A Plague of Secrets

by John Lescroart

  “Don’t worry. I’m pretty secure, although I admit there’s a small chance I could still be swayed.”

  “By what?” Farrell asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. A new fact or two.”

  “Well,” Farrell said, “that’s not going to happen, not at this stage.”

  “Actually, it might,” Hardy said. “In fact, maybe it already did.” He told them about Lori Bradford, new to Stier’s witness list. “I’ve already sent Wyatt out to talk to her, see what she’s got to say.”

  “What’s in the police reports?” Gina asked.

  A rueful grimace. “It seems they never got around to writing it up.”

  “You shock me,” Farrell said.

  “I know,” Hardy agreed. “It’s rocked my worldview. But the fact remains, she’s got to have something to say or Stier wouldn’t have made such a fuss about getting her on the witness list. Even if he’s not going to call her. He’s hoping I’m going to let her slide too.” He smiled at his two partners. “But I’m afraid I’m going to let him down on that. At least until I know what she’s got, or not.”

  Seven-thirty P.M., killing time until Craig Chiurco’s expected arrival, Hardy sat at his desk. As was his habit, he was reviewing his files, hoping something among this amorphous mass of kindling might spark. The files now ran to four thick black three-ring notebooks, into which he’d crammed, in some semblance of order, forensics reports, police reports, interview transcripts such as those he’d used with Jansey in the courtroom today, photographs, private notes of Schiff and Bracco—the endless accretion of litigation.

  At last, having reviewed his notes on Jansey’s testimony—forty-seven pages’ worth—for the second time, he closed the binder and leaned back into his chair. Though part of him yearned to recall her to the stand and pick apart individual strands of her testimony that he’d left unaddressed that afternoon—which was, after all, most of it—he also realized that he’d succeeded in doing his main job, which was discrediting her so that all of her testimony was suspect. Besides, he couldn’t ignore his gut feeling, his pure instinct, that there was nothing in her perjured story that, were the truth known, would likely change any juror’s opinion about Maya’s guilt. The basic facts remained—whether Maya had had an affair with him or not, Vogler had been blackmailing her, she’d been paying the blackmail (which meant she was guilty of something), she’d gone down to BBW and over to Levon’s.

  Why? Why? Why?

  Jansey was undoubtedly lying, but lying for all of her own, probably very good, reasons. In the end he believed that nothing she said was going to make any real difference.

  Hardy got up, walked first over to the window where he looked down on Sutter Street, then came around to another recessed cabinet on the wall across from his desk, this one holding his dartboard. He opened the doors of the cabinet and slid them back into wherever they went, then grabbed his tungsten beauties from their slots and retreated to the dark cherrywood throw line in his polished white oak hardwood floor.

  Twenty. Double twenty. Five.

  From the board to the line.

  One. Five. Twenty. Then one, one, five. Another four or five lost rounds—terrible, atypical shooting—before he finally rang up twenty, twenty, twenty.

  Okay.

  Leaving those darts where they’d landed, he lifted himself back onto the desk.

  Chiurco, again in his coat and tie, sat in a wing chair across from Hardy in the more informal of the two seating arrangements in the office. He seemed nervous, so Hardy did the initial lifting. “So. Levon Preslee.”

  “Okay.”

  “Remind me. How did his name come up in the first place?”

  “Wyatt had put me on Dylan’s old robbery conviction. He thought there might be some tie-in to whatever he was using to blackmail Maya. Or, even better, we might turn up somebody else who wanted to kill him.”

  “So how’d you get to Preslee?”

  “I just did a Web search. I found Vogler. That gave me the robbery in 1997. And there’s his codefendant, Levon. So I run him on the Web and find out he’s working for ACT. You’re not going to believe this, but he’s also listed in the phone book. I figure he works in the theater, he’s probably home during the day, so I drove out there. I didn’t even know that Wyatt had run across him, too, until I heard about that from you guys.”

  “You didn’t call him first?”

  “No, sir. I thought in case he wasn’t right with all this stuff, I might get better answers if I caught him off guard.”

