The Motive (35 page)

“Nope. Still here.”

A pause. “Are you all right?”

“First day of trial.”

“I hear you. How’d it go?”

“You can flip on the light if you want. I’m not coming up with anything. It went okay, I think. I hope. I even got a little bonus from Strout’s testimony, so maybe I should declare victory and go home.”

But Roake didn’t turn on the room lights. Her silhouette leaned against the doorpost, arms crossed over her chest. “Except?”

“Except…I don’t know. I was waiting for a lightning bolt or something.”

“To illuminate the darkness?”

“Right, but not happening.”

“It’s the first day,” Roake said. “It’s too soon. It never happens on the first day.”

“You’re probably right,” Hardy admitted. “I just thought it might this time.”

“And why would that be?”

“Because Catherine didn’t…” He stopped.

“Didn’t what?”

“That’s it.”

“Okay, I give up. What?”

“I told her she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life in jail. Spontaneously. That I wouldn’t let that happen.”

Silent, Roake shifted at the doorpost.

“I don’t think she did it, Gina. That’s why I said that. She didn’t do it.”

But Gina had been in more than a few trials herself. “Well, you’d better defend her as though you think she did.”

“Sure. Of course. That’s about all I’ve been thinking about all these months. How to get her off.”

“There you go.”

“But it’s all been strategy. Get the jury to go for murder/suicide. Play up the harassment angle with Cuneo. Hammer the weak evidence.”

“Right. All of the above.”

“But the bottom line is, somebody else did it.”

She snorted. “The famous other dude.”

“No, not him. A specific human being that I’ve stopped trying to find.”

Roake was silent for a long moment. “A little free advice?”

“Sure. Always.”

“Defend her as if you believed with all your heart that she’s guilty as hell. You’ll feel better later. I promise.”

But driving home, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. So basic, so simple and yet he’d been ignoring it for months, lost to strategy and the other minutiae of trial preparation. If Catherine didn’t kill them, someone else did. He had to get that message into the courtroom, in front of the jurors. In his career, he’d found nothing else that approached an alternative suspect as a vehicle for doubt. It struck him that Glitsky’s failure to get an alternative lead to pursue—another plausible suspect—had de-railed him from any kind of reliance on the “soddit,” or “some other dude did it,” defense. He never had come back to it, and he should have, because in this case some other dude
had
done it.

It wasn’t his client. It wasn’t Catherine. Somehow, from the earliest weeks, and without any overt admission or even discussion of the question of her objective guilt, Hardy had become certain of that. This was a woman he’d known as a girl, whom he’d loved. They’d met nearly every day for months and months now, and even with all the life changes for both of them, every instinct he had told him that Catherine was the same person she’d been before. He’d been with her when she sobbed her way through
The Sound of Music.
One time the two of them had rescued a rabbit that had been hit by a car. She’d been a candy striper at Sequoia Hospital because she wanted to help people who were in pain. This woman did not plan and execute a cold-blooded killing of her father-in-law and his girlfriend and then set the house on fire. It just did not happen. He couldn’t accept the thought of it as any kind of reality.

Every night as he sought parking near his home he would drive up Geary and turn north on 34th Avenue, the block where he lived. He never knew—once or twice a year he’d find a spot. His house was a two-story, stand-alone Victorian wedged between two four-story apartment buildings. With a postage-stamp lawn and a white picket fence in front, and dwarfed by its neighbors, it projected a quaintness and vulnerability that, to Hardy, gave it great curb appeal. Not that he’d ever consider selling it. He’d
owned the place for more than thirty years, since just after his divorce from Jane, and now he’d raised his family here. He felt that its boards were as much a part of who he was as were his own bones.

And tonight—a sign from the heaven he didn’t really believe in—twenty feet of unoccupied curb space lay exposed directly in front of his gate. Automatically assigning to the vision the status of mirage, he almost drove right by it before he hit his brakes and backed in.

He checked his watch, saw with some surprise that it was ten after nine, realized that he hadn’t eaten since his lunchtime lamburger. In his home, welcoming lights were on in the living room and over the small front porch. When he got out of the car, he smelled oak logs burning and looked up to see a clean plume of white coming out of the chimney.

Home.

Cuneo didn’t hear the telephone ring because he was playing his drums along with “Wipeout” turned up loud. He had the CD on repeat and lost track of how many times he’d heard the distinctive hyena laugh at the beginning of the track. The song was a workout, essentially three minutes of fast timekeeping punctuated by solos on the tom-toms. Midway his sixth or seventh time through the tune, Cuneo abruptly stopped. Shirtless, shoeless, wearing only his gray sweatpants, he sat on the stool, breathing heavily. Sweat streaked his torso, ran down his face, beads of it dropping to the floor.

In the kitchen, he grabbed a can of beer, popped the top and drank half of it off in a gulp. Noticing the blinking light on his phone, he crossed over to it and pressed the button.

“Dan? Dan, you there? Pick up if you’re there, would you. It’s Chris Rosen. Okay, you’re not there. Call me when you get in. Anytime. I’m up late.”

Cuneo finished his beer, went in to take a shower, came out afterward wrapped in a towel. Armed with another cold one, he sat at his kitchen table and punched up Rosen’s numbers. “Hey, it’s me. You called.”

“Yeah, I did. I just wanted to make sure you were still cool about this Glitsky thing.”

“Totally.”

