59
DUE TO THE sense of urgency surrounding the ballistics test on the past Sunday morning, Len Faro had spent a good deal of time at the police lab in Hunters Point. Aside from being the snappiest dresser on the police force—today he was in about five grand worth of Brioni—he was punctilious about his evidence, especially the chain of evidence. In a perfect world—the one he tried to inhabit—once he took an item into custody, it remained under his constant guard, either in his personal possession or, eventually and more likely, in the city’s evidence locker, until he needed to produce it again at trial. That way, when he was called to testify at court—and he always was—he could swear under oath that every item introduced as an exhibit had been under his personal and uninterrupted control from the moment it had been discovered until its appearance in the courtroom. On the flip side, anything that did not meet these criteria would not be admitted. So no one was planting any bogus evidence on his watch, thank you.
It made Faro nervous enough for regular police officers, even those under his direct command, to have access to this stuff; today, with someone like Abe Glitsky, with whom he had a long and cordial history but who no longer worked for the Police Department, he had his defenses on full alert. Not that he really thought Glitsky might plant or remove anything, but why take the chance?
So when Abe had stopped by to ask permission to review the evidence in the Chase and Foster matters, Faro had volunteered to drive him down—he had some stuff on a new case to drop off, anyway—and together they could see what Abe needed or thought he needed to see.
Now they sat at a large table in an air-conditioned room adjacent to the evidence locker. Both of them wore latex gloves. On the table were two medium cardboard boxes, and in front of the men was a good-sized pile of Ziploc bags of various sizes. Everything taken from the car and from the body of Adam Foster.
Glitsky’s first close look had been at the gun, followed by the slugs. He also examined the blown-up copies of photographs of the ballistics test, which, to his experienced eye, made the report’s conclusion unambiguous. The same weapon had fired both bullets. Foster’s fingerprints were the only ones on the weapon, and their positioning was absolutely consistent with the theory that he’d fired the gun himself. Further, Glitsky’s understanding about gunshot residue turned out to be correct—Faro told him that they’d checked Foster’s hands first thing, and there was plenty of the stuff on his right hand to verify that he’d been holding the gun and pulled the trigger.
Though he wasn’t certain what, if anything, it might mean, Glitsky brought up Jeff Elliot’s question about the pencil and paper; Faro and his techs had found neither in the car. The car was pretty darn spotless inside and out. Glitsky remembered the showroom shine he’d noticed and picked up a Baggie containing a business-card-sized bit of cardboard with the words “$1 Discount Off Your Next Carwash—Cable Car Washers. Good until . . .” An ink stamp had printed out the date “December 21.”
“Where did this come from?” Glitsky asked.
Faro glanced at the card. “That little covered cubbyhole between the front seats.”
“Anything else in it? Coins, CDs, anything?”
“They’d be here if they were.”
“I know, Len, just making sure.”
“There is,” Faro added, picking up another Baggie, “this little trash bag. Same carwash.” He read the logo. “ ‘A clean car lasts longer.’ I’m not sure of the veracity of that statement.”
“Sounds like false advertising to me. Somebody ought to sue ’em.” Abe stared at the card for a few more seconds. “Do we know when he got the wash?”
“Actually, we do. It was Saturday.”
“How’d you get that?”
Faro wasn’t entirely successful hiding the pleasure of his accomplishment. “I called them yesterday and asked them about that date. You get a week between washes if you want to save a buck. December twenty-first is next Saturday. So he got his wash on the fourteenth. Saturday.”
“Nice work.” Glitsky sat back. “So the guy gets his car washed when he’s planning to go kill himself?”
Faro shrugged. “It could have been his Saturday routine. Wake up, get the car washed, save a buck. He didn’t think about it.”
Glitsky felt he had something and didn’t want to let it go. “Okay, but I’ll tell you what he did think about. He thought about getting dressed up.”
Faro, who dressed to the nines every day, clearly hadn’t viewed Foster’s outfit as out of the ordinary. Glitsky realized that it quite possibly meant something important.
“What are you getting at?” Faro asked.
Up to now, Glitsky had kept the reason for his interest in looking at the evidence under wraps. The last thing he wanted was to let the rumor mill get wind of the idea that Foster might not have killed himself. And until he found something that verified his suspicions, he preferred, if possible, to keep them to himself.
That was becoming less feasible by the second. “I’m getting at wondering why Foster gets himself all dolled up if he’s planning to shoot himself in the head.”
“You think he was all dolled up?”
Glitsky’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “Maybe not by your standards, Len, but the rest of the world, yeah. He was going out on the town. Until somebody stopped him.”
Faro blinked in surprise. “You’re saying you don’t think he killed himself?”
