The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  There was a long silence, and when it ended, Kensing was completely unprepared for Hardy’s fury. “Oh, you think so, Doc? The lieutenant in charge of homicide interrogates you for two hours about a murder that’s on the front pages every day, that might be connected to a brutal murder of a whole family, and you’ve got motive, means, and opportunity and you think maybe, just maybe, they might think you’re a righteous suspect. You studied anatomy, didn’t you, Doc? Does everybody else have their head up their ass or is it just you?”

  Kensing just sat there looking at the receiver in his hand. He felt a rush of blood to his head, and then physically sick. He thought he might throw up. His knuckles were white on the phone. His throat was a barren desert, constricted. After a few more seconds, unable to get a word out, he hung up.

  When Hardy called Kensing back twenty minutes later to apologize for his outburst, he didn’t find himself fired, as he’d half expected. Instead, his client apologized back to him, ending with his observation that Glitsky “might really think I killed Tim.”

  About time he got that message, Hardy thought. But he only said, “It’d be smart to assume that.” But he had called his client back for another reason besides the apology. If he was still defending the good doctor, he had some pertinent questions to ask him. “Eric, I went by Portola today and talked to some nurses there. What do you think are the odds that the overdose was accidental?”

  “Basically, in this case, zero. Why?”

  Hardy ran down Rebecca Simms’s theory about the occasional inadvertent overdose. When he’d finished, Kensing repeated what he’d said before. “No. It wasn’t that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I was there. Markham wasn’t even on potassium. He was stable. Relatively, anyway.”

  “So,” Hardy asked simply, “what’s that leave? Who else had access to him?”

  “Carla, I suppose, technically. Maybe Brendan Driscoll earlier. Ross, a couple of other doctors. The nurses.”

  “How many nurses?”

  “You’d have to check the records. I don’t know. There’s usually two, sometimes three. I think there were two.” The enormity of it seemed to hit him for the first time. “You’re saying one of those people killed him, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what it looks like, Eric.” He refrained from adding, “Either one of them or you.”

  “Jesus,” Kensing said weakly. “So what do we do now?”

  Hardy hesitated for just an instant. Trace awkwardness remained from the earlier outburst. But he went ahead. “This may seem a little prosaic after what you’ve been through tonight, Eric. But before things go any further, we’ve got to talk about my fees.”

  “Can’t you just bill my insurance?”

  Neither man laughed.

  Hardy waited out a reasonable silence, then said, “You might want to get where you can be comfortable. This is going to take a while.”

  Glitsky wanted to debrief the car police after the Kensing interrogation at his condo, so although it was late, he drove back downtown. Now he was back at his desk, waiting for Fisk and Bracco so they could talk about what, if anything, they’d learned, how they were going to proceed on this investigation. Outside his door, five of his other inspectors were hanging around catching up on their paperwork. Someone had brought in a pizza, the smell of which was driving Glitsky crazy since he was supposed to go light on the food groups that used to be his favorites, which included cheese and grease.

  What was keeping those guys? He’d thought they were right behind him. Finally he heard some laughter out in the detail and got up to check it out. He thought it entirely possible that somebody had Krazy Glued Fisk to his chair.

  Glitsky gave up the good fight and grabbed a slice of pizza from Marcel Lanier’s desk, and put half of it in his mouth before he could change his mind. When he had swallowed enough of it so that he could talk, he asked what was so funny.

  Lanier was a veteran of the detail, and he leaned back in his chair with his feet crossed on his desk. His hands were linked behind his head. “Just the DA’s office sent up another crazy today, and I finally figured out a way to help him without sending him to the FBI.”

  Glitsky knew that a regular feature of life in the city was the abundance of bona fide lunatics—folks who generally lived on the streets and heard voices, thought they were possessed, communicated with aliens. Occasionally, one of these people would take their concerns to the public defender’s office, which would in turn direct him to the police station downstairs in the hall. There, the desk would nod sympathetically and forward him to the DA’s office, which always sent him to homicide. Most of the time, homicide sent him over to the FBI, where God knew what happened to him.

