Guilt

by John Lescroart

  Well, what, really? A guy who did a job she didn't approve of. Didn't it come down to just that? What was so bad about him? It wasn't like he was a mass murderer, a professional wrestler, a car salesman. And the violence of her reaction to what he did – though she hated with all her heart to admit it – might have had just a tad of a tiny bit to do with alcohol.

  So she did the wise thing first – went completely on the wagon. Thought about the whole issue soberly and while sober. She was thirty-five. She hadn't been lonely before, but now, damn it, she was. Well, no, not exactly that. What she wanted was another fix of him.

  Christina had said to look him up in the book, and after two days of struggling with herself, she had. There was a work number, on Columbus, no home number listed. And the number was there right now on the notepad on her bed-table under the lamp.

  'Shit,' she said, flicking on the light.

  What the hell, she was thinking. It's midnight. He's at home and I can just talk to the machine at his office, apologize for being such – no, not apologize, don't start on that note. I'd just like to talk with him. And she'd leave her number.

  But wait. He knew where she lived, and if it had been important to him, he could have come by, rung the bell…

  Except that, no, she'd thrown him out. He'd probably think, with some justification, that she was a nutcase. Even if he was tempted to come back, he'd think twice, maybe ten times – and decide he'd better not. She couldn't blame him. Also, if she was really, as he'd said, the first woman since his marriage, he'd be skittish. And again, she couldn't blame him.

  It was going to have to be her.

  I've got to find out if his marriage is over, she thought. That's got to come first. I'm not getting involved with a married man. I don't know him at all. This is dumb.

  But she was punching the numbers and the phone had started ringing.

  'Hello.'

  'Oh, I'm sorry. I must have the wrong number.'

  She was about to hang up. She wasn't prepared to really talk with anybody, certainly not with him. She was only going to leave a message. 'Sam? Sam, is that you?' It stunned her. He recognized her voice?

  She clenched the phone. She should just slam it down. Wrong number. Wrong time. Wrong.

  'Sam?' he repeated. 'Is that you?'

  She sighed with frustration. 'I wanted to apologize. No! Not apologize, explain. I thought I'd get your machine.'

  'You want, I'll turn it on, promise not to listen till tomorrow morning.'

  'That'd help. Are you still working, I mean at work?'

  'If you ask questions, my machine won't be able to answer. It'll get all confusing.'

  'You're right.'

  'Also, I think you should know that I got my client – Levon Copes? – I got him off today. If that's what you were calling about.'

  'You got him off?'

  'They dropped the charges. The DA decided the evidence wasn't going to stick. He's out of jail.'

  She took a breath. 'Well, that's not exactly what I called about. Maybe a little, but not mostly.' Another pause. 'Listen, if I promise not to get psycho on you, would you like to meet me sometime for some coffee or something?'

  'Sure. I mean okay. I guess. Why don't you tell me when?'

  'Would, like, about now be all right?'

  Part Two

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sergeant Paul Thieu, an investigator in Missing Persons who doubled from time to time as a translator, rode in the passenger seat of Glitsky's unmarked green Plymouth, chattering away as though he was on his way to a wedding or a party, instead of a murder scene. Next to him, Glitsky kept his eyes on the road – it was dusk and the fog clung around the car like wool.

  Actually, Glitsky was thinking that it wasn't so bad hearing a voice with some animation in it. There wasn't much cheeriness in the rest of his life, especially around his house, where now they had a nurse coming in every day.

  Flo wasn't going to spend her last days in any hospital – they'd discussed it and the family was going to be around her. Not that she was there yet, to her last days, but they were coming. Also, Nat – Glitsky's father – was spending a lot of nights on the couch in the front room, taking up the slack with the boys, trying to keep things in some perspective, as if there could be any.

  But Glitsky had hjs job. Going to it was a kind of a relief. And Thieu, chatter or not, represented the beginning of what might turn out to be a more than normally interesting case.

  By far the majority of homicides in the city were what law-enforcement personnel referred to as NHI – 'no humans involved' – cases. One person from the lowest stratum of intelligent life would kill another, or several others, for no apparent reason, or one so lame that it beggared belief.

