61
GLITSKY DIDN’T FEEL like he could face a living soul.
He sat in his car in the waning daylight, caught in rush-hour traffic leaving the city. He didn’t have a destination in mind. Badly shaken, he’d called Treya immediately after leaving Juhle’s office and told her that he was going to be busy until late, checking on some evidence. No, he had promised her, it wasn’t about Cushing. He wasn’t looking into Cushing anymore. Wes was right, Abe was sorry. He’d get home when he could.
How could he have been so completely wrong?
Every single fact about Burt Cushing fit perfectly into his theory, except the tiny flaw that he was somewhere else when the first crime was committed. Abe had neglected to perform the most perfunctory police work—checking his suspect’s alibi. Or, really, both Cushing’s and Foster’s alibis. That oversight had rendered all of his other efforts useless at best, pathetic at worst.
By the time he’d gotten down as far as Candlestick Point, he’d conjured up another theory that might still fit his facts: Another deputy might be the button man within the Sheriff’s Department. He thought about Andy Biehl and his brand-new Audi. He considered Mike Maye of Foster’s poker alibi. It could be any one of a dozen deputies, maybe a hundred.
He’d said it to placate Treya, but by the time he reached Burlingame, he had come to the decision that Wes Farrell was right. Whatever this was, it was too big for him to handle alone. Or even to be a part of. He’d just demonstrated how badly his investigative chops had deteriorated. He might not be a true menace, but neither was he much of a help.
Farrell was also right about keeping Abe out of harm’s way. Chances were, if he could be this wrong about a case, he could be this wrong about his ability to defend himself. His instincts and skills had rusted to the point that anyone could walk straight up to him, wish him a Merry Christmas, and put a bullet through his eye before he’d had a chance to blink.
He was old, old, old. He might not have loved retirement, but retirement was clearly where he belonged.
But God, it galled. It galled.
? ? ?
NOW, WITH FULL dark having fallen, he sat again in the evidence room at the lab, the cardboard box with Adam Foster’s stuff on the table next to him. He hoped something in that box would speak to him again. He had been wrong in the conclusion he’d reached about the sheriff, but no one could deny that his main insight and discovery—that Adam Foster was not a suicide but a murder—was the breakthrough moment in that case, as well as Katie Chase’s.
And that moment had been his and his alone.
He belonged here. This was his world. For nearly forty years, his work and his passion had been bringing murderers to justice, and he was not about to abandon all of that now. He was who he was. He keenly felt the scorn of his unknown quarry and vowed anew that somehow he would bring it down.
Foster’s cell phone was the most likely and obvious source of something Glitsky might have missed while he’d found what he expected. For nearly an hour, he went through Foster’s deleted emails of the past month. Foster was on LinkedIn and had a couple of hundred connections; he was asked for connections, endorsements. But it seemed that he mostly accepted people who wanted to connect with him and didn’t do much afterward. Glitsky could relate, since he treated the social networking app the same way.
There were also several dozen administrative emails either up or down the chain of command at the jail. A flurry of messages in early November about Alanos Tussaint segued into an equal number about Luther Jones. Glitsky knew that these would probably be helpful to the FBI if they took over the investigation; they could follow up on Foster’s home computer. Aside from that, Adam Foster had a few friends, almost all of them male, and there was the usual assortment of purportedly funny attachments that pretty much identified him as the redneck a*shole Glitsky had always considered him.
Finally, Glitsky got to Saturday morning and Foster’s cell phone. The only calls from unknowns were from the same number. Glitsky assumed that would be the number of the woman Foster had presumably made his date with on the night of the killing.
Thinking what an idiot she must be, Glitsky got out his own cell phone—he did not want to add or subtract anything on Foster’s phone—and punched in the numbers on his keypad, then pressed the call button.
He was holding the phone to his ear, listening to the ring. The phone eventually kicked over to the recorded message, and he felt the room come up at him.
“Hi,” the voice said. “This is Patti Orosco. You know what to do.”
? ? ?
HE COULDN’T UNDO it. He’d left his name and phone number on Patti Orosco’s telephone, and knew she would call him back before long.
In his car driving home, he decided that the wisest course of action was to pretend that he was a concerned servant of the people and following up on things with Patti and Hal and the gang. He would tell her that maybe they could make an appointment and get together to do a little debriefing. He would lie to her about this being the normal routine following a murder investigation. He would remember not to refer in any way to the murder, as opposed to the suicide, of Adam Foster.
First and above all, he would get her alibi for Saturday night.
