The Keeper (11 page)

26

T
HE STEEP SIDES
of the canyon were thickly covered, mostly with old-growth eucalyptus, and this kept a great deal of the park permanently and deeply shaded. The ground cover was likewise dense with the barbs of blackberry bushes, a myriad of other low-lying shrubbery, and a good sprinkling of poison oak. Sometimes a daring hiker or jogger would take one of the slippery deer trails on the way to or from Mount Sutro, but for the most part, the Interior Park Belt remained a desolate place: dark, cold, wet, and generally forbidding.

JaMorris and Abby parked on Stanyan—Hal's street, about two blocks south of his house—and walked up to where the crime scene was marked by yellow tape, three black-and-white SFPD vehicles, a couple of news vans, an unnecessary ambulance, and the coroner's van. They showed their credentials to the pair of uniformed cops securing the scene, and then started uphill on a narrow trail of duff and mud to where another knot of officials huddled at a fork a hundred feet along.

The coroner's assistant, Angie Morena, took a step toward the Homicide inspectors and held up a hand, stopping them. “You're a little early. Crime Scene hasn't processed the path. Be careful where you walk.” She pointed to a third spot where the indicated trail, half the width of the one they'd come up, split off to the right through the waist-high shrubbery.

“Who found her?” Abby asked.

“A neighbor kid,” Morena answered, “playing in the woods. The little clearing back in there was one of his hiding places. It's a pretty good one.”

Both inspectors looked over. The Crime Scene personnel photographing and measuring and looking for clues were visible over the low expanse of greenery, but the object of their attention could not be seen from the main trail.

JaMorris asked, “Any ID on her?”

“Not definite, but she's the right age and has on what Katie Chase was wearing the last time anybody saw her: jeans, a red pullover, tennis shoes. There's not much doubt.”

Abby indicated the workers in the clearing. “How long before they're done?”

“You know as much as me. However long it takes. At least several hours.”

“What if we brought around the husband?” Abby asked. “He's local, a couple of blocks.”

Morena glanced back over at the crime scene. “Not to protocol,” she said. “We ought to get her to the coroner's office first. You don't show the next of kin a body lying in a clearing.”

“I know,” JaMorris said, “but maybe it's time for some hardball. If he didn't do it, I'll apologize later. If he did, maybe this will shake him up and he'll give us something.”

Fifteen minutes later, the two inspectors and a haggard-looking, stoop-shouldered Hal Chase broke through the cordon of police cars. By now four television vans clogged the street where the trail led up into the shaded canopy. When they got to the trail, Hal stopped and took a deep breath, then looked up the path as though it were a gallows he had to ascend.

“All right,” he said to no one. He stepped up on the curb and over the sidewalk and into the park. From when the inspectors had first shown up at his house through the length of the uphill walk, Hal had projected impatience. He wanted to know; he had to know. But now, as he moved up the path, the urgency was gone. If anything, he seemed reluctant to keep moving.

Or, Abby thought for the tenth time, maybe he was just a fine actor.

They followed him up to where Morena waited. The ever nattily attired Len Faro of the Crime Scene Unit had come out to join her, talking with what looked from the distance to be enthusiasm; maybe he'd found a clue, some fabric snagged on one of the blackberry brambles. He had a plastic bag in his hand; as they got closer, he squared to face the small party and then put both hand and bag in his pocket.

“This is Hal Chase,” JaMorris said when they got up to the other two.

Morena had obviously prepped Faro. He nodded a perfunctory greeting, then added, “We're all finished in there, if you'd like to follow me. Watch out for the stickers.”

The smaller trail went back into the dense undergrowth for about thirty feet, then turned slightly to the right before it opened into a cleared area perhaps ten feet in diameter. Faro, in the lead, blocked an early visual of the body on the ground, but when he got to the clearing, he stepped to one side. Directly behind him, Hal stopped and drew in a sharp breath.

In the shade, the light was not good, though it was a long way from true dusk. The body lay facing away from them. The cause of death appeared to be a single gunshot wound to the back of the head, as though she'd been walking and, shot from behind at close range, simply fell forward onto her face.

Hal moved up next to the body, on the side her face had turned—one step, then two. He went to a knee, stared at the profile, hung his head. “Oh, Jesus,” he said.

Nobody else said anything.

After a small eternity, he straightened up and turned to face Abby and JaMorris. Even in the dim light, his eyes glistened. Nodding once, he managed to whisper, “Yes, it's my wife,” before he pushed to one side of the trail and squeezed past the people who'd trooped up behind him. When he got back to the main intersection where they'd hooked up with Morena and Faro, he stopped again and drew another breath, an unconscious moan escaping. He put his hands in his pockets, turned left, and one foot after another, slowly walked downhill.

