Bracco couldn't figure his partner out. Sometimes he was worthless and uninvolved; then he'd get some off-the-wall idea and it would get them someplace.
All day yesterday, they'd been a couple of flatfeet. Walking and talking, walking and talking. The hospital, the coffee group, the Judah Clinic. Ten hours, and then no Glitsky to report to when they'd finally gotten back to homicide. He'd rushed out someplace on some call, evidently in high dudgeon. And they'd gotten the message last time. They could report next morning here at the hall rather than at his house. Although they hadn't been able to do that either, not today. The lieutenant hadn't yet come in by the time they had to leave for their appointment with Kathy West, and that was sometime a little after 10:00.
Now they had all been outside on the patio-sun-dappled, no wind-at this Italian place on Union for over two hours. As far as Bracco could tell, they were having the kind of lunch society folks must have every day, and why weren't all of them fat, he wondered? Then, of course, he realized that Harlen was. But still, two hours for lunch? And it wasn't over yet. Maybe this was how his dad felt, hanging with the mayor.
Bracco had to admit that his partner was doing a hell of a job getting to know Nancy Ross. Of course, he had the entree and help of his aunt Kathy, who was part of their lunch foursome. Even so, Bracco thought that Fisk was handling this interrogation very well. In spite of the tape recorder that now sat in the middle of the table amidst the half-empty coffee cups and tiramisu plates, Nancy-she was Nancy by now-seemed to be completely at her ease.
Although Bracco believed she would be equally composed in any situation. She was a thoroughbred, seemingly born to be waited upon, to command, to direct. Though not as physically magnetic as Ann Kensing with her eyes and curvature, Nancy Ross wore a kind of timeless elegance. But she didn't come across as an ice queen by any means. She had a good ready laugh, a naughty turn of phrase. Somehow she'd gotten into a running gag with Kathy West on the word "long"-"My, what long…bread sticks they serve here." Or, "Did you notice the long…earlobes our waiter has?"-and the two of them had gotten nearly giddy a couple of times.
Fisk was very much at home with her. In some kind of foreign-tailored suit and a bright silk tie, with tasseled cordovan loafers and a cream-colored silky shirt, Fisk had of course taken a good measure of grief in the detail when he'd come in. But Bracco had to admit the guy looked good, like he belonged in these threads, which were cut so well they took thirty pounds off him.
Fisk had asked him to dress nice for lunch, so he'd worn his corduroy sportscoat, a sports shirt with a collar, pressed Dockers. But he felt underdressed, and as a consequence found himself more than a little reluctant to speak-not only because he felt outclassed in a literal way, but because until ten minutes ago, there hadn't even been the pretense of doing any police work. He knew that homicide inspectors didn't punch a clock at the end of the day, but the obverse of that-that he could sometimes take two hours off in the middle of it-made him uncomfortable.
Now it was clear that Fisk had had a plan after all. The anecdotes and chatter were prologue. Nancy Ross by now wanted to help this nice man, this nephew of supervisor Kathy West who also happened to be a policeman, in any way she could.
"I know," she was saying. "Malachi was so nervous this morning. Can you believe this is the first time he's ever testified before a grand jury? He's never even gotten a parking ticket in his whole life, or really talked to any real policemen, working on something this serious. I wish he'd met you sooner, Harlen, and you, too, Darrel. He wouldn't have thought a thing about it."
Fisk tsked sympathetically. "I'm sure he has nothing to worry about. The main reason they wanted to talk to him is to get some kind of day-to-day sense of the pressures at Parnassus. It seems to me that your husband would be the best source of that information now with Mr. Markham gone."
"Oh, he would, that's true. Sometimes I thought he and Tim might as well have had the same job. And now, of course, Malachi has Tim's, although he never would have wanted it in these conditions. This has just been horrible."
"Do you know if he's appointed anybody yet to take over his own old spot?"
She shook her regal head. "No. He's looking but…well, to be honest, the basic problem he tells me is that there aren't too many doctors who can make the hard decisions. Malachi's had to learn to live with them over the past few years. They've really taken their toll on him, you know, in spite of the way that awful reporter made him sound."
Again, Fisk clucked sympathetically. As Bracco saw he'd intended, she took it as encouragement to go on. "As though Jeff Elliot, whoever he is, has any idea of how difficult it is to run a company like Parnassus. What does he think the officers and directors are supposed to work for, minimum wage? I mean, really. He just doesn't know."
"I don't think many people do." Fisk, too, thought this was a sad state of affairs.
"I mean," Nancy went on, "you wouldn't believe the calls to the office the day of that column. I don't know how Malachi stood up to it, how it didn't completely break him, he was so exhausted by then. I mean, the night Tim was killed…Oh, never mind."
"It's all right, Nancy. What?"
She sighed. "Just that he was so much trying to do the right thing, as he always does, staying late to talk to that Mr. Elliot. He didn't have to do that, you know. But he wanted to try to make him understand, which Mr. Elliot obviously wasn't there to do at all. So all that talking and talking till past midnight, when he's exhausted beyond imagining to begin with, and what good did it do him? Still it came out all wrong."
Fisk was in sync with her. "I couldn't believe Elliot mentioned your husband's income in his column. Even if it is supposedly in the public record." He included his partner. "Darrel and I both thought that was pretty low. And as though it's that much money, after all, for the work your husband does."
Kathy West chimed in. "And that's all Malachi does, too. Isn't that right, Nancy? It's not like he's sitting on twenty boards gouging the system."
"Exactly right. That's all we live on. We don't have trusts and inheritances and outside income. Except for a few parties-and without them some important charities would suffer-we live very frugally."
Fisk continued to lead her on. "And half goes to taxes anyway. And then half of what's left on the houses and entertaining. I hear you. I really hear you."
Bracco was trying to do some calculations in his head. Unlike his partner, he did not have any understanding of where 1.2 million dollars could go every year. Even if half-six hundred thousand dollars-went to taxes and then half of that-three hundred thousand dollars more-went to houses (note, plural) and entertaining. That left another three hundred grand after taxes to squeak by on. That was three times Bracco's gross salary, including overtime. Lots of overtime.
But Fisk had briefed him beforehand that the point of this meeting would be to find out if Ross and his family considered themselves well off or knocking on poverty's door. Astoundingly to Bracco, it was beginning to seem the latter.
"You do know, Harlen. I can't tell you how refreshing it is to talk to somebody who understands the numbers. I mean, a million dollars! It sounds like so much, doesn't it?" Then, more seriously, "It used to be so much, I suppose, but not anymore."
Fisk appeared to be having a grand old time, laughing at the figure. "I used to believe that I could retire if I had a million dollars. Can you imagine that?"
Nancy laughed at the absurdity of it. "If you only planned to live a year or two after your retirement, maybe. And not that long if you have any household help-I'm not even talking full-time help. And live-in? Forget it. I mean, a maid a few times a week, or the yard man, or kitchen help."
"And don't forget political donations," Kathy West added, half-humorously.
"And the charities, the opera, the donations to the girls' school, which is on top of the twenty-thousand-dollar tuition. It's actually a little terrifying when I stop to think about it."
Bracco almost couldn't bear listening to any more of the litany. In his life, he didn't even have one of the last half dozen expenses they'd mentioned. But he had no idea how to strike the familiar tone Fisk had established, especially when it was about money, and he had to hope his partner was getting to what he had come for.
But Fisk, apparently still sharing Nancy's plight, continued. "What I find so unbelievable," he said, "is that Elliot made it look like your husband was the prince of greed. He should have done another article on real-life expenses. It seems to me that Dr. Ross would be perfectly justified if he just bolted from Parnassus-I'm sure he's in demand-and went somewhere that could pay him what he's worth."
"Actually, he almost did that. He was interviewing last year. Top secret, of course. Even Tim didn't know." Bracco noted that she paused-perhaps she hadn't meant to reveal that. But then she sighed prettily. "I can't tell you how incredibly trying it's been, really only just getting by, if that, year after year after year. No savings, nothing put away for the girls' colleges. And Malachi only staying on at Parnassus out of some sense of duty. And then having everybody suddenly assume we're just fabulously rich. It's just too great an irony."
Fisk volunteered that maybe he could go and talk to Mr. Elliot. "At least try to make him see your side."
"No. Thank you, Harlen, that's very nice, but I don't think it would be wise. He'd only turn it against us somehow. Although I don't know how that could be."
"It couldn't be, is the answer," Kathy West said. She was patting her hand and reaching for the check. "It'll all blow over, I wouldn't worry, Nancy. The best thing to do with these kinds of articles is forget them."
Fisk neatly palmed the tape recorder and slipped it into his pocket. "I'm sorry we got on this difficult subject," he said. "It's a part of the job I don't much enjoy. But you've been very helpful and the lunch was fantastic."
Nancy Ross also reached for the check. Harlen and his aunt objected, but she overrode them both. Bracco, deeply relieved, stammered out his thanks. He'd caught a glimpse of the figure-$147.88, not including the tip. This was half what Bracco paid his father every month for rent.
Then everybody was standing up and kissing everyone else on both cheeks. Nancy Ross seemed to have completely recovered from the depressing financial talk. For Bracco's part, he shook Nancy's hand and then Kathy's, told them how pleasant it had been, how much he'd enjoyed it. And in a way, he realized, it was true. It had been an intimate glimpse into another, totally separate world that coexisted with his own.
And in that world, Malachi Ross had money trouble.
Wes Farrell got the news about Mrs. Loring from Strout's office about five minutes after he arrived at his office. After thinking about it for a minute, he decided that this wasn't the kind of uplifting information you wanted to immediately share with your client: "Hi, Chuck, it's Wes Farrell here. Great news. They're digging up your mom's body and cutting it up for science." No. He didn't think so.
It was, however, a good break for him, a cause for celebration, and in the past months there'd been few enough of them. He made a valiant attempt to conduct other business until lunchtime. But once he locked the door and headed back for his house, he suddenly knew that it was going to take more will than he possessed to get him back in his office before a new day had dawned.
He had an artichoke and a can of tuna fish for lunch, then took a half hour power nap in his living room. Now he was outside, accompanying his sixty-five-pound boxer, Bart, on a walk around Buena Vista Park. He sported a pair of threadbare slacks, high-tech tennis shoes, and a sweatshirt that from a distance read BUSH and up close contained the tiny, lowercase fill-in letters ll it. Farrell liked to think that hanging in his closet he had perhaps the world's premier collection of bumper-sticker wisdom affixed to shirtwear.
The sun had broken through the cloud cover and the day threatened to grow almost warm. It had been warm only two days before, and no San Francisco native would reasonably expect a reprise so soon. And yet it appeared to be happening. Wonders would never cease.
And among them was the appearance of his beloved, Samantha Duncan. Cute, fit, feisty, and now almost forty, Sam had moved in with Wes over five years ago and both considered the arrangement permanent, although a formal marriage was not in their plans-Wes had been there, done that, and had issues with it, and Sam thought that was fine.
As soon as he'd gotten home, he'd called her where she worked at the Rape Crisis Counseling Center on Haight Street and asked her if she wanted to take some time off and maybe engage in some consensual adult activity-the kind of humor she hated in everyone else in the world, but tolerated in Wes. But she'd been busy and wasn't likely to be able to get away.
But suddenly now here she was, falling in step beside him, taking his hand. He stopped, kissed her, held her against him for a minute. "How'd you get away?"
"Fate. One of the volunteers just decided to come in and work." Bart was pulling at his leash, and they both started walking. She turned to look up at him. "So what happened that it's suddenly a holiday?"
He told her, trying to give her some of the flavor of Hardy's idea, Strout's original reluctance, this morning's turnaround, the immediate and salutary effect it might have on his billings. He could, for the first time in about five years, find himself involved in a high-profile case, get his name in the paper, attract a broader client base.
"Which I've heard you say more than once you don't want to do."
"If I said it, it must be true," he admitted. "But that's the problem. You get a lot of people to start paying you, next thing you know they want you to actually do work for them. It's a hell of a drain on resources."
"But you're going for this anyway?"
"Got to. You've seen what happens when you try to hold your practice to only five or six solid clients at a time, as I have so masterfully done. You find yourself turning into some kind of a legal specialist. You turn in the same motions five times each, except you've changed the names and one or two details. So you cut your work by a fifth and multiply your billings times five. It's just a beautiful license to print money. Fortunately I'm man enough to swallow my principles and bill the shit out of all these people, while still providing excellent service, of course."
"Of course." She dropped his hand. "I have no idea why I like you."
"I'm more fun than everybody else, is why. But I'm even more fun than that if I've got spending money. Hence my five-client plan. Except then what sometimes happens, as we've recently seen, is one Supreme Court ruling and the bottom falls out, the money dries up, you leave me. Then I probably kill myself. It's horrible, and all because of the Supremes and their picky little decisions."
"Those darn guys," Sam said.
"And two women, don't forget, as I'm sure you never would. Anyway, so I figure this might be good press and a golden opportunity. I can expand the business again. Then I can pick and choose great clients who can afford to pay huge fortunes for very little work on my part, and then you and I can go on in our life of meaningless hedonism."
"You sound like an awful, awful person. Do you know that?"
"I keep telling you. It's the real me."
"The real you who spent all those nights at your office last summer getting the Mackeys' suit included with the others, and then forgot to charge them anything for all that work?"
"I know." Farrell wore a look of chagrin. "I almost fired myself for that. Besides, my real plan was that they'd win the lottery and be so grateful that they'd split it with me. Don't look at me like that-it could still happen."
They'd come around to the grass at the very top of the park. Sam sat, and Wes stretched out on the ground and put his head on her lap. Bart, getting on in years, rested his muzzle on Farrell's stomach.
After a few minutes, Sam stopped combing Wes's hair with her fingers. "I don't understand something," she said.
"No," he said, "you pretty much seem to get everything."
"What you're trying to get is lucky, isn't it?"
"I'm shocked and dismayed that you could think such a thing." He put a finger to his forehead theatrically, spoke as if to himself. "Oh no, wait. I can't be both." Then back to her, "I'm shocked, Sam, that you could think such a thing. I'd never stoop to flattery hoping to coax a carnal favor from you. Our love is too precious and too real."
"I should have worn boots," she replied. "It's a little thick out here."
Wes shrugged. "All right, I'll be serious. What don't you understand?"
"All this talk about clearing beds. Mrs. Loring even. Dismas Hardy says one possible motive someone might have had for killing her is to get the bed empty. But, so who does that help, if the bed's empty?"
"Then they can put somebody else in it," Wes said.
"Right. That's the part I don't understand. You've got a sick person in a bed, and then that person dies and the next day you've got another sick person in the bed. They're paying the same thing for the same bed, right? So why is it to anyone's advantage to get rid of person A in favor of person B? I just don't see it."
Farrell lifted his head a fraction of an inch. "Bart, you want to tell her? Ow! Those hairs are precious to me."
Wes put his head back in her lap, rubbed a hand over where Sam had pulled. "If you're going to get snippy about it, put simply, here it is. The city contracted with Parnassus to provide all its employees with basic HMO health coverage on what they call a capitated basis."
"Which is?"
"I'm glad you asked. It means that Parnassus gets a set amount every month to provide all the physician and hospital services to city employees who are enrolled in the HMO, which they can do at no cost to them. It comes with the city gig."
"Okay. We've still got that bed."
"I'm getting there, please. So what happens in real life is that Parnassus gets a monthly check from the city. It becomes part of their general operating income. Then, like any other set payment, Parnassus starts using it to cover overhead and salaries and so on. So if Parnassus winds up having to provide an expensive service for somebody in the HMO-like chemotherapy or heart surgery-it feels like it's not getting paid for it."
"But everybody agreed up front-"
He wagged a finger. "Not the point. The point is there are other patients, whether they are city employees or not, who have chosen a more expensive provider option. For these folks, Parnassus gets real live money for the services it provides."
"But it gets real money every month from the city, anyway. Right? I'm still not seeing the difference."
"Okay, let's say a city employee enrolled in the HMO spends five days in intensive care. The city doesn't send an extra check. Parnassus gets its hundred and fifty a month and that's all. However, if a person enrolled in a preferred provider program, for example, spends the same five days in the ICU, Parnassus gets about five grand a day. So it can be argued than an HMO city employee in an ICU bed is costing Parnassus maybe as much as five grand per day."
