The First Law

by John T Lescroart

  He hung up, dug in his pocket for some coins as his pager went off, and punched in his home number. "Treya, it's me. Tell me Rachel's all right."

  When Treya had her voice under this much control, she was dangerously angry. "She's fine, but I think you'd better come home."

  "What is it?"

  "I guess you'd say a threat. A threat to Rachel."

  "What kind of threat?"

  "Just a picture of her. A Polaroid, probably taken yesterday, from what Rita and she were wearing. Rita's holding her on the steps. Somebody circled Rachel in red."

  Suddenly Glitsky understood the urgency of Hardy's problem, as well as Frannie's panic. She, too, had gotten a recent Polaroid of her children. The message was unequivocal, its meaning clear. We know where your children are.

  We can get to them anytime we want.

  Back off or they die.

  27

  A fingerprint search is nearly always run first by a computer against a local database of known criminals. In this case, since Thieu had some specific people in mind, he'd asked Faro to hand check the prints they'd lifted from Holiday's and Terry/Wills's places directly against Rez, Panos and Sephia.

  Thieu got the results at a little before 3:30 and figured he could make it back uptown easily, even with traffic, and get the news to Gerson before the lieutenant went home for the day. First he wanted to share the news and tell Glitsky, though, so he stopped by the fifth floor, only to discover that his old mentor had called in sick—astounding.

  Certainly Thieu had never known him to do it when he was in homicide. He had his home phone number, however, and closing the door behind him—no one seemed to be minding the store in Glitsky's absence—he borrowed the phone on the desk to make the call. "Abe? What's the matter? You don't sound so good."

  "No. I'm fine, Paul. Maybe coming down the flu or something, that's all. What's going on?"

  "What's going on is I got the results on the fingerprints and you were right. Hardy was right. Sephia and Rez were all over Holiday's place. And I have them on tape denying ever being there."

  Glitsky sounded weary beyond imagining. Even this terrific news of Thieu's didn't seem to cheer him in the least.

  "That's great, Paul." He sounded as though he were almost bored by it. "So what are you going to do now?"

  "Lieutenant, are you all right?"

  "I don't know." A long pause. "I may not be in for a few days after all. So I assume you'll be talking to Gerson?"

  "Sure, showing him the results. It's naked eye stuff, almost. Gerson was my next stop. I'm in your office now."

  "Well, you want to do me one last favor?"

  "Sure. Anything."

  "I want you to leave Hardy and me completely out of it."

  "I can't do that, Lieutenant. You were the ones who had the idea. If we get these guys from this evidence, people here, I mean in the department, have got to know it was you."

  Glitsky's voice suddenly became far more familiar to Thieu—terse, biting, brooking no resistance. "Paul, I want you to hear me good. People have not got to know it was me. Or Hardy, for that matter. In fact, it's critical— critical, do you understand?—that it look like we had nothing to do with it. Nothing!"

  "But ..."

  "No buts. If you get this into the system now with Gerson, you'll be the hero and you deserve to be the hero.

  You did all the work."

  "I don't care about being the hero, Abe. I don't want to hog your credit."

  "Forget my credit. I've already got way too much profile around this case as it is. You've got enough now, with this, that from here on out it's by the numbers. With any kind of hustle, these guys should be under a lot of heat. I don't want them to come back on us. So no me, no Hardy. Just good police work did these guys in. And that's all that did it, okay?"

  "Okay." Thieu didn't like it. "If it were me, though, I'd at least want to remind the people who'd accused me, make them eat a little crow."

  "I don't care about that. I really don't. I'm payroll, remember?" A silence, then, "You still don't get it, do you?"

  "No, sir. I'm sorry, but I don't."

  "All right. I guessed you've earned the real reason." Suddenly, Glitsky's tone changed again. It became nearly intimate, quietly intense. "They've threatened my family, Paul, my daughter. Same with Hardy, his kids. It's what you'd call a credible threat. So I don't want them to think we did this. In fact, I want them to think we didn't. After they're in prison for life plus a hundred, maybe then we can go back and gently remind some people on our side that we might have had something to say. But as far as the public needs to know, I'm done. Hardy's done. We were done before you even started thinking about fingerprints.

