Fatal

by John Lescroart

  “I know. But I wanted to give you more time to recover if you needed it. Now I see it could have been sooner, but as I say, I didn’t want to push. But then yesterday, I got an excuse.”

  A perplexed look on her face, Kate said, “You don’t ever need an excuse to come by and visit. But I don’t understand how this excuse was about your job. Are you saying you’re investigating something about a murder that has to do with me?”

  “Not you,” Beth said. “Your husband. And only tangentially at that.”

  “You’re talking Ron? Involved in a murder? That’s absurd, Beth. He’s—”

  Beth held up her hand, stopping Kate’s response. “He’s not really it, either. But I’m assuming both of you know a guy named Geoff Cooke.”

  Kate straightened up and sat back in her chair, almost as if Beth had taken a swing at her. “Sure, we know Geoff. He’s one of Ron’s partners in the firm. He’s the nicest guy in the world, Beth. I mean, we see him socially all the time. You can’t really think he’s got anything to do with killing somebody.”

  “No. I don’t really think that. But Mr. Cooke came by Homicide yesterday wanting to talk about a murder victim named Peter Ash, and when we’d finished our interview, he left me his business card, which told me that he worked in the same firm as Ron.”

  “I just told you, they’re partners. Does that mean anything?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. But when I investigate, I try to get a handle on the victim, on anything that might have led to his death, and it occurred to me that Ron might have known Peter Ash, too. If nothing else, it gave me the excuse I was looking for to see you.”

  “But you know you don’t need . . .”

  “Whatever. I thought it was possible that maybe Ron went out a time or two with Ash and Mr. Cooke and had found out something about Ash, what made him tick, or what he was going through. Something like that, just to add to the picture. Maybe, like Mr. Cooke, Ron knows something about Mr. Ash but doesn’t see its significance.”

  “What does Geoff know?”

  “That’s just it. He doesn’t know if he knows anything either. He just offered to help, and then I find out he’s in Ron’s firm, maybe they all know each other.” Beth shrugged. “At least it’s another avenue to explore. And any connection to the victim is worth following up. Even if it’s as tangential as this one.”

  “Well, you’ll pardon me for saying so, Beth, but that seems a bit of a reach. Geoff knows, or knew, this Mr. Ash? And therefore he’s connected somehow to Ron?”

  “Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad. I guess I’m just surprised you think that there could be something in this.”

  “So you guys didn’t know Peter Ash?”

  Kate went still. “So what is this, now? We’re suspects? I’m under investigation?”

  “No. Not at all, Kate. There’s no reason to be defensive . . .”

  “Except maybe Ron, who tells me everything, maybe he’s got information on this murder victim and somehow Geoff comes to you but Ron doesn’t. So why is he hiding what he knows? And while we’re at it, why am I hiding what I know?”

  “That’s not it at all, Kate. Nothing like that.”

  “I wonder why it seems like it is, then.” She gulped a mouthful of her wine, her eyes alight with affront. “Since you asked, though, the truth is we didn’t really know Peter Ash. We saw him once at a dinner party, and even that was months ago. I hadn’t even thought of him recently until I saw the article in the paper about him dying. Before that, I don’t think I’d heard his name in months. But you can ask Ron and make sure. Maybe,” she added with heavy sarcasm, “he and Geoff and Mr. Ash went out for lunch last week and all got drunk together and Ron just forgot to mention it to me. And then one of them killed him.”

  Beth sighed. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m just fishing because the case is frustrating and I know nothing. I should never have brought it up.”

  Kate, her hands shaking holding her wineglass, took a deep breath, then another. “I’m sorry, too.”

  * * *

  As she drove home, Beth was thinking that she was losing her touch and her intuition.

  In the course of the afternoon, she’d interviewed three women, and not even in a particularly threatening manner, and all of them—Theresa, Carol Lukins, and her best friend, Kate—had reacted far more violently, and defensively, than she would have thought possible. She wondered if it was just because she herself had become immune to the power of her badge. In her mind, she was still a woman (and even a mom) first, cop second, and she more or less expected that other women would view her the same way.

  But judging from today’s reactions, she was dead wrong.

  And now, almost against her will, as she negotiated the myriad streets and turns to her home, she found the cop in her analyzing what she’d drawn out from these women: Theresa’s apparent utter ignorance of Peter Ash’s profligacy around sex, Carol Lukins’s protesting far too much about the last time she’d seen her tenant, and Kate’s going ballistic at the mere mention of the possibility that her husband had even the slightest familiarity with Peter Ash.

  Why, she wondered, were these reactions so strong? Was it just the fact that they viewed her as a cop first, and so her questions, no matter how benign, carried an emotional wallop? Might they all, in different ways, actually feel legitimately threatened? And why would there be all that smoke, she thought, unless there was a flame somewhere?

  Beth might understand the feeling of threat in the case of Theresa, if she was in fact having an affair with her boss.

  Or with Carol, who was almost certainly, in Beth’s mind, another of his sexual partners/conquests.

  But Kate . . .

