A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “Beautiful. And I’m guessing we’re still not done yet.”

  “You catch on fast, Batman. You really want to know?”

  “I want to know where they teach this stuff. I’ve been a lawyer for thirty years and I’ve never run across it.”

  “That’s not a coincidence, Diz, I promise. This is some très arcane shit. But anyway, since you asked, let’s say your people—Kathy and Harlen and even your client—avoid lying to their friendly federal agent. Now they go in front of the grand jury as individuals, where, you remember, they are specifically not targets. Glass gives them immunity for anything they say, and what’s interesting about that? Now they can’t take the Fifth! Now they’ve got to answer every single thing Glass asks them; if they refuse, they go to jail for contempt. Is that great, or what?”

  “Why is that somehow familiar?” Hardy asked.

  “Because you, as a lawyer, will remember that this is almost exactly what happened to Susan McDougal in Ken Starr’s Whitewater investigation. The grand jury called her up and even gave her immunity, but she refused to answer questions because she was concerned her statements would be viewed as false—”

  “There’s a nice distinction,” Hardy commented. “Viewed as.”

  “Isn’t it? Well, anyway, if they were viewed as false, then she’d be indicted for perjury, so she didn’t answer, and so for her troubles she got slammed with civil contempt, where you stay in custody as long as you refuse to answer or until the grand jury term expires, which in McDougal’s case was eighteeen months.”

  “Holy shit.” Hardy rocked gently, his hands gripping the armrests, taking it all in. “So it’s way more than just this forfeiture stuff? What’s Glass going for? Money laundering?”

  “At least. Plus distribution, conspiracy, you name it—where you’re looking at major hard time.”

  “Jesus.”

  Drysdale wasn’t smiling anymore either. “And I’m afraid it just gets worse, Diz.”

  “I can’t really imagine how.”

  “No. You probably can’t. So let me tell you the real ugly truth. You should know for your client’s sake, and Kathy and Harlen’s, too, for that matter, that you want to do everything you can to keep them from getting charged at all. That’s what Jerry wants—he wants to force them to cop a plea to maintaining a place.”

  “Even if Kathy or even Maya had nothing to do with the dope?”

  Drysdale shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. They can still both be criminally liable.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Because if any of them has reason to believe there was the criminal activity, but didn’t ask, the jury is allowed to impute knowledge.”

  “Under what possible guise, Art?”

  “Simple and glorious. They should have asked, so it’s deliberate ignorance.”

  “Deliberate ignorance. I love that.”

  “And why would you not? It’s a lovely thing.”

  Hardy sat still for a long moment, his feet planted to the floor. “So let me get this straight. They’re going to get them at least for maintaining a place, pretty much automatically, it sounds like. Is that about right?”

  “Close enough.”

  “Then why wouldn’t they want to duke it out in court on the money-laundering and distribution and conspiracy charges?”

  “Good,” Drysdale said. “I love a guy who pays attention. That was just hanging out there, wasn’t it?” He absently threw up one of the baseballs and caught it. “I was saving the best for last. I bet you think that if you get acquitted in federal court, you can’t be sentenced.”

  “Well, yeah. That’s kind of what acquitted means, doesn’t it?”

  “Ah, the naïveté of youth! In federal court, as it happens, if you’re convicted on even one count of anything—perjury, maintaining a place—the judge can base a sentence up to the statutory max on your acquitted conduct. So one small white lie to a federal agent—which, by the way, may not have ever been actually told—could get your client five years federal time. And keep in mind that the max for maintaining a place is twenty years. And, oh yeah, there’s no parole with the feds. So of course they try to plead it out, even if it costs them the property. Maybe that’s all Glass wants anyway, but probably not. Is that a lovely squeeze or what?”

  “It’s unbelievable, Art. There’s got to be a way around it.”

  “Well, if and when you stumble upon it, my friend, get the word out and you’ll make yourself a quick million bucks the first week. I guarantee it.”

