The Keeper (25 page)

“Six.”

“There you go. One of them will talk.”

“I wouldn't be so sure, Diz. If any of them admits they weren't in San Bruno, they're essentially confessing to covering up a murder. All of them could wind up going down for conspiracy or worse. I don't think Cushing or Foster is going to let them forget that.”

“The feds offer immunity, and that goes away.”

“Maybe, but maybe not. They don't need immunity if they never cop to the lie, so why would they? Here's another idea. How about your client?” Glitsky asked. “He's one of the six.”

“On the advice of his attorney,” Hardy said, “Hal won't be talking. Especially not to the feds. You want to know my real concern?”

“Sure.”

“If it comes to it, they try to pin Tussaint on Hal. The bogus alibi, if it comes out, doesn't need to have been for Foster. Any one of the six would do, wouldn't it? And Hal's already up for murder. Why not stick him with another one?”

Glitsky was silent for so long that Hardy asked him if he was still there. “Just thinking,” he said. “You might be right.”

“I don't want to be,” Hardy said, “but I don't think it's an impossible scenario.”

“It still depends, though, on one of the five giving up on San Bruno. And if I were one of those guys, I'd never admit it. Ever. To anybody.”

“No,” Hardy said. “Neither would I.”

55

G
LITSKY DIDN'T KNOW
whether to blame it on the six months he'd spent being a civilian, or on his disgust with the ease with which law enforcement professionals could and did game the system, but he felt that the only progress made in any of these investigations had been because he'd followed his own path, not necessarily the rules of procedure about which he'd always been so punctilious, and which sworn officers were supposed to follow.

His
‘
CityTalk' interview, his chat with Allison Biehl, his decision to go to Strout for a second look at the Tussaint autopsy: All of these moves had brought him new and important facts, as well as a sense that he was closing the net around Foster and Cushing; eventually, he felt, if he kept at it the way he was going, he'd get them, along with the evidence to put them away. If he personally kept up the pressure, one of the principals—Cushing, Foster, a guard, a guard's wife—would break.

He wanted to rattle some more cages. Play people off against one another. Make something happen.

So he didn't call Farrell when he hung up with Hardy. Hardy was right—when Farrell heard about Tussaint, he would almost undoubtedly call in the feds, which would be a clarion call to everyone in ­Cushing's realm to go into severe lockdown mode. Everybody would lawyer up and take the Fifth. Nobody was going to give up the truth about San Bruno. No witnesses would turn up to say they saw the Tussaint beating. ­Nobody was even going to point a finger at Hal. This was blue-collar-cop culture, where the code of silence was all but absolute.

Around one o'clock, Glitsky found himself knocking on Burt ­Cushing's front door, a beautiful house on Clay in outer Pacific Heights that Glitsky thought could have gone a long way toward supporting an investigation, not to say an indictment, for corruption. How a career civil servant who'd gone to City College and never earned a salary over a hundred and fifty thousand dollars could afford to live in this stately mansion was the sort of question that tended not to get asked of politicians.

The sheriff wore khakis, black cop shoes, and a blue pullover sweater. He greeted Glitsky with a firm handshake and some small talk as he led him though a lavishly furnished living room with a view to rival Patti Orosco's—Golden Gate Bridge, Marin headlands, sailboats on the bay—and into his dimly lit office down a short hallway to the left. In that room—floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, high-backed red leather chairs, latticed windows, a huge globe of the earth—he went around his desk and sat down, indicating that Glitsky should take one of the chairs.

“All right, Lieutenant,” he began, and came out swinging. “I admire your balls, I'll give you that. Cutting into my weekend when you've got to know I have nothing to say to you. I only agreed you could come by ­because I assume Wes Farrell ordered you to apologize to me in person for that ‘CityTalk' horseshit, and I would like things to run smoothly ­between our departments down at the Hall.”

The opening was fine with Glitsky, who didn't want to pretend to be friends or even colleagues anymore. “That's not it, Sheriff. Not even close.”

Cushing's nostrils flared. He put his palms down on the top of his desk. “Well, then, I don't know what else you think is important enough to get in the way of the kickoff.”

“I got a call this morning from John Strout,” Glitsky said. “He no longer thinks that Tussaint's death was an accident.”

“Really?”

“Really. You've got a handful of guards who have sworn that he was alone in his cell when he died. Now Strout's saying somebody killed him.”

Cushing showed no sign of surprise or alarm. Shrugging elaborately, he said, “The old fool got it wrong the first time, then got it wrong again. So what?”

“I talked to another witness yesterday who said Adam Foster killed Tussaint. A credible witness. Not one likely to die of an overdose anytime soon, and that witness is on tape.”

Cushing shot a flat hostile glance over the desk. “How many times I got to say this, Lieutenant: So the fuck what? Who's this witness?”

“No comment.”

