The Dismas Hardy Novels

by John Lescroart

  So he’d turned off the computer.

  Then, fighting a nagging sense of ennui, he decided to work out at his gym for a couple of hours. When he came home from that, he showered and made a really lovely, well-presented mesclun salad with beets and feta cheese for lunch, which he ate alone on his sunny back patio area. But it didn’t cheer him up. Depressed, he called Roger at work, but he was busy with clients and thought he might even be late getting home, which made Brendan edgy. You just never knew, really, and now he didn’t have a job….

  Well, he was just feeling insecure, and who could blame him? He certainly would never have thought Tim would have considered letting him go, either. People changed. You had to be on your guard, flexible, ready for anything.

  The afternoon yawned before him, endless. He put on some music, walked to the back of the house, threw in a load of laundry, washed his lunch dishes. Finally, deciding that it was the house, he was just going stir-crazy, he got dressed, went down to the garage, put the top down on his Miata, and pulled out into the day.

  Now he’d been driving for two hours. He’d crossed the Golden Gate Bridge and driven up as far as Novato, then turned and come back, stopping for twenty minutes in Corte Madera for a cappuccino. He spoke to no one and no one seemed to notice him, even in his red convertible. He was alone, alone, alone, crossing the bridge again, the ocean blue and white-flecked below him.

  He found himself on Seacliff Drive, turning and pulling up in front of Tim’s house. A realty company had already put a sign on the lawn. The sun was behind him, warm on his shoulders. When he could no longer bear sitting in his car, he got out and approached the house, which seemed to shimmer pink in the afternoon light.

  On the stoop, he stood and, without really thinking about it, rang the doorbell, listening to the loud chiming. Finally he turned around and sat on the top step. He had no idea how many times he’d looked at his watch today, but now he checked it again.

  The sun slipped another degree or two. He didn’t move. A Mercedes drove by on the street. After another segment of time, another car passed, this one throwing newspapers onto some of the driveways, but not the Markhams’. A large crow landed on the walkway down by the sidewalk, hopped a few steps toward him, and cawed loudly.

  It was already the longest day of his life, and still hours before the sun would set.

  He started to cry.

  Glitsky, Bracco, and Fisk met up at the hospital cafeteria and sat at one of the isolated tables, comparing notes.

  “I talked a while to Mr. Bhutan,” Glitsky said. He had a plain, dry bagel in front of him and a cup of hot water he was turning into tea. “He’s an uptight guy and doesn’t seem to have many friends, here or anywhere else. But he struck me as more sad than violent. The suffering of patients seems to bother him a lot for someone who works with it all the time.”

  “Are you saying you think he euthanized some of them?” This was Fisk, who’d reached this conclusion on his own a little earlier.

  “Maybe. It’s a little early, but he might be worth squeezing as time goes by.”

  But Fisk was attached to his theory. “He was the only nurse who worked all of Kensing’s list, you realize that?”

  “Yep. What I don’t know, though, is how many of those people were homicides. And were there other homicides, not on Kensing’s list, where Bhutan wasn’t on duty?”

  Some sign passed between the two inspectors; then Bracco admitted that he’d mentioned the same thing a while ago. He was drinking from a can of Diet Coke, and interested in finding more true homicides. “You have any luck with that, Lieutenant?” Bracco asked. “You said you had somebody else with suspicions.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Another nurse named Rebecca Simms. No names of victims, yet, but she’s asking around. I should tell you that she also mentioned Mr. Bhutan by name.”

  “I like him,” Fisk said.

  “I got that impression, Harlen. I did, too, for a while, but then I got to talking to him about Tuesday night.”

  “Tuesday night?”

  “When Carla Markham died.” Glitsky waited for the words to sink in, then continued. “I’m as fascinated as the next guy with Loring and what we may find with the rest of Kensing’s list. But I’ll tell you both frankly, I’m having trouble with the leap of faith that we’ve got related killings.”

  Bracco repeatedly flicked the side of his soda can. “You mean are Kensing’s eleven homicides related to Markham at all?”

