Fatal

by John Lescroart

  * * *

  “No.” Geoff Cooke gently placed his coffee cup down in the middle of its saucer at their kitchen table. “I’ve been thinking about it all night, hon, and I’m not going,” he said.

  “Of course you are,” Bina replied. “Of course we both are.”

  “I am not. The son of a bitch put the make on you? The balls on the guy. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  Bina reached over and patted his hand. “I should never have mentioned it. It really was a nonevent, Geoff.”

  “That’s not even the point. Here we are, best fucking friends. I mean, I really believed that. And he’s trying to talk you into betraying me.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he didn’t see that as a conflict.”

  “He’s trying to fuck my wife and it’s not a conflict?”

  “Geoff. Come on. And it wasn’t that crude. Maybe he was just playing a game. Maybe I misinterpreted it.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Well, and even if I didn’t, the fact remains. We absolutely have to go to his funeral.”

  “I’m not seeing why.”

  “Because the whole world knows, including little Inspector What’s Her Face . . .”

  “Tully.”

  “Whatever. She knows, and everybody else believes because you’ve told them, about the friendship you and Peter had, how close you’d gotten. How strange would it be if you weren’t at the funeral? Why wouldn’t you be there, the first among the mourners? It would not go unnoticed, particularly by Tully, to say nothing of everybody else.”

  “So it gets noticed? So what?”

  “So you have a reputation, a good one going back forever, and that’s not who Geoff Cooke is. He is a true and loyal man, and he goes to his best friend’s funeral.”

  “Goddamn it.”

  “All right. Don’t think I don’t understand. But you’ve simply got to make an appearance there, Geoff, and that’s the end of that story.”

  * * *

  Even though St. John of God was a very small church on Fifth Avenue, there were more than a few empty pews for the funeral mass. Beth and Ike got there at around 10:20 and the service was already well under way, so they settled into the last row. Beth was thinking that for a guy everybody supposedly loved except possibly his murderer, this wasn’t much of a turnout, with a total of probably fewer than fifty people in attendance. Beth recognized Manny Meyer and the receptionist from Peter’s firm; Julie, Jill, and the twin boys; Geoff and Bina Cooke; and, very much to her surprise, Kate and Ron Jameson, along with their two children—obviously off from school—Aidan and Janey.

  No Carol Lukins, she noticed, nor anyone else from Peter’s apartment building. Though Beth had been more or less expecting a decent turnout of some of the many women with whom Peter had been involved, very few, if any, had actually shown up. The rest of what there was of the crowd seemed to come from the legal community—most of them, by far, men in the general neighborhood of Peter’s age in well-cut business suits.

  Beth and Ike stood on the sidewalk outside after the Mass ended. The priest had announced that they would be driving down to Colma for the interment, and most of the crowd, in spite of the heavy fog that clung to the street, came out the church’s front doors and seemed to be waiting for direction, the limo for the casket, something.

  Kate was the first one to recognize Beth. Dragging her family with her, she was soon by her side. Evincing no sign of their last uncomfortable meeting, or of their phone call, Kate fluttered about after first bussing Beth on both cheeks, getting introduced to Ike (“The famous Inspector McCaffrey who Beth just raves about!”), making the pro forma introductions to her family again. Though both Ron and the kids had only rarely been part of the two women’s activities together, there had been enough picnics and birthdays and Christmas cards over the years to make introductions unnecessary, if not a little bit silly. Nevertheless, Aidan and Janey dutifully shook hands with Beth and Ike just like the very polite children they were.

  Ron, somewhat awkwardly, came forward and gave Beth an embracing hug and an air kiss. “I can’t believe how long it’s been,” he said to her with apparent real enthusiasm. “You and Gin have got to come by for dinner. And soon, I mean it. With your miraculous recoveries behind you—look at you both!—it’s time to do a little celebrating and get back to real life.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Beth said.

  “It does,” Kate said. “You and me, Beth. And definitely Ginny and the kids for a change. Let’s pick a day soon.”

