’s a pristine file or it’s corrupted, and you’ve already made the argument to me that it’s the latter. Which means the DNA, such as it is, doesn’t matter. However it got there, planted or bleeding out on the pier, it doesn’t matter. It has no bearing. Don’t you see that? If I’m wrong, please fill me in on where, because it’s clear as day to me.”

  “So we just drop it?”

  She gave the thought a second or two. “Yes. We just drop it.”

  “It kills me,” he said. “We are so close.”

  “Actually, Chet, we’re no closer than we’ve ever been.” Then: “We’ve got to let it go.”

  “Forever?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she said. “Forever.”

  EPILOGUE

  WITH HIS LOVE of all things arcane and esoteric, Hardy was thrilled with Frannie’s choice of locale to have the firm’s retreat dinner, a terrific South of Market restaurant called Trou Normand, because it would give him the opportunity to wax eloquent about stuff nobody knew about, one of his favorite endeavors.

  They had the whole place reserved for this Friday night in mid-April, and his partners, colleagues, and employees ought to start showing up any minute, but he was already engaged in a conversation with the first arrivals, Don Peek’s secretary, Kathleen Mavone Wheeler, and her boyfriend, Eric, about the meaning of the name.

  “I speak a little French,” Kathleen said, “and doesn’t trou normand just mean “Norman hole”? Which, if I may say, would not be among the top ten food-related names I would pick.”

  “Ah,” Hardy said, “but that’s the beauty of it. It means Norman hole all right, but what does that refer to?” His eyes sparkled. “What’s the hidden meaning?”

  Eric leaned in. “The Norman hole,” he said. “Are you sure we want to know?”

  Hardy gave him a quick stern look—how could someone not want to know a factoid?— then followed the scowl with a conciliatory smile. “I think you will. You may have heard that they typically eat a lot of food at their meals in Normandy, possibly even to excess. It’s kind of the ritual there. You just keep eating until you can’t do it anymore. Butter, meats in cream sauces, cheese for dessert. More and more a
nd more.”

  Kathleen put her hand to her midriff. “This is starting to sound a little iffy.”

  Hardy held up a hand. “It gets better. Because finally you’re done. You can’t eat another bite. But of course there’s still some more dessert items and maybe some other food on the table. So what do you do?”

  “Stop eating,” Kathleen said. “Just an idea.”

  Hardy gave her a deadpan look. “No, no, no. And here’s where the genius of the French kicks in. Normandy happens to be the home of this terrific apple brandy called calvados.”

  “Something I know at last,” Eric said with real enthusiasm. “I love calvados.”

  “Okay. You’re going to love this next part, then. You can’t eat anymore. You’re completely stuffed. So what do you do?”

  “Slip into the vomitorium for a couple of minutes?” Eric asked.

  Hardy shook his head. “That was ancient Rome. This is modern France and a way better solution to the same problem. You get yourself a large shot of calvados and you drink it off all at once. This makes a fire in your throat as it burns its way down and finally the fireball creates a hole in your stomach that allows you to have another few bites of food. And that hole is, of course, called the trou normand.”

  “Wonderful,” Kathleen said.

  “I can’t wait to try it,” Eric added.

  “I don’t know if I’d recommend that,” Hardy said. “But it is a hell of a good thing to know about just on general principle.” He looked at Kathleen. “Just don’t tell Wes Farrell when he gets here. He hates it when I hit him with obscure French stuff.”

  “You have my word,” Kathleen said. “No French with Mr. Farrell unless you give us the all clear.”

  • • •

  IN ALL, INCLUDING employees, boyfriends, girlfriends, and significant others, there were five full tables of ten.

  Hardy sat with Frannie on one side of him and their daughter, Rebecca, on the other side next to their son, Vincent (not a member of the firm or even a lawyer), with Glitsky and Treya directly across from them. To his right, Wes and Sam presided over their table of young associates, while Gina did much the same on his left with some of the older ones: Graham Russo and his wife, Sarah; Amy Wu and her husband, Jason; Don Peek and his new bride, whose name Hardy couldn’t remember. (It occurred to him that maybe for some reason Peek himself was the cause of Hardy’s inability to remember the names of the women around him.)