Damage (31 page)

“But you have no evidence on Ro, either.”

“I’ve already said everything I have to say on that issue.”

“Why did you feel the need to interview him, then?”

“To give him the chance to eliminate himself as a suspect.”

“And did he do that?”

“Well, as you know, he provided an alibi for the time of Janice Durbin’s death.”

“So that eliminates him, right?”

“Unless the alibi doesn’t hold up.” Bracco brought his feet down off the desk. “Listen, Sheila, I’m sorry but I’m going to have to cut this short. The investigations are continuing. That’s about as much as I can give you.”

“The Matt Lewis investigation, too?”

“I’m not the investigating officer on that case,” Bracco replied.

“But you also asked where Ro was when that crime was committed?”

“A cop gets killed, we throw a wide net.”

“And again, with no evidence against Ro?”

“Both investigations are continuing,” Bracco said. “We have not eliminated anyone as a suspect.”

No sooner had he hung up with Marrenas, though, than Bracco realized that what he’d told her was true—Glitsky hadn’t eliminated any suspects in the Janice Durbin murder. Glitsky and Becker might be 100 percent certain that Ro Curtlee was guilty ofof killing her—and Ro sure as hell looked guilty to Bracco of the Matt Lewis murder—but the plain fact remained that Ro had given Bracco an alibi for Durbin’s time of death and four people who could corroborate it. Granted, by no stretch could this corroboration—his parents, Eztli, and the maid or morning cook, Linda—be deemed unimpeachable. But what if they were all telling the truth? And if Ro, in fact, had not been at the Durbin home—and no physical or other evidence placed him there—that meant that someone else had killed Janice.

“Earth to Bracco. Come in, Darrel.”

He looked up, startled to see Glitsky hovering over his desk. “Abe! Hey.” In his chair, he straightened to attention.

“I’ve got to learn that trick,” Glitsky said. “Sleeping with my eyes open.”

“I wasn’t sleeping. I was thinking.”

“Good. Thinking is one of the approved activities. What about?”

“Well, Sheila Marrenas called me. I just now got off the phone with her.”

“I hope you didn’t tell her too much.”

“I said that our two investigations are continuing. Durbin and Lewis. We didn’t have suspects for either.”

“She believe you?”

“She didn’t care. She’s going to write what she writes anyway, whatever that spin might turn out to be.”

“So what were you thinking about?”

“Well, since that’s what I went out there to find out, it looks like Ro’s got an alibi for Durbin.”

“If you believe it.”

“He’s got four people he says will back it up.”

Glitsky said, “The parents and two servants.”

“True. I’m not arguing with you, Abe. I’m just saying ...”

“No. It’s a good point,” Glitsky conceded. He had lowered his haunch onto the corner of Bracco’s desk. His eyes had gone to a half squint. His mouth was tightly closed and a muscle worked in his jaw. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“And,” Bracco hesitated, “while we’re talking, one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Ro’s arm.”

“What about it?”

“It’s in a cast. Still. Righteously broken in the fight with you, was it not?”

“All right.”

“All right, so you told me that Janice Durbin was strangled, didn’t you? Manual strangulation, not a ligature.” Ligature was a strangulation device, such as a rope or a belt.

Bracco stopped and leveled his gaze at his boss, waiting for the impact of his words to kick in. He didn’t have to draw the picture any more clearly. Every homicide cop knows how extraordinarily difficult it is to strangle someone to death, even under the best of conditions, using both of one’s hands. The struggle tends to be violent and protracted. The idea that someone could do it one-handed, while probably physically possible for a very strong and committed person, was close to far-fetched. When he was sure from his lieutenant’s change of expression that Glitsky had understood his point, Bracco went on, pressing it. “Did Strout find any signs she’d been knocked out before she got strangled? Lacerations or abrasions or bruises to the head?”

“I’d have to check to be sure, and I intend to, but my memory says no.”

Bracco leaned back in his chair. “So Ro is holding her down with his knees,” he said, “and she’s bucking and kicking under him and he never hits her to knock her out—I mean, he’s got a heavy cast on, right? And instead he’s got her by the neck and strangles her with one hand? This, when we know he’s in possession of a gun because that’s what he killed Lewis with, and he doesn’t use that?”

Shaken more deeply by Bracco’s objections to Ro as Janice’s killer than he cared to show, Glitsky walked down to the third floor, where he would sometimes drop in on Treya in the middle of the workday just to say hello, share a few bons mots, touch base. Today he made it as far as the hallway that led to the DA’s office and nearly stopped at the outer door to Farrell’s lair—Treya’s office—noticing that her desk was still unoccupied—no replacement, yet, anyway. Standing in the outer doorway, he heard Farrell’s voice emanating from inside. In a few steps, he passed Treya’s workstation and stood in the open doorway where he saw Farrell sitting on one of the couches, a telephone to his ear. “No, I have no comment,” he was saying. “No, sorry, no comment. I’m afraid I’m not going to talk about that.”

Glitsky knocked once on the doorjamb. Farrell looked up and, indicating the telephone, shook his head in disgust, and then waved Glitsky in and motioned him to one of the chairs while he continued listening and then said, “I’m sure, but we’ll just have to see how that turns out . . . well, no . . . I mean, yes, of course, you’re going to do what you have to do. But the same is true of me . . . I know, and I’m sorry about that, but I’ve got an appointment that’s just showed up here and I can’t really say any more at this time ... All right . . . All right, thank you.”