  “So then what?”

  “Then I get into his lobby, and there’s this woman standing there at the door.”

  “How’d you know it was Maya? Had you met her before?”

  “No, but she’s our client. I saw her picture in the paper. It was her.”

  “As it turns out, you’re right.”

  “But anyway, I didn’t know what she was doing there, or what I should do, so I just stood there for a minute.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, she told me he wasn’t home, and walked out past me. Mr. Hardy, honest to God, I think she was jiggling the doorknob like she was trying to get in, but I got there a split second too late, and I can’t be absolutely positive. But really, that’s what I think I saw.”

  “Well, then, if that’s the best you can do for us, then that’s what we’re going to go with. At least it’s something. If I call you to testify, don’t try to improve it. That’s what you’ve got to say. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Okay, then. So write it up just like that and sign it, because if I decide to call you, I’ll need to give the discovery to the DA.”

  “Cool.”

  “Okay, then. Have a good night.”

  “You too.”

  “She’s an old lady,” Wyatt Hunt said, “but I don’t know where they got senile.”

  Hardy had remembered to call home and tell Frannie he didn’t know when he’d be in—common enough during trials—but at the same time he’d remembered that he’d also forgotten to eat. So when Hunt had checked in after his meeting with Lori Bradford, saying he was at his own office just around the corner on Grant, Chinatown’s main street, preparing to go out to grab some Chinese, Hardy invited himself along.

  Now they sat on high stools, sharing a tiny two-top in the front window, the only two customers, eating shrimp and pork and no sign of souvlaki lo mein à la Lou the Greek’s. A good thing.

  “So what’s her story?”

  Hardy chewed and listened while Hunt laid it out. For all of its simplicity the implications, Hardy realized, might be enormous—nothing less than a complete restructuring of the theory of the case. More importantly, there was no set of facts he could imagine that would be consistent with Maya having been involved in this two-shot scenario.

  “No,” he told Hunt, “think about it. There’s only one shot from the supposed murder weapon, right? Right. So what did she do, shoot once—at what? Dylan? Some kind of warning shot? Unlikely. But the main thing is if there’s that second shot from the one gun, the magazine would have been light two bullets, and it wasn’t, just one. And to get back to that one, she would have had to reload. And that’s just plain absurd.”

  “Stier’s going to say it didn’t happen, period. He’ll even use your own argument of no evidence. No second casing, no second slug, no nothing. It didn’t happen. It was a backfire.”

  “Yeah. Right. I know. But let’s pretend for a minute.”

  “All right. So what do you see?”

  “Got to be two guns.”

  “Two?”

  Hardy, into it, put down his chopsticks. “Whoever came to shoot Dylan had his own gun and knew Dylan carried, so he stuck him up at gunpoint for the other gun first.”

  “Why? Why didn’t he just shoot him, bang?”

  “He knew him. Maybe first he thought they could talk it out, whatever their differences were. Maybe Dylan tried to stall him somehow.”

  “So they ha
d a meeting planned? With Maya too?”

  Hardy shook his head. “I don’t have that one figured yet. How would this woman, the one you saw tonight—”

  “Lori.”

  “Right. How would she be on the stand?”

  “Pretty good, I’d say. Sincere and smart. Knew exact times for the shots and remembered the day and date even after all this time. She’s no dummy, Diz.”

  “So. What is it? Did Stier just not believe her? I mean, why leave her out up front instead of trying to find some way to explain her story? And, PS, it’s pretty easily explained, as you’ve already done about a minute ago.”

  “He might not have known about her.”

  “Till when?” Then Hardy pointed a finger, recalling the tense lunchtime gathering at Lou’s with Glitsky and Jackman and the inspectors. “Maybe lunchtime today, huh?”

  “The thought crossed my mind, to be honest.”

  “This could do it,” Hardy said. “For the verdict, I mean.”

  Hunt popped a shrimp. “It might,” he said, then cocked his head with a question. “Is there something else? Besides the verdict?”

