The Fall

by John Lescroart

  But it was going to be their place at last, their very own, and with all its problems it was still a huge improvement over the truly filthy crowded apartment (and bedroom) Royce had been sharing with his five lowlife criminal friends. They’d fix it all up. They’d be making good money, and even with the exorbitant twelve-hundred-dollars rent, Honor figured they’d be able to buy some new stuff and get the place cleaned up and livable in no time.

  But now it was six weeks later, and Honor had to admit that the situation with the apartment—not good to begin with—had, if anything, deteriorated. The first thing that went wrong was that once she had left McAllister Street, her control over the girls began to evaporate. She was no longer on the premises to arrange assignments and follow up on payments, and almost immediately, two of them decided they could make their own arrangements, hooking up with other customers. Another one decided she didn’t really like the work and would rather concentrate on school and try to get a real job when she got out.

  So the income was falling. About a month ago, Royce had gone so far as to suggest that Honor take on a few customers of her own to make up for the shortfall. That had been a bad night. Honor considered herself a businesswoman who had discovered a lucrative trade that she could exploit, that was all. She was not about to sell her body to some guy for money. She loved Royce, which was why she was with him. They were building a life together. She couldn’t believe that he could even consider her like one of her girls. She was a cut above, smarter, different. She was his partner, not just his main source of income. They were equals.

  He’d hit her again that night, hard, and more than once. He had told her what she needed to do, and she was going to do it, goddammit. Afterward he’d made up with her, or tried to, saying he was sorry. She was right. She shouldn’t ever have to turn tricks. And it wasn’t like she was going to leave him. Where would she go, after all?

  But it changed things for her.

  And then—hard to believe all these changes happened in a matter of weeks—came the drugs. Royce had always dealt a little weed to augment his spending money, but he’d given that up once Honor had gotten her string of girls steadily producing. With that cash flow slowing down, he had looked up some of his old connections and decided that he could do better than weed by dealing cocaine, for which there always seemed to be a ready market. Since cocaine was available to him, he had started taking the occasional snort or more.

  By far the worst of the changes, she thought as she sat in their dirty apartment at eleven-thirty on this Thursday night, was his stepping out on her with a bitch named Lilianne Downs, whom he’d known from his old ’hood and had run into when picking up some powdered product a couple of days ago. Lilianne had called him on his cell three times in the past two days, as if Honor couldn’t figure out who it was. Honor also knew that he’d called her back only this evening, just before he remembered needing to go meet a guy about a thing; he’d left the apartment a little after seven, telling Honor he’d be back soon.

  She didn’t define four hours as soon.

  •  •  •

  AT LAST, THE click of the lock turning.

  She started at the sound, immediately and completely awake, and sat up. The built-in clock on the stove read 11:43, and the juice glass in front of her, from which she’d been drinking her wine, was empty.

  That son of a bitch.

  She got to her feet and made it to the door just as he was starting to push it open. She kicked at it, and it slammed closed with the power to shudder the walls.

  On the other side of the door, Royce exploded in a tirade of profanity. He turned the knob again, and she threw her whole body against the door, slamming it again.

  “Goddammit, Honor! Open up! Let me in.”

  “You’re done here, you motherfucker,” she screamed. “Go on back to your whore! You’re not getting in.” She had her foot pressed against the bottom of the door, but when he came at it next time with all of his might, he pushed that wedged foot back a couple of inches, then threw his arm into the crack he’d forced open. She had no time to reset herself before he slammed his whole body against the door again, opening it another two or three inches. He shoved more of his arm in.

  Leaning up against the inside of the door, Honor threw a backhanded fist into his forearm, then threw her body back against him.

  He screamed in pain and pulled his arm out but didn’t give back one inch of what he’d gained, holding the door open with the strength of his body, leaning up against it. He kicked the bottom of the door, got his foot through the breach he’d opened, and once more body-slammed it. And again. Another inch. And another.

  Finally, he pulled away and charged, knocking her backward and off the door. Unsteady from her drinking, she screamed, stumbled, and went down, and even though she kicked at him and connected two or three times, he was all the way inside the apartment and hovering over her, kicking at her ribs and then pouncing nearly full length onto her body, holding her down, his knees on her arms up around her shoulders, snapping her head to the left with his right hand, to the right with his left, every breath a swear word as the blows rained down left and right, left and right, left and right . . .

  •  •  •

  WAS SHE DEAD?

  What had happened? Where was she?

  In some sort of bed, but not her own bed in her apartment. She could tell, even in her near-unconscious state, that it was too clean, too tightly blanketed, for that.

  And her eyes. She didn’t have to try opening her eyes to tell that she couldn’t. They felt like something heavy was weighing on them, pressing them into her skull. Her arms seemed to be tied to her sides. She had no sense of her face. It was all numb. Maybe she was drugged. That’s right, she was drinking wine, she thought. Something also felt wrong in her jaw. She couldn’t define it, but it was different. Her mouth, too, the inside of her mouth. Were some teeth gone? She couldn’t move her tongue to check.

  She was sinking, going under again.

