The Second Chair (48 page)

“That doesn’t really point to a sinister gay secret life to me.”

“It doesn’t to me, either. She might not have been part of the original plan, but as a witness she had to be eliminated.”

“Do you really think that?”

“I really don’t know. I’m hoping my client is innocent. Beyond that, I’m fishing. But it would be helpful to get the simple fact of Mike’s gayness out in front of the judge.”

“And how would that help?”

“It might punch some holes in the prosecution’s motive theory.”

“What about his father?”

Hardy’s own expression had grown somber. “I know. I’ve been trying to figure that one out. Bring it out in chambers, seal the record, something. I see you’ve dealt with it, too.”

Her mouth was a hard line. “God, those years. When I compare them to how I live now . . .”

“How long were you together?”

Her eyes came back to him. “Not so long in real time, I guess. Thirty months, something like that, beginning to end.” Her mouth tried to signal a kind of apology for getting so personal. “It was an eternity, though, in psychic time. We really were best friends, even back when he was with Terri. I was the other woman, you know, in their marriage. Broke them up. It was really pretty funny, actually, if you had a taste for irony.”

“Did you know?”

“About his being gay? Not at first. At the time . . . hell, you know . . . we were young and living the theater life, all of us. It was assumed that we all led active sexual lives and that some of us experimented with . . . various combinations. We didn’t see it as a big deal. And Mike was pretty . . .” She laughed again with the brittle embarrassment Hardy had first heard on the phone with her. “Actually, he
was
pretty, period. Gorgeous. And promiscuous as all hell, trying to prove what he wasn’t, you know? God! Was it exciting! Drama every day, especially when he, when we, were cheating on Terri. Sometimes she’d be out on stage doing a scene—I mean in plain sight, thirty feet from us. Jesus.”

He gave her a minute to come back to him. “So how did you find out?”

Hanging her head, she drew her dessert near and picked at it. “After we got married, we had a couple of good months. But pretty soon the . . . the physical side . . . I guess what turned him on was the forbidden fruit aspect. When I stopped being that . . .” Her shoulders rose, then fell. “But as I said, we were friends. We liked to do the same things. So at first we pretended everything was the same, fooling ourselves, you know. I’m not sure if Mike really admitted to himself that he was strictly gay, even then. We were always together and busy and . . . shit, I may as well tell you . . . we never had sex in our bed. It was always someplace we might get caught. For me, that got a little old, but as long as we had our busy routine and found time to sneak away, I told myself that we were intimate enough. The lies we tell ourselves, huh? And then, as it turned out—nobody’s fault—but the routine changed on us anyway.”

“What happened?”

“Mike got called to jury duty.”

31

L
ucas Welding. Write it down.” Hardy was in his car, speeding north, talking to Glitsky. It was 10:30 and he’d left Catherine Bass fifteen minutes before. His right hand was sore from taking notes, but he remembered everything he’d written. “In 1984, he strangled and murdered his wife, Ginny. Got tried and convicted in San Francisco in ’86, sentenced to LWOP.”

“But he’s out now?”

“Looks like.”

“How’d that happen?”

“I don’t know. But Mrs. Bass, Mooney’s ex-wife, is a lawyer herself now and remembered Boscacci distinctly as the prosecutor. She’s followed his career ever since. I’ll bet you a million dollars that your Elizabeth Cary was on the same jury.”

“You said you’re in your car. Where are you?”

“Just passing the airport.”

“Meet you at the Hall,” Glitsky said. “Twenty minutes.”

Since the ground floor of the Hall of Justice was the location of SFPD’s Southern Station, the building was open. Hardy and Glitsky opened the front door together and passed through the metal detectors and security cops in the lobby. Lanier was already waiting for them in the hallway outside Glitsky’s office, and the three of them filed into the small conference room behind the reception area.

By earlier that afternoon, they’d finally managed to set up a total of six borrowed computers for the use of the two General Work officers and the twenty-two others that both Jackman had provided and Glitsky had recruited out of their respective clerical staffs. All overtime expenses paid.

It had taken a good part of the afternoon to get the computers up and connected, but when Glitsky had left work that night, all of them had been in use. Six volunteers at a time worked the list of four hundred recently released convicts, while six others—armed with case numbers from the computer searches—went downstairs and under the building to Records, where they searched for the physical files on the Boscacci “hits.”

