The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  “It’s a noble idea, Wes,” Scerbo said, “but we’ve had some difficulties executing it in the past, as you well know. Alanos Tussaint being a prime example. If you remember, we had a righteous witness to that beating . . .”

  Wes nodded. “Luther Jones.”

  “Right. It was pretty straightforward. Luther saw the whole thing and told Homicide all about it. Homicide came to me about what kind of a deal they could give him and how they could hide him after he testified and got out of jail.”

  “That’s what I understand, Luke, and it’s why I invited you to be part of this. This is no reflection on your handling of that last case, but we may not be so far beyond it that we can’t try to resurrect it.”

  Scerbo leveled his eyes at Wes. “You got another witness?”

  “No. We’re putting somebody else inside who’s going to try to get back to Luther.”

  Scerbo was shaking his head in disagreement. “Even if you do, he’s recanted once already. His testimony will be all but worthless.”

  Dobbins said, “Not if we can make the guard’s threat to him part of the case. He’s still the most likely place to start.”

  Scerbo wasn’t buying it. “We can do anything we want with Luther Jones,” he said, “but getting him to talk again is going to be some kind of magical trick. And I don’t blame him. Those guards play for keeps. Luther had just seen a guard kill Alanos. He didn’t have much doubt they’d do the same to him if he got . . . troublesome.”

  “Troublesome,” Farrell said. “There’s a good word.”

  “It is a good word,” Scerbo replied. “Trouble is what these guys in the slammer want to avoid. And okay, Luther forgot that for a minute. He thought that he was a human being with rights, when in fact he was just another animal in the zoo. Cushing’s the zookeeper, and he’s got a long reach.”

  Farrell made a face. “I’ve got a long reach, too,” he said. He looked from one investigator to the other. “Look, guys, as we all know, Luther’s in for carjacking, firearm enhancement, second strike. He’s looking at prison after his trial, so we’ve got leverage on him.”

  Scerbo said, “Prison is better than dead. We’ve got nothing while he’s in jail.”

  “Trust me, Tom, we do have something. Frank and I have brought somebody on, and we’re confident she can get to Luther. Under Cushing’s nose.”

  “Okay,” Scerbo said. “But even then, what?”

  “Then we get Luther on board with us again. We keep him around in another jail—Alameda, Santa Clara, anywhere—and protected as a witness until he testifies about Alanos. Then get him in a program that lets him disappear.”

  Scerbo asked him, “You really think this will work?”

  Farrell nodded. “I think it’s as good a chance as we’re likely to see. In any event, it’s my call, and I’m making it.”

  Frank Dobbins dragged a British accent up from somewhere and said to Farrell, “Heavy is the head that wears the crown, sir.”

  “Bite me, Frank. Just bite me,” replied Wes with a tired smile.

  25

  ONE FLOOR ABOVE Farrell, Devin Juhle didn’t have any problem with the hierarchy of the desk. He sat behind his and looked over the empty expanse at his two inspectors, who were pitching him on the idea of arresting Hal Chase for the murder of his wife, even in the absence of a body.

  Juhle said, “But without a body, guys, and I know you know this, but it’s hard to establish there’s even been a homicide.”

  “And yet,” Abby said, “here we are, Homicide inspectors, building a case that looks a hell of a lot like Katie is actually dead.”

  “Well, still,” Juhle argued, “corpus delicti and all that. No body, no homicide. That’s the way we do it.”

  “Aha!” JaMorris held up his index finger.

  “Aha what?” Juhle asked.

  “The body in corpus delicti isn’t about the physical body of the dead person. It’s about the body of evidence that proves the crime’s been committed.”

  “Are you shitting me? Where’d you get that?” Juhle asked. “You going to law school at night or something?”

  “I think it’s true, Devin,” Abby said.

  “Even if it is, and I’m not so sure that Jambo’s right on that, what’s changed that we’re now ready to go ahead?”