  “There’s who really did it, Wyatt. If it wasn’t Maya. And if there were two guns . . .”

  The idea set back Hunt in his chair. “Well, now,” he said, and stared out the window into the misty street. “An innocent client? Wes swears that never happens in real life.”

  “I know. He’ll be devastated, but he’s been wrong before.”

  After a minute, Hunt came forward again, elbows on the table. “But so, on the other thing, I’ve been dying to know what you found out.”

  “What other thing?”

  “Tess Granat? The hit-and-run? I Googled it after lunch.”

  “Thank God for Google,” Hardy said, really wishing that Hunt hadn’t brought this up again. “Everything that’s ever happened, there it is.”

  “Except Dylan Vogler. His early life, at least.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that except for the few days right after he got shot, I think our friend Dylan might be the only human being Google hasn’t found and chronicled.”

  “You looked?”

  “Diz. Google’s half my life, maybe three quarters. It’s where you look first. Which brings us back to Tess Granat, who was very real and very chronicled. So what’d you find out?”

  Hardy picked up his tea and blew on it. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? She wouldn’t say, or what? Even if she wasn’t involved, she must have known all about it.”

  Hardy could see there wasn’t anything to do but come clean. “It was a privileged conversation, Wyatt. I can’t talk about it.”

  Hunt broke a smile. “Diz. Dude. I’m your investigator. I’m covered by the privilege.”

  “Well, just because I can tell you doesn’t mean I should. And don’t think it doesn’t break my heart.” Hardy put his cup down, moved on. “But, listen, I don’t know if we’re going to need that anyway. This Lori Bradford, as I said, might do it all by herself. We’ve got to get her subpoenaed.”

  “As our witness?”

  “Absolutely. And ASAP, I think.”

  Hunt took a small notebook from his jacket pocket and made a note. “I’ll have Craig come by your office for it in the morning.”

  “That’ll work,” Hardy said. “I’ll make one out first thing and leave it with Phyllis. Give the boy some meaningful labor, work through his problems.”

  “Well, I’m hoping he’s over them. Kids, you know. Love.”

  “I’ve heard of ’em both,” Hardy said.

  “Anyway, if Craig doesn’t show, I will. Don’t worry. And I got Lori on tape tonight, anyhow, for what that’s worth. It’s back at the office, locked up.”

  “Excellent.” Hardy put away the last bite of pork and looked at his watch. Quarter to ten. Blowing out heavily, he shook his head. “Sometimes I think I’m getting too old for these things anymore.”

  “Trials?”

  “Not just trials. Murder trials.”

  “I thought they were the fun part, when lawyers felt most alive.”

  Hardy gave him a look. “Uh-huh. Only in the sense that when you’re suffering, at least you know you’re alive.”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “There you go,” Hardy said.

  But suddenly, Hardy realized as he was driving home that the confluence of the two new facts he’d only discovered today—the two-shot scenario at the alley behind BBW, and Maya’s involvement with the death of Tess Granat—had, much against his will and inclination, pushed him not just over the line into doubt about his client’s guilt, but into a near certainty that she might in fact be innocent.

  The key element regarding Tess Granat, which he and Hunt had hinted about at lunch today, was simple and yet profound. Dylan Vogler had known about the accident and had been blackmailing Maya about it since he’d gotten out of prison. Hardy could believe—and in fact had believed—that his client had all the motive in the world to have killed Dylan. She’d also had means and opportunity.

  What had changed in the Tess Granat scenario, which had the rather significant advantage of being true, was that to Hardy’s mind, it completely eliminated Levon Preslee from the picture. He’d already gotten his one favor, his job, from Maya, and maybe even through Dylan. But that had evidently been enough. That job had worked for him, for a new start on a different life. And in any event, that favor, or whatever it was, had been years before. There was no record or even sniff of a record that Maya had seen or spoken to him in eight years before she suddenly went over to his apartment on the day he was killed.

  Again—why?

  Because Levon had called her?

  In just the same way that Dylan had called her?

