The Oath (24 page)

J
ackman was as good as his word, and on Monday morning, Hardy had two more binders of discovery on the Markham case ready for him when he got to his office.

He got himself a cup of coffee, settled down at his desk, and opened the first folder. Someone had obviously lit a fire under the transcribers, because already several interviews had been typed up, including Glitsky’s with Kensing, with Anita Tong the housekeeper, Bracco’s with Ann Kensing. He flipped pages quickly. Nothing was tabbed yet—that would be one of his more tedious jobs—but he was satisfied to see much of what he’d hoped and expected: the original incident report at the hit and run; the hospital PM, performed immediately after Markham’s death; Strout’s autopsy findings and official death certificate; the first cut of the crime scene analysis of Markham’s home.

He’d been at it for over an hour, unaware of the passing of time. His hand automatically went to his coffee mug and he brought it to his lips. The coffee had gone cold. Suddenly he sat up straight with almost a physical jolt. He raised his eyes from his binder, almost surprised to see the familiar trappings of his own office. For a while there, with the taste of the bitter dregs of coffee on his tongue, caught up in the analysis of evidence, he was a DA again, putting on this case rather than defending it. The feeling was unexpected and somehow unsettling.

He got up, shaking his head. In front of his desk, he threw a round of darts, then walked over to the window and looked down at Sutter Street. Outside, San Francisco wore its usual workday face after the glitzy and gaudy weekend—street debris kicked up by a good breeze off the bay, an obscure sun fitfully breaching the cloud cover.

He realized that it wasn’t just the mnemonic tug of the coffee. The truth was that he was in prosecutor mode. To prove his client’s innocence, it inexorably followed he must show that someone else had killed Tim Markham and presumably his whole family, as well. That left him only one mandate—find that person and the evidence to convict.

It was ironic, he knew, that he’d ever become a defense attorney in the first place. He wasn’t drawn by nature to stand up for the accused. On the justice versus mercy continuum, he always came down for justice. After he’d gotten out of the marines and Vietnam, he walked a beat as a cop for a few years. