The Fall (17 page)

The judge turned to Braden. “Redirect?”

Rebecca hadn’t gotten back to her seat before a visibly shaken Braden was back on his feet. “Doctor, your findings are also perfectly consistent with someone throwing her off that bridge, are they not?”

“Yes.”

“So there was no evidence of any kind that this was other than murder, isn’t that true?”

“That’s correct,” Strout repeated patiently. “I can’t say anything about how she came to fall, only that the fall killed her. From her injuries alone, those that caused her death, she might have jumped, or she might have fallen.”

“The jury will have to determine from other evidence how she went off the bridge. Correct?”

Rebecca, still in an almost surreal state, found herself rising from her chair, objecting to the question as argumentative, and Bakhtiari sustained her.

Braden cast her a fast, appraising look, as if really noticing her for the first time. He came back to the witness. “Nothing inconsistent with murder. Is that correct, Doctor?”

“Correct.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

T
HE
H
ARDYS’ TWO-STORY
house was the only stand-alone residence on a block of mostly four-story apartment buildings, although the occasional duplex slightly broke up the monotonous elevations. Distinctively, a true white picket fence ran along the sidewalk, preserving the Hardys’ as the only house with a lawn, albeit a tiny one bisected by a crushed stone path. Until it had been gutted by a fire about a decade before, it had been a one-story railroad-style Victorian—a long hallway ran down the left side from the front door to the kitchen, and both the living and dining rooms opened off that hallway to the right.

The kitchen was large and, artificially, well lit. The three windows to the outdoors were over the sink, but they didn’t let in much light. The view—fifteen feet away, the towering side of the neighbors’ apartment house—left a little something to be desired. Nevertheless, the kitchen tended to be the gathering place when they had company, as they did tonight.

The Glitskys were the last of the Hardys’ generation of friends to have young children living at home. (Several of their friends had grown children who’d moved back in after high school, college, or grad school, but that was an entirely different situation.) Abe and Treya had the sensitivity and intelligence not to include the youngsters in every single adult meal or event to which they were invited.

Tonight, for example, Glitsky was explaining, they’d left both the kids in a pickle barrel in their living room.

“I don’t remember seeing a pickle barrel there last time I came by,” Frannie said.

Treya corrected her. “Two pickle barrels. They’re new, and you can’t fit both kids their size in one pickle barrel, Frannie. They each get their own.
You know, Abe’s been working on his whole new pickle-barrel theory of how to raise children, and I must say, it’s working out better than I expected.”

“So this is kind of permanent?” Hardy asked.

“We figure only until they’re eighteen. Before that, we just feed ’em through the bunghole, and when they’re done, we let ’em out and send them off to college.”

“I like it,” Hardy said. “Though of course we’ll miss them in the interim.”

“Oh,” Abe said, “you can say hi to them whenever you come by. It’s not like they won’t have a life.”

“That’ll be nice,” Frannie said. “Kids should definitely have a life, I think.”

“That’s what we’re going for,” Treya said. “Quality of life for all of us, with just a slight emphasis on the ‘us’ part, meaning me and Abe.”

“But seriously,” Frannie said, “you do know they’re always welcome for dinner over here.”

“We do, and thank you for that, but we thought it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have the four of us grown-ups hanging out together.”

“Who are you calling a grown-up?” Hardy asked.

“Well, relatively,” Treya replied. “Not in the sense of old or anything.”

“Okay, then,” Hardy said. “In that case, does anybody else want a relatively grown-up beverage?”

•  •  •

T
HEY ATE FROM
a large paella pan that Frannie placed on a hot pad in the middle of the dining room table: shrimp, clams, mussels, halibut, chorizo, chicken wings, peas, pimento, saffron, and rice. It was one of Frannie’s signature meals and had been the Glitskys’ request when she’d asked them what they’d like for dinner.

After the first couple of bites, with appropriate exclamations of delight, Abe drew a breath, drank some iced tea, and then asked, “So, is trial talk off limits? Maybe I should ask you, Fran.”

She put her fork down. “I have no objection.” Then, to Hardy, “Counselor?”

“Good by me. But any slander regarding my daughter will be dealt with severely.”

