Fatal

by John Lescroart

  Faro nodded. “They found it under the gutter—the drain thing that runs along both sides. Stuck there under the lip. It’s a miracle it didn’t wash out, proving once again that God’s with the good guys. And you want to hear the best part?”

  “This isn’t it?”

  “This is good, I admit. It means somebody shot a gun on the boat, as you predicted and as I, much to my chagrin, doubted. But the best part is you’ll remember we got a casing out of Cooke’s car last night.”

  “I like the way this is going.”

  Faro bobbed his head again. “You’ll like it better in a second. Just after you left, I gave up and sent some of my gang straight over from Cooke’s suicide to the boat.”

  “How’d you get onto the dock?”

  “Piece of cake. Cooke’s key ring, still in the Benz’s ignition. Dock and boat both.”

  “This really is divine intervention, Len.”

  “Tell me about it. Anyway, Jasper’s not on the boat for five minutes when they find this thing, and five minutes after that, he’s back with me. At first glance, the casings are twins, but we’ve got everything we need to know for sure, so I send Jasper off to the lab with both casings and the gun for comparison.”

  “And you wouldn’t be here right now if they didn’t match up.”

  “Perfectly. Bottom line is the same gun shot those two bullets—one of them killing Geoff Cooke and, I’d bet on it, the other one did Peter Ash. And yes, on Cooke’s boat. Oh, and I almost forgot . . .”

  “There’s more? How could there be more?”

  “Not tied up as tight as these casings yet, but back at the boat, they luminoled everywhere, popped it with our ultraviolet magic light, and there it was, plain as day. Spatter on the side and a small pooling in the gutter.”

  “So blood on the boat?”

  “Luminol. I love that stuff.”

  “What’s not to love?” Faro went on. “So anyway, Mr. Cooke had tried to wash the deck down and clean the blood off, of course, but he didn’t get it all because no one ever does. I’m having it expedited at the lab even as we speak, and I’m betting that the blood came from Peter Ash. But we’ll know that soon enough.”

  Beth turned the baggie over again. “Damn,” she said. “Nice work, Len. I mean it.”

  “Well, a day late and a dollar short,” he said seriously. “If I’d have listened to you when you first brought it up, we might have saved Mr. Cooke’s life.”

  “Yeah. Well, it looks like he didn’t want it saved, so I wouldn’t lose sleep over it.”

  * * *

  “Is this what it’s going to be like to be dating a cop?”

  “Is what what it’s like?”

  “You know. You set something up and then if the cop doesn’t have work, you can go ahead and do whatever you planned. But if something in the line of work comes up, the date gets canceled or moved around.”

  “Yep. That’s pretty much it. We’re a pretty flexible group. But who’s dating a cop who wants to know?”

  “I seem to be trying to, without much luck so far.”

  “Maybe you should try again.”

  “All right. Assuming no citywide catastrophe or personal tragedy, would you like to go out this Friday night, seven p.m., to dinner someplace?”

  “That was a good try.”

  “Thank you. So what’s the answer?”

  “What was the question again?”

  “Smart-ass.”

  * * *

  Beth and Ike, eleventh and twelfth in line for the Swan Oyster Depot on Polk Street, stood with their hands in their pockets against the chill—not as cold as the near-frost of the previous week, but with the wind chill it was midfifties—plenty cold enough for San Francisco. The bright sun packed all the warmth of a birthday candle on the fifty-yard line.

  The Swan—one of the best seafood spots in a big seafood town—was a tradition between Beth and Ike whenever they closed a righteous murder case. Waiting in the ever-present line was always an entertainment in itself. In front of them today, they’d already met a couple from Portland, Oregon, who were celebrating their tenth anniversary and who had had their first date here. Just behind them, the self-styled Sally the Septuagenarian marched in place, keeping her feet warm (she told them), humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” just loud enough to be heard.

