A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  Debra Schiff was already there inside, clogging up the hall by the kitchen with some coroner and crime-scene people, including Lennard Faro, and the original team of inspectors who’d pulled the call—Benny Yung and Al Tallant. They were all trying to keep out of the way as the photographer finished her work.

  Schiff, at a glance, was wet and, by the looks of her, none too happy either. Darrel looked around as he came in out of the rain—the murder had occurred in a ground-floor front unit on the right-hand side of a Victorian building on Potrero Hill. There weren’t any obvious signs of struggle in the living room to Bracco’s right. A distraught-looking young man was sitting on the couch with his hands clasped between his knees, while another patrolman sat across from him, unspeaking.

  There was similarly not much sign of struggle as Bracco came and looked over Schiff’s shoulder, except for the one overturned kitchen chair and the body sprawled out on the floor, the puddle of blood underneath Levon’s head.

  “Not that I’m not thrilled to be here,” Bracco announced to all and sundry, “but does somebody want to remind me again why we need Deb and me?”

  Tallant was a mid-thirties distance runner with big teeth, a long, jowly face, and a perennial shadow that he couldn’t ever seem to shave off completely. “Not our call,” he said. “We ran it by Glitsky and he said to bring you in.”

  Debra turned back to her partner. “Listen to this, Darrel,” she said. “Why don’t you hit it, Ben?”

  Yung, heavyset and normally cheerful, at the moment seemed stretched thin and exhausted. He reached over and pushed a button on the telephone unit on the kitchen counter. “Levon,” a voice said, “I am a private investigator named Wyatt Hunt and I’m working for a lawyer here in town who’s representing a woman named Maya Townshend, maybe known to you as Maya Fisk, who I believe went to school with you at USF. If I could have a couple minutes of your time to ask you a few questions, I’d appreciate a callback. My cell number, anytime, is—”

  Yung hit the stop button and turned back to his colleagues. “We called Hunt and asked him what he was working on and eventually got around to Dylan Vogler. I recognized the name and we talked about it and decided to call Abe.”

  “It was a good call, Benny,” Schiff said. “Don’t mind Darrel. He gets crabby when his beauty sleep gets interrupted.”

  “Hey,” Bracco said, “I’m not crabby. I said I was thrilled to be here. And if this is part of Vogler, even more so.” He pointed back toward the living room. “Who’s the kid out front?”

  “Boyfriend,” Yung said. “Brandon Lawrence, says he’s an actor. He called it in and waited for us to arrive. Had a dinner date and a key, but this was over before he got here and I think I believe him.”

  “Well, let’s keep him on a while anyway.”

  “That’s why he’s still here,” Tallant commented with some asperity. “He’s not going anywhere till we let him.”

  “Hey, no offense, Al. I see a fresh body, I get a little pumped up.” Bracco looked across and down to the body, spoke to the crime-scene boss. “So, Len, what do we got?”

  Faro, the squad’s token metrosexual with his well-trimmed goatee, spiky hair, and multiple gold chains around his neck, was in his early forties but looked and dressed a decade younger. He’d been leaning against the kitchen wall and now came off it. “He got hit hard and hit at least once again, best guess is by the back of the cleaver we found rinsed off in the sink. Maybe dead before the second blow, although that’ll have to wait for the autopsy, not that it matters much. He’s dead enough now.”

  Faro moved away to the far side of the kitchen table. “Whoever did this, our victim almost undoubtedly knew him. Or her. No sign of forced entry.” He pointed down at the table. “Note the condensation ring, still here, across from where Levon was sitting. Maybe they were sitting here together having a glass of something. We bagged up some clean and dried glasses that were in the tray by the sink. Maybe find a print on one of ’em, but unlikely. So whatever else you might say, your killer’s a pretty cool customer, washing up after. Michelle,” he asked the photographer, “you get all this?”

  She nodded, then pointed and shot at the ring on the table one last time and stepped back to survey the room and make sure she’d captured it.

  “So what’s his connection to Vogler?” Bracco asked. “Besides Maya?”

  Al Tallant knew that one. “None that we know of. Not yet.”

  “Is that why we got invited to this party?” Bracco asked.

  Tallant nodded. “Pretty good guess.”

  “Anything else?” Schiff asked.

  “Nope,” Yung said. “Levon was clean, with a job and everything.”

  “Where?” Bracco asked.

  Yung nodded. “ACT.” This was the American Conservatory Theater. “He had business cards in his wallet. Associate director of development. He was moving up.”

  Schiff looked down on the body. “Not anymore.”

  “How about dope?” Bracco asked. “You see any sign of marijuana?”

  “Funny you should ask,” Faro said. “He had a half-full Baggie in the drawer next to his bed. Anybody else, hardly worth talking about. But if he’s connected to Vogler . . .”

  Bracco nodded. “I hear you.”

  “Well,” Tallant said, “if you guys won’t be needing us anymore, it’s been a slice.”

  Bracco and Schiff stayed on the scene until the coroner’s team removed the body well on toward two o’clock in the morning. Faro and his crime-scene unit stayed on as well, poring over the house from stem to stern but adding little to their store of information.

  Out in the living room the inspectors tag-teamed Brandon Lawrence, who in fact had his own key to the apartment and had called nine one one when he’d discovered the body. He told them both, verifying the obvious, that Levon lived alone and that they were in a “wonderful, committed relationship.” He told them that he hadn’t touched anything after coming upon the body and, not being able to stand the proximity to his lover, had waited outside the whole time for the arrival of the first squad car. He would do anything he could—anything!—to help them find who’d done this. But he’d seen nothing suspicious, either in the neighborhood or once he’d let himself in. Until he’d seen the body. Bracco and Schiff made sure they had his ID, DNA, and fingerprints. They told him these were for elimination purposes and let him go home.

  Bracco walked Lawrence to the door and then returned to sit at the end of the couch, catercorner to where his partner sat back in an armchair in the well-lit living room. Schiff’s face wore a pained expression, and she sighed. Finally, she looked over at Bracco. “I’d hate to think that getting Jerry Glass involved and shaking things up at the Townshends’ had anything to do with this.”

  “Maybe it didn’t, Debra. Maybe Maya doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No. You?”

  “Based on the rule of never a coincidence, me neither.”

  “I’d love to call her right now, find out if she’s got an alibi.”

  “Not yet. Not in the middle of the night, without more than this.”

  “I know. But still . . .”

  “We could pull an all-nighter and hit her at seven sharp. If she’s got no alibi, we sit her down for a serious chat.”

  “She’d just call Hardy and he wouldn’t let her talk.”

  “Fine. Wake him up early too. And by the way, I’ve been meaning to ask, how do you get to be friendly with a defense attorney?”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as friendly. He and Abe are pals. I worked with him a time or two. He used to be a cop, you know.”

  “Who did? Hardy?”

  “Yeah. Then a DA.”

  “Get out of here!”

  “True.”

  “What made him go over to the dark side?”

  Bracco gave her a sideways glance. “You’re more mad at yourself than at me or Hardy or anybody else, aren’t you?”

 
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have gone to Glass. Levon might still be alive.”

  “I’m not going to say you might have wanted to discuss it with your partner first.”

  “Good. Don’t.”

  Bracco took a beat. “What do you think of the cleaver?”

  “As a murder weapon? It seems to have worked.”

  “You think it’s a woman’s weapon?”

  “Spur of the moment? It’d do.”

  “But it couldn’t have been spur of the moment. Whoever it was knew him and if they came over here to kill him, they would have brought something to do it.”

  Schiff nodded. “Either that or she knew he had the cleaver. All she had to do was get him into the kitchen and get behind him. In fact,” warming to her theory a little, she went on, “I think I like that she used the wrong side, the dull side. A guy maybe doesn’t do that.”

  Bracco sat back on the couch. “Maybe not. I don’t know. But we could talk about this all night and never go anywhere. As opposed to what we do know.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Well, keeping it simple, let’s assume that Levon hung out with Maya in college. We’ve been thinking that Vogler was blackmailing Maya, so let’s call that a fact too. What does that say to you?”

  “She’s the connection, back when they were all in school.”

  “That’s what I see.”

  “She didn’t own the coffee shop then.”

  “Yeah, okay. So the blackmail didn’t start then. It wasn’t until she had money.”

  “Maybe she was paying Levon, too, somehow.”

  “And then he finds out Vogler’s been killed and suddenly he’s a little uncomfortable.”

  “No, he’s a lot uncomfortable.” Bracco sat with his thoughts for a moment, then suddenly came forward, stood, and went over to a lamp table across the room where he’d left some small Ziploc evidence bags and other stuff from Levon’s pockets, including his cell phone. As a matter of course he and Schiff were going to go through the recent history of calls received and made, which were automatically logged, but they’d both thought they’d wait until the next morning when people would be awake. Now, though, he picked up the phone, turned it on, and brought it back over to where he’d been sitting. “I love these things,” he said. “Remember what a hassle it used to be to get phone records on people? Days, weeks, subpoenas. Now, push a button, bingo. Ah, here we go.”

  The very first number in Levon’s recently made calls menu was a 415 area code that struck Bracco as familiar. He took out his own cell phone and ran down his own recently called menu until he came to the same number.

  “It looks like Levon got uncomfortable enough to call somebody we know,” he said.

  17

  Debra Schiff wasn’t the only person feeling some responsibility for setting events in motion that had apparently and very suddenly gotten out of control. At three A.M., Dismas Hardy still hadn’t gotten to sleep.

  He’d come down for the first time after an hour’s tossing in bed, made himself a warm Ovaltine, gone into his front room, and rearranged the caravan of glass elephants that trekked across the mantel over his fireplace.

  Sitting in his reading chair with the lights off, though, he’d convinced himself that really he had had no choice. All he’d done was send his own investigator team out to try to pry loose one of his client’s secrets. He would need to do that, to have that information, if he was going to help her in her defense.

  Should it come to that.

  Which—pretty obviously—was looking more probable every minute.

