The Keeper (6 page)

12

H
AL
C
HASE EASED
himself into the comfortable chair that faced the sheriff's desk. As always in the presence of his boss, he was somewhat nervous, and more so now because he had no idea why he'd been summoned. Adam Foster, the boss's chief deputy and a hard-ass of the first order, hadn't given him any hints to ease his mind while he'd waited in the outside office, although he came up with a few possibilities.

Hal had had several interruptions in his workday yesterday, including: extra time off at lunch when he'd gone over and called on Dismas Hardy; the earlier interview with the Homicide people; Abe Glitsky's appearance before his shift was technically finished. Burt Cushing wasn't a big fan of flexibility in work scheduling. You were supposed to be somewhere at a certain time, and by God, that's where he wanted you to be. To keep a jail full of animals at bay, you had to keep order, and a key element of order was punctuality. You were where your comrades expected you to be so that you could be counted on—for backup, for protection, for the power of numbers, and for simple safety.

A relatively short, squat, powerful fireplug of a man, Cushing made up for his stature with an oversize personality. Hal found it difficult to read Cushing's face and, until he knew why he was here, hardly dared to look at it. But he knew its features well: pitted pale cheeks, closely set dark eyes under a low brooding forehead, a brush-cut marine haircut, a cauliflower nose over a thin-lipped mouth that somehow managed to convey warmth with a frequent smile. Hal had heard the voice rumble in anger, had heard it command attention with a low-volume order. But today, when it came, the voice was solicitous and sincere. “How are you holding up, son?” he asked.

“Trying, sir.”

“Those Homicide people giving you a bad time?”

Hal nodded. “Pretty much. They think I killed her.”

“Pardon me for putting it baldly, but do they know she's dead?”

“I don't think so. Someone would have told me.”

“I guess that's true. I pray she's not.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Cushing paused, then lowered his voice. “She's a terrific person. You know that? A wonderful person.”

Hal straightened in his chair. “I wasn't sure you'd have remembered her, sir. It's been a couple of years.”

“Yes, well. She's not the kind of person anyone is likely to forget. Even if she hadn't . . .” He stopped and took another tack. “I sometimes feel she saved my daughter's life. That may be an exaggeration, but not much of one.”

Hal remembered it well. Cushing's thirteen-year-old daughter, Kayla, had been suffering for months from severe acne, her lovely face starting to scar, perhaps permanently. Kayla had gone to at least three ­dermatologists and taken several different drugs, all to no avail, when Hal had overheard a conversation between a couple of his sergeants about the sheriff's ­extreme distress at this seemingly hopeless situation. Hal had suggested a new anti-acne drug that his wife was very enthusiastic about.

It turned out to be a bit of an effort. Only two doctors in the city were prescribing the drug, and neither was accepting new patients, but Katie told Cushing that she could probably get Kayla an appointment and, if the doctor agreed, get her on the drug. Within a month, Kayla's acne was all but gone.

“She was glad to help,” Hal said. “That's the way she . . . That's how she is.”

“Yes, it is. I remember well.” Cushing blew out through his mouth. “Who's watching your kids?”

“My stepmother's standing in until I can get somebody else. She lives close, so it's not much of a burden.”

“What about you? Would it be helpful to you to be home with them? At least until you get a more permanent solution?”

Hal drew in a breath and finally said, “It would, sir, yes. But I've been worried about the time off.”

Cushing waved a hand. “You've got too many other things to worry about without having that be any kind of a concern. You should go home now. Be with your kids. Let me worry about your time. We'll take care of it. You're on special assignment for as long as you need. Full pay.”

13

A
BBY AND
J
A
M
ORRIS
met with Katie's brother, Daniel Dunne, in his office at the law firm where he worked—Daley Silver Edwards—on the twenty-third floor of Two Embarcadero. As it turned out, Daniel had talked to his parents the night after they'd met with the Homicide inspectors, and he'd decided that he needed to be more proactive. When he'd heard that Homicide had gotten officially involved, he counted it as the beginning of real progress, so he'd called the department and asked the inspectors to come by.

