The Keeper

by John Lescroart

  “I know what I said.”

  “Right. That Chick Davis had already said they’d never gone down to San Bruno that day. Let’s get Davis to come down and talk to me, and then I’ve got a source I can use and print.”

  “Except,” Glitsky said, “that I made that up about Davis, to get her to talk.”

  “You lied to her?” Dorothy asked from the doorway.

  Glitsky turned to her and shrugged. “I gave her some false information. She reacted to it by telling me the truth. It’s not an unknown technique.”

  Again, Jeff lifted his hand. “Thus the issue with quoting people who told you they talked to other people. I’m sure Dorothy doesn’t mean to criticize, Abe. I’m glad it worked. I just can’t use it. That’s the problem.”

  Glitsky brought both hands up to his forehead and ran them back over the top of his head. “This is too close. We can’t let it slip away.”

  “Okay, look, hold on a minute,” Jeff said. “You say you’ve got their number. Maybe all is not lost. You play Andy Biehl the tape, or maybe not even that. Just tell him you know what you know. This is his chance to save himself. You offer him some kind of deal. You already know the truth, and it’s only a matter of time before it comes out. Or I call Foster in my role of ace reporter. I’ve got this information. I don’t name the informant and—my own little lie—I think we’ll be running with it. Would he care to comment?”

  As it turned out, Foster didn’t care to comment. As soon as Jeff identified himself on the phone, the chief deputy hung up on him.

  • • •

  MIDNIGHT, AND GLITSKY was still awake.

  He’d gone to bed with Treya at ten-thirty and hadn’t been able to get to sleep within the next twenty minutes; that was the limit of his endurance before he declared the effort hopeless and got up. Now he sat up in the living room by the picture window—still life with fog—with a book called Consider the Fork facedown on his lap. It was a good book, full of fascinating facts about how cooking utensils and pots and kitchens had evolved, but he’d given up after only a few pages, turned off the light, and tried not to think.

  The not thinking wasn’t going very well.

  Eventually, he got up and walked in to check on Rachel and Zachary. They slept in the same room because that was how they felt most comfortable. Thank God for them, he thought as he pulled the blankets up first around one, then the other. He stood at their door, listening to them breathing, grateful that both were healthy and apparently well-balanced.

  For an instant, his overactive brain flashed back to the Chase children, with all their difficulties, especially Ellen, or Ellie, as Ruth called her. He couldn’t imagine dealing with that day to day with his own children—ADHD or hyperactivity or whatever it might be. Unbidden, Ruth’s comment that Ellie’s problems were “under control” slammed into his brainpan. He wondered if that meant Ruth had put Ellie on medication. He should tell Hardy to talk to Hal about his instructions for the kids, make sure things at his home didn’t get lost in the shuffle.

  Thinking about Hal brought him sharply up against a conflict he’d had to resolve in his own life. He was nearly fifteen years older than Treya. When they’d started talking about marriage, Abe hadn’t wanted to start another family. He’d already raised three boys. He did not want to have children with Treya and then not live long enough to raise them. His relationship with his own father, Nat, was one of the touchstones of his life and always had been. He regularly talked to all of his grown-up boys and saw them with as much frequency as he could. The importance of fathers could not be overestimated; for a child to lose one had to be devastating.

  Even more so, to lose a father to suicide.

  As Glitsky looked at his son and daughter, he felt a pang. He had no control over it, and he knew it, but he vowed silently that if he could extend his life span at all by will or fortitude, by nutrition or exercise or attitude, he would do whatever it took.

  Someday, Abe knew, Zachary would move into his own room down that short hallway, but for the past four years, his young son’s future bedroom had been the family’s computer room. Now Abe went there, closing the door behind him. Sitting at the ergonomic chair in the dark, he reached for the mouse and brought the screen to life. Going to Google with no plan in mind, he pulled up Jeff Elliot’s column from that morning, which he reread and where he found nothing new—just the same tantalizing connections.

  Searching “Hal Chase” provided him around a thousand hits, everything from the articles that had run in the local and national media, to blogs and discussion groups and all of the other permutations of online madness that seemed to attend any sensational story. He glanced at the first couple of websites at random, then realized that there was too much information to digest, and probably little if any that he didn’t already know.

  He should go back to bed and try to get some sleep.

  Instead, he typed in “Katie Chase” and discovered nearly as many hits as he had for her husband. Glitsky made a mental note to check back with Frannie on Ruth’s contention that Katie had been dealing with mental illness as opposed to emotional problems. He thought it unlikely, first because Frannie was a marriage and family counselor and not a licensed psychiatrist, and second because he hadn’t heard it from any other source. If Katie suffered from mental illness that needed medication, Glitsky was fairly certain he would have known about it before today.

  Of course, mothers-in-law had been known to form and hold opinions without any basis in fact. Almost everybody in the world saw what they expected or wanted to see, believed what they wanted to believe.

  The name “Ruth Chase” brought up several hundred more hits, but Glitsky knew it was a common enough name. Finding the various hits on Hal’s stepmother among the other Ruth Chases would require more time and energy than Glitsky felt it warranted, especially since all of this Web surfing was mere curiosity, a mindless exercise fed by his insomnia.

  However, at the bottom of the first page of the Ruth Chase hits, under “Searches related to Ruth Chase,” he saw “Ruth Chase San Francisco” and clicked on that. Once again, several pages of hits turned up, but this time Abe could identify Hal’s stepmother among the crowd. Somewhat to his surprise—although it shouldn’t have been, since he knew she had a college-age son—she had a Facebook account. A blog site, the last entry from three years ago, gave her tag as WineBitch and seemed to be about investing in upscale wines and the wine auction market. There was a short article in the San Mateo County Times about the marriage of Ruth Johannson to Peter Chase in 1989, the second marriage for both and a new beginning for the couple, each of whom had lost a spouse to tragedy—Pete’s first wife to a cerebral hemorrhage and Ruth’s first husband to a tragic accident. There was a legal notice about her adoption of Hal in 1991.

  Yawning now and finally beginning to fade, Glitsky clicked on another site that caught his eye and found himself looking at a short news article from the San Francisco Chronicle in 1995:

  * * *

  DEPUTY’S DEATH RULED ACCIDENTAL

  After an initial preliminary ruling of suicide, a police investigation into the death of a San Francisco jail guard has concluded that the drug and alcohol overdose death last Saturday was accidental. Peter Chase, 46, was taking medication for his insomnia and imbibed alcohol in a combination that proved lethal. When his wife, Ruth, returned from grocery shopping, she discovered her husband lying on the floor of their garage and called paramedics. Following the autopsy, police investigators noted that there was no sign of foul play, that Chase had no reason to take his own life and had been in good spirits when last seen by his wife. Investigators also found no evidence of marital or financial difficulties. Ruth Chase expressed her gratitude to the investigating team for the revised ruling: “I’m just so relieved to have this ordeal behind us.”

  54

  ADAM FOSTER’S FEET pounded on the treadmill. He didn’t give a
shit about the signs that told all the exercisers to be thoughtful of the other members and limit their time on a machine to twenty minutes. Fuck that and fuck them. He’d already gone a half hour and had barely gotten a good sweat going; he’d go at least that long again. The one thing you didn’t want to do if you worked with clientele like his was to get soft. He wasn’t about to let that happen.

  As he jogged, his mind ran along, thinking that all this recent media hoopla about Alanos Tussaint and the rest of it was a pain in the ass for sure but that it shouldn’t really worry him. These things tended to go in cycles. He remembered, for example, when Wes Farrell had been running for DA and his main opponent, a liberal cretin named Ron Gabriel, had decided that conditions in the jail should be a main concern of the citizenry.

