Damage

37

Glitsky got the call from Bracco, with one of the arrest teams. The teams had been gathering out in front of the mansion on Vallejo Street when they'd heard the shots from inside the house and rushed to the door.

Glitsky had to pull up and park behind rows of other cars and vans nearly two blocks away. It was raining steadily and it seemed impossible to him that such a crowd-of police personnel, curious neighbors, news vans, politicians, and reporters-had developed in such a short time. But then again, the bare fact of what had apparently happened here seemed impossible as well. All these people braving the inclement weather in coats and umbrellas, pressing in against the yellow police tape line they'd strung along the street and across the property line.

Glitsky picked his way through the mass of people, ducked under the police line, and showed his ID to one of the patrolmen standing guard at the bottom of the steps. Once he was safely inside the perimeter, he turned briefly to look behind him.

He estimated there were fifteen black-and-white patrol cars, each with their red and blue lights strobing the night. Somebody had already set up at least one set of kliegs to brighten the place even more. Glitsky counted four television vans, which must have gotten the word even more quickly than he did. Sheila Marrenas, so far unsuccessfully, was trying to bully her way through the line down at the end of the driveway. Leland Crawford was giving an interview to a small knot of television people over by his limo.

Glitsky jogged up the steps and slowed down at the open door, where Bracco was waiting to meet him. "That was fast," the inspector said.

Glitsky nodded. "I was motivated. Where'd it go down?"

Bracco pointed and started walking toward the study at the same moment, Glitsky at his heels. "The chief here yet?" he asked.

"Not yet, no."

"How about CSI?"

"Yep. And we've got the suspect in custody back in the kitchen. One of the maids. Linda Salcedo. She's not giving us any trouble."

"Let's hope we can keep it that way. You got the weapon?"

"Tagged and bagged. It was on the floor where she dropped it."

"She dropped it?"

"Dropped it and answered the doorbell, then showed us where to go. You could still smell the cordite. Craziest thing I've ever seen."

But by then they had reached the arched entrance to a small room, guarded by two other members of what was originally supposed to be the arresting team. Glitsky stopped a half step behind Darrel, and nodded at both of the other men. There was plenty of light from a couple of standing lamps and an overhead chandelier. The study was less than fifteen feet deep, maybe twelve feet wide. It seemed to be filled with bodies.

And even with his vast experience, Glitsky was impressed by the body count in the enclosed place.

The iron smell of blood and, underlying it, something sweet smelling and alcoholic. Glitsky stepped forward so he could take it all in.

The butler lay on his back by the fireplace, his tuxedo coat wide open revealing a shoulder holster with its gun still in it. A red splotch bloomed in a wide circle in the shirt over his heart. Another slug looked like it had taken him in the shoulder, but the one by the heart looked like it had done the job. When Eztli had gone down, he'd knocked over the screen in front of the fireplace, which lay on the floor by his head. On the other side of his head, a bottle of champagne lay on its side. The mirror above the fireplace was shattered, and shards from it littered the floor all around him.

Ro Curtlee sat slumped in an easy chair, literally soaked in blood. He'd taken two or three in the chest and one at really close range high in his left cheek. The force of the shot had canted his head to the right and the entire right side of his shirt was soaked from the exit wound damage, the exit wound annihilation.

The most ghastly image was Cliff Curtlee, who had managed to get up and turn around before he'd been hit, or hit fatally. The shot that had done the most obvious damage had evidently taken him in the side of the throat-his carotid spurting arterial blood over the rug and onto the hardwood of the adjoining dining room floor-but several other rounds had hit him in the side and back, evidently as he tried to get away. From the blood trail, it looked like he kept on crawling through his own blood for a good three or four feet before finally stopping with the shock and trauma of the injuries and bleeding out.

Bracco leaned over Cliff and examined the throat injury with interest. He turned to Glitsky and said, "That's going to leave a mark."

Glitsky took in all of this at a glance, then said to no one in particular, "Where's Mrs. Curtlee?"

One of the crime scene guys looked up from photographing Ro's body in his chair. "Other room," he said.

"Dead?"

In a perfect imitation Munchkin voice from The Wizard of Oz, the tech said, "She is not just merely dead, she is really most sincerely dead."

Glitsky, once again reminded of the wisdom of the rule that reporters were not allowed on crime scenes until the techs had finished, turned and saw Vi Lapeer coming through the front door and he moved to intercept her. "Chief," he said. "What you've probably heard is true. They're all dead, the Curtlees and their butler. Shot at close range. We have a suspect subdued and in custody in the next room."