  “That’s it,” Glitsky replied. “One thread leads back through these Pavulon deaths and another leads off the potassium, but do the threads meet?” His tea was getting dark enough and he tested it, bit his bagel, chewed thoughtfully, then shook his head from side to side. “I know it’s possible. It might even be what we have here. And I’d love ’em somehow to be connected, but I can’t seem to make the jump.”

  “They’ve got to be,” Fisk protested.

  “Why is that, Harlen?”

  “Well, I mean…Markham’s how we got to here, right?”

  “That was my original thought when I first heard about Loring, but now I’m wondering. So maybe you can tell me. Why do they have to be connected? We got any evidence tying them together? We got a similar drug? The same M.O.? Anything? Tell me, I’d love to hear.”

  Glitsky knew he sounded a little harsh. He was angry with himself, more than anything, with the first of his conjectures brought about by the addition of Loring in the Markham mix. But he’d use Fisk as a surrogate whipping boy—maybe the rookie would come up with something Glitsky hadn’t himself considered.

  After a moment’s reflection, Fisk spoke up. “We do have the same place for the homicides, Lieutenant. The same way the drugs got administered, through the IV, right? That’s something.”

  “Yes, it is,” Glitsky admitted. He sipped more tea. “But does that in fact really connect Loring and Markham? Same basic M.O. but different poisons? I don’t know. The problem is Carla and the kids. I can’t believe she’s not connected to Markham. I just can’t go there.”

  Bracco had a question. “Okay. How about Bhutan then? You were saying you asked him about Tuesday night.”

  “I did. Turns out he’s got master points in bridge and that night he was at a tournament at a hotel in San Jose and spent the night down there. Which, if true and I’m betting it is, eliminates him from Carla, and therefore Markham.”

  “But not from Loring or any of these others.” Fisk finally saw Glitsky’s problem.

  “Right. It has no necessary bearing on those at all. In fact, if Bhutan did Loring, they almost certainly can’t be connected.”

  And at this truth, they fell silent. Glitsky ate some more bagel. Bracco tipped up his soda. Fisk, deciding he needed some refreshment, pushed his chair back and headed for the snack counter. The two other men watched him go. “So what do you want us to do now, Lieutenant?”

  Glitsky knew what Bracco was asking. In an administrative sense, the homicides from the Kensing list weren’t going to be part of the Markham homicide investigation any longer—they’d just pretty much established that. The two new inspectors had no claim to the assignment of what might turn out to be a very high-profile serial killer case. “What do you want to do, Darrel?”

  Bracco didn’t hesitate. “I’d still like to get some kind of a line on Markham.”

  “And how do you propose to do that? You’ve been on that case over a week. You got a suspect I don’t know about?”

  “I got questions I haven’t asked, if that’s what you mean. I’ve got a couple of ideas.”

  “Good. Let’s hear one of ’em.”

  “Let’s take the focus off Markham. Nobody saw anything here. But we’ve still got Carla and as you yourself said, whoever killed her killed her husband, am I right?”

  “You might have trouble proving a negative.”

  “With respect, though, sir, we haven’t even looked. You haven’t wanted us to.” Glitsky knew that Bracco was right, that he’d hamstrung their invest
igation from the beginning by keeping them away from the true principals, including even Kensing. This had created a vacuum where there should have been basic information—alibis, timetables, opportunities. Bracco was going on. “We’ve been dicking around for a week now with motives and women’s gossip. But if somebody killed Carla, we’re looking at a very limited universe of suspects.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  Bracco’s eyes were alight with the chase. “First, we forget the nurses here. As I think we’ve just proven, a connection between any of them and Markham is a fluke. None of the nurses from here killed Carla and her kids, I’d bet a million dollars on that.”

  “I would, too.”

  “Okay, so who’s that leave? Who else was here last Tuesday?” He ticked them off on his fingers. “Kensing. Driscoll. Ross. Waltrip. Cohn. It’s one of them.”

  “One of who?” Fisk was back with an ice-cream sandwich.

  Glitsky was nodding in satisfaction. Darrel was going to be a cop someday.

