Terrell tried to shrug it off. "Sure, but like I said, this shit happens all the time."
"You're right." Hardy pushed the door open, steeling himself against the cold. "You're right, it does."
A seven-year-old Matthew Witt smiled up in full color and perfect focus. Whoever had taken the school photos had done a good job, capturing the personality behind the impish face. Whatever constrictions had worked on Matt in his sterile home, they apparently hadn't defeated him. There was a real smile in the eyes, some kidlike sense of jauntiness – maybe he'd just said something smart to the photographer and was proud of himself. But it wasn't a wise-ass look – it was friendly, open. A nice little boy aiming to please.
David Freeman was in the shower in his apartment and Hardy slumped deep in an ancient red leather chair near one of the living room windows, trying and failing to tear himself away from Matt. There were lots of other pictures in the folder that he held on his lap, and he had already gone through quite a few when he go to the boy.
He had black hair, neatly combed and parted except for a cowlick. He was wearing a green-and-white-striped T-shirt with a soft collar, up on one side and down on the other like puppies' ears. There was a gap between his two front teeth. Freckles across the bridge of his nose. Long eyelashes. The beginning of a dimple. The laughing eyes were a deep green.
Hardy sat back, pulling at the skin on his face, staring without seeing anything out the window into the fog. He didn't know how much time had gone by when he felt a hand on his shoulder.
"There's nothing we can do about that."
Freeman, in a frayed terrycloth bathrobe, gave Hardy's shoulder another gentle shake. He was, at times surprisingly, perhaps sympathetic – the tone said so – but ultimately pragmatic. If you couldn't affect anything, if you couldn't act, then by Freeman's definition there was nothing to be done. Hardy didn't agree – it might not produce any tangible result but he thought you could at least grieve.
Barefoot, unshaven, his wet hair in a gray-and-brown mess, Freeman walked across his living room to the breakfast nook, where on a shining mahogany table he had spread his own working papers, legal pads, binders, boxes of cassette tapes. Currently working a trial, planning for a new one, cleaning up the loose ends and appeals of trials gone by – was this what Hardy's life was going to become? He got a glimpse of it from Frannie's perspective and wondered if by getting involved with David and Jennifer he was making a mistake.
Then he looked down at Matt. God… if Jennifer had killed him, even by accident, even if he'd just gotten in the way…
But what if it wasn't that, what if Jennifer were telling the truth? Then someone else was out there. Someone who needed to die and was walking around, letting Jennifer go through this hell, leaving Matt unavenged.
Hardy did believe in vengeance – in severe, purposeful vengeance. It was what had drawn him into police work, then into the prosecution business in the first place. But, and this way he knew he was becoming a lawyer, he now believed that before the vengeance he – personally – had to eliminate any reasonable doubt.
And this was what drove him now – not to sell his soul as a mouthpiece for some prosecution or defense posture, for some legal opinion, not to argue because he could prevail, but to uncover the truth of the matter, however it came out.
He put Matt's picture face down and went to the next one.
Freeman lived on the corner of Taylor and Pine, one steep block down from the peak of Nob Hill, a floor above one of the oldest and best French restaurants in the City. Freeman kept his own personal wine cellar in the restaurant and averaged perhaps ten meals there every month.
His own apartment was modest in size and conveniences – two bedrooms, living room, kitchen with eating nook. In spite of his income, the place resisted any not to modern technology. Freeman still used a rotary wall-mounted telephone in the kitchen, and whenever he played his classical music, which was the only kind he listened to, it was on long-playing 33a rpm records that he'd bought with his then brand new stereo system in the early sixties. The couches and chairs in the living room were comfortable, cracked old red leather; the coffee and end tables were of some dark wood with lion's claw feet. The lamps all had shades, and most of them were three-way.
His current trial had been continued – put on hold – until the following Monday because the prosecuting attorney had a toothache and needed to see the dentist. So he'd left a message at Sutter Street that Hardy should come up – it was only a six-block walk – to discuss some Jennifer Witt matters before the weekend.
The crime-scene shots had been in the file, of course, and Hardy knew there were people who turned to look at them first, before they did any reading. He wasn't one of them.
There were twenty-seven pictures of the room where the murders had been committed as the photo team had found it, although many were shots of essentially the same thing from a slightly different perspective. These photographs were, as usual, competently done. By design, they didn't strive for artful composition, but the focus was perfect, the color sharp, the angles inclusive.
There were also eight shots each of Larry and Matt, of the bodies and their wounds on the autopsy table.
Hardy and Freeman, separately, had gone through them all one by one. It was quiet work.
When they finished they spread out an even dozen of the crime-scene photos for a closer inspection together.
Both father and son had been shot one time each with a. 38 caliber automatic. The bullets, in common with the five that had been discovered in the clip later, had hollow points, common enough among people who had bought their weapons for home defense. Sometimes the argument went, you only got one shot off, and that shot needed to do as much damage as possible.
By this criteria, the bullets had done their job, Larry had been shot through the heart. The slug, at that close range, had exited through his back, and the core of the original bullet had imbedded itself in the drywall. There was a close-up of that section of the wall, and Hardy was surprised he had missed it completely while he'd been there, but then, he had not by that time been in his most objective state of mind.
The force of the shot had apparently knocked Larry backward onto the end of the bed, where he had rolled off onto the floor. He had come to rest on his right side, his life gone before he had hit the carpet, judging from the fact that there was no smearing of the bloodstains beneath him.
Neither Hardy nor Freeman wanted to view the pictures of Matt, who had been hit in the head. He evidently had been standing by the bathroom door. Last night, the bathroom had seemed antiseptic, but in these pictures the bathroom mirror was a shattered spider web, the walls dotted with red.
Putting the pictures aside, they moved on to the ATM, the discussion Hardy had had with Lightner, his tour of the Witt home, the Crane coincidence and Terrell's view of the Ned Hollis murder. Freeman, pacing the kitchen in his bathrobe, took it all in. He did not seem displeased. When Hardy had finished he acknowledged that he had been busy. "This isn't as bad as it looked yesterday. Of course, it may look worse tomorrow."
"I'm glad you said that last part. You wouldn't want it to look better two days in a row."
Freeman ignored him. "Still, our work is cut out for us. I had Phyllis wire the money over to our account, by the way. The initial retainer. It went through."
"Did you think it wouldn't?"
"Tell you the truth, like many other things about Jennifer, I just wasn't sure."
Hardy decided he wouldn't push it. "I thought I'd go talk to Jennifer again this morning, get some kind of line on Larry's work and her family that they never visited. I also want to find out about the last couple of months. That house showed no sign of anybody living there. I'd like to know if she ever went into the murder room after they cleaned it out."