A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “To get in, yes. Before they told me they had this warrant, they asked me about what I did yesterday.”

  “When yesterday? What time?”

  “Afternoon.”

  “And you didn’t tell them anything, right?”

  “I said I’d gone to church, that’s all.”

  That was enough, Hardy thought, wondering anew about his client’s predilection to lock herself into a position that might incriminate her. But he kept his voice mild. “You went to church again?”

  “I know. Most people don’t, I suppose. But I do all the time. St. Ignatius.”

  “And how long were you there?”

  “I don’t know. A little while. Before I had to pick up the kids. But I told them, the inspectors, that I wouldn’t answer any more questions until you got here.”

  Open barn door, let horse out, close barn door after it. Check. But there was nothing to do about it now, so Hardy merely said, “Good for you, Maya. Try to stick with that. I can be there in a half hour. How’s that sound?”

  “Like a long time.”

  “I know. I can’t help that. I’ll get there as fast as I can. Promise.”

  “Okay.” Hardy heard her breathe.

  “Maybe between Harlen and Joel they can stop them before that.”

  “Harlen? Your brother Harlen?”

  “Yes. I told you I called him first, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah, but you said it was something about the kids.”

  “Well, that too. But he and Sergeant Bracco are friends, you know.”

  “Right. I’m aware of that. They were friends, but now he’s—” Hardy stopped before he said anything else, such as that given the presence of Jerry Glass around this case, Harlen Fisk was possibly the worst imaginable choice of a person to confront the police, and especially Schiff, about the legality or reasonableness of a search warrant in Maya’s house.

  “He’ll be good with them, Mr. Hardy. Harlen’s good with everybody.”

  “Okay, then, but even after he gets there, if it’s before me, can I ask you please not to say anything to the police until I get there? Can you promise me that?”

  After she did, Hardy pushed the button to ring off the phone and went to straighten himself, but the crick in his neck asserted itself again and he sat back down with some care, twisting his head to find an angle that didn’t hurt.

  “Are you all right?” Frannie coming through the dining room with two steaming cups in her hands.

  “Except for the icepick in my neck.” Taking one of the cups. “You’re the best, you know that?”

  “I’ve heard rumors. So why again were you sleeping down here?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping upstairs and didn’t want to wake you up.”

  “You can always wake me up.”

  “That’s what they all say, but they don’t mean it.”

  “I mean it, Dismas. You know that.”

  “I know. I’m sorry, just kidding.” He sipped his coffee, and sighed. “But all kidding aside, this isn’t starting to look too good.”

  “Maya Townshend?”

  He went to nod but stopped himself before he got too far. “I need to get over there right now. They’ve got to have something new or they wouldn’t have moved like this.”

  “You think it’s this guy Glass?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I should call Abe.”

  “And what?”

  “Finesse him to get some inside dope. Failing that, see if he can slow things down.” Realizing the absurdity of that possibility, he added, “Which he’s just plain not going to do, is he?”

  “Not if they have something on her, which they must, right?”

  “Right. I wish I knew what it was.” Grimacing, he reached over and put his cup down on the windowsill. “I’ve got to get moving.” He started up again, and again his hand went to his neck, but this time he fought through the pain, got to his feet. “One step at a time,” he said half to himself. “One step at a time.”

  18

  Arriving at the premises, Hardy convinced Bracco to let him sit with his clients in their kitchen in return for a vague promise that they might have something to say to the inspectors.

  Maya set her mug of coffee down on the countertop. “Even if he did call me, that doesn’t mean I went and saw him afterwards, does it? I don’t even know where he lives. Lived.”

  “So you couldn’t have gone there,” Hardy said. “You’re absolutely sure you didn’t go there, right?”

  “Well, yes. Of course. I don’t see why there has to be a connection between him calling me and me going to see him. He just wanted to talk about Dylan and if anybody suspected him.”

  “Because you all used to be friends,” Hardy said in a low voice.