“No slander,” Abe said. “The word is that The Beck drew first blood today.
Braden kicked a chair so hard in his office that he hurt himself. He never saw it coming.”

“Yeah,” Hardy said. “It was a good moment. But to be honest, I don’t know if even I would have picked up on it.”

“I’m betting you might have,” Frannie said.

“Maybe, but it didn’t enter my mind today until The Beck did it. And you know, once the jury gets over the grisly pictures, Strout has been known to put people to sleep.”

“That’s a kind spin, Diz,” Treya said. “But let me just say that you didn’t want to see Wes when he got back to the office.”

“Unhappy, was he?” Hardy was grinning. “That’s what you get when you go too fast. No offense, Abe.”

“No. Of course not. It wasn’t me who went too fast. I just happened to find our eyewitness. Since then I’ve been mostly out of it.” He forked another bite of paella. “Are you guys really giving any thought to going with suicide?”

Hardy shrugged. “Can’t prove it wasn’t. Although I don’t see The Beck making a major point of it. But after today, it’s in the jury’s mind, I guarantee that. And every little bit helps.”

•  •  •

T
HE MEN SAT
in the living room, Hardy in his wing chair with a snifter of Laphroaig, Glitsky on the love seat with more iced tea.

Hardy savored a sip of Scotch. “You’re still a witness, though, right?”

“I’m on the list,” Abe said. “I can’t imagine they wouldn’t call me, since I’m the one who talked first to Mr. Abdullah, but that’s about as far as that ought to go. Other than that, I’m pretty much not involved with Mr. Treadway anymore, and haven’t been since the arrest. I couldn’t even tell you the names of the outlying players, if they ever found any. And I can’t say it breaks my heart.”

“You don’t like the case against him?”

Abe leveled a gaze at him. “Let’s say I’d be more comfortable if we’d found a little more before we charged him.”

“You found your eyewitness.”

“Yes, I did. And I believe him. But a little corroboration from another source or two wouldn’t have hurt before the grand jury got ahold
of him. Just in terms of convictability. Not saying that I have any doubts at all.”

“No. God forbid you should. If it makes you feel any better, in my darker moments I think Braden’s story sings pretty well. If I’m on the jury, I’m damn close to buying it.”

“We’ll see.”

Hardy sipped again, then sat back, feet on his ottoman. “So what’s going on in the office?”

“Nothing to do with your case. But some pretty interesting stuff. A couple of weeks ago, we got this call from a DA in Minnesota, where they were holding a guy, Ricardo Salazar, for a murder he committed there. The problem was, they dialed him up out there in Fargo-land, and their records indicated that he was in custody in Napa.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, he’s supposed to be locked up here, but he’s physically present in Minnesota.”

“How’d he do that?”

“I know. It’s a good question.”

“No record of his release? Nothing?”

“Well, listen.” Abe drank some tea. “Mr. Salazar, it turns out, was arrested here a little over three years ago, but he got declared incompetent to stand trial, so they sent him to Napa to see if he could get to competence over the next three years. So I call there—Napa—and sure enough, they knew he was gone, but they thought he was still where they released him after the three years were up.”

“And where was that?”

Glitsky’s lips turned up a fraction of an inch, for him a broad smile. “Here,” he said.

“What do you mean, here?”

“I mean San Francisco, superior court. From where he disappeared, after he got declared incompetent again. In any event, he got sent to a halfway house, instead of held here in jail for murder or returned to Napa.”

“They released him to a halfway house? A guy in for murder?”

“A couple of murders. So they should have been keeping him on some sort of—”

“Murphy Conservatorship,” Hardy said. “But that means he stays locked up. He gets sent back to the hospital.”

“
True, in theory. But somebody here didn’t get the memo. Instead of checking the box for a Murphy, they checked the box for gravely disabled and shipped him out to this halfway house, still on the books as imprisoned, and next thing you know he’s killing somebody in Minnesota.”

“Yah,” Hardy said in his best Norwegian accent. “Killing somebody in Minnesota.”

“You want to hear the weird thing?”

“Yah, shure.”

