The Fall

by John Lescroart

  “No slander,” Abe said. “The word is that The Beck drew first blood today. Braden kicked a chair so hard in his office that he hurt himself. He never saw it coming.”

  “Yeah,” Hardy said. “It was a good moment. But to be honest, I don’t know if even I would have picked up on it.”

  “I’m betting you might have,” Frannie said.

  “Maybe, but it didn’t enter my mind today until The Beck did it. And you know, once the jury gets over the grisly pictures, Strout has been known to put people to sleep.”

  “That’s a kind spin, Diz,” Treya said. “But let me just say that you didn’t want to see Wes when he got back to the office.”

  “Unhappy, was he?” Hardy was grinning. “That’s what you get when you go too fast. No offense, Abe.”

  “No. Of course not. It wasn’t me who went too fast. I just happened to find our eyewitness. Since then I’ve been mostly out of it.” He forked another bite of paella. “Are you guys really giving any thought to going with suicide?”

  Hardy shrugged. “Can’t prove it wasn’t. Although I don’t see The Beck making a major point of it. But after today, it’s in the jury’s mind, I guarantee that. And every little bit helps.”

  •  •  •

  THE MEN SAT in the living room, Hardy in his wing chair with a snifter of Laphroaig, Glitsky on the love seat with more iced tea.

  Hardy savored a sip of Scotch. “You’re still a witness, though, right?”

  “I’m on the list,” Abe said. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t call me, since I’m the one who talked first to Mr. Abdullah, but that’s about as far as that ought to go. Other than that, I’m pretty much not involved with Mr. Treadway anymore, and haven’t been since the arrest. I couldn’t even tell you the names of the outlying players, if they ever found any. And I can’t say it breaks my heart.”

  “You don’t like the case against him?”

  Abe leveled a gaze at him. “Let’s say I’d be more comfortable if we’d found a little more before we charged him.”

  “You found your eyewitness.”

  “Yes, I did. And I believe him. But a little corroboration from another source or two wouldn’t have hurt before the grand jury got ahold of him. Just in terms of convictability. Not saying that I have any doubts at all.”

  “No. God forbid you should. If it makes you feel any better, in my darker moments I think Braden’s story sings pretty well. If I’m on the jury, I’m damn close to buying it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  Hardy sipped again, then sat back, feet on his ottoman. “So what’s going on in the office?”

  “Nothing to do with your case. But some pretty interesting stuff. A couple of weeks ago, we got this call from a DA in Minnesota, where they were holding a guy, Ricardo Salazar, for a murder he committed there. The problem was, they dialed him up out there in Fargo-land, and their records indicated that he was in custody in Napa.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, he’s supposed to be locked up here, but he’s physically present in Minnesota.”

  “How’d he do that?”

  “I know. It’s a good question.”

  “No record of his release? Nothing?”

  “Well, listen.” Abe drank some tea. “Mr. Salazar, it turns out, was arrested here a little over three years ago, but he got declared incompetent to stand trial, so they sent him to Napa to see if he could get to competence over the next three years. So I call there—Napa—and sure enough, they knew he was gone, but they thought he was still where they released him after the three years were up.”

  “And where was that?”

  Glitsky’s lips turned up a fraction of an inch, for him a broad smile. “Here,” he said.

  “What do you mean, here?”

  “I mean San Francisco, superior court. From where he disappeared, after he got declared incompetent again. In any event, he got sent to a halfway house, instead of held here in jail for murder or returned to Napa.”

  “They released him to a halfway house? A guy in for murder?”

  “A couple of murders. So they should have been keeping him on some sort of—”

  “Murphy Conservatorship,” Hardy said. “But that means he stays locked up. He gets sent back to the hospital.”

  “True, in theory. But somebody here didn’t get the memo. Instead of checking the box for a Murphy, they checked the box for gravely disabled and shipped him out to this halfway house, still on the books as imprisoned, and next thing you know he’s killing somebody in Minnesota.”

