The Oath

by John Lescroart

  A particularly impressive hematoma on the back of the liver was commanding his complete attention, but he was subliminally aware of his assistant Joyce making her way back through the length of the morgue. When she stopped next to him and hovered, he continued with his examination for a moment, then drawled, "This here could'a done it by its lone self." Then, looking up and seeing her expression of worried concern, he pulled away from his work. "Is something wrong, darlin'?"

  Joyce was new to the staff, but not as new as the equipment they'd recently bought to upgrade the lab. For the past few days, Strout had been supervising Joyce as she conducted tests to calibrate these machines, which ran sophisticated scans on blood and tissues. Since he had Tim Markham's body on the slab this afternoon, he'd given Joyce samples from his body.

  Now she appeared extremely nervous, and for a moment Strout thought she must have broken one of the expensive new toys. "Whatever it is, it can't be that bad," he told her. "What's the problem?"

  She held up a slip of paper, the results from the lab tests she'd been running. "I don't think I could have done this test right. I mean, the machine " She let the thought hang.

  Strout took the paper and squinted at the numbers, saw what she was showing him, and pulled off his sanitary gloves. "That the right number?"

  "That's what I wanted to ask you. Could that be right? I ran it twice and I think I must have done something wrong."

  His eyes went to her face, then back to the paper, which he now took in his hand and studied with great care. "This is from Mr. Markham's blood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Dang," he whispered, mostly to himself.

  * * *

  From the morgue, Strout walked down the outside corridor that connected his office with the back door of the Hall of Justice. A biting afternoon breeze had come up, but he barely noted it. After passing through the guards and the metal detector, he decided to bypass the elevators. Instead, he turned directly right to the stairs, which he took two at a time. Glitsky wasn't in his office. As was the norm in the middle of the day, there were only a couple of inspectors pulling duty in the detail, and neither had seen the lieutenant all day. Strout hesitated a second, asked the inspectors to have Abe call him when he got in, then turned on his heel and hit the stairway again.

  One floor down, he got admitted to the DA's sanctum—hell, he'd come all this way, he wanted to talk to somebody—and in another minute was standing in front of Treya Ghent's desk, asking if Clarence Jackman was available in his room next door. Somethin' pretty interestin' had come up. But even before she answered, her look told him he guessed it wasn't going to be his lucky day. "He's been at meetings all morning, John, and then scheduled at other ones all afternoon. That's what DAs really do, you know. They don't do law. They go to meetings." Strout considered Ms. Ghent—or was it Mrs. Glitsky?—a very handsome, dark-skinned mulatto woman with a few drops of Asian or Indian blood mixed in somewhere, and now she smiled at him helpfully. "Is there anything I can do for you?"

  He thought a minute. "Do you know where Abe's got to?"

  She shook her head no. "He left the house this morning with one of his inspectors. I haven't heard from him since. Why?" Although she knew the answer to that. Strout wanted to see her husband because he was head of homicide. There was no doubt that the "somethin' pretty interestin'" he'd referred to wasn't a hot stock tip.

  The lanky gentleman sighed, then sidestepped and, after asking her permission, let himself down onto the waiting chair by the side of the door. "Got to catch my breath a little. I came up by the stairs, which at my age ain't always recommended."

  "It must have been important," Treya said, she hoped with some subtlety.

  Not that Strout needed the prompt. He was fairly itching to get it out. "You recall the discussion we all had the other day over to Lou's about the Parnassus Group?" Of course she did. Mr. Jackman was still mulling over his options. "Well, you just watch. It's goin' to get a lot more interestin' in a New York minute."

  In a few sentences, Strout had brought her to the crux of it. When he'd finished, she said, "Potassium? What does that mean?"

  "It means the hit-and-run car didn't kill him, 'tho he might'a died from those injuries eventually if they'd just left him alone. But they didn't."

  "It couldn't have been an accident? Somebody grabbing the wrong needle?"

  He shrugged. "Anything's possible, I s'pose. But on purpose or not, he got loaded up full of potassium, and the thing is, that can look pretty natural even if someone does an autopsy. So I'm thinkin' you might know where your husband might be. He's goin' to want to know."

  * * *

  When Jackman got the news about the potassium, he asked Treya to patch Abe in his car and have him come to his office as soon as he arrived back downtown. Then he'd called Marlene Ash and John Strout, both of whom had replied to the summons and were here now, too.

  It was 6:45, and the freshening afternoon breeze had transformed itself into a freezing gale, the howl of which was easily audible even in the almost hermetically sealed DA's office.

  As Jackman stood at his office window looking down at the still-congested traffic below him on Bryant Street, the first large drops of rain, flung with great force, seemed to explode onto the glass in front of him. Unconsciously, he backed a step away.

  He was aware of the hum of urgent shoptalk behind him. The discovery about the potassium had been extraordinary enough, but when Glitsky had finally responded to Treya's call and told her where he'd been all day and what had happened to the Markham family, a sense of impending crisis seemed to wash through the Hall of Justice like a tsunami. At almost the same moment that Abe told Treya about the Markham family, word of the tragedy hit the streets and the calls started coming in to Jackman's office from all quarters—newspapers, television, radio, the mayor's office, the Board of Supervisors, the chief of police.