  “…but today I had this great idea,” Marcel was saying, “and told this poor gentleman what he had to do was braid together a string of paper clips—I gave him a whole box, it took him like an hour—until it reached from his head to his feet. Then he had to attach it to his hair and let the other end drag on the floor, and that would stop the voices.”

  “And why would it do that, Marcel?” Although Glitsky wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer.

  “Because then he’d be grounded.” He held up his right hand, laughing again with the other inspectors. “I swear to God, Abe. He walked out of here a cured man.”

  “You’re a miracle worker, Marcel. That’s a beautiful story. Can I have another slice of pizza?” Glitsky turned to go back to his office, but stopped as Bracco appeared in the detail’s doorway. One of the guys behind him sang out, “Car fifty-four, where are you?” to the enjoyment of the other inspectors.

  Glitsky made a face of disapproval, pointed at his new young inspector and then to his office. When Bracco was inside, standing at-ease as he did, Glitsky waited at the door another minute. “You guys take the scenic route or what? Where’s Harlen?”

  “He’s, uh, he’s not here.”

  Glitsky closed the door behind him. “I got that far on my own, Darrel. The question was where he is, not where he’s not.”

  “I don’t know exactly, sir. He had an appointment.”

  “He had an appointment?”

  “Yes, sir. One of his aunt’s fund-raising—”

  Glitsky interrupted him. “Were you under the impression that you had an appointment here with me? Weren’t my last words to you something very much like, ‘See you back at the hall’? Did you think I meant like tomorrow morning?”

  “No, sir. He said he had to go and he’d already put in his hours for the day, sir.”

  Glitsky’s scowl deepened for an instant and then, suddenly, he found himself chuckling. “‘His hours for the day.’ I love that. What planet’s that boy from? All right, sit down, Darrel, if you haven’t got your hours quota filled up yet. I’ll deal with Harlen tomorrow. Lord.” After Bracco was seated, he pushed his own chair back from his desk, rested his hands over his belly, and put his feet up. “So what’s your take on Dr. Kensing?”

  Bracco sat the same way he stood, with a ramrod-straight back. Using only the front half of the chair’s seat, he kept his hands entwined on his lap. “I guess he’s got motive to burn—and who else has any reason to kill Markham?—but without any hard evidence, no jury would convict him, I don’t think.”

  “I agree.”

  “I think he sounded guilty, if that means anything,” Bracco opined. “I think he thought he was smarter than us and could direct the way it would go tonight.”

  Glitsky allowed the trace of a smile. “I flatter myself I may have disappointed him.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “For the moment, I’d be interested in a minute-by-minute account of how Dr. Kensing spent his day last Tuesday, and I mean from when he woke up.”

  “You think it’s him?”

  Glitsky nodded. “I’d like more physical evidence, but even without it, he was there, he hated and maybe feared Markham, he had every opportunity. Sometimes that’s all we get.”

  B
racco seemed to be wrestling with something. Finally, he came out with it. “If he did kill Markham, are you thinking he also killed the wife?”

  “I’m deeply skeptical of the notion that she killed herself. Let’s put it that way.” He told Bracco about the cell phone in her purse with its call to homicide, the back-to-front trajectory of the slug, the wrong-handedness with the gun.

  “She called homicide? On her cell phone? When was that?”

  “Six o’clock.” Langtry had left the message on Glitsky’s voice mail. Information might be slow in coming, but it was showing up, and that’s what counted.

  “So while everybody was at her house…?”

  “Yep. And nobody was here in homicide. She didn’t leave a message.”

  “Six o’clock was about when Kensing got there, wasn’t it?”

  Glitsky nodded. “From what I can tell. Pretty close.”

  A silence descended.

  Again, Bracco hesitated, considering whether to talk. Again, he decided he must. “You know, we talked to Kensing’s wife today and—”

  Glitsky raised his eyebrows. “When was that, and why?”