  While they waited, between their interactions with their line mates, they’d already covered the continuing progress of Ike’s daughter, Heather, and Alan’s sister, Laurie, and the burden of raising children in general.

  Moving on to professional matters, due to the lack of even one witness, they had decided to refile the Ulloa Super case as inactive, at least until the next liquor store robbery presented itself with a similar pattern of facts. It turned out that the Ulloa Super’s surveillance camera, when they’d fired it up again, hadn’t been working anyway. Beth figured that mom-and-pop stores had one mainly for wall decoration. She’d never seen one that actually worked the way it was supposed to. The television, by contrast, always worked perfectly. Finally, on the Ulloa case, Ike pointed out the hopeful detail that they had recovered a bullet slug that might prove useful in comparison at a later date.

  Beth went into a rant about trying to correct the basically unintelligible transcripts they were getting on their cases. She wondered about the possibility of giving some kind of merit-based test to determine an applicant’s eligibility for the transcription pool. “You know,” she said, “like the ability to type. How about that?”

  “It’ll never happen,” Ike said.

  “But it’s the job.”

  “Right. Which means you can teach people to do it. And this in turn means you can hire them to do it even if they’ve never typed in their lives.”

  “But there are so many people who can already actually type. Every kid in the world grows up glued to a keyboard. Why don’t we test and then hire them? And by the way, I read a story the other day where eighty-seven percent of kids under twenty-five didn’t know what a typewriter ribbon was. You know why? They don’t know what a typewriter is. Maybe they think that whatever it is, it comes wrapped in a ribbon.”

  Ike nodded sagely. “That’s like the story I read the other day that said seventy-four percent of all statistics are wrong.”

  Beth gave him a cold eye. “Funny,” she said. Then, “Hey, we’re up.”

  There are no tables at the Swan, just about a dozen mismatched seats in front of a counter. Everyone is elbow to elbow.

  A couple of spoonfuls into her clam chowder, Beth finally got around to Ike’s morning down at the morgue. “Any surprises?”

  “Well, after our talk last night when you were so pissy about the note to his wife . . .”

  “I was not pissy. It just seemed a little off. Sent in an email? Really?”

  “Well, whatever, I went down to the morgue with a bit of a chip on my shoulder. I wanted to make sure the body didn’t have any tales to tell that might eliminate suicide.”

  “So you agreed with me, the whole computer suicide email thing?”

  “Actually, I didn’t. I thought you were grasping at straws. My opinion, that note was completely legit. But hey,” he held up a finger, “I also wanted . . . hell, you know. This far along, ready to close the case, I didn’t want to fuck things up by taking things for granted.”

  “Always a good idea. So how’d it go down there?”

  “Pretty damn well. It got me past reasonable doubt, anyway. Mr. Cooke killed himself. Want me to count the ways?”

  “Go for it.”

  “One. GSR was all over his gun hand, on the front of his shirt, every place you’d expect to find it, no place you wouldn’t.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  “Burn marks right up against the hair? Check. Trajectory of the shot through the brain? Totally consistent with self-inflicted. By the way, is it just me or is Patel a little bit out there?”

  “Maybe a little,” Beth said. “But I like him. So he signed off on
his ruling?”

  “Well, he was still on it when I left, but off the record, he said that unless he came across something truly drastic, which he didn’t expect from what he’d seen so far, he was going with suicide.” The waiter slid a glass filled with white wine along the counter. It stopped of its own accord right in front of Ike. “These guys are too good,” Ike said. He picked up the glass and knocked back a third of it. “And though it pains me to say it, Beth, you’re not so bad yourself.”

  “Me? I did nothing.”

  “Wrong. You turned Len on to the boat, where he never would have looked on his own. And which in turn closes the circle on Cooke and Ash. I mean, the casing and blood match from the luminol, both. You must admit it’s about as clean as it gets.”

  “Still, believe me, it was just a hunch that worked out.”

  Ike took another sip of wine. “This false modesty ill becomes you.”