  “Yah,” Hardy said in his best Norwegian accent. “Killing somebody in Minnesota.”

  “You want to hear the weird thing?”

  “Yah, shure.”

  “Stop. Apparently, in the last year or so, there was a rash of this kind of thing in our very own city. Mr. Salazar, and no doubt a few other gentlemen who were legally incompetent and in custody for violent crimes, got sent to a halfway house as disabled instead of back to Napa, and nobody seemed to worry about it at all. And since he was in a halfway house, he decided to walk away. And since he was disabled, nobody bothered to report it back to the court. They just say he eloped—”

  “Eloped?”

  “That’s the word. Eloped. These guys walk away, and basically, they forget about them. Unless he shows up around another crime someplace like Minnesota. And we get the call in San Francisco, which is where I come in.”

  “Where is that, exactly?”

  “This is a bigger problem than you’d think. Wes has us looking at records of the Thirteen Sixty-eights over the past ten years in San Francisco to see if we can find where these people are now, how many of them are there, and whether they were found competent and had their trial, or if not, then where they were. I’ve got two of my guys, Villanova and Schwartz, working on this pretty much full-time. Depending on how many of these bozos there are, the whole unit might have to get involved.”

  “And after they get these elopers, then what?”

  “I don’t know if that’s completely clear yet. First we need something like a census on them, to find out how many of them there are. If these guys are supposed to be in jail but they’re not, Wes wants to know about it, at least be aware of the numbers we might be dealing with. Put out a net of some kind to drag ’em in.”

  “And how, again, did they get out of jail without anybody noticing?” Hardy asked. “Did I miss that part?”

  “I know,” Glitsky said. “It blows the mind.”

  •  •  •

  AT ABOUT THE same time her father and Abe were calling it a night, Rebecca hadn’t yet gotten home. After her long day in court, she’d gone back to the office and spent some more time with her discovery folders, which she’d already all but memorized. She subscribed to the same theory her father did—that it never hurt to go through them again. She’d ordered a sandwich delivered, and at around nine o’clock, she’d made a phone call.

  Now she was sitting across the desk from Hardy’s go-to private investigator, Wyatt Hunt, in his office at the Audiffred Building over Boulevard restaurant. Hunt was in his early forties and newly married to his longtime assistant, Tamara Dade. Rebecca had always considered him distractingly handsome and was kind of glad he was married so she didn’t have to think about it anymore. Tonight Hunt was wearing jeans and a western-style shirt with pearl buttons. He was nearly horizontal, slumped in his chair, cowboy boots up on his desk. He clasped his hands behind his head, the picture of lanky relaxation. “I thought you and your dad had ruled out that whole third-party thing.”

  “We have.”

  Hunt was referring to a defense tactic that Hardy had used to good effect several times; quite often it found its way into jury trials, because when it worked, it was a very effective way to introduce reasonable doubt into the proceedings. This was the so-called SODDIT defense: “some other dude did it.” Formally, it was known as “third-party culpability.”

  The big problem with
it was that over the past couple of years, several upper-court rulings had limited the admissibility of evidence related to that other dude. It was no longer enough, as it once was, to produce an alternative suspect with a motive, even if he had a terrific motive. It still wasn’t enough if the defense attorney added the other dude’s opportunity to have committed the crime. No. Besides both motive and opportunity, they had to show direct or circumstantial evidence linking the third party to the actual perpetration of the crime.

  In Hardy’s last big trial, he’d taken three shots at three different other dudes, all of them plausible, all with great motives and opportunities, and the judge hadn’t allowed one word of it. There had been no evidence, direct or circumstantial, tying the dudes to the actual crime, so the jury wasn’t going to hear about any of them. End of story.

  This time around, Hardy and Rebecca had discussed putting Wyatt Hunt on a search for other potential suspects and had ruled it out because there was no evidence of any kind tied to Anlya’s death. Even if they found someone who might have wanted her dead, they wouldn’t be able to get it past the admissibility issue.