By the time of Glitsky’s departure earlier that night, out of the first 154 they’d identified seven cases where Boscacci had been the actual trial prosecutor. At 8:00
P
.
M
., the second “shift” of twelve was scheduled to come in and continue through the night and then the next morning, until they got something.

But now the room was empty.

“Where is everybody?” Glitsky asked.

“They’re all downstairs,” Lanier said. “They got the case number on Welding five minutes after you called. Finding the physical records isn’t so easy. It may be a while. He wasn’t in your original four hundred, you know.”

“So he didn’t get out in the last two months,” Glitsky said.

“Where’d they keep him?” Hardy asked.

“Corcoran, according to the computer.”

Hardy threw a glance at Glitsky, came back to Lanier. “And he’s out now?”

“Pretty much got to be if he’s killing people, don’t you think?”

Glitsky took Hardy’s silent cue. “We call, tie it up. If it turns out this guy is the Executioner, we want to know everything about him. The warden gets a wake-up.”

Hardy and Lanier followed him around the corner to his office, where he flipped through his Rolodex and picked up the telephone. After a short wait, he identified himself by name and rank and said he needed a record on one of the prison’s inmates immediately. It was urgent.

Glitsky listened for a while, then said, “Yes, I realize that. But if he’s the only one with that access at this time of night, then I need to talk to him.” Another pause while the scar in Glitsky’s lips went white. Then: “Could I get your name and rank, please? Thank you, Sergeant Gray. Listen, I could have the mayor of San Francisco call again in five minutes, and possibly even the governor after that, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary trouble. I’ll take full responsibility.”

Glitsky spelled his name, left his badge and telephone number, hung up. “I guess the warden likes his beauty rest,” he said.

They heard the elevator and the scuffle of feet, and in a minute the small army of twelve volunteers had gathered again in the computer room. They’d brought up two large gray rolling trolleys, each about four by six feet wide and three feet high, and on them were piled what looked to be about twenty cardboard boxes. The lead guy, who was in uniform, saluted Glitsky. “This is the case, sir, or as much of it as we could find. Lucas Welding. Eighty-six. There’s no room and worse light down there, so we thought we’d bring it up. What are we looking for?”

“The jurors,” Glitsky said. “Also, just to be thorough, let’s make sure Allan Boscacci tried the case.”

Everyone, including Hardy, took a box and started going through the paper—endless, endless reams of paper, the complete record of a California murder trial. The boxes contained everything from the initial police reports to the autopsy and forensics information, to witness interviews, as well as all discovery, prosecution notes, expert witness testimony and background, the transcript of the trial itself. After fifteen minutes, one of the workers said, “I’ve got Boscacci. Here’s the what-do-you-call-it, the front page.”

“The caption page,” Hardy said, although nobody looked up or seemed to care.

Glitsky jumped, though, and was looking at it. “Okay. So far so good.” He flipped through a few of the following pages in that document, then closed it and handed the whole thing back. “Let’s keep going,” he said.

A long twenty-five minutes after that, Lanier’s easy delivery broke the silence. “Here we go.” He was sitting across the table from Glitsky, and slid the document across, while everyone else—some from out in the reception area—stopped what they were doing to look.

Glitsky read for a moment, then put a hand to his scar and pulled at it. “He’s the one,” he said in a hoarse and strangled tone. Then, clearing his throat, he read aloud. “Philip Wong, Michael Mooney, Edith Montrose, Morris Tollman.”

“What about Elizabeth Cary?” Hardy asked.

Glitsky looked down, nodded. “Elizabeth Reed. That was her maiden name.”

“Jesus Christ,” someone whispered.

“I doubt it,” Lanier said. “He wouldn’t have come back for a murder trial.” To a titter of nervous laughter.

But Glitsky was already punching numbers into the phone on the desk, a muscle working in his jaw. While he was waiting, another phone rang in his office. “Diz. That’s the warden. Get it,” he ordered. “Tell him I’ll be right there.” Hardy jumped.