  Just before Hunt had received the call from the police at Levon’s place and called Hardy with the news, he’d learned from his own employee Craig Chiurco that the same Levon Preslee that Hunt had already identified as a friend of Maya’s during their time at USF was the guy who’d been arrested with Vogler in the robbery they’d committed at about that same time.

  Chiurco had gone out to Levon’s apartment in Potrero in the late afternoon, but no one had answered his knock—he might have already been dead. Chiurco was in the process of reporting back to Hunt, planning to track the potential witness down either later that same night or in the next day or so to question him, when the call had come in from Inspector Tallant with the news of Levon’s death.

  As soon as Hardy heard this, it had immediately become clear that if Maya did not have an alibi—and of course no one knew even the approximate time of Levon’s murder—she was going to be even more squarely in the sights of Bracco and Schiff as a suspect not just in this latest crime, but with Vogler as well.

  Part of Hardy wished that Wyatt hadn’t been so forthcoming with the police when they’d called him. But then again, what else was he supposed to do? They already had the message he’d left on Levon’s phone—that he was working for the lawyer who was representing Maya Townshend. He couldn’t very well deny that, and once the police recognized her name, along with any connection whatsoever to the dead man, she was going to assume a higher profile, and there was nothing at all he could do about that.

  The Ovaltine finished, Hardy had gone back up to his bedroom and tossed for another hour and change, his mind ping-ponging willy-nilly between Maya and her husband and Jerry Glass, then Bracco and Schiff, and Glitsky and Zachary, and Wes Farrell and then back through the litany in a different order. Everybody either in trouble or making it, or both.

  Until finally he got up again, grabbed a robe, and padded downstairs. The rain still fell heavily onto the skylight, drumming away. He went back up to the front of the house and settled himself down in his reading chair in the dark.

  He couldn’t afford a sleepless night. He had a feeling he was going to get a call from his client in the very early A.M., was somewhat surprised that he hadn’t gotten one already. But maybe she didn’t know yet about Levon.

  Or maybe she knew all too well.

  And at this thought—the actual admission of it to himself as a possibility—all of Hardy’s random imaginings about the troubles of his friends or those making trouble for them coalesced into a tiny pinpoint of something that suddenly felt like a certainty.

  Whether or not she was in fact a killer, he was sure that Maya was involved as some kind of active participant in all of this. In both the deaths of Dylan Vogler and of Levon Preslee.

  And it was starting to seem that regardless of what Hardy chose to do, and however cooperative Maya was with the police, she could be arrested for both murders.

  Still sleeping in his reading chair up at the front of his house, the rain and wind pounding at the bay window three feet from his right hand, Hardy never heard the telephone ring. And now suddenly here was his wife first touching his shoulder, then shaking him gently. “Dismas.” Opening his eyes, everything out of focus, he saw her standing there in a bathrobe, the receiver in her hand, concern writ large on her features. “Maya Townshend,” she whispered.

  Straightening up, his neck cricked with a stabbing pain, it took him a few more seconds to get his bearings. All right, he was still downstairs, must’ve fallen asleep trying to figure . . .

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

  Hardy cleared his throat. “No, of course not.” What the hell time was it anyway? He glanced outside, where the heavy storm clouds kept it looking like half-night. “This is just my precoffee voice. Don’t mind it. How can I help you?”

  “They’re here again.”

  “Schiff and Bracco?”

  “They’re unbelievable, these two.”

  “I don’t know. I find myself believing in them lately. What do they want?”

  “Apparently they’ve got a search warrant. They want to look through the house. Joel’s furious, of course. We haven’t even finished breakfast, and the kids are all upset. I don’t know who’s going to take them to school now.”

  In fact, Hardy heard children crying in the background. “What time is it, actually?”

  “Ten after seven. They got
here at seven sharp.”

  Hardy knew that this was a bad sign. Generally speaking, police were not permitted to serve warrants in the middle of the night. In fact, search warrants were not valid for service between ten P.M. and seven A.M. unless a judge specifically found evidence that justified the extreme intrusion into someone’s home. Absent an emergency, judges were reluctant to issue such a warrant. They would do that, of course, if there was cause to believe that a suspect would destroy evidence or flee under cover of darkness. So the fact that they’d waited until seven—the first allowable minute without that extraordinary finding—was ominous.

  “So where are they now?”

  “Right here. Joel’s trying to reason with them. They said we had to let them in. They have us all sitting on a couch in the front room. They won’t let us move. If we try to move, they said they’ll put us in handcuffs. They wouldn’t even give me my cell phone until I said I needed to call Harlen to get the kids and then you. Can they do all this?”

  “If they have a warrant, they can. Did they say what they’re looking for specifically?”

  “Shoes and/or clothing that might contain blood . . .”

  Which meant, Hardy knew, that she was now a suspect.

  “. . . phone and financial records, computer files—a lot of the same kind of stuff they wanted for the other—” The woman’s voice suddenly broke. “Oh, God. I don’t know why all this is happening to us all of a sudden. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like we’re living in a police state. Can they just come in here and look through everything?”

  “Not without a reason, so they must think they have one, and they must have convinced some judge too. Have they talked to you at all?”