  “The new thing is we’ve got the girlfriend,” JaMorris said. “Plus, we know Hal’s got nothing like an alibi. He could have left the house with Katie and the kids at four, five, six o’clock, driven to someplace secluded, done the deed, and driven back home.”

  “Everybody’s been talking about the missing three hours, seven-thirty to ten-thirty,” Abby added, “but it could have been as much as six hours. Then you plug in Patti Orosco and the affair and her several million dollars . . .”

  JaMorris could barely contain his enthusiasm. “No jury’s going to see her and not also see a motive.”

  “She really is something to see, Dev,” Abby added. “I’m not a guy by a long shot, and she is one heck of a package.”

  “And then,” JaMorris continued, “the jury learns about her fortune, and not one person on it, even in this town, will believe that he wouldn’t have killed for her.”

  Juhle kept shaking his head. “We got nada. Equally plausible explanation: Katie finds out that she’s losing her husband to a beautiful woman. She can’t stand it and she runs away, maybe kills herself. If the jury has two explanations, they have to accept the one that leads to a ‘not guilty’ verdict. Your theory is compelling as hell, and I completely believe it, but I don’t think Farrell will charge it—why would he, with no evidence?—so what’s the point in pressing for a warrant? For that matter, what judge would sign off on it? We need more.”

  “How about if Farrell goes to the grand jury?” JaMorris suggested. “On what we’ve got, it’ll indict Hal in a heartbeat.”

  “Same problem, guys,” Juhle said. “Farrell has to think he can get a conviction at trial. Without that, he’s not going forward, I promise you.”

  “But if Hal’s indicted and locked up,” Abby said, “then we can get some warrants and do some searches.”

  “First you need something beyond motive to open the door.” Juhle pushed his chair back and settled into it. “While we’re on this, what’s with Glitsky’s appearance? What the hell is that about?”

  “It means our boy is lawyered up,” JaMorris said.

  “Glitsky doesn’t have a private license that I know of, and I think I would have heard. Did he get in your way?”

  “No,” Abby said, “although he was surprised to see us.”

  “Did he identify himself to Patti as a police officer?”

  “Not in front of us,” JaMorris said.

  “Although,” Abby said, “if I remember, she called him Inspector Glitsky.”

  “That might be enough. If he’s impersonating a police officer, he and I are going to have to have a discussion. He’s talking to Hal, too?”

  Abby nodded. “Apparently.”

  “It would be interesting to find out what he knows,” Juhle said. “If he’s on another track, what’s he going on? And if he’s pretending to still be a cop . . .” He let the comment hang.

  “Whatever it is,” JaMorris said, “it led him to Patti Orosco.”

  Juhle processed for a second. “She and Hal were definitely having an affair?”

  “Until about a month ago,” Abby said. “Total admission, in spite of what she knew it could mean to us. But she put the best possible spin on it.”

  Juhle asked her, “Who broke up with whom?”

  “Hal ended it,” Abby said.

  “And how did Patti feel about that? Bitter? Pissed off? Hurt?”

  The two inspectors shared a glance. Abby said, “None of the above, wouldn’t you say, Jambo?”

  Her partner nodded in agreemen
t.

  Abby went on, “She seemed completely okay with it. Hal wanted to go back and make things right with Katie, and for that to happen, she and Hal had to break up, and in some ways it was too bad, but she wished both of them the best.”

  “Really?” Juhle asked.

  “That’s her story.”

  “No scorned-women rhetoric?”

  “Not remotely.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Juhle said.

  “We tend to agree,” JaMorris said. “We talked about it after we left and agreed it was more like she was waiting a reasonable amount of time after Katie’s disappearance before she and Hal could come out as a couple. If her heart was even a little broken, she was hiding it pretty well.”

  “So—”

  Juhle was interrupted by the telephone on his desk. He listened for the better part of two minutes, pulling over a yellow legal pad and taking a few notes. When he hung up, he came back to his two inspectors. “Somebody just found a woman’s body, blood all over her head, on the Interior Park Belt out by Parnassus. You know where that is?”

  JaMorris was already up and out of his chair. “Hal’s neighborhood,” he said.