  Okay?"

  "Okay."

  "Just get this to Gerson direct. Don't go through Cuneo and Russell."

  "That was my plan."

  "It's a good one. You've still got time today, I see. Go."

  Thieu looked out Glitsky's one window. The sun had just set, but he might just get lucky and find Gerson still at the job.

  "I'm gone," he said.

  Behind Gerson's closed door, Thieu had been sitting now for over twenty minutes and still couldn't believe he was hearing this. The lieutenant had, at first, been reasonably enthusiastic, listening to Thieu's explanation of how his earlier suspicions at the Terry/Wills scene—the shoe, the plethora of convenient evidence—combined with the suspicion of planted evidence at Holiday's ...

  "What suspicion of planted evidence? Have you been talking to Glitsky?"

  "Lieutenant Glitsky? No, sir. I haven't talked to anybody. This is just me."

  "Just you?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Who got these prints for you?"

  "That was Len Faro, but he was just dusting. He had no idea what it was all about. And nobody at all knows about this taped statement. Not a soul."

  Gerson let out a heavy breath. "All right. So. Where did you hear about this so-called planted evidence?"

  Thieu fidgeted in his chair. "Remember, sir? From Sadie Silverman's statement. Dan Cuneo didn't believe it, but I thought ..."

  "Nobody believed it, Sergeant.

  Nobody suspected planted evidence at Holiday's." He shook his head in pro-found displeasure. "But go on, you were saying."

  And he did go on, but instead of Gerson's approval, Thieu sensed a growing impatience and even anger. "The point is, sir," he concluded, "that in fact these fingerprints from Sephia and Rez do prove that they were there, at Holiday's. And they flatly deny it. So they could only have been there to plant the incriminating evidence."

  Gerson crossed one leg over the other, leaned an elbow back against his computer table. "I'm trying to see where you get this, Sergeant. I really am. And maybe I am slightly blinded by my anger at the fact that you took it upon yourself to go investigate these cases that I'd assigned to other inspectors. But"—he held up a hand—"of course if you did find a smoking gun, it would be a different matter. More easily overlooked anyway."

  "But with respect, sir, this is pretty much a smoking gun."

  "Maybe that's what I'm having trouble seeing. You have statements from both Sephia and Rez that they hadn't been in the Terry/Wills apartment, but you don't have their fingerprints from that scene."

  "I didn't really expect there would be, sir. They went there to kill these guys and either wiped the place down or, more likely, wore gloves.

  "But the fact remains, no prints where they said they'd never been. I fail to understand how this can be compelling to you."

  "What's compelling is that their prints were at Holiday's, where they also deny ever being. They didn't know I was going to ask that until the tape was already on, so they told a stupid lie."

  Gerson drew a large and histrionic breath. "Sergeant, these men played poker together at least several times in the past year. They may have had some kind of falling out recently—I don't know about that—but they certainly shared each other's company, quite possibly at Mr. Holiday's h
ouse. So now they simply admit that they lied to you. They say they knew Holiday was a murder suspect and didn't want to be more closely associated with him."

  Gerson already had the tape in its case under a paper-weight on his computer table.

  "But sir, the bare fact ..." Thieu paused. "You have to admit this looks a lot like something fishy, at the very least.

  Sephia and Rez should be thoroughly interrogated. In my opinion," he added.

  Finally the lieutenant seemed to break through some barrier. He leaned back, let out a long exhalation. "You might be right," he said. "I don't know why I'm fighting you so hard on this. Everything you're saying makes sense. It's just that this case has been nothing but a headache from day one." Gerson's hand, in fact, went to his head. He sighed again. "I've got to use the can a minute. Be right back."

  Thieu came forward, his elbows on his knees, his head tucked. He had of course considered the objections that Gerson had made. Nothing was simple. Okay, so what's new? The point was, Thieu thought, that any conscientious cop would see enough questions for Sephia and Rez to at the very least jump all over them and move them up to the realm of legitimate suspects in the multiple slayings. If only to avoid the embarrassment and hassle of falsely arresting John Holiday when there were obviously so many other possible interpretations of the evidence.

