A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “And beyond that, Craig, while we’re on the topic, being high isn’t going to help you figure anything out. Especially this. Isn’t that pretty goddamn obvious?”

  “It should be, yes.”

  “So?”

  “So”—a sigh—“so I’m gonna stop. I mean it. Starting now, Wyatt. I swear to God.”

  Hunt just stared at him, this discussion already far beyond his tolerance level. “So what do you think I ought to do about this now? About you?”

  “You could fire me if you want.”

  “I know I could. Maybe I should. If this wasn’t the first time you screwed up like this, I sure as hell would.”

  A trace of hope showed itself on Chiurco’s face. “I swear to God, Wyatt, it’s over. You can tell Tam it’s over.”

  “You can tell Tam it’s over, Craig. I’ve got other work to do.”

  “I could—”

  “No, you can’t.” He pointed a finger at Craig’s chest. “Tomorrow you can if you’re straight by then. And this is the one and only warning. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, fuck you. Clear?”

  “It is. I hear you.”

  “I hope so,” Wyatt said. Then, “Get some sleep and be on time tomorrow.” He turned on his heel and stalked off down the hallway.

  Bay Beans West was open again, business at least back to slow but steady.

  Wyatt Hunt, the embers of his anger still smoldering in his gut, stood across Haight Street on this cool and overcast Tuesday lunch hour and watched people come and go for about twenty minutes. The clientele couldn’t be more diverse, and Hunt reflected that if we were what we eat and drink, then we human beings were really mostly the same; nothing should really separate us at all, since apparently every ethnic group in the world, both sexes, and people at every economic level drank coffee and lots of it.

  Hunt entered at last and got his place, fifth in the ordering line. Getting up to the counter, he ordered a regular with a couple of shots of espresso. Leaning over, he then quickly showed his business card and mentioned that he was an investigator—he specifically did not say police investigator. Although quite often that’s what people heard, and he usually didn’t correct them. Could he please, he inquired, have a few words with the manager? It was about the Maya Townshend case.

  Before he’d had his order filled, a flamboyantly dressed, pony-tailed young man with a diamond in his ear appeared at Hunt’s side and introduced himself as the manager, Eugenio Ruiz. Thanking him for coming over, Hunt again flashed his business card and this time identified himself as a private investigator working with the defense on the Townshend case.

  “Okay, what can I do for you?”

  “We’re trying to get a little specific,” Hunt said, “about the way Dylan Vogler ran the marijuana out of here. Did you know anything about that?”

  Ruiz had quick, dark brown eyes, and they flashed over to the register and then back to Hunt. “Dylan pretty much handled all of that himself, I think.”

  “Really?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  At the counter they called Hunt’s coffee, and he turned and smiled. “That’s me, be right back. You mind we go sit someplace for just a minute?”

  “A minute. Sure.”

  Hunt got his coffee, turned, and found Ruiz again at his elbow. “There’s some chairs in my office,” he said. “After me.” And led the way.

  The room was small and narrow, maybe six or seven by ten feet. A cluttered desk sat along the left-hand wall, and Hunt took one of the two chairs at the far end of it. The walls were papered with posters of coffee-growing locations—Costa Rica, Hawaii, Kenya, Indonesia. Ruiz closed the door behind them, then pulled over a small wooden barrel and sat on it. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes,” he began. “We’re getting into a rush out there.”

  “Seems like you’ve always got a rush.”

  “That’s pretty much true.” A hopeful smile came and just as quickly disappeared.

  Hunt took a small sip of his hot coffee. “Really delicious,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” Hunt said, “I guess the big question is how Dylan distributed the money to the workers here. Was it only the assistant managers, or did everybody get a slice?”

  Ruiz, to Hunt’s gratification caught completely off-guard, opened and closed his mouth a couple of times. “Um, no.”

  “No, everybody got a slice?”

  The quick eyes triangulated the little room, finally came to settle on Hunt. “No, neither. This was all Dylan’s thing.”