  Although her reaction had in some ways been the most defensive, besides the random social occasion, there was no evidence that Kate had ever had anything to do with Peter Ash. Beth tried to give her the benefit of the doubt—after an incredibly difficult time while she recovered from her injuries and infections, she was simply super sensitive trying to protect her husband and her family. But still, her reaction could only be viewed as somehow provocative.

  And something nagged. Something intimately connected to the two of them—her and Kate—and to the day they’d both been shot. The connection flittered back and forth across her subconscious, a ghost of a memory almost totally obliterated by the violence and destruction they’d endured together on that day.

  And now, bubbling up from some cauldron of repression in the wake of the disaster, Beth tried to recall: in the seconds before the shooting began, they’d been talking about Kate’s dalliance with some guy . . . had it actually happened? Had Kate admitted . . . ?

  Beth remembered now. She had just told Kate about her upcoming date with Alan Shaw, Laurie’s brother, and Kate had tried to cover up that she’d gone ahead and hooked up with the guy she had been fantasizing about. Beth had called her on it. Or had she? Had they gotten that far? Beth knew that she had drawn the conclusion, but had Kate confirmed the conjecture?

  The answer was right there, just out of her reach.

  Stopped at a red light, she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to recapture the conversation, the telling details . . .

  Suddenly behind her came the familiar whoop whoop of a patrol car. At the same moment, flashing red and blue lights exploded in her rearview mirror.

  “Shit!” Slapping her steering wheel, she pulled over to the curb and waited. When the officer appeared at her window requesting her license and registration, she opened her wallet to her badge. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t paying enough attention. What did I do?”

  “You sat through an entire green light cycle. If people do that, even if they don’t turn out to be inspectors, I like to see if they’re all right.”

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I’m fine, except I guess I’ve been thinking too hard about a case. I should be paying more attention to what I’m actually doing.”

 
“That’s a good thought.” He handed back her ID. “Do you need an escort?”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. I’m on my way home. It’s only a few more blocks.”

  “Okay, then. Please drive carefully.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  She waited until the officer had gotten back to his car before hitting her ignition and pulling carefully back out into the street. Drawing a deep breath, she shook her head in disgust even as her brain returned, seemingly of its own volition, to the question that had been nagging at her: hadn’t Beth mentioned a name? She and Kate were sitting and talking seconds before the attack at the Market Café, and then . . .

  Suddenly there it was, the name of the man Kate had slept with. It finally settled down out of the miasma shaking around in Beth’s skull with total clarity.

  The name, she now remembered, was Peter.

  22

  LAURIE WASN’T SURE WHAT EXACTLY had gotten into her, but she wanted her whole apartment, and especially the table, to be particularly nice.

  Last night, with Beth and Ginny in her kitchen, using real plates and utensils, eating food that had flavor, it was all still so odd, something she vaguely remembered from another era that now, late but maybe not too late, was making an unexpected reappearance in her life.

  If she had to say what it was, as she had tried to describe it to Alan when they’d talked in the morning, she felt as if she’d come awake after a long sleep. The feeling had lasted all day, bolstered by two meals—she’d scrambled an egg for breakfast and ate some turkey—a slice and a half—sometime in the middle of the afternoon.

  Oh, and a spoonful of the java chip.

  The feeling was still with her, a kind of hopefulness that felt as though in some way she was regaining some of the strength in her muscles.

  Beth and Ginny would be here again in a few minutes, and she checked herself in the bathroom mirror. She’d put on jeans that weren’t too loose and a bright red pullover that bulked her up somewhat. With a little makeup, the blotches disappeared, a touch of mascara brought her eyes to life, some gloss gave a clean definition and fullness to her lips.

  She realized that in spite of everything she’d put herself through, all of the eating problems, the psychological trauma, she still looked good, reminiscent in fact of how she’d looked when she and Frank . . .

  With something of a shock, she realized that she hadn’t once thought of Frank all day, not even when she’d been outside buying the bouquet for the table at the place he’d always stopped to get flowers for her.

  She walked into the kitchen. The bouquet was in a vase in the middle of the table, which she’d set with great care. It was full of fall foliage, large and flamboyant and the orange and yellow in it matched the placemats and made it look as though somebody lived here.

  Somebody could live here.

  * * *

  “Okay, I’ve got one,” Ginny said.

  Laurie swallowed a bite of lamb meatball. “Go.”

  Beth didn’t let on, but she was taking an inventory of the food that Laurie was eating and thus far, it looked promising. That was also the way Laurie herself looked. Not that she’d gained any visible weight since yesterday, of course, but she was carrying herself differently, with what struck Beth as confidence that hadn’t been there before. She’d also told them about her meals during the day, if you wanted to call them that—a slice of turkey and an egg—but Beth realized that any eating was a bonus.

  There was no question about whether she loved the meatballs. She was on her third one, smothered in yogurt sauce. Plus, two relatively big servings of rice pilaf, two stalks of asparagus. One whole piece of pita bread. More importantly, without dwelling on it she seemed to simply be enjoying the food, the experience of eating.