“I mean, today, earlier…”

“It just pissed me off, that’s all. It still does. But what am I gonna do?”

“Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. What you’re going to do.”

“Nothing. That’s what you said, right?”

“It’s what I said, yes, but I’ve been reconsidering. Maybe we can spin this sexual thing back at them. I mean, everybody already believes Hardy’s poking her, right? So she’s the loose one, she’s easy, get it?” Rosen gave Cuneo a moment to let the idea sink in. “I mean, isn’t she the kind of woman who would have made the first move? We didn’t want to bring it up before because, well, I mean, what would be the point? Try her on the evidence, not on innuendo or her personal habits. More professional. Blah blah blah. We didn’t want to embarrass her. But once they introduce the whole question, the jury needs to hear the truth. I mean, only if it is the truth, of course—I’m not trying to put words into your mouth. But if she did come on to you first, and you rejected her…it’s your word against hers. And you’re a cop with an unblemished record and she’s a murder suspect. If we bring it up first as soon as I get you on the stand…you know what I’m saying?”

Cuneo brought the ice-cold can of beer to his lips. His internal motor suddenly shifted into a higher gear, accelerating now on the straightaway instead of straining up a steep grade. He’d never done anything to harass Catherine Hanover. He knew it. Whatever it was had been her imagination and her lies. Not him. He was sure of that.

Let’s see how she liked it.

For the first couple of Hardy’s murder trials, Frannie had tried to have some kind of dinner waiting for him when he got home. She went to some lengths to try to time his arrival at home to coincide with dinner being done so that they could sit down as a family together—the sacred ritual, especially when the kids had been younger. But the effort turned out to be more a source of frustration than anything else. Try as he might, Hardy couldn’t predict when he’d get home with any regularity. It was another of the many
things in their daily lives that was out of their control. Aspects not as ideal as they had once imagined it, and yet were part and parcel of this constantly evolving thing called a marriage. Tonight, as Hardy stood at the stove and Frannie, in jeans and a white sweater and tennis shoes, sat on the kitchen counter with her ankles crossed, watching him, neither of them remembered the growing pains of the dinner issue that had led them here. Hardy was in trial, so he was responsible for his own meals. That was the deal because it was the only thing that made any sense.

From Frannie’s perspective, the best thing about Hardy’s cooking was that it was all one-pot—or, more specifically, one-pan. He never messed up the kitchen, or created a sinkful of dishes. This was because he was ge-netically predisposed to cook everything he ate in the ten-inch, gleaming-black cast-iron frying pan that had been the one item he’d taken from his parents’ house when he’d gone away to college. Ignoring his own admonition to keep the iron from the barest kiss of water lest it rust, she noticed that he was steaming rice as the basis of his current masterpiece, covering the pan with a wok lid that was slightly too small.

Talking about the usual daily kid and home trivia, inter-spersed with trial talk, and then some more trial talk, and once in a while a word about the trial, she’d watched him add a can of tuna to the rice, then a lot of pepper and salt, a few shakes of dried onions, a small jar of pimentos, a spoonful of mayonnaise, some green olives, a shot of tequila. Finally, she could take it no more. “What are you making?” she said.

He half turned. “I haven’t named it yet. I could make you immortal and call it ‘Frannie’s Delight’ or something if you want.”

“Let’s go with ‘something.’
Now
what are you putting in there?”

“Anchovy sauce.”

“Since when do we have anchovy sauce?”

“Since I bought it. Last summer I think. Maybe two summers ago.”

“What does it taste like?”

“I don’t know. I just opened it.”

“And yet you just poured about a quarter cup of it into what you’re making?”

“It’s the wild man in me.”

“You’ve never even really tasted it?”

“Nope. Not until just…” Hardy put a dab on his finger, brought it to his mouth. “Now.”

“Well? What?”

“Primarily,” he said, “it smacks of anchovy.” Hardy dipped a spoon and tasted the cooking mixture. “Close. We’re very close.” He opened the refrigerator, nosing around, moving a few items.

“I know,” she said, teasing, coming over next to him. “Banana yogurt.”

“Good idea, but maybe not.” He closed the refrigerator and opened the cupboard, from which he pulled down a large bottle of Tabasco sauce. “When in doubt,” he said, and shook it vigorously several times over his concoction. He then replaced the cover. “And now, simmer gently.”

“Are you taking a conversation break while you eat this,” she said, “or do you have more work?”

“If you’re offering to sit with me if I don’t open binders, I’ll take a break.”

She put a hand on his arm and looked up at him. “We’re okay, right?”

“Perfect.” He leaned down and kissed her. “We’re perfect,” he said.

A
rson inspector Arnie Becker took the oath and sat down in the witness box. In a sport coat and dark blue tie over a light blue shirt, he looked very much the professional, completely at home in the courtroom. He canted forward slightly, and from Hardy’s perspective, this made him appear perhaps eager. But this was neither a good nor a bad thing.

Chris Rosen stood and took a few steps forward around his table, until he was close to the center of the courtroom. After establishing Becker’s credentials and general experience, the prosecutor began to get specific. “Inspector Becker, in general, can you describe your duties to the court?”

“Yes, sir. In the simplest terms, I am responsible for determining the cause of fires. Basically where and how they started. If there’s a determination that it’s a case of arson—that is, a fire that’s deliberately set—then my duties extend to other aspects of the crime as well. Who might have set the fire, the development of forensic evidence from sifting the scene, that kind of thing.”