“Marcel.” Glitsky handed Lanier the conference room phone he’d been using. “That’s Batiste. When he picks up, tell him what we’ve got and that I’ll be right back. Now or sooner we’re going to need eight teams at least,
at least,
to protect the people who are left.” He was moving back to his office. “And when you’re done, put out an all points on Welding ASAP.”

In his own office, Glitsky strode in and grabbed the phone from Hardy. “Warden Fischer,” he said. “This is Glitsky. Thanks for getting back to me. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these Executioner killings we’ve been having . . . Okay, great. In the last hour or so, we’ve developed a tentative ID on the suspect and believe he was staying at your place until recently. We’re going to need all the information you have on him immediately—last known address, next of kin, the works. He went up in ’86, LWOP. I know. I wondered about that, too. Welding. W-E-L-D-I-N-G. Lucas. Yeah, I’m sure. Why?”

Hardy watched Glitsky’s face, already hard, turn to stone. The eyes narrowed, the lips went tight, the jaw muscle by his ear quivered. His hand went to his side and he pushed in as though trying to reposition his intestines. Then, for a long frozen moment, he ceased to move entirely. Finally, he asked, “You’re sure?” Then, “Yes, of course, I see. Thank you.”

He hung up, raised his head, saw Hardy standing there. “Lucas Welding is dead,” he said.

For the next half hour, Glitsky was a dervish. Other people might still be at risk. Knowing that there had to be a connection between the Executioner and Lucas Welding, he sent people to find the names of all of Welding’s visitors at Corcoran; correspondents, cell mates, people who put money on his book; everyone who had ever met the guy. He assigned the other half of his volunteers in pairs to track down the other jurors from Welding’s trial. Check phone books and reverse listings. Get unlisted numbers from the phone company. Go online—somebody had to know how to locate individuals by name and get their address. Be aware of the maiden name issue. Leave messages with DMV and any federal agency they could think of. Wake up anybody they needed to, the jury records people. He didn’t know precisely how the connection fit yet, but he knew that it did.

He ran down the hall to homicide and stopped Lanier from issuing the APB.

Back in his office, he briefed Batiste on the general situation and told him he wanted to assign protection officers to the jury people—to have teams of two standing by to deploy as soon as he could locate the jurors. Then they had to reschedule other officers to fill the affected shifts. Everyone’s time would be on the Boscacci event number, if that met with the Chief’s approval, which it did.

Hardy listened in, picking up the information secondhand. “He died two months ago in the infirmary in Corcoran,” Glitsky told the Chief. “Fischer remembered specifically because it was a bit of a deal—he’d just been cleared on appeal. DNA. It looks like he really didn’t do it. But then the cancer got him first.”

“If that’s true, it’s ugly,” Hardy said as he hung up. “They put away an innocent man?”

“Looks like.” From the expression on his face, Glitsky wasn’t happy about it either. “The Executioner seems pretty upset about it, too.”

“I can’t say I blame him.”

Glitsky’s look went black. “You don’t?”

Hardy held up a palm. “Easy. For what he feels. Not for what he’s doing.”

“He does what he’s doing, I don’t care how he feels.”

This certainly wasn’t the time to discuss it, and Hardy wasn’t sure he disagreed so much anyway. Injustice happened, he knew, and sometimes—perhaps with Welding—even innocently. Revenge and violence wasn’t going to make anything better. At least, that was the theory. “So who is it?” Hardy asked. “Did he have a kid maybe? Some other relative?”

Glitsky, still in “do something” mode, snapped his fingers and picked up his desk telephone again. “Fischer”—the warden—“will know that. Where are you going?”

“Home.” Hardy looked at his watch. “It’s twelve-thirty and I’ve got a hearing this morning.”

“You don’t want to know how this comes out?”

“I know how this comes out, Abe. For my client.”

Glitsky had certainly already known this on some level—Hardy had given him the first inkling of it the night before on the telephone, and tonight the Mooney connection through Catherine Bass had all but cinched it—but suddenly it hit him fresh. He put the phone down on the desk. “And the girl, too.”

Hardy nodded. “Laura Wright. She just happened to be there.”

32

A
t 9:40 on Wednesday morning, Dismas Hardy stood up at his place at the defense table and addressed the juvenile court for the first time
In the Matter of Minor: Andrew Bartlett.