  And beyond that, the younger women were clearly having fun. They’d spent almost ten minutes howling over some app on Ginny’s cell phone that gave the wrong, but invariably hysterical pronunciation of common, or sometimes not so common, words. Such as synecdoche—syna kyna dotie chotie! When Ginny had first discovered the app, Beth herself had laughed until she’d cried more than once.

  That had led to a few rounds of riddles, Laurie stumping Ginny with, “What never leaves the corner and yet travels around the world?”

  Beth having to supply the answer—a stamp.

  And then Ginny jumping in with, “So Donald Trump and Sarah Palin are both drowning in the pool right in front of you, and you know there’s only going to be a minute or two before one or both of them goes under. Here’s the question: What kind of sandwich do you make?”

  Laurie laughed out loud. “That’s awful,” she said.

  “It is, a little,” Ginny agreed. “I feel bad every time I tell it, but not bad enough to stop.”

  As the two girls continued laughing and generally yucking it up, Beth got up from the table, took a few steps over to the refrigerator, and pulled the java chip out of the freezer so it would soften up a bit before she served it. She had just placed it on the counter by the sink when the doorbell rang. “I’m up. I’ll get it,” she said. “Are you expecting anybody?”

  “Not really. It’s probably just Alan.” At Beth’s fleeting, questioning expression, she raised her palm as though taking an oath and said, “Unplanned, I promise. Sometimes he just stops by.”

  * * *

  The younger girls had gone into the living room with their ice cream and they’d put on some music, someone Beth didn’t recognize. She and Alan stood by the sink, and she handed him plates to dry as she finished washing them. “The thing I’m so surprised about,” she said, “is how young Laurie is. Tonight she seems almost like Ginny’s age, which is eighteen. When I first met her, I thought she was closer to thirty. Of course, that was the day she heard about Frank Rinaldi’s death, and that could put a few years on a person.”

  “She’s twenty-three,” Alan said.

  “So? What? You’re in your twenties, too?”

  He chuckled. “Hardly. I was nineteen when she was born.”

  “Same mom and dad?”

  “That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Or did, at least, until they died.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Alan.”

  He shrugged. “It was a long time ago. She was ten when Dad passed—heart attack. Then Mom with cancer a couple of years after that.”

  “Who’d Laurie live with then?”

  “Me, until five years ago, when she moved out for college.”

  “You supported her? By yourself?”

  He downplayed it. “If you don’t count the two hundred grand my parents left us. That helped a bit. Still does.”

  “But you raised her during those special teenage years?”

  “I don’t know if I’d call it raising her. We lived in the same apartment. She was pretty much on her own, with me working. But she mostly kept herself out of trouble. Until this food stuff started, which like an idiot I couldn’t even see.”

  “And you blame yourself for that?”

  He shrugged. “Somebody else might have recognized the signs earlier, that’s all. Gotten a little more proactive.” A sudden burst of laughter came from the living room. “That’s a good sound to hear,” Alan said. “I haven’t heard very much of it lately.”

  Beth handed him another plate. “They’re getting along.” Then, “It’s good of you to come by and check on her.”

  “It’s good of you,” he replied, “to come by at all.” He indicated the kitchen, the table, the food. “And bring all this.”

  “Well, you said it was serious, and I agree with you. I don’t know exactly what should happen next to get her some help, but meanwhile I’ve got a case that’s eating me up and my partner’s daughter is sick in the hospital, so I . . . I mean, there’s nothing else I can do until . . .”

  “Hey hey hey. Stop. No apologies. You’re here. Your daughter’s doing more good in there than any shrink or doctor on the planet. I haven’t heard Laurie laugh out lo
ud in a year, maybe more. Whatever the prize for being a great person is, you’ve already won it, so I don’t want to hear about you not doing all you can. This is half a miracle right here, to say nothing of all the food she told me you’d brought over. And speaking of which”—he put down the dry plate and reached for the wallet in his back pocket—“what do I owe you for all that?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I’m not being ridiculous.”

  “Well, you’re not giving me any money, either. This has been my pleasure. And listen to them.” She cocked her head back toward the living room. “My daughter’s having a great Friday night and maybe getting herself a new friend in the bargain. That’s worth a lot more than a bag or two of groceries.”

  “Maybe. But it still doesn’t feel right, not paying our own way.”

  “It feels right to me. So how about we don’t fight about it? Just say ‘Okay, you win,’ and we let it go at that.”

  He took in a frustrated breath, cast his eyes around the kitchen, came back to her. “Okay, you win,” he said, then added, “but I owe you.” A beat. “Maybe a dinner, if you’d like to try that again.”

  “I might,” Beth said. “But not because you feel you owe me anything.”

  “That wouldn’t be it.”

  “Well, we’ll see.” Her shoulders settling, she put down the last washed plate and turned off the water. Turning, her arms now folded over her chest, she looked up into his face.

  She met his eyes again and drew a breath. To her dismay, she felt her eyes begin to fill with unexpected tears, and she quickly, almost angrily, brushed at them before they overflowed onto her cheeks. She didn’t want to play any part of this for sympathy.

  * * *

  “Twice?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Two bullets. One per leg. I thought you might have noticed me walking a little funny as you followed me down the hallway.”

  “I noticed you walking, all right. Way more graceful than funny.”