  Just as Jackman turned away from the window, Glitsky appeared in his doorway. "Abe, good. Come on in."

  The lieutenant touched Treya's arm, nodded around the room. Jackman sat on the front of his desk, facing them, and wasted no time on preliminaries. "So we got a whole prominent family dead in a twelve-hour period. The man's company has the city's contract for health care, and it's damn near broke. I'm predicting media madness short term, and long term? God knows what chaos if Parnassus can't recover. Anybody disagree with me?" He knew nobody would, and he clearly expected the same unanimity with his next question. "Does anybody here have any ideas about how we're going to characterize these developments? I'm going to need some good answers when people start asking."

  The scar through Glitsky's frown was pronounced. He cleared his throat. "We say we're looking into it. No further comment."

  "I thought that would be your position."

  "It's the only position, Clarence." Glitsky, still slightly shell-shocked from his day at Markham's home, didn't know where the DA was going with this meeting, why it was being held at all. "It's also the truth," he added.

  "As far as it goes, yes it is. But I'm thinking we might want to help people decide how they want to think about this. All of it. I think we want to say right up front that Tim Markham was murdered."

  Glitsky glanced at the faces around the room. At this point, the conversation seemed to be about him and Jackman. "Do we know he was murdered?"

  "We know what happened, Abe," Marlene interjected. "It's obvious."

  "I hate obvious," Glitsky replied evenly. "Couldn't it have been an accidental overdose? Was he on potassium anyway for some reason?" He faced Strout. "Couldn't somebody have just made a mistake in the hospital?"

  The coroner nodded. "Could've happened."

  But Jackman didn't like that answer and he snorted. "Then why'd the wife kill herself?"

  "Who said she killed herself?" Glitsky asked.

  "That's the preliminary report I heard," Jackman said.

  "You know why they call it 'preliminary,' Clarence? Because it's not final. It might not be true. We rea
lly don't know anything yet about the wife and kids, that whole situation—"

  "Sergeant Langtry told me it was clearly a murder/suicide, Abe. Just like many he'd seen before. And you, too, isn't that right?"

  "There might be some similarities, but there are also differences. It's just plain smarter if we don't say anything until we know."

  But Jackman was pacing in front of his desk, commanding the room with his presence. "I may know what's plain smarter, too, Abe. I may even agree with you. But humor me. Other inquiring minds are going to want to know—the press, the mayor's office, you can guess—and they're going to ask me. I'm concerned that if we don't say anything, it looks like we don't know anything—"

  "We don't know anything! It's okay if it looks like that."

  Jackman ignored the interruption, repeating his earlier statement. "We know Markham was murdered. We believe his wife was a suicide."

  "I don't know if I believe that at all, Clarence. John here hasn't even done an autopsy on her yet." Glitsky reined himself in a notch. Jackman was playing devil's advocate, he knew, but he would hate it if the DA committed his office to a public stance when it wasn't necessary. It would be more politics messing with his job. "All I'm saying is that it's possible somebody could have gone to a lot of trouble to make it look like a suicide. I know Langtry thinks it might be, but we haven't eliminated any possibilities yet, and I'd be more comfortable—you'd be more comfortable, Clarence—if we could eliminate a few before we start talking to the press."

  Jackman frowned. "You're saying maybe somebody killed her and her family and tried to make it look like a suicide? They find anything at her place that supports that?"

  "Not yet, no, sir. But there's still a lot of lab work to be done." Glitsky pressed on. "I'll go with suicide the minute we can prove it, Clarence. I promise you. But for now we've got a theory that looks squirrelly to me, which is Markham gets to the hospital all banged up, nearly dead in fact, and somebody decides, spur of the moment, to take the opportunity and kill him?"

  Jackman wasn't backing down. "I honestly believe it will look just precisely like that to some reporter somewhere."

  "Okay, so tell him you've got a problem with that. Like why take the risk if he was probably going to die anyway?"

  Jackman went back to Strout. "He wasn't necessarily going to die, was he, John?"

  Conjecture wasn't Strout's long suit, but the DA had asked him a direct question and he felt he had to say something. "Maybe not. Especially once he's out of the ER." He stopped, lifted his shoulders, let them drop. "He could have survived."

  "So," Jackman took Strout's answer as a ringing endorsement, "somebody, maybe even his wife—"

  "Maybe even the wife!" This was new and, to Glitsky's mind, completely bizarre. "You're saying Carla killed her husband at the hospital?"

  Jackman backed off. "All right, maybe not. But somebody at the hospital came to the conclusion that Markham was going to pull through and, for some reason, couldn't have that."

  "All I'm saying then, Clarence, is let's find the reason."

