45
SINCE HE WAS almost out to Frannie’s office anyway, Abe decided to try his luck and see if she was in. He got her answering machine when he called, but he hadn’t gotten far into the drive home when she called him back, saying she’d been with a client but was free for the next couple of hours if he wanted to come by.
“Diz fired me,” he told her as he came into her office. “The good news is that Wes Farrell wants to hire me.”
“Diz fired you? Really?”
“No. I’d be doing the same job for Wes. Diz just found a way to have somebody else pay me.”
“What brought that about?”
Glitsky gave it to her in broad strokes: the likelihood that Burt Cushing had been Katie’s lover, the connection between Hal, Cushing and the cover-up on the murder of Alanos Tussaint, Hal telling Katie about it, the shooting of Maria Solis-Martinez.
By the time he was done, Frannie was sitting on the love seat with her hand over her mouth. “You’re telling me somebody shot this poor girl just last night? Because she was looking into this inmate getting killed in the jail?”
“That’s our working assumption,” he said, “although you should know there is absolutely no sign that we’re right. It might have been what it was made to look like, a robbery. But why shoot somebody, and obviously shoot to kill, when you can just grab the purse and run? Not that it doesn’t happen, but . . .”
“I don’t see why that would work, Abe. Killing her wouldn’t make whatever she was working on go away, would it? Why won’t they assign her cases, and this particular case, to somebody else?”
“Because it’s not about who gets the case. It’s about what Luther Jones might have told her. Now, no matter who gets the case next, Luther is absolutely not talking, because he’s dead, too. The message is that they don’t control things just in the jail. If they can get to her, a cop, walking on the street, they can get to anybody.”
“How do you think you’re going to get to him? The Luther Jones investigation? Is that the idea?”
“Not exactly. We don’t do anything with Luther Jones. Diz and Wes seem to believe that we can hide behind the smokescreen of the Katie Chase investigation, stir the pot at the jail, and force Cushing and Foster to make a wrong step.”
“And then what?”
“Well, then it gets interesting. It depends on what they do when they find out they’re under active investigation. They’ll do something to obstruct it, and that’ll be our opening.”
“Except if the something they do is decide to kill more investigators.”
A corner of Glitsky’s mouth rose a quarter inch. “The consensus is that won’t happen. In any event, this seems like a reasonably good bet.”
“And now you’re here.” It was a question.
Abe nodded. “I thought we could talk a little more about Katie. You saw her every week for a couple of years. Maybe there’s something, some things, in her file. Maybe she told you something she didn’t know she knew. I thought if you didn’t mind, maybe you and I could spend some time and take a run at finding it.”
? ? ?
GLITSKY EXPECTED A fairly serious and wide-ranging discussion with Treya when she heard he would be going back to work in the DA’s Investigations Division. It would mean arranging the daily schedules the way they had been before he’d retired, among other things. Maybe their longtime nanny, Rita, would still be available; if not, they’d have to address that issue as well.
When he got to Wes Farrell’s office at four-thirty, as requested, he realized he needn’t have worried. Farrell had already called Treya in and sounded her out on the idea, painting the new assignment in the rosiest light. Abe, he had told her, with all of his experience, blah blah blah. He’d be taking over Maria’s immediate caseload, but over time, he would move into his specialty, which was homicide. Abe had informally applied for the job before, and now he had it. It was a perfect fit, and Wes was glad Hardy had thought of it.
What did Treya think?
Treya had already aired most of her objections by the time Abe showed up, and she had discovered, to her surprise, that they weren’t nearly as substantial as she had been thinking. The plain fact was that Abe hadn’t been ready to quit when it had been decided that he needed to; he was bored spending all those hours reading and watching TV at home; he was ready for a new challenge.
She stood up at her desk when he appeared at the office door, came around, and gave him a chaste kiss on the cheek. “You know what this is about?”
“Generally,” he said.
“And you want to do it?”
“I wanted to see if you were good with it first.”
“The short answer is yes. I’ve already called Rita, and she’s picking up the kids. We can talk about the long answer later tonight. Meanwhile, His Nibs is waiting.”
She crossed to Farrell’s door, knocked, and opened it for her husband.
? ? ?
AFTER A SHORT congratulatory meeting with Wes Farrell, Abe was on his way down to the office of Dr. Strout, the medical examiner, his mind racing.
He wasn’t entirely sure that it was a reasonable strategy, but he did like the fact that he once again would be working as a legitimate cop. He would have a badge and his gun. He could make arrests. And this time, without the caveat that he couldn’t pursue the most likely suspect, he could run a righteous murder investigation according to his own instincts, regardless of how Diz or Wes wanted him to proceed.
He also knew that Hardy and Farrell could have all the fine theories in the world about who killed Katie or Maria or Luther, or Alanos Tussaint, for that matter, and all of those theories would amount to nothing if he could not find physical evidence to support them. In the case of Katie’s murder, he’d already put in a substantial amount of time and mental energy looking at people other than Hal who might have had means, motive, and opportunity. And he’d come up with nothing.
