The Keeper (29 page)

“Okay,” Glitsky said.

“Not okay, as it turns out, Abe. The three of us start talking, and about the first thing Jambo mentions is Katie Chase got killed on the night before Thanksgiving, which wasn't something I'd really thought about since it happened. But I hear that, and I'm like, ‘Whoa, wait a minute. What time?' ‘Seven, eight, somewhere in there.' And I say, ‘The day before Thanksgiving? Absolutely?' They're both sure. I mean, this is one fact that's in no dispute whatsoever, right? Katie Chase is killed on Wednesday night, the day before Thanksgiving.”

“Right,” Glitsky said. “No question.”

“Okay, “ Juhle said. “Here's the problem. You want to know where I was on the night before Thanksgiving? I was at Burt Cushing's yearly Thanksgiving party at his house. I was there from sometime around eight until maybe eleven, eleven-thirty. So was Cushing. So, in fact, was Adam Foster. And in case you were wondering, I promise you I'm not one of the sheriff's stooges, backing up his alibi. There must have been two dozen of us there, and you can check with any or all of them. They'll all tell you the same thing. The point is, if Katie Chase got shot that night, Burt Cushing flat-out didn't do it. And neither did Adam Foster. I hate to say it, Abe, but you're barking up the wrong tree.”

61

G
LITSKY DIDN'T FEEL
like he could face a living soul.

He sat in his car in the waning daylight, caught in rush-hour traffic leaving the city. He didn't have a destination in mind. Badly shaken, he'd called Treya immediately after leaving Juhle's office and told her that he was going to be busy until late, checking on some evidence. No, he had promised her, it wasn't about Cushing. He wasn't looking into Cushing anymore. Wes was right, Abe was sorry. He'd get home when he could.

How could he have been so completely wrong?

Every single fact about Burt Cushing fit perfectly into his theory, except the tiny flaw that he was somewhere else when the first crime was committed. Abe had neglected to perform the most perfunctory police work—checking his suspect's alibi. Or, really, both Cushing's and Foster's alibis. That oversight had rendered all of his other efforts useless at best, pathetic at worst.

By the time he'd gotten down as far as Candlestick Point, he'd conjured up another theory that might still fit his facts: Another deputy might be the button man within the Sheriff's Department. He thought about Andy Biehl and his brand-new Audi. He considered Mike Maye of Foster's poker alibi. It could be any one of a dozen deputies, maybe a hundred.

He'd said it to placate Treya, but by the time he reached Burlingame, he had come to the decision that Wes Farrell was right. Whatever this was, it was too big for him to handle alone. Or even to be a part of. He'd just demonstrated how badly his investigative chops had deteriorated. He might not be a true menace, but neither was he much of a help.

Farrell was also right about keeping Abe out of harm's way. Chances were, if he could be this wrong about a case, he could be this wrong about his ability to defend himself. His instincts and skills had rusted to the point that anyone could walk straight up to him, wish him a Merry Christmas, and put a bullet through his eye before he'd had a chance to blink.

He was old, old, old. He might not have loved retirement, but retirement was clearly where he belonged.

But God, it galled. It galled.

•  •  •

N
OW, WITH FULL
dark having fallen, he sat again in the evidence room at the lab, the cardboard box with Adam Foster's stuff on the table next to him. He hoped something in that box would speak to him again. He had been wrong in the conclusion he'd reached about the sheriff, but no one could deny that his main insight and discovery—that Adam Foster was not a suicide but a murder—was the breakthrough moment in that case, as well as Katie Chase's.

And that moment had been his and his alone.

He belonged here. This was his world. For nearly forty years, his work and his passion had been bringing murderers to justice, and he was not about to abandon all of that now. He was who he was. He keenly felt the scorn of his unknown quarry and vowed anew that somehow he would bring it down.

Foster's cell phone was the most likely and obvious source of something Glitsky might have missed while he'd found what he expected. For nearly an hour, he went through Foster's deleted emails of the past month. Foster was on LinkedIn and had a couple of hundred connections; he was asked for connections, endorsements. But it seemed that he mostly accepted people who wanted to connect with him and didn't do much afterward. Glitsky could relate, since he treated the social networking app the same way.

There were also several dozen administrative emails either up or down the chain of command at the jail. A flurry of messages in early November about Alanos Tussaint segued into an equal number about Luther Jones. Glitsky knew that these would probably be helpful to the FBI if they took over the investigation; they could follow up on Foster's home computer. Aside from that, Adam Foster had a few friends, almost all of them male, and there was the usual assortment of purportedly funny attachments that pretty much identified him as the redneck asshole Glitsky had ­always considered him.

Finally, Glitsky got to Saturday morning and Foster's cell phone. The only calls from unknowns were from the same number. Glitsky assumed that would be the number of the woman Foster had presumably made his date with on the night of the killing.

Thinking what an idiot she must be, Glitsky got out his own cell phone—he did not want to add or subtract anything on Foster's phone—and punched in the numbers on his keypad, then pressed the call ­button.

He was holding the phone to his ear, listening to the ring. The phone eventually kicked over to the recorded message, and he felt the room come up at him.

“Hi,” the voice said. “This is Patti Orosco. You know what to do.”

•  •  •

H
E COULDN'T UNDO
it. He'd left his name and phone number on Patti Orosco's telephone, and knew she would call him back before long.

In his car driving home, he decided that the wisest course of action was to pretend that he was a concerned servant of the people and following up on things with Patti and Hal and the gang. He would tell her that maybe they could make an appointment and get together to do a little debriefing. He would lie to her about this being the normal routine following a murder investigation. He would remember not to refer in any way to the murder, as opposed to the suicide, of Adam Foster.

First and above all, he would get her alibi for Saturday night.

When he got home at 8:45, Treya had already put both kids to bed. In their years together, tension had only rarely invaded their home, but tonight it entered draped on Abe's shoulders and spread out to cover every inch of the duplex. Glitsky, seeking comfort where he could, opened the number one forbidden food item in the house of a heart attack victim—a can of Spam—and fried it as patties with three eggs. Treya started to say something—about the job, about Spam, his health, retiring again—but Abe's excessive politeness drove her to a frigid kiss good night, then to their bedroom, where she turned off the lights and closed the door after her.

Glitsky washed and dried his dishes. Sitting in the living room under his reading light, he didn't so much as pick up a book.

The silence in the home felt like a physical presence.

At 9:23, he punched Hal Chase's number into his cell phone. If nothing else, he told himself, he wanted to make sure Hardy's ex-client was alive. Hal picked up on the second ring, and the two men said their hellos. Glitsky apologized for calling so late.

“No worries. We're just sitting up talking, having some wine.”

“You and your mom?”

“No. Patti and me. Mom and Warren both left today. And no offense, but not a minute too soon, if you know what I mean. I'm so ready to get back to real life.”

“Are you going back to work?”

“Maybe not. I mean real life outside of work. My kids. Patti.”

“I'm glad for you. Listen, that's part of the reason I called. I tried reaching Patti earlier to follow up on a few things—just routine bookkeeping—and I couldn't reach her on her cell phone.”

“No, you wouldn't have,” Hal said. “She lost it on Saturday.”

“Ah.”

“It's a drag, but I'm sure it'll turn up. She probably just put it down someplace and forgot, what with all the chaos this weekend.”

“Chaos?”

“She was over here, helping out. Mom was at the end of her rope, and Warren . . . well, you know Warren. So Patti volunteered to lend a hand and wound up staying the weekend.” Glitsky could hear that Hal said the next for her benefit. “This is what we call a good woman. Patti plus Warren plus Mom equals let the good times roll.”

Abe heard Patti's laugh, heard her say, “Better times if Mom goes to a movie.”

“When was that? This movie?” Abe asked.

“Saturday night. Mom was driving everybody nuts, so they sent her to a movie. Evidently, it made for a better night. But what is it you wanted to talk to Patti about?”

“Actually, it's you, too.” Abe was riffing blindly, since he'd just heard that Patti Orosco apparently had an alibi and a witness—Warren—on Saturday night.

Which meant . . . what?

He all but stammered, “I just wanted to personally follow up how you're doing with the whole Adam Foster thing.”

“Still in a little shock,” Hal said. “But not really surprised. On the other hand, the son of a bitch got me out of jail. I'll probably get it all worked out someday. Maybe I'll go to the counseling you and I were talking about. Get so I can put it all someplace. It would be nice to have some of it make sense, but I think that might take awhile.”

Abe heard Patti comment in the background and asked, “What did she say?”

“She said,” Hal replied, “‘tell that mean Mr. Glitsky I don't care what he thinks. I could never kill anybody.'”