"Per day?"
"Every day, my dear. You don't watch it pretty close, it'll add right on up. So now let's take our own Marjorie Loring, who happens to be a pretty good example of what we're talking about. She was a city employee insured through the Parnassus HMO. So if she happens to defy the odds and hangs on for six months, she's going to cost Portola what? At least a hundred grand, maybe more.
"Now if you were running Portola, would you rather have Marjorie Loring in that bed or someone else who's insured with a preferred provider program that paid a full dollar for every dollar billed, all other things being equal?"
Sam didn't have to think very long. "All other things being equal," she said, "it sounds to me like Dismas Hardy might be on to something."
It was getting on to midafternoon and Glitsky couldn't eat another bite of rice cake.
A little-used and semienclosed staircase ran along the Hall of Justice on the Seventh Street side, and he took it down to the ground. Out on the corner, he was waiting at the light to cross and go get some peanuts at Lou's, even if they gave him an instant heart attack that felled him at the bar. Suddenly he found himself facing his two new homicide inspectors, coming his way in the crosswalk. Fisk was dressed like a fashion model and even Bracco looked pretty sharp. "Where's the party?" he asked. "You feel like a handful of peanuts?"
Coming from their boss, this wasn't really a social request. The light changed and the three men walked.
The bar at Lou's didn't have any empty stools, so Glitsky stood while he ordered three small bags of cocktail peanuts and a pint of iced tea. Following his nonalcoholic lead, Bracco and Fisk bought cups of acidic coffee, after which they all repaired to a booth and got settled. The lieutenant sat on one side and the two inspectors on the other. Glitsky threw a bag of peanuts at each of them, tore at his own. "So what's got you two boys so duded up?"
Since the lunch with Nancy Ross and Kathy West had been Harlen's idea, Bracco thought he'd let him explain it.
He was surprised when the lieutenant seemed to approve. When the narrative ended, Glitsky was nodding. "So we now know what we've always suspected. You can't make too much money, and nobody thinks they got enough. Anything else?"
Bracco decided he needed to speak up. "Couple of things," he said. "One, it might be interesting to compare Ross's tax returns the last few years with what they've spent. Mrs. Ross might not have realized it, but she basically said they were living on more than they were making."
"So am I," Glitsky said. "Who isn't?" He chewed his ice for a moment. "So they've extended themselves on credit cards, so what? And what would that prove anyway? How's it relate to Markham?"
"If Ross was taking money from Parnassus in some way and Markham found out-"
"You mean embezzling? Something like that?"
"I don't know," Bracco admitted.
Glitsky didn't like it. "Anything obvious or proven and he would have fired him on the spot, don't you think?" He drank some more tea, frowning. "My problem with this whole line of thought," he said at last, "is that I've got to go on the assumption that whoever killed Markham in the hospital probably wasn't planning to kill him until he showed up there after the accident. That's why I like Kensing so much. He didn't just have a motive. He had several long-standing motives, where he might see the opportunity and just go, 'At last.'
"On the other hand-just hear me out-if Ross was somehow threatened by Markham to the degree that he actually planned to kill him, doesn't it make more sense to think that he would have done something proactive, like actually try to run him over, for example, rather than just wait for fate to put him in his path? What if it didn't happen? And ten out of ten times it wouldn't."
"If I may, sir?" Harlen said.
Glitsky's face relaxed a degree. "You may."
"They've worked together a long time, Ross and Markham, so there could have been the same buildup of motives that we know about with Kensing, couldn't there? The point we made this afternoon was that Ross needed his job. But something was making him want to leave Parnassus."
This wasn't too conclusive for Glitsky. "He read the writing on the wall. The place was going down. He didn't want to go with it."
"Okay." Fisk's frustration with Glitsky's objections was beginning to show. "But he couldn't get any other jobs. His wife told us he'd gone looking and couldn't get hired anywhere else. Why not? Finally, who benefits most immediately from Markham's death? Dr. Ross, who took over the top job and gets another two hundred grand a year salary, just for starters."
Glitsky upended his peanut bag, threw the last few into his mouth, chewed thoughtfully. "But we don't know that there were in fact any serious-and I mean deadly serious-problems between him and Markham. Do we?"
Downcast, the two inspectors looked at each other, then back across the table. "No, sir," Bracco said. "But it might be fun to keep looking."
"You can look all you want," Glitsky replied. "But as far as I know, the only person we've got in the room when Markham died was Kensing and the nurses who had no personal relationship with Mr. Markham at all. And that pretty severely limits the field, don't you agree? Has that changed?"
"Actually, it might have," Bracco said. "I went back up to the ICU station yesterday while Harlen was waiting for an interview downstairs." He went on to describe his successful entry into intensive care unmolested and apparently unnoticed, and when he finished, Glitsky was frowning.
"What time was this?"
"About the same time Markham died. Early afternoon."
"And what about the nurses' station?"
"One nurse was at it, sitting at the computer."
"How long were you in there?"
Bracco shrugged. "A minute, give or take. I walked around to each bed."
"And nobody else…"
"Nobody. I just walked behind the nurse at the computer, opened the door, disappeared. Which means that anybody else could have done the same thing."
Glitsky's face had hardened down to granite. His cell phone rang and he picked it from his belt and growled out his name, then listened intently. The scar between his lips stood out in stark relief. He said, "Are you sure?" In less than a minute, he closed up the phone and stared out over the heads of his inspectors.
The town of Colma, just over San Francisco's border with San Mateo County, has far more dead inhabitants than live ones.
Hardy stood at one of the thousands of gravesites. This one was near the end of a row of headstones, under a redwood tree. With the cemetery's permission, he had planted the tree himself twenty-eight years before.
It was April 16, the day Hardy's son Michael had been born. He'd died seven months later when he fell out of his crib. It probably had been the very first time he'd stood up. Certainly, neither Hardy nor Jane, his wife back then-the marriage was another casualty of the tragedy-had ever seen him get up on his feet. He'd only been crawling a few weeks, it seemed. A couple of film rolls' worth.
So they left the sides down on his crib. Not all the way down. Halfway down. They'd childproofed the house, but neither one of them had ever given a thought to the sides of the crib. Michael wasn't old enough for that yet. But he must have been able to stand all the way up. Otherwise, he would not have been able to pitch over and land wrong.
Hardy wasn't thinking about that now, about that one long-ago moment that had forever modulated the course of his life, who he was, what he had become, into a minor key. He wasn't conscious of any thought at all. He was simply standing here, by his infant son's now-old grave. He had never faced this place before, though he'd always marked the date and had been to Colma many times. He had never before been able to find the courage.
But something had drawn him here today, something he either couldn't define or didn't want to examine too closely. He felt that too many of the important things in his life were slipping away. Maybe he hoped that a gradual slip-unlike an abrupt fall-could be stopped. Lives could be saved.
He had called Frannie and told her where he was going. He could tell the call worried her. Should she meet him there? she'd asked him. Was he all right?
He didn't know the real answer to that, but he told her he was fine. That he loved her. He'd see her tonight, after Vincent's Little League practice, when his normal life resumed.
Downtown, near his office, the day had been threatening to be nice again. Driving out, as far as the Shamrock, he had his windows down. But here, except for his lone redwood, the eucalyptus and the windswept, twisted cypress trees and the thriving endless lawn, it was all grays-everything from the sky down through the air itself. Gray and cold.
He wore his business suit and even with the coat buttoned, it wasn't nearly enough to alleviate the chill. In the groves both close and far, the wind droned with a vibration he felt more than heard. Already in places the cloud cover had gone to ground and wisps of the fitful fog drifted and dissipated into the endless gray.
He had not prayed in thirty years. Perhaps he wasn't praying now. But he went to a knee, then both knees, and remained in that position for several minutes. At last he stood up, took a final look at the name still sharply etched into the marble headstone-Michael Hardy.
Now so unfamiliar, so impossible.
He drew a breath, gathering himself. When he turned to walk back to his car, Glitsky was standing on the asphalt path thirty feet away.
He wore his leather flight jacket. His hands were in its pockets. He took a step forward at the same moment Hardy did. When they had closed the gap, both stopped. "I tried your office," Glitsky said, "then the cell, then Frannie." He hesitated. "You okay?"
He motioned vaguely back behind him. "He would have been twenty-eight today. I thought I owed him a visit."
A gust shuddered by them. Glitsky waited it out. "That's my greatest fear," he said.
"It's a good one."
"I've got my three grown boys, Diz. I beat the odds. Why do I want to do this again?"
Hardy took some time before he answered. "Most of the time it doesn't end up like this, that's why. Most of the time they bury us."
Glitsky was looking somewhere over Hardy's shoulder. "I couldn't put my finger on why I was so…" He couldn't get the thought out. "It's, what if they don't bury us? What if it is like this?"
"Then you do what you have to do," Hardy replied. "You suppose time goes by, but you're not part of time anymore. And then one day something you eat has flavor again, or maybe the sun feels good on your back. Something. You start again." He shrugged. "You did it with Flo, so you know."
"Yeah, I do know. But the funny thing is, I'm more scared of it now. I'm not good with fear."
"I've noticed that." A ghost of a smile flitted around Hardy's mouth. "I'd actually call that a good sign, especially compared to how you were before you met Treya, that long sleepwalk after Flo died. Now it all matters again, though, doesn't it? And ain't that a bitch?"
"No, it's good, but…"
"No 'but' about it, Abe. It's all good." He motioned back toward the gravesite again. "The little guy had something he needed to tell me. I think that was it."
Coming back at Glitsky, he realized that they'd been baring their souls to each other, and that this was, in fact, who they were. Without any need to acknowledge it, both of them knew that their fight, somehow, was over. They might still have serious professional issues between them, but the essential bond was secure.
They started walking together to where they'd parked their cars. "There was something else," Glitsky said. "Why I was trying to get you in the first place."
"What's that?"
"Strout called. Marjorie Loring's autopsy."
"Done already?" This was very fast, but Hardy wasn't really surprised. Jackman had made it clear that it was a high priority.
Glitsky nodded. "You were right. She didn't die of cancer."
A wash of relief ran over Hardy-he'd invested more than he'd realized in these results. "So what was it?" he asked. "Potassium?"
"No. Some muscle relaxers. Pavulon and something chloride. Both of them stop natural breathing. Both would have been administered in the hospital."
"Kensing wasn't anywhere near her, Abe. He was on vacation with his kids in Disneyland. And before you say it, I know this doesn't mean he didn't kill Markham. But it does mean something, doesn't it?"
Glitsky didn't need to go over it. "You and I have to talk. You said you got more of these people?"
Hardy nodded. "Ten more. And that's just Kensing's list. I know at least one nurse that has her own suspicions. She might have some names to go with them, although I'd agree with you that one homicide doesn't mean there are ten of them."
"I didn't say that."
"Yeah, I know. I read your mind. But it does mean there's one of them, and it wasn't Kensing. But it also wasn't potassium, which I kind of wish it was."
Glitsky looked questioningly at him. "Why is that?"
"Because if both Loring and Markham got killed the same way, it would be the same person doing it, wouldn't it?"
"It might at that," Glitsky admitted, "but as far as I'm concerned, this is good enough in terms of me and you." They'd gotten to Glitsky's car. He stopped by the front door. "I think I owe you an apology."
"I agree with you. Was that it?"
A small chuckle. "As good as it gets." But surprisingly, he went a little further. "All I can say is that you don't work with as many defense attorneys as I do. You get a little cynical after a while, even with your friends."
This was the sad truth and Hardy believed it. He could argue that he, Dismas Hardy, Abe's best friend, wasn't just another defense attorney given to pulling unethical tricks out of his hat just to protect his clients. But he knew that in the world of criminal law this in itself would be a rare and suspect guarantee. Hardy had won at least a couple of lesser cases on technicalities that Glitsky in his cop mode would probably consider some form of cheating.
Wes Farrell had gotten his boy off the other day when the arresting officer hadn't made it to the courtroom. For all Hardy knew, Wes had taken the cop out the night before and got him plowed so he'd be too hungover to appear. Beyond that, a true eminence at the defense bar such as David Freeman wouldn't even blush to do exactly what Glitsky had accused Hardy of. Squeeze a witness by bringing her children into play? Get the coroner to dig up half of Colma? Pretend you needed an emergency tooth extraction on the first day of jury selection? If it helped your client, if it even delayed proceedings for any substantial period of time, it was justifiable. Even, arguably, commendable. Ethically required.
"So where do we go from here?" Hardy asked.
Glitsky had no doubt. "Kensing's list. If there's an angel of death at Portola, I want to know about it. Meanwhile, Marlene's going ahead with the grand jury. I got another unpleasant surprise about five minutes before Strout called." He told Hardy about Bracco's discovery on the lack of security for the ICU at Portola.
"So anybody could have gone in? Is that what you're saying?"
"Bracco seemed to think so." Glitsky paused. "I don't want to have two potential killers," he said. "I really don't. The idea offends me."
"Me, too, but three's worse," Hardy reminded him.
"Three?"
"Whoever drove the car."
Brendan Driscoll talked most of the afternoon to the grand jury. Obviously, he thought someone who hated him had testified before he did. The prosecutor, Ms. Ash, seemed poisoned against him from the outset. He had been planning to talk about Ross and Kensing and Kensing's damned wife and the others who had made life so difficult at Parnassus.
Instead, she wanted to know all about his personal relationship with Tim, and this made him very nervous. He'd worked very hard to keep it all low-key-of course, they'd had their disagreements. When you worked so closely with one individual over a long period of time, there was bound to be some friction. But in general they had been an extremely good team.
But Ash had already heard about the warning memo he'd received from Tim, the personal dressing down he'd endured-Ross must have been the source for that, he thought-and had spent what seemed like a lot of time going over what he'd done at the hospital last Tuesday. Finally, before he could direct her to anyone else who'd had run-ins with Tim, she'd started asking questions about Mr. Markham's correspondence, his own familiarity with it, especially the decision to bill the city for outpatient services.
She was clueless, he thought. He'd rather have her looking at other people than at this business decision, which, so far as Driscoll could tell, had nothing to do with anything except the company's cash flow. But if it distracted her from his own personal issues with Tim, especially during this difficult last month, he supposed he should be happy. He would have preferred to direct her attention to one of his pet enemies, and he tried a couple of times.
"…the outpatient billing decision was really Mr. Markham's to make, and he was dead set against it. But Dr. Ross…"
"…although during the time you're asking about, Mr. Markham wasn't able to concentrate on his work the way he liked to because Dr. Eric Kensing's wife, Ann, was demanding so much of…"
When he couldn't get Ash to bite, he finally decided he had to leave it.
But Jeff Elliot was a different story. Driscoll had already called the reporter yesterday and made an appointment to talk to him after he was finished with the grand jury. When he got out-quite a bit more shaken than he'd expected to be-he walked to the Chronicle's building, where Elliot was waiting for him.
Now he had a cup of coffee and had finally gotten comfortable on a chair in the little cubicle. He knew who he wanted to vilify, and had printed out Markham's letters both to Kensing and to Ross, as well as over a hundred memos to file. These outlined Tim's ongoing dissatisfaction with both of them on a variety of points. Driscoll was making his pitch that these documents supplied a number of very plausible motives for someone to have killed Tim.
Elliot flipped through the pages without much enthusiasm. "This is good stuff, Brendan, except that it looks like we've got a whole different ball game over there now."
Driscoll straightened himself in the chair. Touching the knot of his tie, he cleared his throat. "What do you mean by that? Over where?"
"Portola. It appears that a lady who died there a few months ago was also poisoned. From what I'm hearing, there may be several more." He filled Driscoll in on most of what he'd learned to that point. "So needless to say, this casts some doubt over whether Mr. Markham was killed for personal reasons. He might have been just the latest in a series of these drug deaths at Portola, in which case the motives anybody might have had to kill him would be pretty irrelevant. Don't you agree?"
"That makes sense, I guess." Driscoll was sitting back in a kind of shock. For three days, he'd been plotting his revenge on Kensing for all the trouble he'd caused, on Ross for firing him. He thought he'd planned perfectly. Certainly he had a great deal of evidence against both of them. If Elliot would go public with any of it, it might force the board and maybe even the police to act.
