Nothing but the Truth (65 page)
Abe remembered, didn’t he? When his wife, Flo, had died, he’d been at the synagogue from early morning. Had anybody ever checked what Ron had done the day of Bree’s funeral? She was, after all, his sister.
“What do you mean, sister?”
Hardy felt the blood drain out of his face. “Did I say ‘sister’? I meant his wife. His wife’s funeral. The point is, if Ron’s got an alibi for Griffin, he didn’t kill Bree, did he? If you got that, you rub it in Randall’s face that you’re not covering up anything. Why doesn’t he get out of your way and let you do your damn job?”
Sitting on the corner of Hardy’s desk, Glitsky made a swift decision and pulled the phone over. “Does it have the number there? St. Catherine’s.”
It did, and when five minutes later he replaced the receiver, the lieutenant was close to actually smiling, the scar between his lips standing out white. “Everything should be that easy,” he said. “Ron was with the priest all day. His kids. A couple of other people.”
“That’s what it sounded like.” Hardy feigned satisfaction, leaned back in the couch, broke his own smile. “That’s great.”
“It’s at least good.” Glitsky didn’t skip a beat. “So that brings us,” he said, “back to Baxter Thorne, who as you point out is one slick—”
He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Hardy got up to answer it. David Freeman stood in the hallway, hands in his pockets. “Five minutes are up,” he said pointedly.
“One more,” Glitsky said.
Freeman looked at him, nodded, came back to Hardy. “If nobody’s left down there when you make it back, don’t blame me.”
“I’ll be right there. Promise.”
Freeman shrugged—he’d tried—and started back down the stairs. Hardy turned back to Abe. “You heard that,” he said.
“Okay.” Glitsky handed the paper bag he’d been carrying over to Hardy. “More stuff for your private collection. Photos from Griffin’s car, the backseat and what they’d tagged earlier. Only the so-called significant stuff is inventoried, but you can check the photos. Canetta. Couple of interview transcripts you might have missed.
“Also, Kerry does have a Glock. It’s where he said it was and hasn’t been fired since it was last cleaned— my guess is maybe a year, maybe never. Of course, he wouldn’t have had to fire it if he pointed it convincingly enough.
“Finally, I know you’re wanted down below, but here’s the short version on Thorne. You’re going to want to know, trust me.” When he finished with the damning but completely unprovable information on the gasoline and one of Hardy’s elephants in Thorne’s coat pocket, Hardy asked if they had found any evidence of his connectionto SKO, to the MTBE dump, any other terrorist acts.
The answer was no, but Glitsky was pulling another warrant tomorrow, sending a couple of teams of search and cyber specialists back to the apartment and to the FMC offices. It was going to be the full press, with full phone record follow-ups and data searches for palimpsest disks, forensics teams.
“Where are you getting the staff?” Hardy asked. “I thought you had seven new homicides, no troops.”
“I’m reassigning people,” he said simply. They started back toward the stairway. “It’s a new management tool I’m working on, called do what your boss asks and see if it improves your life.”
“I like it,” Hardy said.
“Me too. I think it’s going to work. And in case it doesn’t,” he said, “there’s always the FBI.”
As it turned out, in the Solarium no one had gone home, although Hardy’s return to the conference room didn’t occasion the warmest reception he’d ever encountered. Still, the guys finished the work and left the office, spreading out to deliver the bad news to Kerry, Valens, Pierce, Thorne, David Glenn. Everyone Hardy could think of.
After much debate, Hardy and Freeman decided to serve both Randall and Pratt with subpoenas as well. They would have to appear in Judge Braun’s court for Hardy’s hearing, and wouldn’t that just fry them?
He wasn’t sure he would call all of these people as witnesses—or even most of them. But he wanted to keep his options open, and the turns in this case had surprised him often enough already. He was damned if he was going to be taken unawares in court.
This strategy, though, wasn’t without some peril. The shotgun approach was an abuse of the subpoena power and might even earn Hardy a reprimand from the state bar, a contempt citation of his own, but he was beyond those considerations anymore. If his strategy failed, contempt would be the least of his problems.
And then finally, at a little after nine, even Freeman packed up and went home, leaving him alone again up in his office, his pages spread out before him, his mind numbed by the gravity of his decisions, the impossibility of what he was considering.
If Ron’s got an alibi for Griffin, he didn’t kill Bree, did he?
Hardy’s own words to Glitsky came back to torment him. He’d used them earlier to convince himself, believing them absolutely. It was so logical that it had to be true—Griffin was investigating Bree’s death and Griffin had been killed. Same with Canetta. Therefore they were all, somehow, connected.
Except if they weren’t.
Except if Carl Griffin, in the course of poking into lives as he did, had discovered an unpleasant truth about the last documented man to have seen him alive—Baxter Thorne. And except if Phil Canetta, stumbling upon the Thorne/Valens arrangement after he’d left Hardy and Freeman on Saturday night, had gone alone after the glory—to deliver a cop killer to all the suits downtown in homicide. And he’d underestimated his man.
Thorne.