  •  •  •

  A WOMAN’S GENTLE voice. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Hunh.” It came out sounding wrong. She tried again. “Honor.” Her mouth seemed to be wired shut.

  “Honor?”

  She couldn’t nod, couldn’t blink, couldn’t tell the woman she’d gotten it right. Her eyes let in no light. And the weight on them . . . “Yes. Honor Wilson.” It still didn’t sound like her name.

  But the woman repeated it, got it close enough. “Honor Illsun. Is that your name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Honor,” she asked, “who did this to you?”

  Did what? she wanted to say. Everything seemed to be broken. She realized she couldn’t feel her feet. The whole world was black.

  All of a sudden, it came back to her. Royce trying to let himself in. The struggle at the door to her apartment, getting pinned down, his knees on her arms. The fists coming at her one after another until . . .

  Until she woke up here, wherever she was.

  What had happened? How did she get here?

  It was Royce, the fucker. Royce, the man she’d loved. Who’d cheated on her, betrayed her. And now she knew with all her soul that he had killed her. She was going to die. That’s why she had no body anymore. No feeling. She would sink again into blackness and never come up out of it.

  The voice spoke again, whispering, gentle. “Honor, who did this to you?”

  “Royce.”

  “Rice?”

  “No.” She tried to breathe in, get more air behind what she said. “Royce. Royce Utlee.”

  “Rice Sully?”

  “No. Ut-lee.” Her tongue could make the T sound. Good. That would be close enough. Rice Utlee. They could identify him from that, and once they started looking, they’d know who had done this to her.

  And she would get her revenge for what he’d done. The fists came back to her, the pounding on her. He must have done more after she lost consciousness—her arms and legs,
her eyes.

  Where had they found her?

  Where was Royce?

  She was going to take him down. At the very least, ruin the rest of his life. She heard the woman saying something from far away, as though talking to somebody else. Honor forced herself to make a guttural moan.

  “It’s all right.” The voice was soothing. “What is it, Honor? Do you want to say something?”

  “Yes.” She could say “yes” clearly, and she repeated it. “Yes.”

  “I’m right here. Talk to me.”

  “Royce Utlee,” she managed, with all the enunciation she could muster.

  The voice repeated it almost exactly; she had it now. “Something else about Royce Utlee?”

  She drew a breath. “Yes.”

  “What is it?”

  “Also killed Anlya Paulson.”

  “Also killed who?”

  “Anlya Paulson. Tunnel girl.”

  “Anlya Paulson.” She got it right on the first try. “The tunnel . . . Oh my God! You’re saying ‘the tunnel girl’?”

  “Yes.”

  Honor didn’t know if she smiled. She couldn’t feel her face. Her heart was glad, though. The woman understood what she’d said. Honor would get back at Royce and give him another murder to explain while he was about it.

  Because Honor had long since decided that Royce had killed Anlya to get her out of their business. Back then, that hadn’t been her concern, what he’d done with Anlya. But now it was. Now it would be another bullet in the weapon that would take that motherfucker down.

  It was already dark. Her eyes could not open. She let out a breath. It went all the way out to where there was nothing left to exhale. She felt warm and suddenly at peace as she went to grab the next breath, but she found no purchase there as the air ran out and the darkness swelled and settled around her and took her all the way down.

  •  •  •

  OFFICER JANINE McDOUGAL was twenty-eight years old, and for three of those years she had been a uniformed patrol cop in San Francisco. At about one-fifteen A.M., with her partner, Don Cortes, she had been patrolling a godforsaken bit of turf in the Western Addition when Dispatch had alerted them to the 911 on Turk and Webster—an unidentified young woman, perhaps a victim of a hit-and-run, lying in the street. Janine and Don beat the ambulance there, and Janine rode with the victim out to General Hospital, while Don followed in their cruiser.

  Janine didn’t know if there was a distinctive pattern of injuries consistent with hit-and-run victims, but in her time on the force, she had gained an unenviable familiarity with the injuries seen in cases of domestic violence. After a good preliminary look at this woman, she felt pretty sure she was viewing a very serious beating that the victim had suffered, probably at the hands of her mate, spouse, boyfriend, whatever. Once the EMT crew had arrived, and even with all of her experience in these situations, she was appalled to hear the medical techs say that regardless of whether the woman had been beaten, they would bet she’d also been run over by a car, probably to kill her for sure and keep her from identifying her assailant.

  The victim was obviously tougher than that. By the time they got her to General Hospital, where her condition was pronounced critical by the ER, Janine felt certain that this would turn out to be a homicide.

  But it wasn’t yet. And she was a cop, and she was here. And she had her tape recorder.

  She couldn’t call Homicide until the woman was dead. Well, she could, but because of the late hour, it would not be appreciated. The first time she had called for a victim who was still alive, the Operations sergeant had told her drily that the Homicide protocol was for completely dead people, not almostees. So she told Don she was going to stick around, if he could spare her, and try to talk to this victim if she regained consciousness.

  At 4:51, against all predictions, that’s exactly what the victim did.