  “Well, remember you said you’d rather we didn’t interview certain witnesses. We didn’t want to get in your way, so we stayed around the edges. We went to see Harlen’s aunt, then Ann Kensing.”

  The lieutenant brought his hands up and rubbed them over his eyes. Then he met Bracco’s eyes over the desk. “I shouldn’t have given you the impression that I didn’t want you to talk to people, Darrel. You can talk to anybody you want. This is your case.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  “But I want you to report to me every day. Before you go out, after you get back in.”

  “Yes, sir. But if I may—”

  “You may. You don’t have to ask that. What?”

  “Are we still going on the assumption that the original hit and run was an accident? Harlen still wants to look for cars. I mean, somebody hit him. Maybe it was on purpose.”

  Glitsky’s gaze was level, his voice reasoned and calm. “At this point, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t an accident, but I wouldn’t have predicted Markham’s family would get shot, either. Why? You got some kind of lead on the car?”

  “No, sir. I just wanted to be clear on whether we should drop it entirely or not.”

  “If that moment comes, Darrel, it will be clear to you. Until it is, keep your options open. Now can we go back to what you were going to say, about Mrs. Kensing?”

  Bracco took a second or two dredging it up, and finally he spoke with a kind of reluctance. “Well, she sort of said she thought he admitted it, but Harlen and I didn’t think she really meant that. She was very upset, pretty unaware of what she was saying.”

  Glitsky stopped chewing his pizza and took a long beat. “She said who admitted what?”

  “Kensing. Killed Markham.”

  “She said he told her that?”

  “Yeah, but really, I don’t think…you had to have been there. She was just screaming, crazy upset.”

  Glitsky pulled at his ear, doubting what he’d just heard, wanting to be absolutely sure he was getting it right. “Are you telling me that Ann Kensing told you that her husband said he killed Mr. Markham? He said this to her face?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what she said, but…”

  “And you’ve not gotten around to telling me this before now?”

  “You were already set up with the camera and ready to go, sir, and if you remember we didn’t get any time alone together before you started. So we thought we’d wait until we—”

  Glitsky seemed to be fighting for control. “Didn’t this strike either of you as important information?”

  Bracco shifted uncomfortably. “Well, my understanding was we weren’t supposed to give much credit to hearsay, which was what it was, really. At least we thought.”

  Fingers templed at his lips, Glitsky lowered his voice to keep himself from raising it to a scream. “No, Darrel. Actually, that would be an eyewitness testimony to a confession, which is almost as good as admissible evidence gets. Did you by any chance have a tape running?”

  Sure enough, on the tape, Ann Kensing came across as hysterical, even raving. The tirade was laced with obscenity, with crying jags and breakdowns, with a screaming keening and insane laughter. But there was no question about what she’d heard, what it meant. She’d told Bracco and Fisk that the only reason she hadn’t gone to the police the day before is because she believed the hit-and-run accident had killed Tim Markham. As soon as she realized he’d been murdered, and how he’d been murdered…

  “Listen to me! Listen to me! I’m telling you he told me he’d pumped him full of shit. That’s exactly what he said. Yeah, full of shit. Those words. Which means he killed him, didn’t he? It couldn’t mean anything else. I mean, nobody else knew then, did they? Not before the autopsy. Oh, you bastard, Eric! You miserable, miserable…”

  Glitsky heard it all out, then told Bracco to take the tape directly to the DA’s office for transcription. Somebody would still be there, and if they weren’t, call somebody at home and get them down here working on it.

  When Bracco had gone, Glitsky pulled an arrest warrant form out of his desk and started to fill it out, but after the first few lines, his hands stopped as though of their own accord. This was new and unambiguous evidence—true—and probably strong enough by itself to arrest Eric Kensing. But given the overwhelming, multiple motives and all the political repercussions of the Parnassus question, Glitsky thought the better part of valor would be to hold his horses until the morning and go to Jackman to make the final call.