  “What?” Fisk asked again.

  Glitsky motioned to Bracco. “Darrel will tell you in a minute, Harlen. Meanwhile, you guys remember Hardy?” Glitsky asked. “Kensing’s lawyer? Jackman’s office this morning?”

  “The guy with Kensing’s list,” Bracco said.

  “Exactly. As you may have noticed, he’s got a deal going with Jackman. We’ve been sending your transcripts and other discovery over to him.” At their expressions of disbelief, he nodded. “Don’t ask. But in theory we’re trading information, so you might want to find out what he knows before you start. Who he’s talked to. What they said. He did used to be a cop, and—”

  “Who did?” Fisk asked. “Hardy?”

  “Long time ago, Harlen. He was my partner, actually. We walked a beat in uniform together.” He let them digest that, enjoying their faces. “He’s not stupid, and he might have talked to some people already, which would save you time. If you even think he’s holding back on you, arrest him and bring him to me. Better yet, shoot him and hide the body.”

  But something wasn’t sitting well with Bracco. “So if Hardy’s somehow with us, we cross Kensing off?”

  Glitsky allowed a hint of a smile. “No, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Hardy got that impression.”

  Hardy threw his darts as a form of meditation, “like Sherlock Holmes playing his violin,” he’d told Freeman once. But Bracco and Fisk didn’t know that. He’d been perusing his new discovery binders for nearly two hours, ever since a few minutes after getting back from his meeting with Jeff Elliot, and when the inspectors had arrived, he had just stood, stretched, decided to throw some darts and let the new facts settle. Both of the inspectors undoubtedly thought he was goofing off at the end of the workday, and he saw no need to disabuse them of that notion. He threw another dart. “What do you want first?”

  “The lieutenant said you’d give us whatever you’ve got,” Bracco replied.

  “Except that most of what I’ve got is your stuff. It could get a little tedious.” The last shot of the round hit the double 11 and Hardy cracked a quick grin in satisfaction, walked up to the board, and pulled darts. “But okay, here’s something you may not know. You remember Frank Husic?”

  “The guy next door?”

  “Right. He heard the shots at quarter to eleven. He looked next door and the lights were on. They were still on an hour later. Then, two hours after that, somebody had turned them off. And here’s a clue—it wasn’t Carla.”

  “I was there at a little before ten.” Bracco sat forward stiff-backed on the couch, elbows on knees, hands clasped in front of him. “Does Lieutenant Glitsky know this?”

  “I was planning to call him later, so he probably doesn’t.” He shot a look at Bracco. “What time did you leave there?”

  Bracco answered without inflection. “A few minutes after your client, say ten straight up.”

  “And he was the last visitor?”

  “The last car in the street out front, yeah. Plus he told me he was the last one there except the family, and they were turning in.”

  “After he left”—Hardy threw a dart—“did you go up to the house?”

  Fisk, idly turning the pages of one of Hardy’s magazines, suddenly stopped and looked up at the question.

  “No,” Bracco replied. “Your guy kind of convinced me that they’d had enough for the day. What did he do after he left?”

  “He drove home and went to bed. And, Inspector”—Hardy threw again—“he didn’t come back.”

  “Can he prove that?”

  “Can you prove he did?”

  Fisk cleared his throat, closed his magazine, and dropped it onto the end table. “Mr. Hardy. Darrel. What do you say we keep Kensing out of the mix until he puts himself back in. How’s that sound?”

  Hardy had gone back to his board and was pulling darts. Now he walked back to his desk, put them down on it, and pulled a chair around. “That’s a good idea, Inspector. Dr. Kensing’s not going to put himself back in.” He met both of their eyes. “I apologize if I’m touchy about my client.”

  Bracco hadn’t moved an inch, but his shoulders settled almost imperceptibly. When he spoke, the tone was conciliatory, too. “We’ve narrowed it down to the five people who’d been around the ICU that morning, excluding the two nurses. Does that fly with you?”

