13
ABBY AND JAMORRIS 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.”