The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  “This year? Was he autopsied?”

  “Absolutely. Cause of death was ‘natural causes.’ His heart simply stopped. It’s stressful getting arrested. It could have happened.”

  “All right.” Maria crossed her arms, her brow furrowed. “But here we are, so something must be bothering you.”

  “This latest guy got my attention, but I’m more immediately concerned with a guy named Alanos Tussaint, who died in jail last month. Poor guy fell down and bumped his head.”

  “He bumped his head and died? That was a hell of a bump.”

  “Right. A significant bump. Anyway, it seems there was some question about Mr. Tussaint’s death. In the early stages of the investigation, another inmate told the SFPD cops that a guard had gone off on Mr. Tussaint and beaten him to death. The next time the inmate got interrogated, he changed his story, saying he’d gotten it wrong. The guard had hit Mr. Tussaint a couple of times in self-defense, but it wasn’t really a beating. And since there were no other witnesses, the case never got off the ground. It obviously wasn’t much of a priority. I’ll take responsibility for that, since assigning priorities is my job. But the fact remains. Bad stuff is going on at the jail, and it needs to end. We were hoping to bring in somebody from the outside who’s unknown around here. Frank thinks that ought to be you.”

  Maria nodded. “I’m flattered and very interested, but I’m a little concerned how the rest of your office is going to take it.”

  “How’s that?” Farrell asked.

  “If I come on, it kind of implies that whoever handled those cases didn’t do a thorough job, doesn’t it? If somebody like me got ahold of one of these—say Mr. Tussaint—on the rebound, whoever had it first won’t be happy. Plus,” she added, “if we’re going to question our inmate witness again, he’s probably already been talked to, or worse, by the guards. That’s why he recanted, obviously. They threatened him. So you’ll have to get him protected and out of the population, and as soon as you do that, you’re in the sheriff’s face. All on the off chance that this guy might have seen something he wants to talk about again, something that might get him beaten or even killed.” She paused. “I’m just saying that this doesn’t strike me as a casual decision. You’re opening a big can of worms.”

  • • •

  ANOTHER ROUND OF drinks later, the conversation turned to the overdoses. “Black heroin in the jail,” Farrell said. “How do you think it got there?”

  “How do you think it got there, sir?” asked Maria.

  “There had to be guards involved. But as Frank here will tell you, he’s already talked to the sheriff about it. Mr. Cushing, too, was appalled by the evidence of drugs in jail, but he was pretty sure it was some of the defense lawyers or shrinks visiting their clients or patients, since it couldn’t be any of his guards, and the family and friends didn’t get any physical contact with the inmates. The lawyers and psychiatrists, they hide it anywhere—briefcases, pockets, you name it.”

  Maria chuckled. “He didn’t really say that? Professional people were bringing it in?”

  “Sure. They have no respect for the law, those guys. Some of the lawyers—I bet you didn’t know this—accept payment from their jailed clients in drugs, then sell it to their other clients out on the street.”

  “Sure, I’ll bet that happens all the time,” Maria said with heavy irony. She turned to Wes expectantly. “So . . . what do we do now?”

  “Well, if you’ll take it,” Wes said, “I’m offering you a job as a DA investigator. You have a police background, you speak Spanish, and Frank tells me you’re perfect for the job, which he never says about anybody. But this first assignment is going to be absolutely confidential and, frankly, damned dangerous. We want to get you inside the jail to find out what’s happening to these people. I want to be sure you’re okay going after these guys.”

  “Are you kidding?” she asked. “It would make my year. We’re the good guys, aren’t we? If we don’t have the guts to take on the bad guys, who will?”

  Wes nodded appreciatively and looked over to Dobbins. “That sounds like the right answer to me, Frank. How about you?”

  “It’s why I called her in,” Dobbins replied.

  “All right, Maria.” Farrell held out his hand. “Welcome aboard.”

  20

  AT SEVEN-THIRTY, WHEN Hal came back into the house after dropping Warren off at the airport, the tenuous truce between Ruth and Ellen that had held since Katie disappeared seemed to have come unraveled. His stepmother was sitting on the living room couch, nursing a glass of clear liquid with ice cubes. She did not get up, merely turned her head and nodded.

  “Is everything all right?” Hal asked her.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Your daughter. She can be an exasperating little girl, you know that?”

  “She’s lost her mother, Ruth. I can’t blame her if she’s having a hard time. And you shouldn’t, either. Where is she?”

  “Last seen in your bedroom. I closed the door. Don’t worry. She’s perfectly safe. She just needed a time-out.”

  “I’m going to go see her.”

  Ruth lifted her glass. “Please. Help yourself.”

  His shoulders sagging under the strain, he went down the hallway and knocked, then opened his bedroom door. “Ellen?” He switched on the lights and saw his daughter wedged into a corner on the floor, holding one of the bed’s pillows against her. “Hey,” he said gently, crossing over to her. “Are you okay? Want to give your dad a hug?”

  She shook her head. “Where’s Mommy?”

  “We don’t know. We’re looking for her.”