  Last week, Glitsky had arrested a twenty-three year-old woman whose IQ soared into the double digits and who'd killed her boyfriend in a dispute over what television show they were going to watch. After she'd shot him, she sat herself down and watched all of Roseanne before thinking, 'Well, hey, maybe I'd better see if I can wake old Billy up now.' Which, with a bullet in his heart, proved an elusive undertaking.

  But occasionally someone with a more or less normal life got killed for a real reason; the deadly sins did continue to reap their grim rewards. These were the cases Homicide cops lived for. Glitsky and Thieu were driving to what looked like one of them now – an attorney named Victor Trang, who'd been stabbed in the chest.

  'So the way I figure it, there's no way I'm going to get to Homicide by moving up the list.' Thieu was referring to the seniority list by which promotions in the SFPD were controlled. 'The other guys up there – isn't that true? – they put in their fifteen-twenty and by the time they get assigned to Homicide, they are completely burned out. Then they discover they actually have to work weekends and nights if they want results. But they don't want to put in that kind of time. Hell, Homicide's a reward, isn't it? But they can't be touched because of their seniority. And they still want the prestige of the Homicide detail, so they take the job and then don't do it.'

  Glitsky shot him a glance. 'I do my job, Paul. Other guys do their jobs.'

  Thieu didn't seem affected by Glitsky's lack of agreement. Certainly it didn't shut him up. 'I'm not saying that, Abe. I'm not talking about you. You know who I mean.'

  A non-committal nod. Glitsky did know who he meant, and Paul had perfectly analyzed the deadwood problem within the unit. It was not Glitsky's inclination, however, to bad-mouth anyone else in his detail. These things had a way of getting around.

  'But the point is, I'm being the squeaky wheel. I want to do this. This is the action and I crave it.'

  Something in Thieu's enthusiasm for the work forced Glitsky to consider smiling. The idea of the thrill of the chase had slid away from his vision of his job over the years.

  'And imagine this!' The gush went on. 'I get this call in Missing Persons and we wait our three days and I just know. I know this is a homicide.'

  'It's a rare gift, Paul.'

  Thieu caught the intonation and realized he was pushing too hard. But who could blame him for being excited? When he got the call from the Vietnamese-speaking mother about her missing son, he'd had a hunch. In San Francisco, a missing person had to be gone for at least three days before it became an official police matter. And Thieu had gone by the book, waiting the full three days, but sticking with the story as it developed.

  'So how many calls did you get in total?'

  Thieu didn't have to consult his notes. A graduate of UCLA in police science, crew-cut and clean-shaven, he represented the increasingly new brand of San Francisco cop. He wore a light green business suit and a flamboyant red and green silk tie that somehow worked. 'His mother, his girlfriend, one of his clients.'

  'And how long was he missing?'

  'This was in the first day, before it even got to us.'

  'Three people in the first day? This was a popular guy.'

  'Well, evidently that's a question.'

  Gl
itsky, driving slowly, flicked him a glance.

  'I looked into it a little, did some background before he got filed officially as an MP.' A missing person. 'Something the mother said about a lawsuit this guy was working on.'

  'Which was?'

  'Well, evidently he was well known, but not particularly liked – except by his mom and girlfriend.'

  'Why not?'

  'Why not what?'

  'Why wasn't he liked?'

  'Oh. Well, appears the guy was a politician in the Vietnamese community here. Glad hand, big smile, full of shit.' Thieu looked over at Glitsky, checking for his reaction, which was not forthcoming. He was watching the road. 'That's not me speaking ill of the dead. It's what I've heard.'

  Glitsky was paying attention to Mission Street. They were now at the light on Geneva, which wasn't working. Traffic was a mess. The fog made it worse. Darkness was closing in fast.

  So Thieu kept chattering. 'Anyway, seems this guy Trang was always showing up at parties, gatherings, weddings, funerals, giving his card to everybody… a real nuisance.'

  'I think I met him,' Glitsky said, straight-faced.

  'Really? You met Trang?'

  Another sideways glance. 'Joke, Paul. Not really.'

  Momentarily taken aback, Thieu slumped a little in his seat. Glitsky, perhaps oblivious to his passenger's distress, said, 'The heck with this,' and pulled his flasher out, putting it on the roof, turning on the siren. In five seconds, they were through the intersection, rolling. 'So what did his mother say?'

  Glitsky's rhythms put Thieu off his own – he'd lost the thread of what he'd been saying. 'About what?'

  'About some case he was working on that made you think there might be trouble, which as it turns out there is, if you define trouble as getting yourself killed, which I do.'

  'Well, apparently Trang was suing the Archdiocese of San Francisco for a couple of million dollars or something…'

  'What for?'

  'I don't know. Not yet. The mom said he was over his head, and knew it, but it was a big case. He was scared, she said.'

  'Of what?'

  'I don't know. Just playing at that level, I think. The mom seemed confused about the Church and the Mafia and thought getting mixed up with one was like the other.'

  Glitsky nodded. 'I've heard worse theories. So he was scared. Did he get any threats anybody knew of, the mother knew of? Anything like that?'

  'No.'

  'Well, there's a help.'

  As was often the case, Glitsky was the first of the Homicide team to arrive. The body had evidently been discovered at around 4:15 p.m. by someone from Trang's weekly cleaning service, who, undoubtedly not wanting to call attention to his immigration status, had gone back to the main office and reported it to management. After suitable discussion, the company had called the police. Squad cars from Ingleside Station had confirmed the stiff.

  Since they had a tentative identity for the victim, Glitsky had made a courtesy call to Missing Persons and asked if they had an outstanding MP named Victor Trang. Which had alerted Paul Thieu, who'd asked if he could tag along.

  A couple of squad cars were parked in front of a squat, faceless, depressing building on a side street off Geneva. Two uniformed officers stood shivering four steps up in a little semi-enclosed portico, smelling of urine and littered with newspaper and broken glass. Identifying himself and Thieu, Glitsky asked them to wait until the coroner and the Crime Scene Investigators arrived.

  Then he and Thieu opened the door and entered the building.

  Inside, two bare bulbs illuminated a long hallway, in which three doors were staggered on opposite sides. At the far end, the other two officers and either another plainclothes cop or a civilian stood in a tight knot, whispering. Glitsky was aware of his and Thieu's echoing, hollow footfalls on the wooden floors.

  Though the other doors in the hallway were wood-faced, pitted and stained, with the lacquer peeling off, this one's top half was of frosted glass, upon which had been etched the name Victor Trang and under it, in script, Attorney At Law.

  'He had that door made special,' the civilian said. His name was Harry something and he lived upstairs and said he managed the place.

  Poorly, Glitsky thought.

  Harry did have master keys for the building – the uniforms had located him as soon as they'd set up. It was a minor miracle, and Glitsky was grateful for it. 'Must of cost him a thousand bucks, the door.' Harry was trying to be helpful, talking to be saying something.

  Glitsky ignored him and turned to Thieu, to whom the likely presence of a dead person was having the opposite effect than it was having on Harry. Thieu had stopped chattering. 'You ever do this before?'

  'No.'

  'You might want to wait then.'

  Steeling himself- it was never routine – Glitsky opened the door, flicked on the light. Fortunately, he thought, it had been cold in the office. Even now the room was chilly, but he could detect, before he saw anything, the distinctive smell. Something was rotting in here.

  In Glitsky's experience, real-life crime scenes tended to be prosaically ordinary, rarely capturing the vividness, the sense of evil and foreboding so favored by cop shows and B movies. This one, though, Victor Trang's office, came close.

  Trang had evidently blown all of his appearances money on his door. Once inside, the office reverted to the form of the rest of the building and neighborhood. The long desk was an eight-foot slab of white-washed plywood – in fact, Glitsky realized, it was another door, perhaps the original. At an L to the desk, a table held a computer and printer, the phone and answering machine.

  The walls were a fly-specked shiny beige which might once have been white, and they were absolutely bare – not a calendar, not a picture, not even a post-it. Behind the desk, a dark window, without blinds or curtains, was a black hole. There was an off-green couch along the side wall, a wooden library chair with a pillow seat, a folding chair set up facing the desk.

