34
GLITSKY DROVE OUT past Hal Chase’s home, and kept driving for another two blocks, until he came to the Interior Park Belt. Parking there, he got out and stood staring at the large canopy of eucalyptus in front of him. The trail that Katie’s killer must have taken had been pretty seriously trampled—the cops, the curious—in the days since her body had been found, so it was no trouble to follow it back up into the deeper shade.
Sure enough, a hundred or so feet up, a tributary trail cut off to the right through the low underbrush. The little path might originally have been challenging to pick up when the body was there, but after all the intervening foot traffic, it might as well have been lit by neon. It was also—and it seemed this must usually be the case—wet.
Glitsky picked his way through the low brambles until he came to the clearing where the body must have fallen. Here he stopped, turned, looked behind him.
John Strout, the medical examiner, had told him that the shooter might have been short in stature, and Glitsky had countered that he’d heard the trail was a relatively steep uphill climb. Standing there, he realized that it came nowhere near to reaching the thirty-five- or forty-degree threshold that Strout had talked about. In fact, by San Francisco standards, it would hardly be considered steep at all. The pitch of the canyon steepened significantly on the other side of the clearing, but here at the opening, the first steps in, it was all but flat.
So the brass-jacketed slug had entered at the base of Katie’s brain and exited at the hairline. Strout’s admittedly nonscientific pronouncement about the bullet’s path seemed right, although, as he’d noted, there were several possible explanations: Katie might have had her head down as she walked, the shooter might have tripped and panicked and shot from below Katie’s neck. There were any number of other possible scenarios, and he was keenly aware that, for an experienced Homicide inspector, all in all, this was an exercise in stupidity. There were at least a dozen quick-to-hand variables that could produce the kind of path that the bullet had taken on its way through Katie’s brain and into one of the surrounding eucalyptus trees. This was something he shouldn’t be wasting a minute on.
Except for one thing . . .
And that thing—Strout’s mentioning it as more a likelihood than a possibility—Glitsky should ignore only at his peril. John Strout was an objective guy with vast experience. He dealt in science and numbers, angles and percentages and lab results at the microscopic level. He did not guess very often, and he never guessed when he testified. For him to tell Glitsky that he might want to consider the possibility that the shooter was shorter than Hal’s six feet was remarkably out of character. Strout was speaking in an unguarded fashion to an ex-cop and longtime acquaintance about an instinctive feeling, nothing that he could mention or ever would consider mentioning in court.
Nevertheless, he had said it. It was, Glitsky thought, what the good doctor believed. He couldn’t prove it, probably wouldn’t even try.
But there it was.
? ? ?
BACK AT HAL’S house about a half hour later, Glitsky sat at Katie’s computer in the master bedroom upstairs. Below, he was vaguely aware of the constant faint hum of activity of Ruth and the children, punctuated rather too frequently in his opinion by explosions of young toddler pique and impatient snappish adult response. Ruth, Ellen, and even to some extent baby Will working out the kinks in their relationships.
He wasn’t paying attention to that, though. He was here, at Frannie Hardy’s suggestion, to try to get a line on Katie Chase’s love affair, which was quite possibly going on or had just ended in the months surrounding March 2010. The computer had been turned over weeks before by the officers in Missing Persons, who had Hal’s permission. They had since downloaded and returned it. But they had been looking for more recent activity that might have had to do with her disappearance, and probably they hadn’t paid too much attention to three-year-old records. Fortunately for Glitsky, Hal had given them the computer’s password, which Hal and Katie had shared, and the officers had left the sheet of binder paper containing Hal’s notes, including that password, in the middle drawer of the desk on which the computer sat. As an added bonus, Katie was clearly not paranoid about her security and used the same password for her Facebook account.
But after nearly an hour of checking emails, her Facebook, and other random documents, Glitsky had come away with exactly nothing that looked even remotely promising. Her Facebook wall for those months after Ellen’s birth had been filled almost exclusively with pictures of the new baby, dozens if not hundreds of them, and of the babies of the women who “liked” her photos. Her emails were mostly to her sisters and brother and some coworkers, and none of them contained any hints about her lover, or any indication that she and Hal were having problems. To all outward appearances, they were the glowing new parents.
Even if he was unlucky finding specific information, Glitsky considered himself lucky to have so much no-hassle access. When he decided to give up on the computer for the day, he went looking for her telephone records. Again, the super-organized, type-A Katie made things easy for him. She had three wooden file cabinets along the wall beside the computer desk, and in them she kept all their household records, in alphabetical order, for at least the past five years and what might have been their entire marriage. Glitsky pulled out the physical telephone bills for the first half of 2010 and, using the reverse-number feature on her computer, once again found nothing suspicious, much less damning. Certainly no string of calls to any one number. The outgoing calls from both this home number and from her cell phone—the same account—were again limited almost entirely to her family members, to her employer’s office, and to the jail where her husband worked. The greatest number of the calls was likely there.
Glitsky sensed the early onset of dusk and saw that he’d have to leave for the day. He had to pick up his own children and needed to hustle if he was going to make it.
Downstairs, things had calmed down. Will was in his high chair and Ruth was feeding him while Ellen was the picture of intense concentration, her tongue sticking out of her mouth as she sat at the table across from her grandmother, drawing silently on an Etch A Sketch.
“How are you doing?” Glitsky asked.
Ruth turned. “Very good. I was born for this. Ellie and I are getting along splendidly, aren’t we, sweetie?”
The child raised her head from her creation. “Ellen,” she said, “not Ellie.”
Ruth rolled her eyes for Glitsky’s benefit. “Ellen then,” she said.
Ellen said, “What?” and went back to her drawing.
Then, as if suddenly remembering why Glitsky was there, Ruth cocked her head. “Did you find anything?”
“Zero.”
“Maybe I’d have heard something or seen something. Were you looking for something specific?”
Glitsky didn’t want to burden Ruth with the supposition that her daughter-in-law had been involved in an affair. As far as he knew, even Hal didn’t know that. Not yet, anyway. He shook his head. “Just anything that might jump out, and nothing did.”
She sighed. “Tragic,” she said. “Just so tragic.”
“It is.” Glitsky let out a breath. “I’m off to pick up my kids at school. Can I get you anything?”
“I know you’re trying,” she said, “but all I really need is to get my good son back. He did not”—she glanced at Ellen—“you know. About Katie. And no jury is going to find that he did.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said. “Call if you need anything or think of something I should look into.”
“I will.”
“Bye, then.”
“Bye.” Then, “Ellie, say goodbye to Mr. Glitsky. There’s a good girl.”
But Ellen was immersed in her Etch A Sketch and didn’t look up.
Glitsky said, “That’s all right. She’s got a lot to deal with right now. I’ll see you.”
When his hand was on the front doorknob, he heard the girl’s voice in indignation: “Hey!”
“Don’t you ‘hey’ me! You’re not the boss around here, young lady. I’m the boss.”
“That’s mine! It’s mine! Give it back!”
“When I want to, and not before, Ellie.”
“It’s Ellen.”
“It’s whatever I want it to be. Now settle down and be a good girl for once.”
Glitsky pulled the door closed gently behind him.