Lapeer slapped her game face on. Taking a steadying breath through her mouth, she set her jaw and started across the dining room toward the archway. At eleven o'clock, the techs were still working in the study. The bodies had been bagged and taken in the coroner's van to the medical examiner's office behind the Hall. Since Bracco spoke excellent Spanish and was already here at the scene, Glitsky assigned the formal investigation of these murders to him, so Bracco had given Linda Salcedo her Miranda warning and a quick preliminary interview and was on his way with her to the detail for a full videotaped statement. Outside, the crowd had eventually mostly dispersed. Neither the mayor nor Sheila Marrenas had ever been admitted to the crime scene, and both had eventually gone away, as had a stoic Vi Lapeer.

Amanda Jenkins had been out at a restaurant with a couple of other assistant DAs and caught the breaking news flash on the television. Now she sat at the dining room table with Glitsky, both of them too wound up to go home.

"So our suspect evidently had heard about the earlier rapes, so she had some type of warning," Glitsky was saying, "but she didn't take it seriously enough."

"You're saying Ro had already done another one of them? Since he got out?"

"No. One of the other workers here had heard the stories and told her she should be on her guard."

"But she wasn't."

"Not enough, anyway. He called her up to his room under the pretext of her cleaning up something last night…"

"Last night? He pulled this shit just last night? When he knew we're all over him?"

A brisk nod. "He thought he had us beat. Killing Farrell's dog. Cutting our balls off. Squeezing Lapeer with the mayor. Time to go back and check out the home turf."

"What an asshole. So she was warned about it and still went up?"

Glitsky shrugged. "He'd been home almost a month and never did anything. Last night he called and needed something cleaned up, so she goes to his room and he's naked in bed with a gun on her."

"So she…?"

"She wanted to stay alive."

Jenkins shook her head in disgust. "I'd like to kill him again."

"I hear you."

"What about the shoes?"

"Evidently not an issue this time. I know she didn't mention anything to Darrel."

"Okay, so how'd she get the gun?"

Glitsky's lips turned up slightly. "This is my favorite part," he said. "He just left it in his drawer next to his bed in his room. Loaded. So he goes out with his man, Ez, today and doesn't take it with him. Probably figures that Linda liked it-the sex, not the gun, or the sex with the gun. So today she comes up, makes sure the gun is still there, and waits for her opportunity, which doesn't take long coming."

"But why kill the others? Why isn't she just waiting in his room for him when he comes home?"

"I asked Darrel to ask her that myself. She said it was self-defense. Where she's from, you kill a member of a powerful family, they kill your whole family. She knew if she was going to kill Ro, she had to kill them all."

Jenkins thought about this for a minute. "Knowing the Curtlees, she just might have been right."

"Maybe. Anyway, she knew Ez carried a gun, and so he had to go first. And then she figured Cliff and Theresa, they knew what Ro was doing and had been doing all along and they enabled him. Not her word. So they were part of it, what he was doing, and so the heck with them, too."

"Jesus Christ, though," Amanda said. "I didn't think anybody was that good with a pistol. She killed all four of them?"

"God was on her side."

Amanda sat back, looked up at the ceiling, and closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm going to want to run ballistics on the gun tonight, the murder weapon, to see if it matches the one that killed Matt."

Glitsky nodded. "Probably a good idea."

"And Ez's, too, while I'm at it."

"Whatever you can find," Glitsky said. "I don't think a search warrant is going to be a problem this time around." At the Novio house, the muted jubilation over news of the death of Ro Curtlee was even more restrained than it otherwise might have been because by midnight, Jon Durbin still had not come home. He had not answered his cell phone or responded to text messages, either, even when Michael had Jon's little sister, Allie, text from her phone and beg him to just tell her he was okay.

Now finally all three of the girls were asleep and Peter lay on a couch covered by one of Kathy's comforters, sleeping with the TV on in the family room. The three adults sat in the living room, Chuck and Michael on either end of the couch, Kathy in a lounger, all of them obviously wrecked by the recent and continuing events.

Finally Michael sat up straighter and slapped at his arm of the couch. "That's it," he said, starting to get up, "I'm going to call the police."

Chuck looked over. "And say what?"

"That my son's missing. See if they can go on some kind of lookout for him."

"But he's really not missing," Kathy said softly. "Not any more than he was last night, Michael. He's just confused, trying to sort things out."

"And the police won't be able to find him anyway. Or-check that-they won't look for him," Chuck added. "He's too old and it hasn't been long enough. I don't think they even consider an adult missing anymore unless no one's heard from them in three days."

"Well, that sure gives whoever it is enough time to hide out pretty good, doesn't it?" He slumped back into the cushions. "I just want to talk to him, that's all. I can answer any questions he's got for me. Any of them. I promise."