But he hadn't been able to get his accusations aired either in front of the grand jury or now, here. It wasn't fair. "So what's going to happen now?" he asked. "Don't you want any of this?"
"Of course. This is great stuff." Elliot certainly wasn't faking his enthusiasm. "I just wanted to be straight with you that I might not get to it real soon. But hey, cheer up. Parnassus is going to be news for the rest of the year." The reporter patted the stack of paper. "This will be good bedtime reading."
Brendan had one last question. "So these other deaths at Portola? Do they mean that the police no longer think Eric Kensing might have killed Tim?"
"I think if nothing else it's going to give him a reprieve. Why?"
Driscoll shook his head. "I don't really know. I think I'd just come to believe that he had actually done it. Certainly he had more reason than anybody else. I guess I'll just have to adjust."
Vincent's Little League team, the Tigers, practiced only a few hundred yards from Hardy's house. They'd gotten permission to set up a backstop in an otherwise deserted section of Lincoln Park Golf Course, up against Clement Street. Hardy couldn't commit the time to be the team's manager, but he tried to show up as often as he could and help coach. He'd played ball through high school and his son's love for the game was a source of satisfaction in his own life.
He got back from Colma in time to pitch batting practice. There was no fog here twenty blocks inland. When the team broke down for infield practice, Hardy came off the field and stood next to Abe, who had been watching from behind the backstop. Mitch, the manager, laced one down the third-base line where Vincent snagged it backhand and threw a strike to first. Abe nodded in appreciation. "Your boy's looking pretty good."
Glitsky had called home and told his family to meet him for a barbecue at the Hardys'. So after practice, they stopped in at the Safeway and bought tri-tip steaks and some kind of gourmet sausage, prepackaged potato and Caesar salads, sodas, and a six-pack of beer. Vincent pulled a half gallon of cookie dough ice cream out of the freezer. Glitsky held four flavors of bottled iced tea in two four-packs.
Hardy stood behind Glitsky and his son and watched as they loaded their goods onto the conveyor belt. It struck him that Louis XIV-the Sun King himself-probably didn't have this kind of food selection, this kind of weather, that in fact he was living in a kind of golden age and he'd be a fool to forget it. If it sometimes threatened to break his heart, it was a good thing.
He put a hand on Glitsky's shoulder, one on his son's.
"Rebecca Simms? This is Dismas Hardy again."
He thought he heard an intake of breath. Nurse Simms had been straightforward enough last time about not wanting to hear from him again, not wanting any more involvement. He rushed ahead before she could cut him off or hang up. "I know it's a little late, but I thought I owed you a phone call. Have you seen the news on TV?"
"No," she said. "I try not to watch too much TV. I read instead. What news?"
Jackman got the word out that he wanted them all in his office before eight o'clock the next morning. What the DA wanted, the DA got. Dead silent, Bracco and Fisk stood against the open door. Wes Farrell and Hardy sat on either end of the couch drinking coffee, while Glitsky was in the outer office with his wife. At a couple of minutes after the hour, Jackman arrived, accompanied by Marlene Ash and John Strout. After greeting everyone cordially, the DA went behind his desk, sat, and gave a sign to Treya. She ushered Glitsky inside and closed the door after him.
Jackman wasted no time on preliminaries. "Diz," he began, "I hear you've got ten more names on this magic list of yours. You'll be giving that to Abe, I presume."
"Yes, sir. Already done. Copies to Dr. Strout. And I spoke to another potential witness last night-a nurse at Portola-who's going to talk to the people she works with. Dr. Kensing only began his list about six months ago. My nurse witness might have more names."
"And that doesn't include what comes out of the woodwork," Marlene Ash put in. "I've got a feeling that everybody who died at Portola is going to seem fishy to somebody."
Jackman nodded in agreement, but he'd considered this.
"That's why I'm asking Dr. Strout here to have one of his assistants review what I expect is going to be a flood of requests for exhumations and autopsies. At least that way we'll make sure some doctor might have thought something was wrong about a premature death before we go ahead."
"Good luck with that," Farrell said. "You're talking about these folks overruling the PM their own hospital conducted. You're not going to get a lot of cooperation from doctors who work there. And the administration's going to be worse."
"They'll have to if we order it."
"Sure," Farrell said, "but we can't make doctors and nurses voice suspicions if they don't want to. Or don't have them."
Jackman wasn't worried about it. "Don't get me wrong. I don't want a lot of these requests."
"But we're going to get them, from families if no one else." Ash looked around the room. "We'd better be ready."
"All right." Jackman was ready to move on. "John, why don't you give us a little rundown of your results yesterday, although I think we've all gotten the basic message."
The medical examiner laid it all out for them. Mrs. Loring had been killed by an overdose of Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride. They were two muscle relaxants that, especially in the case of someone who is already comatose, might mimic a natural death.
"No might about it," Farrell interrupted. "Nobody thought a thing about it until Diz gave me her name and told me I'd be smart to look. I was even planning to sue the hospital over negligent care and didn't have any suspicion she'd been murdered."
Strout went on with his explanation. These drugs were extremely powerful, and always administered in IVs. Beyond that, since Mrs. Loring had been bedridden in the ICU, there was no real possibility that she'd taken pills orally in an effort to end her own life. She wouldn't have had access to them. The conclusion was that Strout was calling this homicide "death at the hands of another." In other words, some degree of murder.
"But no potassium?" Glitsky wanted that nailed down.
"Not any. No."
A silence settled in the room, and Jackman broke it. "It seems to me that the salient point here is not so much the type of drugs that may have been used in these two deaths. And I don't want to speculate ahead of the facts on potential future discoveries we might make. But more than the difference in drugs, the common feature of these two homicides is that somebody seemed to know, or believe, that Portola rubber-stamped their postmortems, when they were done at all, especially in the more obvious cases."
"I checked into that a bit," Strout volunteered. "Seems the cutbacks they've been livin' with have left them very short in this area. Hospital PMs, as a rule, aren't very thorough anyway. These guys were barely goin' through the motions. They don't even have a forensics specialist on staff anymore. Instead, they run only basic scans out to their lab-"
"If they even take it that far," Farrell said.
Strout bobbed his head. "I would agree that it might not always happen."
"So what are the standard scans, John?" Hardy asked.
"It can vary," Strout said, "but basically we're talkin' money and levels of complexity. You've got your A-scan, which is set for alcohol and some of your common drugs-aspirin, cocaine, and so on. Generally, you find a cause or possible cause of death at one level-say you've got toxic levels of cocaethylene, which is cocaine and alcohol, at the A-scan-then you stop looking. But if you want to keep goin', the B-scan's set for a slew of other drugs. Anyway, each level of scan gets more expensive. So if you got a cause of death at the zero-scan level, most folks stop there."
"And that's what you think happened here, with Mrs. Loring?" Jackman asked.
Strout nodded genially. "That's my best guess. Nobody looked too hard. They looked at all, somebody would'a seen 'em."
"Once you got a cause of death, did you stop, too, John?" Marlene asked him. "Or did you take it beyond there?"
"Yes, ma'am, I sure did. She had her chemo agent and some morphine for the pain. I got her records when I called for the body, and she was self-medicatin' with morphine in the hospital. But nowhere near a fatal dose of anythin' else."
"But if she was self-medicating," Farrell asked, "that means she was fairly coherent, doesn't it?"
"It could," Strout agreed. "She knew when she was hurtin', and when it got bad enough, she hit the button for a dose of morphine."
"Which is premeasured, am I right, John?" Ash asked him. "And time-release controlled?"
"Right. No way she overdoses herself, if that's what you're sayin'."
"So she wasn't in any kind of coma?" Hardy had for some reason imagined she was. Somehow the fact of her consciousness made her death all the worse. "You're telling us she was alert and somebody just came in and killed her?"
"I don't know 'bout that, Diz. She might'a been sleepin' at the exact time. But otherwise, in terms of was she in a conscious state? I'd have to say pretty much yeah."
Everyone seemed lost in private thoughts. The DA simply moved his head up and down, up and down. Finally, he stopped. "Mr. Farrell, I want to thank you for coming to this early call. I expect we'll be hearing from you in the near future. I appreciate your cooperation."
It took Farrell a moment to realize that Jackman was telling him to leave. When it clicked in, he was gracious about it, thanking the DA for thinking to invite him, then Strout for his efforts and Hardy again for his.
Strout spoke up, as well. "If you don't need me, Clarence, I got a feelin' I'm lookin' at a busy day, and I'd best get on with it."
After the two men left, Jackman stood and came around the front of his desk, then boosted himself up onto it. "Diz, we're sharing information with you on Markham and you're the man responsible for bringing Mrs. Loring to the attention to all of us. We're grateful to you. But we still expect your client to testify fully before the grand jury. Especially in light of this list he provided for us, which opens its own can of worms." He looked around to Ash and Glitsky, to the two inspectors by the back wall. "If anybody wants Mr. Hardy to step outside, I'm sure he'll understand."
But nobody said a word. Jackman gave it another few seconds, then turned to Glitsky. "All right, Abe, we all know that this throws some kind of a wrench into Markham. How do you propose we proceed?"
When Hardy came in, David Freeman looked up from the no doubt brilliant brief he was writing longhand on his yellow legal pad. "Ah, Mr. Hardy," he said with pleasure. "Come in, come in." He had half of an unlit cigar in his mouth. The top button of his shirt was undone, his tie so loose it was barely attached. Hardy thought it might have been the same tie he'd been wearing yesterday, the same shirt. The shutters were still partway drawn, although it was by now well into the workday. Had Freeman slept here in the office? It wouldn't be the first time, but he decided he wouldn't ask. All in all, he'd rather not know.
"You wanted to see me? If it's about the rent, I'm not paying any more and that's final. In fact, I already pay too much."
Freeman harrumphed. "This Portola woman is your doing, isn't it?"
"Perhaps."
"Which makes you either the unluckiest son of a bitch on the planet, or the dumbest. I'd be curious to know your thoughts when you asked Strout to dig up this poor woman's bones."
"How'd you know it was me? And in actual fact, it wasn't. It was Wes Farrell, although I admit I played a role."
"That charade yesterday at lunch, which perhaps in all the excitement you've forgotten. John Strout mentioned both Mr. Farrell and Mrs. Loring by name, and I happened to notice them again in the newspaper this morning. Front page, if I'm not mistaken."
"And Jeff Elliot's byline, now that I think of it. I've got to call him and have him buy me lunch or something."
Freeman sat back, took him in. "You're not taking this seriously."
Hardy took an upholstered chair and moved it into Freeman's line of sight, then sat in it. "Yes I am. And with all due respect to your gray hairs, it's neither unlucky nor dumb. I checked to make sure my client was long gone when Mrs. Loring died. He couldn't have killed her."
"No, maybe not her. But maybe she's got nothing to do with Markham."
"Technically true, but not relevant. She's got everything to do with him."
"What, pray? As I understand it, and even Mr. Elliot's article made it quite clear, your Mrs. Loring died of a different overdose, from an entirely different drug, than Mr. Markham. That in itself points to a different hand. Res ipsa loquitur, n'est-ce pas? Can it be you don't see this?"
Hardy was getting a bad feeling about Freeman's direction, but he had to admire somebody who could string English, Latin, and French together so fluidly and without apparent forethought. It was something you didn't hear every day. So Hardy had half a grin on when he replied. "Sure, David, I see it. I just don't see the problem."
Freeman came forward, arms and elbows on his desk. He took his cigar from his mouth. "The problem is that it neither proves nor disproves anything about your client in regard to Mr. Markham, and you're pretending that it does. When in fact all it does is bring more pressure to bear on Mr. Jackman to bring an indictment on at least somebody at Portola, and the closest person to hand might in fact turn out to be Dr. Kensing."
Hardy shook his head. "As it turns out, I was just with Clarence. He's not thinking that way at all."
"He will. Give him time."
"I don't think so. He's going to be looking for the person who killed Mrs. Loring, and maybe several other patients at Portola. He's then going to assume that that person killed Markham, as well."
"And why will he do that?"
"Jesus, David. Because it makes sense. Doesn't it just stretch your credibility a little too much to believe that two separate murderers are prowling the halls at Portola?"
Hanging his head, Freeman sighed. "Didn't O.J.'s slow car chase stretch credibility? Didn't Monica's blue dress turning up unwashed stretch credibility? Or the Florida recount-two hundred-some votes out of sixty million. Trust me, Diz, people nowadays are used to a boundless elasticity of credibility. And what I see is that you're sorely tempted to think you've won already, you've gotten Kensing off. I'm telling you that that's not the case. All you've done here is put the magnifying glass on everybody at Portola, and that includes him. You can't ignore that, and from what I'm hearing, that's what you were intending to do."
Hardy glared at the old man. "So what's your suggestion?"
Freeman was glad to give it. "The heat is way up now, Diz. They're going to have to put handcuffs on somebody for something soon, or there's going to be a peasant revolt. They're entirely likely to do your client for Markham, then kind of hint he's good for most, if not all, of the rest, but they just can't prove it." His eyes glinted under the steel wool brows. "You may have given Kensing a defense at trial, but now it's a hell of a lot more likely that he's going to have one."
In fact, Hardy had concluded that Kensing's troubles were pretty much over. In the euphoria of guessing right on Mrs. Loring, then of Glitsky's conversion, he conceded now that he might have gotten carried away with some of the implications of the autopsy's results. Freeman was reminding him that his client was still exposed and vulnerable, and now maybe more than ever. Hardy had better remain vigilant until the whole drama had played out.
"Let me ask you this," the old man said, "what if one of the new batch of autopsies shows potassium again? You think that helps your client?"
"David, he wasn't there for Mrs. Loring. Get it? If he didn't kill her, he didn't kill any of them."
"Not true. Pure wishful thinking. And now you're getting angry, as well you should when you see your logic breaking down. But don't take it out on me." He picked up his cigar and chewed at it thoughtfully. "Listen, I don't want to rain on your parade, I really don't. I admit you've opened a door here and it might lead where you want to go. I hope it does. I hope it's one serial killer who confesses to it all before sundown.
"But think about this. Who supplied the names of the dead people? Kensing. If he was so suspicious so many times, why then didn't he mention some of this sooner? Why did he wait until he was a suspect in Mr. Markham's death? Isn't that a little convenient? And isn't it possible he could have been in collusion with someone else at Portola, maybe one of the nurses, so he needn't have been physically around for every death? You're laughing, but none of these are frivolous questions. Have you considered the possibility that Kensing and one or more of the nurses could have been getting bonuses under the table from Parnassus for clearing the beds of terminally ill long-term patients without adequate insurance? This kind of thing has been known to happen, especially in cash-strapped organizations." He slowed down for a minute, sat back in his chair, and drummed the desktop with his fingers. "I'm not saying any of this is even remotely likely, Diz. But I am concerned. And you should be, too."
Hardy shifted uneasily in his chair. Freeman had been his informal mentor for many years, and though he might sometimes be outrageous, he was never stupid. It was worth hearing him out.
And he had one more point to make. From his intensity, maybe it was the most important of them. "As I understand it, Diz, the ten or so other names on your client's list were all people with a long-term but terminal prognosis. Isn't that the case?"
A nod. "That's why Kensing started noticing them. They died too soon."
"So if that proves to be true, does any further conclusion spring to mind, particularly regarding Markham?"
Hardy saw the problem immediately. "He doesn't fit the profile, either. He wasn't long-term terminal."
"Exactly." Finally, it appeared that Freeman was satisfied. "Now if it turns out that each of the other ten died of this muscle relaxant and not potassium, then Markham had both a different prognosis and died from a different drug than all of them. This, to me, may not be conclusive, but it does provoke its own questions, wouldn't you agree?"
"Such as who killed Markham, and why? Right where we are now." He stood up. "And to think I was feeling good a mere fifteen minutes ago, as though I'd made progress."
"It'll feel that much better when it is real, Diz. You watch."
"I'm sure it will, David. I'm sure it will."
He turned to go, but Freeman stopped him again. "There is one way you might be able to use this to help Dr. Kensing, now that I think of it."
"I'm listening."
