31
GLITSKY HAD MADE an appointment with the medical examiner of San Francisco, John Strout, who was ancient and had stayed on in his job long after his pension could have kicked in. Yet he showed no signs of slowing down. His acuity included what was lately a remarkable response to Glitsky’s coming into a room, namely a comment on his retirement.
“How did you hear I was retired?” Abe asked.
Strout had a huge desk cluttered with ordnance and the tools of mayhem. For as long as he’d been the ME, Strout had, often quite illegally, assembled a collection of murder weapons that now graced a glassed-in cabinet against the side wall. If that didn’t get your attention, he had a human skeleton perched on a medieval garroting device that he’d had shipped over from Madrid. Now, with Glitsky comfortable across from him, he sat back, idly tossing a hand grenade—rumored to be live—from hand to hand. “Hell, ain’t it been like six months? Who ain’t heard by now?”
“I could give you a list,” Glitsky said.
“You still are, right?”
“I am.”
“How you likin’ it?”
“As you can see, John, I’m putting my foot back in the water. That answers that.”
“All right, then, who are we going to be talking about?”
“Katie Chase.”
Strout nodded as though he’d expected nothing else. “Damn straightforward. One shot, lower occipital, exit at the hairline.”
“Anything on the slug?”
“Thirty-eight, brass jacket. Common as dirt.”
This informed Abe that the murder weapon had been a revolver. It also explained the absence of a casing at the scene.
Strout went right on. “There were powder burns in her hair and on her scalp. It was close. Two to three inches. Who are you working for on this if you’re off the force?”
“Dismas Hardy.”
Strout’s eyebrows went up. “Defense work?”
Glitsky smiled. “I know. It kind of crept up on me, too. Is there anything you want to tell me that might be useful in court?”
“It’s going to court? The husband?”
“Rumor has it that the grand jury’s indicting him today.”
Strout gave the grenade a spin on his desktop. “You met him, the husband?”
“Several times. We’re pals by now.”
“How tall is he?”
Glitsky cocked his head to one side. “That’s an interesting question, John. Why do you ask?”
“You tell me first.”
Glitsky thought about it. “Six feet even, give or take.”
Strout nodded.
“You’re being a little enigmatic, John. You enjoying yourself?”
“Always.” Strout reached for the grenade again. “This is as nonscientific as it gets, but my instinct tells me the shooter wasn’t that tall. Here’s why: We got a clean trajectory back to front. There’s a clear canal from entry low in the back to exit high in the front. Pretty good angle.”
The corners of Glitsky’s mouth turned down. “You been to the scene?”
“Nope. But I saw the pictures.”
“Maybe not close enough,” Glitsky said. “It was uphill.”
“This would have been pretty steep uphill, Abe. Maybe thirty-five or forty degrees, almost too steep to walk without feeling like you’re climbing. If it’s less than that angle, the shooter probably wasn’t six feet tall, although I’d never testify to that on the stand. Katie was sixty-eight and a half inches—that’s five eight and a half. Pretty tall. Now, she could have had her head tucked in, any number of other variables. But I don’t think that was it, either.”
“Why not?”
“Because of where some sharp-eyed Crime Scene person found the slug.”
“And where was that?”
“About nine feet off the ground in a eucalyptus tree.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Scout’s honor. These guys comb an area, they don’t mess around. Plus, they got lucky, which never hurts. Anyway, if Hardy’s looking for something to argue about, and I assume that’s what you’re talking to me for, he could do worse than start with a short shooter. At least plant a seed, mount some posters, do a little show-and-tell.”
“I’ll mention it to him. You got anything else, defense-wise?”
“You want to give me a hint?”
“They found some of her blood in her kitchen. Hal thinks she slipped cutting something. You got any ideas about that?”
Strout leaned back in his chair. Something about the question evidently pleased him. “Could have been. I wondered about that. Something cut two fingers of her right hand. Not deep, but it would have bled.”
“What was that?”
“I don’t know. Could have been self-inflicted, or maybe somebody getting her attention?”
“Wouldn’t the gun have done that all by itself? If you’ve got a gun, you don’t need a knife.”
The damn grenade still in one hand, Strout spread his arms. “Hmm. All too true, Abe,” he said. “All too true.”
? ? ?
IT WAS ALL well and good for Dismas and Abe to say that Frannie’s advice to Katie “probably” had nothing to do with her death. Since both men were laboring under the assumption that Hal was innocent of the crime, any talk of his motivation was moot. If he didn’t do it, then it didn’t matter what reasons he might have had.
But her irresponsibility—whatever the result had been—left Frannie with a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach.
She had schmoozed with Abe for a while until Diz had come down in his business suit, then she’d followed them out and waved goodbye as they’d driven off separately. The temperature had climbed a few degrees since yesterday, and it was pleasant walking to her office with the prevailing breeze at her back.
Now Frannie sat in her recliner with a small stack of her notes on Katie’s visits, twenty months’ worth. Katie’s first visit had been triggered by her second pregnancy and by what she’d called an “emotional breakdown” over the fact that she was letting Ellen be raised by a nanny and the two grandmothers.
She was toying with the idea of quitting work to stay home and be a full-time mom, and she wanted to talk out all the myriad issues and implications, many of which Frannie had been able to relate to. (With a stab of chagrin, Frannie punched some numbers into her calculator and realized that while she was listening to Katie’s problems, many to do with how tight the Chases’ money and budgeting would be, she had billed her about ten thousand dollars.)
Only now, nearly two years after the event, did Frannie see what struck her as the most obvious truth in the world: that Katie may well have started to see her because of an emotional breakdown, but that crisis was probably caused not as much by her concerns over becoming a stay-at-home mom as by the fact that she was involved in an affair.
It had just begun, or she’d just ended it, or maybe she was smack in the middle of it and feeling guilty. It would not have been the first time that clients had started seeing Frannie because they were misbehaving in their private lives. She believed that basically people started going to counseling for two reasons: confession or absolution, sometimes both. She had always thought that Katie was an exception to that rule, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Charged with adrenaline at the realization, she rose out of her chair, went over to where her coat hung on one of the pegs behind the door, got her phone, and punched in one of her favorite numbers. “Abe,” she said, “sorry to bother you, but I’ve been thinking about what we all were talking about this morning. I know you and Diz don’t think it mattered if Katie told Hal about her affair, but Diz said it put somebody else in the picture, and that could be a good thing for Hal if we could find out who it is. It’s just occurred to me that I think I know when that whole thing started. I mean, within a few weeks. And if you’ve got that, you’ve got a reasonable window where you can check her phone records, maybe her computer use, something that might identify him, don’t you? How does that sound?”