The Motive

by John Lescroart

  The most celebrated of these slaughters occurred in 1997. The government arrested a nineteen-year-old boy named Antar Rachid on suspicion of taking part in the carjacking and assassination of a minor Algiers municipal official. Three days after Rachid’s arrest, government security forces raided the downtown café out of which Rachid had operated, in the process killing three other GIA soldiers and confiscating a large cache of automatic weapons, cash and ammunition from the hidden room in the café’s cellar. Obviously, they broke Rachid with torture and he talked.

  Here Glitsky speaks again. “How many of his relatives did they kill?”

  “I was getting there.” The number seems to slow down even the phlegmatic Thomas. He takes a breath, tries to sound matter-of-fact. “One hundred and sixty-three. Raids in Algiers itself and in thirteen villages over the next couple of days. Gone before they knew what hit ’em. After that,” Thomas says, “captured suspects stopped talking and started dying in jail.”

  In 1999, Algeria finally got a new civilian president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, and he offered amnesty to rebels who hadn’t been convicted of rape or murder or other heinous crimes. Along with about eighty-five percent of the rest of them, Monique returned to civilian life, moving back in with her father and mother, going back to work at the bank. But she’d proven herself a valuable organizer and strategist to the GIA, and they weren’t ready to abandon her. It wasn’t the kind of organization where you simply walked out—Rachid’s experience, and many others similar to it, made that crystal clear. It was like the mob. It doesn’t matter if you were arrested, or if you tried to leave on your own . . . you are never out.

  “But by now, I’m talking 1999,” Thomas continues, “things have really begun to change over there. A new faction called the GSPC splits off of the GIA, and though they’re still hitting government and military targets, they swear off civilian attacks within the country. After all the killing of the past years, this has a lot of grassroots appeal. The GIA leadership doesn’t see it that way, but they’re losing influence and, more importantly, members. And funding. They need to do something dramatic to call the faithful to them. This is jihad now, not just revolution. The will of Allah will be done, and even if fellow Muslims are killed, it is acceptable because they all become martyrs.” Thomas pauses again. “The GIA decides they are going to blow up the biggest elementary school in Algiers. Six hundred kids.”

  “Lord, the world.” Glitsky’s elbow is on his desk. His hand supports his head.

  “But Monique won’t help them. She can’t go there. It’s too much.”

  Glitsky snorts a note of derisive laughter. “A saint, huh?”

  “In some ways, she was, actually.” Thomas shifts in his chair. “But now she’s got an even bigger problem. On the one hand, she hates the government and what it stands for. But on the other, she can’t let the GIA go ahead with this bombing. But if she tells anybody, if she betrays her cell, she knows what happens next. Her family disappears, all of it. She’s seen it happen not just to Antar Rachid and his family, but maybe half a dozen other times.

  “She’s got four brothers and a sister, all of them married with kids. Her mother and father, both still young enough to be working. Her mother comes from a family of five, her father’s the oldest of four. She’s got about forty-five cousins.” Thomas comes forward, finally showing a hint of urgency. “They’re all dead if she talks. There’s no doubt about it. Meanwhile, she’s in on the planning. If she refuses, she’s with the enemy. She can’t show a thing.”

  Glitsky, nodding, appreciates her problem. “So she comes to you guys.”

  “She comes to me, personally. I’m stationed over there at the time. My cover is I’m with the visa section at the embassy, but she’s been underground for four years and she’s figured that out. I do some banking at her branch and she approaches me one day, tells me her story.

  “The only way she figures she can do it is if she appears to be killed in the raid on the planners. If I’d help her appear to die, she’s got information on a major planned terrorist attack. Remember, this is pre-9/11, but the Cole had already happened, the African embassies. It might have been a trap, but the bottom line is, I believed her. And it turned out it was all true. They raided the cell and found the explosives, and the government announced that Monique Souliez was one of the rebels killed in the raid.”

