Damage (43 page)

“Right about the time the dog was poisoned,” he said.

“Can you see the license number on that vehicle?” Jenkins produced a certified DMV record, had it marked as an exhibit, and handed it to Farrell. “Tell the grand jurors, Mr. Farrell, based on the photo and those records, whose car was parked near the rape crisis center just before your dog was poisoned.”

“The records indicate,” Farrell said, “that the car belonged to Ro Curtlee.”

Jenkins let a long minute pass before she concluded. “Questions from the grand jury? Mr. Farrell, you’re excused.”

After being admonished, like every other witness, by the fore-person not to discuss his testimony, Farrell got up and, nodding soberly as he passed Jenkins, walked out of the room.

Down in his office, Wes closed and locked his door behind him. His whole body was shaking with the cynical enormity of what he’d just done. Crossing over to the foosball table, he grabbed two of the near handles and put all of his weight on them. Closing his eyes, he sucked in a deep breath, swallowing against the urge to throw up.

He’d been through difficult times before in his trials, his failed marriage, with his children, in his life, but never before had he completely abandoned his essential view of himself as a good man, an honest man, a man of good character. And he had just—willingly, knowingly, with aforethought—done exactly that.

He didn’t kid himself. He knew that what he’d said and shown the grand jury might have been marginally relevant—even there he was on thin ice. But he also knew that the way he did it, appearing as a witness in his own prosecution, was at very best unprofessional if not flat-out unethical. He had done something he knew he wasn’t supposed to do.

In the grand jury room, there was no check on his power. It was virtually absolute, and it had corrupted him absolutely. He remembered what Treya Glitsky had told him in his first days in office: that his predecessor Clarence Jackman had stayed on because he’d become addicted to the power. And now Farrell had a clear understanding of what she had meant.

This was his Rubicon—he was cheating, he knew he was cheating, he would cheat again under similar conditions.

And then suddenly the shaking within him stilled into a calm acceptance. He let go his death grip on the handles, got his weight back onto his feet. Surveying the shattered remnants of his conscience as though from a great height, he felt neither guilt nor pain, only a mild regret at its former gentle insistence upon the right and the fair, the last vestige of his idealistic youth.

What mattered most to him was that, in the sacred secrecy of the grand jury room, Jenkins would get her twelve votes.

“I’m sorry, Abe,” Amanda Jenkins said. “I just can’t seem to stop crying.”

“Crying is okay. It’s not like baseball. We allow crying in law enforcement, even encourage it. There are classes.” Trying to keep it light.

It didn’t work. “I don’t know whether it was the dog, the stupid beautiful dog. Or relief. Or even Matt. I mean, Matt . . . I still can’t believe . . .” She couldn’t go on, dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief.

Glitsky put an arm around her. She had come down to his office to share with him what she hoped would be the upcoming good news about the indictment, except that as she started telling him it had blindsided her. In the end, she couldn’t stand being cooped up inside the Hall of Justice any longer and she’d borrowed Glitsky’s spare raincoat and they’d snuck out the back stairs down to Bryant, and now were walking east in the misty, cold, gray, windy early afternoon.

“You know what else I can’t stop. I can’t stop thinking I want them to kill him,” she said. “I want this indictment so bad, and then I want him to just think about resisting arrest and have them kill him.”

“Maybe they will.”

They walked another half block in silence. Glitsky tightened his arm briefly around her shoulders, and then let it drop as they continued side by side.

“Assuming we get the vote, you think we’ll really get him?” she asked.

“I don’t see why not. We got him last time. Not without a little difficulty, but we got him. We’ll get him again.”

“Who’s going out?”

“Lapeer’s picking a couple of special teams. Assuming the grand jury decides soon enough, they’ll be waiting for him when he gets home.”

“Not you?”

Glitsky’s mouth went up a quarter inch. “Wiser heads prevailed.”

“I’d have thought you wanted to be there.”

“I did. She took my interest into consideration.”

Another half block. A restaurant with happy early TGIF revelers. A body repair shop. A tattoo parlor. Four homeless people.

“Gets home from where?” Jenkins asked.

“Wherever they wind up going.”

“They?”

“Him and the butler. They left at around ten thirty. We got him tagged with the GPS when he stopped at his bank about ten minutes later.”

“So where’d they go after that?”

“San Bruno for a half hour or so, and finally Sunnyvale now for a while. I checked just before you came in. He was still there.”

“What’s down there?”

“I don’t know. Some lunch place, maybe. A whorehouse. I ...”

Glitsky came to a standstill, put his hand on Jenkins’ arm.

“What? Abe?”

“I just had a horrible thought,” he said. “I could be wrong. I’m probably wrong.”

“What?”