  “Deal,” Beth said, knowing that that day might be far off, if ever.

  “So,” Ron said, leaning in and lowering his voice. His expression now dead serious, concerned. “How’s your investigation into this tragedy going? Are we allowed to ask?”

  “You can ask and I can tell you it’s ongoing.”

  “Well, at least that’s better than ‘stopped dead,’ I’d say.”

  Beth smiled at him. “Better than that, yes. Though frankly, not much better.”

  “That’s a shame. He was a good guy.”

  “That seems to be the consensus. But I thought you and Kate didn’t know him that well.”

  “Not that well, that’s true. But you didn’t have to know him that well to pick up the charm,” Ron said. “Though I guess the main reason we’re here is to show solidarity with Geoff. You know my law partner, Geoff Cooke?”

  “We’ve met, yes.”

  “Well, he and Peter—you probably know—they were really close. This whole thing has just devastated him.”

  “So I gather.”

  “I’d love it—we’d all love it if you got whoever did it.”

  “I would, too, Ron. We’ll see.”

  Over Ron’s shoulder, she saw Jill, still in her dark glasses, and Jill’s sister Julie and a man in a trench coat over a business suit approaching with the twins. Excusing herself from Ron, she gave Ike the high sign to join her—he’d been buttonholed by Kate on some pretext—and together the two inspectors moved a few steps back from the Jamesons and turned to the newcomers, who clearly had something they wanted to talk to them about.

  “Good morning, Inspectors,” Jill began. “They’ve almost got the casket loaded into the limo and we’re going to have to leave soon, but I hoped we might save us all some time and trouble.” She stepped to one side, including her entourage. “This is Ben Patchett,” she said, “the lawyer we mentioned the other day. Ben, Inspectors Tully and McCaffrey.”

  Patchett looked to be in his midfifties. He was deeply into the hired-gun role of attorney for the defense. With steel-gray, short-cropped hair and almost matching steel-gray eyes, he did not project any sort of warmth. Nodding but silent at the introduction to the inspectors, his mouth may as well have been sewn shut. Beth thought it possible that he was incapable of a smile in any setting, and certainly in this one. He did not extend his hand.

  Jill, showing more strength than Beth had seen before, stepped closer, right up in her face. “All right, we’re here, Inspectors. And we’ll give you five minutes to ask anything you want, after which I expect never to see either one of you again.”

  To which her lawyer, in a barely audible voice of gravel, immediately added, “Mrs. Ash is speaking with you, much less at her husband’s funeral, over my strenuous objection. In fact, I don’t think any of the family should be talking to you at all, given your previous interaction.”

  “If I get anything wrong, he’s going to jump in and save us from ourselves,” Jill said. “But in the meanwhile, we were all having a discussion last night and the question of Eric’s gun came up. The one that was stolen.”

  “Right,” Beth said. “From his room in Berkeley.”

  “Well, that’s the first thing.”

  Patchett cleared his throat. “Jill.”

  “It’s all right,” she assured him, then said to Beth and Ike, “He never brought it to Berkeley.”

  “Well, then . . .” Ike reached into his breast pocket. “I’m go
ing to be recording this.”

  “Absolutely not,” Patchett said. “And have the slightest deviation in any of my client’s statements be produced at trial, if it should come to that, and made to appear as an egregious contradiction? Jill, I simply can’t allow it.”

  “It’s not negotiable.” Ike was matter-of-fact. “I don’t want there to be any question of precisely what anyone has said.”

  “Well, I’ve already made my decision, Ben, so, Inspectors, you can tape away. None of us have done anything wrong and so we’re not likely to implicate ourselves in anything. And regardless of what you might think, we really do want you to find whoever killed my husband.”

  Beth said, “I believe we were where the gun wasn’t in Eric’s room in Berkeley. So where was it?”

  “In his room,” Jill said. “At our house.”

  “So it was stolen from your house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who took it?”