"Of course you can." Kathy let out an exhausted sigh. "Maybe this news tonight will make a difference to him. They said on the news that the police are closing the Ro Curtlee cases, and that's got to include Janice, wouldn't you think?"

"You would think," Michael said, "but maybe not. Not the way Glitsky's been looking at it. He obviously still thinks it was Ro, but keeps talking about things that don't fit. Which still doesn't mean it was me. I mean, as far as I know, he hasn't done a thing about even looking at her clients."

"I don't know if he can do that," Kathy said. "Isn't there some kind of privilege or something? And besides, why would he want to talk to her clients? Do you know something that points to any of them?"

"Only that she was-" He stopped abruptly.

"What?" Kathy asked. "You were going to say something."

"No." Mike brought his hand up and squeezed at his temples. "Only that I'm so tired. I don't know what I'm saying."

But Kathy persisted. "Was there something you know about one of her patients? Michael? That could be real."

"I don't want anything to be real, Kathy," he said. "I'm sure it was Ro Curtlee. It's just this other stuff muddying the waters for Glitsky."

"But what other stuff?" she persisted.

Chuck finally spoke up. "Mike thinks she was having an affair."

"What? Janice? No way, Mike."

Durbin shrugged. "Yeah, Kathy, I think there was a way."

"Why do you think that?"

"Well." A brittle little laugh. "That's kind of personal, if you know…"

"Did you talk about it?"

"No."

"Did she say she was going to be leaving you or anything like that?"

"No." He hesitated, looked to each of them in turn, then spoke to Kathy. "We hadn't had the most intimate last couple of months."

And now she laughed her own brittle laugh. "Ha! If that's it, I think they must be putting something in the water."

Chuck's head came up in a quick spurt of anger. "Kathy!"

She looked right back at him. "What? What if it's the truth?" Then she turned to Durbin. "Like that's a sign you're having an affair? Even happy couples go through some ups and downs like that. It's part of the package." Then, back to her husband, "Isn't that right, Chuck? It doesn't mean your marriage is in trouble. At least, I hope it doesn't."

"She's right, Mike," Chuck said. "She's absolutely right. But going back to the original question, I'd like to know what Glitsky's reservations are," he said. "I mean, it's obvious enough to all of us that Janice was killed by Ro Curtlee and now Ro Curtlee's dead and that ought to be the end of it. Is there something none of us are seeing?"

"Well, this affair, if there was one," Kathy said.

"But even if there was one," Chuck said, "there's nothing that eliminates Ro Curtlee. He had a reason, he slashed the paintings for the same reason, Mike. He wanted to get at you. Even if Janice was having an affair, why would the guy slash your paintings? That had to be Ro. Which means the fire had to be Ro, too. Why don't you tell that to Glitsky next time he asks?"

But all this emotion and discussion, along with the worry over his son, were finally taking their toll. Durbin bowed his head and shook it slowly back and forth. "Let's just hope he doesn't," he said. "Doesn't think he's got a reason to ask. Now, if you guys don't mind, I'm going up to bed."

"I think we should, too." Kathy pushed herself up and looked down at her husband. "Chuck?"

He brought his head up and smiled at her. "Right behind you," he said. "You said call anytime."

"I did," Treya said, "but I'm not sure I meant one o'clock. You're never out until one o'clock."

"Occasionally I am, as you can see. But I can hang up now and call you in the morning."

"Or you can just tell me what time you're getting down here, and then I can go back to sleep and wake up in time to greet you warmly."

"Well, on that… I thought you and the kids might want to consider coming back up here, get back to normal life."

She paused for a long beat. "You got your indictment and arrested Ro."

"No. Close, but better."

"What could be better?"

"If one of the maids he raped shot him."

"Are you kidding me?"

"Not even a little."

"He's dead?"

"Completely."

He heard her exhale. "I know I shouldn't be too happy about somebody dying, but…"

"There are cases it's warranted. This would be one of them. So, do you want to come home?"

She paused again. "What's the weather like?"

"Beautiful. Forty-five and pouring. What could be nicer?"

"Seventy-eight and sunny, for starters."

"Seventy-eight?"

"Scout's honor. Sixto told the kids we'd take them to the beach tomorrow. Do you realize we've never taken either of them to the beach?"

"I'm not surprised. Why would we?" It was Abe's turn to hesitate. "It's really going to be seventy-eight?"

"If not eighty."

A last pause, and then Glitsky said, "I'm on Southwest, landing in Burbank at eleven fifteen. Maybe you could pick me up?"

"Not impossible," Treya said. "I'll see what I can do."