“I’m thinking it more and more every minute.”
Obviously taken with the idea, Faro reached over and went through another small pile of Baggies. Lifting one of them, he held it up. It contained a condom. “That might explain this, too,” he said. “Front pants pocket. And you want to hear something else? I talked to Strout yesterday. I didn’t think anything other than it was a little unusual, but now . . .”
“What?”
“He had just shaved his balls.”
“Just?”
“That day. Saturday.”
This slowed Abe down to a dead stop, and he sat motionless until he remembered to breathe. “So he washes his car, shaves his balls, gets all dressed up, drives out to the Presidio, and shoots himself? How many ways does this not fit?”
Faro had no answer and turned his palms up. He didn’t know.
Glitsky reached out for another of the Baggies, the one that held the alleged suicide note. He turned it over, checked the back, flipped it again. “This was in his coat pocket, you said?”
“Yep. Front left outside. “
“How’d you find it so soon?”
“I saw the perforated top sticking out. Grabbed it with my tweezers.”
Glitsky flipped it another time, sighed, put it down in front of him. “What else we got?”
Faro threw a glance across the table. “Cell phone,” he said.
“Now we’re talking.” Glitsky was pulling the Ziploc toward him. Removing the cell phone, he pushed the button to bring up the screen, and nothing happened. “It’s dead.”
“Perfect,” Faro said. “I think I’ve got my charger out in my car. You want to take five while I go grab it?”
“More than anything. And wait another twenty or so while it charges, if it does after all this downtime. I love technology.”
“Everybody does. We can use the extra time to think.”
“My favorite.” What other option did he have? “Go,” he said.
As the door closed behind Faro, Glitsky stood up, stretched, walked out in the hall, found the restroom, and used it. When he got back to the table in the little room, he absently started going through the pile of Ziploc bags—the bullet, the gun, the condom, the carwash discount stub, what must have been Foster’s set of keys.
Abe paused to count the keys, see if one of them jumped out at him as possibly significant, but he couldn’t identify anything. Frustrated, he leaned against the hard back of his chair and cast an evil eye at the door. Where was Len? He checked his watch. He’d been gone eight minutes, not that Abe was counting.
Coming forward, he reached for the Baggie that held the alleged suicide note, checking it again. Nothing had changed, of course. He turned it over, looked at the blank side, sat back again, closed his eyes.
Time stopped.
He heard the door and opened his eyes, saw Faro shaking his head. “Sorry it took so long, but no luck. I must have left it back at the office. Maybe one of the guys here has one we can borrow.” He got no reaction, Glitsky sitting slumped with no expression. “Abe?”
Glitsky had the sense that he’d somehow been away for a long time. Coming back into the present with Faro, he fought off a keen and disturbing sense of disorientation.
“Are you all right?” Faro asked.
“I think so.” Abe let out a breath that he felt like he’d been holding, getting his bearings caught up to where he found himself. Shaking his head as though to clear out the cobwebs, he picked up the Baggie with the notepad page, held it out, and said, “Tell me again how you found this thing.” When Faro finished identically repeating the story he’d told before, Glitsky sat with it a minute and then asked, “How far was it in the pocket?”
“Pretty much all the way. I just happened to notice the ragged top where it had been torn off.”
“And the rest of the paper?” Glitsky glanced at it again, no creases. “It doesn’t look like it got bent over or scrunched up.”
“No. He just slipped it in the pocket.”
“All the way down?”
“I think I just said that. What are you getting at?”
“When did he put it in the pocket?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, if he killed himself, he probably wrote this note someplace besides the car, maybe at his home, right? Since there was no pencil or the rest of the notepad in the car. Good so far?”
“Okay.”
“On the other hand, if he was murdered after somebody made him write the note at gunpoint in the car, then what?”
“Then,” Faro replied, “the next thing is the murderer tells him to put it in his pocket so we’d find it, just before he shoots him.”
“Right. What if the murderer didn’t do that last part, wait for Foster to slide it into his pocket? What if it was a pretty uptight moment, as it must have been, and the exact second Foster finished writing, his killer popped him?”
“Okay. What would that get us?”
Glitsky put the Baggie down as if it had become radioactive. “Foster’s writing the note. The notepad’s on his lap. He finishes, and the gunshot splashes blood all over the driver’s-side window. It also has to leave a mist of blood all over the body, to say nothing about the GSR, which is all over the place, too.”
“Right. So?”
“So”—Glitsky gingerly picked up the Baggie again—“if this thing was in Foster’s lap when he got shot, it’s going to have blood and GSR all over it. If it was a suicide and all the way down in his pocket before the shot, it won’t.” Abe was on his feet and moving. “Let’s go find us a tech and find out which it was.”