  The incumbent DA, on his way out, hadn’t been nearly hard enough in investigating allegations of impropriety in the lockup, and Ron Gabriel was going to make a Sheriff’s Department cleanup a major priority in his administration. The poor inmates were being mistreated on a daily basis, and a city that prided itself on sensitivity to the plight of misunderstood and underserved individuals should not stand for it.

  Adam Foster’s take on Ron Gabriel? The guy didn’t have a clue. First thing, most of the inmates lived the life of Riley, with more amenities than they had in their own rat-hole apartments, flophouses, crash pads, or whatever other cribs they might have called home. They got three square meals, and good ones, every day. Meat, spuds, gravy, bread, milk, green stuff if you wanted it. His fellow guards ate the same meals, and you never heard them complain.

  On top of that, with a little cooperation, any reasonably motivated jailbird could get his hands on whatever else made his life good—drugs from weed to heroin to Oxy, alcohol, and television. Of course, none of that was free. There was even a charge for the choice bunk in each cell. But this stuff wasn’t free on the outside, either. If Ron Gabriel or any of his ilk wanted to ask the average inmate how he or she liked the jail experience, Adam Foster bet eighty percent would say it was just fine.

  What Burt Cushing always came back to was true: It was a well-oiled machine. The oil that made it all work so well was the money the inmates brought in on their books from peeps on the outside, then spent on the goods he and Burt provided.

  Once in a while you’d get some greedy douche bag who thought he was a player and could ease in on some of the action, and that’s where Adam came in, enforcing the status quo. He was their keeper, supplying protection so the majority would be safe while they were behind bars. Protection was a major commodity all over the world. Everybody understood that. It was only when some foolish or mentally challenged inmate, such as Alanos Tussaint, tried to upset the apple cart that action had to be taken.

  Given the socioeconomic background of most of these animals and their marginal-at-best levels of sophistication, action had to be forceful, immediate, and unambiguous. No. Somebody stepped out of line, you whacked him back in, and if he still didn’t get it, what happened was unfortunate but had to be done for the greater good. They always brought it on themselves. Always.

  Now they were in another cycle where the call for reform hovered in the air. Foster was surprised to see it coming from Glitsky, who, as a longtime cop in the Hall, must have been aware of the basic realities. And from Farrell, who had been the soul of benignly tolerant laissez-faire for the first three years of his administration. What the hell had gotten into these guys?

  Well, okay, Solis-Martinez.

  Maybe they’d moved too fast on that, didn’t think through the ramifications. But he wasn’t about to whip himself over it. She’d put herself into a situation that had been settled. If you stir up a hornets’ nest and don’t expect to get stung, you’re a dumb shit. And dumb shits have a tendency not to survive.

  Despite the rants of that meddling Jeff Elliot, they had no chance to connect Foster or Burt to Maria Solis-Martinez. He’d done that job right. There was no evidence, and none, he knew, would ever turn up. Foster was a pro, and the truth was that random violence happened every night in the city. Glitsky and Farrell could believe what they wanted, but they’d never be able to prove a damn thing.

  So, yeah, the next few weeks would probably be a hassle, but if there was one thing Foster had learned about his boss, it was Cushing’s ability to deflect not only most general criticism but especially official opprobrium. In six years, through at least three cycles of the kind of witch hunt they were experiencing now, no one had ever laid a glove on them. Every investigation into alleged crimes committed inside the jail had come to nothing.

  Foster had no doubt that even the Tussaint situation, which had bred its own unexpected and festering sore, would be settled in the coming days or weeks. The Luther Jones case was a nonstarter. This time Foster had been careful that nobody saw anything. He would bet they wouldn’t be able to prove he was even in the jail when Luther OD’d. If there were alibi discrepancies for Tussaint—Foster was thinking of Hal Chase—he knew that an alibi problem, absent evidence of or an eyewitness to the crime, was all but useless. People mixed up dates and days and what they had done and when they had done it. The paperwork showed he’d been at Bruno. It would be a nonissue.