  “Grandma isn’t. She wouldn’t tell me where she was.”

  “She doesn’t know where she is, sweetie. Nobody knows. That’s the problem.”

  “Why didn’t Grandma just tell me that? That she didn’t know. That nobody knows. Why don’t they know? Where did she go?”

  Hal slowly lowered himself to sit in front of her. “If you give me your pillow, it’ll make my lap softer.”

  She stared him down for a moment, then handed the pillow across and finally crawled into his lap, where she started to cry. “I want Mommy.”

  He smoothed her hair and let her lean against him and cry herself out. At last, he asked, “Do you think you want to go to sleep?”

  She shook her head. “I want to know where Mommy is.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “We all want that. We just have to keep trying to find her.”

  “But where? And why would she go away?”

  Hal shook his head and rocked her against him, and time stopped while he kept rocking and she settled against him and started to breathe with a deep and easy regularity.

  Blessed sleep.

  Gradually, he managed to get all the way up without waking her, then carried her into the bedroom she shared with Will. Putting her down in her bed, he covered her and tucked the blankets around her, then leaned down to plant a kiss on her forehead. On the way out, he pulled the door, leaving it a little bit open so that he could hear either of them if they called out or needed him.

  It looked as though Ruth hadn’t moved an inch, except now her glass was nearly full. She glanced up at Hal. “She wouldn’t go to sleep for me,” she said.

  “She’s worried about where Katie is, Ruth. I don’t think that’s so inappropriate.”

  “No, I don’t suppose so. But she was so willful. I told her it was time for bed and we could talk about all this tomorrow, but now she was tired and she needed to be a big girl and do what I told her.”

  “She’s not used to you, Ruth, that’s all.”

  “And whose fault is that?”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means how can they get to know me if I’m never around?”

  “Ruth. Come on
. You know you are always welcome. You’ve always been welcome.”

  She broke into a chilly smile. “You know that’s not true, Hal. Maybe welcome to you, but Katie wouldn’t let anybody else have any influence on those children. That’s the way she was.”

  “ ‘Is.’ Let’s go with ‘is’ until we know something different.”

  “I didn’t mean anything by that.”

  “I know.” Hal let out a heavy sigh. “I’m going to get a beer. Do you want a refill?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve had one.” At his questioning look, she said, “One. Really.”

  He went to the refrigerator, opened his beer, returned to the living room, and sat down across from her. “I really appreciate all you’ve done this past week, Ruth. I don’t blame you if it’s getting tiresome. I’ve got the time off if you’re burning out.”

  “It’s not tiresome, Hal, and I’m nowhere near burning out. These are my grandchildren, and I’m just so happy I’m finally getting to spend some time with them. Not that I’m happy about the circumstances. Of course they’re heartrending. But then I see the way Katie . . . well, how Ellen got so belligerent so fast when I told her she had to go to sleep. Has she ever not gotten her way? I thought it would do her good to have somebody tell her no.”

  Hal pulled at his beer. “I don’t want to talk about Katie’s mothering, Ruth. We didn’t always agree about that, but this isn’t the time, all right? I think she was getting more flexible; at least I hope she was. And I’m sorry we didn’t have you over more often, but we’d stopped seeing many people because a lot of times we weren’t having much fun.”

  Ruth waved him off. “That’s all right. I’m a big girl. I just think that maybe I could have helped, and gotten to know my grandchildren a little more in the bargain. But Katie wouldn’t let that happen. You know that’s true.”

  “If we find her, that’s going to change. Lots of things are going to change.”

  “I hope so,” Ruth said. “That would be very nice.”

  21

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, AFTER he dropped his kids at school, Abe Glitsky decided to try to clear up as many of the outstanding uncertainties about Katie’s disappearance as he could. As his first stop, he drove out and parked by the Highway Patrol station on the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Over the course of his career, he’d been out here dozens of times, but the familiarity of the place did little to erase the negative energy he attached to it. Getting out of his car, even wearing his heavy leather fighter jacket, he felt the cold wind cut through him. He found it hard to believe that people chose to come out here by the hundreds, if not thousands, for recreation; even as he wondered about it, a trickle of people was passing him on all sides, wrapped up for the weather, enchanted by the view. Before they got on the bridge proper, all of them had to pass the sign over the telephone hotline that read CRISIS COUNSELING. THERE IS HOPE. MAKE THE CALL.

  There might be hope, Glitsky thought, but not enough of it to go around. Although no accurate figure was possible because so many suicides off the bridge went unnoticed, it was generally accepted to be among the most popular places on the planet for people to take their own lives. In spite of the Highway Patrol’s success in talking down perhaps eighty percent of the potential jumpers they encountered, the known or suspected suicide rate every year held steady at around thirty, or about one every two weeks.

  Glitsky put his hands in his pockets and, into the wind, made his way across the small lot. If he’d learned anything over the past couple of days, it was that his name still carried some weight in legal circles. Sure enough, when he dropped it at the back door, they knew who he was, or used to be, and let him in.

