Fatal

by John Lescroart

  “Why would I be over here to see him? I don’t even live in this building. Did somebody tell you that they saw me here? Because if they did, it’s not true.” Her eyes again began to take on a slightly glazed look. “I might have come by early in the day,” she went on, in Beth’s view protesting far too much. “There’s always something that needs fixing in one of the units, but by Monday night, I would have been done with whatever it might have been. But I don’t think there was anything. Not on Monday, anyway.”

  “That’s a lot of denial, Carol. When actually nobody’s even suggested you were here.”

  The hint of rebuke seemed to take the wind out of her. “Well, but if they do, I’m just saying they must have the day wrong.”

  “I hear you,” Beth said. “So do you recall the last day you did see him?”

  “One day last week—I want to say Thursday or Friday—I ran into him as he was coming in from work.” She paused, then said, “No, it was Friday, because he asked if I had any great plans for the weekend. That’s the last time I specifically remember.”

  “Good.” Beth saw nothing to gain in pushing her any further at this moment. But Ned’s account and Carol’s reactions all along made Beth reconsider her original idea of doing a manual search of Peter’s apartment rather than having the Crime Scene Unit process it for trace evidence. Whoever was in that bed with Peter last Monday might have been the last person to see him alive, and Len Faro might find fingerprints or DNA to identify that woman. And Beth now had Carol’s DNA on the glass she’d been sipping from, and if the landlady had been in Peter’s bed four days ago, there was probably matching DNA there as well.

  Meanwhile, Beth needed to back off, end this interview, and preserve the sanctity of the scene. Particularly, she didn’t want Carol to go into the bedroom at all. So, standing up, she put out her hand down to where Carol still sat on the floor. “Do you feel okay to move?”

  “Better, I think, yes.” She took Beth’s hand and pulled herself up. “I still don’t know why I had that reaction. And thank you again for catching me.”

  “All in a day’s work,” Beth said. “But let’s not you and me take any more chances. I might not be near enough to catch you if it happens again, and I really don’t need to take any more of your time. I’d be more comfortable poking around here on my own anyway.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am. Thanks for coming down and letting me in.”

  “No problem. I’m glad I could help.” She hesitated. “I hope you catch him.”

  “So do I, Carol. So do I.”

  * * *

  With Beth feeling very much like an extra wheel, staying out of the team’s way as it moved from room to room, Len Faro and his Crime Scene Unit spent the better part of three hours at Peter Ash’s apartment. In the end, they left with his bedsheets and the drinking glass that Carol had used. They also took Peter’s laptop and an iPad, but they encountered no sign of a telephone. They tested for gunshot residue and blood spatter evidence, but there was none of either. They collected fingerprints. Peter had ten business suits hanging in his closet, along with sixteen dress shirts, a coat hanger full of ties. Underwear, socks, t-shirts, sweaters, and casual pants in the dresser. In the refrigerator, they found a bottle of Hafner chardonnay, half of which was gone, and they bagged it to bring to the lab. If Peter and his guest had been drinking that on Monday, this was another possible source of either fingerprints or DNA. There were also two unwashed wineglasses on the counter, the dregs dried up in the bottom of each of them.

  Faro’s team was thorough, but it didn’t find much. Maybe one or both of the computers would reveal something about Peter’s personal life, but that was a big maybe. Also, if they couldn’t get a DNA match with Carol Lukins—that is, if she had not been Peter’s sexual partner on Monday night—then Beth thought it unlikely that the search exercise would have produced anything of substance.

  Taken together, the condition of the room and Ned’s testimony indicated that Peter had come home from work, bought beer for his young neighbors, then had a woman stop by, with whom he apparently drank some wine and then had sex. Afterwards, he changed into more casual clothing and, assuming he hadn’t been shot in this room, he must have gone out. Which left a couple of unanswered questions: Did his sexual partner leave right afterwards on her own, or did they leave together? And if he left alone, did someone then pick him up? Or did he drive himself?

  Where was his car?

  Leaving Faro to his colleagues and duties, Beth excused herself, left Peter’s apartment, and crossed the landing to number 3, where she knocked, hoping to get the cooperative Holly, but no one answered. Her legs killing her, Beth trudged up the next flight to Ned’s apartment where, much to her surprise, she seemed to have succeeded in waking him up again.

  “Man,” he said as he opened the door, squinting through a haze of marijuana smoke. “Really?” He had removed his shorts and stood on one foot in the doorway in his tighty-whities and his Marley t-shirt while the man himself was singing “No Woman, No Cry” in the apartment.

  “Really, Ned,” Beth said. “Tough day at school?”

  He shrugged, grinned stupidly. “I fixed my schedule so I don’t do Fridays. Is that great, or what?”

  She shook her head, not particularly sharing his thrall. “Do you know Peter Ash’s car?”

  “Sure,” he said. “A Beemer Z3 convertible. Totally awesome machine.”

  “The ultimate driving, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Clearly not getting the reference, Ned’s face slipped further into vacancy.

  Beth moved along. “So do you know where he would usually park it? Does this building have some designated spaces?”