  Right now he was more concerned about a call he’d gotten this morning about Hal Chase. The woman said she had important information and needed to see him in person but wouldn’t elaborate. She wouldn’t give her name and wouldn’t come to the office. He couldn’t get her to say if it was about the Katie Chase murder or something else, and it was the something else that worried him.

  Chances are it was bullshit. Somebody who’d had a dream or a clairvoyant moment or otherwise wanted to grab a piece of a high-profile case. There was also, truth be told, an unheralded and titillating but under-the-table upside to these regular flare-ups of infamy. For as long as his name, and sometimes his picture, was in the paper or on the news, Foster became—for a certain type of woman—catnip. Clean-cut, hard-looking, unyielding, he seemed to fill a specific niche: equal parts cowboy, outlaw, celebrity, killer. It shouldn’t have been much of a surprise when he considered the amount of mail that inmates received was usually in direct correlation to the degree of their notoriety, but the few times it had happened to him, it always struck him as a pleasant bonus to his work, a reward of sorts for the way he did his job.

  One way or the other, with all the shit that was going down, he could ill afford not to follow this up. He told the woman he’d meet her after he finished his workout.

  • • •

  THOUGH JOHN STROUT hated to admit it, occasionally he was not as absolutely rigorous as he could have been in the performance of his duties. As a doctor and a scientist, he knew that his job as medical examiner was to objectively analyze the bodies of the deceased and to make a definitive ruling on what had been the cause of death. Over the course of his forty-some years on the job, he had performed literally thousands of autopsies, and he took great pride in his work, knowing that he was often in a sense the last true voice of the victim, calling out from beyond the grave for justice.

  The body, he knew, held its own truths, and his sacred duty was to tease out the oft-times hidden meaning behind those truths.

  But sometimes—he hoped and believed that it was once only in a very great while—circumstances would conspire to impact his diligence and his objectivity. The van would pull up, and all at once he would have four bullet-riddled young bodies to autopsy, and he did not generally go looking for signs of congestive heart failure; or an elderly homeless man whose blood alcohol level of 4.6 would have been enough to kill him several times over—did it really matter that he was also fatally hypothermic? Or, as in a case like that of Alanos Tussaint, Strout would get a body that, frankly, nobody cared about, and a plausible story from a reliable source to go along with it, and he’d find the obvious cause of death and rule on it.

  Now, on this gray Saturday midmorning, he was sitting in fro
nt of the computer at his desk, going over the results he’d signed off on with Tussaint. At first glance, nothing had been amiss. Blunt force head trauma was unquestionably the correct call. Since the body had long since been cremated, nobody was ever going to examine it and come to a different conclusion. But Strout had followed his own guidelines for conducting autopsies and had taken a couple dozen very clear full-color photographs of the body back and front, as well as of the fatal head wound, and he could blow them up on his computer screen to examine in larger-than-life detail.

  He’d hardly begun to go through them when it became clear to him that he had not given sufficient attention to Tussaint’s body as a whole. Strout knew that life in jail was not easy, and everyday interactions could result in lacerations and abrasions. These guys didn’t tend to say “excuse me” when they got close to each other in line, or shackled and in transit, or passing in a hallway. They’d push each other around, get slammed into bars or walls; being physical was more or less their default setting.

  Even against that backdrop, this time around, the pictures of Tussaint’s injuries showed unmistakable signs of the deceased having been the focus of if not an outright beating then at least a substantial fight. And yes, both the guards’ statements and the following investigation by SFPD inspectors had acknowledged that Tussaint had been in a fight just prior to his slip. That was how he’d come to be in an isolation cell. But how, Strout wondered, had he missed the similarities of the welting and the other bruising on the shoulders and upper back?

  He probably hadn’t paid enough attention to the full-body pictures because he’d been expecting a single sharp blow to the temple that had produced a concussion and massive internal cerebral bleeding, which had brought about Tussaint’s death. But upon closer review of several of these bruises, he could make out the clear outline of the weapon that had caused them—straight and almost an inch thick. It read “nightstick” almost as clearly as if it had a caption under it.