A Plague of Secrets

17

Debra Schiff wasn’t the only person feeling some responsibility for setting events in motion that had apparently and very suddenly gotten out of control. At three A.M., Dismas Hardy still hadn’t gotten to sleep.

He’d come down for the first time after an hour’s tossing in bed, made himself a warm Ovaltine, gone into his front room, and rearranged the caravan of glass elephants that trekked across the mantel over his fireplace.

Sitting in his reading chair with the lights off, though, he’d convinced himself that really he had had no choice. All he’d done was send his own investigator team out to try to pry loose one of his client’s secrets. He would need to do that, to have that information, if he was going to help her in her defense.

Should it come to that.

Which-pretty obviously-was looking more probable every minute.

Just before Hunt had received the call from the police at Levon’s place and called Hardy with the news, he’d learned from his own employee Craig Chiurco that the same Levon Preslee that Hunt had already identified as a friend of Maya’s during their time at USF was the guy who’d been arrested with Vogler in the robbery they’d committed at about that same time.

Chiurco had gone out to Levon’s apartment in Potrero in the late afternoon, but no one had answered his knock-he might have already been dead. Chiurco was in the process of reporting back to Hunt, planning to track the potential witness down either later that same night or in the next day or so to question him, when the call had come in from Inspector Tallant with the news of Levon’s death.

As soon as Hardy heard this, it had immediately become clear that if Maya did not have an alibi-and of course no one knew even the approximate time of Levon’s murder-she was going to be even more squarely in the sights of Bracco and Schiff as a suspect not just in this latest crime, but with Vogler as well.

Part of Hardy wished that Wyatt hadn’t been so forthcoming with the police when they’d called him. But then again, what else was he supposed to do? They already had the message he’d left on Levon’s phone-that he was working for the lawyer who was representing Maya Townshend. He couldn’t very well deny that, and once the police recognized her name, along with any connection whatsoever to the dead man, she was going to assume a higher profile, and there was nothing at all he could do about that.

The Ovaltine finished, Hardy had gone back up to his bedroom and tossed for another hour and change, his mind ping-ponging willy-nilly between Maya and her husband and Jerry Glass, then Bracco and Schiff, and Glitsky and Zachary, and Wes Farrell and then back through the litany in a different order. Everybody either in trouble or making it, or both.

Until finally he got up again, grabbed a robe, and padded downstairs. The rain still fell heavily onto the skylight, drumming away. He went back up to the front of the house and settled himself down in his reading chair in the dark.

He couldn’t afford a sleepless night. He had a feeling he was going to get a call from his client in the very early A.M., was somewhat surprised that he hadn’t gotten one already. But maybe she didn’t know yet about Levon.

Or maybe she knew all too well.

And at this thought-the actual admission of it to himself as a possibility-all of Hardy’s random imaginings about the troubles of his friends or those making trouble for them coalesced into a tiny pinpoint of something that suddenly felt like a certainty.

Whether or not she was in fact a killer, he was sure that Maya was involved as some kind of active participant in all of this. In both the deaths of Dylan Vogler and of Levon Preslee.

And it was starting to seem that regardless of what Hardy chose to do, and however cooperative Maya was with the police, she could be arrested for both murders.

Still sleeping in his reading chair up at the front of his house, the rain and wind pounding at the bay window three feet from his right hand, Hardy never heard the telephone ring. And now suddenly here was his wife first touching his shoulder, then shaking him gently. “Dismas.” Opening his eyes, everything out of focus, he saw her standing there in a bathrobe, the receiver in her hand, concern writ large on her features. “Maya Townshend,” she whispered.

Straightening up, his neck cricked with a stabbing pain, it took him a few more seconds to get his bearings. All right, he was still downstairs, must’ve fallen asleep trying to figure…

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

Hardy cleared his throat. “No, of course not.” What the hell time was it anyway? He glanced outside, where the heavy storm clouds kept it looking like half-night. “This is just my precoffee voice. Don’t mind it. How can I help you?”

“They’re here again.”

“Schiff and Bracco?”

“They’re unbelievable, these two.”

“I don’t know. I find myself believing in them lately. What do they want?”

“Apparently they’ve got a search warrant. They want to look through the house. Joel’s furious, of course. We haven’t even finished breakfast, and the kids are all upset. I don’t know who’s going to take them to school now.”

In fact, Hardy heard children crying in the background. “What time is it, actually?”

“Ten after seven. They got here at seven sharp.”

