The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  "I think I get it from there," Thieu said. He might have been a hard-boiled six-year veteran inspector of homicide, but he was shaking now not with the cold, but with the recitation. He didn't think he could bear to listen to Faro's certain-to-be-vivid clinical description of how the throats of both of them had been slit, or the individual steps as Randy Wills was undressed, trussed, and finally castrated.

  Faro needed a moment to extract himself from his imagination. At last, he turned to Thieu. "Anyway, my point is that whatever happened here, this was separate. Nothing to do with Creed or Silverman or anything else. This was its own thing and the case ought to belong to you if you want it."

  John Holiday loved Clint Terry—he really did—but he was going to have to fire the irresponsible son of a bitch. He was thinking this as he pulled the chairs off the tables that he'd put on them when he'd closed the place last night at two o'clock. Why did he bother? He set the last chair in its place and checked his watch. Noon. He'd closed the place up a mere ten hours ago, and thank God he'd come by just on a random check to find the door closed and nobody behind the bar. This was his only source of income and it had to be open for him to actually make some money, stay solvent and not be forced to sell cheap.

  He still believed he could get a lucky streak going, maybe at poker. Lucky streaks weren't out of the question. Look at him and Michelle. With just a few solid months and a bit of luck, he could make the Ark presentable, and then maybe sell at a profit, go back into something more legitimate.

  What was the matter with people? he wondered. A gay ex-convict like Clint with a questionable reputation and no real skills, where was he going to get another job as good as this one? With a laid-back boss, flexible hours, decent pay. What, if anything, was he thinking as he undoubtedly slept in this morning, making it two days in a row, knowing he was blowing the job off? All Holiday asked, essentially, was that the big galoot show up, and especially—especially! —when Holiday had pulled the night shift the day before. But first yesterday, then today. Enough was enough.

  He was going to have to do it. That was all there was to it.

  Fortunately, when he'd closed last night, he'd prepped the back bar and cleaned up every bit of the glass and mess—good guy and great employer that he was—so that Clint could have it easy when he opened. Now, at least, he was close to ready, albeit two hours late, as he unlocked the front door and flicked on the OPEN sign.

  As sometimes happened, a man was waiting just outside and pushed open the door while Holiday went around the bar. The man, a wiry Asian of some kind, was seated by the time the two men were face to face, a cocktail napkin down on the bar between them. "Morning," Holiday said.

  "What can I get you?"

  "How about a beer?"

  "Bottled? Draft? We got Sam Adams and Anchor Steam."

  "Which one's colder?"

  "Anchor," Holiday said, naming the city's own brew.

  "It's lived here longer so it's had more time to chill. But you sure you want cold today? There's plenty of that outside."

  But the play had run out. "Anchor's good," the customer said.

  Holiday turned and grabbed a glass from the refrigerator, tipped it up against the Anchor spigot and drew off the pint. Coming back to the bar, he noticed a twenty dollar bill in the gutter, the man's wallet out on the pitted wood.

  The badge.

  He put the beer down carefully. "I told the guys who came by yesterday that I wasn't talking to you without my lawyer here. I'm still not. You want me to call him?"

  "I'm off duty and I've got the world's simplest question, I promise. Whatever answer you give me, I drink my beer and go home and get some sleep."

  For some reason—Clint's absence, or this man's easy manner, or even his own fatigue at having his guard up all the time—Holiday called him on it. "Okay. What the hell?

  One," he said.

  "Where were you last night at midnight?"

  Holiday actually laughed out loud. "That's it? That's the one question? We could play this all day. I was here, and by here I mean right here"—he tapped the bar twice—"tending this twenty-two feet of antiquated glulam with dedication and some might even say panache."

  "So you had customers? People you knew?"

  "Six or eight at least. But I just gave you another question."

  "Two actually," Thieu said. He lifted his glass and, closing his eyes, drained half of it. "Great beer," he said. Then, "Thank you."