"If, as you believe, you've got Clarence and Abe excited about the various possibilities raised by your discovery of Mrs. Loring, there might be an opportunity to dig a little deeper into things without arousing any suspicion. Tongues might be looser, pearls might fall."
This was what Hardy had experienced to some degree this morning in Jackman's office, when there had seemed to be a first flush of intuitive belief that maybe Kensing hadn't killed anyone. But Freeman was probably right in saying that it wouldn't last long. If Hardy wanted to take advantage of it, he had to move quickly.
Glitsky wasn't going to send his rookies out alone on this one. He knew that his most senior veteran inspector, Marcel Lanier, had taken the lieutenant's exam in January, passed high on the civil service list, and now craved a chance to show what he could do administratively. He would soon be reassigned out of homicide to his own command and wanted it to be a good one. This would be his opportunity.
So while Bracco and Fisk got practice writing up search warrants for hospital records, Glitsky left Lanier in charge downtown and drove out to Portola. There he skirted around the phalanx of television news vans huddled in the parking lot and walked no-commenting himself by the knot of reporters in the hospital's lobby.
Outside the administrator's office, the secretary started to tell Glitsky that Mr. Andreotti wasn't seeing reporters individually. He'd be holding a press conference in about a half hour. At this news, the lieutenant produced his badge and wondered if the administrator could spare a few minutes for him right now.
Andreotti came around his desk with a death mask of a smile, grabbing Abe's outstretched hands in a kind of desperate panic. Gaunt, gray, and hollow-eyed, dressed in a gray suit with an electric blue tie, he seemed composed today of equal parts terror and exhaustion. Glitsky didn't suppose he could blame him. In the week since Tim Markham's murder, the hospital's troubles had increased exponentially, culminating in this morning's bombshell. Not only were Portola's postmortems, as a matter of course, slipshod at best and criminal at worst, but at least one and perhaps as many as eleven people had been killed while they lay in their beds in the ICU.
It wasn't yet 10:00 A.M. Harried and distracted, Andreotti had already been on the telephone with Time and Newsweek, USA Today, and The New York Times. He'd met with representatives of his nurses' union, of the Parnassus Physicians' Group, and of Parnassus Health itself. The mayor wanted to see him at two o'clock.
He got Glitsky seated, then went around his desk again and sat. "Whatever we can do to facilitate your investigation, Lieutenant," he began, "just let me know. We'll try to cooperate in every way we can. I've told everybody here the same thing. We've got nothing to hide."
"I'm glad to hear that, sir. My staff will be coming by before too long with what's going to look like a substantial shopping list, including search warrants regarding staffing records for the ICU, including the time Mrs. Loring was hospitalized."
"Yes, of course."
"Also, as you may know, there is some speculation that other patients may have been killed here, as well. We've got a list we're working from-"
"Yes. Kensing's, isn't it?"
"Yes, sir, it is."
"All right. You know what you're doing, I suppose, but the word here was…that is, I've heard that he was on your department's short list for Mr. Markham's murder?" He phrased it as a question that Glitsky didn't feel compelled to answer. He waited him out. "Anyway," Andreotti finally said, "I guess if it were me, I'd just wonder about any such list supplied by a murder suspect."
Nodding thoughtfully, Glitsky crossed a leg. "Normally, in principle, I would agree with you. But in this case, the first name came up positive. Mrs. Loring was killed here."
Andreotti said it all but to himself. "Jesus, don't I know it."
"But to backtrack for a minute, you said you'd heard that Dr. Kensing was our prime suspect for Mr. Markham's murder. Was that the common feeling about him around here?"
"Well, no. I mean…" Andreotti's eyes shifted to the door, back to Glitsky. "I don't mean to accuse anybody of murder. Dr. Kensing was quite popular here with the medical staff."
"The medical staff?"
"Well, the other doctors and nurses. He's a very good doctor but a bit of an…opinionated man. I think many of his colleagues admired his integrity, though he could be difficult to work with. He was not a team player."
"So he didn't get along with the administration?"
"He didn't, no. Nor did he get along with Mr. Markham. It wasn't any secret, you know."
"No. We've heard about that. So he killed Mr. Markham? Is that what you think?"
"Well, he had big problems with the man and he was in the room…" Andreotti spread his hands imploringly. "I suppose I've thought about it, though I hate to admit it."
"You're allowed," Glitsky answered, "but I'm not here today about Mr. Markham. I wanted to talk directly to some of the staff, and wondered if you could supply me with some records of who might have been on duty, especially in the ICU, about the time when Mrs. Loring died."
"I'm sure I could find out. Can you give me a couple of minutes?"
It was more like ten, but when Glitsky saw the name Rajan Bhutan, he remembered the name from the transcript he'd read of Bracco's and Fisk's interviews here. He asked Andreotti if Bhutan still worked at the hospital, and if so where he could find him.
Rajan was surprised to be summoned again to talk to the police. They'd been here so often in the last week, talking to everyone. When they'd come to him, what had there been to say? He'd been with Dr. Kensing, treating Mr. Lector, when the screeching had begun on Mr. Markham's monitors. After that it was like it always was during code blue, except twice as busy. He couldn't say who had come into the room, who had gone. He was taking orders from Dr. Kensing, trying to anticipate, all of it going by so fast he remembered none of it really. Although he'd been there, of course.
Entering the lounge, he saw at a glance that this new man was older than the others, and harder. His skin was as dark as Rajan's, but he had blue, very weary eyes. A scar began just above his chin, continued through his lips, cut off under the right nostril. Something about the sight of the man frightened him, and Rajan felt himself begin to shake inside. His palms suddenly felt wet and he wiped them on his uniform. The man watched him walk all the way from the doorway to the table where he sat. He didn't blink once.
Rajan stood before him and tried to smile. He wiped his hands again and extended the right one. "How do you do? You wanted to see me?"
"Have a seat. I want to ask you a couple of questions about Marjorie Loring. Do you remember her?"
Marjorie Loring? he thought. Yes, he remembered her, of course. He tried to remember something about each of his patients, although over the years many had vanished into the mists of his memory. But Marjorie Loring had not been so long ago after all. She was still with him. He could picture her face. She was to have been another of the long-suffering dying, as Chatterjee had been.
But fate had delivered her early.
After Freeman's lecture, Hardy wasted no time.
Now he was back at the medical examiner's office where, to his complete astonishment, Strout had his feet up on his desk and was watching the closing minutes of some morning talk show on a small television set. Hardy had seen the TV before, but assumed it was inoperable since it must have been used to kill somebody. Strout indicated he should pull up a chair and enjoy the broadcast. The two hosts-a man and a woman-were talking to someone Hardy didn't recognize, about a movie he'd never heard of. The actor was apparently branching into a new field and had just released a CD. He proceeded to sing the eminently forgettable and overproduced hit song from it. When the segment was over, Strout picked up his remote and switched off the television. "I love that guy," he said.
"Who? That singer?"
"No. Regis."
"Regis?"
"Diz, please." Strout didn't believe that Hardy didn't recognize the most ubiquitous face in America. "You ever watch that Millionaire show? That's him. You notice the ties I been wearin' this last year? The guy invented a whole line of 'em. My wife tells me I look ten years younger."
"I knew there was something," Hardy said.
"And you know why else I love him? You ever notice how happy he is?"
"Not really, no. I can't say I see too much of Regis myself."
Strout clucked. "You're missin' out." He sighed, then picked up a stiletto from his desk, pushed the button, and clicked the narrow steel blade out into its place. "Now what brings you back here so soon? And I'm hopin' it's not another request like the last couple."
"The last couple got you one headline and a quick thousand dollars."
Strout was cleaning his fingernails with the knife. "Truth of the matter is I been wrastlin' with the idea of givin' you back your money since it turns out you was pretty close to right. That was work worth doin'. After Loring, nobody's gonna call me for doin' the first one-Mr. Lector, I mean."
"Well, you do what you want, John. If you want to give me back the money, I'd take it. But you won it fair and square. While you're deciding, maybe we could talk a minute about Carla Markham."
Strout didn't answer right away. Instead, he closed the knife up, clicked it open again. Closed it, clicked it open. "I was kind of wonderin' when you'd want to talk about her."
"Are you saying there's a reason I should have?"
"No. I'm not necessarily sayin' anything. I ruled on it clear enough, comin' down on murder/suicide equivocal."
"But something about it makes you uneasy?"
Strout nodded. "A lot about it makes me uneasy. You get a copy of my report, is that it?"
Hardy nodded. He'd read it for the first time on Sunday night, then again at the office yesterday. It had become a habit for him to read and reread witness testimony and reports, where the truth often lay buried beneath mounds of minutiae. "I noticed the gun was fired from below and behind the right ear, going forward."
"That's correct." Strout closed the stiletto again, then stood up and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf that lined his left-hand wall. He boosted a haunch onto the thin counter, pulled an old six-shooter off the first shelf, and spun the cylinder. "I've seen it before."
"How often?"
Strout spun the cylinder again. "Maybe twice."
"In your thirty-year career?"
A nod. "About that. Maybe three times."
Hardy took that in. "So I take it Mrs. Markham was right-handed?"
"Nope. That ain't right, either." Except for an unconscious rocking of a leg, the coroner finally went still. "Plus, you know she'd bit the back of her front lower lip."
"I saw that. Did somebody have a hand over her mouth?"
"Comin' up behind her, you mean? Possible, but by no means conclusive. Just as likely she bit her lip."
Hardy sat a moment. He stared without focus in the direction of the venetian blinds behind Strout's desk. Dust motes hung in the striped shafts of sunlight. The cylinder spun a few more times. Eventually, he looked up. "So why'd suicide even get mentioned?"
"She had GSR"-gunshot residue-"on her right hand. And I know, I know what you're going to say." Strout held up his hand. "Doesn't prove she fired the gun. The shot that killed her could have put her in the gunshot environment. And you're a hundred percent right. But there's the gun by her hand…" Strout wound down, met Hardy's eyes. "I didn't have any forensic reason to rule it out, Diz."
"So somebody might have done a decent job of making it look like a suicide?"
"That's within the realm of the possible, Diz. It surely is. But let me ask you a question. Why do you want her to be murdered?"
"I guess because it's the only place left."
"Except your list, you mean."
Hardy shook his head. "As Mr. Freeman points out, there's no definite correlation between anybody on that list and who killed Tim Markham. But if Carla was killed, I'm betting it had to be the same person who killed her husband."
"But wasn't your client the last one at her house before…?" Strout let that hang.
Hardy sighed. "The theory's not perfect yet, John. I'm working on it.
Armed with their search warrant, Bracco and Fisk approached Donna, the records clerk at Portola. She was about thirty years old, slightly overweight, edgy at first when she found out they were policemen. She wore a small ring in her purple lips and another through her right eyebrow. It was obvious to Fisk that Bracco wasn't going to be comfortable talking to her, so he took point. Somehow, within minutes, they were all friends. She was competent at her job and pulled up and printed out all the Portola personnel and patient records for the relevant days within about a half hour.
After another half hour in one of the conference rooms, they pretty much had what they thought Glitsky wanted. As it turned out, the ICU nurses did rotate on a fairly regular schedule, although throughout the hospital there were more of them than the two inspectors had first been led to believe. In all, on the ten shifts when Kensing's list implied that patients might have died prematurely, nine nurses had spent some time in the intensive care unit. Only two, however, had been on duty for every death shift-Patricia Daly and Rajan Bhutan.
"Except we don't know for sure yet that any of those ten were homicides, do we?" Bracco asked. "All we know is Loring and Markham."
"But we do know Daly wasn't around for Markham, don't we?" Fisk replied. "Although Bhutan was. His partner that shift was-what's her name?"
She was one of the other seven regular ICU nurses, and Bracco had it at his fingertips. "Connie Rowe."
"I don't know how you remember a detail like that. I recognize the name when I hear it but I can't pull it up for the life of me."
"That's all right, Harlen. That's why they put us together. There's stuff you're good at that I'd never think about. Like Donna, for example, just now. Or looking for Loring's shift, which I had completely blown off."
Fisk, warmed by the praise, stood up and stretched. "What's another half hour when we're having this much fun?"
They both walked out to records-by now they were old friends with Donna-and told her there was a last shift they had to check. Bracco the detail man remembered the date: November 12. Marjorie Loring had breathed her last during the swing shift, between 4:00 P.M. and midnight.
Donna's fingers flew over the keyboard; then she looked up at them. "That's weird," she said. "I think every shift you've looked at, there's been this name R. Bhutan, and it's here, too. Are you guys looking specifically for somebody?"
"No, but he just keeps turning up, doesn't he?"
The young woman clicked her black fingernails on the countertop. "What is it about these dates, anyway? Can you tell me?"
Fisk leaned over and theatrically looked both ways, up and down the length of the room. "We could," he said and added the old chestnut, "but then we'd have to kill you."
Donna's eyes grew into saucers for a second; then she giggled and punched the key to print a hard copy of the record. Fisk took the sheet and glanced at it. Connie Rowe again, he noticed, not Patricia Daly. With a meaningful glance, he showed it to his partner, then turned back to the clerk. "Let me ask you something, Donna, if I may. Is there any record of the doctors who came and went during these same shifts that we've been looking at?"
She thought for a moment. "Well, the individual patients would have had their own doctors making rounds. Is that what you mean?"
"Not exactly. I mean all the doctors who had reason to go into the ICU on those days, for whatever reason."
"All of them?"
Fisk shrugged and smiled at her. "I don't know. I'm just asking."
Her tongue worked at the ring in her lip. "They might keep a record at the nurses' station-you could ask, although I don't know why they would. The doctors come and go all the time, you know. I think it would kind of depend on a lot of things."
To Jack Langtry, the crime scene supervisor, the situation was bizarre.
Just before lunch, Marlene Ash invited him down to her office to discuss Carla Markham. When he arrived, another guy was standing by her, leaning over her desk, examining the scene photos. Langtry could smell lawyers a mile away, and this guy was one. And then Ash said by way of explanation, "Mr. Hardy's representing Dr. Kensing. Lieutenant Glitsky and Mr. Jackman have agreed to cooperate with him in exchange for his client's testimony. He'd like to ask you a few questions."
Langtry didn't know what to make of this, but if Marlene Ash was okay with it, then so was he. "Sure, mate," he said. "No worries."
Hardy's eyes were pinned to the color print of Mrs. Markham's body as it lay when Langtry had first seen her on the kitchen floor. The gun was in the top of the picture. Hardy had his finger on it. "Where'd the gun come from?"
"Lower-left drawer in Markham's desk, which was in the office next to the kitchen. At least that's where the registration was, the ammunition and cleaning stuff. We got a picture of it somewhere in that stack."
"I think I've seen it. Twenty-two, right?"
Langtry lifted his own eyes from the picture, looked in Hardy's face, said nothing.
"You got it in evidence, right? How many rounds did it hold?"
"Six, but there were only five spent casings."
Hardy frowned. "So five shots fired?"
Langtry shrugged-how the hell did he know? "Four dead people, one dog, one round each."
"What are you getting at, Diz?"
Hardy turned to Marlene. "I'm thinking somebody else fired the gun the first five times, then put it in her hand and fired again and took the last casing with him-"
"Where'd the slug go?" Langtry asked.
"I don't know. Out the window?"
"Closed."
"Maybe it was open the night before. How about the kids?" Hardy asked. He flipped a few photos to where they began; then he looked up and away for a moment and sucked in a breath. Langtry felt the same way, sickened again at the sight of them.
"What do you want to know?"
"Just what went down."
While Langtry spent the next few minutes outlining the specifics of the crime, Hardy flipped through the pile of photographs. When Langtry was done, he had another line of questioning. "How loud's a twenty-two revolver?"
"Not too. Nothing like a three five seven. Just a flat pop."
"You shoot one in a house at night, you wake everybody up?"
"I don't know. Maybe not."
"All right. Here's another one. Why would Markham have a twenty-two?"
"I don't know that one, mate. Makes no sense for protection. Wouldn't stop any determined bugger, now, would it? Unless the shot was dead-on. Or point-blank, like these here."
"Okay." He flipped through some more pictures. "If you don't mind, Sergeant, and Marlene, I'd like to see the house."