  “Are you kidding? Parking is like the biggest hassle there is.”

  “So where did he park?”

  “Wherever he found a space, and good luck with that. It could take twenty minutes circling the block, sometimes more. A total drag.”

  “Do you know what color it was?”

  “Purple.”

  “Okay, Ned. Thanks a lot. And by the way, how’re you doing on those email addresses you were going to get me?”

  “I haven’t gotten on that yet. Today’s kind of not my main workday.”

  “I’m picking that up,” Beth said. “I could wait and you could go rustle them up right now. How long could it take?”

  Sighing deeply at the tremendous infringement on his personal liberty and busy schedule, Ned said, “Give me five.” Leaving his front door open, he disappeared back into the apartment.

  Beth leaned back against the railing by the stairs. She thought if she got randomly tested for drugs in the next hour or so, the pot smoke she was inhaling would show her positive for THC. She backed a couple more steps away from Ned’s door.

  It actually took him less than four minutes. He came back to the door—still no pants—and handed her a sheet of paper. “They were all here the whole time,” he volunteered. “Nobody would have seen anything.”

  “Well, I’ll just double-check to be sure. Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  “No,” she replied. “I didn’t think it was.”

  Faro and company were finishing up as she passed Peter’s unit on the way down. Her legs were shot, her right thigh especially—catching Carol Lukins as she’d fallen, then standing around in the apartment, finally walking up and down the long flight of stairs three or four times—had taken their toll. Still, she forced a regular gait as she passed Faro on the landing. Lennard wasn’t a gossip, but he had six officers with him, and you just never knew what people, even her law enforcement colleagues, saw and what they’d comment on.

  Outside the building, she turned left and with the cold sun at her back walked down four blocks to Broderick, where the neighborhood decidedly changed its character, from mostly students to mostly ghetto. Peter Ash wasn’t likely to have parked his BMW convertible any further east than Broderick, not if he wanted it to b
e there unmolested when he came back to it.

  She found the car with a handful of parking tickets under its windshield, at McAllister near Lyon. She called it in for towing to the city lot behind the Hall of Justice.

  * * *

  “So what does that tell us?” Ike asked her. “He didn’t use his car. So what?”

  She was sitting in her car, the heater going as the sun went down, parked where she’d left her ride within half a block of Peter’s apartment, in front of a fire hydrant on Grove. Miraculously, she thought, this time her dashboard ID seemed to have worked and the traffic Nazis hadn’t cited her. “So one of two possibilities,” she said. “Either he went walking around in the dark, or somebody came by and picked him up, which is the money bet.”

  “Whoever picked him up must have called him first, wouldn’t you say? I’d kill to get my hands on his cell phone records.”

  “Me, too, but that’s probably not happening.”

  “Fucking terrorists.”

  “Right. Again, now and always.”

  “If the FBI hadn’t put in a request for basically all the phone records in the city . . .”

  “Yeah, but they do,” Beth said, “and the phone companies are backed up to forever. A couple of low-rent homicide inspectors like us will be lucky to see anything within a month.”

  “Okay, moving on,” Ike said. “This landlady, she’s cute, right?”

  “Quite a bit more than that.”

  “And she truly fainted? What’s up with that?”

  “I think Carol had a rendezvous with our victim on Monday night and coming back to his apartment with a homicide inspector in tow literally knocked her out. She thought she could power through how she’d feel and she got it wrong. We’ll find out for sure, I hope, if we match some DNA from Peter’s place, but I’m giving big odds she and Peter got it on.”

  “So . . . Theresa’s out.”

  “Not necessarily. It still could have been Theresa who picked him up afterwards. Or anybody else. Carol’s husband comes to mind, for that matter.”

  “She’s married?”

  “She’s got a ring. So I assume.”

  “Okay. You think it’s time we got Theresa’s alibi?”

  Beth took a moment. “I was hoping to keep her thinking she was on our side until she gave us the phone numbers from Peter’s office, but you might be right. It would be nice to eliminate her entirely if we can, or reel her in.”

  “Well, you’ve been doing all the work lately. Maybe I should give her a call, pitch the phone records again, then either way find out what her Monday night looked like.”

  “I’ll leave that decision up to you.”

  “Got it. I’ll let you know something as soon as I do.”

  “Sounds good. And whatever else, hug your little girl for me.”

  “Will do.”

  21

  KATE JAMESON WAITED UNTIL 5:00 o’clock sharp before she opened the bottle, poured herself a generous glass of Rombauer chardonnay, and moved to the reading chair in her living room to watch the dusk advance across her front lawn.

  She’d been craving that first drink all day, but today she wasn’t going to start early as she had the day before.

  Yesterday, with the shock of Peter Ash’s death right there in the newspaper and minutes later in the wake of Ron’s confession that he knew about her and Peter, she’d started in on the wine at lunch and had had to summon all of her will and physical strength as she struggled to act sober enough to put together dinner for them all. And as soon as they’d finished, she had pleaded a headache and had been essentially passed out in bed by 8:00. She didn’t suppose Ron, who missed nothing, had been fooled by her feigned sobriety.

