4
ALTHOUGH HE ALREADY had an idea of the answer, Hardy asked what he could do for Mr. Chase.
“My wife disappeared from our home last Wednesday night, while I was at the airport picking up my brother. I was cooperating with Missing Persons every way I knew how, until this morning, when a team of hard-ass inspectors—Homicide, not Missing Persons—took over, obviously thinking I had something to do with her disappearance.”
Over in the corner by the windows, Chase had taken one of the chairs in the more informal of the two seating areas in Hardy’s office. So far, he had left untouched the cup of coffee Phyllis had brought in; it sat on the table in front of him. He held himself with his hands clenched on his thighs, his back ramrod-stiff, his feet planted flat on the floor. His hazel eyes were shot with red, bruised-looking underneath. “I’m sorry to barge in without an appointment,” he said, “but I didn’t know I was coming here until I got to your front door.”
“Walk-ins are always welcome.” Hardy gave him his professional smile. “Did somebody refer you to me?”
“Not in so many words. You may know, though, that my wife, Katie, was—is—a client of your wife’s. In one of your last trials, Katie had put together who you were. All of a sudden this morning, I think I might need a lawyer. So here I am.”
“Your wife’s missing. Is there some evidence indicating that you had anything to do with that?”
“No. They say they found a few drops of her blood in the kitchen, but she was prepping the Thanksgiving stuff that night and probably cut herself. Big deal. Being more or less in law enforcement myself, I knew what they were thinking. These were not good cops wanting to help me find my wife. All they were interested in was me as a suspect, what I was doing when she disappeared.”
“You were at the airport?”
“Correct. Picking up my brother. Half brother. Warren.”
“And these inspectors you spoke to, they had a problem with your alibi?”
“Alibi. Jesus Christ. It’s not an alibi. It’s where I was. They didn’t know why I left my house when I did. An hour and twenty minutes for a half-hour drive? I tell them, ‘Guys. It’s the day before Thanksgiving, the biggest travel day in the world. Of course I went down early.’ I figured traffic would be hell, although as it turned out, it wasn’t. But who knew? I was checking my cell, and it turned out the flight was delayed, so I pulled off in South City and had a beer to kill some time.”
“And they weren’t buying?”
Hal wagged his head from side to side. “It’s like they were starting from the position that Katie was dead. And that I killed her. Okay, if we got home and she was dead on the floor, I could see where they’re coming from. I know it’s always the spouse. I get it. I’m a cop. It always is the spouse. But that’s if she’s dead, and she’s not. Thank God. Not that we know of, anyway. She’s missing, and nobody who knows how to go about it is trying to find her.”
Hardy took all of this in, fighting his own skepticism. He’d been in the law business a long time himself, and his experience told him that in cases like this, the spouse was most often in the middle of it one way or another. Hardy felt, on the one hand, that Hal was smart to get hooked up with a lawyer as soon as he began to feel that he was a suspect; on the other, the fact that he’d decided he needed a lawyer this early on was in itself somewhat—perhaps illogically—disconcerting. There must be something more to the picture if, without any physical evidence, the police were already considering Hal a suspect.
“I might be able to put you in touch with people who could help with trying to find her,” Hardy said. “Meanwhile, your job is to fully cooperate with the police, but through me. If they want to ask you specific questions about you and your wife, or the timing on the night she went missing, or anything that sounds to you like they’re considering you as a suspect, you direct them to me. Your main concern is that you’ve got a missing wife and want to know what they’re doing to find her. You’re not willing to concede that she’s dead, and you sure as hell didn’t kill her.” He sat back. “That’s where you are right now. If the inspectors come again, get back to me. No more talking to them directly, and never without me. When they talked to you earlier, did you tell them anything other than your concern about your wife’s disappearance?”
“Not really. I saw where they wanted to go and cut off the interview.”
“When you say ‘not really,’ do you mean no, you told them nothing? Or you got into it a little?”
At Hardy’s questions, Hal’s lips went tight, and he cast his eyes upward as though praying for patience. “They asked me how our marriage was, if we were having problems, and I told them what I’d told the Missing Persons cops. Katie was seeing your wife about some issues . . .”
“Yours? Hers?”
A shrug. “Both, I’d say. We were working on it. The kids were wearing us down. Even if we were doing that, what did it have to do with Katie being gone? Then they pressed it. ‘So there was something wrong between you two?’ Which was when I told them I was done talking with them.”
Because Katie was Frannie’s client, Hardy knew the marriage had problems, but what relationship didn’t? Eventually, he would probably find out all he’d ever want to know about the Chases and their life together. Meanwhile, Hal’s wife was missing, and Hardy thought that somebody should spend some time looking into that instead of trying to prove that this worried and exhausted husband must have been involved.