Cushing huffed out a small laugh. “Oh yeah. Very strong. Stop the presses. So Strout says he was killed. Who cares? He'd been in a fight. Everybody says there was a fight, the animals going at it like they do. If Strout thinks it's one of them instead of the fall that killed him, who gives a shit? The guy's just as dead either way. They want to do another investigation, be my guest.” Shaking his head, he sounded almost apologetic. “Look, Lieutenant, I don't know any more about it. Are you about done?”

“Not quite. I thought we might talk a little about Katie Chase.”

Cushing's eyes briefly went to the corner of the room. Then back to Glitsky. “What about her?”

“You told me you didn't have any special relationship with her.”

“Right. I've been married twenty-five years. I've got three daughters.” He pointed a finger. “Don't you fuck with my marriage, Lieutenant. I'm warning you.”

“You've already threatened your marriage, Sheriff. And it's going to come out, just like all the rest of this is going to come out.”

“There's nothing to come out.”

“You deny talking to Katie Chase on the phone several times a day over a two-and-a-half- or three-month period a couple of years ago?”

“She helped my daughter with some medication. We talked a few times about that.”

“I'm not talking a few times, Sheriff. I'm talking every day for a couple of months.”

“No.”

“No, you didn't? Katie's phone records indicate otherwise.”

“Those records couldn't show anything.”

“There are records, though. Is that what you're saying?”

Cushing made no reply.

“The answer is yes,” Glitsky said. “There are records of her calling you at your office.”

“Records don't show what you're talking about.”

“So you admit there were calls and the records are correct.” Glitsky sat back into the chair. “Listen to me, Sheriff. Nobody outside of you and your family is going to care about your infidelity, but those folks are going to care a lot, aren't they? And you know that it'll be a piece of cake to verify wherever you met and whatever you did once it's part of a homicide investigation. And it will be.”

Cushing made a move to get up. “We're finished here.”

Glitsky put out a hand, stopping him. “Not quite. I'm not talking about infidelity. I'm talking about homicide. I'm talking about Tussaint, and Maria, and Luther, and Katie Chase. I'm talking about Adam Foster.”

“Good for you,” Cushing said. “I'm not talking about any of it or any of them. Not here, not now, not ever. It's all a house of cards.”

Glitsky shook his head. “What I'm telling you is that we and probably the feds are going after Foster for the homicides, at least on Tussaint and Luther and Maria, and the wider the investigation grows, the more likely it is that your infidelity will be part of the story.”

“It's not part of the story, Lieutenant.” Cushing pushed on his hands and got to his feet. “You can't prove a lick of it, and I've wasted enough of my day talking to you. So now I'm telling you to get your meddling ass out of my house. And I mean now. Before I call the real cops.”

56

A
T ELEVEN-FIFTEEN THAT
night, the phone rang next to Abe's bed. Jolted out of his slumber, he reached over to grab it before it rang again. “Glitsky.”

“Abe, this is Abby Foley.” It wasn't her half-apologetic late-night voice; she was all but breathless with excitement. “Sorry to wake you, but you might want to come down.”

“Down where? The Hall? What time is it?”

“Late. We're out by the Lombard entrance to the Presidio. One of the parking lots just inside.” She got herself collected for a half second before she blurted it out. “It looks like Adam Foster shot himself.”

It didn't take Glitsky fifteen minutes to get dressed and make the drive through the dense fog. When he got to the lot, he parked next to a black-and-white squad car at the periphery and made his way over to where a good-sized knot of people had gathered by one of the lot's overhead lights. Across the asphalt, about as far away from where he stood as from where he'd parked, he could make out a set of klieg lights and another area of activity—undoubtedly the Crime Scene team—­surrounding a dark-colored car. After nodding around at the group, Abe moved off a few paces with Abby and JaMorris.

“How'd you two get the call on this?” he asked.

“Pure luck,” JaMorris said. “We were on call. We didn't know it was Foster till we checked the registration and then looked at the body. It's him.”

“Suicide? Clearly?”

“Sure looks like it,” Abby said. “One shot to the temple. Gun still in his hand.”

“Who called it in?”

“One of the security guys here. We've already talked to him.”

“What'd he know?”

“Not much,” JaMorris said. “The car wasn't here at eight, then it was when he made his rounds again at nine. This is evidently a favored make-out spot, so he gave it some room until ten, when he thought he'd go over and move 'em along.”

“So he didn't hear the shot?”

“No,” Abby replied. “Windows closed. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

“Has Crime Scene told you anything else?”

“Not yet,” JaMorris said. “Tell you the truth, we were waiting for you.”

“Not that I don't love getting called out at midnight, but why was that?”

“After the ‘CityTalk' thing,” Abby said, “he seemed like he was your guy. We thought you'd want to be in on it from the get-go.”

“I appreciate that,” Glitsky said. “Let's go check it out.”