Now he had another murder victim—Maria—whose death was arguably related to Katie’s. And Maria’s was a murder that Hal definitely had not committed. If Glitsky was assuming that one person was responsible for all four of these murders—and this seemed to him at least a reasonable theory—then Hal was off the hook for Katie and, by extension, for Alanos Tussaint. As a working theory, it meant that whoever killed Tussaint had done the same to Maria and Katie and Luther. If this were the case, all the murders were somehow the work of only one pair of suspects: Burt Cushing and Adam Foster.
Glitsky thought it was a far more reasonable hypothesis than anything he’d been laboring under to date. It also might provide some new physical evidence, and that was what had him knocking on the medical examiner’s door, catching the old man when he was getting ready to punch out for the day. “Won’t take five minutes,” Glitsky assured him.
“That’s what they all say.” But Strout ushered him in.
“Alanos Tussaint,” Glitsky said without preamble.
Strout retrieved the name in about three seconds. “A month, maybe six weeks ago. Blunt force head trauma.”
“Homicide?”
“My ruling was that it wasn’t inconsistent with homicide. It also wasn’t inconsistent with accidental slip-and-fall.” He shrugged. “They found him in his cell. He had the top bunk. Could be he fell down and banged his temple on the corner of the bed, which is concrete. That’s what the investigation went with.”
“Okay, but let’s go back a step. He fell down? What made him fall down?”
“I don’t know for sure. He was loaded up with Oxy. But he’d also been in a fight with some other inmates. The guards broke it up and put him in the closest empty cell, and that’s where he either passed out or slipped and fell.”
“You believe that, John?”
Strout cocked his head, obviously wondering if he should take offense. “I believe he died of what I put on the death certificate, Abe. You know, whenever somebody dies over there, there’s an investigation.”
“Right.”
“They had one in this case.”
“I’m sure they did. But the guards there, they’re all their brother’s keepers, aren’t they?”
“I’ve heard the same about guys on the regular force. I always think those rumors are just interoffice squabbling.”
Glitsky nodded. “There’s some of that. But sometimes it’s not the case.”
“You think this is one of those times?”
“This time we had an inmate tell a different story, then retract it.”
“Well, inmates . . .” Strout gestured extravagantly and let the words hang in the air. It was no secret that jailhouse snitches were not the most trustworthy witnesses on the planet. Many would testify to almost anything in exchange for a slight improvement in their situations, the smallest reduction in their sentences. As a class, they were inherently unreliable, and everyone in law enforcement knew it.
“This inmate,” Glitsky said, “was named Luther Jones. Ring a bell?”
Strout drew a frown. “That would be the Luther Jones on the slab in there?”
“The same. I just came from Farrell’s office, and he told me that Luther called to set up an appointment to meet with a DA investigator yesterday and maybe retract his retraction of his testimony about Alanos Tussaint. She told Frank Dobbins about it. Her name was Maria Solis-Martinez.”
Strout had no doubt spent a good portion of his afternoon performing an autopsy on the young woman. His face hardened further. “That was a damned heinous thing to do. I heard it was a robbery gone bad.”
“You also heard Alanos Tussaint slipped and fell in an empty cell. There’s always a story, John. Purse snatchers usually don’t execute their victims with a shot to the face.”
“You’re saying somebody from the jail . . . ?”
“I’m not saying anything yet. I’m asking questions, trying to get a feel for things. What I know is that Luther told a DA inspector that Adam Foster had killed Tussaint.”
“Adam Foster? Himself?”
Glitsky raised a hand. “Hear me out. Luther then retracts that statement. Wes Farrell decides he believes the first version and sends Maria over to the jail to make a deal with Luther. A few days go by. Finally, Luther decides to play. He talks to her, and on that same night, Maria gets hit. Luther ODs the next morning.”
Strout digested for a moment, then shook his head. “My, my, my.”
“So far it’s just a story,” Abe said. “I’m nowhere near charging anybody yet. I don’t have any evidence. Certainly nothing on Maria. Nothing on Katie Chase . . .”
“Katie Chase?”
“You remember her from the last time we spoke.”
“She’s in this?”
“Same threat to Foster.”
“How’s that?”
“Hal’s his alibi for Tussaint. He told Katie it was a lie, and we think she called Cushing and threatened to talk.”
“You are truly shitting me.”
“I’m not, John. I wish I were.” Glitsky let out a breath. “The logjam, of course, is that we don’t have, and we’re not likely to get, any new evidence on either Maria or Katie. You’ve already ruled on Tussaint, not inconsistent with homicide. I was just wondering if you might be persuaded to go back to your records on him, maybe take another look, see if anything new jumps out at you. And when you examine Luther, you might keep all these circumstances in mind. At least that might put some more evidence in play.”
Strout’s lips were tight with concentration. Eventually, he nodded. “If there’s anything to find,” he said, “I promise you, I’ll find it.”