  Glitsky said, “Yeah. I told Debra maybe she moved a little too soon on that. Glass.”

  “You know him?” Hardy asked.

  “Never had the pleasure.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “If it’s any help, I kind of tried to call her and Darrel off.”

  “That would have been good if the horse wasn’t already out of the barn.”

  “I told her this being an agent of the grand jury wasn’t really recommended SOP. For what that was worth. Which, from her reaction, I gather wasn’t much.” At the table at Kokkari, Glitsky turned a hand over. “Another failure, I’m afraid. I’m going for a record.”

  Hardy killed a minute lifting a perfect backbone out of the whole sea bass he’d ordered for lunch. Hardy had cabbed back from Glass’s office and picked up Glitsky in front of the Hall of Justice, thinking maybe some great Greek food would cheer them both up. But so far, halfway through the meal, it wasn’t working too well.

  They’d covered Zachary’s situation on the drive over. The doctors were recommending a few more days in the hospital before proceeding to the next operation to replace the dura mater early the next week. The boy had apparently recognized everybody in the family on the visit last night, going so far as to reach out and poke his sister, who’d come along to the hospital for the first time, in the arm, after which he’d broken into a short-lived smile. He still hadn’t spoken yet, which everyone agreed might be a little worrisome—Glitsky loved the word, worrisome!—but his other motor skills had clearly improved. The diagnosis had moved from critical to guarded, and the general tone of the medical team was one of optimism.

  Although very little of that optimism had rubbed off on Abe.

  The usually glib Hardy kept his peace as he squeezed lemon on his fish. Self-loathing was about the last reaction he’d ever expected to run into from his hard-assed longtime best friend. Glitsky hadn’t before harbored too many doubts about who he was or what he was all about.

  Or if he did, he didn’t show it.

  Now Zachary’s accident seemed to have unleashed a pride of demons set upon undermining his confidence and self-respect.

  Hardy chewed, then put his fork down. “You know,” he began, “I was the one who changed Michael’s diaper before I put him in bed that last night. I had all the time in the world to lift the side of the crib. I mean, there I was, leaning over the damn thing, tucking him in. It was halfway up and all I had to do was stand and pull it up the rest of the way. Easiest thing in the world. Piece of cake. Unfortunately, the thought never crossed my mind.”

  Glitsky put his iced tea down halfway to his mouth. “Unfortunately . Think that’s strong enough?”

  Hardy’s heart thumped in his chest with an unexpected jolt of rage that it took several seconds to control. Finally, he let out a breath. “It’s how I’ve come to see it, Abe. It’s what I’ve had to get to so I could live with it. You think I’ve been lying to myself all these years?”

  “You said it yourself—the thought never crossed your mind.”

  Hardy took a sip of his club soda, picking his way with care. “So you’re standing there being a good dad, taking Zack out on his new bike. You get him settled on the seat and think, ‘Oh, yeah, the helmet . . .’ ”

  Glitsky cut him off, his volume up a notch. “I know what I did.”

  “I don’t know if you do.”

  “Don’t push me, Diz. I mean it.”

  Hardy drew a breath. “I’m not pu
shing you. I’m saying you didn’t do anything that caused it. The thought never crossed your mind.”

  “It should have.”

  “Why? Anything remotely like that ever happen before? You’ve got to think of every single contingency that can happen? If that were true, you’d never let your kids out of your sight. Ever. Hell, you might not let ’em get out of bed because something might happen.”

  “Something did happen.”

  “You didn’t make it happen.”

  “I could have prevented it. If I’d have thought—”

  Hardy put a flat palm on the table between them. “If you’d have thought,” he said. “But there was no reason you should have. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Next time, okay, you’ll think to put the helmet on first. But not thinking of it then wasn’t negligence, Abe. It was a freak accident. You could do everything exactly the same a thousand times and nothing bad would ever happen again. It wasn’t your fault.”