Hardy knew that this was a bad sign. Generally speaking, police were not permitted to serve warrants in the middle of the night. In fact, search warrants were not valid for service between ten P.M. and seven A.M. unless a judge specifically found evidence that justified the extreme intrusion into someone’s home. Absent an emergency, judges were reluctant to issue such a warrant. They would do that, of course, if there was cause to believe that a suspect would destroy evidence or flee under cover of darkness. So the fact that they’d waited until seven-the first allowable minute without that extraordinary finding-was ominous.

“So where are they now?”

“Right here. Joel’s trying to reason with them. They said we had to let them in. They have us all sitting on a couch in the front room. They won’t let us move. If we try to move, they said they’ll put us in handcuffs. They wouldn’t even give me my cell phone until I said I needed to call Harlen to get the kids and then you. Can they do all this?”

“If they have a warrant, they can. Did they say what they’re looking for specifically?”

“Shoes and/or clothing that might contain blood…”

Which meant, Hardy knew, that she was now a suspect.

“… phone and financial records, computer files-a lot of the same kind of stuff they wanted for the other-” The woman’s voice suddenly broke. “Oh, God. I don’t know why all this is happening to us all of a sudden. I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like we’re living in a police state. Can they just come in here and look through everything?”

“Not without a reason, so they must think they have one, and they must have convinced some judge too. Have they talked to you at all?”

“To get in, yes. Before they told me they had this warrant, they asked me about what I did yesterday.”

“When yesterday? What time?”

“Afternoon.”

“And you didn’t tell them anything, right?”

“I said I’d gone to church, that’s all.”

That was enough, Hardy thought, wondering anew about his client’s predilection to lock herself into a position that might incriminate her. But he kept his voice mild. “You went to church again?”

“I know. Most people don’t, I suppose. But I do all the time. St. Ignatius.”

“And how long were you there?”

“I don’t know. A little while. Before I had to pick up the kids. But I told them, the inspectors, that I wouldn’t answer any more questions until you got here.”

Open barn door, let horse out, close barn door after it. Check. But there was nothing to do about it now, so Hardy merely said, “Good for you, Maya. Try to stick with that. I can be there in a half hour. How’s that sound?”

“Like a long time.”

“I know. I can’t help that. I’ll get there as fast as I can. Promise.”

“Okay.” Hardy heard her breathe.

“Maybe between Harlen and Joel they can stop them before that.”

“Harlen? Your brother Harlen?”

“Yes. I told you I called him first, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but you said it was something about the kids.”

“Well, that too. But he and Sergeant Bracco are friends, you know.”

“Right. I’m aware of that. They were friends, but now he’s-” Hardy stopped before he said anything else, such as that given the presence of Jerry Glass around this case, Harlen Fisk was possibly the worst imaginable choice of a person to confront the police, and especially Schiff, about the legality or reasonableness of a search warrant in Maya’s house.

“He’ll be good with them, Mr. Hardy. Harlen’s good with everybody.”

“Okay, then, but even after he gets there, if it’s before me, can I ask you please not to say anything to the police until I get there? Can you promise me that?”

After she did, Hardy pushed the button to ring off the phone and went to straighten himself, but the crick in his neck asserted itself again and he sat back down with some care, twisting his head to find an angle that didn’t hurt.

“Are you all right?” Frannie coming through the dining room with two steaming cups in her hands.

“Except for the icepick in my neck.” Taking one of the cups. “You’re the best, you know that?”

“I’ve heard rumors. So why again were you sleeping down here?”

“I wasn’t sleeping upstairs and didn’t want to wake you up.”

“You can always wake me up.”

“That’s what they all say, but they don’t mean it.”

“I mean it, Dismas. You know that.”

“I know. I’m sorry, just kidding.” He sipped his coffee, and sighed. “But all kidding aside, this isn’t starting to look too good.”

“Maya Townshend?”

He went to nod but stopped himself before he got too far. “I need to get over there right now. They’ve got to have something new or they wouldn’t have moved like this.”

“You think it’s this guy Glass?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe I should call Abe.”

“And what?”

“Finesse him to get some inside dope. Failing that, see if he can slow things down.” Realizing the absurdity of that possibility, he added, “Which he’s just plain not going to do, is he?”

“Not if they have something on her, which they must, right?”

“Right. I wish I knew what it was.” Grimacing, he reached over and put his cup down on the windowsill. “I’ve got to get moving.” He started up again, and again his hand went to his neck, but this time he fought through the pain, got to his feet. “One step at a time,” he said half to himself. “One step at a time.”