Damage

by John Lescroart

  And only last week, in a highly publicized sequence of events, Lieutenant Glitsky arrested Mr. Curtlee again on charges ranging from death threats and resisting arrest to attempted murder. During his arrest, Mr. Curtlee fought with police, including Glitsky, and sustained several injuries, including a broken arm. Two of the arresting officers were also injured. And again Ro Curtlee was released on bail.

  The common denominator in all of these crimes is Ro Curtlee. Officers sought and obtained an interview with Mr. Curtlee, in the presence of his lawyer, to determine his whereabouts and activities at the time of these latest two murders in an effort to eliminate him as a suspect in either of them. He provided them with alibis for both, and that is where the matter stands at this time.

  Despite the hysteria generated by the Courier, a Curtlee-owned newspaper and no friend of the police, there seems no evidence suggesting that these have been other than straightforward murder investigations. Police have named no suspects in the Matt Lewis or Janice Durbin murders.

  What has been widely publicized as police harassment in some circles may well instead be seen as a simple attempt by the rich and powerful to use their political and media influence to insulate themselves from investigation for a series of brutal crimes.

  Glitsky, at his kitchen table, nodded in a kind of grateful relief as he read these last words. As usual, Jeff Elliot had gotten it right, his tone reasonable. Maybe this, he thought, sipping his tea, would help to lower the temperature a little around all this madness and he could get back to just doing his job.

  He folded up the Chronicle and was rinsing out his mug, getting ready to leave the duplex and go to work early, when the telephone rang. It was just after six o’clock, which gave the trained investigator in him a clue as to who it possibly was, he hoped. He took the two steps across the kitchen and picked up before the second ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hey.”

  “Hey. Everybody okay?”

  “Everybody’s fine, except I miss you.”

  “You do?”

  “I do. Of course I do.”

  “I thought you were furious at me.”

  “Mad, not furious. Frustrated. Now I’m over it and just miss you.”

  “I miss you, too. I can fly down this weekend if you’re going to stay.”

  “If I’m going to stay.”

  “Are you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t decided. It seems so stupid and melodramatic to be down here, but up there it felt real and scary. I just don’t know what he’ll do, Abe.”

  “Nobody does. That’s what makes him so scary.”

  “I mean, what are the odds he’d really try anything with any of us?”

  “If there’re any odds, they’re too great.”

  “Now you sound like me.”

  “Good. You’re obviously the smart one.” He paused. “You know, on second thought, maybe you ought to think about staying down there a few more days. I can fly down, make it a vacation for the weekend. How’s Sixto holding up with the kids?”

  “My brother? Are you kidding? He wants to keep them forever.”

  “Maybe we could do a little negotiation. Get a night away.”

  “I could do that.”

  Glitsky took a breath. “I wasn’t sure we were okay. We’re okay?”

  “We’re different, but okay. I don’t do the risk thing so well.”

  “You shouldn’t have to.”

  “You shouldn’t, either.”

  “Well, then I should change jobs.”

  “Which you don’t want to do.”

  “No. I don’t. Somebody’s got to hang in there and do it, and I’m temperamentally suited. It’s a curse but it’s who I am.”

  “I know. And I don’t want you to change. I love who you are.”

  A sudden surge of emotion made his head go light. He put his hand up to steady himself against the wall. “I’ll call when I know what time I’ll get in at Burbank,” he said.

  Lou the Greek’s opened for business at six o’clock in the morning every day but Sunday. The bar/restaurant occupied a semi-hygienic, semi-subterranean space directly across the street from the Hall of Justice, and this location made it a favorite for cops and jurors and lawyers. At lunchtime, it tended to be packed with humanity, the tiny tables and six-person booths equally hard or impossible to come by, and this in spite of the fact that the only item on the menu was the special, a mostly edible, sometimes not, sometimes delicious combination of flavors and textures drawn from the rather disparate culinary cultures of both Greece and China. Only Greece and China. Lou’s wife, Chiu, upon whom the Chronicle had a few years before bestowed the sobriquet “Most Creative Chef in the City,” had an undeniable knack, no doubt about it—souvlaki char siu bao, barbecue red pork moussaka, hot and sour and lemon curd dolma stew, crispy duck pita pockets, and the ever-popular and mysterious yeanling clay bowl.