  The police had let them give the children to a neighbor—Harlen hadn’t made it there yet—to take to school. They were probably just as happy not to have the kids underfoot anyway. The three of them—Joel, Maya, and Hardy—sat around the island stove in the Townshends’ ultramodern, supergourmet kitchen. Every appliance, from the refrigerator and stove to the toaster and coffeemaker, was of brushed steel; every flat surface a green-tinged granite. Outside the wraparound back windows the storm swirled and eddied around them. The lights had already blinked twice as gusts of wind hammered at the glass.

  Along with two other search-specialist cops Bracco and Schiff were somewhere back or up in the house behind them. Occasionally the disembodied voices from one or more of these people would carry in to the trio in the kitchen—thrumming undertones of a somehow undefined menace and conflict. The uniformed officer left at the door of the kitchen to watch them didn’t appear to be either interested or listening.

  Nevertheless, they kept their voices low. “It made perfect sense to me, Dismas. Even if it doesn’t to you.” She motioned back toward the rest of the house. “Or to them.”

  Hardy nodded. “Although you must admit,” he added, “that the timing doesn’t look too good. He calls you the day he’s killed.”

  “I can’t help when he called me,” Maya said, “or what he wanted to talk about. And it wasn’t like I spent a lot of time talking to him. He was mostly afraid somebody, like those inspectors, might think he had something to do with Dylan, you know? And had I heard anything? He was worried.”

  “I know. That’s what you said. And it looks like he had reason to be. Look,” Hardy said. “As long as you didn’t go there, and they can’t prove you did . . .”

  “Come on. I told you. I was at church.”

  “For two hours?” Joel asked.

  “I didn’t time it, Joel. As long as it took. I don’t know.”

  “It’s all right.” Hardy held up a hand. “If you were at church, that’s where you were. All I’m saying is if that’s the case, there’s nothing Schiff and Bracco can do. If you weren’t at Levon’s, you weren’t there. End of story.”

  Maya stared hard at her husband. “That’s what I’m saying, Joel. And there’s no dispute about whether I was there, so the phone call doesn’t matter anyway.”

  No doubt, Joel wanted to help his wife, but he obviously didn’t believe yet, as Hardy had come to, that Maya could possibly be going to jail, maybe in the very near term—possibly today.

  When Hardy had arrived, he’d asked what had changed in their investigations that Bracco and Schiff needed to serve a search warrant on his client first thing in the morning. They had told him about the call from Levon’s cell phone to Maya’s home number. After a flustered minute she’d admitted not only to her past friendship with Levon and the connection between Dylan, Preslee, and herself, but that he had in fact called her yesterday, out of the blue. Before that she hadn’t heard from him in a couple of years.

  The good news from Hardy’s perspective was that now he felt sure he understood in a general way what the blackmail had been about. The specifics might not ever be forthcoming, but given Levon and Dylan’s criminal conspiracies, and the fact of Maya’s close friendship—and perh
aps more—with at least one of them, it was pretty clear that she’d gotten herself involved in some kind of illegal activity, that she’d made deals with each of them to keep herself off the radar.

  The bad news, of course, was that her involvement on any level with two men murdered within the same week made her an extremely attractive candidate as a suspect in the killings.

  Except that, according to her, she’d never been to Levon’s home. “Maya,” Hardy now said, “it might be helpful if you could write down as much as you can remember about the phone call. Just to give it added credibility.”

  The police packed up and left, taking with them a lot of clothing, their computers, phone books, and financial records. Joel was on the phone in his office calling his place of business to see if perhaps the police had been there, and trying to decide how to reconstruct the financial records the cops had carted off. Hardy and Maya had just sat down in the kitchen when the doorbell rang, and Maya got up to answer it.

  She came back in trailing her brother, who parked his bulk on a counter chair and sighed. “I don’t like this, Diz.”

  “I can’t say I’m wild about it either, Harlen. But if she’s never been to Levon’s . . .”

