Sitting on the corner of Hardy’s desk, Glitsky made a swift decision and pulled the phone over. ‘Does it have the number there? St Catherine’s.’
It did, and when five minutes later he replaced the receiver, the lieutenant was close to actually smiling, the scar between his lips standing out white. ‘Everything should be that easy,’ he said. ‘Ron was with the priest all day. His kids. A couple of other people.’
‘That’s what it sounded like.’ Hardy feigned satisfaction, leaned back in the couch, and broke his own smile. ‘That’s great.’
‘It’s at least good.’ Glitsky didn’t skip a beat. ‘So that brings us,’ he said, ‘back to Baxter Thorne, who as you point out is one slick-’
He was interrupted by a knock on the door. Hardy got up to answer it. David Freeman stood in the hallway, hands in his pockets. ‘Five minutes are up,’ he said pointedly.
‘One more,’ Glitsky said.
Freeman looked at him, nodded, and came back to Hardy. ‘If nobody’s left down there when you make it back, don’t blame me.’
‘I’ll be right there. Promise.’
Freeman shrugged – he’d tried – and started back down the stairs. Hardy turned back to Abe. ‘You heard that,’ he said.
‘OK.’ Glitsky handed the paper bag he’d been carrying over to Hardy. ‘More stuff for your private collection. Photos from Griffin’s car, the back seat, and what they’d tagged earlier. Only the so-called significant stuff is inventoried, but you can check the photos. Canetta. Couple of interview transcripts you might have missed.
‘Also, Kerry does have a Glock. It’s where he said it was and hasn’t been fired since it was last cleaned – my guess is maybe a year, maybe never. Of course, he wouldn’t have had to fire it if he pointed it convincingly enough.
‘Finally, I know you’re wanted down below, but here’s the short version on Thorne. You’re going to want to know, trust me.’ When he finished with the damning but completely unprovable information on the gasoline and one of Hardy’s elephants in Thorne’s coat pocket, Hardy asked if they had found any evidence of his connection to SKO, to the MTBE dump, or any other terrorist acts.
The answer was no, but Glitsky was pulling another warrant tomorrow, sending a couple of teams of search and cyber specialists back to the apartment and to the FMC offices. It was going to be the full press, with full phone-record followups and data searches for palimpsest disks, forensics teams.
‘Where are you getting the staff?’ Hardy asked. ‘I thought you had seven new homicides, no troops.’
‘I’m reassigning people,’ he said simply. They started back toward the stairway. ‘It’s a new management tool I’m working on, called do what your boss asks and see if it improves your life.’
‘I like it,’ Hardy said.
‘Me, too. I think it’s going to work. And in case it doesn’t,’ he said, ‘there’s always the FBI.’
As it turned out, in the Solarium no one had gone home, although Hardy’s return to the conference room didn’t occasion the warmest reception he’d ever encountered. Still, the guys finished the work and left the office, spreading out to deliver the bad news to Kerry, Valens, Pierce, Thorne, David Glenn. Everyone Hardy could think of.
After much debate, Hardy and Freeman decided to serve both Randall and Pratt with subpoenas as well. They would have to appear in Judge Braun’s court for Hardy’s hearing, and wouldn’t that just fry them?
He wasn’t sure he would call all of these people as witnesses – or even most of them. But he wanted to keep his options open, and the turns in this case had surprised him often enough already. He was damned if he was going to be taken unawares in court.
This strategy, though, wasn’t without some peril. The shotgun approach was an abuse of the subpoena power and might even earn Hardy a reprimand from the state bar, a contempt citation of his own, but he was beyond those considerations anymore. If his strategy failed, contempt would be the least of his problems.
And then, finally, at a little after nine, even Freeman packed up and went home, leaving him alone again up in his office, his pages spread out before him, his mind numbed by the gravity of his decisions, the impossibility of what he was considering.
If Ron’s got an alibi for Griffin, he didn’t kill Bree, did he?
Hardy’s own words to Glitsky came back to torment him. He’d used them earlier to convince himself, believing them absolutely. It was so logical that it had to be true – Griffin was investigating Bree’s death and Griffin had been killed. Same with Canetta. Therefore they were all, somehow, connected.
Except if they weren’t.
Except if Carl Griffin, in the course of poking into lives as he did, had discovered an unpleasant truth about the last documented man to have seen him alive – Baxter Thorne. And except if Phil Canetta, stumbling upon the Thorne/Valens arrangement after he’d left Hardy and Freeman on Saturday night, had gone alone after the glory – to deliver a cop killer to all the suits downtown in homicide. And he’d underestimated his man. Thorne.
A dangerous, decisive, quietly confident man of action, already armed with Griffin’s gun, his adrenalin high from torching Hardy’s house. Or had that been when he was feeling truly invincible, after he’d killed Canetta?
And that, of course, left Bree. And another killer entirely. David Glenn’s friends had begun to arrive. He said he wanted to help Hardy with 902, but he couldn’t just let him in to a tenant’s apartment. He could be fired for that. Why didn’t Hardy just come back with the lieutenant, with a warrant, as he had before?
But again, agonizingly, Hardy couldn’t come to Glitsky. And the reason was more personal, more compelling than anything else he was likely to encounter. It was Frannie.
If Rita Browning – the invisible Rita Browning – was another of Ron Beaumont’s credit card identities, if Griffin had discovered the Movado watch in 902 and not in Bree’s apartment after all…
Hardy could not let Glitsky get to Ron. There could be no arrest, no police interrogation. Because if Ron continued to deny any involvement in the murder – and there was little doubt that is what he would of – then Frannie would always believe him. Worse, she would also believe that the system had betrayed Ron. Her friend Abe had betrayed her.
And her husband, too.
So if Ron had killed Bree after all, Glitsky wouldn’t be any help – he couldn’t be any part of it.
Ron would have to say it himself. In front of Frannie. In open court.
Hardy had to leave here, go see his children, make sure Cassandra was safe. Slumped, nearly reclining on the couch, he held his right hand over his eyes, shielding them from the overheads. His left hand fell on the photos Glitsky had left with him – extreme close-ups of the items under the back seat of Carl Griffin’s car. Then there were the written forms – Canetta’s autopsy report, his car. Interviews, interrogations.
Forcing himself up, he carried all the stuff over to his desk and went down the hall to throw some water in his face. When he returned, he had a moment of indecision – there was no chance that he could analyse any significant portion of all this material. What was the point of even starting?
But this, he knew, was the devil.
So he began, but after a quick scan knew that he wasn’t equipped now to see anything in the photos of the junk, food wrappers, and French fries that had been under the back seat of Griffin’s car. He’d try again in the morning, but expected nothing. Instead, he turned to the tapes, putting one of the micro-cassettes into his hand-held machine.
He listened to an understandably impatient but finally cooperative Jim Pierce talking in his office with Vince Coleman – again. Next was Glitsky, Hardy, Kerry, and Valens from last night.