  “And Monique became Missy D’Amiens?”

  “That’s right.”

  Glitsky sits in silence for a minute. “So why are you here now, with me?”

  “I thought you needed to hear the story.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Maybe so you’ll understand where she’s coming from. She’s a quality person. Maybe the best thing would be to leave her alone, wherever she is. More than anything else, she’s a hero.”

  But Glitsky doesn’t even begin to accept this. “More than anything else, she killed two people in my town. I can’t leave her alone.”

  “That might not have been her.”

  “No? I’ll entertain other suggestions if you’ve got them.”

  “It could have been GIA.”

  Glitsky snorts. “Here? They found her here?”

  But Thomas keeps on with it. “It’s not impossible. You know the guy they arrested at the Canadian border with explosives bound for LAX? He was GIA. They’re still very much active. They’re not going away.”

  “Maybe so,” Glitsky says, “but they didn’t befriend some homeless woman so they could establish phony dental records for her.”

  Thomas takes in the truth of that. It costs him some. But he tries another tack. “If she’s exposed, they kill her family, even now.”

  “I would hope they wouldn’t do that.”

  The words say it all. Thomas hears them clearly. This, his personal mission, has failed. But he tries one more argument. “I’d ask you to think of what she’s been through. It’s so different over there. She hasn’t lived in the same world as most of us do. If she did kill these two people, I know it was to save her family. Two deaths against sixty. That’s the kind of choice she had to make all the time back home. It must have seemed like the only option she had.”

  “Maybe it did,” Glitsky says.

  But he doesn’t give him any more. After a last moment of silence, poor lovesick Scott Thomas gets up out of his chair, walks to the door, opens it and, like the spook he is, vanishes.

  33

  Inside the Putah Creek Community Bank, three tellers sat ready to work the windows, but there weren’t any customers. A couple of other employees were huddled over a desk behind the screened work area—muffled voices that seemed to be talking gossip, not banking. Out front, a matronly-looking middle-aged woman raised her head at the entrance of Glitsky and Matt Wessin. With a nervous smile, she rose from her seat behind a shiny, empty desk.

  Glitsky, in his all-weather jacket with a gun in his armpit, hung back a few steps while the chief extended his hand to the woman. Obviously, the two were acquainted—small town. “Traci,” he said, “this is Deputy Chief Glitsky from San Francisco police.”

  “Yes, we talked a couple of days ago.” More handshakes.

  And Wessin went on. “He’s told you, I believe, that he’s got a warrant to view the records of one of your accounts, and also the contents of a safe-deposit box linked to the same account. Do you remember a match in a 314(a) form you sent in a couple of weeks ago? Monica Breque?”

  “I do. I think it’s the first one we’ve had out of this branch, but I’m afraid I don’t remember her. When I saw the name on the 314 form”—she turned to Glitsky—“and then when we talked the other day, I tried to remember something about her, but nothing came to me.”

  Wessin said, “Maybe one of these will help.” He produced from the folder he carried several likenesses that Glitsky had brought up with him, including not only the glossy of the Chronicle photo, but also several of Hardy’s snapshots from the Hanover family albums. Now Traci examined the pictures slowly,
one by one. When she’d gone through them all, she shook her head. “I’m afraid I don’t know her at all. And we pride ourselves on personal service, knowing our customers on sight by name.”

  “She might have had a bit of a French accent, if that’s any help,” Glitsky offered.

  She stopped shaking her head. “A French accent? Now that rings a bell. And she started here last May, we said? That would have been me if it was a new account, too. I’m sorry.” Traci looked back down at the pictures. “I just don’t have any memory of someone who looked like this. I do remember the accent, though. Is it all right if I show these to the staff?”

  Five minutes later, one of the tellers admitted that, like Traci, maybe she’d seen the woman, or someone who looked like her. If it was the same person, though, the hair was certainly different, and she doubted if she’d been wearing the same kind of tailored, high-end city clothes she fancied in the pictures. “But all the same, I’d bet it’s her. Great face.”