  “No,” Hunt said. “No, we know that’s not true.”

  “It is true.”

  “No, it’s not.” Hunt shook his head in commiseration. “Good try, Eugenio, but Maya’s told us in general terms how it all worked. And frankly we’re to the point of getting a little desperate to find somebody else who had a motive to kill Dylan. Or the jury’s going to decide Maya did it. So she—Maya—wants us to go to the police and start bringing you guys downtown to talk. And really, who can blame her? But my boss thinks we don’t have to shake things up that much to get what we need.”

  “What do you need?”

  “I need to know what you and your coworkers know.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know specifically, you see. But certainly clients who might have been having a hard time paying, or maybe were making trouble for Dylan some other way. Competitors, people threatening to bust you. Come on, Eugenio, you know. You’ve been doing this. You don’t run a ten-grand-a-month drug business and not have some problems.”

  Eugenio turned halfway around to check the door. When he came back to Hunt, again he shook his head. “No.”

  Hunt smiled. “I thought we’d been over that, Eugenio. ‘No’ is not the right answer. ‘No’ means you and your guys start going downtown.”

  “But they say it wasn’t about the weed. They didn’t steal the weed Dylan had on him.”

  “There you go. ‘They.’ ‘They’ is not ‘she.’ So who is ‘they’?”

  The highly strung manager fidgeted on his barrel. “I don’t mean ‘they’ like that.”

  “So how did you mean it?”

  “You know, like a figure of speech.”

  “Okay. But let me tell you something. The more we’re looking at this, the more we’re convinced that it is, in fact, about the weed. Maya thinks it’s about the weed, since it’s definitely not about her. So you see where we’re coming from. We’re running out of time.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know any names.”

  Hunt broke a frigid smile. “Well, that’s where you’re in luck. Because it turns out we do have names, a whole list of them. We just don’t know what kind of relationships some of these people had with Dylan. We need to talk to you some more and other staff members who were part of this thing.”

  “Nobody was part of it. Nobody sold or handled anything except Dylan.”

  Hunt leaned back in his chair. “I believe you, Eugenio. But we’re not talking sales. We’re talking cooperation and payoff. You guys knew what Dylan was doing and you helped him do it, and in exchange he paid you under the table, probably pretty well. Now, I know this and you know it, but it hasn’t been the subject of much police concern so far because they’ve been thinking about Maya and murder. So up to now you’re all under the radar. And the really good news here is that talking to me or my colleagues isn’t going to get you in trouble. But if the cops come down here and get involved, that’s all going to change.” Hunt came forward. “Is there something that’s unclear about this to you? This is a great deal for you guys, I promise.”

  Eugenio tattooed out a rhythm on the edge of the barrel. “Do you have that list with you?” he asked. “I could look at it, see if any names ring a bell.”

  At a few minutes past eight that night Treya and Abe Glitsky were standing over the sink, doing the dinner dishes—Abe washing, Treya drying—in their small kitchen. They had a dishwasher, but it had gone on the blink short
ly after Zachary had gone into the hospital, and they’d just never gotten around to fixing it.

  Now it was beginning to look as though that might never happen. The simple rhythm of handling the dishes—rinsing, handing the plates and cups and silverware to your partner to dry, talking all the while—had brought to them both an unspoken comfort and even a kind of intimacy that had somehow kick-started their communication during those darkest days when Treya sometimes thought Abe would never really talk again.

  Sometime during that crisis time with Zachary, Treya had also instigated a practice she called Parent Savings Time, or PST, and tonight she had put it into practice for the first time in a couple of weeks. The idea, she admitted, was fiendishly simple, and perhaps even inlaid with a tiny element of cruelty. But kids could be such a pain sometimes—even though of course you always loved them—that she didn’t feel too guilty laying some payback on them for their own cruel ways.

