It was to Rigby. But Washington wasn’t through yet. ‘Sharron, Marian. You’re both elected officials. I’m just a layman in matters of the law, but this comes across as serious arrogance and the public seems to have a bad reaction to that particular trait. You might want to think about that.’
Hardy opened his eyes and for the second time in as many days had to take a minute to figure out where he was.
Down a floor, in the lobby of the Freeman Building, he put on a pot of coffee, then went in for a shower. In ten minutes, he was back in his office, dressed in his smoky clothes and drinking coffee from an oversized mug.
The fog remained. He put in a call to Erin, told her where he was, and spoke to the kids, who were polite and even solicitous. Was he all right? They missed him. He and Mom were coming to stay with them so they’d all be together at Grandma and Grandpa’s in two days, right? They really, really, really missed him and Frannie.
He believed them.
After he hung up, he went back to the couch and sat. His brief from the night before was ready to submit for typing downstairs, and he left it with the early morning staff at word processing, then took the stairs two at a time back to the work that waited for him.
The xeroxed pages of Griffin’s notebook.
Griffin had been working on a number of homicides at the time of his death. Snatches from each of them were scattered on each page - names, dates, addresses. Arrows for connections. Exclamation points. Phone numbers.
In his previous passes through the pages, whenever Hardy had run across a name that didn’t appear elsewhere in some other file on Bree Beaumont, he’d assumed it was from one of the other cases. It was tedious and inexact, but he had to eliminate on some criterion, and this had seemed as reasonable as any.
This morning, though, he resolved to read it all through again. Things had changed. And if Damon Kerry had a connection to Baxter Thorne that Griffin had been aware of, he wanted to know about it. Hardy hadn’t even heard of Thorne or FMC the last time he’d read the pages. Nor a lot else.
Carl had been shot on Monday, 5 October. Bree had died on the previous Tuesday, 29 September, so he started there. At least Carl tended to enter dates with some regularity.
It appeared that on day three of his investigation, 10 01, he’d slogged through the usual opening gambit of talking to people who lived in the deceased building. Suddenly the name O. or D. Chinn (or something in a smeared scrawl very much like it) popped up at him.
Hardy had assumed this was an Asian witness from one of Griffin’s other cases and hadn’t considered it at all, but now, suddenly, he remembered the superintendent in Bree’s building and consulted his own notes on his yellow pad. David Glenn. D. Chinn. Close enough.
But there wasn’t much Hardy recognized written under it. There was either a B or an R, then 805. A time? ‘NCD!!!’
Then, a new line. ‘Herit., TTH.!!!’ And a phone number.
Those damn three exclamation points – they clearly meant something significant, but Hardy for the life of him couldn’t figure out what NCD was. TTH could only mean Tuesday Thursday, but what, in turn, was that about?
Hardy checked his watch. Still too early, before eight o’clock, but he went to his desk and called the number next to ‘Herit. TTH!!!’ anyway.
It was a woman’s voice in a heavy Asian accent and Hardy nearly hung up, frustrated for even wasting this much time. This note must have referred to one of Griffin’s other cases after all. But Hardy heard out the recording. ‘Many thank you for calling Heritage Cleaning. Office hours are Monday to Friday, eight thirty to six. Please leave message and call back.’
‘And the case breaks wide open,’ Hardy muttered to himself as he hung up. ‘Now we know where Griffin did his laundry.’ He went back to the couch, to the notebook.
Still on 10 01, the inspector evidently spent part of the day talking to the crime scene and forensics people downtown. There were scribblings Hardy took to be about Strout, Timms, Glitsky. Then, further down, another maddening three exclamation points – ‘fab. wash,’ ‘r. stains!!!’
He shook his head, nearly getting all the way to amused at the prosaic truth. More laundry.
By Friday, Griffin was checking alibis. Apparently he had spoken to Pierce, JP, and perhaps his wife, CP. ‘Time checks?’ Evidently referring to Pierce’s alibi.
The weekend intervened.
Then on Monday, more alibi checking, this time with Kerry. And here Hardy consulted his own notes for corroboration. ‘SWA 1140, SD.’ Southwest Airlines to San Diego around noon. That checked. But what had Kerry done before being picked up to go to the airport? Griffin’s notes didn’t give a clue.
A few lines down the page, and apparently still under Kerry, there was another number: 902. If it were a date, it was over a month out of synch, so Hardy assumed it must be a time. And if it were a time, it would comport very closely with the hour of Bree’s death.
So what had Griffin discovered about Kerry’s whereabouts at nine o’clock? And why so precisely?
It had to be a phone call, Hardy reasoned, but where were the phone records? He flipped quickly through the few pages, but was sure he would have noticed them sooner if they’d been there, and sure enough, they weren’t.
He chewed on possibilities for a couple of minutes, then got up again, went to his desk, and picked up the phone.
‘Glitsky, homicide.’
‘Hardy, bon vivant, scholar, champion of the oppresse-’
‘What?’ Glitsky growled.
‘I’m guessing Kerry called Bree or vice versa on the morning she was killed.’
‘Great minds.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Kerry’s got both a residence and a cell phone. I checked already. I got a rush call in on both phone records this morning, to see if maybe he didn’t sleep in late like he said he did. I’m waiting for the fax.’
‘So what about Griffin? Did any phone records turn up under that back seat?’
‘Not yet. I stopped by the garage again coming in. They’d barely got it cleaned out, much less catalogued.’
‘But Griffin must have gotten the phone records, right? Don’t you guys do that?’
‘I would hope so,’ Glitsky said, ‘though I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.’
‘So where are they?’
‘They’d be with the stuff you have if he’d filed them.’
‘Uh huh. See if you can guess whether they are.’
Glitsky sighed. ‘His desk is cleaned out, Diz. It’s all somewhere. Stuff related to his cases supposedly got forwarded to the new teams.’
‘Maybe they were in one of the bags in the trunk, tagged already?’
‘Then they’d be downstairs in the evidence lockup’. Another sigh. ‘You think there’s some possible phone connection to Kerry?’
‘It’d be sweet if there was.’ Hardy hesitated. ‘I’m really starting to like the good candidate.’
‘I told you last night, I might even vote for him.’
‘That’s not how I meant “like.” ’
‘No,’ Glitsky said. ‘I know what you meant.’
After he hung up, Hardy went back to his couch and his notes. He had come now to the last full day of Griffin’s life, and under Sunday found what he’d been hoping for: ‘Box T, Embarc.2, 10/5, 830. Burn, or Bwn. $!! -??’
He had earlier assumed that this might be a reference to a post-office box in one of the highrises along the Embarcadero. Now he saw it in a different light. It wasn’t Box T. It was Bax T.
Baxter Thorne. As he read it now, Hardy realized that the note referred to an eight thirty a.m. meeting at Thorne’s Embarcadero office.
Hardy stared at the cryptic note. Here, finally, was Thorne connected to Bree in Griffin’s investigation. Had the inspector in fact gone to question Thorne on the morning of his death? Had they then taken a little drive?