They drove out separately. Langtry met him again at the Markhams' front door, and as he was fiddling with the key, suddenly another man was coming across the lawn from next door, waving at them in a friendly manner. "Excuse me," he said. "I saw you waiting, standing on the stoop here. You should know that nobody…nobody lives here anymore."
"Yes, sir, thanks." Langtry had pulled his wallet and badge, and now showed it to the man. "Police. We know all about it. And you are…?"
"The neighbor from over there. Frank Husic." He motioned toward his own home. "Just keeping an eye out."
"We appreciate it. Thank you," Langtry said. "We're taking another look."
"You go ahead then. Sorry to have bothered you."
"No bother."
Now they were inside, in the kitchen. Hardy stood on the Mexican tiled floor. Warm daylight suffused the room. Through a skylight, the noon sun drew a large and bright rectangle in front of the stove. There was a double-wide window over the sink, a laundry room off the back, well-lit with natural light. A short hallway by the refrigerator-where the dog had been killed-led to a half-glass back door.
Langtry was sitting behind him on a dining room chair that he'd pulled over. Hardy went down to one knee. Rising, he crossed to the sink, undid the latch, and lifted the right-hand window. Stepping sideways, he did the same to the left one, then walked back to where Carla had fallen. "If I'm down here near the ground and put a bullet through either of those windows"-he could have been talking to himself-"I don't hit the house next door. I hit the sky. You want to do me another favor? Stand here in the kitchen a minute."
Langtry did as requested and Hardy went back out through the dining room. His footsteps fell audibly on the central staircase; then his voice carried as he called down, "Count to ten and then call up to me as loud as you can."
After another minute, Hardy was back in the kitchen. "I heard you, but just barely. I was in Ian's room."
"Which means what?"
"It means nobody wakes up while Carla and the dog get shot. It means the dog's shot to shut him up, which is the only thing that makes sense."
"Then why do the kids get shot?"
"He's afraid he's woken somebody up. Either that or the kids knew he was here when they went to bed. Except the kids are asleep. The gunshots didn't carry up. But it's still too risky. So it's Ian first, and he silences the gun with the pillow. Then the girls. How's that sound?"
Hardy wasn't going to talk to a witness with a cop there. He followed Langtry for a few blocks, then honked a goodbye and drove back to Markham's street, where he pulled up, parked, got back out of his car, and knocked on Frank Husic's door. The gentleman probably assumed, since he'd been next door with Langtry and his badge, that he, too, was a cop. Hardy let him think so.
Husic invited him in and offered him iced tea, which he accepted. They then went out the back door onto a well-constructed redwood deck. Hardy didn't know when he'd last sat amidst such an explosion of well-tended flowers. Husic had planted them around the deck on the ground, in pots on the deck itself and now in late April they were blooming in profusion. But he'd left an open area in the center of the deck, and in that had placed a wrought-iron table, shaded by a large canvas umbrella. Here they sat in comfortable padded chairs.
From the transcripts he'd read, Hardy knew that Husic was a retired dentist, sixty-two years old. He had a ruddy complexion and cropped gray hair. Today he wore faded navy blue slacks, loafers with no socks, a shirt with a button-down collar, two buttons open at the neck. He came across as solicitous, friendly, intelligent. Hardy made a mental note that, should it come to that, Husic would make a terrific witness.
"Yes, I heard the shot," he said. "It's only a stone's throw away over there. I already told this to the police, you know."
Hardy did know this, but one of the frustrations of his discovery in this matter was the ineptness of some of Fisk's and Bracco's interrogations. He wondered if they'd ever heard of the relatively simple concept of asking witnesses where they'd been, what they'd seen or thought, and what they'd been doing at the time of a murder. This, he thought, was not high-concept police work. And Husic's interrogation-just random chat about flowers and investments, almost nothing about the day of Markham's death-had been one of the worst, he thought.
So he had a lot to fill in here. "I realize that," he replied. "In fact, I've read a transcript of that interview, but I've got a slightly different approach. You just now said 'shot.' You only heard one? I thought I noticed you said 'three' somewhere."
Husic sipped his drink thoughtfully, put it down carefully on the table. "They asked that, too, and I'm afraid I don't have a good answer. I believe I told the other officers that I was in bed at the time, pretty tired after the day over at Carla's. It was emotionally draining as hell over there, let me tell you. But if she needed me, I wanted to be available." Lightly slapping his forehead, he made a face. "Which doesn't answer what you asked me, does it? Sorry. You're a dentist, you spend your whole life making conversation with people who can't answer you. It affects your patterns of speech, and here I go again. All right. How many shots did I hear? Distinctly, only one."
Hardy looked across the expanse of lawn to what he knew to be the Markhams' kitchen. He realized they'd left the kitchen windows open when they'd gone.
"I thought it was a backfire or something. I mean, a gunshot is not your first thought in this neighborhood."
"But you may have heard three of them?"
"Well, that's funny, you know. None of them were really loud. In my memory it's three, but when I go back there and try to hear them, it's more like I heard one and remembered two. I'm not making sense, am I? What I mean is, the last one definitely was something-I sat up in bed-but the first two were almost as if I dreamed them, you know how that happens?"
"Sure." Hardy nodded. The siren that turns out to be your alarm clock. But this, he thought, might possibly be the two shots that killed the girls-right there seventy feet away-then the last round through the open kitchen window, which would have been louder. "But you were in bed when you heard them? Do you remember what time it was?"
"Yes, exactly. It was ten forty-two on the clock by my bed. I remember being very frustrated. I don't go to sleep easily since Meg passed-four years ago now-and if I wake up, that's usually it for the night. I'm up. And last Tuesday, with all the strain, I came home from Carla's and had a glass of wine, but barely dozed. Then with the gunshot…"
"You were awake the rest of the night?"
"Until three, anyway. Those are long hours, eleven to three."
Hardy made a sympathetic noise. "I know them pretty well myself. So when did you finally determine that they were gunshots?"
"Oh, not until the next morning." The memory bushwhacked him for a moment. "God, it's just so awful."
"You were close to them, the Markhams?"
He hesitated. "Well, Carla, I'd say so. Tim was a bit of a cold fish, at least to me." Moving along to happier memories, his face came alive. "But Carla would come over and help with my garden here sometimes. We'd have coffee…some nice talks. I can't believe…" He hung his head and shook it. When he looked back up, he smiled, but his eyes had a glassy quality.
Hardy let the silence extend another moment. Finally, he asked quietly, "So you didn't go and explore the source of the noise when you heard it?"
"No. After a minute I got up and looked out the window, of course, but everything was still. Just so still."
"Would you mind telling me what you saw, exactly?"
"Well, really nothing unusual at all. Carla's house right there." Husic seemed puzzled by the question. "Just her house."
Not "their" house, Hardy noticed. Just "her."
"But I knew people had been over and if they'd all gone home, I wasn't going to bother her, not that night. Let her sleep, I thought."
"So it was dark?"
Again, puzzlement. "Well…no. There were lights on in the kitchen and I remember over the front porch. And then the upstairs hall light was on." He turned and pointed. "That's that middle one, on the top."
"And what did you do then?"
Husic blew out heavily. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hardy, but didn't I already give you all this in my first statement?"
"Maybe not all of it, sir. Could we take five more minutes? I'd really appreciate it."
Another sigh as Husic gave in. "I turned on Letterman. I thought if I could laugh, maybe I could get to sleep. But nothing was going to make me laugh that night. Not even Dave. I was still worried about Carla, couldn't get her out of my mind, actually. What was she going to do now?" Absently, he reached for his drink and stirred the ice in it with his finger. "But I couldn't do anything more that night, you know. I had to wait and let time…Anyway, I was still awake, so I came out here-see the little greenhouse back there?-and worked with my bonsais for an hour, maybe two. Then-by now it's two o'clock, thereabouts-I saw the lights were out. So Carla had gone to sleep, at least I thought that at the time, and then suddenly I could, too."
The first letter was dated nearly seven years ago.
Parnassus Medical Group
Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, California
Dear Dr. Kensing:
This letter will document the decisions mutually agreed to by you, the Parnassus Physicians' Group, and the Parnassus Medical Group (collectively, the "Group") pursuant to the disciplinary committee meeting held last week. You have admitted that at various times and in various locations since you commenced employment with the Group, you have taken unspecified quantities of morphine and Vicodin for your personal use. Additionally, you acknowledge that you are an alcoholic whose medical performance while in a diminished mental state due to alcohol consumption has on several occasions fallen below the standard of reasonable medical care.
The Group recognizes your considerable skills as a doctor and communicator and before the recent discoveries memorialized herein, considered you a valuable member of its community. Because of this consideration, after substantial discussion, and over the dissent of the Medical Director, the Group's disciplinary committee decided at this time to issue only this formal letter of reprimand rather than terminate your employment and pursue possible criminal charges against you upon the following conditions: 1) you will immediately and forever desist from use of all alcohol and all narcotics, except those drugs that may from time to time be prescribed to you by another physician for legitimate medical reasons; 2) you will voluntarily submit to random urine sampling to determine the presence of drugs or alcohol in your system;3) you will immediately accept the recommendation of the substance abuse counselor and attend and cooperate with any programs recommended by the Group; 4) for the next calendar year, in addition to the regularly scheduled visits with your appointed counselor, you will daily attend a so-called 12-step program, approved by the Group, to address your problems with addiction and chemical dependency; 5) after the first year of such counseling, but for the remainder of your service time within the Group, you will attend such 12-step programs as the Group deems necessary, but in no event shall these be scheduled less frequently than once a week.
You freely acknowledge your culpability in these above matters, and further acknowledge that any breach of the points agreed to above will result in your immediate dismissal from the Group, without appeal, and may result in further criminal and civil proceedings, as may be appropriate.
Very truly yours,
Timothy G. Markham
Parnassus Medical Group
Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, California
Dear Dr. Kensing:
In view of the fraternal rather than militant approach that I've suggested the Group take in helping you deal with your problems over the past couple of years-and over some high-level objection, I might add-I'd like to personally request that you consider tempering your critical remarks, both to your colleagues and to the press, about our various internal policies regarding the drug formulary. I am not trying to muzzle you or interfere with your right to free speech in any way, but I believe you're aware of the financial difficulties we're encountering in many areas. We'd like to keep the Group solvent so that we can continue providing the best care we can to the greatest number of our subscribers. We're not perfect, of course, but we are trying. If you have specific suggestions for improvement or disagreements with Group policy, I will be happy to discuss them with you at any time.
Sincerely,
Timothy G. Markham
Parnassus Medical Group
Embarcadero Center
San Francisco, California
Dear Dr. Kensing:
It has come to my attention that you intend to appear on the public affairs television program Bay Area Beat. Let me remind you that the several medical committees on which you sit with the Physicians' Group have confidentiality arrangements with the Health Plan. I will interpret any breach of this confidentiality as grounds for dismissal. As a personal note, you are aware, I am sure, of the critical negotiations we are conducting with the city at this time. I find your public appearances and negative comments about some of the Group's policies to be singularly ungrateful and morally unconscionable, particularly in light of the Group's leniency and compassion toward you in other areas in the past.
Very truly yours,
Malachi Ross
Chief Medical Director and CFO
Parnassus Medical Group
Embarcadero Center San Francisco, California
Dear Dr. Kensing:
If you don't want to prescribe Sinustop to your allergy patients, of course that is your prerogative and your medical decision. But it is a useful drug, and I have approved its inclusion on the formulary. Your continued efforts to undermine the Group's profitability by questioning my decisions are inappropriate. I have been patient with you long enough on these matters. The next event will have disciplinary repercussions.
Malachi Ross
"Where did you get these?" Hardy asked Jeff Elliot. He flipped through the pages he held, maybe twenty more of them. They were at the counter at Carr's, a nondescript and-due to the new Starbucks around the corner-possibly soon out-of-business coffee shop on Mission by the Chronicle building. "Especially this first one. Jesus."
A twinkle shone in Elliot's eyes. "As you know, Diz, I can never reveal a source."
But Hardy didn't have to think very hard to dredge it up. "Driscoll. Markham's secretary."
Elliot's eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch. Hardy knew he would rob Jeff blind at poker. "Why do you say that?"
"He's come up a few times. He's fired, right, and probably saw that coming in advance. So he e-mailed his files home in case he wanted some leverage for later. Or just simply to screw somebody for the pure joy of it."
Elliot scratched at his beard. "Without either denying or admitting your guess as to my source, he's a reporter's dream. Vindictive, gossipy, craves attention. He probably gave me five hundred pages."
"All on Kensing?"
"No, no." Elliot laughed at Hardy's panicked response. "No, as far as I can tell, on the whole world at Parnassus."
"Does Marlene Ash know about them?"
"She'd be trying to get them if she did, although of course I couldn't give her any of it, either. I did tell him, though-my source, I mean-that if he wanted to keep any kind of exclusive control over its use, he might want to download it onto disks and put it someplace special, where Marlene or Glitsky wouldn't think to look for it."
"And yet you've got it here."
"I know." Elliot grinned. "Sometimes I like my job."
Hardy picked up his spoon and stirred his coffee. "Anybody could have just typed them, you know. They might not be authentic."
"You're right. Maybe they're not. But somebody would have to type really fast to get all this since last week."
Hardy accepted this. In fact, he had no doubt that the letters were genuine. They'd never be accepted as proof of anything in court-not without hard copies and signatures-but this wasn't the law. This was journalism and Jeff could decide to accept them if his source was credible enough. "So what are you going to do with them?"
This was the crux and they both knew it. Jeff had called Hardy as a courtesy because Hardy was Kensing's lawyer. In view of the intense interest in nearly everything to do with Parnassus since Markham's death, Elliot told him that Kensing's substance abuse problems constituted real news. "On the other hand," he said, "the heat's kind of gone up under the Loring thing. If there's a serial killer at Portola, that's going to trump Kensing every time. I don't really want to run this, Diz-I like the good doctor and it would ruin his day-but if it turns out to be important, I won't have a choice."
"What could make it that important, Jeff?"
"How about if he was high when he was working on Markham in the ICU?"
Hardy had to admit, that would do it. "Has anybody said boo about that?"
"No. But I'll tell you something. If my source actually read most of these pages and thinks about it enough, I predict it's going to come up."
Hardy shook his head, marveling at the capacity for simple meanness in some people. Eric Kensing was only one doctor out of two or three hundred at Parnassus, but he'd unfortunately crossed Driscoll. Perhaps more importantly, he committed the cardinal sin of dissing the boss, with whom Driscoll identified heavily.
But a fresh thought surfaced. Driscoll might have a far better reason to impugn the characters of Kensing or anybody else than wanting to punish them for real or imagined past slights. He might simply want to keep people from looking at him.
"What are you thinking?" Elliot had been watching him.
Hardy covered. "Nothing really, except whether you're going to tell me anything about the other four hundred and ninety-five pages."
"I haven't gotten to them. I can only read so fast. The Kensing letters popped up pretty quick and I thought I owed you."
"As well you did, so now if you do me another favor, I'll owe you, right?"
Elliot considered, nodded. "Maybe. What?"
"If you hear some more rumors from your unnamed source about Kensing's sobriety a week ago Tuesday, don't run the story until you get it confirmed someplace else."
"I don't think the letters are rumors, Diz."
"I didn't say they were. But I've got something that isn't a rumor, either. Maybe we could trade."
When Hardy finally got back to his office at about 3:30, he was both gratified and depressed by the delivery of more discovery on the Markham case from the Hall of Justice. It was nice that Glitsky had moved into a more cooperative mode, but he could do without another six hours of tedious reading material. But he opened the box, pulled out its contents, and placed them in the center of the blotter on his desk. Glancing at his phone, he saw that he had two messages.
"Diz. This is Eric Kensing. Checking in. I'm at home if you need me." Hearing Kensing's voice reminded Hardy of how frustrated he was with his client. Maybe he'd come to terms with his drug and alcohol problems long ago, but how could he possibly convince himself his lawyer didn't need to know about them?
The next voice was Glitsky's. Of course, it being Abe, there was no preamble of any kind. "If you're really there, pick up." A silent three-count pause. "All right, call me." Hardy thinking, What a personality.
He picked up the phone, but didn't call Abe. He called his client. When he finished, Kensing didn't say anything for several seconds. "Eric?"
"I'm here. What was I supposed to do?"
"You were supposed to tell me. How's that?"
"Why?" he asked. "All that's far behind me. That was early career, early family pressure, and a giant mistake. I haven't touched-" He stopped himself abruptly, said simply, "That's not who I am anymore."
Hardy heard the words and believed that they might be technically true. But their truth wasn't his issue. "You're saying you're not an alcoholic? What's the first thing you say at your AA meetings?" Hardy knew the answer: "My name's Eric, and I'm an alcoholic," present tense, a permanent condition of being for those in the program. "Look, this is water under the bridge now, Eric. But Jeff Elliot's got this information and it's the currency he deals in."
A note of panic sounded in Kensing's voice. "He's not going to print this, is he? How did he find it out anyway? Everything about it has been confidential." But Hardy didn't have time to form a reply before Kensing said, "Shit. Driscoll."
"He's upset and taking it out on the world. The point is that the hospital's under siege as it is. If it now comes out that they're making secret deals to hide problems with their doctors…there's no question that it's news, Eric."
"Driscoll's trying to take the whole place down with him, isn't he?" A sigh. "And the small shall inherit the earth."
"Let's hope not. Anyway, I made Jeff a deal to keep you out of the limelight a few more days, maybe forever. But I've told him he can't use what I gave him-which means you're still on the burner-until I tell him he can. And that's going to depend on you."
"Okay, whatever it is, I'm in."
"All right." Hardy realized that he'd been gripping the telephone tightly. He relaxed his grip, forced an even tone. "You remember the night Markham died, you went to his house."
"Sure. I never said I didn't."
"I want you to think about what you did when you left. What time was that, by the way?"
"A little before ten, I think. That inspector, Bracco, he saw me drive away. He might have a record of it."
"He might," Hardy conceded. "But he didn't stay around and it's conceivable that you might have come back."
"Well, I didn't. Why would I do that?" He hesitated. "What's this about?"
"It's about Carla's murder. I want to know what you did after you left there."
"What I've always said I did. I drove home and went to sleep."
"I know you've said that, but that doesn't help me. I want you to try and remember if you met somebody in your building, or talked to anybody in the street, or used any of your phones or computer. Anything that could place you away from Markham's house between ten and eleven or, even better, ten and twelve."
Another pause. "I used my cell phone to call the clinic and see if I had messages."
This was good, Hardy thought. There would be a record of the call. They would even be able to pinpoint its point of origin within a several-block radius. "Great. When was that?"
"Right after I left. I don't think I'd gone two blocks."
Wrong answer. Kensing could have made the call, driven around the block, and been back in plenty of time. "Think of something else," Hardy pleaded.
"Why? What's this about?"
He wanted to scream at him to just answer the question-could he give himself an alibi? Instead, he answered, "It's about me talking to a witness who heard the shots, Eric, and placed their time at about a quarter to eleven."
"Which fixes the time of death."
"Yep. Quarter to eleven, she's dead and the lights are on. Two o'clock, they're all off. I figure that whoever killed her waited around a while, then turned off the lights and snuck away."
"Why would anybody wait, though?"
"I don't know. Maybe spent the time looking for something. Maybe covering up. Maybe thought they'd be seen leaving the place after the shots. Your guess is as good as mine, but now we've got a murder and a time, which means you're clear if you can think of anything that-"
"No!" Suddenly, Kensing blurted it out. "Just no, okay? Jesus, I didn't kill anybody, Diz. I'm a doctor. I save lives, for Christ's sake. I just didn't do this. Can we leave it?"
Hardy's exasperation boiled over. "Sure we can, Eric. But nobody else on the planet is going to. So you just take your own sweet time and if you remember exactly what you did that night, why don't you call me back? If it isn't too goddamned much trouble."
Hardy slammed down the phone.
Brendan Driscoll couldn't believe the emptiness.
He'd gotten up at his regular time, a little bit after 7:00, and made breakfast for himself and Roger. After Roger had gone to the bank, he'd spent a couple more hours with the Parnassus files. But even now they were beginning to lose some of their fascination for him. After all, Jeff Elliot wasn't going to use everything, at least not just yet. Worse, this new situation over at Portola, with the lady they'd found murdered, was going to seem more important to Jeff than any inside information about the business side.
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 investigation 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 was 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?"
"He's got maybe twenty people who'll swear where he was when Carla got shot. For me, that clears him on both her and Markham."
Jackman pushed some paper clips around the blotter in front of him. When he spoke, it might have been to himself. "It beggars belief that Kensing could be the source of this problem at Portola when there's no relation to Markham."
Marlene added her own thoughts. "I think it's high time we get him in front of the grand jury, find out what he knows once and for all. Have you ruled him out on Carla, Abe?"
Glitsky almost laughed. "Not close. Far as I'm concerned, he's still the inside track. Matter of fact, I'm dropping by his place on my way home." Glitsky produced a terrifying smile and then a piece of paper from his jacket pocket. "With a search warrant this time."
Marlene got out of her chair. "If you can give me five minutes, I can have a subpoena for you to deliver, too. You mind?"
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Jackman interjected. "You're both forgetting something. I promised Hardy we'd give Kensing thirty days' grace."
This dampened the room's enthusiasm level for a nanosecond, but only that. Marlene had the answer almost before the objection was out. "That was on Markham's murder, Clarence, when Kensing was our suspect. Rather specifically. There's no way Hardy could object to the grand jury needing to hear about the list Kensing himself provided."
"And as soon as possible." Glitsky turned to the DA and added formally, "To keep our mutual and cooperative investigations on track."
Jackman considered for a long beat, then finally nodded. "Okay, do it."
Dr. Kent Waltrip told Hardy he'd made his morning rounds at the ICU-he had a patient coming out of a bout with spinal meningitis-and he'd finished up at about 10:15, after which he'd gone to the clinic to see his regular patients. He'd worked there all day.
Judith Cohn's office number, too, was listed and Hardy was surprised and happy when he got his second human being in a row to answer the phone at a little past 5:00. He identified himself to the receptionist, explained his relationship to Eric Kensing, then asked if Dr. Cohn would please call him when she got the message.
"I could page her right now," the cooperative voice replied. "If you give me your number I'll just punch it in."
Two minutes later, Hardy was standing by his open window looking down on Sutter Street when his direct line rang. He crossed to the desk in three steps, picked up the phone, and said his name. On the other end of the line, he heard a sharp intake of breath. "Eric's lawyer, right? Is he all right?"
"He's fine. Thanks for getting right back to me. I wondered if I could ask you a few questions?"
"Sure. If they'll help Eric, I'm here."
"Great." Hardy had considered his approach-he didn't want to scare her off-and written a few notes. Now, sitting down, he pulled his pad around. "I'm trying to establish Eric's movements on almost a minute-by-minute basis on the day Tim Markham was killed."
"The police don't still believe he had anything to do with that, do they?"
"I think it's safe to assume that they do, yes."
He heard her sigh deeply. "Don't they know the man at all? Have they ever talked to him?"
"Couple of times, at least."
"Christ, then they're idiots."
"They may be," Hardy said, "but they're our idiots. And we have to play with them. I understand you had your own patient or patients in the ICU on that day, as well. Tuesday a week ago."
"Oh, I remember the day well enough. It started bad and kept getting worse. You know how it works with scheduling the ICU and ER, don't you?"
Early on, Kensing had explained the Parnassus idea to maximize efficiency. The doctors at the Judah Clinic, who were part of the Parnassus Physicians' Group as well as usually on the staff at Portola, were responsible for making sure that at least one physician was assigned to the ICU, and at least one to the ER as well, at all times. This duty was on a rotating schedule and its essential purpose, according to Eric, was to eliminate at least one full-time doctor's salary from the payroll. Its other effect was to leave the clinic perennially shorthanded. It was not a popular policy.
"Basically," Hardy replied, "there's a staff physician covering each room."
"Right. In the ICU, only a few of the beds, if any, contain that physicians' personal patients. Except if they get somebody straight out of ER or the OR, or a critical baby, something like that. Anyway, so that morning I had ER downstairs, late to work as it was, when the Markham madness just broke it open-"
"Wait a minute. You were with Markham in the OR? You did the surgery on him?" So, Hardy realized, she had not just floated by the ICU to check a patient-she'd been there at Portola all morning.
"Yeah. He was a mess. I was amazed he survived to get in, much less out. Anyway, I walked in, frazzled at being late to begin with-I'm never late-"
"What had happened?" Hardy asked quickly. "With you being late?"
"It was so stupid, I just overslept. Me, Miss Insomnia. I think I must have turned off the alarm when it went off and never really woke up. I guess the only good news is I was well-rested for Markham's arrival. I needed to be, believe me. Although Phil-Dr. Beltramo? He'd just worked ten to six-he didn't appreciate it much."
"So when did you make it up to the ICU finally?"
"I came up with Markham's gurney, when we got him admitted and settled in there, Eric and I. Then I bopped up, I don't know for sure, must have been four or five times before he died. Maybe every forty-five minutes, whenever I got a break. I'd pulled him out, after all. He was my patient." She grew silent for a moment. "I didn't expect him to die. I really didn't."
"He didn't just die, Doctor. Somebody killed him." Hardy was trying to assimilate this unexpected information, which, he had to admit, Cohn was volunteering easily enough. He wasn't picking up any phony sympathy for Markham, any reticence to describe her own actions. "And the police continue to think it might have been Eric. Were you in the ICU when Markham went code blue?"
"No. I was down in the ER. Although I heard it, of course, and came right back up."
"But you didn't notice Eric in, say, the ten or fifteen minutes before?"
"No. The last time I saw him he was in the hallway with Rajan Bhutan. He's a nurse there. They were with a patient on a gurney."
This comported perfectly with everything he'd heard so far about the minutes just before Mr. Lector's monitors started to scream and, as before, it didn't do his client any good, except insofar as it might implicate Cohn herself.
"Let me ask you this, Doctor. Did Eric tell you anything about his visit to Mrs. Markham's later that night?"
"Not really," she said. "I was asleep when he finally got in and then we didn't get any time together for a few days after that. What would there be to say, though? It must have been depressing as hell."
But Hardy had cued on something else. "What did you mean, when he finally got in?"
"Back from Mrs. Markham's, you meant, right?"
"Right. So you were at Eric's place that night?"
A small laugh. "You didn't know that? Whoops, blown our cover, I guess." Then, more seriously, "I thought he could use some company after the day he'd had. I know I could."
Reeling from this latest revelation, Hardy struggled to control his voice. "So what happened? Did you go home from work together?"
Another laugh. "No, no. We've given up trying to plan anything. We're both on call half the time. Our hours get too weird. I just went over there and let myself in. I've got a key."
"Aha," Hardy said, jostling her along.
"But Eric stayed late at Portola, then went to Mrs. Markham's. By the time he got home, I'd finally gotten to sleep."
"The insomnia kick back in?"
"Jesus, with a vengeance, probably because I'd slept in that morning. I've said a million times, if I could change one thing in my life, other than my frizzy hair, it's insomnia."
"Hemingway says he wouldn't trust anybody who's never had it."
"Yeah, well look what happened to him. Insomnia just plain sucks. There's no upside and I ought to know. Can you imagine what it would be like to want to go to sleep, close your eyes, and presto, you're gone? I would call that heaven. I'd sell what's left of my soul for half of that."
"But that wasn't Tuesday night?"
"Jesus." She suddenly sounded tired just thinking about it. "It must have been one o'clock, and I started trying-I'm talking in bed with the lights out-around ten."
"And Eric wasn't home by then?"
"No. He was still at Mrs. Markham's. Evidently it went on pretty late."
Glitsky held the warrant up in front of him. "We're talking now," he said. Marcel Lanier was with him and brushed past in a show of force, getting himself inside the apartment.
"Where do I start, sir?" he asked.
"Back to front, but maybe first the bedroom. I'll be with you in a minute or two."
"What are you looking for?" Kensing had gotten back from a run recently. He still wore his running shoes, shorts, and a tank top. He'd been at his kitchen table, drinking orange juice and ice, when the doorbell had rung. Now he turned at the sound of Lanier rummaging somewhere back in his room. "You can't just come in here and tear things apart."
Glitsky turned the warrant around, pretended to read it, came back to Kensing. "Judge Chomorro says I can. Oh, and before I forget." He handed him Ash's subpoena, as well.
"What's this?"
"An invitation to talk to the grand jury. Tomorrow, nine thirty."
"You can't do this," Kensing repeated. "This isn't right. Mr. Hardy had a deal with the DA. I'm going to call him."
"Go ahead." Glitsky stepped over the threshold. "He's not allowed in here without our permission when we're conducting a search. He might take something. But you can call him if you want. Then you can both wait until we're done. Take it easy, Doctor. I told you last time you should have let me in when we could have talked in a more comfortable atmosphere. You've really left me no choice."
"What are you looking for?"
Glitsky read from the warrant. "Medical paraphernalia, specifically syringes and prescription drugs-"
"I'm a doctor, Lieutenant. You want, I'll go get all that for you." He turned and wiped sweat from his brow again. "I don't believe this. This is America, right? We do this here?"
"You'd better thank God this is America, Doctor, and that this is how we do it. Anywhere else it wouldn't be so pleasant." Glitsky was reading from the warrant again. "Clothes with splatter or stains consistent with blood-"
"You're going to find that, too. I work with blood every day. It comes from inside people."
Glitsky raised his eyes in a baleful expression.
"I want to call Hardy."
"Absolutely. I'd never try to stop you. But he's not coming inside here."
Another thumping noise emanated from the bedroom.
Glitsky raised his voice. "Marcel! Easy! By the book, please. Nice and neat."
The doctor hung his head for a minute, then looked back up. "This is bullshit," he said.
Bracco struck out trying to reach either Malachi Ross or Brendan Driscoll. He was in the middle of leaving a message with the latter's answering machine when another call came in on their line and his partner picked it up. "Fisk. Homicide."
"Sergeant Fisk, this is Jamie Rath again, from Carla Markham's coffee group? I'm calling because I've been worrying all day. My daughter said something last night and it got me to thinking that maybe it was something you'd want to ask her about."
"What was it?"
"Well, you know she plays soccer. She's at practice right now, in fact. But she also runs cross-country, so she gets up early every morning and runs down to the greenbelt on Park Presidio and then up to the park and back the same way."
"Okay."
"Well, we were talking about Tim's accident, me just being a bitchy mom trying to remind her how dangerous the streets could be, even when you were paying attention. And she said she didn't need me to remind her. On the same day that Tim had gotten hit, almost the same thing had happened to her, only a couple of blocks away."
Fisk was snapping his fingers at his partner, indicating he ought to pick up the other line.
Mrs. Rath was continuing. "It had scared her silly. She'd just turned off Lake onto Twenty-fifth, coming back home, and was crossing the street. She saw this car coming, but there was a stop sign and she was in the walkway. Then suddenly she heard the tires screech and she looked over and jumped backward and the skid stopped just in time. Lexi was standing there with her hands on the hood, just completely flipped out. She said she yelled something at the driver, to watch where she was going, then slapped at the hood and went back to running. But I didn't have to tell her how dangerous it was. She knew."
"Did she say anything else about the car? What color it was, for example?"
"Oh yeah. It was green, which I guess is what made me think about Tim. Didn't I read that the car that hit him was green?"
Bracco butted in. "What time does your daughter get home from soccer practice, Mrs. Rath?"
Lexi sat between her mom and dad, Doug, on the couch in their living room. She'd been home long enough to have showered and changed into jeans, tennis shoes, and a light sweater. She was a tall and thin fourteen-year-old with braces and reasonably controlled acne. Her long brown hair was still wet. She was holding both of her parents' hands, nervous at being the center of attention, at talking to these policemen who were sitting on upholstered chairs facing her. "It wasn't really that big a deal. I mean"-her eyes begged for her mother's understanding-"I had this kind of thing happen before while I've been running. Maybe not this close, but almost. People just space out when they drive, but I know that. So I pay attention when I'm out there."
"I'm sure you do," Fisk responded. "And paying attention the way you do, did you notice anything unusual about the car that almost hit you?"