  He picked up his wallet, got off his stool, and walked to the door, where he stopped and turned again. "Keep the change."

  The evidence bonanza that was the Terry/Wills apartment was almost enough to overcome the revulsion felt by both Cuneo and Russell when they had first arrived and taken in the appalling scene. Thieu had still been there with them, of course. They didn't know it, but Gerson had overruled his request, based on Faro's theory of the case, that on reflection he should remain the inspector of record. Thieu didn't argue with the lieutenant, but simply hung around until all three inspectors signed off on the release of the bodies to the medical examiner's with a great sense of relief.

  Once the overwhelming presence of the corpses was removed, and Thieu had gone, Faro and the other members of the CSI unit began walking the two new inspectors through the masses of evidence they'd acquired and bagged in plastic. Cuneo and Russell were both tightly focused and slightly flushed with the successful results of the ballistics test they had finally shepherded through the crime lab. That test, performed on two remarkably undamaged slugs, had conclusively shown that Sam Silverman and Matt Creed had been shot with the same .38 caliber weapon.

  And now, among other items, they were looking at just such a gun, a Smith & Wesson revolver with its serial number filed off, found under a pile of socks in the bureau drawer in the bedroom. Two empty bullet casings remained in the cylinder with four live rounds. Additionally, the same drawer yielded a box of .38 ammunition minus eight shells, a stack of bills of various denominations—$2440 in all—each one marked with a small red dot in the upper right-hand corner. Wade Panos and Sadie Silverman, both and separately in their respective interviews, had mentioned this habit of Silverman's, red-dotting the bills he'd be depositing.

  When they had nearly finished—Faro had already gone home for the day without burdening the new inspectors with his theory of the case—Cuneo had an idea and went to the bedroom closet. The CSI team had already looked inside it and found nothing, then had reclosed the door. Of course, the clothes the two victims had been wearing were already bagged and tagged, but Cuneo had read Thieu's report on the Creed crime scene and had something specific in mind. He wasn't a minute looking before he stopped humming "Bolero" and turned back to the room. "Lincoln, get me another bag, would you? Good-sized."

  He came out holding a pair of large shoes. They were nicely made, expensive-looking loafers of light brown braided leather with a tassel. The soles were worn smooth, but there was some gunk—still tacky—stuck where the heel started, a little more around the edge, on the right one. "If this is what I think it is," Cuneo said, "we got this thing wrapped up."

  As it turned out, they didn't need the analysis of the garbage effluent. This time the two inspectors of record didn't email the lab and request that someone drive up to the Hall and pick up their new evidence. They had the gun—the probable murder weapon—and, since they hadn't been back to the Hall to return the earlier slugs to the evidence locker, they had possession of them, too. So they had another hamburger lunch at Dago Mary's while the lab fired the gun and compared this new bullet to the earlier rounds.

  By one o'clock, they were back uptown talking to Gerson in his office. Ten minutes after that, they appeared in the chambers of Judge Oscar Thomasino, a venerable presence on the bench, who was on his lunch break from the trial over which he was presiding. This was his week as duty judge, which meant he was the person responsible for approving search warrants, and he was already well disposed to both Cuneo and Russell. The DNA evidence that had
led to the arrest of the alleged rapist and murderer Shawon Ellerson last week had come from a search conducted by these two inspectors at the suspect's apartment, and Thomasino had signed off on the warrant for that search.

  He got up from his desk and the paperwork on it and ushered the two men over to a small seating area by the room's one window. "You boys are having yourselves quite a week," he said.

  Russell nodded soberly. It never did to gloat. "We're getting a few breaks, your honor. That's true."

  "It's funny how breaks come to the good cops. I've noticed a definite correlation."

  "Thank you, your honor."

  "This one looks pretty solid," Cuneo added. He handed the warrant across to the judge.

  Thomasino looked it over carefully. These may have been good cops, but the decision to violate a citizen's residence by allowing a legal search was never a casual one, and Thomasino took it very seriously indeed. When he'd finished reading, he looked up. "So this man, Holiday, how does he fit exactly? I'm not sure I see it."