A dangerous, decisive, quietly confident man of action, already armed with Griffin’s gun, his adrenaline high from torching Hardy’s house. Or had that been when he was feeling truly invincible, after he’d killed Canetta?
And that, of course, left Bree. And another killer entirely.
David Glenn’s friends had begun to arrive. He said he wanted to help Hardy with 902, but he couldn’t just let him into a tenant’s apartment. He could be fired for that. Why didn’t Hardy just come back with the lieutenant, with a warrant, as he had before?
But again, agonizingly, Hardy couldn’t come to Glitsky. And the reason was more personal, more compelling than anything else he was likely to encounter.
It was Frannie.
If Rita Browning—the invisible Rita Browning—was another of Ron Beaumont’s credit card identities, if Griffin had discovered the Movado watch in 902 and not in Bree’s apartment after all . . .
Hardy could not let Glitsky get to Ron. There could be no arrest, no police interrogation. Because if Ron continued to deny any involvement in the murder—and there was little doubt that is what he would do—then Frannie would always believe him. Worse, she would also believe that the system had betrayed Ron. Her friend Abe had betrayed her.
And her husband, too.
So if Ron had killed Bree after all, Glitsky wouldn’t be any help—he couldn’t be any part of it.
Ron would have to say it himself. In front of Frannie. In open court.
Hardy had to leave here, go see his children, make sure Cassandra was safe. Slumped, nearly reclining on the couch, he held his right hand over his eyes, shielding them from the overheads. His left hand fell on the photos Glitsky had left with him—extreme close-ups of the items under the backseat of Carl Griffin’s car. Then there were the written forms—Canetta’s autopsy report,
his
car. Interviews, interrogations.
his
car. Interviews, interrogations.
Forcing himself up, he carried all the stuff over to his desk, went down the hall to throw some water in his face. When he returned, he had a moment of indecision—there was no chance that he could analyze any significant portion of all this material. What was the point of even starting?
But this, he knew, was the devil.
So he began, but after a quick scan knew that he wasn’t equipped now to see anything in the photos of the junk, food wrappers, and french fries that had been under the backseat of Griffin’s car. He’d try again in the morning, but expected nothing. Instead, he turned to the tapes, putting one of the microcassettes into his handheld machine.
He listened to an understandably impatient but finally cooperative Jim Pierce talking in his office with Tyler Coleman—again. Next was Glitsky, Hardy, Kerry, and Valens from last night.
Hardy realized that this case—these cases?—must have gotten inside Glitsky as well. He’d put a rush on getting copies made of everything he’d delivered to Hardy, and then sat on his people to make sure it all got done.
Canetta’s autopsy, especially. The morgue was backed up with bodies, but the coroner did his work on Canetta first. Hardy realized grimly, though, that this might not have been Glitsky’s influence after all, but a final show of respect for a policeman killed in the line of duty.
He’d been at it for over an hour and the effects of the cold water splash had long since worn off. And here before him now was the technical sheet from the autopsy of Phil Canetta. Entry wounds, exit wounds. A fresh wave of exhaustion rolled over him and he closed his eyes against it.
And against the other painful reality—if he hadn’t recruited Canetta, the man would still be alive. The image floated up at him—Canetta enjoying the hell out of his mortadella sandwich just a couple of days before, his cigar on Saturday night at Freeman’s. The sergeant had been very much alive—in tune with tastes, buffeted by the storms of love, hamstrung by his responsibilities. So much like Hardy, and now in a day gone to dirt.
Clothing. Powder bums. Next to the medical/chemical analysis of sugars, starches, and carbon compounds, someone from the coroner’s office—maybe under Glitsky’s questioning—had written down in the margin the layman’s version of Canetta’s stomach contents. Cop food. His last fast-food burger with a coffee and a candy bar—chocolate, beef, potato, almond, bread, pickle. Hardy passed over it, went on to blood levels for alcohol, nicotine . . .
He closed his eyes and saw Canetta’s face again on the bench in Washington Square, his eyes lit up with the memory of Bree Beaumont, the simple joy in his deli sandwich.
Enough enough enough.
He flipped desultorily through the rest of the pile, which seemed to go on and on. His office closed in around him, and he shut his eyes again, just for a second. Then, starting awake, realized that he must have dozed. Still, he couldn’t quit. He didn’t know yet . . .
Frannie, still in jail . . .
He turned another page, trying to will himself to focus. It was no use. He could barely even make out the letters, and those he saw formed words that had lost all meaning.
PART FOUR
37
Hardy tasted turpentine in the coffee. At the kitchen table—showered, shaved, and dressed—he added more sugar and turned a page of the morning paper.
It was six a.m. He had returned to the Cochrans’ at a little after eleven. All three of the children and both adults had still been awake. There might have been giggling in the background, but the atmosphere in the house was as carefree as an operating room.
By two a.m., after five increasingly firm visits from the adults, the kids stopped making noise. Hardy, on the couch in the living room, heard the clock chime the hour at least twice after that.
Now he rubbed at his eyes, trying to get the salt out of them. The sugar didn’t improve the java and he set the mug down and massaged his right temple, which throbbed dully.
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