  PST involved going around the house and setting the clocks an hour, or even two hours, ahead. Then, after dinner, you’d look up with surprise, and say, “Oh, my gosh, where has the time gone? It’s bedtime already.” And you whisk them off to their slumbers.

  Now Treya took a dish from the drying tray and began wiping it down. “So what did Diz say?”

  “He said it wasn’t Schiff’s finest moment.”

  “So what’s going to happen?”

  “Nothing. Diz says that the Levon count might not even get to the jury.”

  “Wow. How often does that happen?”

  “Not too. Normally you go for a double one eight seven, if the second one’s squirrelly, they don’t file it. Or maybe it gets dismissed at prelim, but never in the middle of a trial. Still, Diz is talking about a motion to dismiss as soon as Stier rests. I can’t imagine Braun granting it, but if she did, it would be pretty huge for Diz.” He paused. “It wouldn’t be so huge for me.”

  “You? What do you have to do with it?”

  “Well, though you might not know it to look at me, especially the last few months, in theory I run the homicide detail. Which means I have some input on what we bring to the DA. Or not. At least where there’s a question.”

  “You’re saying there was a question here?”

  “I thought there might be when Debra first went to Glass. But I just couldn’t seem to stay focused back then.”

  “Gee, Abe. I wonder why that was.”

  Glitsky put his sponge inside a drinking glass and turned it absently around the rim. “The reason doesn’t really matter, Trey.”

  “No, I know. God forbid you have a legitimate excuse or, worse, use one.”

  “I don’t need an excuse. I take full responsibility.”

  “You? You’re kidding.”

  He handed her the rinsed glass. “Quit busting my chops, woman, would you?”

  “I’m not. I’m teasing you.”

  “I’m laughing. See me laughing.”

  She put down the glass, put a finger into his belt, and turned him toward her. “Kiss me.”

  “My hands are all wet.”

  “I don’t care. Kiss me.”

  After about thirty seconds he said, “Are we going to finish these dishes?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “At least not right now.”

  Wet hair wrapped in a towel, wearing a pale yellow terry-cloth robe, Treya came out into their living room where Abe, in black flannel pajamas, sat on the couch, hunched over a couple of stacks of papers on the coffee table. “Well, look at this,” she said.

  Shooting her a false glare. “You starting again with me?”

  She smiled down at him. “You want me to?”

  He patted the couch and moved over an inch or two.

  She sat down. “Finding anything?”

  Shrugging, he turned a page over, laid it facedown on the second pile. “That’s the problem.” Another page. And another. “Diz said it was about the blood, and he might be right.”

  “What about it?”

  “There isn’t any. Not on Maya’s clothes, not in her house. Nowhere.”

  “Couldn’t she have just ditched them?”

  Abe put his current page down and sat back on the couch. “Let’s see if this flies for you. She kills Levon in a pretty spectacularly bloody way. Spends a few minutes cleaning up, running water in the sink, no doubt splashing, and blood dripping off the table onto the floor like a few inches behind her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, first thing, we know she’s got some blood on her.”

  “We do?”

  “Got to, Trey. No way with all that splashing front and back can she avoid it. So from there we’ve got two possible scenarios. One, she doesn’t see any blood and just goes from Levon’s to pick up the kids and then goes home with them. We’ve got a timeline for her somewhere in here”—he pointed to the papers in front of them—“that shows her actions from picking up the kids until the next morning. Her story, anyway, but corroborated by her husband and their housekeeper before anybody thought it was an issue. So I’m tempted to believe it. She didn’t go out.”

  “Which means?”

  “It means those clothes are at her home at seven the next morning when Bracco and Schiff show up, and luminol’s going to show the blood, even if she couldn’t see it.”

  “All right.”

  “All right. So it didn’t show up.”

  “What’s the second scenario?”

  “She sees blood and has to dump her clothes. But the problem with that is she picked up the kids promptly at three.”

  “So she either brought a change with her—”

  “Not.”

  “No, I agree. Or she . . . what? Went home first and changed?”

  Glitsky shook his head. “No time for that. And besides which, the maid says she didn’t come home first.”

  “So what’s that leave?”

  “That’s the question.”

  “All the people who alibi her could be lying.”

  “That’s true.”

  “But you don’t think so?”

  Glitsky nodded. “Not that it couldn’t happen, but they wouldn’t have known what they were covering for when they said it, so it’s unlikely.”

  “So what does this all mean?”

  “She wasn’t inside. I’m okay with no fingerprints, no DNA, all that. Hard, but doable if you’re careful. But if she was there and killed him, she got blood on herself, that’s all there is to it.”

  “You know what, it’s good to see you into this.” She put her hand on his leg.

  He turned to face her. “I’m starting to believe, hope, whatever, that Zack’s going to be all right.” He leaned forward and rapped on the coffee table. “Knock on wood. Anyway, so maybe I’m not hopeless. Maybe there’s something I can do to make sure they don’t get blown away on the Vogler side of the trial too.”

  “Is the evidence better on that?”

  “Oh, yeah. No question, basically. But still, if they left anything out, maybe I can help them get it back in.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Shore up if there’s any other weak spots. Whatever they might need.”

  Treya sat silently for another minute, her hand resting on his leg. “So if the judge dismisses the Levon side, then what?”

  “Nothing, really, except that Diz looks good for a media minute, which actually lasts only about thirty seconds.”

  “No. I mean about Levon.”

  “What about him?”

  “Well, technically, wouldn’t he be an open case again?”

  Abe’s mouth tightened up in concentration. “Not really. I mean, even Diz thinks she looks good for it, even if the DA can’t . . .” He ground down to a stop, met his wife’s eyes.

  “Except,” Treya said, “she had no blood on her, did she? She never went inside. Which means somebody else was in there and killed him, doesn’t it?”

  28

  At around nine o’clock the next morning Hardy “no-commented”
his way through the crowd of reporters who accosted him as he tried to sneak into the back door of the Hall of Justice. He was in relatively high spirits, having slept well for a trial day—waking up without an alarm at five-thirty as opposed to the more usual three or four.

  Even though neither Kathy West nor Harlen Fisk had shown up at the truncated morning session of the trial yesterday, the powers that be had determined that a metal detector was still a necessity. So a line of spectators and more reporters snaked for fifty or sixty feet outside of Department 25. Upon laying eyes on it Hardy was about to backtrack and take his shortcut behind the courtrooms when he heard a familiar voice call his name and, turning, was somewhat surprised to see Fisk striding toward him.

  The normally hale and hearty face seemed today to have an underlying pallor, and dark circles under his eyes spoke of a lack of sleep, but if Hardy had a sister on trial for murder, he thought he might lose a few zz’s himself. He stepped into the line and extended his hand. “Hey, Harlen. Got the trial bug, do you?”

  He tried a smile that mostly failed. “Maybe some of that, Diz. But mostly I wanted to ask you, after yesterday, why can’t Jackman just drop the Preslee side of this thing?”

  “Careful, Harlen, your politics are showing. The short answer is that Stier’s picked this fight for them and they’re in it. What I am hoping is that maybe Braun’ll do it for them.”

  “She can do that?”

  “She can grant my motion to dismiss when Stier’s done with his case. If I can convince her that no reasonable juror could convict on the Preslee count with this evidence.”

  “What’s it going to depend on?”

  Hardy chortled, leaned in closer to whisper. “In theory, careful weighing of the evidence. In fact, pretty much whim.”

  “That’s heartening.”

  “Welcome to Superior Court. But in truth, I think we might actually have a chance. There really isn’t anything that proves she killed Levon.”

  Harlen nodded. “This whole thing is a mockery, if you want my opinion. Always has been.”

  “I agree.”

  “And if Braun does drop Levon, isn’t that saying Maya didn’t do it?”