So Paul was happy to accompany Abe to the Hall at seven this Sunday night. Glitsky left him downstairs at the lab, then went up to his office. Checking Damon Kerry’s fingerprints against all the others found at Bree’s apartment was going to take Ghattas some time and Glitsky had a slew of his own work now to move on.
The litany of information that Hardy had recited earlier in the evening had been deeply disturbing, mostly because Glitsky hadn’t known any of it. And as head of homicide, to say nothing of being Hardy’s best friend, he should have. Batavia and Coleman weren’t brain dead by any means, and yet somehow between them they’d missed getting any kind of a toehold in this case.
He was half tempted to arrest Hardy for what he’d withheld from him just on general principles, for not mentioning diddly squat about what he’d found, what he had been doing. Like, he had been working with Canetta. He’d made the connection to Griffin. He’d talked with Valens this morning when neither of Glitsky’s inspectors could locate the campaign manager. Now he had Baxter Thorne, who had possibly been at least the brains behind dumping the MTBE into the Crystal Springs Reservoir and, more relevantly, had killed a man in Glitsky’s jurisdiction in the process.
But for all Hardy did know, Glitsky realized, he had a blind spot, and that was Ron Beaumont. It was a common truth in homicide that the spouse did it, and in spite of all the activity surrounding Bree’s oil interests, Ron still looked pretty good to Glitsky. He had fled the scene, using multiple identities. Judging from the bedrooms in the penthouse, he and Bree hadn’t been intimate recently, and since she was pregnant, this provided a pretty solid motive.
Glitsky hated to give the DA the satisfaction, but he could no longer ignore Ron as a suspect. In fact, from his perspective, the best suspect.
Abruptly, he sat up in his chair, coming to the unpleasant realization that his friend was still holding out on him – otherwise Ron would be on Hardy’s own short list, too. He would have to be. Therefore, Hardy knew something more and he wasn’t telling. He hadn’t told Glitsky even as he had pretended to bare his soul a couple of hours before, when they’d planned to meet again down here when Hardy got his belongings together.
Now Glitsky was in a slow burn, thinking that by God, friend or no friend he should arrest the duplicitous bastard when he got back down here after all. He started punching Hardy’s office number into his desk phone, give him an earful if he was still there, but he heard footsteps out in the hallway and stopped, replacing the receiver.
A minute later, Inspector Leon Timms, the crime scene specialist from Canetta’s murder, was in his doorway. ‘You asked me to put a rush on the ballistics check, Abe. Can you believe it? There’s somebody in at the lab.’
‘Paul Ghattas,’ Abe replied. ‘I dragged him down from his house. Fingerprints.’
‘Fingerprints?’ In spite of their exalted presence in books and movies, Timms knew that in real life, fingerprints were rarely a factor in police work. But he merely shrugged – if the lieutenant wanted to check prints, he was welcome to. ‘He ran the ballistics for me. The guy’s a one-man shop down there.’
This was good to hear about a man whose job he had saved, but Glitsky had his sights elsewhere. ‘So what did he find?’
Timms nodded. ‘Same shooter. Griffin’s gun. For sure.’
When Hardy arrived, he was happy but not surprised to learn that Glitsky’s surmise about Griffin’s gun was correct. He wasn’t as happy when his friend got up, closed the door to his office, and asked him what he knew about Ron Beaumont that he wasn’t telling.
‘What do you mean?’ But that effort at deflection went about as far as Hardy had imagined it would – nowhere.
Glitsky was propped on the corner of his own desk, hovering a foot or two over where Hardy sat in his hard chair, pressed back against the office wall. As Glitsky intended, this posture made Hardy uncomfortable. ‘What do I mean?’ he repeated with an edge. ‘Let’s see if I can explain it. You know the whereabouts and most of the life history of everybody who’s even remotely involved in the death of Bree Beaumont. You discover that Carl Griffin’s death is probably connected, too. And today Canetta makes that pretty much a certainty. We’ve got four or five suspects and no righteous alibis for any of them, but you don’t appear to have any suspicion at all about the one I feel the best about. If you’re keeping score here, that would be Ron.’ Glitsky had his arms folded, his game face on, and it wasn’t any kind of an act. The eyes were unyielding. He wasn’t going to be breaking out the peanuts in his desk drawer for a little philosophical chat.
Hardy sucked air and held it in, then let it out in a rush. ‘You won’t like it.’
‘I didn’t expect I would.’ Glitsky waited through another pause.
‘I’m in this for his kids.’
The eyes, so lately flat, narrowed. Glitsky’s nose flared and the scar in his lips went white. He took a breath or two and when he finally spoke, it was in a terrifyingly controlled voice. ‘You’ve seen him? You’re representing him?’
Hardy knew that any attempt to finesse this would only infuriate Abe more. ‘I’ve seen him once. Friday night, before things had gotten anywhere near here.’
‘So where was this?’
‘The Airport Hilton.’
‘So he was leaving town? Has he left?’
‘No. Neither. He was ready to if he had to. That was all.’
‘That was all. That’s nice. And then somehow you decided it wasn’t important to let me know about any of this?’
‘No. I never made that decision. You were specifically not looking for Ron at that point.’
‘Well, I am now. Where is he?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘My ass.’
Hardy shrugged. ‘I’m not lying to you. I haven’t ever lied to you, Abe. I’ve omitted what you didn’t need to know.’
‘Well thank you so much.’ Glitsky made a face of disgust, his voice now rising in indignation. ‘How about if that’s not your decision to make? How about if it’s my job to do this, not some hobby I can pick up and lay down when the mood strikes me? That ever occur to you, Diz? You ever think about any of this?’
But Hardy wasn’t about to go begging for mercy or forgiveness. He’d done what he felt he’d had to do. He believed it was defensible. ‘Look. Ron called me last night. The answering machine is still in my office with the message on it. You can come listen to it anytime you want. I don’t know where he is. or how to reach him and it pisses me off just a bit myself.’
‘But it’s not your job, Diz.’
‘Don’t kid yourself, Abe. It’s a hell of a lot more than my job. First it’s my wife, then my house; next it’s maybe me, my life. If I had even the smallest suspicion any of this was Ron, you think I’d gamble all of that? You don’t think I’d give him up to you? Hell, I’d lead the parade.’
‘Not if he was your client.’
Hardy lowered his own voice. ‘He’s not it, Abe. You’ve known that all along. You go after him, you’re barking up the wrong tree.’
‘Yeah, but that’s what I do, bark up trees. Things fall out, I pick ’em up, and maybe it points me to another one.‘
‘Maybe it doesn’t.’ Hardy came forward in his chair. ‘There isn’t time, Abe.’
Glitsky glared, very little of the fury gone. After a couple of seconds, he stood up, walked back to the door, opened it, and left the room.
He was standing at the back windows of the homicide detail, arms folded, looking out through the black fog to the jail across the way.
Hardy came out of Abe’s office and walked up behind his friend. ‘I’ll tell you everything I can,’ he said to his back, ‘but there’s some things I can’t.’