•  •  •

G
LITSKY WAS PADDLING
upstream alone in a kayak. Dense jungle hung over the water, and the hanging vines and foliage swiped at his face with regularity. He had both hands on the oar and couldn't wipe any of the stuff away. A helicopter's rotor sounded behind him, coming up low and fast, and he shored the kayak, coming up on the muddy bank. He ran up the steep and slippery trail as the helicopter got louder. Finally, he got some traction and forced himself up through the waist-high brambles, pushing them aside. They were following him on the main trail, but a smaller path broke off to his right. He took it and broke into a jog but almost immediately tripped on a log across the path. Except, turning, he saw it was not a log but a body . . . a woman's body.

With a terrified yell, he sat upright.

Treya woke and put her arms around him, holding him. “It's okay. You're all right. It was just a dream.”

Glitsky gripped his chest with his right hand. His breath was coming in gulps. He felt his wife's hand moving up and down over his back, her lips brushing his shoulder, shushing him as if he were a baby.

Closing his eyes, he let his body settle, his breathing slow down, forcing one deep breath, then another. He moved his right hand to cover Treya's, gave it a small squeeze. “Sorry I woke you up.”

“It's okay.” She kissed his shoulder again. “Bad one?”

He nodded. “I'm going to get up for a minute.”

“All right. If you need me, come and get me.”

“I will.”

He padded into the kitchen, ran cold water into his hands and drank some of it, then splashed the rest of it onto his face. Closing his eyes, he let his weight settle on his hands, braced on either side of the sink. He summoned back the scenes from his dream, climbing the muddy trail, breaking to the right, pushing through the brambles.

Breaking right.

Opening his eyes, he could barely make out his reflection in the window over the sink, more a shadow within the shadows than a mirror image. He couldn't see any of his specific features: the shape of his head more like an apparition, the guy from his dream.

The dream, coalescing into something tangible. A memory.

He had it.

62

T
HERE WAS NO
question what Abe should do.

There was also no question that he wasn't going to do it.

What he had done: He had called Wes Farrell at his home at six-thirty
A.M.;
by seven-thirty, at the Hall of Justice, he had included Devin Juhle, along with Abby and Jambo, and he had shared all the information he had. He then gathered a number of relevant facts, for a change. Certain he wasn't giving anything away, he'd spoken on another pretext with Hal first thing in the morning and followed up on what he'd learned from him. With all the resources at their disposal, Homicide could undoubtedly move the case along to its conclusion, or at least to an arrest, much more quickly and efficiently than he could. Abe knew that Abby and JaMorris had already gotten their first search warrant and that several others would be forthcoming before long.

He was finished. He had done his work and should just butt out.

He didn't care.

He had amends to make with these people, all of whom he had led down the primrose lane over the past weeks, pursuing a theory that turned out not to have been based on the facts.

There was also his reputation.

This time he wasn't taking any chances. He still had some critical questions to which he'd much prefer to have answers before he dropped another theory in everyone's laps. He was confident that he could get them.

Alone.

•  •  •

T
HOUGH IT WAS
now late morning, the fog clung as heavy as ever.

Glitsky parked within a block of the address on Upper Ashbury. To his surprise—although he should have expected it—the house was not just beautiful but large and elegant: a dark brown two-story bungalow set a bit farther back from the street than most of its neighbors. Its surrounding shrubbery was well kept, perfectly trimmed. A colorful array of flowers trimmed the walkway up through the lawn. A brace of large ceramic urns graced the steps leading up to the wide wraparound porch. The front door was paneled glass.

Glitsky stood in his heavy jacket on the welcome mat and took a breath. He carried two small tape recorders: one that would remain hidden in his jacket pocket and another that he would put out for the world to see.

Turning the hidden one on, he pushed the doorbell.

A deep gong resounded through the house, and through the panes, he made out a woman's shapely figure as she emerged into the entryway. The door swung open, and she greeted him with an easy smile. He'd called, and she'd been expecting him.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Ruth.” He kept his tone cordial, low-key. “May I come in?”

“Of course. It's a little brisk for conversation out here, wouldn't you agree?” She stepped back, holding the door open, and Abe stepped over the threshold into the house, a seemingly casual but legally critical moment—no assertion of authority, no sign of coercion, a “consensual encounter.” He could ask her anything he wanted, and her answers would be admissible. “I've got a little fire going in the library, come this way,” she said.

She turned and walked in front of him. Her above-the-knee skirt and low heels showcased her legs, and the clinging sweater, with three buttons undone, her cleavage—the package much more put together than he'd seen at Hal's with the kids. Chattering easily over her shoulder, she went on, “I know they don't want us to burn real fires anymore, but really, how silly, don't you think? Why have fireplaces if you can't burn wood? It doesn't make any sense. In any event”—she turned and led him into a cozy book-lined room on their left—“here we are.” Two nicely upholstered wing chairs sat before the low fire, a small coffee table between them, and she motioned Abe into one. “Can I get you anything?”

“Thanks. I'm fine.” He motioned for her to take the other chair.

As she sat, she said, “I must confess, I'm a little bit curious as to what could be so important that you had to see me today. I was under the impression that you'd pretty much cleared everything up. Of course, I'm completely at your disposal if it will help Hal in any way, but I did wonder.”

Looking over at her, Glitsky had a moment of doubt. Not about what Ruth Chase had done but about his own personal strategy, his decision to confront her alone. He knew it was possible that Abby and Jambo had ­already completed some of the searches he'd outlined for them that morning, and that they might even have enough evidence and a cooperative judge to sign off on an arrest warrant. They could be here as his backup, ensure everyone's safety, and formally take her into custody.

Abe also knew that if the inspectors came with their warrant, any chance to talk to this woman would be gone. Once she knew the game was up, she'd go quiet, far too cunning to waive her rights and talk to police. It had to be now, informal, a voluntary chat. Though Abe had no doubt about her guilt, there lurked in his mind an uneasy concern that she might find a way to escape. He had to keep that from happening.

He had to get her talking.

He took out his tape recorder. “Do you mind?”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Of course.” He gave her his closest approximation of an apologetic smile. “Just to keep the record straight. And I'm a lousy stenographer.” He began by saying in as casual a tone as he could muster, “As it turns out, there are a few outstanding and unanswered questions I was hoping you could help me out with.”

“If I'm able to. Of course.”

“Do you remember at Katie's funeral, you and I had a discussion about Hal, and I told you I didn't think he was guilty after all?”

She nodded. “That was one of the first hopeful moments I'd had since his arrest. I was so grateful for it.”

“I remember. I also remember you told me in some detail that you couldn't imagine Hal walking up that path behind her with the gun at her head. You said you couldn't imagine him pushing her onto that path off to the right through the bushes and shooting her. Do you remember saying that?”

Ruth smiled uncertainly, her brow furrowing slightly. “I do, yes. As I said, I was grateful you were being so open-minded about Hal. I remember it distinctly.”

“So do I.” Abe let a silence build. “I'd pretty much forgotten about it until last night. Then it came back to me and got me wondering how you knew about that right turn.”

Ruth shot him another questioning smile. “I . . . I don't really know. I think maybe Hal must have told me about it when he found her.”

“I don't think that was it,” Abe said. “I talked to Hal this morning and asked if he remembered telling you about him being taken to see Katie's body, and he said you wouldn't even let him start. You told him it made you sick just thinking about it. You didn't want to hear any details at all. Do you remember telling him that?”

“Not really. He must've started and . . .” She stopped. “It might have been one of the other guards who was there.”

“And how would they have known?”

“Maybe Hal told one of them.”

“He says he didn't, though. Thinking about it made him sick, too. He says he didn't tell anybody.”

Ruth, her lips tight, let out a breath through her nose. “This has all been so upsetting. At this point, I'm not sure what I knew or how I knew it. Do you know what, Abe? It's almost lunchtime. I'm going to make myself a drink. Can I get you something?”

“No, thank you. I'm fine.”

Abe watched her stand and then disappear into the hallway. In fact, it wasn't almost lunchtime, and when she returned, she wasn't drinking wine but a nearly full glass of clear liquid on ice.

“So,” she began as soon as she'd sat back down, “about where they found Katie's body. Maybe I saw or read something.”

“You looked at pictures and articles even though you didn't want to know any details because they made you sick?”

“Maybe I did. I don't really remember. What does it matter?”

“Maybe it doesn't, Ruth. Except that it led me to another question. About Pete's death, Hal's father, your second husband.”

Ruth's gentle smile vanished. “This is getting rather far afield, isn't it, Lieutenant?”

“I don't think so. I know that Pete died of an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol. You take barbiturates, don't you?”

“Not barbiturates. Just some amitriptyline to help me sleep.”

“When they prescribe that kind of drug, they tell you not to mix it with alcohol, don't they? And there was an awful lot of both in Pete's system when he died, wasn't there?”

She waved that off. “Pete didn't pay much attention to that kind of stuff. Besides, I already told you that while it was kind of the coroner and the investigators to help us by calling it an accident, I've always believed Pete killed himself.”

“Well, however he died, you ended up with a million dollars.” He saw her straighten and decided to tone it down a bit—too much of a press might shut her up, and he needed to keep her talking. “Tell you what,” he said, “let's get back to the matter at hand. Katie's murder.”