  From behind the pack, Tyler came forward. “That was me. I took it.”

  “Really, this time,” Patchett said. “No.”

  Tyler ignored him. “You remember I kind of lost my temper last time you guys were out at the house. And I left. Remember that?”

  “Sure,” Beth said. “You asked me why I wasn’t out hassling homeless people.”

  He dropped his head for a moment in chagrin. “I’m sorry about that. That was stupid. I’m not usually that person. Anyway, the point is I wasn’t there when you started asking Eric all about the gun. I didn’t find out what all the hassle was about, why we needed a lawyer, nothing, until last night when we were trying to get all of this straight.”

  “So why did you take it?” Ike asked.

  “Because Eric was really going to kill Dad with it, and I had to stop him.”

  “Okay,” Beth said. “But then when it went missing . . . where did Eric hide it?”

  “Our room. We both have had our secret places up there, in our room, I mean, forever. His is under the floorboards under his bed. So he started talking seriously—this was after the fight, you know?—about killing Dad. He was going to get himself a gun and kill him. So I started checking and one day, there it was.”

  “Come on, Tyler,” Ike said. “He must have known it was you.”

  “Yeah, he thought that. Of course. What else is he going to think? But I said I didn’t know what he was talking about. We got seriously into it. In fact, he almost strangled me, but I wouldn’t give it up.”

  Beth got in her question. “So Eric, if you didn’t know where it was, why did you lie to us about the gun getting stolen from your dorm?”

  The surlier brother stood slumped with his hands in his pockets. “Because if it wasn’t Tyler who took the gun,” he said, “then the only other option in the house was Mom. I had to keep you guys away from her.”

  “Us guys? Us inspectors, you mean?” Beth asked.

  “Yeah.”

  Clearly, Jill could still barely believe it. “He actually thought that I found his gun and used it to kill his father,” she said.

  “And who would blame you?” Eric said. “Nobody in the world.”

  “Please, son,” Jill said. “Especially not here, not now. Not ever again, okay?” She walked over and put her arms around him. “It’s over. I love you. This part is all done.”

  Eric leaned into her. He hid his face, and his shoulders began to heave, and Jill turned and walked her big son away.

  “So Tyler.” Testing the fragile surface of the cone of silence, Ike asked, “What happened to the gun?”

  “I dropped it into the sewer.”

  “Any particular sewer?”

  “The one at the corner down from our house.”

  “And when did you do this?”

  “I don’t know exactly. A month and a half ago? Something like that.”

  Beth felt blood starting to pump in her ears. With the continuing drought, there had been no significant rain in San Francisco for the past eight months at least. If Tyler was telling the truth, that gun was in all probability pretty close to exactly where he had pitched it. “Tyler,” she said, “how’d you like to ride out with us right now and show us exactly where you tossed it?”

  Patchett took a step forward. “Tyler, I don’t really think . . .”

  “No offense, sir,” he said. “But I’m going. That gun didn’t shoot my dad, which means Eric didn’t shoot my dad, and neither did my mom.”

  Beth wasn’t sure that any of this would prove to be true. In fact, this whole tangled scenario could be a highly orchestrated charade, but if so, it would be creative beyond her wildest imagining. She believed that everything she’d just heard from the Ashes was the truth and, if nothing else, if they got their hands on Eric’s gun, they would at last have their first morsel of physical evidence related to the case. Even if it turned out to be only a useless trinket, physical possession of the actual gun bought by Eric Ash to kill his father would feel like a moral victory.

  “Do you guys want to go right now?” Tyler asked her.

  “If you can talk your mother into you missing the rest of the funeral,” Beth said.

  “I’ll go ask her. I just need to get this over with.” He turned and started walking, and his aunt Julie fell in behind him.

  Three feet from Beth, Patchett stood alone, mute and self-important. Beth caught his eye and gave him a curt nod, the twin to the one with which he’d greeted them. “Thanks so much,” she said with as flat an affect as she could muster. “You’ve been a big help.”