  “So if we’re not going SODDIT,” Hunt asked, “what would you want me to do?”

  “You’re going to laugh.”

  “I promise I won’t.”

  “Well, cutting to the chase, I want you to find out who actually killed Anlya.”

  After a few seconds, Hunt said, “That wasn’t technically a laugh. It was more a chortle.”

  “I don’t really blame you. But I’m not kidding.”

  “So I’m guessing you’re thinking your boy didn’t do it.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “You sound pretty certain.”

  “There’s just no way, Wyatt. If you met him, you’d think the same thing.”

  “Maybe not. What’s your father think?”

  Rebecca made a face. “He’s so cynical. He doesn’t believe anybody anymore, except Mom, and even her only most of the time. He says I’m going to get to be the same way when I get a little more experience in the criminal law business; I should just wait. I reminded him that he’d had innocent clients. It happens. Especially when they move so fast with making the arrest.”

  “Which I’m sure you’re going to argue about.”

  She nodded. “I am. But I’ve got to admit, it’s not a great argument. The judge will just say if they don’t have what they need to convict, the jury in its wisdom will find Greg not guilty. If anything, he’ll say, the rush to arrest is a positive for the defense.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay. So . . . if Greg is in fact innocent . . .”

  “Now it’s ‘if.’ ”

  “No. He is. And that means someone else killed her.”

  “Maybe.” Hunt broke a small grin. “How about the suicide angle, by the way? That sounded like a sweet moment.”

  Rebecca allowed her own tiny smile. “You heard about that, huh?”

  “I was talking to your proud father on another matter. But might she just have jumped?”

  “Possible, barely, but no way does the jury buy it. Not with all the witnesses hearing the struggle and the scream.”

  “How about the random mugger?”

  “Again, possible. But that’s where the eyewitness hurts us.”

  “While we’re on that, what’s your boy’s story?”

  “It wasn’t him. He wasn’t there. He was home sleeping.”

  “I heard they had him on the video.”

  She shook her head. “Any white guy wearing a tie.”

  “Really?”

  “You can check it for yourself. Believe me, without Mr. Abdullah, there’s no ID.”

  “The logical move, then, I suppose, would be to kill him. Abdullah, I mean.”

  “It would be, I know. But it just seems a little wrong.”

  “Picky, picky.” Hunt waved off her objection, then brought his boots down off the desk, straightening up. “So we’ve still got the question: What about the mugger?”

  “If it was a mugger, and it might have been, then Greg’s in trouble. Unless the mugger shows up with her purse.”

  “Her purse? What about her purse?”

  “She had her purse with her, and it hasn’t turned up.”

  Hunt shrugged. “That’s easy. She dropped it in the struggle. Somebody picked it up, took what they wanted, if anything, and threw it away.”

  “Probably. And once they got on Greg’s trail, nobody looked. Which is the problem all along here. Once Greg got on their radar, with all the pressure to identify a suspect, the inspectors didn’t look at any other possibilities. I was looking through some discovery documents earlier tonight, and that’s when it hit me: There are at least a couple of unexplored leads that they just dropped after they glommed on to Greg.”

  “Like?”

  “Like something was going on at the home she lived in. There was some kind of drama with another one of the girls, but after the first interviews, nobody followed up. Then there’s something about her mother and her old boyfriend, a guy named Leon. You can read the transcript of Sharla’s interview. Apparently, he sexually abused her—”

  “The mother?”

  “No. Anlya. When she was younger, thirteen or fourteen. In any event, the mom, Sharla, is damned evasive when she ought to be bending over to help the inspectors find Anlya’s killer, wouldn’t you think?”

  “Unless she just hates cops.”

  “Okay, maybe that, but still. Somebody should talk to her again and try to find out.”

  Hunt cocked his head. “Is that it?”

  “Not completely, no. Last is that nobody’s talked to the person closest to her. Her twin brother. Max.”

  “You’re saying he’s a suspect?”

  “No. I can’t see that. But they never talked to Max to see if he could give them some idea of what else might have been going on in her life. They never even asked.”

  Hunt lifted and dropped his shoulders, resigned. “That’s what happens when you identify your main guy, Beck.”

  “Yes, but it sure does leave a lot of unanswered questions, and I believe that one of them is going to lead to her murderer.”

  “And you want me to ask them?”

  She nodded. “I think you’ll turn up something.”

  “Then what? They confess?”

  Now she broke a real smile. “That would be ideal, though I’m not counting on it. I was thinking more you get something real and pass it along to Devin Juhle. You guys are buds, right?”

  “Reasonably. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to jump on evidence I turn up.”

  “Yes, he will. With all this Liam Goodman stuff in the background, if it looks like something that truly might threaten Greg’s conviction, he’ll want to know all about it, if only to cover his own ass.”

  Hunt chewed the side of his cheek for a moment. “I don’t want to seem unenthusiastic, and I could use the work, but you realize it is overwhelmingly likely that I won’t find anything and it all might get us nothing?”

  “I don’t think that. I think there’s something out there that nobody’s looked at, and that’s why Anlya died.” She reached down and opened her briefcase, extracting a thick folder and reaching over to place it on Hunt’s desk. “Something’s in there,” she said. “Give it a look. See what you think. What do you say?”

  “I say I’ll do what I can. I’ll read all that tonight.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  “Always a pleasure.” He stood up, and they shook hands over the desk. “By the way,” he said, “do you want to hear a coincidence?”

  “Always.”

  “You know that third-party culpability we were talking about earlier? At your dad’s last trial, when he had three of them lined up—you want to guess who one of them was?”

  “Mr. Abdullah?”

  “Beck. Come on. Seriously.”

  “I am serious. You said it was a coincidence.”

  “And it is.”


  “Okay. I give up.”

  “Liam Goodman.”

  Rebecca reeled, almost as though she’d been slapped. “Really?” Then, considering it further, “As a suspect in a murder case?”

  Hunt nodded. “Your dad knows all about it. I went and talked to Goodman. You’ll love this. Somebody was blackmailing him. His blackmailer wound up dead. But no evidence tied him to the actual perpetration of the crime, so the judge never let us get him on the stand.”

  “Wow,” Rebecca said. “That is interesting.” She took another beat, thinking. “Do you have any idea what, if anything, it means in the context of this trial?”

  “No clue,” Hunt said. “Or if it has any meaning at all. It might be just one of those things.”

  “Wow,” Rebecca said again. “Small town.”

  •  •  •

  IN HER NIGHTGOWN, Frannie came into the bedroom from the adjoining bathroom, and Hardy closed his hardback copy of Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and put it on the bedside table. “Are you going to read this when I’m done?” he asked.

  “I’m planning to. I love her stuff. Is this one good?”

  “No. It’s great. But I want to warn you, whatever you do, don’t read the jacket. They ought to have a banner ribbon around the damn thing saying, ‘Spoiler Alert.’ Why don’t they just tell me the whole story so I don’t need to read the actual book? Except that I want to read the book without knowing what happens next. Is that so hard?”

  “Apparently so. And I am now forewarned. Why don’t we just throw the jacket away so I’m not tempted? Here, give it to me. I’m not kidding.”

  He grabbed the book, took off its cover, and handed it across. “Don’t even glance at it! You might pick it up by osmosis.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Frannie crushed the paper in her hands and went to throw it in the bathroom’s wastebasket.

  Also next to Hardy’s bed, the phone rang. Hardy checked his watch: 11:20. “Got to be The Beck.” He reached over to pick it up. “Isn’t it slightly late?” he said by way of greeting.

  It was, in fact, the Beck. “I don’t know . . . Oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize . . .”

  “It’s okay, sweetie. What’s up?”