Lexi threw her eyes up to the ceiling in concentration, looked from Jamie to Doug, back to the inspectors. "I really only saw it out of the corner of my eye. You know, there was a stop sign. I saw it coming up the street and thought it would stop, so I didn't break my stride. I guess she didn't see me until I was right in front of her."
"So it was a woman? The driver?"
"Oh, yeah. I mean, yes, sir. Definitely."
"Was there anybody else in the car?"
"No, just her."
"Did you get a good look at her?"
She nodded yes. "But only for a second."
Bracco had been letting Fisk take the interview. He'd crowed all the way out here about the car, the car, the car. Jamie Rath had called him at the detail, or at least he'd answered the phone. He knew all along that the car would be part of it. Bracco didn't mind-Fisk tended to be good when gentleness was called for. But Bracco thought that sometimes he didn't hit all the notes. "But you did get a good look at her for that second, is that true? Do you think you could recognize her again?"
"I don't know about that. Maybe. I don't know."
Doug patted her reassuringly on the leg. "It's okay, hon. You're doing good."
"You are doing good, Lexi," Fisk seconded. "What we're asking is maybe we could send an artist out here to try to draw her face as you remember it. Would that be all right with you?"
She shrugged. "I could try, I guess."
Bracco asked her about the time, wanting to narrow it down.
"I know just what time it was because when I stopped, when she almost hit me, and then I started running again, I checked my watch to see how much time I'd lost. It was twenty-five after six."
This perfectly fit the timetable for Markham's accident. "So let me ask you this, Lexi. Would you close your eyes for a minute and just try to visualize everything you can think of about the car or its driver-I know it was only a second-just tell us what you see."
Obediently, she leaned back into the couch, scrunched between her mom and her dad. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath. "Okay. I was on Lake, just running like, and then I usually turn up Twenty-fifth and cross over, so I got to the corner and there was this car maybe, I don't know, a ways down the street, but coming to the stop sign, so I thought it would stop."
"Was the car speeding, do you think?" Bracco asked.
"I don't know. Probably not, maybe, or I might have noticed it more."
"Okay."
"But then I was off the curb like one step, and I heard the brakes go on, or the skid, you know that sound, whatever it's called. So I turned and she was going to hit me, so I jumped backwards and was facing her. Luckily she stopped just as I was reaching out. You know, in case she hit me."
"All right," Fisk said gently. "So you're leaning on the hood of the car. Is it damaged at all? Crashed in a little?"
"The light, yeah. I guess it would be the front, my left. I remember because I didn't want to cut myself on the broken headlight."
"Front right then, on the car."
"Okay, I guess so." She opened her eyes and seemed to be silently asking her parents if she was doing all right. A couple of nods assured her, and she closed her eyes again, but shook her head uncertainly. "I was kind of shaking then. It was pretty scary. But then I just got really mad and slammed my hands down on the hood again, really hard. I screamed at her."
"Do you remember what you said?"
"You almost killed me. You almost killed me, you idiot. I said it twice, I think. I was really mad and screamed at her."
"Then what?"
"Then she held up her hands, like it wasn't her fault, like she was sorry."
"Lexi," Bracco said with urgency, "what did she look like?"
It was almost comical the way Lexi screwed up her face, but there was no humor at all in the room. "Maybe a little younger than Mom, I think. I can't tell too good about adults' ages. But dark hair, kind of frizzy."
"Any particular hairstyle?"
"No. Just around her face. Frizzy."
"What race was she?"
"Not black. Not Asian. But other than that, I couldn't say."
"How about what she wore? Anything stick out?"
"No. It was only a second." She was showing the first signs of defensiveness. "We just stared at each other."
"Okay, that's good, Lexi," Fisk said. "Thank you so much."
But Bracco wasn't quite done. "Just a couple more things about the car, okay? Would you call it an old car or a new one? How would you describe it, if you can remember?"
Again, she closed her eyes. "Not a sports car, but not real big, you know. Kind of like a regular car, maybe, but not a new one, now that I think about it. The paint wasn't new. It just looked older, I guess. Not shiny." Suddenly, she frowned. "The back lights were kind of funny."
"The back lights?" Bracco asked. "How were they funny? How did you see them?"
"I turned right after I started running again. They kind of went out from the middle, almost like they were supposed to make you think of wings, you know?"
"Fins?" Fisk asked.
"Like on Uncle Don's T-Bird," Mrs. Rath volunteered. "You know how they go up in the back. They're called fins."
But she was shaking her head. "No, not just like that. Lower, kind of along the back, where you'd lift up the trunk. Oh, and a bumper sticker."
"You are doing so good, Lexi," Fisk enthused. "This is great. What about the bumper sticker?"
She closed her eyes again, squeezing them tight. But after a minute, she opened them and shook her head. "I don't know what it said. I don't remember. Maybe it wasn't in English."
At the day's last light, the two inspectors made one last stop, at the stop sign at Lake and Twenty-fifth. They had already decided to send a composite artist specialist out to the Raths' to work with Lexi. Fisk had a book at home with front and back views of every car made in America for the past fifty years, and he was planning on bringing that by, as well, to see if Lexi could give them a positive identification on the make and model.
They got out and walked from the stop sign back to the first streetlight. There was no sign of a skid mark, from which Fisk hoped to get something, perhaps a tire size. And then Bracco remembered. "The storm," he said. "We can forget it."
Kensing reached Hardy on his cell. It sounded as though he was in a restaurant somewhere. Jackman had already talked to him. He'd phrased the subpoena as a request. They wanted to proceed with dispatch on investigating Kensing's list, and without his testimony, the grand jury would be left in the dark. Hardy thought cooperation here wouldn't hurt them, and he'd okayed the new deal. But he wasn't nearly as sanguine when Kensing told him about the search warrant. "Glitsky was there tonight? Looking for what?"
"I don't think anything really. I think it was just to scare me, although they did take some of my clothes."
"Why did they do that?"
"They said they were looking for blood. They probably found some."
"Christ on a crutch."
Hardy had meant to turn off his cell phone when he and Frannie had left the house on their weekly date. It was one of their rules, but he'd forgotten and then of course it had rung and he'd answered it, telling her he'd just be a sec. That had been nearly five minutes ago. Once he had Kensing on the line, he wanted to grill him at length about the discrepancy between Judith Cohn's account of Tuesday night, when he hadn't gotten home by at least one o'clock, and his own, which would have put him there by about 10:30.
But they wound up talking about the search, and then about tomorrow's grand jury appearance. Then their waiter came up and gave him the sign and Hardy realized he really ought to hang up. They frowned upon cell phones here. Hardy did, too. Just not at this precise moment.
He squeezed in one more sentence. "But we really need to talk before you get to the grand jury."
If either Glitsky or his inspectors talked to Cohn as Hardy had done, they'd get the message to Marlene Ash and Kensing's appearance tomorrow in front of the grand jury wouldn't be pretty. With his multiple motives and Glitsky's animus, the squishy alibi might just be enough to get him indicted. At least he ought to know his girlfriend's story, or he'd get bushwhacked.
So they were meeting tomorrow at Kensing's at 8:15.
Now Frannie raised her glass of chardonnay, clinked it with his. "That sounded like a pleasant conversation," she said.
Hardy ostentatiously turned off his cell phone, put it in his jacket pocket. "Honest mistake, I swear," he said. "Which is better than the one Kensing made when he talked to Abe, or when he lied about when he got home last Tuesday."
Frannie stopped midsip. "I don't like to hear about clients who lie to you."
"It's not my favorite, either. In fact, as a general rule, I'd put lying in my top ten for what I'm not looking for in a client."
"And Abe just now searched his house?"
Hardy dipped some sourdough bread into a shallow dish of olive oil, pinched sea salt over it all. "I got that impression."
"Last night Abe seemed to think it might not be Kensing after all."
"Right. But last night we were all hot over Mrs. Loring, and we knew for a fact that Eric wasn't around when she was killed, so it looked like he was completely in the clear. But today, unfortunately, it turns out that these other deaths at Portola might have nothing to do with Markham or his wife. Basically, it looks like nobody in the universe that could have killed Mrs. Loring even knew Carla Markham, much less went to her house. In which case, they're unrelated."
"In which case, your client gets back on Abe's list."
"If he ever really left. But you know Abe. He likes to start with a big list, then whittle it down."
"You're saying he's got a lot of other suspects?"
"Sure. It's still early."
"How many?"
"Two, maybe three others."
Frannie whistled softly. "Big list. Anybody else Abe likes as well as Kensing?"
Hardy held his menu and looked down at it, then up at her, grinning. "But enough about the law. I'm going with the sand dabs tonight. There is no fish more succulent than a fresh Pacific Ocean sand dab, and they do them great here. Lemon, butter, capers. Out of this world. You really ought to try them."
Kensing was in a business suit, sitting at his kitchen table. He had poured some coffee for both of them, but the cups sat cool and untouched.
Hardy sat between the table and the sink. He had pushed himself back a little so he could cross his legs, and now his ankle rested on its opposite knee. "So you told Glitsky this last night, too?"
"Yeah, of course. Why wouldn't I? It's the truth. Jesus Christ, Diz, why do we keep going back over this? There's nothing to talk about!"
Hardy drew a breath, collected himself, let the breath out. It was possible, he supposed, though doubtful, that Judith had remembered the wrong night. "As a matter of fact, there is, Eric. The reason I can't get over it is that you never told me that Dr. Cohn was here that night, sleeping over. This is hard for me to fathom since she could have corroborated your alibi." His voice grew harsh. "And then we could just leave it. Or is it time to find yourself another lawyer?"
Kensing's eyes did a quick dance, came to rest. "She was asleep when I got home." He paused, scratched his fingernail across the table. "As it turns out, I didn't wake her up. So she wouldn't have known I was there. I wanted to keep her out of it."
Hardy waited to see if Kensing would ask the obvious question, but when it didn't come, he supplied it. "Aren't you interested in how I found out she'd been here?"
No answer.
"I talked to her and I asked her, how about that? Last night. And she was asleep when you got home, you're right. Although it wasn't ten thirty, was it? It was after one in the morning. Are you going to tell me she's lying?"
Kensing ran a bluff for about five seconds; then all the air left him in a rush. His shoulders sagged, his head hung down. He stood up and walked over to the sink, out of sight behind Hardy, who didn't turn to keep an eye on him and suddenly felt the hair on his neck stand up. A selection of kitchen knives hung off a magnet strip on the wall back there. Kensing could pull one off and slash with it before Hardy could move a muscle.
He whirled.
His client wasn't even facing him, and Hardy felt a moment of something like shame. Kensing was leaning with his hands on both sides of the sink, staring out the window. He finally spoke in a hoarse whisper. "I've been clean and sober for seven years, Diz. Seven years, a day at a time. You know how long that is?" He chuckled bitterly. "The answer is you don't. Nobody does. So last Tuesday, the man who ruined my marriage and took my kids from me shows up in my unit, and three hours later he's dead. Just dead. An act of God as far as I know. Finally some justice, finally something fair. But then between Carla and Driscoll, there's bedlam in the hospital. Then Ann comes to see me and she's raving, talking about me killing him, and for a minute I actually wonder if I didn't do all I could to keep him alive."
He stopped, ran water into a glass, drank it off, and wiped his mouth with his hand. "Anyway, somehow I made it through the rest of that day, going over to Carla's, trying to find a place for this…this thing that had happened. Then that cop, Bracco, outside at Carla's, and more talk as though somebody had done this to Tim. But then I was gone, free from it, driving home at last. I even got all the way here, parked just up the street a ways. I saw the light on and knew Judith was here."
A deep sigh. "Then I walked down to Harry's and had a drink. A double actually. Scotch and soda. Just sitting there savoring it, the most delicious thing I'd tasted in forever. Then another one, drinking to the good Mr. Markham's health, the beauty of it. God, it was so beautiful." He came back to the table and sat. "Then another one, this one for all the lost nights and my babies and Annie and all the shit I'd taken from her. And a couple more for Parnassus and what my life had turned into, a sham of healing people with minimum care, pretending that I was some paragon of virtue and knowledge. One more because the whole thing's a lie and I'm a fraud. Then the rest because I'm a drunk and a loser and that's all I am. So finally, when I try to order one more, the bartender, God bless him, cuts me off. It's closing time. He'll even give me a lift home if I need it."
"You think he'd remember you?" Hardy asked.
"Without a doubt. But if this gets out, I lose my job. And I won't get another one soon."
Hardy considered it for a while. "You realize this is your alibi for a murder, Eric."
Kensing was adamant. "It can't come out."
A flat gaze of frustration. "Then you better hope Glitsky hasn't talked to Judith."
"If he has, I'll tell him she made a mistake. It wasn't that night."
The rest of the conversation was simpler. It took place in the lobby of the Hall of Justice. Both men had had some time to cool off on their respective rides downtown, although Hardy had come to the unsettling realization that now Judith Cohn had no alibi for the time of Carla's death. But he wasn't going to bring that up to his client, not this morning. He had other, more pressing concerns.
He started the conversation by reminding Kensing that there was no physical evidence tying him either to Markham's death or Carla's. Trials were about evidence. If the prosecutor found herself getting too carried away with motives and possible motives, Hardy told Kensing that he should politely answer the questions. He didn't have to be confrontational. Don't argue. Keep it on point. "And the point, Eric, is to take yourself off the list of viable suspects."
The lecture continued. Hardy once again admonished his client to tell the truth about even the most seemingly damning of situations-between him and Markham, Markham and Ann, him and Parnassus. Tell the whole truth, especially about his trip to the bar on the night of Carla's death. Eric could believe it or not, but the truth was the best friend of the innocent. And further, protecting the secrets of witnesses was precisely what the grand jury was all about.
"You're telling me they don't leak?"
Hardy hated to admit it, but he did. "No. Everything leaks, Eric, from time to time. But the grand jury really doesn't leak often. If you're low-key and explain the situation, don't call undue attention to it, it will flow right by, after which you're not a suspect anymore." He really needed to drive this home. "Why should the grand jury care if you stopped by for a few drinks at a bar after a stressful day? Okay, you're an alcoholic and not supposed to drink-but murder, not alcoholism, is the crime."
Hardy needed to make him understand this crucial point. They were standing off alone by the wall engraved with the names of slain policemen. It was already after 9:00 and Kensing had to be upstairs by 9:30. The volume in the cavernous lobby was picking up with the increased traffic-cops and lawyers and a steady stream of the public, which sometimes did seem vast and unwashed, especially here. Hardy moved a step closer to his client, into his space, backing him against the wall, locking him in his gaze.
"Listen to me, Eric. You're an intelligent man, but right now you are letting fear and lack of focus hurt you. I don't blame you for being worried. It's a scary time, but don't let it blind you to the way you're going to strike those nineteen grand jurors. You're a doctor, an upstanding citizen, a voluntarily cooperative witness in a murder. You can't be a suspect because you simply were not at Carla's when she was shot. You were somewhere else-where that was specifically isn't going to matter. Once the jurors hear that, the psychological advantage is all yours. Where you were when you weren't killing Carla Markham won't even be newsworthy enough to leak, no more than what color tie you're wearing. There's really only one person that gives a shit if you went to that bar and had a drink, and that's you. So don't let the prosecutor in there-Marlene Ash-don't let her paint you as a killer. That's not who you are. In truth, and in fact." Hardy actually poked his finger in Kensing's chest. "Get it inside you. Believe it. Act like it."
But his client still wasn't quite with him. "And you're willing to risk my career over it?"
Hardy considered and answered in a level tone. "If you go up there with something to hide, it's going to be all over you like a stink and the jurors will smell it. And when inevitably it comes out, you've committed perjury, which is a felony. Go up there an innocent man, that's how you'll walk out. If they catch you in a lie, and Glitsky will if you give him time, you're probably indicted. Then you've perjured yourself, you're still a drunk, and maybe a murderer to boot. Where's your career then?"
Marlene Ash had a double agenda but there was no doubt at all about which one she was going to pursue first today. She had Abe Glitsky's prime suspect for a murder at the table next to the podium where she stood. While she respected Clarence Jackman's opinion and the deal they'd both made with Hardy, she didn't for a moment believe that one of the staff doctors in the Parnassus Physicians' Group was in possession of any insider knowledge about bogus billing at the corporate level. So she was going for the murder indictment.