Glitsky was already turned around, starting back toward the hall. “We’ve got to get back and find out for sure,” he said.

“Abe? What?” she asked again.

“Not what, who,” he said. “Gloria Gonzalvez.”

Gloria built her work schedule so she would get the maximum time with her children. There was no avoiding leaving her baby, three-year-old Bettina, every day with Angela, who was a find, at eighteen really more like an older sister than a babysitter. But with the boys, Ramón and her six-year-old, Geraldo, both of them finally spending their full days in school, she could leave home just after they caught the bus at eight, clean her five or six houses—only four on Friday!—and still be home by the time they got there at three thirty or thereabouts.

Today she’d finished a little bit earlier than usual, dropped off her two helpers at their apartments, then did a little grocery shopping for dinner and the weekend before stopping by Angela’s to pick up Bettina. Now she had an hour or so before the boys got home as she turned into her block, enough time to get dinner started and play with her baby alone, which was such a rare and special treat that they both loved. Her street, down in the flats just to the west of the freeway, was wearing its shabby winter coat today, the trees bare, the small, stand-alone houses in dull and faded pastels, what lawns there were as gray as the leaden sky above.

This was a neighborhood of working people, and the line of cars that sometimes made parking at the curb so challenging at night and on the weekends was missing, making the street feel all the more deserted. Gloria thought it was a little odd to notice a brand-new white SUV parked a couple of houses down from hers. People on this block didn’t buy showroom-quality Toyotas or Lexuses or whatever the car was. It was out of place enough that she glanced over as she drove by and was reassured by the Latino driver—well dressed but clearly one of them, someone who belonged here. Maybe someone’s cousin, she thought. Or new boyfriend.

She pulled her own rust-stained green midnineties Honda into her driveway and pulled all the way in so that she could enter by the back door directly into the kitchen. She had Bettina buckled behind her in her backward-facing baby seat, and she went around to the car’s back door, opened it, leaned over, and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek—“
Momento, chica.”
Then she opened the car’s front passenger door to get out her two grocery bags and closed that door when she had them both.

With a bag in each hand, she turned and went up the three steps on her back stoop. Putting the bags down, she fished for a second in her purse for her keys, then found them, and opened the back door. Picking up the bags again, she brought them inside the house, put them on the counter, and then remembered that she’d bought some Häagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche ice cream, Roberto’s favorite. She didn’t want to let that get warm and start to melt, so she dug down in the bag for it and crossed the kitchen to put the carton in the freezer.

All the while, she’d been softly humming to herself, as she did when she was happy, and suddenly she thought she heard something. Closing up the freezer, she stopped and listened intently, her head cocked to one side.

What had that sounded like?

The answer came to her in a flash—a car door opening!—just as she turned and bolted for the back door and out onto the stoop.

And there was a man already halfway out of her car on Bettina’s side, the close side to her, straightening up and turning around, holding her baby in his arms.

She stopped, her eyes wide with terror, frozen.

Ro Curtlee was holding her baby.

“Hey, Gloria,” he said with his terrible smile. “All these years and you’re still a damn fine-looking woman.”

Glitsky placed a cell phone call to the Sunnyvale Police Department while he was jogging back to the Hall of Justice. Since he hadn’t placed it as a 911 call, the dispatcher down there put him on hold before he could get a chance to state his business. Two blocks later, as he was getting to the steps of the Hall, he gave up, hung up, and tried 911, which was busy.

Inside the building, he lost his signal altogether.

He ran down the internal hallway that led him to Southern Station, the police precinct located on the ground floor within the Hall of Justice where a sergeant named Mildred Bornhorst was monitoring the GPS results. Here Glitsky learned that Ro’s car was still parked down in Sunnyvale, where it had been for more than an hour. Glitsky got the relevant information, such as it was, to give to the emergency operator, but again he couldn’t get past the busy signal.

It was not until he was in his office again—the clogged river of humanity in the lobby, the long ride up in the world’s slowest elevator—that he could punch up the emergency numbers again on a landline. This time through a disturbance in the Force he got through and in another two minutes was talking to a Sergeant Bransen at the Sunnyvale Police Department.

“The suspect is Ro Curtlee,” Glitsky was explaining. He spelled out the name. “He’s out on bail on a rape/murder charge . . .”

“There’s no bail on a rape/murder charge,” the sergeant said.

“Don’t ask,” Glitsky snapped. “In any event, he’s armed and dangerous. He’s due to get indicted on multiple murder within the next couple of hours, so if you can get in his face any way you can, we’d appreciate it more than I can tell you.”

“Get in his face? What’s that mean? Is he indicted or isn’t he?”

“He should be by the time you find him.”

“What if he isn’t?”