  “Yeah, but you can’t prove a negative.”

  “True, but luckily, the burden of proof isn’t on us. It’s on Darrel and Debra.”

  The doorbell rang again, and again Maya went out to answer it.

  “You think she’s telling the truth?” Fisk asked, his body language saying he didn’t.

  “She’s my client,” Hardy said. “I have to believe her. If there’s no evidence placing her at Levon’s, no blood on her shoes or clothes . . .”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “No, but—”

  Maya’s returning footsteps closed out the discussion as Hardy turned to see her coming back into the kitchen. “It’s your investigators,” she said. “They’re wet and said they’re good waiting out in the lobby. You asked them to come out here?”

  Hardy shrugged, standing up. “I didn’t know what was going down exactly when I called them. I knew your children needed rides to school. But sometimes cops serving search warrants get carried away. It never hurts to have backup. Witnesses tend to keep things copasetic. Although it doesn’t look like that’s needed today. I’ll go and talk to them.”

  Out by the front door Wyatt Hunt stood dripping in hiking boots, jeans, and a Giants slicker, and Craig Chiurco looked a bit more well-defended against nature with a natty tan trench coat. But the weather wasn’t foremost on their minds. They didn’t even notice Hardy as he approached them, so intent were they on their conversation, whispering back and forth.

  Until he stopped two feet away from them, and hearing Chiurco’s last words, “. . . don’t have to say anything about it?” Hardy said, “About what?”

  Hunt shook him off. “Nothing.”

  “Ah, the famous nothing.”

  “You don’t want to know, Diz,” Hunt said. “Really.”

  “I like knowing stuff,” Hardy countered. “It’s one of my hobbies.”

  “You really might not want to know this, Diz. I promise. The only way you want to know this now is if it comes out some other way later and you didn’t hear it here first.”

  “You’re saying I’d be pissed?” Hardy leaned in toward them and lowered his own voice. “Maybe I should get to decide. I hate surprises later. So I decide yes now.”

  Hunt motioned off with his eyes behind Hardy, over toward the kitchen. He stopped, turned to Chiurco, and shrugged, then shook his head. To all appearances, he had a bad taste in his mouth.

  “You’re the boss,” Chiurco said. “Your call.”

  Hunt hesitated another moment, then finally let out a long breath. “Craig saw her.”

  “Who?” Hardy asked, his empty stomach suddenly bunching up on him. For of course he immediately knew who, and when, and where.

  Two minutes later they were all back in the kitchen. Joel had appeared from his duties elsewhere in the house and now stood over by the sink, holding Maya’s hand. They’d all been in a spirited conversation talking about something but stopped when a firm-jawed Hardy trooped in with Hunt and an especially disconsolate Chiurco in his wake.

  Without any preamble Hardy looked around to Joel and Harlen and said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak to Maya alone for just a minute if I could.”

  Joel, on edge in any case and perhaps emboldened by his interactions over the past hour or so with the police, moved a half-step over in front of his wife, protectively. “That’s not happening. We’ve already told you our decision on that. We’re fighting this together, Maya and me, all of it.”

  “All right, then,” Hardy said. “But if that’s the case, I have to tell you that you’ll be doing it without me.”

  “Fine,” Joel said. “We didn’t—”

  Maya held up her own hand. “Wait!”

  “Maya.” Joel, warning her, scolded her back into her place.

  “No!” She turned her gaze to Hardy. “Dismas, can’t you just say whatever it is in front of Joel? We are in this together.” She turned to her husband, met his eyes. “We really are, Joel. But”—coming back to Hardy—“but I’ll go talk with you if you need me to. If that’s the only way.”

  “There’s no only way, Maya. There’s no one way. There’s just the way it’s worked for me. The way I do it.”

  Joel, adopting a reasonable tone, said, “Mr. Hardy, all right. Maya wants to keep you on, we’ll play it your way if you need to. But I’m telling you that you can say whatever you need to in front of me. And Harlen, for that matter. He’s family too.”