  Glitsky sat hunched forward over his plate. Their table was by a window and he glared out at the blustering day. Finally, he came back to Hardy, seemed to force the words out one at a time. “How can it not be my fault when he was my responsibility? If it happens on my watch, I’m at fault.”

  “This isn’t police bureaucracy, Abe. This is your life.”

  “Being a cop is my life.”

  “Don’t give me that shit. Being a cop is what you do. The rest of you is your life. The problem you’ve got here is this really happened to you, to your boy. So you’re both victims of it. And since the one thing you won’t do, ever, is be a victim, that leaves you holding the bag and taking responsibility for it. ’Cause that’s who you are. That’s what you do. It’s automatic.”

  Glitsky spit it out. “It’s not wrong either.”

  “I’m not saying it is. Not all the time, not usually. But this once, this one time, it’s beating you down when you’re going to need to be strong, when Treya and Rachel and even poor fucking attorneys like me need you to get over it so your troops don’t go riding roughshod over their cases. You didn’t do this. You didn’t cause it. It happened, that’s all. You’re a victim of that, okay, fine. Legitimately. But that doesn’t make you any kind of unworthy human, not if you don’t let it.”

  Glitsky’s scar burned white through his lips. His heavy brows hung like a precipice over hooded eyes, which remained fixed on the plate before him and refused to meet Hardy’s, who thought it wasn’t impossible that his friend would suddenly either physically explode at him across the table or throw something and storm out. Instead, though, the eyes came up. “You done?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Glitsky nodded. “I’ll give it some thought.”

  It was a bit of an extra drive—several other churches, and even St. Mary’s Cathedral, were closer to her house—but Maya Townshend felt a special energy connecting her with St. Ignatius, the church at the edge of the USF campus, and it was where she had driven now. She needed all the divine intervention she could get, and here is where she most often came to pray for forgiveness. Those prayers she had prayed here had, for the most part, been answered.

  Answered in the form of Joel and her life with him. Their healthy family. Their wonderful home and financial security. If God had not forgiven her, surely he would not have showered such beneficence upon her.

  Or so she had come to believe.

  But now she was suddenly not so sure. She knew that killing was a mortal sin and wondered if God’s apparent acceptance of her penance and prayers was really just the first stage in a punishment that would strip from her all that she loved and cherished. If, because of all this, if she lost Joel now, or the children, or even their home and fortune, it would be far more devastating than if she’d never known such love and contentment. God demanded justice as well as he dispensed mercy. The Church taught that there was no sin that God would not forgive, and that the failure to believe that was the worst sin of all—despair. God’s mercy was infinite. But the key to any claim to that mercy was confession. And she could not confess.

  She could never confess.

  And that truth, she believed, stood to damn her for eternity.

  A regular here, she went to her usual back pew and knelt, making the sign of the cross, then bringing her hands together and bowing her head.

  But no prayers would come. Her mind kept returning to the lies she had told Joel just last night; the lies she’d been living now for so long; the truths that were even worse.

  The padded wooden rail on which she knelt had a gap in the middle of the pew, and after only a minute of attempting to pray she moved down and again went to her knees, but directly onto that gap now, putting all of her weight onto it, offering up the pain even as it shot up her leg and became nearly unbearable.

  “Please, God. Please, please forgive me. I am so, so sorry.”

  She raised her head and through tearful eyes tried to focus on the crucifix above the altar far away up front, on the suffering of Christ.

  But Christ had never done what she’d done. Christ knew that God’s mercy would save him.

  After the events of the past few days she no longer harbored that hope for herself.

  14

  Not two hundred yards away from where Maya suffered and tried to pray, Wyatt Hunt turned another page in the yearbook, thinking that private investigators in the future would have an easy time of it. All they’d have to do with kids who were going to school now would be call up their MySpace or Facebook accounts, and they’d have a blow-by-blow account of everything their subjects had done from about sixth grade on.