  But before lunchtime, and especially in the early morning, Lou’s was a haven for serious drinkers, not so much the indigent or homeless alcoholics as one might suspect, but in general a well-dressed and bleary-eyed clientele of men and a few women who often were in line down the steps to the front door by the time Lou opened up at the crack of dawn. The stools at the bar, which had closed four hours earlier, were usually filled up before Lou could ring up the first sale.

  On this Friday morning, though, the main action wasn’t at the bar, but in the booth farthest from it along the right-hand wall. And nobody was drinking anything alcoholic. A galvanized Farrell, positively dapper in Armani, had made some important decisions and in fact had already sprung into action during the night, and finally he’d contacted the principals who would need to be involved in his plan and told them that he needed them at Lou’s by seven A.M.

  So he was sitting against the wall next to Amanda Jenkins and looking across the table at Glitsky and an uncomfortable Vi Lapeer. Everybody had already expressed their condolences and outrage about Wes’s dog, Gert, then said nice things to Abe about the morning’s “CityTalk” column, and after that vein had played itself out, Farrell drank some of his coffee, cleared his throat, and spoke in a voice that though firm was so quiet that it could have been a stage whisper.

  “This is the most off-the-record conversation any of you will ever have with me. I would vastly prefer it if not one word of it got out to anyone beyond the four of us. Is that acceptable to all of you?”

  Eyebrows went up in surprise all around the table, but no one objected, and within a few seconds all nodded their assent.

  “All right, then,” Farrell went on, “I’ve asked you all here this morning because after all he and his family have put us all through the last couple of weeks, I’ve decided that enough is enough. It’s my intention to get Ro Curtlee back behind bars by tonight.”

  “Fuckin’ A,” Jenkins said, pumping her fist. “Yes!”

  Although he nodded again in apparent agreement, Glitsky’s brows came together in his default frown while Chief Lapeer, sitting across from Farrell against the wall, squinted in consternation, threw a quick glance at Glitsky, then came back to Wes. “How are you planning to do that?”

  “The short answer is that I’m going to indict him.” He spent a few moments bringing everyone up to speed on the grand jury, explaining the relatively newly hatched strategy of tying via motive Ro’s earlier conviction to the current crimes he was suspected of committing, thus creating the special circumstances Farrell would need to outright deny him bail.

  When he finished, Amanda had a perplexed look on her face. “I understand the strategy, Wes, but the grand jury doesn’t meet until Tuesday, and even then . . .”

  But Farrell was shaking his head. “I’ve called them into emergency session this morning at eight o’clock.”

  “This morning? But how did you ... ?” Amanda began.

  “I called them at home last night. I got fourteen of them to commit to be there and left messages for the other six, and I only need twelve. So we’re
good to go.”

  “Except that I’m not nearly prepared.”

  “That’s not going to be your problem. You know the basic argument. That’s what you’re going to give them.”

  “But without any new evidence, it’s not going to be enough.”

  “We’ve got solid gold evidence from the original trial. For Sandoval , I already have the good Dr. Strout coming in to say she was raped. I’ve got the evidence tech to say that the sperm in her was Ro’s. And since Nuñez is dead, we can read her transcript into the record. That’s all we should need for her.

  “Then Strout can talk about how Nuñez is dead, the crime scene guys say that the body was naked except for she was wearing shoes, and Arnie Becker says it was arson. We get a detective to say that Ro was out on bail facing a trial during which Nuñez was expected to testify. That gives us multiple murder specials and the specials of murdering a witness to prevent testimony.”