  * * *

  Back in the Hall of Justice just after lunch, they were doing a reprise of their early-morning meeting with the Crime Scene boss. “All right,” Faro said. “Let’s do this again and take it slow, because on a first listen this isn’t going to add to your case to get you on your boat.”

  Beth nodded. “Ike told me you were going to say that.”

  Faro eyed her partner. “Ike’s a smart guy,” he said. The gun that Eric had bought, a Taurus twenty-five caliber, tagged and bagged in a Ziploc, was sitting in the middle of his desk, and Faro now poked at it with the eraser end of a pencil. “But let’s play this out, just for fun, starting with the gun. Do we know that this is the gun that killed Peter Ash?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Do we know that it’s not the gun that killed Peter Ash?”

  “Yes.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Absolutely,” Beth said. “This gun hasn’t killed anybody, at least in the last twenty years or so.”

  “And we know this because?”

  “Because it’s a total piece of shit, Len. Eric Ash had no idea what he was doing when he went looking for a gun in Oakland, and he wound up buying a pig in a poke. Add to that, he was evidently so scared when he got it that he didn’t bother hanging around long enough to shoot the damn thing to make sure it worked. Not with bullets in it, anyway. And guess what? It doesn’t work. The slide is so corroded you can’t even pull it back to chamber a round.”

  “Great,” Faro said. “So this is in all probability not the gun that shot Mr. Ash. How does this get you anywhere closer to your boat? There’s no way this rises to the level of evidence. Now, if you knew it was the gun that did kill him, then we might have something to talk about, but even so, it would be a reach. And this . . .” He poked at the baggie again. “Make me an argument about what any of this means. I’ll be open-minded, swear to God.”

  “Okay,” Beth said. “Before we found this gun, we’d pretty much narrowed down our suspect list to two people, Eric Ash and Geoff Cooke, our boat owner. This gun eliminates Eric. Leaving only Cooke.”

  “How about if Eric bought another gun?” Faro asked. “The one he actually used after the first one he bought didn’t work and next turned up stolen.”

  “He didn’t do that.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because he really thought his mother might have done it. Which means he didn’t do it.”

 
Faro glanced at Ike, now growing a bit testy. “Really?”

  Ike nodded, noncommittal. “I’m with my partner here. She’s right. Eric didn’t kill his dad, with this gun or any gun. And that leaves only Geoff Cooke, who has given us permission to have your guys take his boat apart.”

  His patience clearly wearing thin, Faro rolled his eyes. “Seriously? You think this is going to persuade me? This is not new evidence. It’s not evidence at all. It gives me no reason to okay a Crime Scene visit to this man’s boat which, I might point out, is very possibly not a crime scene at all.”

  “But if we do find, say, a casing—” Ike began.

  Faro fairly exploded. “A casing? You think you’re going to find a casing on this boat?”

  “I realize it’s not a strong possibility,” Beth said, “but at least—”

  “Not a strong possibility! Holy shit, Inspector. I mean it. Holy shit.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. “We’ve got one shot taking out Ash, isn’t that correct? Bang. Once. The gun fires, the casing gets ejected out in the middle of the bay, if anything actually happened on this boat at all and it’s even out in the bay to begin with. And now let’s say it didn’t get ejected into the bay, but landed someplace on the boat. Don’t you think, since it’s the only evidence tying him to the crime, that the killer is going to put in a little effort looking for it, so he can then throw it overboard? Does this not sing to you?”

  “Of course,” Beth said. She flashed him an apologetic smile.

  “So you admit it’s a near impossibility that you’ll find a casing? Or anything else? And you’re still hassling me about this?”

  Her smile actually brightened. “We really want to get on that boat, Len. Your guys, I mean. Find whatever we find.”

  “I’m getting that impression, but really, guys—both of you—the troops are all taken. Get me a crime scene, I’ll put people to work. Really. That’s what we do here, after all. But not ’til.”