  But until tonight, just now, Gerson had seemed congenitally blind to these subtleties. He had a suspect and evidence and an arrest warrant, and goddamnit, why should he keep looking at all?

  Now the lieutenant returned, got back in his swivel chair, made some kind of conciliatory gesture. "I apologize for being such a hard-ass about this, Paul. It's actually nice to have an inspector with this kind of initiative. It certainly wouldn't hurt to put these two guys in an interrogation room and sweat them on videotape, would it? If they broke ..." Gerson brightened up, met Thieu's eyes. "But I would be more comfortable either way if we got Dan and Lincoln on board. Does that sit all right with you?"

  Thieu remembered Glitsky's admonition that he should go directly through Gerson, without involving the two inspectors of record. But the reaction here had rendered that suggestion moot. If there was going to be any resolution to this case, there was no avoiding Cuneo and Russell now.

  "Sure. Your call, sir."

  Gerson turned and punched numbers into the phone.

  "Hey, is Cuneo or Russell out there? Do you know when they...? Oh. Really? Okay, thanks." He hung up.

  "Evidently they're coming in by chopper right now. Five minutes." The police helicopter, as well as others belonging to the Highway Patrol and even private companies such as Georgia AAA, often landed on the target painted on the roof of the Hall of Justice. "I don't think I've been out of this room all day, Paul. You mind if we get some exercise and meet them up there? I could use the air."

  "Sure. Why not?"

  Gerson grabbed his jacket from the peg by his door while Thieu went to get his off his chair. They passed out of the homicide detail and into the hallway, where Gerson turned right and Thieu followed. They went into the Inspectors Bureau, unoccupied at that time of the night, and pulled a key off a hook in a side room. This enabled the elevator to go all the way to the roof. They ascended in a companionable silence.

  "Watch out," Gerson said, as he stepped over a low sill and out, "it's gotten a little dark."

  And indeed it had come to full night, with a chill and biting wind.

  Thieu had his hands in his pockets and shuddered against the cold. With the stiff breeze, he wasn't surprised that he couldn't yet hear the thwack-thwack of the helicopter's approach, but he turned a half circle and looked for it anyway.

  The city was all dressed up. Thanksgiving was still a couple of weeks off, but already the Christmas lights were burning in several locations, some of the hotels, uptown.

  Taking in the sight, Thieu wondered why he didn't come up here more often. There was a splendid isolation, especially at this time of night, when the traffic was heavy but mostly unhearable, the stars close enough to touch. He moved a couple of steps toward the low edge of the roof, then started to turn back to ask his lieutenant if he knew from which direction the chopper might be approaching.

  But he hadn't really begun the turn when a pair of strong hands hit him low in the back. With his own hands stuck deeply in his pockets, he could offer no resistance. "Wait!" was all he could think to say. "Wait!" But his feet hit the bottom of the wall almost before he realized he was being pushed, and there was nothing to stop his body from pitching over into the air.

  Thieu's last whole thought, in the instant before the falling wiped his consciousness clean of anything but terror, was that Gerson had made that call to the outer office to check on the whereabouts of Cuneo and Russell. He'd talked to someone out there, and then less than a minute later they'd left the office to come up here. But no one had been in the office when Thieu had gone to retrieve his jacket. He should have remembered that, grown suspicious.

  He should have...

  28

  Susan Weiss, McGuire's wife, was doing her best to cope with the unexpected crisis, but it had thrown her off balance. This—the sudden arrival of her sister-in-law's family at her three-bedroom apartment in the Haight—was not something she felt equipped for, or trained to handle. She listened to their talk about fleeing from their house after the darkness had become complete, all of them making certain no one was behind them, with an air of disbelief. Was this really happening?