  Juhle nodded solemnly. “Close enough.”

  26

  THE STEEP SIDES of the canyon were thickly covered, mostly with old-growth eucalyptus, and this kept a great deal of the park permanently and deeply shaded. The ground cover was likewise dense with the barbs of blackberry bushes, a myriad of other low-lying shrubbery, and a good sprinkling of poison oak. Sometimes a daring hiker or jogger would take one of the slippery deer trails on the way to or from Mount Sutro, but for the most part, the Interior Park Belt remained a desolate place: dark, cold, wet, and generally forbidding.

  JaMorris and Abby parked on Stanyan—Hal’s street, about two blocks south of his house—and walked up to where the crime scene was marked by yellow tape, three black-and-white SFPD vehicles, a couple of news vans, an unnecessary ambulance, and the coroner’s van. They showed their credentials to the pair of uniformed cops securing the scene, and then started uphill on a narrow trail of duff and mud to where another knot of officials huddled at a fork a hundred feet along.

  The coroner’s assistant, Angie Morena, took a step toward the Homicide inspectors and held up a hand, stopping them. “You’re a little early. Crime Scene hasn’t processed the path. Be careful where you walk.” She pointed to a third spot where the indicated trail, half the width of the one they’d come up, split off to the right through the waist-high shrubbery.

  “Who found her?” Abby asked.

  “A neighbor kid,” Morena answered, “playing in the woods. The little clearing back in there was one of his hiding places. It’s a pretty good one.”

  Both inspectors looked over. The Crime Scene personnel photographing and measuring and looking for clues were visible over the low expanse of greenery, but the object of their attention could not be seen from the main trail.

  JaMorris asked, “Any ID on her?”

  “Not definite, but she’s the right age and has on what Katie Chase was wearing the last time anybody saw her: jeans, a red pullover, tennis shoes. There’s not much doubt.”

  Abby indicated the workers in the clearing. “How long before they’re done?”

  “You know as much as me. However long it takes. At least several hours.”

  “What if we brought around the husband?” Abby asked. “He’s local, a couple of blocks.”

  Morena glanced back over at the crime scene. “Not to protocol,” she said. “We ought to get her to the coroner’s office first. You don’t show the next of kin a body lying in a clearing.”

  “I know,” JaMorris said, “but maybe it’s time for some hardball. If he didn’t do it, I’ll apologize later. If he did, maybe this will shake him up and he’ll give us something.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the two inspectors and a haggard-looking, stoop-shouldered Hal Chase broke through the cordon of police cars. By now four television vans clogged the street where the trail led up into the shaded canopy. When they got to the trail, Hal stopped and took a deep breath, then looked up the path as though it were a gallows he had to ascend.

  “All right,” he said to no one. He stepped up on the curb and over the sidewalk and into the park. From when the inspectors had first shown up at his house through the length of the uphill walk, Hal had projected impatience. He wanted to know; he had to know. But now, as he moved up the path, the urgency was gone. If anything, he seemed reluctant to keep moving.

  Or, Abby thought for the tenth time, maybe he was just a fine actor.

  They followed him up to where Morena waited. The ever nattily attired Len Faro of the Crime Scene Unit had come out to join her, talking with what looked from the distance to be enthusiasm; maybe he’d found a clue, some fabric snagged on one of the blackberry brambles. He had a plastic bag in his hand; as they got closer, he squared to face the small party and then put both hand and bag in his pocket.

  “This is Hal Chase,” JaMorris said when they got up to the other two.

  Morena had obviously prepped Faro. He nodded a perfunctory greeting, then added, “We’re all finished in there, if you’d like to follow me. Watch out for the stickers.”

  The smaller trail went back into the dense undergrowth for about thirty feet, then turned slightly to the right before it opened into a cleared area perhaps ten feet in diameter. Faro, in the lead, blocked an early visual of the body on the ground, but when he got to the clearing, he stepped to one side. Directly behind him, Hal stopped and drew in a sharp breath.