  Cuneo took point. "We believe he was with the other two men—the victims this morning in the apartment where we found the gun—during the Silverman robbery and murder. Plus, we've confirmed that the same gun was used to kill a security guard two days ago, Matt Creed."

  "But these men were not shot? This morning?"

  "No, sir. Somebody had cut their throats," Russell said.

  "And you think it was this Holiday?"

  "Yes, your honor." Cuneo, exuding urgency, came forward in a kind of a crouch. "We didn't get a positive match on the slugs for Silverman and Creed until this morning and based on them, we were planning to arrest Terry and Wills, except they went dead on us."

  "But not Holiday? Why not?"

  Russell shifted in his seat. "He's a bartender. He was working when Creed got shot, so we think that Creed was just the two of them, Terry and Wills."

  "Maybe Holiday didn't even know they were planning on killing him," Cuneo added. "He might have felt they were getting too trigger-happy and were a risk. Which is why Holiday decided he had to kill them."

  "But," Russell said, "it's probable he did know about Creed. That they all decided."

  "And why would they do that?" Thomasino asked.

  Cuneo straightened up, the tag team continuing. "Because Creed had identified all of them as the guys who'd killed Silverman. So they figure he can't testify if he's dead."

  Russell jumped back in. "And me and Dan repeating what Creed told us would be hearsay and inadmissible anyway, isn't that right?"

  A faint trace of smile tugged at the judge's mouth. "The rules about hearsay have fooled better men than me. But you're saying you had an ID on Holiday? Then why isn't he in jail already?"

  "The ID was in the dark at fifty feet, your honor," Russell said. "The DA wouldn't have charged it if that's all it was."

  "We needed physical evidence tying him to Silverman,"

  Cuneo added. "And we didn't get any until this morning, when we got plenty."

  Thomasino stroked his chin, pulled at his ear, rubbed his neck. Something about all this still bothered him. "I see you've got a lot for these two dead men, although it's a little late now. I'm still not sure I see the connection to Holiday so clearly."

  Cuneo had started tapping his thighs in agitation. "Your honor, he killed them both last night. The other dead man, Creed, put Holiday with them both during the Silverman robbery and murder. I'm a hundred percent certain we'll find evidence we can use at his place tying him to four murders. This man needs to be off the street."

  "But you need probable cause for a search warrant. You gentlemen know this. And I'm not sure you've got anything yet that rises to that standard."

  "Your honor." Russell reached over and touched his partner's arm, stopping the agitation. Playing counterpoint to Cuneo's intensity, he leaned back in his chair, crossed a leg over his knee, "I personally heard Matt Creed positively identify the three men who robbed and killed Mr. Silverman as Clint Terry, Randy Wills and John Holiday." He pointed to the form in Thomasino's hand. "As the affidavit indicates, we found bills with Mr. Silverman's distinctive mark at Wills's and Terry's apartment. We will be searching for similar bills at Mr. Holiday's. We know they were together."

  Chewing the inside of his cheek, the judge sat with it for another moment. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and leaned forward. "Inspector Russell, you heard this Mr. Creed's identification with your own ears?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Inspector Cuneo? Same question."

  "Yes, your honor."

  Thomasino nodded. "All right. Perhaps the warrant application just isn't as clear as it needs to be. I want you to handwrite that right here, initial and date it, each of you.

  I'm calling that good enough for me." He came all the way forward and placed the warrant on the small table between them. The pen's scratch was the only sound in the room.

  Holiday called Michelle at her apartment from the Ark.