As soon as they'd gotten settled, he started right in. “I understand that my family didn't exactly present a united front with you guys yesterday.”

“We don't need a united front,” Abby said. “The more input we get, the better.”

“My father thought that you favored the girls' opinion.”

“Which was what, as you understand it?”

“That Hal was just destroyed by all this and couldn't have had anything to do with it.”

JaMorris joined in. “We were interested in your father's opinion, except he had nothing specific to offer, other than, given the timing, Hal was the only reasonable suspect who could have abducted Katie and ­gotten her out of the house.”

“What's wrong with that picture?”

“Nothing,” JaMorris said, “except that your father couldn't supply a motive, not even a hypothetical one. And from all we've been hearing, some money issues aside, Hal and Katie were doing pretty good together.”

Daniel shook his head. “That's just plain not true,” he said. Dragging a hand over his forehead, he leveled his gaze at the two inspectors. “This really pisses me off. You guys know she was going to a counselor, right? Tell me, is that what you usually see with happy couples?”

“Lots of couples go to counseling,” Abby said.

“But they didn't go as a couple,” Daniel countered. “Katie went by herself. She was trying to save the marriage, and he didn't want any part of it.”

“How have we not heard about that yet?” JaMorris asked.

“Because she didn't talk about it. She was working on it. Katie was a fighter and wasn't about to give up on something she'd put so much effort into.”

“Let me ask you,” Abby said, “how do you know this when your mother and father and sisters don't seem to?”

Daniel spread his palms. “What can I say? She didn't confide in them. She did in me. We're close. We were close. We are close.” Taking a deep breath, he blinked a couple of times, then continued, “Look, she's the big sister, she's Mom's firstborn. She was going to present a good front to them—Mom and Dad—until there was nothing else she could do. She was happily married, goddammit. That was the story. A good mom, a loving wife. As long as she and Hal were living together, making a go of it, the story was that they were happy. Because what if she fixed it all up and things really were good again? She didn't want Mom and the girls to harbor bad feelings about Hal, about how he'd made things tough for her.”

The two inspectors shared a look. “So what was the problem?” Abby asked.

After a slight hesitation, Daniel came out with it. “Have you guys heard anything about Patti Orosco?”

JaMorris answered, “No. Who is she?”

“She was Katie's best friend until a couple of years ago, when she started hitting on Hal.”

“And?” Abby asked.

“As I understand it,” Daniel said, “they're now an item. I mean, I don't know for sure, but I think it's pretty damn likely. He still sees her all the time. Katie knew that. He'd stop by her place coming home from work. He'd disappear for a while on the weekends. Katie could smell her perfume on him, but she never got solid proof. Maybe she didn't want it, I don't know. I told her she ought to hire a private eye, follow the son of a bitch around, that I'd even pay for it, but she didn't want to do it. Still, every time she talked to me, she brought it up.”

“She didn't call him on it?” JaMorris asked.

“No.”

Abby wanted to know, “Why not?”

“Same thing as with my family,” he said. “If she didn't tell them something was wrong, then when things got better, she would have saved everybody a lot of pain, and everything could go back to normal.” He ran a finger under an eye, clearly fighting his emotions. “She was just such a stupid believer that if you ignored certain things, even important things, they'd eventually go away. You didn't need to have a confrontation about everything.”

“Good luck with that,” JaMorris said.

“Tell me about it.” Daniel scratched at a speck on the arm of his chair. Then, with apparent reluctance, he went on. “Besides, she felt she couldn't accuse him without coming straight with him herself.”

The inspectors waited.

Daniel brought his hands together on the desk. “She had a thing with a guy a few months after Ellen was born. She was going through severe postpartum depression and made a mistake. At least that's how she made it sound to me. But she decided she was going to end it and not mention it to Hal, and sure enough, it all worked out. So now, if he was screwing around, it wasn't like she couldn't understand what he might be going through. If she didn't bring it up, maybe it would all go away, like hers did. Except, in this case, he wanted to get free, and he killed her.”

“Over this Patti woman?” Abby asked. “Why would he kill her? Why not just get a divorce?”