Over the past few days, she'd put in long hours going over printouts of computer files supplied by Parnassus, mostly about Kensing, his estranged wife, and their relationship with Tim Markham. It had been anything but pleasant. Without question, the two men had hated each other. Ironically, Marlene thought, and only from reading one side of the correspondence, Kensing seemed to become bolder and more threatening as the relationship between his ex-wife and Markham flowered. Markham appeared to be bending over backward to give Kensing what he wanted-the subtext being that Kensing would expose them.
And now, in spite of her ammunition, Ash couldn't seem to make a hit. She'd had Kensing now for an hour and he'd cordially rebutted each of her assaults with reasonable responses that rang true.
He hadn't been worried about losing his job under Markham (as the correspondence had made clear). The relationship between Markham and his wife was insulation against that. In fact, Markham's death had actually imperiled his employment. He was currently, under Dr. Ross, on administrative leave, proof that in a way Markham had been his reluctant protector, and not a threat at all.
He had once felt rage for Tim Markham and his wife. Certainly. Who wouldn't? But as a matter of fact, he was in a satisfying relationship at the moment. In retrospect, he realized that his wife leaving him had been an opportunity, albeit a painful one. There was no anger anymore. If anything, he was doing better than Ann. The divorce was proceeding amicably. They were sharing visitation.
Ms. Ash was misinformed. There had been no fight last weekend. Ann had had an accident. He had filed no charges against her, and she'd brought none against him. She was hurt and angry and wanted to lash out because Tim Markham had left her the week before. Her rage was understandable, his nonexistent. He took the kids until she was back home. He and Ann had talked for several hours just two days ago. The police had regrettably misunderstood.
Again, Ms. Ash was misinformed. He had never admitted killing Tim Markham. No, of course he hadn't. He wasn't sure what Ann thought she'd heard. She had probably misunderstood. He hadn't wanted to discuss her testimony with her in advance because his lawyer had told him not to.
He readily admitted that the Baby Emily case had exacerbated the already strained relations between him and Parnassus. There he had simply done the right thing, and doing so had angered the money people in his company. This was a recurring theme in medicine everywhere-money versus care. He was a doctor, and made no bones about where he stood on the issue. Did this, he inquired, make him guilty of something?
He had come here voluntarily. He could take the Fifth Amendment, yet did not. He wanted to clear the air, clear his name, so he could get back to his life, his patients.
"All right, then, Dr. Kensing," Marlene Ash said at last. "You were the last person to see Carla Markham alive, were you not?"
"I can't say, ma'am. I'd assume that would be her murderer."
A snicker rippled across the jurors.
"When did you leave the Markham house on the night of Mr. Markham's death?"
"At a little after ten."
"And you told Lieutenant Glitsky you drove straight home, isn't that true?"
"Yes, ma'am. That's what I told the lieutenant." He took in a breath, then came out with it. "But that was not true." He had his hands locked on the table in front of him, and addressed himself to the jurors. "Lieutenant Glitsky interrogated me on this issue. I didn't want to tell him where I'd been. When I talked to my lawyer, he told me that today I would be under oath. He told me my testimony would be protected and you would keep my secret. I'm sorry I lied to the lieutenant, but I didn't go straight home. The truth is, I'm an alcoholic and…"
Fisk and Bracco had decided that their priority was to collect the facts that they'd been unable to gather previously. To do this most efficiently, they should split up. Bracco had drawn Brendan Driscoll, called him from the Hall of Justice, made an appointment. The suspect seemed enthusiastic.
Driscoll had dressed for the interview-pressed dress slacks, shining wing tips, coat, and tie. When he opened the door, Bracco's first question was if he was going someplace.
The answer surprised him. "Don't I know you?"
"I don't think so, no." He held up his badge. "Inspector Bracco. Homicide."
"Yes, I know. Come in, come in."
They went into the living room, off to the left of the hallway at the front of the duplex. It was a bright space, made more so by the slanting sun through the open windows, the white-on-white motif. Water bubbled soothingly from a Japanese rock sculpture in the corner.
Bracco was suddenly, intensely uneasy. He could not place the other man's face, but there was an unmistakable recognition, a shift in the dynamic between them. Driscoll indicated one of the chairs, then sat kitty-corner all the way back on the couch, almost lounging, one arm out along the top of the cushions. Bracco got out his tape recorder, turned it on, and placed it on the glass tabletop, next to a large, flat tray of raked white sand and smooth stones.
Keeping himself busy with the standard preamble, he finally looked over again at his potential suspect. "I'm going to cut to the chase, Mr. Driscoll. I understand you were at Carla Markham's house in the late afternoon through the evening on the day her husband was killed."
"Yes. That's true."
"Do you remember what you did later that night?"
Obviously the question was unexpected, and resented. "What I did? Why?"
"If you could just answer the question."
"Well, I can't just answer the question without a reason. Why would you want to know what I did later that night? I thought you were coming here to talk about Dr. Ross or Dr. Kensing, that maybe Mr. Elliot had come upon something in what I'd given him."
"Jeff Elliot? What did you give him?"
Driscoll had to some degree recovered his aplomb after the insult. "Some of my files from work. Evidence, I would suppose you'd call it. Although the grand jury didn't seem interested when I talked to them."
"You think these files contain evidence relating to Mr. Markham's death?"
"Absolutely. Of course they do. They must."
"And do you still have copies here?"
Driscoll hesitated for an instant, then shook his head. "No. I gave them all to Mr. Elliot."
Bracco didn't believe this for a moment. "And yet you thought I was coming over here to discuss them with you?"
"I thought you must have talked to him."
"No." Bracco met Driscoll's eye. "But maybe I should."
"On second thought, he probably wouldn't show them to you. Sources, you know. But I could call him and get them back, then let you know."
"That might be helpful," Bracco said. "Or we could get a search warrant and go through them ourselves."
Driscoll was shaking his head, supercilious. "You're way late, Sergeant. Ross has erased all the good stuff by now. Everything about him and Tim, anyway."
"But you say you had it and gave it to Jeff Elliot?"
A self-important shrug. "I didn't read it all, but some of it was certainly provocative, if you know what I mean. He was definitely firing Ross, you know?"
"Markham?"
"I'm sure he was taking kickbacks for putting drugs on the formulary. Tim got wise to it, too, after Sinustop. He just needed more proof before he could accuse him directly. But if you read between the lines, you can see it. It was over between them."
Bracco decided not to press anymore with Driscoll the issue of whether he'd kept copies of his files, or what might be contained in them. He'd come here today to talk about the Tuesday night, and he returned to that topic. "I'm still wondering about after you left the Markhams'."
A petulant glare, then a sigh of capitulation. "All right, then, I came home here."
"Thank you. And what time was that?"
"I'm not sure. Nine, nine thirty. You have to understand that my world had just fallen apart. I wasn't keeping track of the time very well."
A brusque nod. "Were you alone?"
Brendan brought a hand to his forehead. He closed his eyes for a long moment. "Yes. Roger was working late, which he's been doing all the time recently. But I called him and he was just crunching numbers, no clients at that time, and we could talk. At least we could talk. It had been the worst day, just the worst. I almost went down to his bank just to be with him, but he told me he'd be coming home."
"You called him at his bank after you got home at nine thirty?"
"Yes. I was so upset, just so upset."
"Did you and Roger talk a long while?"
"I don't know. It seemed too short, but you know how that is. I just couldn't tell you how long it was. Honestly."
Ross didn't have any kind of trouble remembering. He told Fisk, "I was talking with Jeff Elliot here in the office until late-I don't know the exact time, maybe nine o'clock, something like that. It had been the day from hell, I'll tell you. Then he finished with me-although he didn't really finish with me until he'd written that fucking column-and I realized I'd hit the wall, so I got in my car and went home."
Fisk's young and earnest face clouded over. "So you got home about nine thirty?"
"Yeah, something like that. Is there a problem with that?"
Fisk scratched behind his ear. "Only, sir, that I think your wife said something about you getting home after midnight that night."
Ross gave it some more thought, then let out a humorless chuckle. "No. She's got it mixed up with another night. I've been getting home at midnight so often lately, she probably thinks that's my regular hours. But it wasn't anywhere near there. Maybe ten, tops."
Glitsky had put off taking care of some of his administrative duties as long as he could, but this morning he came in and began. For three hours, he'd been caught up in such minutiae as collating the mileage run up by his inspectors on city-issue cars. Now he was chewing on the last dry bit of rice cake and sipping the dregs of his tea, which had attained room temperature. So he was in a suitably cheerful mood when Marlene Ash knocked on his door as she was opening it.
He sat back gratefully, pushed the paperwork aside. "You broke him," he said.
She closed the door quietly, then turned back to him and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed over her chest. "Pending verification of his alibi, which I'd expect in the next few hours, Dr. Kensing is no longer a suspect, at least for Carla's death. And that means Markham's, too, I'd suppose."
Glitsky squinted up at her, shook his head. "He doesn't have an alibi."
"He didn't tell it to you. He wanted the secrecy protection of the grand jury."
"As though I'd tell anybody?"
"He wanted to be sure."
"And you believe it. What was it?"
Ash uncrossed her arms and took one of the folding chairs across from Glitsky's desk. "You know the story of the man in the Old West who was sleeping with his best friend's wife at the time of the murder and got hanged because he wouldn't admit that's where he'd been? It was something like that, except it didn't involve sleeping with anybody."
"He was someplace he shouldn't have been?"
"Close enough, Abe. And about as far as I want to go, even with you. If this gets out later, and it always might, I want to be able to say I never told a soul. I believe it, rock solid. He didn't do it."
Still way back in his chair, Glitsky sat with this new reality for a long beat. "This is one of the few times, Marlene, when I see the value in profanity. You're truly satisfied he couldn't have been at Carla's? Who's going to check this out?"
"Not at ten forty-five, Abe. Unless that time is squishy and I have an investigator out checking now."
But Glitsky had taken Hardy's information, then gone back himself to talk to Frank Husic. He considered that man's testimony to be unimpeachable, and Carla's time of death established. If Kensing hadn't been there at 10:45, he was innocent. He'd give a lot to know precisely where the doctor had been, but knew he wasn't likely to get it from any source, and certainly not from Marlene Ash. "Thanks for the heads-up," he told her. "You got anybody else you like?"
"Not really, Abe. I'm talking to the accountant and maybe a couple of board members this afternoon. I've got to broaden the net and make some progress on the money side or Clarence is going to be unhappy. He's already going to be unhappy that his deal with Dismas got us nothing of any substance."
"It got me something," Glitsky said ruefully. "I didn't arrest him, which is starting to look like a good idea."
This was unarguable, and Marlene went on. "Well, anyway, I've subpoenaed all of their financial records for the past three years and we'll see who can explain them satisfactorily. I'm going to have the grand jury take the fraud issue head-on. Then maybe I'll get back to the murder indictment, but for now my priority…"
"What are you guys talking about?"
Bracco and Fisk weren't exactly talking. They'd come back and met at the hall after their respective interviews in the morning. The volume of their conversation out at their desks had pulled the lieutenant out of his office and his meeting with Ash.
"Nothing, sir. Sorry." Darrel Bracco didn't want to fink on his partner, although he was plenty disappointed in him.
"It didn't sound like nothing." Glitsky stood over their combined desk with the stoplight in the middle of it. He was looking down on them, one to the other.
At last, Fisk caved. "Malachi Ross told me when he went home on the Tuesday night, but it was a different time than his wife had said."
"So Harlen told Ross what she'd said," Bracco finished for him.
"You told him?" Glitsky's voice was flat. Ash had come out and was standing behind him, shaking her head at these Keystones.
Fisk nodded. "She said after midnight and he said ten o'clock. So he just said she was wrong. She'd made a mistake."
"And then, the minute Harlen walked out the door, he called her." Bracco was appalled at his partner's error. "How much you want to bet?"
"Easy, Darrel." Glitsky turned a surprisingly patient eye to Fisk. "Usually when you get contradictory statements from two witnesses, especially if they're closely related, like married, you don't want to tell the one what the other said until you can get them together and confront them with the contradiction. That can be instructive."
"Yes, sir. I got that now. I made a mistake. Do you think he's called his wife?"
"Absolutely," Bracco said.
Ash spoke from behind Glitsky. "Do you have her number? You could call and ask her yourself."
Fisk said he thought he'd try that. While he made the call, Bracco started to tell Glitsky about his interview with Brendan Driscoll. When Ash heard about the correspondence and computer files, she piped in, "What are all these papers? He never mentioned them when he was up before the grand jury."
"He told me you didn't ask about them."
"How could I? I didn't know they existed outside of the company computers. What did he do, steal them?"
"I gathered he e-mailed them to himself before he got fired."
"So he stole them. Are they still at his house?"
"I got that impression, the disks anyway."
Ash turned to Glitsky. "We need that stuff, Abe."
"Jeff Elliot's already got it," Bracco offered.
"Forget it," Glitsky said. "He's a reporter. We'll never see it."
"So we'll go for Driscoll's originals," Ash said. "Where are your warrant forms? You keep 'em up here?"
"You might not even need them," Bracco told her. "Driscoll's just looking for a way that he can disrupt things at Parnassus. He's bitter. He wants to get back at people, especially people who made life hard on Markham."
Ash nodded, but told them to get a warrant anyway. Fisk came back over to the knot of them, dejected. "She didn't admit he called her, but she said she remembered wrong and changed her mind. She was glad I called. She was going to call me." He looked mournfully around him. "Ten o'clock."
"He called her," Bracco snapped.
"It doesn't matter." Glitsky was in a fatalistic frame of mind after Kensing. "The wife wouldn't have testified at trial against her husband anyway. We haven't lost anything. Not like with Kensing."
The two inspectors shot glances at each other. "What about Kensing?" Bracco asked.
Again, Ash stepped in. "You can take him off your list. He has an alibi for Carla's murder. I was just telling Abe."
This brought them all to silence, which Bracco broke. "So it's all coming down to Carla?"
Glitsky nodded. "Looks like. Is there anybody left without an alibi? What about Driscoll?"
"I asked him this morning," Bracco said. "He might have been talking on the phone."
"To who?"
"His partner, Roger. I was going to check his phone records. It's on my list."
After a moment, Fisk perked up. "I don't know if you've heard, Lieutenant, but we've made some progress on the car."
Hardy should have been elated. After all, his client was no longer a suspect. He'd remained on the fifth floor, eschewing an opportunity to visit with either Glitsky or Jackman, waiting on a bench outside the Police Commissioner's Hearing Room until Kensing had come out. Eric told him how it had gone, which was pretty much exactly as Hardy had predicted.
The two men had walked up to John's for a celebration lunch but it had turned out to be a sober affair, in all senses. Hardy made a few-he thought-subtle attempts to get Eric to open up about his girlfriend. How had Judith Cohn gotten along with Markham? With Ross? With all the Parnassus problems, monetary and otherwise, with which Kensing had such difficulty? What were their plans together, if any?
Eric was reasonably forthcoming. She'd only been on staff at Portola for a year after her residency at USC and internship at Johns Hopkins, then two four-month stints-one in Africa and one in South America-with Me´dicins San Frontie`res.
"You know, Doctors Without Borders, although she always gives it the French reading, posters in her room and her bumper sticker even. She's proud of her languages, French and Spanish. And she's a fanatic about the organization, really. I think she's got me half-convinced to go over with her next time-it's Nigeria this summer-although God knows there's enough to do here in this coun try. But if Parnassus does let me go…andmy kids, I don't know how they'd handle it. Remember when decisions used to be easy?"
After they said good-bye, Hardy stood in the sunshine on Ellis Street, about midway between his office and the Chronicle building. It should be over, he knew, but somehow it wasn't. This wasn't the familiar emotional letdown after the conclusion of a trial. There was no conclusion here, not yet.
Someone had murdered Tim Markham and his family. Someone had murdered a succession of patients at Portola.
And he still had his deal with Glitsky. They were sharing their discovery, and he was privy to knowledge that Abe did not share. It rankled and left him feeling somehow in his friend's debt, which was absurd. Hardy had, if anything, done Glitsky a big favor.
But whatever the complications, he knew that he was too involved to quit, even if there was no one left to defend.
It couldn't be the end. It wasn't over.