  Slowly taking it in as he moved, Glitsky walked around the folding chair. Had it been set up for an appointment? Was it always where it was now?

  He stopped. The chair behind the desk had been knocked over – he could see it now up against the back wall.

  The body rested along the length of the desk in an attitude of repose, almost as though – no, Glitsky realized, exactly as though – it had been placed there. Carefully laid down.

  Trang had been wearing an off-white linen suit, and now it was striped with red, in neat rows. There was a large bloodstain in the center of the chest, but it was roughly circular – it hadn't run down the front of his shirt. Therefore – strangely – it hadn't bled much until Trang was already on the floor.

  Glitsky stood looking for a moment, letting it all sink in. He would wait until the coroner arrived, until he'd read the forensic reports, but his impressions were coalescing into a certainty. He knew what the red stripes were. It chilled him.

  The killer had used a knife, then had held Trang up in some death embrace, holding him up, maybe for as long as a minute, leaving the knife in, perhaps twisting it toward the heart. Then, with his victim good and completely dead, he'd laid him down carefully on the floor, finally pulled out the knife, then calmly wiped the blade off on Trang's suit – two or three swipes at first glance.

  Glitsky had been a cop for twenty-two years, in Homicide for the last seven of them. From the evidence of what he was seeing here, he thought he might be looking at the most cold-blooded, up-close and personal murder of his career.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  'Mark, are you all right?'

  Christina stood in the doorway, one arm propped against the frame. Her hair was down. She wore a navy blazer over a white silk blouse, two buttons open, just this side of demure. She wouldn't start her summer job until late June, but she'd been coming in regularly for the past couple of weeks – ever since Dooher had counselled her to be supportive yet independent – to help Joe get his workload organized for the move south.

 
She'd also gotten into the habit of stopping by Dooher's office after business hours, just before she went home. Daylight Savings Time had begun two weeks ago, and the office was above the fog layer, bathed in an amber light from the sunset. 'Is something wrong?'

  'No. Nothing's wrong.'

  'Something, I think.' Moving into the room, she stopped behind the brocaded easy chair, hands resting on it.

  He took in a deep breath, held it a moment, exhaled heavily. 'The Trang thing, I guess. Can't get it out of my mind.'

  He raised a hand to his eye and rubbed. Weary and distressed. An apologetic half-smile at Christina, a shake of his head. 'What's the sense in it, huh? Here's a guy who's just getting started, prime of his life, perfect health… I don't know. You wonder. It rocks you.'

  'The big plan?'

  'Yeah, I guess. The big plan.'

  'Maybe there isn't one.'

  'It's all random, you mean?'

  'If it isn't, what's free will?'

  He paused a minute, nodding as though in agreement. 'That's a good lawyer question. I'll have to get back to you on it.'

  Her lips curved up slightly and she came around the chair, sat on the edge of it, pulling at her skirt, meeting his eyes, then looking down. 'You do hide behind that, you know? That lawyer pose. The glib answer.'

  'I am a lawyer, Christina. If I'm glib, it's a line of defense. First we argue, then we deflect the direction words might be going, and on those rare occasions when it doesn't look like we're going to win, we… obfuscate. But I'm not hiding from you. I hope you believe that.'

  'I do. I know that.'

  He shook his head again. 'I feel bad about Trang, but what's the point of belaboring it? Nothing's going to bring him back. It's the simple fact of it… of life being so fragile. I don't feel so glib about that. Not at my age.'

  'Your age again. How old are you, anyway? Sixty? Sixty-five? You couldn't be seventy.' She was teasing him, trying to cheer him up.

  'Eighty-three next month,' he said. 'But I work out.' He pushed around some items on his desk. 'Actually, since you're as young as you feel, I couldn't be a day over eighty-one.' He shook his head. 'Sometimes the world gets to me, Christina. I shouldn't burden you with it.' Shifting around behind the desk, he flashed his self-deprecating grin. 'You're just lucky, I suppose, getting to listen to my moaning.'