56
AT ELEVEN-FIFTEEN THAT night, the phone rang next to Abe’s bed. Jolted out of his slumber, he reached over to grab it before it rang again. “Glitsky.”
“Abe, this is Abby Foley.” It wasn’t her half-apologetic late-night voice; she was all but breathless with excitement. “Sorry to wake you, but you might want to come down.”
“Down where? The Hall? What time is it?”
“Late. We’re out by the Lombard entrance to the Presidio. One of the parking lots just inside.” She got herself collected for a half second before she blurted it out. “It looks like Adam Foster shot himself.”
It didn’t take Glitsky fifteen minutes to get dressed and make the drive through the dense fog. When he got to the lot, he parked next to a black-and-white squad car at the periphery and made his way over to where a good-sized knot of people had gathered by one of the lot’s overhead lights. Across the asphalt, about as far away from where he stood as from where he’d parked, he could make out a set of klieg lights and another area of activity—undoubtedly the Crime Scene team—surrounding a dark-colored car. After nodding around at the group, Abe moved off a few paces with Abby and JaMorris.
“How’d you two get the call on this?” he asked.
“Pure luck,” JaMorris said. “We were on call. We didn’t know it was Foster till we checked the registration and then looked at the body. It’s him.”
“Suicide? Clearly?”
“Sure looks like it,” Abby said. “One shot to the temple. Gun still in his hand.”
“Who called it in?”
“One of the security guys here. We’ve already talked to him.”
“What’d he know?”
“Not much,” JaMorris said. “The car wasn’t here at eight, then it was when he made his rounds again at nine. This is evidently a favored make-out spot, so he gave it some room until ten, when he thought he’d go over and move ’em along.”
“So he didn’t hear the shot?”
“No,” Abby replied. “Windows closed. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Has Crime Scene told you anything else?”
“Not yet,” JaMorris said. “Tell you the truth, we were waiting for you.”
“Not that I don’t love getting called out at midnight, but why was that?”
“After the ‘CityTalk’ thing,” Abby said, “he seemed like he was your guy. We thought you’d want to be in on it from the get-go.”
“I appreciate that,” Glitsky said. “Let’s go check it out.”
Their timing was excellent. The techs had finished the preliminary work; they would tow the car down to the police lot and go over it in greater detail, but they had already photographed and swabbed, fingerprinted and measured, and now they were ready to have the body tagged and bagged and hauled off to the morgue, although for the moment it remained slumped against the driver’s door.
Len Faro, the always well-dressed head of the CSI team, saw them coming and walked out to meet them. “Hey, Abe,” he said with recognition. “You back on the job?”
“More or less,” Glitsky replied. “The glamour keeps drawing me back.” He cocked his head at the car, a Honda Civic. “Is this what it looks like?”
“Maybe more than most.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, they tell me we got a note.” Reaching into his trench coat, Faro extracted a Ziploc bag. In it was a small piece of paper torn from a spiral-top notepad. “I saw this sticking out of his coat pocket, and I lifted it,” he said. “I don’t want to take it out of the evidence bag before it goes to the lab, but you can see through the bag what he wrote.”
He held it out, and Glitsky leaned over to read the words, written in pencil in a bold though barely legible cursive scrawl: “Hal Chase never killed anybody. I’m sorry I got him into this.”
Abby Foley, leaning in closer for a better look, grabbed her partner’s arm. “Jambo, look at this.”
JaMorris stepped forward, squinted at the page, then straightened. He put a hand on Glitsky’s shoulder. “I’d say you got to him, Lieutenant. Congratulations.”
“Got to who?” Faro asked.
“Our victim here,” JaMorris replied. “Abe was a step or two away from bringing him in.”
“I guess he decided he wasn’t coming in alive,” Abby said.
“How close were you, Abe?” Faro asked.
“Obviously,” JaMorris answered for him, “close enough.”
Abe scowled. In his wildest dreams, he hadn’t contemplated this kind of resolution. It had never occurred to him that Foster was the kind of guy who would kill himself; his first reaction after the dawning certainty was a gnawing hollowness in his gut. Viewed in a certain light, he knew that it was a clear win for him and for justice. But it felt so sudden, so incomplete, so unfinished; Foster had cheated Abe out of his victory.
In a second wave of guilt and nausea, he flashed back to his talk earlier that day with Burt Cushing, in which Abe had made his case against Foster abundantly clear, and equally clear the unspoken message: If Cushing gave up his defense of and collusion with his chief deputy, his family might never hear about his infidelities; all of his immediate problems in terms of the jail would be laid at Foster’s feet, and the sheriff himself, though equally guilty under the law, would walk away clean.
Had Cushing called Foster today and cut him loose? Glitsky couldn’t dismiss the possibility that however much this looked like a suicide, it was Burt Cushing cleaning up loose ends.
Glitsky swallowed against his rising bile, chewed at his cheek. “You got anything else, Len?” he asked. “Before we take a look.”
“As a matter of fact,” Faro said, “I was just getting to it. We’re having Christmas a little early.” He pulled a Baggie from another pocket and held it up in the light. “Bullet. From the cushion behind the seat.”
Abby said, “Let me guess. Thirty-eight?”
Faro shook the slug in its bag. He nodded. “Looks like. That would match the gun we found in his hand.” Then added, “You really know this guy, don’t you?”
Abby broke a smile. “We were just getting close. And talk about Christmas—you might want to check that slug and the gun against the Katie Chase evidence.”
JaMorris turned to her. “You think?”
Abby shrugged. “Worth a try. How could it hurt?”
While they’d been speaking, the coroner’s van had arrived, and the assistants were rolling their gurney over to Foster’s car.
“Last chance to get a good look,” Faro said.
Glitsky nodded. “Should we expect any other surprises?”
“Not so much. But if you see something you want to talk about, let me know. I’ll be hanging around for a while.”
“We’re on it,” Glitsky said.
They walked over to the Honda, the two Homicide inspectors trailing a step or two behind Abe, who opened the passenger door and knelt down on the asphalt. There wasn’t much to see. CSI had taken the gun away. Foster, up against the other door, wore a herringbone sport coat over a canary-yellow dress shirt with the collar unbuttoned. A gold chain hung around his neck. There was a clean bullet hole in front of and a little above his right ear, with a line of blood flowing out of it down into his shirt. The rest of the blood and other matter had spattered the driver’s-side window, leaving the front of Foster’s body unsullied—the neatly pressed black slacks, black socks, alligator loafers.
Though the klieg lights lit up the area like daylight, Abby handed Abe a flashlight, and he ran it over the rug and flooring on both sides, the passenger seat, the dashboard. With the exception of the fingerprint powder, the interior of the car was pretty much spotless.
There was the bullet hole in the cushion behind his head.
Glitsky turned to the inspectors and handed the flashlight back to Abby. A little rickety, he got to his feet. The car had a showroom finish in the bright lights. Leaning over, he took a last look inside. “Do you see something?” Abby asked him.
“No,” he said, “but I know I should. I always miss something the first time. You guys notice anything?”
“No.”
“No.”
Abe gave it a last glance, stem to stern. “Okay, then,” he said. “What do you say we call it a night?”