  Now, forty-one minutes later, Honor was dead and Janine was talking by phone to Devin Juhle. She felt as nervous as she had at her first prom—her career goal was Homicide inspector—and this was her first dance. “I told Operations this was a homicide. They said they would send the on-call inspectors, but because of what the victim told me before she died, I thought you might want to know right away, so I had them call you and give you my number in case you wanted to talk to me right now. I hope I’m not wasting your time.”

  Juhle, sounding like the soul of patience, finally got a word in. “It sounds like you handled everything perfectly, Officer. So start from the beginning. What did she say?”

  “She said her name was Honor. She said it two or three times. Honor, as in honor thy father and thy mother, last name Wilson. I’m pretty sure that’s it, or sounds a lot like it. As I say, I’ve got it on tape, and I figured we could run her driver’s license and see if we got lucky, find out where she lived, and so on.”

  “Excellent. But that’s not why you called me. What else did she say?”

  “Well, when she came to, I told her it didn’t look good, that she might not make it, and this was her chance to say what happened. I asked her if she could tell me who had beaten her.”

  “That was good thinking.”

  “Thank you. Again, between the drugs and the condition of her mouth, the name didn’t come out crystal-clear, but she really seemed to want us to know who had done this to her, so she came back to it a couple of times, and eventually, I think we got it. A Royce Utlee.”

  “Her killer’s name from her deathbed? It doesn’t get better than that, Officer. Good work. And though I don’t want to sound impatient, that’s great stuff for the inspectors, but again, why are you calling me?”

  “There was more, and I think it’s important.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She said this Royce Utlee also killed Anlya Paulson, the tunnel girl.” After fifteen or twenty seconds, Janine said, “Lieutenant, did you copy that? I said—”

  “No, I heard you. She said he killed Anlya Paulson. Did she give any further details about that second murder?”

  “No, sir. Just the bare fact of it.”

  “How did she know about it?”

  “She didn’t say. She just came out and volunteered the information.”

  She heard Juhle sigh at the other end of the line. “Anlya Paulson,” he repeated.

  “Isn’t that trial going on right now, sir?”

  “I believe it is, yes.”

  “Is the suspect Utlee? Is he out on bail? Wouldn’t that be odd in a murder case? I mean, could he have . . . ?”

  “The suspect isn’t Royce Utlee. It’s Greg Treadway.” Juhle sighed again. “Okay, after she gave you Anlya’s name as somebody else Utlee killed, what happened next?”

  “She flatlined, sir. And they weren’t able to bring her back.”

  27

  AT WHAT WES Farrell considered the truly obscene time of 6:50 on Friday morning, he spotted Devin Juhle at one of the back tables near the corner at the Irving Street Café, which was about midway between their two houses. He wound his way through the crowd and took a chair across from the red-eyed, heavy-lidded Homicide chief.

  Farrell’s face registered pure disgust. “Well, ain’t this a fine kettle of fish?” he asked. Sitting back in his chair, he let the waitress fill his coffee cup, then thanked her and said to Juhle, “Have you gotten anything else since we talked?”

  “Actually, quite a bit, although I can’t guarantee you’re going to like it.”

  “What a surprise. Hit me.”

  “The girl’s name is, in fact, Honor Wilson. Both Waverly and Yamashiro knew all about her. She lives in Anlya’s group home, at least that’s the address on her DL, although there seems to be some question if she was still there.”

  “What about this Utlee guy?”

  “We don’t have much of a handle on him yet. This will shock you, but he’s not at the address on his DL, which is suspended anyway. He’s got a one-strike sheet with a Two-eleven as an adult, but I’m betting it’s got m
ore than that robbery charge if you count juvie time. They’ve pulled a warrant on him based on Honor’s deathbed ID, but for the moment, he’s nowhere to be found, although my guys are heading out to Anlya’s house even as we speak and hope to talk to some of the other girls about what, if anything, was going on there. But last time, with Anlya’s death, nobody knew nothing. The usual.”

  “Shit.”

  “That’s what I thought. More important, what are we going to do about the Anlya Paulson thing?”

  Farrell drank some coffee, made a face, dropped a couple of sugar cubes into his cup, and stirred. “First off,” he said after a more acceptable sip, “you can set your mind at ease about Anlya, because it’s hearsay and it’s not admissible. It’s just this Wilson girl’s statement.”

  “Deathbed statement, though. A dying declaration.”

  Farrell shook his head. “Nope. A dying declaration has to be about the cause and circumstances surrounding the death. So Utlee killed me, admissible. He killed somebody else, inadmissible. And not to quibble, there’s also no foundation. We have no idea why she thinks this Royce Utlee killed the tunnel girl. We don’t know if he confessed to her, if she saw it, or if her dead cat came to her in a dream and told her. We can’t prove she has personal knowledge. It’s not admissible. Maybe when you find this guy, you can sweat him and get a confession or something else you can use, but unless you do, the girl’s statement is worthless.”

  “Okay,” Juhle said, “that’s the legal answer. But that’s not really my question.”

  The waitress came by and interrupted to take their orders—eggs over easy, bacon, the best hash browns in the city, English muffins, and orange juice for both of them—then promptly disappeared again.