Farrell hung up, flipped the bird at the telephone, then looked at Glitsky, who had not yet sat down, and said, “Some son of a bitch leaked the grand jury. That, if you didn’t guess,” he added, gesturing at the phone, “was Marrenas.”

“She’s getting around today,” Glitsky said. “Twenty minutes ago, she was talking to Darrel Bracco, but not about the grand jury.”

“Well, then, she must have talked to somebody in between, because what you heard just now was all grand jury all the time. She even had the strategy of combining the cases so we’d get to specials and beat the bail problem.”

Glitsky walked over to Farrell’s library table, knocked the wood on the top of it a couple of times, thinking, then turned around. “It couldn’t be Chomorro. I wouldn’t pick him as capable of doing that. He couldn’t give us our warrant, but I got the impression he was on our side.”

Farrell, nodding in agreement, said, “But remember who was in his office when we got there, just having a nice little chat?”

“Baretto.”

“That’s the magic word. You win a hundred dollars.”

“You think he called her? Marrenas?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t matter who called who. There’s a lot of candidates. Someone in the clerk’s office, a bailiff, a court reporter. The point is she’s got it and she’s going to print it, which means Ro and Denardi will know, if they don’t already by now.”

“Well, so they know. So what? It wasn’t the original plan, but it shouldn’t make any real difference.”

“No?”

“Not really. I don’t see how it could, anyway.”

“How about if Ro gets to one of the grand jurors first or to Amanda or even to me?”

Glitsky leaned back against the table. Pensive, frowning, he scanned the room, settled back on Farrell. “You could call Marrenas back and tell her she got it wrong. Whoever told her, they got it wrong. You’ve thought about it since you hung up and she really needs to know you’re not going to the grand jury. Period. The strategy of combining all the cases is flawed. There’s not enough evidence. It just couldn’t work. You’re waiting until Ro’s retrial.”

“And then what?”

“Then you go to the grand jury anyway.”

“You’re saying I lie?”

“No. God forbid. You just changed your mind again after you hang up with her. Oops, sorry. You forgot to tell her that part.”

Farrell settled back into the couch, put a hand to his temple, rubbed at it. “Just to spin it out,” he said. “So I go to the grand jury and get my indictment and arrest Ro, whereupon Marrenas then tells the whole world that I flat-out knowingly lied to her. What’s that do to my credibility with the fourth estate?”

“Who cares by then? You’ve got your indictment. Ro’s in jail. He doesn’t kill anybody else in the meantime. Sounds like a winner to me.”

Farrell shook his head. “I can’t lie, Abe. I’ve got to leave it at ‘no comment.’ It’s a secret proceeding, for Christ’s sake. I can’t talk about what I’m doing with it. That’s the whole point of the damn thing. And why? So grand jury witnesses don’t get threatened or worse by the lowlifes they’re testifying against. So I can put on my cases without fear of reprisal, which let me tell you, I’ve got a shit-load of right now. I mean true, actual fear. If I didn’t know they had a twenty-four-hour tail on Ro, I think I might be completely paralyzed.”

“Well, on that,” Glitsky said. “The first shift already lost him.”

Ro and Eztli were a little high, laughing at how easily they had eluded the more-than-obvious city vehicle that had been parked on the street since early morning. Ro had simply lain down on the floor in the backseat while Eztli pulled out of the driveway, waved to the cops, and drove off in the 4Runner on his mid-afternoon errands. Three blocks out, he had pulled over and Ro had gotten back into the passenger seat. If it wasn’t so funny, they agreed, it would be pathetic.

Now they were in a warehouse in the industrial area just north of San Bruno, another Peninsula suburb. Later that night, the warehouse was going to be the venue for about six rounds of pit bull fighting that would begin around eight and go on until past midnight, but Ro had gotten a call from Tristan Denardi earlier in the day reporting on his private investigator’s lack of progress locating Gloria Gonzalvez, and Ro was quickly losing his patience. This woman had to be found and neutralized, or he was going to go back to prison. And if Denardi wasn’t going to be able to find her, Ro had to make it his own business.

So he’d discussed the problem with Ez, and as usual, the man had a sound, workable idea of how to get some results. Eztli had long ago developed a relationship with Lupe García, who not only ran the dogfights, but was the go-to guy in the Bay Area Guatemalan community if you wanted to borrow money or bet on almost anything or buy a weapon or drugs or get a woman to be your maid or your sex slave or both.

When Ro and Eztli caught up with him, escorted by two of his bodyguards, Lupe was in the inner shell of the warehouse, a huge, prefabricated sheet-metal space very much like the inside of a circus tent, complete with bleachers surrounding the ring, fourteen feet in diameter, where the fighting took place. Lupe was hosing down the carpeting that the dogs needed for traction, cleaning it from the previous night’s fights. He could have farmed out this work—certainly it was far beneath his station—but he liked to get down on the floor with the smells and the damp and the blood.

Ez and Ro and the bodyguards waited while he finished up, turning off the hose, drying his hands on a towel and coming over to them, a warm smile of greeting on his face. Lupe wasn’t a big man. Perhaps five foot eight and wiry, he wore long hair pulled back and blue jeans and cowboy boots and a canvas jacket over a plaid shirt. A heavy-looking silver cross hung off his left earlobe. Tattoos covered the backs of his hands and disappeared into his shirtsleeves. He and Eztli greeted each other with clasped hands and one-armed hugs.