“Stop. Apparently, in the last year or so, there was a rash of this kind of thing in our very own city. Mr. Salazar, and no doubt a few other gentlemen who were legally incompetent and in custody for violent crimes, got sent to a halfway house as disabled instead of back to Napa, and nobody seemed to worry about it at all. And since he was in a halfway house, he decided to walk away. And since he was disabled, nobody bothered to report it back to the court. They just say he eloped—”

“Eloped?”

“That’s the word. Eloped. These guys walk away, and basically, they forget about them. Unless he shows up around another crime someplace like Minnesota. And we get the call in San Francisco, which is where I come in.”

“Where is that, exactly?”

“This is a bigger problem than you’d think. Wes has us looking at records of the Thirteen Sixty-eights over the past ten years in San Francisco to see if we can find where these people are now, how many of them are there, and whether they were found competent and had their trial, or if not, then where they were. I’ve got two of my guys, Villanova and Schwartz, working on this pretty much full-time. Depending on how many of these bozos there are, the whole unit might have to get involved.”

“And after they get these elopers, then what?”

“I don’t know if that’s completely clear yet. First we need something like a census on them, to find out how many of them there are. If these guys are supposed to be in jail but they’re not, Wes wants to know about it, at least be aware of the numbers we might be dealing with. Put out a net of some kind to drag ’em in.”

“And
how, again, did they get out of jail without anybody noticing?” Hardy asked. “Did I miss that part?”

“I know,” Glitsky said. “It blows the mind.”

•  •  •

A
T ABOUT THE
same time her father and Abe were calling it a night, Rebecca hadn’t yet gotten home. After her long day in court, she’d gone back to the office and spent some more time with her discovery folders, which she’d already all but memorized. She subscribed to the same theory her father did—that it never hurt to go through them again. She’d ordered a sandwich delivered, and at around nine o’clock, she’d made a phone call.

Now she was sitting across the desk from Hardy’s go-to private investigator, Wyatt Hunt, in his office at the Audiffred Building over Boulevard restaurant. Hunt was in his early forties and newly married to his longtime assistant, Tamara Dade. Rebecca had always considered him distractingly handsome and was kind of glad he was married so she didn’t have to think about it anymore. Tonight Hunt was wearing jeans and a western-style shirt with pearl buttons. He was nearly horizontal, slumped in his chair, cowboy boots up on his desk. He clasped his hands behind his head, the picture of lanky relaxation. “I thought you and your dad had ruled out that whole third-party thing.”

“We have.”

Hunt was referring to a defense tactic that Hardy had used to good effect several times; quite often it found its way into jury trials, because when it worked, it was a very effective way to introduce reasonable doubt into the proceedings. This was the so-called SODDIT defense: “some other dude did it.” Formally, it was known as “third-party culpability.”

The big problem with it was that over the past couple of years, several upper-court rulings had limited the admissibility of evidence related to that other dude. It was no longer enough, as it once was, to produce an alternative suspect with a motive, even if he had a terrific motive. It still wasn’t enough if the defense attorney added the other dude’s opportunity to have committed the crime. No. Besides both motive and opportunity, they had to show direct or circumstantial evidence linking the third party to the actual perpetration of the crime.

In Hardy’s last big trial, he’d taken three shots at three different other dudes, all of them plausible, all with great motives and opportunities, and
the judge hadn’t allowed one word of it. There had been no evidence, direct or circumstantial, tying the dudes to the actual crime, so the jury wasn’t going to hear about any of them. End of story.

This time around, Hardy and Rebecca had discussed putting Wyatt Hunt on a search for other potential suspects and had ruled it out because there was no evidence of any kind tied to Anlya’s death. Even if they found someone who might have wanted her dead, they wouldn’t be able to get it past the admissibility issue.

“So if we’re not going SODDIT,” Hunt asked, “what would you want me to do?”

“You’re going to laugh.”

“I promise I won’t.”

“Well, cutting to the chase, I want you to find out who actually killed Anlya.”

After a few seconds, Hunt said, “That wasn’t technically a laugh. It was more a chortle.”

“I don’t really blame you. But I’m not kidding.”

“So I’m guessing you’re thinking your boy didn’t do it.”