27

T
HEY HELD THE
funeral Mass at St. Ignatius the following Monday morning. It was a tense and brittle affair.

In the days since the discovery of Katie's body, the suspicions about her husband had coalesced into what seemed a nearly universal acceptance that he was her killer and it would be only a matter of time before the police arrested him. No one with inside knowledge was supposed to be talking about the investigation, which, in San Francisco, meant everybody was. Both major city newspapers got up to speed quickly on everything that Glitsky and the two Homicide inspectors had discovered: Katie's counseling, Hal's refusal to be a part of it, his inconclusive alibi, his affair with Patti Orosco. Perhaps most damning was the revelation that just after the birth of Ellen, Hal and Katie had taken out a life insurance policy that paid the surviving spouse five hundred thousand dollars should the other die, double that for accidental or violent death.

No one could deny that it was a huge amount of money, especially for a family struggling to cover everyday expenses. As a purely objective matter, it painted Hal in a terrible light, in spite of his explanation that because of his stepmother's experience with his father's pension and a generous insurance policy, the family culture believed in insurance. Indeed, Ruth told any reporter who asked that Hal's father's insurance and pension had allowed her to raise and educate two sons in relative peace and comfort.

The topic of Hal's guilt was ubiquitous, with the ever salacious
Courier
publishing a poll on the day before the funeral indicating that sixty-eight percent of its readers thought Hal had “probably” killed Katie.

The high-pressure system of the past week held steady, and the skies were clear, although the temperature had been dropping each day. When the service began at eleven o'clock, it was forty-two degrees.

Inside the cavernous space, it didn't seem much warmer. Adding significantly to the chill was the very apparent estrangement between the two sides of the family, which had become entrenched since the discovery of Katie's body. The Dunnes wanted nothing to do with the Chases. Katie's entire extended family—sixty or so people—waited outside in the cold until it was clear on which side of the church Hal would sit (the right). Following Curt Dunne's lead, they walked not up the center aisle but all the way around to the left, as far from Hal as they could get. Also in those left pews were Katie's six playgroup friends and their husbands, all of whom had spent significant amounts of social time chez Chase and now apparently viewed Hal as a pariah. Abby Foley and JaMorris Monroe were there too, since it was not unheard of for a murderer—even if it wasn't Hal—to be among the mourners at services.

The Chase contingent was significantly smaller and more spread out. With the exception of a decent show of solidarity from Hal's boss, the sheriff, his chief deputy, Adam Foster, and thirty of his colleagues among the guards, bailiffs, and other deputies, barely a dozen souls had taken their places in the right-hand pews. Hal, Ruth, Warren (back in town for the funeral), and the two children sat in front. A scattering of guys from Hal's earlier life—bowling and fishing and drinking buddies—had entered on their own and filled in empty bench space. Three rows behind Hal, Dismas and Frannie Hardy sat with Abe Glitsky. Despite Hardy's advice to the contrary, Patti Orosco showed up. Although she tried to keep a relatively low profile, she wore a stunning hooded brown leather and fox-fur parka that looked like it cost five thousand dollars if it cost a penny, which immediately sparked a feeding frenzy in the media, some of whose bolder members had to be removed from the church.

Since he was the spouse of the deceased, Hal's wishes trumped those of his wife's nuclear family. The tensest moment came at the end of the service, when Daniel and Curt Dunne seemed to want to fight Hal about who would be pallbearers—they and their friends, or Hal and Warren and the sheriff's people. Finally, Cushing took charge; he and Foster and two other deputies stepped forward with Hal and Warren and got the casket lifted into the waiting hearse.

28

M
ARIA
S
OLIS
-M
ARTINEZ SAT
at a pitted gray metal desk in the jail's infirmary. For security purposes, it was an enclosed place surrounded by glass windows and entrances without doors that could be closed or locked.

The surroundings did little to calm Maria's nerves as she awaited the arrival of Luther Jones. She might have been hard-pressed to identify any single immediate cause of her concern, since there were so many possibilities: She was meeting a dangerous and threatening inmate; she was here under false pretenses, pretending to be a nurse-practitioner at the jail and attending to the routine minor complaints of the various inmates; she couldn't allow herself to fail; she was unarmed—as an investigator, she was used to carrying her weapon—and yet she intended to have the guard leave Luther Jones alone with her, unrestrained by handcuffs or foot shackles.

So her mouth was dry and her palms damp when Jones—mean and scary in person, in his jailhouse orange garb—appeared at the entry, a confused look crossing his face as he saw her. She realized she would have to act quickly and decisively if she didn't want to have the moment get away from her, so she pushed back from the desk and stood.

“Mr. Jones,” she said as she came around and advanced on him. “I'm Maria Solis-Martinez, and I'm here to replace Ms. Bartlett. I know you're here for a routine diabetes monitoring, but there's something I need to talk to you about.”

