Maybe.
But Hardy didn’t want to lead Jeff Elliot there. He had his own agenda and he figured he’d sure as hell earned the right to pursue it now. ‘I thought he’d told me a lie,’ Hardy said mildly, ‘and I wanted to talk to him about it.’
‘And had he?’
‘It was more a misunderstanding. It got straightened out.’ Deflection time. ‘You ever catch up with Kerry?’
‘Today’s agenda,’ Jeff promised, ‘if I get to it.’
‘What would stop you?’
‘One of the problems doing a daily column,’ Jeff said, ‘is you’ve got to write it. Kerry’s going to be impossible until Tuesday. Tomorrow I’m going for Thorne.’
‘How are you going to get to him?’
Hardy would bet Jeff’s eyes weren’t tired now – he was on a scent. ‘A little classic bait and switch. I’ve put in a call to FMC that I’d like an interview on the Pulgas story, which he’ll want to talk about. Once I’m in the door, I’ll ask different questions.’ He changed his tone. ‘I think we’re very close, Diz, really.’
‘I hope so,’ Hardy said, ‘but do me one favor, would you?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Don’t go alone.’
After they hung up, Hardy immediately put in a call to Glitsky’s pager. Jeff Elliot might hate him for it, but from Hardy’s perspective, this was now a police matter, and that’s where it was going.
In fact, even without Bree Beaumont, the case could be made that the arson at Hardy’s house, if it had been started by the same people who dumped the MTBE, was related to a San Francisco homicide, and therefore in Glitsky’s domain. Even though the Pulgas Water Temple was in San Mateo County, it was city property and Glitsky could assert at least dual jurisdiction – he had authority to investigate the death of the middle-aged hiker who’d been killed there yesterday.
And now, with the new information Hardy could supply from his talk with Jeff Elliot, that investigation might lead him to Baxter Thorne, and perhaps all the way back to Bree.
Waiting for Glitsky’s call, he got up from the desk, stretched, and came around front to throw a round of darts. But he didn’t retrieve any of them. Instead, he walked to the window and looked down on to Sutter Street, then returned to his chair and pulled his collections of paper up closer to him.
Now that he knew he was looking for something specific – evidence of any relationship between FMC and Bree – he thought he might have a better chance of seeing it.
But the telephone rang.
‘Yo.’
‘Get a earphone, some kind of beeper, something, would you? I’ve been calling all over town trying to run you down.’
‘I’ve been here at my office. And I called you, remember?’
‘Yeah, well, I couldn’t imagine you’d be working on a Sunday so I didn’t think of there.’
Hardy ignored the bad attitude. Abe had gone to a murder scene and had spent the last several hours there. It was understandable that he was in a surly mood. ‘OK, so now we’re talking. You interested in what I called about? You will be.’
‘Not as much as why I want to talk to you.’
Glitsky’s tone wasn’t getting any better.
‘What?’ Hardy asked.
‘The cop who got shot.’
It suddenly hit him. If Glitsky needed to reach him on that matter, there could only be one reason. His stomach went hollow in a rash. ‘Phil Canetta.’
His friend’s voice was grim. ‘You heard it here first.’
‘Where are you?’
Glitsky told him.
25
Hardy was in the Muir Loop, just inside the Presidio. He’d driven through the urban forest many times before, and in his memory it was serene and lovely, a two-lane road overhung with boughs, winding through an expansive eucalyptus glade.
But today in the late afternoon it seemed that menace dripped from every branch. With the dense fog, visibility was no greater than fifty feet. He crept along at fifteen miles per hour, squinting into the nothingness. There were no curbs on the street here, no street lights, and twice he felt his tires leave the asphalt.
At last Hardy got a glimpse of some parked vehicles and slowed down even more. With the fog, the scene was etched in stark relief- the outlines of three squad cars, a couple of vans, some news trucks by now, the unmarked cars of inspectors. He pulled in behind the line of them, zipped up his jacket, and tried to pick Glitsky out of the milling group of spectral figures.
The lieutenant was at the back door of one of the vans, and as he got closer, Hardy recognized Glitsky’s companion – John Strout, the lanky, drawling coroner for the city and county. He was nearly on them before Glitsky noticed.
‘John, you know Dismas Hardy.’
‘Sure do.’ Strout had worked with Hardy before and testified at several of his trials. That Hardy was now a defense attorney made it odd that he was at this crime scene, at this stage, but Strout had been around the block many times, and very little surprised him. ‘How you doin’, Diz?‘ He extended his hand and Hardy took it.
‘I’ve been better,’ Hardy admitted. ‘It’s been a long day.’
Strout was his usual laconic self. ‘Wish I could say the same for our victim here. His day only lasted a couple of hours. I reckon, given the choice, I’d go for long.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Glitsky jerked a thumb. ‘Hardy’s house caught fire this morning.’
‘Not by itself,’ Hardy said sharply.
Strout caught something between the two men. ‘There some connection with that and this?’
Glitsky gave Hardy a shut-up look and said he wouldn’t rule it out, there was some possibility, but they had a ways to go on this one first, on Phil Canetta. He didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Hardy got Glitsky’s message – the relationship between Canetta’s murder and Bree’s, to say nothing of Hardy’s house – wasn’t going to be part of the public debate. Not yet. It was not even immediately clear that Glitsky was overtly, officially pursuing the Griffin parallels.
‘So what did go down here?’ Hardy asked.
Strout took his boot off the van’s bumper, looked across the street, said, ‘Reckon they’re close enough,’ and headed out. Hardy and Glitsky followed.
The car had all four of its doors open. Strout walked around off the fringe of the road to the driver’s door, but Glitsky touched Hardy’s arm and the two of them stayed in the street, on the passenger side. They could see inside clearly enough in any event, and just as clearly, Glitsky wanted a private ear.
But the first sight of Canetta was more bad news. He was dressed as he’d been at Freeman’s last night, the last time Hardy had seen him. There was no way now that Hardy could pretend that his relationship to Canetta wasn’t relevant to Glitsky’s investigation, and that in turn was going to have to lead to further revelations, none of them even remotely pleasant.
The body was slumped against the back of the seat, canted slightly to its left. Strout spoke in the professorial drawl he adopted when reciting undisputed facts on the witness stand. Today, though, Hardy found the impersonal tone unsettling.
‘You can see if you lift that right arm’ – he was doing it – ‘ – rigor’s let up enough now – that the second bullet…’
‘The second bullet?’ Hardy asked quietly.
Glitsky nodded grimly. ‘He wasn’t shot here. First one was in the chest. He was facing the shooter.’
Hardy heard Strout over their conversation. ‘… probably fragmented into some ribs and ripped the heart into pieces…’
He shut that out and went back to Abe. ‘So you’re saying he was carried into the car and driven here?’
‘And pushed over to make it look like he drove out on his own. I’m not just saying it. That’s what happened.’
‘But why would somebody…?’
‘Because this is what Griffin looked like and they got away with that. Turned out, I’d say it was a bad idea.’