  Or had someone else called her? Either or both times?

  Someone who was connected to both Dylan and to Levon in the present, and who might have had dealings with them in the past as well?

  Paco.

  33

  At ten-fifteen, long after everyone else except the downstairs guards had left the building, Harlen Fisk sat holding a Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic weapon, the twin to his sister’s, in his office upstairs in City Hall. Harlen had bought both the guns at the same time, while he was still only a couple of years into his service with the police force. As was the custom, when Glock came out with the new model, they’d offered it at a discount to active-duty cops, in the hope that cops would come to favor the gun and entire cities would order it as the on-duty weapon for their police force. In fact, he’d insisted on buying Maya’s for her after they’d had an early robbery at BBW. You needed a weapon if you owned a store in the Haight, even if you weren’t planning to use it. It was good for peace of mind.

  Back in those days Dylan’s time in prison hadn’t seemed to weigh so heavily on everyone. Not even to a cop like Harlen. They’d all known each other when Dylan and Maya had been in college, Harlen the older brother, not yet a cop. Sometimes they all smoked dope together, had some laughs. Then Dylan had done something truly dumb, and got caught. But he’d paid for it, and now he was working with Maya, doing a great job. Harlen never considered that he’d go back to crime. Why would he? He didn’t need it.

  So he’d bought the guns, the Glocks. Harlen hadn’t even known or cared about the ballistics quirk—that fired bullets from this model couldn’t usually be traced back to a particular gun—until he’d heard about it at trial.

  Harlen’s office wasn’t large, and most of it was filled with the old-fashioned desk and free-standing bookshelves that lined the wall to his right. To his left the view out his large windows across Van Ness included a glorious stretch of San Francisco’s somewhat grandiose architecture—the Opera House, Performing Arts Center, and War Memorial. Behind him a framed rogues gallery of himself posing with various other politicians and celebrities—his aunt Kathy, of course, Bill and Hillary, Dianne Feinstein, Robin Williams, Dusty Baker in his Giants uniform—offered mute but com
pelling testimony to his own popularity and success.

  Harlen had made it, in a somewhat tortuous route, and in the most cutthroat of fields, almost to the very top. At least to the city’s top—and after that, who knew how far he could go? He’d been a supervisor now for seven years, after starting out as a clerk in Kathy’s office just out of college about seven years before that. Through his aunt Kathy’s tutelage and influence he’d joined the PD as a uniformed patrolman, and rose quickly, finally making it all the way to homicide for a few months before finally quitting and jumping over to the political side, starting with the low rungs of community activist work—soup kitchen and homeless shelter service on the one hand; victims’ rights advocacy, a natural with his police background, on the other. Mix in a couple of stints on various visible boards—the National Kidney Foundation, Friends of the San Francisco Public Library—and a term on the school board, and then Kathy moved up to mayor and he ran for and won her seat on the Board of Supervisors.

  And now here he was, gun in hand, wondering if it was all going to end.

  The immediate problem was Cheryl Zolotny. No, Biehl now. Sweet sweet girl, and hot hot hot when she’d been younger. In fact, she was still more than easy to look at, and in other circumstances he might have found himself falling into those bedroom eyes—eyes that he’d once known well—over lunch.

  But not today.

  Today her testimony about all those years ago with Maya simply had made Harlen realize how at risk he still was. This was a woman who’d not only known him, she’d done drugs with him. And so, okay, it had only been marijuana. Lately, and in spite of his long-term support of the medical marijuana laws and parlors in the city, he’d come to appreciate how much trouble a little pot could get people into.

  If only Dylan hadn’t been wearing that backpack . . .

  But he had.

  And now Cheryl, from out of nowhere, had suddenly returned full-blown into the picture. Not that she was, so far as he knew, out to get him in trouble in any way. In fact, at lunch she’d been nothing if not inviting, even downright flirtatious, in spite of her marital status. Making noises about how flattered she was that he—a very important man now, in his exalted position—that he even remembered her from back when they’d fooled around a little, when she’d been just a kid.