  The only remaining question in his mind was whether he should include Carla’s name—and the kids’—on the warrant.

  15

  When Hardy dragged himself through the front door of his dark and quiet house at 11:15, he wondered if he’d have the energy left to make it up the stairs to his bedroom. Maybe he should just let himself collapse on the couch here in the living room.

  There was still a glow from the embers in the fireplace. He put down his briefcase, hit the wall switch for the dim overheads, then shrugged himself out of his raincoat and suit coat and crossed the room. On the mantel, Frannie’s new-since-the-fire collection of glass elephants caravanned around several potted cacti. He’d gotten into the habit of rearranging them almost every day—it was a chess game without rules or a board that served as some kind of connection between him and his wife. Nonverbal, somehow positive, and every little bit helped. Between the kids, her school, and his work, he sometimes thought they almost needed to make an appointment to say hello. Without their formal date nights, they would lose track of each other completely. So he made a few moves with the elephants.

  The embers collapsed in a small shower of sparks. Hardy put an arm up against the mantel, rested his head on it. After a minute, he found himself on the ottoman, his elbows on his knees, staring blankly into the last of the glow.

  “I thought I heard the door.” Frannie was wrapped in a white turkish towel bathrobe they’d bought in Napa on their last getaway weekend almost a year before. She came across to where he made a space for her, squeezed in next to him, rubbed her hand over his back.

  “What are you doing up?” he asked.

  “Moses and Susan only left a few minutes ago,” she said. “I was awake.”

  “Moses and Susan? What were they doing here?”

  “And Colleen and Holly. Evidently you told him we’d baby-sit for them tonight so they could go out.” It was half a question. “Which was a nice thing for them, but next time you might want to let me know. Especially if you’re not going to be here.”

  He hung his head, shook it wearily. “What can I say? I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry’s good.” Her hand kept moving across his back. She wasn’t mad, though perhaps would prefer if he could remember commitments he’d made that involved her. “But it’s all right,” she continued. “It went fine. It wa
s lucky I was home, that’s all. Abe called, by the way. And some woman named Rebecca, who said it might be important.”

  Earlier in the day, he might have felt some spark of interest. At the moment, it only felt like more work. “She’s a nurse at Portola I talked with today. This new case.” He was still furious that Glitsky had gone behind his back to interview his client. He tried to keep the anger out of his voice. “What did Abe want?”

  “He said you’d know.”

  Hardy gave it a second. “He lied.” Did he want to get into a long explanation? But her hand felt good on him. They were together. He leaned slightly into her. “He took a statement from my client after I told him not to. Full court press, guns blazing. Maybe he found out my guy didn’t do it and wants to say he’s sorry. But I doubt it.”

  “He must think your client did something.” This was always an issue. Since Hardy had begun working as a defense attorney, she remained uncomfortable with the fact that her husband consorted not only with people accused of crimes, but often with those who had actually committed them. When the charge was something like a DUI or some kind of thievery or fraud, it wasn’t so bad. But when it was murder, Frannie tended to worry on the not unreasonable theory that anyone who had killed once might get angry with somebody else—say, their attorney—and do it again. “So did your client do it after all?”

  “He says not,” Hardy said simply. “But who doesn’t?”

  “And you believe him?”

  “Always.” He faced her. “My problem is Abe. I’ve got no idea what he’s doing.”

  “That’s probably what he called about. To explain.”

  “I’m sure.” Not, Hardy thought. He glanced at his watch. “I’m tempted to call him right now and wake up his sorry ass.” He sighed wearily. “What was the other call? Rebecca? The nurse? She said it might be important?”

  He could see that Frannie hated to admit it again—she’d already done her duty by telling him once. Clearly, she hoped he’d forget. But no. Hardy didn’t forget much about his work—only baby-sitting deals he’d made with relatives. It was Frannie’s turn to sigh. “She said no matter what time it was.”