  A Highway Patrol officer led him back to a small and crowded room with desks that could sit a total of eight, each with a computer. At the moment, five other Highway Patrol officers filled the space. One glass wall faced the recently redundant tollbooths; another faced video screens showing different live shots of segments of the bridge—people on the walkway, cars in the road going both directions, overhead distance shots from up in the cables, pretty much the entire bridge on videotape all the time.

  The sergeant running the operation of the office today was Ted Robbins, from the looks of him an all-business career officer in his mid-forties. If a detective from Homicide was here, there would be only one reason for it, to Robbins’s mind, and he got right to it. “You’re looking for a jumper.”

  Glitsky nodded. “A mother of two named Katie Chase. She went missing last Wednesday.” He started to give more details but hadn’t gotten too far before Robbins was shaking his head, and Glitsky stopped. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “You’re saying she was at her home at seven o’clock last Wednesday?”

  “Right.”

  “We don’t let pedestrians out after dark.”

  Though this statement contained the potentially good news that Katie was not dead from suicide off the bridge, it also closed off at least one possibility that would have left Hal Chase in the clear for her murder. Glitsky bit at his cheek in some frustration. “You actually close the gates?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And when do you open them again?”

  “Basically, first light. I could check the exact time for any given day, but you don’t think she waited out here all night and then went out in the morning, do you?”

  “No. I don’t really see that. Any other way she could have gotten on the bridge without being seen?”

  Robbins considered. “Do you think there’s a chance she rode out here on a bicycle?”

  “What difference would that make?”

  “It might not, but bicyclists are allowed after dark. They buzz at the gate, and we get them on the security camera and open up for them.”

  “Bicyclists are allowed and walkers aren’t?” Glitsky asked. “What’s that about?”

  “You got me,” Robbins said. “I don’t make the rules. But bikes are allowed.”

  Glitsky asked, “Would it be all right if I looked at some tapes?”

  “DVDs. We back everything up nowadays. You could look, but what would you be hoping to find?”

  “Some bicyclist buzzes and you open the gate. It’s open for a few seconds behind the biker, isn’t it? If people are waiting, they could stroll right through, couldn’t they?”

  “In theory, it could happen. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

  “I wouldn’t, either, but I’m here, and it couldn’t hurt to make sure.”

  22

  PATTI OROSCO OPENED her front door to two Homicide inspectors and, under the impression that she’d made an appointment for this visit, invited them in.

  Barefoot, Patti was wearing jeans and a blue sweater. She led the way up the stairs and into the living room. When they got there, the view stopped Abby in her tracks. “Wow,” she said.

  Patti turned and said with an air of apology, “I know. It’s kind of ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t use that word. If I lived here, I wouldn’t get much done. I’d just sit and stare out that window.”

  As everyone took a seat around the coffee table, Patti said, “I spend some time doing that myself. Probably too much. If I were working, I’d have to go someplace else to get anything done.”

  “You’re not working?” Abby asked.

  “I don’t. No. I haven’t in some time.” Patti offered another apologetic smile. “Sometimes I think I’m one of the luckiest people in the world, except for my personal life. But how I really feel is that I’d trade it all, straight up, the money for the other stuff. People don’t believe me, but sometimes I think I would.”

  “Did that cause friction between you and the Chases? The fact that you were wealthy?” Abby asked. “We’ve heard that they were having trouble with money.”

  “I think that was part of it, at
least recently, after Katie stopped working and her cash flow dried up. In a way, I couldn’t blame her if she was jealous about my situation. I mean, what happened to me was so weird.”

  “And what was that?” JaMorris asked. “What happened to you?”

  Patti brushed some hair off her forehead, let a sigh escape. “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about, I suppose, but it usually hits people funny.”

  “Do you want to tell us?”

  “When I got out of college, I got a job as a secretary with Bazoom! Nobody remembers them anymore, but back then they were a happening start-up. They gave us the option to take some of our pay in stock. Anyway, long story short, I took them up on it, and about two years later, say ’03 or ’04, Sprint bought us out and I made about three million dollars.”

  JaMorris nodded in appreciation. “That must have been a good day.”

  “It was completely amazing. But then—for better or worse, depending on where you were—I invested in some other stocks, and everything doubled over the next few years. On top of that, I got freaked out at my exposure in the market and pulled it all out and into cash about two months before the crash. I’ve been so stupidly lucky, and all I do now is feel guilty about everything.” She shook her head. “Oh, but listen to me, the poor little rich girl.”

  “I love that story,” Abby said. “So it really happens.”

  “It does.” Patti brought her hands together. “But where are my manners? Can I offer you anything, or do you want to just get down to it?”

  A small silence settled before JaMorris asked, “Down to what, exactly?”

  “You know. Me and Hal. What you called me about yesterday.”

  The two inspectors shared a questioning glance. JaMorris took up the ball. “Sure,” he said. “You and Hal.”

  “All right. Then let’s start with I know he didn’t kill Katie.”

  “How do you know that?” Abby asked. “Do you have any solid proof or evidence? Did you see him or talk to him or anything that night?”

  “No, but I know he was trying to get back with her and make it all work.”