  Jenkins, obviously excited by these possibilities, still had her doubts. “What about Janice Durbin? We have a Johnson problem.” She was referring to the case that requires the district attorney to tell the grand jury about possible exculpatory evidence. “If we try to subpoena Curtlee’s alibi for Durbin, which is his parents, they’ll know what we’re doing. Denardi will at least delay the whole thing, maybe block it indefinitely.”

  “Right,” Farrell said. “So here’s what we do. We get the indictments for Sandoval and Nuñez first. We start the grand jury on Durbin, maybe even present a couple of witnesses, then we subpoena Ro’s alibi—his parents and employees—but by then he’s already in custody for the first two, and they can screw around as much as they want. When we get the indictment for Durbin, we join it up to the other two. We don’t, we still have him in jail on multiple murder, no bail.” He looked around at a quorum of clear skeptics. “Listen, I’ve spent thirty years hearing that as far as the grand jury is concerned, any DA worth his salt could indict a ham sandwich. Well, I guess we’re going to find out if I’m worth my salt and prove it once and for all if we can.”

  “But doesn’t that mean you’ll have to try him on those charges?” Lapeer asked.

  “Eventually, maybe.”

  “I thought it was within sixty days,” Glitsky said.

  Farrell allowed himself a self-satisfied smile. “Yes, and if Ro’s lawyers want to argue that they’re ready to go to trial in sixty days, guess what? Then they’re obviously ready to defend him on the remand trial, aren’t they, since it’s the exact same case? They can’t have it both ways.”

  Glitsky held up a finger. “Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see him in jail yesterday. But I’ve still got concerns about Janice Durbin.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well, Ro’s got the alibi witnesses. Even if they’re all lying, that’s a lot of firepower for a jury to ignore, even a grand jury . . .”

  “By the time they hear from those alibi witnesses, he’s already in custody for our two best cases,” Farrell said. “I think they’ll indict in spite of the alibi, but if they don’t, no harm, no foul.”

  “Okay,” Glitsky persisted, “but for the real trial . . .”

  “Then we’re back to what I just said a minute ago. They can’t have it both ways. If they’re ready for one trial, then they’re ready for both, or either. And meanwhile Ro’s out of circulation, which is a consummation devoutly to be wished, I think we all agree.”

  “Amen to that,” Glitsky said.

  “Hear, hear,” Jenkins added.

  Lapeer finally spoke up. “So what do you need me for, Wes?”

  Farrell drew a breath, twirled his coffee cup around for a moment with both hands. “I know you’ve been taking a beating on this since the minute you took office, Chief. I also understand why you were persuaded to withdraw your surveillance people you had attached to Ro.”

  Lapeer’s brow clouded. “How did you even hear about that?”

  “Word gets out, Chief. That’s the way it is. But even so, I thought you might have given me the courtesy.”

  “We’ve all got jobs we’re trying to hold on to here, Mr. Farrell,” she said. “If His Honor gets one more excuse to let me go, and this surveillance was going to be one . . .”

  Farrell held up his hand. “I said I understood your problem. So now I’m asking you to do what I’m doing.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Pretend that none of this—what we’re talking about privately here this morning—none of this is happening. Pretend that we’re not going ahead with the grand jury. We’re beaten and cowed into submission. Pretend that we’re not keeping Ro under surveillance.”

  “But, in fact, we’re not.”

  “Well. We will be.” Here Farrell took a beat, letting out a breath he seemed to have been holding with an almost audible sigh. “What I propose we do this morning is send out a couple of unmarked vehicles to the Curtlees’ home, starting as soon as this breaks up here. They’ve got five automobiles up there—three in the garage, and a matched set of white SUVs usually driven by their butler and the household staff. Any one of those vehicles leaves the premises, we trail them. First stop they make, somebody sticks a GPS under the bumper.”

  Lapeer had her hands clasped tightly in front of her on the table. “And why are we doing this right now?” she asked.

