He grabbed at it-Hardy.
"What's the word?" he asked.
On the following Tuesday morning, Hardy sat in the Police Commissioner's Hearing Room, kitty-corner from Marlene Ash's place at the podium. He raised his head and saw the clouds scudding by outside and thought them somehow fitting. It was going to be a cold spring, probably a cold summer. He was going to take a sabbatical for a couple of months after the school year ended, rent an RV with Frannie and the kids, drive all the way to Alaska and back, camping. He was going to fish and hike and take some time, because you never knew how much you were going to have. Things could end abruptly. He needed to think about that, to do something about it.
"I'm sorry. What was the question again?"
"The events that led to Lieutenant Glitsky's presence at Mr. Bhutan's apartment."
"Okay." He spoke directly to the grand jurors assembled before him. "As I've said and as Ms. Ash has explained, I'd been working independently but in a parallel arrangement with the district attorney on elements of the Portola homicides. I had obtained access to some documents that Mr. Markham had written, and following up on those, asked Lieutenant Glitsky to join me. In the course of the morning, we spoke to Mike Andreotti, the administrator at Portola, and then the Parnassus corporate counsel, Patrick Foley.
"Lieutenant Glitsky thought we had enough information to obtain a search warrant for Dr. Ross's house-specifically, he wanted to confiscate his clothing and deliver it to the police lab to check for trace amounts of Mrs. Markham's blood, which-as I understand it-allegedly did turn up on one of his suits. But Glitsky was unable to obtain a warrant with the information we had.
"At that time, Lieutenant Glitsky returned to his duties as chief of homicide. He couldn't lawfully pursue Dr. Ross without more. I was on my own for the rest of the day. During our talk with Mr. Andreotti, I had conceived the notion that Dr. Ross may also have been at Portola and had a hand in the homicides on what we'd been calling Dr. Kensing's list-terminal patients who had unexpectedly died there in the past year or so. Another suspect for those homicides was a nurse at Portola named Rajan Bhutan. Mr. Bhutan appeared to have been the only person with opportunities for these multiple deaths, and with a reason to have killed them-euthanasia. His wife died several years ago after a long illness, and inspectors had noted that for a nurse he appeared suspiciously oversensitive to suffering. The police had interviewed Bhutan, but the lieutenant and I agreed that I should do another interview. Perhaps I would be less threatening since I was not a police officer.
"In any event, I asked Glitsky if I could talk to him and he gave me his permission and Mr. Bhutan's home address and phone number. I went to Bhutan's house after work. As I hoped, he finally voiced suspicions about Dr. Ross. He also admitted to a very great fear that the police would try to blame him for the murders. It became clear that Dr. Ross had been at Portola quite frequently, and at least on several other dates when the homicides were suspected to have occurred.
"At that point, I thought it might be worthwhile to try and force Dr. Ross's hand. Because of some other information we'd gathered, I suspected he had large amounts of cash on hand at his house. I enlisted Mr. Bhutan's aid to pretend to blackmail him, to see if we could lure him out and make him come to us."
Reliving it, Hardy now hung his head, ran a hand over his brow. "In hindsight, this was probably a mistake. I should have simply tape-recorded Mr. Bhutan's original phone call, which would probably have been enough for Judge Chomorro to sign a search warrant. But I didn't do that. Instead, Mr. Bhutan made the call. When it seemed to work, I called Lieutenant Glitsky, who arrived there with Inspectors Bracco and Fisk within about a half hour.
"I want to add that both Lieutenant Glitsky and the other inspectors were upset with and vehemently opposed to my plan. The lieutenant actually predicted that Dr. Ross, if guilty, would become unpredictable and violent. He was very unwilling to involve a nonprofessional such as Mr. Bhutan in such a situation. Nevertheless, since events had already been set in motion, and since Mr. Bhutan was not only willing but eager to participate, we went ahead. There seemed no way to halt events without ruining whatever chance remained to force Ross's hand.
"So Lieutenant Glitsky and I waited in the darkened bedroom, just off the kitchen, while Inspectors Bracco and Fisk were stationed in their car around the corner with instructions to come running when the lights went on and off."
He shrugged miserably. "The plan seemed reasonable and not excessively risky. But I did not contemplate that Dr. Ross would act so quickly. In fact, had Mr. Bhutan not found a way to mention the gun out loud without giving away our presence, and had Lieutenant Glitsky not acted so quickly, though at great cost to himself, Mr. Bhutan might have been killed."
A week later, after hours, coming out of a client conference in the solarium in Freeman's office, Hardy was surprised by the appearance of Harlen Fisk, waiting in an awkward stance by Phyllis's receptionist station. The chubby, fresh-faced inspector looked not much older than twenty. He seemed uncomfortable, nearly starting at the sight of Hardy, then bustling over to shake his hand.
"I just wanted to tell you," he said, after they'd gone up to Hardy's office, "that I'm going to be leaving the department. I'm really not cut out to be a cop, not the way Darrel is anyway, or the lieutenant. I don't know if you heard, but Darrel's starting over, in a uniform again, with motorcycles. My aunt's offered to find me something in her office, but I'm not going to go that way. People seem to resent it somehow."
"That's a good call," Hardy said.
"Anyway, I've got some friends with venture capital and they think I'd be valuable to them in some way. I'd like to give something like that a go. Be in business for myself. Be myself, in fact. You know what I mean."
Hardy, with no idea in the world why Fisk was telling him any of this, answered with a neutral smile. "Always a good idea. Is there anything I can do for you?"
"Well, you know," Fisk sighed, "I had hoped that I'd be able to find something on the car that killed Mr. Markham. I know people always were laughing at me, but I really thought for sure there'd be some connection, and I'd show them. But you were the one person who took me seriously, who listened, took a look at my Dodge Dart list, even asked for a copy. I just wanted to let you know I appreciated it."
The kid was going to be a great politician, Hardy thought. Every connection was a chance to make a friend, make an impression, trade a favor. "I thought it might lead somewhere itself, Harlen."
"Well, that's the last thing. I wanted you to know that it didn't. I checked out every one of the twenty-three cars in the city. There were really only twenty. Three were nowhere to be found. I just thought you'd want to know how it ended."
"I appreciate it," Hardy said. "Your new company needs a lawyer, look me up."
"You do business law, too?"
"Sometimes. I'm not proud."
"Okay, well…" Fisk stuck out his hand. "Nice to have worked with you." At the door, he turned back one more time. "Nobody blames you, you know. In case you thought they did."
The trail led Hardy to one of the housing projects, apartment house boxes in the Western Addition-three-story blocks of concrete and stucco, once bright and now the color of piss where the graffiti didn't cover it. As he expected, nobody knew nothin'.