  “So she still comes in here?” Glitsky asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carla said. “I wouldn’t call her a regular.”

  “Can you think of what was different about the hair?”

  The teller closed her eyes and gave it a try. “Maybe it was short, and not so dark, but I can’t really be sure.” She checked the picture again. “But I’ve seen her. Definitely.”

  This was reasonably good news, but didn’t get them anywhere, so Glitsky and Wessin went back to the manager’s desk and got to the account records themselves. Missy, or Monique, or Monica, did not use her checking account to write checks. She had deposited a hundred dollars to open the account on May 17, and hadn’t touched it since.

  This gave Glitsky a sense of foreboding that he tried to ignore. “Let’s take a look at the safe-deposit box,” he said.

  They all walked into an old-fashioned vault with a heavily reinforced door, its inner workings and tumblers open to the lobby. Traci had a set of the bank’s master keys for one of the locks and she’d called in a locksmith to drill out the other one, which needed the customer’s key. In short order, she was taking the box from its space in the wall. She placed it on a table in the center of the vault. It was one of the larger boxes—a foot wide, eighteeninches long, four inches in depth. It only took another few seconds to get it open.

  Unwittingly, Wessin whistled under his breath.

  The stacks of money—fifty- and hundred-dollar bills—was what caught the eye first, but then Glitsky noticed what looked to be a rogue bit of tissue paper stuck against one side of the box. He picked that up first and opened it in his hand. It was, of course, the ring, with the stone actually larger than he’d pictured it. Wrapping it back up rather more neatly than it had been, he put it on the table next to the box. “I guess we ought to count this next,” he said.

  Tuesday, two days ago, early afternoon in Jackman’s office with the door closed behind him and thick, rare slabs of sunshine streaking the floor over by the windows, the wind screaming outside. Jackman is in his oversize leather chair behind his desk, his fingers templed at his mouth. Treya, on the second day of her first week back at work after Zachary’s birth, stands guard with her back against the door.

  Glitsky is looking on while the DA reads the 314(a) form. “I just got this thing and wanted to run it by you.”

  “I don’t understand how this can be,” Jackman says. “Didn’t you tell me her Social Security number came up deceased?”

  “When I checked six weeks ago, yes. But if she opened this account within a few weeks of the Hanover fire, say, or even sooner than that, the computer wouldn’t have caught up with her yet.”

  Treya says, “She’s a banker, sir. She knew it wouldn’t.”

  Glitsky adds. “She’s done this before, remember. Established an identity in a new town with ginned-up docs. Undoubtedly she knew they don’t check names against socials. If nobody ever thought to ask, and nobody has now for ten months, she’s golden. What she didn’t know about were the changes since 9/11.”

  Jackman asks, “So what name is she using now?”

  “Monica Breque.”

  “I bet people call her Missy,” Treya says.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Jackman straightens up in his chair. “We need to get her in custody. Have you talked to the Davis people? Police.”

  “Yes, sir, a little. And there is still a problem—I talked to the manager at the bank and got a local address that seems not to be hers. It’s not fictitious. It’s just not where she lives. They sent some officers around to check right away, and it was somebody else’s house entirely. So we don’t know where she is.”

  Jackman isn’t too fazed by this. “It’s a small town. Somebody’ll know where she lives.”

  “I’ll be following up on that.”

  “I thought you might be.” Jackman hesitates. “Abe.” He talks quietly, but he’s firm. “Why not have them work on the follow-up, the Davis police? Have them bring in the FBI if they want. It’s a banking matter, so it’s federal. And she’s a protected witness. And when they find her and surround her and place her under arrest, then have them bring her down here for her trial when they’re done with her. You’ve found her. You don’t physically have to bring her in.”

