A Certain Justice

Glitsky helped him out. 'A spin?'

'Exactly. A spin.'

Reston smiled, and it seemed genuine enough. He put out his hand again, and this time it was firm. 'I knew you'd understand, Abe. We just can't afford to mess with this. Shea is the villain here. We don't want to muddy the waters. Right now he is the best solution to this crisis. He did it. We get him… he is guilty… and the city can move on, start the healing process.'

His face straight Glitsky looked to his chief, then to the new district attorney. 'You got it,' he said to both of them. 'No problem.'

Next to John Strout in the chill air of the forensics lab, Glitsky was shivering. The body of the late Christopher Locke lay, mostly under a blanket, on a gurney in front of them, his head protruding. Strout put a gloved hand under it and raised it a couple of inches. 'Back here,' he said.

Glitsky forced himself to look. It was a small hole, clean and round, behind and a little under Locke's left ear. It might have been invisible had not Strout shaved the surrounding hair. He focused on the spot alone, trying not to see the face, trying not to recognize in it anyone he'd known, talked to, shared jokes with, even if he hadn't been all that fond of the man. He wasn't entirely successful.

'Anything fu

Strout shrugged. 'Not really. Why?'

'No reason. Force of habit. Maybe I'm just getting in the mood for something fu

'Yeah, I know what you mean.' Strout let the head down gently but did not pull the blanket right up. Instead, turning it all the way to one side, so that the hole was up, he leaned over it. 'Powder burns about what you'd expect, maybe a little heavy – '

'Glass?' At Strout's questioning look, Glitsky clarified it. 'From the car window? Shards around the wound?'

The doctor shook his head. 'Shatterproof. It's a city-issue car. I wouldn't expect many, although the microscopic ought to be done any hour now, tell us for sure. You getting at something?'

Glitsky set himself back, flat on his feet. 'You know, John, I'm not getting at a damn thing. I don't know what I'm doing, just pulling at every straw I come across, see if maybe it's attached to something. Tell you the truth, I think I'm overworked lately. And seeing people I know dead doesn't seem to help any.'

Strout straightened up, pulled the sheet up over Locke's face. ' Y'all are sure gettin' that way,' he drawled. 'You think it's a little cold in here?'

He started leading the way out to his office, a large square room lined with bookshelves and well stocked with a variety of ancient and medieval instruments of torture displayed under glass. He stopped on the way to his desk to blow the dust off a spiked mace that graced a pedestal to the right of it. 'One of the DAs was by this morning, handlin' the Arthur Wade thing. Poor girl was a mess.'

'Elaine Wager?'

Strout nodded. 'Started goin' into cause of death – asphyxiation – that whole thing, and she goes 'bout as white as her genes will allow.' He allowed himself a small grin. 'Ma

Glitsky nodded. 'You find any knife wounds on Arthur Wade?'

Strout, by now seated behind his desk, took a moment. 'Knife wounds? No. Rope burns, lacerations, cuts and scrapes, but nothing like a clean cut.' He raised his eyes. 'More straws?'

'Yep.'

'You don't mind a little advice, Abe? Little prescription for some peace of mind?'

'Yep.'

The coroner folded his hands. 'Keep pullin' at 'em,' he said. 'You just never know.'

'Homicide, Glitsky.'

'Lieutenant Glitsky, this is Wes Farrell. I'm an attorney.'

'Sure, Mr Farrell, I know who you are. How can I help you?'

'I'd like to talk to you about Kevin Shea.'

Glitsky was halfway out of his chair, snapping his fingers, trying to get someone's attention outside in the homicide detail so they could pick up a phone, maybe run a tape, at least be a second party. He couldn't see anyone through his open doors at the moment, although he was sure someone had been at one of the desks when he'd gotten back from Strout's.

But no one was appearing. He sat back down.

'Are you representing Shea?'

'I think I know where he is.' A pause. The voice was slurred, as though Farrell had maybe been drinking. Glitsky looked at the clock on the wall. No, that was unlikely – it wasn't yet three o'clock. Still…

The voice continued. '… and I'm in contact with him. He's very much afraid and would like some assurances before he turns himself in. He wants his story heard.'

'All right, then, Mr Farrell. I want to hear it.'

'Where can I meet you?'

'Where are you? You want to come down to the Hall?'

Another long pause. Glitsky heard some discussion over a covered mouthpiece – Shea was right with him. My kingdom for a tapped phone, he was thinking.

'Lieutenant?'

'I'm here.'

'I'd prefer if we could meet personally, alone, you and me.'

'Is Shea going to be with you?'

'No. I'm coming alone. It would just be me.'

If it would put him in touch with Kevin Shea, Glitsky would meet Farrell naked at the top of Coit Tower. 'You know Lou the Greek's, across the street, downstairs place?'

Farrell was definitely slurring. Maybe the guy had a speech defect. 'Lou the Greeksh? Ushed to get my mail there.'

'Say an hour?'

'One hour.'

'Mr Farrell?'

'Yeah?'

'Drive carefully, would you.'

Glitsky moved the police and forensics reports around on his desk. He had been a long time in the business and thought he'd developed a pretty good sense of the moment in a case when the dynamic changed, when you felt you were maybe finally getting to the end of something. He had that feeling now.

He realized that in a certain way Rigby and Reston had done him a favor by reminding him that his role was, after all, specific and limited – he was to bring in a suspect in a murder case. That was all. Find him and bring him in, like Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive. (Glitsky's all-time favorite moment in movie history – Richard Kimble, the fugitive, at the end of the tu

That would be Glitsky now. Leave the big picture out of it. Collect evidence as it came in and, if things changed, be flexible. But for now the job was to get Kevin Shea into a cell here in the Hall.

He still wasn't completely confident that Loretta's theory would hold, that bringing Shea into custody would throw any oil onto these roiling waters, but on the off-chance it did, wouldn't that be a nice bonus?

Meanwhile, he would go by the book with Wes Farrell. He would play fair, keep it to himself and meet him alone. A deal was a deal, and he was reasonably certain that Farrell, even if he wasn't sober, was not trying to pull anything. It had sounded legitimate. Farrell was a lawyer protecting his client, and that wasn't necessarily at odds with Glitsky's job. At least, not yet.

He didn't blame Shea for getting a lawyer. Three hundred thousand dollars was ample motivation for someone to cause him serious mayhem. And Glitsky wasn't forgetting the not-so-hidden hundred-thousand dollar message that Philip Mohandas had delivered – kill him if you have to. Shea must know, and Glitsky thought he was right, that it would be child's play to concoct some story of attempted escape or self-defense that would work as a justification for taking out Kevin Shea.

So it would work out, maybe by tonight. The boys would be gone out of harm's way in Monterey with his father. The city would creak its way back to business as usual, and Abe Glitsky might look forward to a weekend alone catching up on some much-needed sleep. Maybe other things, too.