  Maya Townshend, though, at thirty-two, was just a bit too old for that approach. So Hunt was reduced to searching for clues in the hard copy of her college years. Of course, first he’d Googled her and her husband, and though there had been three thousand or so hits, the majority of them by far concerned Joel’s business and their philanthropy. For such a politically connected couple there was very little about either local or national politics, nor were they particularly active in San Francisco’s high society. Hits for Bay Beans West appeared a whopping four times—all of the stories variants on the Little Local Coffee Shop That Could standing up to the Starbucks giant and making it work.

  Not a whiff of marijuana or, indeed, troubles of any kind.

  On a whim Hunt had done a search for Dylan Vogler, and the coffee shop manager had come up completely empty except for references to his death recently—one of the country’s very few invisible men, Hunt thought.

  Maybe Craig Chiurco, he thought, checking the criminal databanks, would have more luck.

  His next stop was the library at USF, where he started on the 1994 yearbook and found the standard posed picture of Maya Fisk looking about fifteen—fresh-faced, perfect hair, big smile. She was one of her class’s representatives in student government her freshman year, on the debate and IM soccer teams, active in music and theater, appearing in two student productions. She was also a cheerleader. Sophomore year was basically freshman year redux.

  The change must have occurred late in her sophomore year or in the succeeding summer, because her picture as a junior was so different from the others as to be nearly unrecognizable. Though the hair color had turned light and the style more untamed, the main change from Hunt’s perspective was the facial expression. In place of the adolescent with the sunny smile of the previous two years, now a young woman stared defiantly at the camera with a bored smirk. Seeking another view of this chameleon, Hunt turned to the club and team pages, but here again something drastic had changed—Maya had stopped taking part in extracurricular activities.

  In her senior year her photo placed her more closely with the girl from her first two years—she wore a passive toothless smile and she’d combed her still-light hair—but it was a more formal portrait than the others had been. And again, she’d joined nothing.

  Pretty much striking out with the yearbooks, Hunt turned to the microfiches of the student newspaper, the F
oghorn, for the first couple of years, when Maya was still active, and might have appeared in some captioned photographs with other students. In this he was luckier right away. Here was Maya, in her freshman year, mugging for the camera with three other cheerleader friends at a pep rally. Hunt took down all the names. And three others that he found captioned throughout the rest of her freshman year. Obviously, at the beginning, Maya had been a popular and involved student.

  She’d costarred in Othello her sophomore year, and there was a picture of her with her leading man, a handsome African-American kid named Levon Preslee. In an accompanying story entitled “It’s in the Genes,” Hunt read about Maya’s introduction to acting and to the theater through her aunt, the truly famous actress Tess Granat, who’d by that time been the star of sixteen movies and had appeared in four leads on Broadway.

  Hunt sat back, intrigued by the connection about which he’d previously been unaware. He’d seen some of Granat’s films before, he was sure, but he couldn’t remember any titles. Or whatever happened to her. Probably the same thing that had happened to so many former talented beauties who lost enough of their looks to become undesirable and uncastable in Hollywood.

  Or had she died? Some tragedy?

  The name tickled a vague memory of that, but he just couldn’t remember for sure. In any event there was no mention in the article that Granat had played any kind of a day-to-day role in Maya’s life back then, but she was another someone who may have known what the young woman was like or what she had done in those days, and he wrote her name in his notepad.

  Sure, he thought, if she was even alive, he’d just call up the once-famous movie star in Hollywood or wherever she was and chat about old times. That was going to happen. Not.

  But the afternoon, after all, had not been a total loss. When he was finished, he had nine names of people Maya’s age who had known her in college.

  It was someplace to start.

  Back in his office downtown Hunt realized that having nine names to work with was all well and good, but seven of them were women, and this made it likely that some of them, like Maya, had changed their last names since college. Meanwhile, he had Levon Preslee and one other male, Jimi d’Amico, and Levon was listed in the San Francisco phone book.