  Glitsky is standing in the at-ease position between his wife and the DA. He wouldn’t be at all surprised if they both had the same opinion of what he should do now, but he is not going to be drawn into this discussion. Instead, he nods in apparent assent. “Good point,” he says.

  Three hundred and fifteen thousand, four hundred dollars even.

  It took them nearly an hour to count it twice and be sure. Traci left the two policemen to the work. Toward the end of it, Wessin seemed to become a bit impatient, checking his watch several times, and Glitsky learned that he was to be the speaker at a Rotary event at noon. Glitsky had loosened up by now and had become nearly voluble. He told Wessin he should have known that the chief would have some public event he needed to attend—half of Glitsky’s own life was administrative stupidity and public relations. Both men agreed that if people knew, they’d never want to move up through the ranks. Even so, they both understood the importance of Wessin’s speaking gig and picked up their speed. When they finally finished, Wessin still had fifteen minutes.

  They called Traci back in to lock up the box again and insert it into its proper location. A next-to-worst-case scenario for Glitsky—after the possibility of her escaping again altogether—would be if they could not locate the woman in a day or two of canvassing shopkeepers and neighborhoods and had to assign a full-time person to keep watch in case she went to the bank for some cash.

  But he had hopes that it wouldn’t come to that. Already this morning, Wessin’s task force had gone out into the town and onto the university campus, armed with their photographs. Two officers were going to the post office—they had what they hoped was a current alias, and if she’d ever gotten so much as a gas bill under that name, they could find where she lived. The French accent would stand out, as would the face. All talk of small town aside, though, the population of the greater area during the school year when college was in session was something in the order of a hundred thousand souls. If she were consciously laying low—and her years as a rebel in Algeria had certainly prepared her for that—they could miss her for a very long time, perhaps forever. And that’s if she were still here at all.

  Although the money argued that she was.

  Glitsky and Wessin—by now they were Abe and Matt—were standing on the sidewalk outside the bank. The drizzle had let up along with most of the wind, and though the streets were wet and it was still overcast, patches of blue were showing in the sky above them. “People will be checking back in at the station after lunch, Abe. I could drop you back there now if you’d like. Or you could grab a bite downtown here. It’s not San Francisco, but there’s a couple of places to eat.”

  “I’ll find ’em. You don’t have a Jewish deli, do you?”
<
br />   “No, but if you want deli, Zia’s is pretty damn good Italian. It’s on the next block, on the way to where I’m going to talk. You want, I’ll show you.”

  It was a sad but true fact of Glitsky’s life that since his heart attack and the never-ending battle with cholesterol, he rarely ate sandwiches anymore, especially freshly sliced mortadella and salami and all those great nitrates with cheese and vinegar and oil on a just-out-of-the-oven sourdough roll. But he was having one now, enjoying it immensely, washing it down with San Pellegrino water, thinking he liked this low-rise, not-quite-yuppified town, even as he wondered where the black people were.

  With the improving weather, a steady stream of mostly young people—students, he surmised—passed in front of him where he sat outside on the sidewalk. He saw as many per-capita Asians as there were in San Francisco, and Hispanics, and from the evidence a thriving lesbian community—in fact, ethnicities and minorities of every stripe seemed well represented here, but there was nary a black person. What, he wondered, was that about? More than anything else, he found it odd, out of sync with the world he inhabited.

  It was clouding up again as he was finishing his sandwich and his drink, and he went back inside the crowded little deli to discard his bottle and napkins. He looked at his watch. He wasn’t due to meet Wessin for another twenty minutes, so he stopped for a moment to look at the display of imported Italian goods around the shelves. Maybe he’d pick up some eggplant caponata for Treya, or roasted red peppers, and surprise her. They hadn’t had much romance in their lives since Zachary’s birth, and now she was already back at work after the maternity leave. He should really get her something. He never thought to surprise her. He ought to change that. In fact, he should bring her presents more often, he was thinking, let her know how much she was appreciated.