Their timing was excellent. The techs had finished the preliminary work; they would tow the car down to the police lot and go over it in greater detail, but they had already photographed and swabbed, fingerprinted and measured, and now they were ready to have the body tagged and bagged and hauled off to the morgue, although for the moment it remained slumped against the driver's door.

Len Faro, the always well-dressed head of the CSI team, saw them coming and walked out to meet them. “Hey, Abe,” he said with recognition. “You back on the job?”

“More or less,” Glitsky replied. “The glamour keeps drawing me back.” He cocked his head at the car, a Honda Civic. “Is this what it looks like?”

“Maybe more than most.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, they tell me we got a note.” Reaching into his trench coat, Faro extracted a Ziploc bag. In it was a small piece of paper torn from a spiral-top notepad. “I saw this sticking out of his coat pocket, and I lifted it,” he said. “I don't want to take it out of the evidence bag before it goes to the lab, but you can see through the bag what he wrote.”

He held it out, and Glitsky leaned over to read the words, written in pencil in a bold though barely legible cursive scrawl: “Hal Chase never killed anybody. I'm sorry I got him into this.”

Abby Foley, leaning in closer for a better look, grabbed her partner's arm. “Jambo, look at this.”

JaMorris stepped forward, squinted at the page, then straightened. He put a hand on Glitsky's shoulder. “I'd say you got to him, Lieutenant. Congratulations.”

“Got to who?” Faro asked.

“Our victim here,” JaMorris replied. “Abe was a step or two away from bringing him in.”

“I guess he decided he wasn't coming in alive,” Abby said.

“How close were you, Abe?” Faro asked.

“Obviously,” JaMorris answered for him, “close enough.”

Abe scowled. In his wildest dreams, he hadn't contemplated this kind of resolution. It had never occurred to him that Foster was the kind of guy who would kill himself; his first reaction after the dawning certainty was a gnawing hollowness in his gut. Viewed in a certain light, he knew that it was a clear win for him and for justice. But it felt so sudden, so incomplete, so unfinished; Foster had cheated Abe out of his victory.

In a second wave of guilt and nausea, he flashed back to his talk earlier that day with Burt Cushing, in which Abe had made his case against Foster abundantly clear, and equally clear the unspoken message: If Cushing gave up his defense of and collusion with his chief deputy, his family might never hear about his infidelities; all of his ­immediate problems in terms of the jail would be laid at Foster's feet, and the sheriff himself, though equally guilty under the law, would walk away clean.

Had Cushing called Foster today and cut him loose? Glitsky couldn't dismiss the possibility that however much this looked like a suicide, it was Burt Cushing cleaning up loose ends.

Glitsky swallowed against his rising bile, chewed at his cheek. “You got anything else, Len?” he asked. “Before we take a look.”

“As a matter of fact,” Faro said, “I was just getting to it. We're having Christmas a little early.” He pulled a Baggie from another pocket and held it up in the light. “Bullet. From the cushion behind the seat.”

Abby said, “Let me guess. Thirty-eight?”

Faro shook the slug in its bag. He nodded. “Looks like. That would match the gun we found in his hand.” Then added, “You really know this guy, don't you?”

Abby broke a smile. “We were just getting close. And talk about Christmas—you might want to check that slug and the gun against the Katie Chase evidence.”

JaMorris turned to her. “You think?”

Abby shrugged. “Worth a try. How could it hurt?”

While they'd been speaking, the coroner's van had arrived, and the assistants were rolling their gurney over to Foster's car.

“Last chance to get a good look,” Faro said.

Glitsky nodded. “Should we expect any other surprises?”

“Not so much. But if you see something you want to talk about, let me know. I'll be hanging around for a while.”

“We're on it,” Glitsky said.

They walked over to the Honda, the two Homicide inspectors trailing a step or two behind Abe, who opened the passenger door and knelt down on the asphalt. There wasn't much to see. CSI had taken the gun away. Foster, up against the other door, wore a herringbone sport coat over a canary-yellow dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned. A gold chain hung around his neck. There was a clean bullet hole in front of and a little above his right ear, with a line of blood flowing out of it down into his shirt. The rest of the blood and other matter had spattered the driver's-side window, leaving the front of Foster's body unsullied—the neatly pressed black slacks, black socks, alligator ­loafers.

Though the klieg lights lit up the area like daylight, Abby handed Abe a flashlight, and he ran it over the rug and flooring on both sides, the passenger seat, the dashboard. With the exception of the fingerprint powder, the interior of the car was pretty much spotless.

There was the bullet hole in the cushion behind his head.

Glitsky turned to the inspectors and handed the flashlight back to Abby. A little rickety, he got to his feet. The car had a showroom finish in the bright lights. Leaning over, he took a last look inside. “Do you see something?” Abby asked him.

“No,” he said, “but I know I should. I always miss something the first time. You guys notice anything?”

“No.”

“No.”

Abe gave it a last glance, stem to stern. “Okay, then,” he said. “What do you say we call it a night?”