  “Two reasons. First, from everything he’s done so far, Ro is almost undoubtedly on the lookout for the other witness in his trial, a woman named Gloria Gonzalvez, and if he finds her, it probably won’t be pretty. To say nothing of the fact that we’re looking for her as well so she’ll testify again at the retrial. There’s a reasonable chance he might lead us to her, and if he does, we want to get her into protection.”

  “So you’re saying you want to try to follow him again?” Lapeer asked.

  “No,” Farrell admitted. “I don’t think we can do that. Too much manpower, not to mention it’s too expensive, and too much visibility.”

  “Okay, so if we’re not following him, how do we know if he gets near her? And PS, he might not stay in the car anyway. He leaves it at the BART station, then what?”

  Glitsky cleared his throat. “Well, plus, Wes, I’ve got a problem, too.”

  “What is it?”

  “If we have to follow every car that leaves the house, sooner or later they’re going to notice and talk about it. Odds are decent somebody among them thinks about a GPS.”

  “I don’t even want to think about the press reaction if that comes out,” Lapeer said. “We think we’re on the hot plate now . . .”

  Amanda all but snapped. “We can certainly justify wanting to keep some kind of tabs on a convicted rapist and murderer, which let’s not forget is what Ro is. Whatever spin Sheila Marrenas puts on it, this is a reasonable and defensible strategy.”

  Lapeer shot back at her. “So is everything else we’ve done, and it doesn’t seem to have made any difference. Especially to the mayor.”

  “Fuck the mayor,” Amanda said. “He’s just casting for votes, as always.”

  “Well, you’ll pardon me if I don’t want to challenge him any more than I already have. If we don’t play by the book ...”

  “This is by the book,” Glitsky, the voice of reason, put in. “There’s nothing illegal about either tailing him or planting a GPS, provided the car is in a public place and we attach it to some exterior part of the vehicle. No Fourth Amendment problem. It’s legal. Period. Even the Ninth Circuit thinks so, and they don’t like much that we do.”

  Farrell did a little drumroll on the table. “Here’s the deal, people, quite simply, we can’t lose him again. Especially if we get this indictment today, which I am determined to do. We’ll want to serve it immediately. And to do that, we’ve got to know where he is.” He scanned around the table. “Can we all be on board with that?”

  Amanda and Glitsky were both nodding, and Farrell zeroed in on Lapeer. “Vi?”

  Finally she came to her decision. “Let’s just be extra goddamn c
areful planting these goddamn devices, can we?”

  33

  At ten o’clock sharp, Eztli walked up the stairs and found Ro alone, sitting at the dining room table having a breakfast of coffee, fruit, and bacon. Barefoot, and dressed in gray sweats he might have slept in, he hadn’t yet shaved or combed his hair.

  “I just got a call on my cell from Lupe García,” Eztli said. “Somebody says they found Gloria Gonzalvez.”

  Ro put down his forkful of cantaloupe. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “In two days?”

  “I told you, money talks.”

  “Awesome,” Ro said. “Where is she?”

  “The guy won’t say till he sees the money. Which is only smart.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Well, he’s down at Lupe’s now.”

  Ro took a bite of bacon and chewed ruminatively for a moment, then pushed his chair back and grabbed a last sip of coffee. “Time is money,” he said with a victory smile. “Let me throw on some clothes, I’ll be right back down.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” Eztli said. “And Ro?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not going to like this, but don’t bring the gun.”

  Ro stopped in the doorway. “Don’t bring the gun? What are you talking about? I love that thing.”

  “I know you do, but you don’t want it anywhere near you if we get pulled over for any reason. Which, as we’ve seen, can happen. Your parents would kill me if I let you get arrested for something that stupid.”

  “They’re not going to arrest me again. Or even try.”

  “If you’re carrying, they won’t have a choice.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “You’re packing, am I right?”

  “I have a license to carry. And of course it’s not the same piece after the other day. That one’s in my safe in my room until I have a chance to get rid of it.”

  “But I just got mine. You got any idea how long I’ve been without a piece? A guy feels naked, and not in a good way.”