  She had a restaurant review for a place on Chestnut Street and they'd been planning to go there together for lunch, but now that wasn't going to happen. He told her that Clint still hadn't shown up and he was going to have to pull a double shift. He'd see her tonight, late, after he got off. He wondered, since the restaurant was near his own duplex, if she'd mind swinging by his place for a clean shirt or two and some underwear. He might be pulling back-to-backs at the bar and he could be with her sooner tonight if she could save him the long walk or bus ride home. He'd lost the last car he'd owned at a poker game, then found he didn't need a car for his normal life, anyway, since he lived all of it within such a relatively small radius. Most days he walked to work—Chestnut to Taylor or Mason, then all the way down to O'Farrell wasn't even two miles and the hills gave him some badly needed exercise.

  So after lunch, sometime between 2:00 and 3:00, Michelle found herself climbing the stairs to his flat. He'd lived in the same upper duplex on Casa Street in the Marina for over fifteen years, had bought it with Emma, lived there with her for their three years together. In a fit of fiscal probity during Emma's pregnancy, the young couple had actually bought mortgage insurance and because of that, after her death, the place was now paid off. It still had ghosts for him, evidently, and he spent as little time there as possible, although he had told her that he recognized the necessity of holding on to it. He could never afford to rent a similar, or even a far less desirable, place. It was just something he possessed, like his bar. Part of his life.

  There had been three newspapers in the little area at the foot of the stairs, and Michelle was carrying them as she got to the upper landing and noticed that his door was open. She pushed at it gingerly and it gave another few inches. Inside, she heard unmistakable sounds of movement and male voices.

  "Hello!" she sang out. "Is anybody home?"

  The voices ceased. Footsteps approached. The door opened all the way. A well-dressed, clean-cut black man stood in front of her, scowling. "Can I help you?"

  "Is John home?" she asked. "Who are you?"

  The man pulled out his wallet and showed her his identification. Another man, this one white, appeared in the hall behind him. "Inspector Lincoln Russell. My partner, Dan Cuneo. We're with homicide."

  "Homicide?" She backed away a step. "Is John okay?"

  "That would be John Holiday? Yes, ma'am, as far as we know."

  "All right, but then what are you doing here?"

  "We're searching his apartment." Inspector Russell reached into his coat pocket and produced a piece of paper.

  "We have a warrant."

  The other man came forward. "While we're getting to know each other, can I please see some identification?"

  "From me?"

  "Yes, ma'am. If you don't mind."

  It didn't seem to her that it was a request she could refuse. Flustered, going for her purse, she dropped the newspapers around the welcome mat. Finally, she fished around and brought out her driver's license, which she handed to Russell, since he was n
earest to her. He glanced at it, showed it to his partner, then gave it back to her and said, "All right, Ms. Maier, you mind telling us why you're here?"

  Michelle was thinking as fast as she could, showing them nothing. "I've been trying to get in touch with John and he's not answering his phone, so I thought I'd come by and leave a message on his door. I'm going away for a couple of days and he always watches my cats." She knew she was blurting and realized at the same time that this might not be a bad thing. "He's really good with cats. He never forgets. Anyway, so when I got here I thought I'd pick up his papers when I saw them all down there, and then the door was open a little, so I ... well, you know." She stammered to a halt. "I'm sorry to have interrupted you," she said.

  The black inspector turned to his partner, came back to her. "You don't know where Mr. Holiday is?"

  "No. That's why I came by, to see if ..." She gave them both her most plaintive look. "Is he in trouble?"

  Cuneo came forward a step. "You might want to find somebody else for your cats. If he comes by, we'll see he gets the papers."

  It was a dismissal. She couldn't believe it, but as long as she stayed cool, they were letting her just go away. "Okay, then." She forced herself to wait another moment, then raised her hand tentatively, as though wondering if it would be appropriate to wave. "Sorry to have bothered you.

  'Bye."

  "So ... what?" Gerson said. The three of them were in his office, sitting around in something like a circle. The door was closed. "You left his copy of the warrant taped to the front door? Inside?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I don't want any technical error to screw this up."

  "No, sir," Cuneo said. "Neither do we. It was a righteous search, by the book."

  "And where was all this? Just lying out?"