  Settling back into her chair, she took her first small sip.

  It was ironic, she thought, that it had taken Peter’s death to prompt Ron into admitting that he knew about them. Because without that admission, Ron made it clear yesterday morning that he didn’t think there was any chance for the two of them to move beyond her betrayal as a couple. He was furious, of course, but he knew and he truly forgave.

  Ron had had to let her know that he knew, and she had to know and believe that that knowledge would not and could not break them up. Not ever. The irony was that in reality, there had been almost nothing between her and Peter except the one day, and even that one time had been before she’d been shot and her whole world had changed.

  Today, as she sat sipping her wine, she reflected that from the day of the Ferry Building attack until yesterday, when the news of Peter’s murder had appeared in the Chronicle, she hadn’t felt an ounce of desire for him even once. She had, in fact, rarely thought of him in any context at all. She certainly had never known that he’d come to visit her at the hospital when she’d been in her coma. She had no idea why he’d done that. And even now, with the memory of him refreshed, she felt nothing for him as a person.

  She only wished that she could erase the one day, wished that she had not betrayed Ron, not hurt the children.

  But the consequences from that, thank God, were behind her now, behind all of them. The sense of dislocation was over. There were no more secrets. The rupture had healed and her family had survived.

  The doorbell startled her out of her reverie. She could barely remember the last time they’d had anybody stop by unexpectedly. She looked up and was surprised to see that outside, it had grown perceptibly darker. She got up and flicked on the light over her reading chair—“Just a second!”—then hit the room and hall and front porch lights as she walked to the door, saw who it was, and opened it.

  Smiling at her—beaming really—was Beth Tully, who had struck a sassy pose, hands on her hips. “Girlfriend,” she said. “It’s been way too long.”

  * * *

  And in fact, the two friends hadn’t been together since the Ferry Building. Both of their respective recoveries had carved out new priorities, schedules, regimens. Beth had to regain her strength, mobility, and balance and get back to work, while for a long time, with all the complications, Kate fought for her life.

  They had talked on the phone a few times in the past six months, just touching base, but it had felt forced and awkward, and even after Kate had finally left the hospital and come back home, somehow the idea of picking up where they’d left off—relatively carefree as they power walked in their free time for exercise—had never come up.

  But now, sitting at the counter in the kitchen, Kate had refilled her wineglass and poured Beth a large glass of iced tea. “So here’s to us, huh?” she said. “Would we ever have believed we’d be together like this again?”

  “Probably not,” Beth said, “but I’m so glad we are.”

  “I am, too. Before you rang the doorbell just now, I was thinking that it felt like life was finally getting back to some kind of normal at last. And then you drop by, it’s icing on the cake.”

  “Hardly that.”

  “More than you know. Just that you’ve got the guts to do things . . . every time I go out, which is as little as I can get away with, I’m scared to death and can’t wait to get back home.”

  Beth nodded in understanding. “It’s definitely something to work on.”

  “Apparently not for you, though.”

  “Au contraire. I fight it every step of the way. Any crowd bigger than about three people and I get nervous. I think it’s just something we’re always going to have to live with. But on the other hand,” she added brightly, “since we’ve already been in one, what are the odds of getting caught up in another terrorist attack? Very, very unlikely, wouldn’t you say?”

  Kate clearly wasn’t convinced, but she forced a smile. “That’s a good way to look at it.”

  A shrug. “Well, it’s one way. The other thing keeping the fear away is my work.”

  Kate’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t tell me you’re back working? Full time? In homicide?”

  Beth chuckled. “That’s the job.”

  “And it makes you feel safer? C
hasing murderers.”

  “Well, first, there’s very little real chasing involved. Which is lucky, since don’t tell any of my fellow inspectors or my lieutenant, but I’ve slowed down more than a couple of steps. But the other thing is here I am, already shot up once. So it’s like the odds of being in two terrorist attacks. Shot twice? No, I don’t think so. It’s like insurance.”

  “Getting shot as insurance against getting shot again?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I’m pretty sure there’s some kind of flaw in your logic there.”

  Beth shrugged, smiled, sipped at her tea. “Whatever. But I think if we’ve learned anything, it’s that we don’t have much say in the matter of what happens next. All in all, I’ve come to believe that we’re the lucky ones. Certainly as opposed to all the people who died or aren’t ever going to get better.”

  “I can’t argue with that. You’re so right. I just haven’t been looking at it that way.”

  “Sometimes I haven’t either. Not all the time, anyway. But when I get to there, it seems to help. At least, along with the job, it gets me out of the house.”

  “I still just can’t believe that you’re back on the job.”

  Beth stalled for a moment, taking another sip of her tea. “Actually, speaking of the job, it’s full disclosure time.”

  “About your job?”

  Beth nodded. “I’ve been meaning to stop by and see you for the last few weeks or so, but didn’t want to feel like I was pushing you if you weren’t yet up and about and didn’t feel like seeing anybody yet. Particularly if that somebody was a reminder of what you’d been through. Like, say, me.”

  “Come on, Beth, I never felt—”