  The exchange was threatening to grow heated and Treya stepped in. "Maybe there needn't be a rush on the wife, Clarence? You only need to make the point that somebody killed Mr. Markham. And I think we'll all agree," Treya added quickly, turning to her husband, "that the potassium points much more clearly to a murder than an accident at the hospital. Wouldn't that be true, Abe? Could you agree to that?"

  Glitsky understood what she was asking him. More, what she was doing. And while now with the potassium overdose Glitsky believed it likely that Markham had indeed been murdered, belief wasn't certainty and never would be. "Okay," he said to his wife. "Let's for the moment agree Markham was murdered in the hospital. So you tell whoever asks that we're investigating. That's what we do. What's the rush to go public?"

  From Treya's expression, Glitsky realized that finally he'd asked the right question. Jackman raised himself off his desk. "Just this, Abe. If Markham was murdered, it goes to the grand jury. I can legitimately use an investigation into his death as a way to get into the books and business practices at Parnassus. We've got every reason to look in his files, take the place apart, see if we can find out why. And who's gonna complain? Somebody killed their top guy. Why wouldn't they want to cooperate in every way?"

  Jackman let his words hang in the air, then continued. "If we begin any kind of inquiry on the billings and their lawyers get into it, we're talking months, maybe years, delay on subpoenas, delay delivering records that they may have shredded by then anyway, or forged new ones. Plus all the public bickering, loss of faith in the city's institutions, blah blah blah. This way, we're in. It's a murder, Abe, and even in this town a solid majority of the voters oppose murder. Nobody will see it as more complicated than that, at least for now. The grand jury's looking into the murder of Tim Markham. There is every justification in the world to probe his relationships and even business practices. And since he was killed in Portola Hospital, there's a demonstrable link there."

  But Glitsky was shifting in his seat again. It was a bad idea to get the DA's office involved in his investigations, particularly if Markham's murder was just the cover for a financial probe of Parnassus. "What if we find Markham's killer before you get finished?" he asked.

  Marlene answered. "We'll leave the grand jury impaneled. We just keep going on the financial stuff."

  Abe frowned at this, but he knew that technically, Marlene could do just that. The grand jury was not crime specific—Jackman and Ash could simply use it to go fishing.

  "But I'll still have your support for the murder investigation as the priority?" he asked. "I don't want to get a suspect close to the net and not be able to bring him in."

  "That won't happen, Abe," Marlene said.

  "Couldn't happen," Jackman repeated. "We're on the same team."

  Glitsky smiled all around, fooling no one. "Well, with that assurance," he said as he stood up, "I'd better get to work."

  PART TWO

  11

  Hardy hit the button shutting off the alarm. Throwing off the covers, he forced himself to sit up lest he give in to the urge to lie back down, just for a minute. Frannie murmured something from behind him, and he felt her hand brush against the small of his back. Reaching around, he squeezed it quickly, then let go and stood up.

  The house felt dark. He stood a minute, summoning the will to move. Outside, a fresh gust rattled the windows. The storm, still blowing.

  After he'd showered and shaved, he pulled on his pants and a shirt in the bathroom so he'd be as unobtrusive as possible. He didn't remember distinctly, but he must have had a rough night's sleep. He still hadn't quite gotten to fully awake. Frannie hadn't yet stirred, either—he thought he'd go downstairs and bring a cup of coffee up for her. That way they would get a few minutes of peace together before the daily marathon of getting the kids off to school.

  In the kitchen, he turned on the light and fed his tropical fish. The long hallway to the front door seemed especially dark as well, but he'd already concluded that it was the weather, so he didn't give it any more thought. When he opened the door, he noted with satisfaction that the Chronicle had made it up onto the porch—by no means a daily occurrence. Maybe it was a sign. He was in for a lucky day.

  But God, he thought, it was dark.

  He'd often expressed his belief that one of the greatest of modern inventions was the automatic coffee machine that began making your critical morning brew about the time that your alarm went off, so that when you got to it, it was ready for you. But when he got back to it, he stopped, frowning. The carafe was empty. Worse, the little green "program" light was still on—when it went into "run" mode, the light turned red. What was going on? He distinctly remembered preparing the coffee last night before he'd gone up to bed, and now he leaned down, squinting, and checked the clock.

  4:45.

  Turning around, he looked up at the large clock on the kitchen wall. Same time. Finally, he thought to consult his w
atch, and got the third corroboration. It was quarter to five on Thursday morning and he was wide awake, dressed up and nowhere to go. And for no particular reason other than that somebody had obviously reset his alarm. When he found out which kid it had been, there would be hell to pay. He had half a mind to wake both kids up now, identify the culprit, break out the thumb screws.

  But so much for his run of good luck. And he still had to wait for his damn coffee to brew. With nothing to do now except kill time, he angrily opened the paper and threw it down on the dining room table. Sitting down, he noticed that yep, it was still dark.

  At least now he knew why.

  Then he noticed the headline: "HMO Chief's Death Called Murder." With the subhead about potassium, he had all he needed to know, although he read the whole article. His new client appeared only once, as the attending staff physician at the ICU, but once was enough. Hardy started to worry.