  Beth shrugged. “I never put it together, Ike. If Cooke hadn’t done what he did, I’d still be wondering if it might have been Theresa, after all. Or Carol Lukins’s husband. Or the boyfriend of another of Ash’s conquests. So I’m really not considering this my masterpiece in the art of detecting. Cooke had me completely fooled.”

  “Me, too. If it makes you feel any better.” Spearing some crab, he chewed for a minute.

  Beth took the opportunity to get a few words in. “So,” she said, “one last question and I’ll leave this forever.”

  He looked across at her, drank more wine, swallowed. “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Motive.”

  “What about it?”

  “What was it? These two guys were supposedly best friends. Why’d Cooke kill Ash?”

  Ike considered. “Well, first, as we know, motive is highly overrated. Any jury in the world looks at the hard evidence we got—the gun, the matching casings, the spatter on the boat—they convict in a heartbeat.”

  “I’m not talking jury, though,” Beth said, “since there’s never going to be a trial. But just between us, what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of betrayal, I suppose. Maybe with Cooke’s wife. And somebody sleeps with your wife, you kill him, right? Oldest motive in the world, and we know that Ash was on the make at all times.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay, if you don’t like that, how about this? Cooke and Ash were out hounding around together, maybe they did some stupid guy thing and Cooke couldn’t trust Ash to keep their secret so he had to shut him up. There’s at least two motives off the top of my head. But as I say, and as you well know, we don’t need motive. The evidence talks.”

  Beth tipped up her Diet Coke. “It certainly does,” she said.

  Ike looked over at her. “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

  “From me?” Beth asked. “Perish the thought.”

  35

  SOMEBODY SLEEPS WITH YOUR WIFE, you kill him, right?

  Beth opened her eyes and was completely awake, her heart pounding in her chest. Disoriented, she could not at first place where she was. No night-light relieved the darkness in the pitch-black room.

  She all but heard aloud her partner’s voice as his comment at the Swan counter hovered in and around the borders of her consciousness. Those words were what had woken her up, except that in the dream they had been out in a biting wind at Crissy Field, where she and Kate used to walk.

  Somebody sleeps with your wife, you kill him, right?

  Her hand went to her breast, and she was somewhat surprised to realize that she was in a nightgown. She had no memory of going to bed. Or of coming home for that matter.

  Now, forcing a deep breath of air into her lungs, she blew out heavily.

  The dark shadows were becoming familiar. She was in her room.

  Throwing off the covers, she went to move her legs off the side of the bed so that she could stand up.

  But the pain stopped her and for a long moment would not let her move.

  With an unconscious groan, she labored to get another breath, steeled herself, and tried again.

  Her legs held her and she was on her feet. Finally, in her bathroom, she turned on the light and splashed cold water on her face. Her hands gripped the sink on both sides, taking some of her weight off her legs.

  She dried her face and hobbled out to the front of the duplex where she looked down at the quiet street, then turned back and checked in at Ginny’s room.

  But her daughter, she remembered now as she saw the empty bed, was staying over at Laurie’s. Alan was there, too, she supposed. That had been the plan, anyway.

  But for Beth, the fatigue had been too great. The Ulloa all-nighter case this past weekend, then Laurie’s emergency yesterday morning, and finally Geoff Cooke, which had led to formally closing the Ash case with Patel’s suicide ruling they’d been waiting for. She simply had needed to go home and get some rest.

  Now the digital clock on her microwave in the kitchen told her it was 4:17.

  Retracing her steps through her apartment, she found herself back in her bedroom. Gingerly she lowered herself down to where she was sitting on the side of her bed, then lay on her side and pulled her blanket up to cover her.

  A blessed two hours later, she threw the blanket off, forced her legs to move again, and walked into the kitchen, where she pushed the button on her Keurig coffee machine.