“Let me tell you about Katie. She wants to come across as the perfect girl, the perfect woman. But if ever Hal tried to divorce her, I promise you, she would show fangs like you wouldn't believe. She'd go after him with everything she had, not only for betraying her but for exposing that she was the kind of person who would get betrayed. She'd ruin his life and any chance that he could be happy with somebody else. If I know this about Katie, and I'm just her brother, I guarantee you Hal understood it perfectly.”

“Okay, she might want to get nasty,” JaMorris said, “but what could she actually do?”

Suddenly, Daniel seemed to pull himself up short. Yanking at his tie, he undid the top button on his shirt and ran a finger around the inside of his collar. Letting out a heavy breath, he assayed a fragile smile. “Okay,” he said. “I've thought a lot about how much I wanted to tell you, but here it is.”

“Whatever you want to tell us,” Abby said. “You think she would have been able to make Hal's life miserable?”

“Maybe more than that.”

JaMorris chimed back in. “And how does she do that?”

“I don't know any of the details here—names and so on—but you could find them easily enough. A couple of weeks ago, you might remember, there was a stink about this inmate who died in jail. He slipped and fell and banged his head against his cell or something and died. Does that ring a bell?”

Abby resisted the urge to laugh. “Always,” she said.

“Yeah, well, this time they had their usual investigation, and another inmate said it wasn't any accident. He saw one of the guards kill him. Hit him on the head, locked him in his cell, and left him to die.”

JaMorris picked it up. “The guard was Hal?”

“Evidently not. But Hal told Katie that the inmate was right, one of his coworkers killed the guy. Hal was one of the six guards who all alibied each other. Oh, and did I mention that the inmate witness recanted his testimony? Hal was part of the team who helped persuade him.”

“So if Hal filed for divorce,” JaMorris said, “Katie would have brought this out?”

“That's my take,” Daniel said. “Even if he hadn't gotten arrested, there would have been a full-fledged custody fight, and she would have used that to try and keep the kids. She wouldn't have had to warn him. He would have known she'd take him down. He might do prison time, and you know what prison is like for former guards?”

Abby didn't have to guess. “So your theory is that Hal had decided to leave Katie for this other woman, but he couldn't divorce her because she'd go public with the cover-up that the guards were all part of. So if he wanted out, he had to make sure she didn't talk and couldn't accuse him. Therefore, he had to kill her.”

“It's a motive,” Daniel said. “My dad didn't have one for you guys. I do. And while we're at this, there's one other thing you ought to know about Patti Orosco.”

“What's that?” Abby asked.

“She's filthy rich.”

14

T
O THE CASUAL
observer, Lou the Greek's restaurant—directly across the street from the Hall of Justice—might appear to have health and hygiene issues. People in the know suspected that the A it received every year from the city's Health Department was the result of either a health inspector with severely poor vision or an influential clientele who didn't want the place to change or get hassled. Nevertheless, if you lingered on the stairway that led down to the door—say, waiting in line—you'd detect an odor that spoke to the presence of some of San Francisco's treasured homeless population, who used the stairway as a windbreak, bedroom, and sometimes toilet.

Lou got in every morning about four hours after closing at two
A.M.
and before the place opened at six. He rousted the sleepers, hosed everything down, Cloroxed, squeegeed, then opened up for the early-morning drinking crowd.

In spite of all that, but mostly due to proximity to the courts, the place was always jammed at lunchtime. Cops, lawyers, clients, reporters, jurors, witnesses, all of them needed lunch, and Lou's was convenient, cheap, fast, and surprisingly and consistently good. This was all the more unexpected considering that it served only one course every day, the ­famous Special, which was nearly always an original combination of the ethnic foodstuffs of Lou and his wife, the cook, Chui—Greek and Chinese. So you'd get a lot of lamb and pork dishes, squid and octopus and shrimp, meatballs, noodles, rice, grape leaves, and bao dumplings, seasoned heavily with lemon juice, Mae Ploy, or soy sauce. Often weird but always edible, if not downright tasty.

Its other great advantage was that its popularity tended to produce a noise level comparable to a jet engine's. This made it convenient not only for privileged communications, say between lawyers and their clients, but for other conversations that might otherwise have to take place behind closed doors.