  Hardy was somewhat disturbed but not surprised to see Freeman’s predictions of the morning come true so quickly. If the nurses were out of consideration for Markham, then Marjorie Loring’s death wasn’t any part of Kensing anymore, if indeed it ever had been. But, betraying little, he only nodded. “If the nurses have alibis for Tuesday night.”

  “Both of them do,” Bracco said. “Rajan Bhutan was playing bridge in San Jose, although Lieutenant Glitsky says some of the staff think he looks good for Loring. For what it’s worth, Harlen and I don’t think he looks too bad, either—”

  Hardy interrupted. “And he was one of Markham’s nurses?”

  “Yeah. But with this alibi for Carla. And the other one, Connie Rowe, was home with her family—husband, two kids. She didn’t go out.”

  “Okay.”

  “So the scenario at Markham’s house is that someone came between ten and ten forty-five, and Carla opened the door to whoever it was. Then the kids start going to bed while Carla and X talk a while. At some point, X excuses himself and goes into Markham’s office where he keeps his gun.”

  “Who’d know that?” Hardy asked abruptly. “Not just that he had one but where he kept it?”

  “That’s a point,” Fisk said, “but if X was an acquaintance of Carla’s, which it looks like he was, he might have known.”

  Hardy thought that this was reasonable enough. “Okay. Let’s go back to who’s left,” he said, “besides my client, of course.”

  Bracco had them on the tip of his tongue. “Driscoll, Ross, Waltrip, Cohn.”

  Hardy had come across the name Cohn only about an hour before in his reading—the report Bracco and Fisk had written up on what they’d discovered last Friday night but had forgotten to tape. At that time it had leapt off the page at him and brought his heart to his throat. Hearing the name again now, he showed nothing, even let himself chuckle. “You realize I haven’t talked to even one of those people. Who are Waltrip and Cohn?”

  As far as Hardy knew from the transcripts and reports he’d read, the inspectors hadn’t spoken to any of these people, either, although they didn’t volunteer that. Instead, Bracco was low-key. “Just some doctors who’d also been in the ICU that day—Kent Waltrip and Judith Cohn.”

  “But no sign they’d been to Carla’s?”

  “No,” Fisk replied. “We assume they both knew Markham, but other than that, we don’t have much on them.”

  “Their names, is all,” Bracco added. “I don’t think either of them played any role here, but we kept them in just to be thorough.”

  Hardy nodded. “So it’s Driscoll or Ross?”

  It w
as Bracco’s turn to break a small smile. “Under the local rules.” Meaning, not including Kensing.

  Hardy allowed a friendly nod. “So how are their alibis? Driscoll and Ross?”

  Obviously embarrassed, the inspectors exchanged a glance. “We haven’t had a chance to talk to them, either.”

  “Maybe you want to do that,” he said gently. “Meanwhile, just to be thorough, I’ll try to get in touch with Waltrip and Cohn.”

  The second and third names on Kensing’s list had been cremated, rather severely limiting the options for further forensic analysis. The fourth name was Shirley Watrous.

  She had died on the day after last Christmas. She’d been admitted to the hospital a week before that for acute phlebitis, then suffered a stroke in her bed that left her paralyzed and unable to communicate. Moved to the ICU for observation and further testing, on the fifth day she passed away without ever regaining consciousness. The hospital PM listed the cause of death as cerebral hemorrhage.

  This time around, Strout knew exactly what he was looking for—the Pavulon cocktail—and he found it. Mrs. Watrous, too, had been murdered.

  Glitsky, Ash, and Jackman were crammed into Marlene’s office, having a powwow. Her office mate had checked out at close of business, and Jackman sat at his desk. Glitsky had pulled a chair around and was facing them, straddling it backward.

  “Of course,” Glitsky was saying, “he’s got no idea what he was doing on November twelfth”—he was talking about Rajan Bhutan—“but the day after Christmas, he might remember.”

  “Is he a Christian?” Marlene asked. “Maybe he doesn’t celebrate Christmas.”

  “Either way, it’s a holiday.” Jackman turned to Glitsky. “Abe, he’s clean on Carla Markham?”