  * * *

  As she was getting dressed, Beth checked her calendar and realized that on this Wednesday morning, Ike was testifying at the trial of Raul Sanchez, whom they had arrested for the murder of his girlfriend a little over a year ago. Best case, this would tie him up all morning; it would not be unheard of for his testimony to take all afternoon as well. Or longer.

  So she would be on her own.

  This suited her to a T.

  Although it had been Ike’s question—Somebody sleeps with your wife, you kill him, right?—that had woken her up and set her on the path she was now planning to pursue, she also knew that he wouldn’t particularly appreciate her agenda. After all, the Geoff Cooke case was closed, and that in turn closed the Peter Ash inquiry. It was now, Ike was convinced, open and shut. Cooke had killed Peter Ash because his friend had seduced his wife, and then—exact motive be damned—he had taken his own life.

  But Beth didn’t know for a certainty, or even believe as a strong possibility, that Peter Ash had in fact slept with Bina Cooke. And though she knew that the evidence strongly if not overwhelmingly supported the theory on which both cases had been solved and closed, she would feel much better about everything if she could just verify that one prime mover of a fact—if Peter Ash hadn’t slept with Bina Cooke, or even if Geoff never knew or believed that he had, the whole thing fell apart.

  She had to know.

  She’d been to the Cooke home twice before, but somehow the grandeur of the place hadn’t registered. Now as she got herself settled with her tape recorder at the head of the ten-foot-long mahogany table in the formal dining room, she realized that this was one of the most beautiful homes she’d ever seen.

  The view off to her right through the north-facing windows was, she thought, nothing short of ridiculous—the whitecap-studded bay, the bridges, Alcatraz, the Marin headlands, and beyond. She thought that any one of the chairs around the table cost more than her monthly rent; the Murano glass sculpture of a naked woman in the far corner probably would come close to her yearly salary.

  When she and Ike had last come here on Monday night to break the news about Geoff’s death, Bina had been overcome first with shock and then with an overriding grief. But before they were done, she was fairly seething with open hostility—of course wanting to kill the messengers.

  And there had been more than a trace of that anger when Beth had called her an hour ago, asking for another interview. But now, as Bina sat down cater-corner to her, one chair down to her left, before Beth could even lead up to her questions, Bina launched into her own alternative theory of the case, contending that it somehow had to do with Theresa Bol
eyn.

  “I didn’t think of it originally,” she said, “though of course I was aware of it, the connection between Theresa and Peter. But after what’s happened with Geoff . . . well, it occurred to me that her suicide might not have been exactly what it seemed, either. And I know that in Geoff’s case—he did not kill Peter, and he certainly did not kill himself. That is just not possible.”

  “You’re saying that Theresa . . .”

  The color rising in her cheeks, Bina said, “Didn’t you think she did it, too? Killed Peter, I mean?”

  “Well, we did talk to her, but we hadn’t gotten too far before she killed herself.”

  “Exactly. First, she was a suspect and then she conveniently killed herself. Doesn’t this sound all too familiar?”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that when Peter’s real killer realized that Theresa was a suspect, if he could cast the blame onto her, you would stop looking for him.”

  “You’re saying you think the same person killed Peter Ash, and Theresa, and then your husband?”

  Her eyes bright with what seemed almost like a kind of madness, Bina nodded. “And when that didn’t work with Theresa, when the suspicion shifted to Geoffrey, for some ungodly reason, the killer tried the same thing. Except this time, it seems to have worked.”

  Beth scratched at a tiny blemish in the tabletop. Suddenly Bina, in her grief and panic, was exuding a kind of hysterical intensity in the telling that threatened her basic credibility. This was a woman distraught over the loss, the abandonment, of her husband, and if she could find a plausible way to deny the horrible basic truth of Geoff’s taking his own life, Beth thought that she would follow that path wherever it led.

  “Bina,” Beth said with a conscious gentleness, “you realize that there were over a dozen witnesses who saw Theresa step in front of the streetcar that day, and nobody even hinted at the idea that somebody pushed her? Is that what you’re saying you believe?”