  In the shade, the light was not good, though it was a long way from true dusk. The body lay facing away from them. The cause of death appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, as though she’d been walking and, shot from behind at close range, simply fell forward onto her face.

  Hal moved up next to the body, on the side her face had turned—one step, then two. He went to a knee, stared at the profile, hung his head. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

  Nobody else said anything.

  After a small eternity, he straightened up and turned to face Abby and JaMorris. Even in the dim light, his eyes glistened. Nodding once, he managed to whisper, “Yes, it’s my wife,” before he pushed to one side of the trail and squeezed past the people who’d trooped up behind him. When he got back to the main intersection where they’d hooked up with Morena and Faro, he stopped again and drew another breath, an unconscious moan escaping. He put his hands in his pockets, turned left, and one foot after another, slowly walked downhill.

  27

  THEY HELD THE funeral Mass at St. Ignatius the following Monday morning. It was a tense and brittle affair.

  In the days since the discovery of Katie’s body, the suspicions about her husband had coalesced into what seemed a nearly universal acceptance that he was her killer and it would be only a matter of time before the police arrested him. No one with inside knowledge was supposed to be talking about the investigation, which, in San Francisco, meant everybody was. Both major city newspapers got up to speed quickly on everything that Glitsky and the two Homicide inspectors had discovered: Katie’s counseling, Hal’s refusal to be a part of it, his inconclusive alibi, his affair with Patti Orosco. Perhaps most damning was the revelation that just after the birth of Ellen, Hal and Katie had taken out a life insurance policy that paid the surviving spouse five hundred thousand dollars should the other die, double that for accidental or violent death.

  No one could deny that it was a huge amount of money, especially for a family struggling to cover everyday expenses. As a purely objective matter, it painted Hal in a terrible light, in spite of his explanation that because of his stepmother’s experience with his father’s pension and a generous insurance policy, the family culture believed in insurance. Indeed, Ruth told any reporter who asked that Hal’s father’s insurance and pension had
allowed her to raise and educate two sons in relative peace and comfort.

  The topic of Hal’s guilt was ubiquitous, with the ever salacious Courier publishing a poll on the day before the funeral indicating that sixty-eight percent of its readers thought Hal had “probably” killed Katie.

  The high-pressure system of the past week held steady, and the skies were clear, although the temperature had been dropping each day. When the service began at eleven o’clock, it was forty-two degrees.

  Inside the cavernous space, it didn’t seem much warmer. Adding significantly to the chill was the very apparent estrangement between the two sides of the family, which had become entrenched since the discovery of Katie’s body. The Dunnes wanted nothing to do with the Chases. Katie’s entire extended family—sixty or so people—waited outside in the cold until it was clear on which side of the church Hal would sit (the right). Following Curt Dunne’s lead, they walked not up the center aisle but all the way around to the left, as far from Hal as they could get. Also in those left pews were Katie’s six playgroup friends and their husbands, all of whom had spent significant amounts of social time chez Chase and now apparently viewed Hal as a pariah. Abby Foley and JaMorris Monroe were there too, since it was not unheard of for a murderer—even if it wasn’t Hal—to be among the mourners at services.

  The Chase contingent was significantly smaller and more spread out. With the exception of a decent show of solidarity from Hal’s boss, the sheriff, his chief deputy, Adam Foster, and thirty of his colleagues among the guards, bailiffs, and other deputies, barely a dozen souls had taken their places in the right-hand pews. Hal, Ruth, Warren (back in town for the funeral), and the two children sat in front. A scattering of guys from Hal’s earlier life—bowling and fishing and drinking buddies—had entered on their own and filled in empty bench space. Three rows behind Hal, Dismas and Frannie Hardy sat with Abe Glitsky. Despite Hardy’s advice to the contrary, Patti Orosco showed up. Although she tried to keep a relatively low profile, she wore a stunning hooded brown leather and fox-fur parka that looked like it cost five thousand dollars if it cost a penny, which immediately sparked a feeding frenzy in the media, some of whose bolder members had to be removed from the church.