  No one was acting as though the threat to the Hardy kids extended to the McGuire family, to her own children, Brittany and Erica. But even though Susan doubted that Panos knew that Moses and Frannie were brother and sister, she couldn't get that thought out of her mind. A cellist by profession and a true pacifist, Susan went through the motions of dinner and sleeping bags for the cousins and the fold-out couch for Dismas and Frannie with a wary, sleepwalking quality.

  Susan knew the degree of protectiveness that Moses felt for Frannie. Her husband might be a good man with a pure nature, but at heart—and it had always troubled her—he was also a fighter, the veteran of dozens of bar brawls, rugby skirmishes, shillelagh altercations. Moses, like her brother-in-law Dismas, had seen action in Vietnam. Both of them had actually killed people, although she preferred to forget that most of the time.

  Here, though, tonight, that was not possible.

  Rebecca and Vincent wouldn't be going to their school for at least the next day and perhaps several more. Frannie wasn't going to her classes, either. After he talked to Glitsky tonight, Dismas would decide if the family needed to go into true hiding. They could get on a plane for somewhere, or at least check into a hotel out of town.

  Now it was way past bedtime and still her girls sat spell-bound on the floor, caught up in their cousins' fear and excitement. Suddenly, through no fault of Susan's, here was her whole family involved in a world of threats and violence, of intrigue and terror. She couldn't help herself, couldn't stop a great wave of resentment from washing over her. At her husband for insisting that they all come here, at Dismas and Frannie for agreeing. And now Dismas had gone off to discuss the situation with Glitsky, and Moses was back at the Shamrock.

  Susan went to the kitchen, where poor Frannie was rinsing dishes and piling them in the dishwasher. Busing a few more dinner items from the table over to the sink, Susan fell in next to her, and shortly found she couldn't sustain any resentment toward her sister-in-law. Frannie, too, moved in a slightly robotic fashion, as though the strain of all this was just too great to contemplate, and Susan's heart went out to her.

  Frannie finished rinsing a plate, then put it back down on top of the others, turned off the water and hung her head. Susan put an arm around her. "What are you thinking?" she asked.

  Frannie sighed. "That maybe we're going to have to move after all."

  "Where to?"

  "It doesn't matter. Away from here. At least for a while.

  I can't imagine ever letting the kids go back to that
school.

  Or really, to the house for that matter."

  Susan understood what she was saying—she'd of course seen the Polaroid that Dismas had brought with him in a Ziploc bag. The two kids were at the gate in front of their house, knapsacks on, leaving for school, Frannie behind them a little out of focus. Whoever shot the picture couldn't have been more than thirty feet away. A red circle enclosed both of the children's torsos, smack in the crosshairs.

  It was an image that would live with Susan for a long time. "Maybe," she said, "it really is just trying to get Dismas to stop working on this case."

  Frannie turned the water back on, reached for the already rinsed plate. "He's already called their lawyer. But what if it's not who he thinks?" She shuddered. "I just see the man who took the picture sitting in his car right there, Susan. Close enough to touch. Except next time not with a camera. God." Suddenly the shuddering seemed to gather in on her and her shoulders were shaking. She brought her wet hands up to her face and covered it completely.

  Susan tightened her arm around her sister-in-law. She could think of nothing to say.

  Nat Glitsky's one-bedroom made Abe's duplex feel like the Taj Mahal by comparison. As the Hardys had done, Abe and Treya decided that they'd feel safer, for this night at least, somewhere other than their homes. They, too, waited until it had gotten dark. They, too, watched for following headlights on the way over, making sure there were none.

  Now all the adults were in the postage-stamp living room while Rachel slept next to grandpa's bed. Abe sat hunched over, all knees and elbows, on the end of the coffee table.

  His face was set and expressionless, his eyes dark and for-bidding. After much discussion with Treya and his father, he'd decided to call the station cops. Hearing who he was, they'd bumped it up to the station captain, who'd come over from his home, and the duty sergeant.

  "All right." At this point, Hardy felt he'd take any sign of cooperation. "At least that's some action. What did they say?"

  Glitsky shot him down. "Basically, they weren't too interested. Wasn't that your impression, Trey?"