  Hardy, exhausted from the lack of sleep and the postadrenaline slump after what he’d just heard from Chiurco, felt his shoulders sag, and this tweaked the crick in his neck anew. This was not the way the practice of law was supposed to work. To be effective you had to maintain control over the client, the family, the flow of information. And now he was feeling it all inexorably swirling away from him. “I very much appreciate all of your cooperation with one another,” he said, “and your mutual trust. But as I’ve told you, this is just not how I do it. I’ve got to talk to Maya first and alone. She’s my client and I’ve got no choice.” He turned to her. “Maya?”

  She looked around at the room full of men, brushed her husband’s arm, and moved around him. “We’ll be right back,” she said.

  “He’s sure?” she said.

  “He said he’s one hundred percent sure. You’ve got a memorable face, Maya. You passed right by him as he was going in.”

  “I don’t remember him.”

  “No,” Hardy said, “maybe you don’t.” Thinking that it was probably because she had just killed someone. “But you were in fact there, weren’t you?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Maya?”

  She looked up at him. “I didn’t think anybody would believe me if said I went there but he wasn’t home. But that was what happened.”

  “Why did you go there?”

  “He asked me to. He told me he needed to see me. That he’d tell about me and Dylan and him if I didn’t.”

  “Just like Dylan?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what Dylan threatened you with if you didn’t come down too.”

  “No. That was different. That was the shop. I already told you that.”

  Hardy took a beat. “You also told me you didn’t go to Levon’s.”

  Again, silence. Finally, “So what are you going to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you going to tell the police?”

  “No. Of course not. I’m on your side here, Maya. We can’t let the police find out about this at all. We’re just lucky it was my investigator who saw you. He’ll never tell a soul. I’ll never tell a soul. And there is no way we can ever be made to testify against you. But I think it’s time we stop answering any more questions at all. Someone wants
to talk to you, you refer them to me.”

  But no sooner had they walked back into the kitchen than Maya walked and then ran the last few steps up to her husband, hugged him, and started crying.

  “Hey. Hey,” he said, holding her. Then, at Hardy, “What did you say to her?”

  Hardy stood his ground. “There were things she had to understand. She’ll be all right.”

  “She’ll be all right! She’ll be all right! Look at her. She’s crying now, for God’s sake. She’s not all right at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Hardy said. “I didn’t mean to make her cry.”

  “Well, whether or not you meant it . . .” He brushed his hand down over her hair. “It’s okay, babe. It’s okay.”

  She pulled away and looked up at her husband, her voice breaking, hysteria coming on. “It’s not okay. It’s not going to be okay. Maybe not ever again.”

  “Sure, it will. We’ll get through this and—”

  “No, Joel. You don’t understand. I was there. I was there.” She turned and pointed to Chiurco. “He saw me. Oh, God! Oh, God! I’m so, so sorry.”

  Three days later, after the lab confirmed that both Maya’s fingerprints and DNA were on the doorknob of Levon’s apartment, Schiff and Bracco took Maya into custody.

  Part Two

  19

  There were Superior Court judges Hardy liked a lot, and a very few that he’d prefer to avoid if at all possible, but only one he actively despised, and that was Marian Braun.

  The history between the two of them was so extreme that it included a contempt violation and actual jail time for Hardy’s wife. He honestly believed that he might prevail on appeal, should it come to that, if he argued that Braun should have recused herself when she discovered that Hardy was going to be defending a murder suspect in her courtroom. Of course, the flip side of that was that if Hardy was worried about the impossibility of getting a fair trial from Braun, he could have exercised his 170.6.

  That section of the California Code said that any lawyer assigned to trial could excuse one, but only one, judge, without giving any specific reason. The lawyer was sworn and simply declared under oath that he believed the judge to whom he’d been assigned was prejudiced against himself or the interests of his client to the point he thought he couldn’t get a fair trial.