When he got home at 8:45, Treya had already put both kids to bed. In their years together, tension had only rarely invaded their home, but tonight it entered draped on Abe’s shoulders and spread out to cover every inch of the duplex. Glitsky, seeking comfort where he could, opened the number one forbidden food item in the house of a heart attack victim—a can of Spam—and fried it as patties with three eggs. Treya started to say something—about the job, about Spam, his health, retiring again—but Abe’s excessive politeness drove her to a frigid kiss good night, then to their bedroom, where she turned off the lights and closed the door after her.
Glitsky washed and dried his dishes. Sitting in the living room under his reading light, he didn’t so much as pick up a book.
The silence in the home felt like a physical presence.
At 9:23, he punched Hal Chase’s number into his cell phone. If nothing else, he told himself, he wanted to make sure Hardy’s ex-client was alive. Hal picked up on the second ring, and the two men said their hellos. Glitsky apologized for calling so late.
“No worries. We’re just sitting up talking, having some wine.”
“You and your mom?”
“No. Patti and me. Mom and Warren both left today. And no offense, but not a minute too soon, if you know what I mean. I’m so ready to get back to real life.”
“Are you going back to work?”
“Maybe not. I mean real life outside of work. My kids. Patti.”
“I’m glad for you. Listen, that’s part of the reason I called. I tried reaching Patti earlier to follow up on a few things—just routine bookkeeping—and I couldn’t reach her on her cell phone.”
“No, you wouldn’t have,” Hal said. “She lost it on Saturday.”
“Ah.”
“It’s a drag, but I’m sure it’ll turn up. She probably just put it down someplace and forgot, what with all the chaos this weekend.”
“Chaos?”
“She was over here, helping out. Mom was at the end of her rope, and Warren . . . well, you know Warren. So Patti volunteered to lend a hand and wound up staying the weekend.” Glitsky could hear that Hal said the next for her benefit. “This is what we call a good woman. Patti plus Warren plus Mom equals let the good times roll.”
Abe heard Patti’s laugh, heard her say, “Better times if Mom goes to a movie.”
“When was that? This movie?” Abe asked.
“Saturday night. Mom was driving everybody nuts, so they sent her to a movie. Evidently, it made for a better night. But what is it you wanted to talk to Patti about?”
“Actually, it’s you, too.” Abe was riffing blindly, since he’d just heard that Patti Orosco apparently had an alibi and a witness—Warren—on Saturday night.
Which meant . . . what?
He all but stammered, “I just wanted to personally follow up how you’re doing with the whole Adam Foster thing.”
“Still in a little shock,” Hal said. “But not really surprised. On the other hand, the son of a bitch got me out of jail. I’ll probably get it all worked out someday. Maybe I’ll go to the counseling you and I were talking about. Get so I can put it all someplace. It would be nice to have some of it make sense, but I think that might take awhile.”
Abe heard Patti comment in the background and asked, “What did she say?”
“She said,” Hal replied, “‘tell that mean Mr. Glitsky I don’t care what he thinks. I could never kill anybody.’”
? ? ?
GLITSKY WAS PADDLING upstream alone in a kayak. Dense jungle hung over the water, and the hanging vines and foliage swiped at his face with regularity. He had both hands on the oar and couldn’t wipe any of the stuff away. A helicopter’s rotor sounded behind him, coming up low and fast, and he shored the kayak, coming up on the muddy bank. He ran up the steep and slippery trail as the helicopter got louder. Finally, he got some traction and forced himself up through the waist-high brambles, pushing them aside. They were following him on the main trail, but a smaller path broke off to his right. He took it and broke into a jog but almost immediately tripped on a log across the path. Except, turning, he saw it was not a log but a body . . . a woman’s body.
With a terrified yell, he sat upright.
Treya woke and put her arms around him, holding him. “It’s okay. You’re all right. It was just a dream.”
Glitsky gripped his chest with his right hand. His breath was coming in gulps. He felt his wife’s hand moving up and down over his back, her lips brushing his shoulder, shushing him as if he were a baby.
Closing his eyes, he let his body settle, his breathing slow down, forcing one deep breath, then another. He moved his right hand to cover Treya’s, gave it a small squeeze. “Sorry I woke you up.”
“It’s okay.” She kissed his shoulder again. “Bad one?”
He nodded. “I’m going to get up for a minute.”
“All right. If you need me, come and get me.”
“I will.”
He padded into the kitchen, ran cold water into his hands and drank some of it, then splashed the rest of it onto his face. Closing his eyes, he let his weight settle on his hands, braced on either side of the sink. He summoned back the scenes from his dream, climbing the muddy trail, breaking to the right, pushing through the brambles.
Breaking right.
Opening his eyes, he could barely make out his reflection in the window over the sink, more a shadow within the shadows than a mirror image. He couldn’t see any of his specific features: the shape of his head more like an apparition, the guy from his dream.
The dream, coalescing into something tangible. A memory.
He had it.