Ruth finished her drink with a gulp. “Mr. Glitsky . . . Abe,” she said, “I thought we were getting along so well together. Just tell me what it is you want to know.”

“I want to know why Katie turned against you. Why she was keeping you from the kids. Katie got curious for some reason—maybe she noticed that Ellen acted different every time you babysat for her, suspected that maybe her little girl had been drugged—and sometime around the day, maybe the same day, she was killed, she looked you up on her computer, just like I did. But then she took it a step further, the step I should have taken when I first came upon it.”

Shaking her head in apparent bewilderment, her voice dripping with disdain, Ruth asked, “And what, pray tell, was that?”

“She found the article in the
San Mateo County Times
on Ron ­Johannson, your first husband, who also died in a tragic accident. He drowned, didn't he? Another secret you chose not to share with Katie and Hal. You kept a lot from them, didn't you?”

“I kept what I needed to keep,” she said.

“I know,” Abe said. “Quite the keeper, aren't you?”

She shrugged. “Some secrets need to be kept. No one needs to know them.”

“Except,” Abe said, “that Katie found out, didn't she? And realized that coincidentally, in Ron's case, there was also some question of accident versus suicide, but the death got ruled accidental, and once again you made almost a million dollars.”

“Ron's death was an accident. This is all ridiculous. You have no proof of anything you're insinuating about me.” Again she got to her feet. “And I'm having another drink.”

Again Glitsky waited patiently, and again, when Ruth returned, her glass was nearly full. “So?” she began almost brightly. “Where were we? Oh yes. You don't have any proof of a single thing you're saying.”

“Katie didn't need proof, did she?” Abe asked. “She just needed to know in her own mind that you were a sick and dangerous person. But I'm guessing there will be something in those files when we go through them again, as we're already doing. Although I think we're not really going to need it. Proof about your husbands, I mean.”

“I don't—”

Glitsky held up a hand. “Let me ask you this, Ruth. Did you know that most cell phones today keep not only a record of whom you call but where the call was made?”

“What does that have to—”

Abe cut her off once more. “On Saturday morning, you told Warren and Patti that you were having a bad day, so they took Will and Ellen out to the playground in the park, where they stayed for about two hours, didn't they?”

Ruth sat back in her chair, hands clasped in her lap. “You tell me.”

“I will. They did. This is when Patti discovered that she'd lost her cell phone. But she hadn't lost it. You had taken it. And it was with you when you stayed back in the house, all alone. And where you placed two calls to Adam Foster while Patti and Warren were at the playground. No one else besides you could have placed those calls, Ruth. You called him and arranged to meet him that night.”

“No, I didn't.”

Glitsky knew he might have been giving her answers to questions that, better prepared, she could counter later in a courtroom. He didn't care. He wasn't finished yet, not by a long shot, and he wanted her to know what he had come to understand about her, what he had uncovered that would bring her down.

He leaned toward her again. “The other thing you thought you knew, Ruth, is that even with a serial number, Pete's gun couldn't be connected to him. But service weapons don't belong to individual officers. They belong to the city and county. When you quit or retire, your gun comes back. If you die on the job, though, sometimes—especially back then—they forget to ask for it. If it's an old revolver like Pete's, it's retired, but it's still on the books.”

This brought a bit of a rise. “Pete didn't even have a service weapon,” Ruth said. “Guards can't carry guns in the jail.”

“That's right, they can't. So you thought that his gun was just something he acquired on the street, like a lot of cops do. An old throwaway with no history and a serial number that couldn't be traced to him. But as we discovered this morning, it wasn't an old throwaway. It was his service piece. You didn't turn it in after Pete's death. So maybe you'd like to try to explain to me how that gun, the gun that killed Katie and Adam Foster, with a serial number registered on the city and county books as belonging to your husband, Pete, got in Adam Foster's hand.”

Ruth Chase sat dead still for a long moment, unblinking. Finally, turning her head toward Abe, her voice impossibly calm, she said, “Maybe Pete gave it to Adam Foster.” Perhaps realizing how absurd that sounded, she relaxed back into the cushions. “That fool girl,” she said, her voice changing. “What did she want me to do? Go, ‘Oh, you're right, it was so wrong of me to kill my husbands. Maybe I'll just forget about the money and start over again somewhere else'? What did she think was going to happen? So she called that day, and I asked her to wait a little, give me a chance to explain in person. It wasn't what it seemed to be.”