Matter-of-factly, as though she did this every day, she maneuvered him to the bed farthest from the entry where the burly redheaded guard stood. She showed nothing but was relieved when the guard strolled a few feet from the door and began an animated conversation with another guard, leaving her effectively alone with Mr. Jones. She stuck out her right hand and said, “You can call me Maria if I can call you Luther.”

He just looked at her hand, then half-turned to the door as though planning to call the guard back. Instead, he whirled on her and said, “I don't know you. Whatchu want?”

Instinctively, she retreated a step. Just as instinctively, she regained that lost ground and moved forward into Jones's personal space, forcing herself to look directly up—and it was a good way up—into his eyes. Before she'd become a DA's investigator, she'd been a patrol officer and then a vice inspector with the regular police in L.A., so she'd had her share of experience interacting with criminals. Still, this was as up close and personal as she'd gotten with one in years.

But she had not lost the skill set. “Don't fuck with me, Luther,” she snapped. “I'm here to help you out, and if you fuck with me even a little, I'll call the guard in that hallway and he'll have you back in your cell before you know what hit you. Are you hearing me? Answer up, now. Do you hear what I'm saying?”

Jones, all six-four and two hundred fifty pounds of him, broke eye contact and looked quickly to either side of her. “I hear you,” he said, if not exactly meek, then at least with a veneer of respect.

“Good,” she said. “Now, let's go sit down over by that bed, how's that sound?”

Her heart pounding, she marched back around the bed, then turned and sat. Luther had followed her, and he took the other chair. She gave him a reasonable facsimile of a smile and said, “I wasn't kidding, what I said just now.”

Maria and Farrell, Frank Dobbins, and Tom Scerbo had gone around and around on this. Trying to talk to a represented defendant outside the presence of his lawyer created serious problems. If this didn't work, and Luther's lawyer found out about it later, there would be all sorts of hell to pay: He would claim interference with the right to counsel, maybe ask for a dismissal of the charges against Luther or even complain to the state bar. But all four of them had decided no guts, no glory. “I'm here to see if I can help you,” she said.

“Why you want to do that?”

“That's for me to know, Luther. What's important for you is to know that I have the authority to get you out of here without a trial and to dismiss the charges pending against you. You're looking at carjacking with use of a firearm and a strike, which is twenty or thirty years in prison, minimum. That's about right, isn't it?”

“You tell me.”

“I'm telling you. And your lawyer already told you. You're looking at long, hard time. You want to do that?”

“Against dyin', that's what I choose.”

“Who said anything about dying?”

Jones sat back in his chair and crossed his enormous arms. “You're here about that Tussaint thing, ain't you? What are you, really? Fed? DEA? I snitch out around that Tussaint thing, I'm dead. I got the message already. Loud and clear. I ain't seen nothin'.”

“Luther. Do you remember talking about the death of Alanos Tussaint to San Francisco Homicide inspectors?”

“Okay, I did that.”

“You were very clear that you saw one of the jail guards, Adam Foster, pull Mr. Tussaint out of his bunk and slam his head against the wall.”

“No. I never said that.”

“Luther. It's on tape. We got your voice on tape saying that.”

“I don't know nothing about no tape.”

“Look, Luther. Everybody knows what happened. You tried to do the right thing, and they got to you. Now you've changed your mind. I get that.”

“I don't know nothing about no guard or no tape.”

“It's not too late, Luther. I work with the DA. I can get you out of here. It's not too late for you to make a deal. Everybody knew you were talking last time. That was our bad. But nobody knows I'm here now. Nobody but me and the DA. We get you out of here, you say what you got to say. You're gone.”

Luther shrugged elaborately.

“Who talked to you after you talked to those inspectors, Luther? Was it Foster? Was it another guard?”

“It don't matter. They all the same. No, Foster's the worst. Then they all the same after him. Either way, it don't matter.”

“It might matter, Luther. This time nobody's going to know if you say anything about Foster or Tussaint until you're long gone. As soon as we get your testimony again, we're going to get you out of here and into Witness Protection, the charges against you get dropped, and you get another chance to put your life together. Maybe this time you'll do it right.”

Maria knew that Wes Farrell had said no such thing; she was making promises she had no authority to make and no power to keep. She could also sense that if she was going to get anything at all from this guy ever, she had to go for broke right now. “What do you say to that?” she concluded.

“I'm saying you could be tryin' to trick me, see if I'm gonna snitch. Is one thing I'm sayin'.”

“That's not it.”

Luther's gaze was dead flat. “I'll think on it,” he said. “And then how do I talk to you? I ask for the DA from down here, the word gets out, I in some shit.”

Maria had her phony business card with her real cell number ready for him, and she passed the card across the table. “You got phone privileges. Use 'em. You call, I'll come running.”