Today, at the front of the line that extended up the stairs and out to the sidewalk, Glitsky stood with Treya and her boss, Wes Farrell. Abe had stopped by the Hall to see if he could talk to one of the DA's investigators or assistant district attorneys who'd looked into some of the irregularities at the jail, and if somehow he could bring the name Hal Chase subtly into the conversation. Basically, nobody knew nothin'.

Abe was talking to Farrell about it. “It just seems odd that none of these allegations ever got any legs. Jeff Elliot's got files on every incident—every death in custody, OD, or inmate treated for blunt force trauma—that's happened at the jail for the past few years, and none of them has gone anywhere.”

“This surprises you?” Farrell asked.

“Slightly. Especially when you look at what happens if somebody starts talking abuse or excessive force with regular cops. The whole world jumps all over them. Particularly, if memory serves, your office jumps all over them.”

“True. And you know why that is?”

“You guys hate cops?”

Farrell turned to Glitsky's wife. “Try to keep him away from stand-up.” To Abe, he went on, “As you know, that was the wrong answer. We love cops. We have a full and free and respectful working relationship with the Police Department. I am the DA himself, and I have personal friends in the PD. The truth is, our good citizens demand that cops be held to a higher standard than normal people. SFPD operates in the community. They interact with criminals, sure, but also with regular people, many of whom have cell phones with those cool video functions. They operate in an open environment and, when they show up, often don't know what is going on. So they've got a much better opportunity to screw something up and a much better chance that a credible person will be there to see when they do it.

“The sheriff, on the other hand, totally controls the jail, and the inmates are pretty much at his mercy. The only people who are not, by definition, criminals in the jail work for the sheriff, which hardly fosters a transparent environment. So the chances of solving a crime involved in the jail approach zero, and if a guard brutalizes an inmate, nobody's ever going to know. But if we get a righteous case, we try it. I promise you.”

“You haven't gotten one? Not even one?”

“Sometimes we get one. But the ones we do get tend to fall into the misdemeanor category, the Sheriff's Department policing itself and making sure that its members adhere to the law and protocol in all cases. The occasional small-fry investigation yields a misdemeanor conviction that allows for plausible deniability on larger matters. Their story is that they investigate every allegation of wrongdoing, and when they find something actionable, then by God they act on it.”

“None of the larger cases make it upstairs?”

“Very few, if any. And what do you think that could be about?” Farrell asked as they finally got to the door. “I bet, being an ex–police officer of unrivaled sagacity and experience, you can figure this out.”

“You never have witnesses.”

Farrell beamed, spread his arms, and again turned to Treya. “And there it is,” he said. “But now let me ask you one.”

“Shoot.”

“Why do you care? Are you not done with the daily exertions of your brain about criminal matters?”

“I thought I was. But Diz asked me to look into something for him, and Wyatt Hunt is out of town, so I said yes.”

Farrell once was Hardy's law partner, and the news obviously took him by surprise. “You, a cop—”

“Ex-cop.”

“Still. You're working for Diz the defense attorney?”

“Part-time.”

“It's a work in progress,” Treya put in. “He's only just started.”

Farrell asked, “You don't feel like you're working for the wrong side? Don't you find that a little weird?”

“Did you find it weird prosecuting people after thirty years as a ­defense attorney?”

“Actually, yes. I don't know if I'd recommend it for normal people.”

“In my case, I'm an investigator, and I'm investigating, that's all. It's not like I'm on one side or another.”

Farrell chuckled. “No? Just wait. It will be. So what's the case? Something to do with the jail?”

“Only in the sense that Hardy's client is a guard there. I was down with Jeff Elliot at the
Chronicle
this morning, nosing around about my guy, and next thing you know, Jeff's going off about all the troubles at the jail.”

“Connecting them to your client?”

“No. No apparent connection at all.”

“Do you think there is?”

Glitsky shook his head. “No reason to. My guy's wife has gone missing, and I'm trying to find out where she went. Unless she's hiding in the jail, the jail's got nothing to do with it.”