Guilt

The Judge smoothed his hands over the grain of his desk. 'Abe, this is a prominent man, not some lowlife from the projects, not that as a matter of law that makes any difference, of course. And you're telling me you didn't find out anything incriminating from the phone records?'

Glitsky more or less agreed, but tried to sweeten it by riffing around it for a couple of bars. Thomasino stopped him. 'I don't see this one, Abe.' The Judge straightened up in his chair, considering something, then decided to come out with it. 'You know, Abe, this business of coming to Superior Court when Muni turns you down is tricky. I know you've got good instincts; you might even be right. But what I see here, I don't have enough. Connor didn't either.'

'Judge…'

Thomasino held up his hand again. 'I understand you can't go back to Muni, not now. But you've got to get me a little more. If you find it, come by the house, I'm around all weekend. I'll sign off. But I need something I can point to. Do you even know where he was on the night in question?'

'He was killing Victor Trang.'

A face, the eyebrows. 'Okay. But what does he say?'

'He says he went to the driving range, then came back to his office and worked late.'

'Well, if he did that, maybe somebody saw him. Or didn't.'

'That may be.'

'Well, good luck,' the Judge said. 'Have a nice weekend.'

Glitsky was damned if he was going to find himself a picture of Mark Dooher and go trotting with it out to the city's driving ranges, showing it to employees and asking if they specifically remembered seeing him a week and a half before. If he thought that course of events would produce any results, he might have considered it, but he believed what he'd told Thomasino. Dooher had been killing Trang that night, not hitting golf balls.

But the bottom line was that he didn't have the signed warrant and couldn't go looking where he stood a chance of finding, so what the hell else was he going to do?

Pondering, he was standing in the downstairs lobby of the Hall, by the elevators, hands in his pockets, oblivious to the passing throngs checking out for the weekend.

'Too much lemon in your tea, Abe?' Amanda Jenkins, the Assistant DA who'd shared Levon Copes with him, had moved out of the flow of humanity and, amused, was looking up at him. 'That expression – I just sucked on a lemon – it's so you.'

'It so happens I did just suck on a lemon.' He held up the unsigned warrant. 'But what's really made my day is Thomasino's call on this.'

Jenkins snatched it away and scanned it quickly. 'This looks good to me. House, car, office, personal effects. What's the problem?'

'You'll notice the good Judge didn't sign it. My first choice for perp appears to be a pillar of the community, so he's got a higher probable cause threshold than lesser mortals.'

'Ah, democracy.'

'Ain't it grand? I don't have any evidence, so I can't get permission to look for evidence.'

'It's a beautiful system,' Jenkins agreed. 'So what do you have? You got anything? You must have something.'

Glitsky started to tell Amanda what he did have – his hunches, the settlement background, the discrepancy between Trang's women's story and Mark Dooher's, the hazy alibi, the bayonet that had mysteriously – and apparently recently – disappeared, and finally the one search warrant Thomasino had signed off on, for Dooher's phone records.

'They don't by any chance include a earphone, do they?'

'Yeah. But so what?'

Jenkins's normally stern visage cracked. Her eyes lit up with excitement, with the thrill of the chase. 'You got time to take five, get some coffee? All may not be lost.'

The downstairs cafeteria was nearly deserted, cavernous and echoing with the cleanup workers' efforts. Glitsky and Jenkins brought their paper cups over from the long stainless steel counter and were sitting down across from one another at one of the fold-up tables. Amanda was already rolling with it, explaining the new technological investigating-tool breakthrough that had been discovered as a by-product of the cellular phone network. 'You never heard of it,' she enthused, 'because I don't think anybody's ever used it to find out where someone was. Normally, they use it to track where somebody is, right now.'

She could see Glitsky still wasn't clear on the concept. 'Abe, you remember that big kidnap/ransom thing in Oakland last year? Okay, the kidnapper, he's calling the victim's family every five minutes, making ransom demands, changing the drop point, making sure there's no trail, the usual. So guess what? He's using his earphone, and one of our guys remembers an article in one of those magazines we all throw away. He gets a brainstorm. He calls the phone company, asks if there's any way they can tell, even roughly, where a cell call originates. You know how it works?'

'I'm listening.'

'Big metropolitan area like Oakland, there's maybe ten towers around the city – cells, hence the name. Clever, huh? And they work like a combination amplifier/receiver. If you're in your car, you move from one cell to the next and there's a record of it.'

'Okay.'

'But, and this is the cool part, within each cell there are also pie-shaped cones that pick up the signals. So this guy, the kidnapper, he's talking on the phone, calling again, yack, yack, yack. They figure out exactly which block he's driving around, and they nail him.'

Glitsky was nodding. Amanda was right. This, if true, was cool. 'But I don't see how it helps me here,' he said.

'I don't either, Abe. But Thomasino said he only needed a little more to get to probable cause, right? So maybe your perp was ten miles away when he said he was at the driving range, that kind of thing. Prove he lied. Hell, you've got the warrant for the phone records already. Might as well use it all up.'

Sheila told him what she'd done.

'Are you kidding me?! That son of a bitch! He came in here, lied to you, invaded our privacy? I'm calling Farrell, calling somebody. This is pure harassment. I'll have the bastard's badge!'

He threw his leaded crystal bourbon glass with all his might and it smashed into the bottom pane of one of the French doors, shattering glass all over the kitchen. 'That son of a bitch!'

Sheila was in a deep couch in her living room, crying. She was of a class and station that had grown up believing in authority. Sergeant Glitsky had represented that to her. And he had betrayed her, tricked her and used her to insult her husband. She had put her husband in jeopardy. She couldn't stop sobbing.

Mark came over and handed her a large glass of white wine and she held it with both hands. He sat down next to her. 'It's all right, Sheila. How could you know?'

She shook her head, mumbling through her tears, over and over: 'I should have known. I should have just called you.'

He put the palm of his hand under her glass and helped her raise it to her lips. She had to admit that it helped. She took another mouthful, the good cool wine.

She'd been getting back to a glass or two regularly lately and it hadn't caused her any ill-effects. The doctors nowadays were always so paranoid about alcohol. She should have started out taking their dire warnings with a grain of salt. This wasn't hurting her at all. In fact, it was helping.

She got her breathing back under control. 'The whole story didn't make much sense to me, Mark, but I just thought-'

'It's all right,' he repeated. 'There's no harm done. I didn't even have any damn bayonet.'

'I know. But I didn't remember.'

'I lost the damn thing on a camping trip five ten years ago, maybe longer. You don't remember?'

'But why would he think, the Sergeant…?'

Her husband shook his head. 'I have no idea. I knew Trang. Maybe I'm the most convenient warm body. I think that's how these guys work.' He reached out, laid a hand on her shoulder.

'So what happens now?' she asked timidly.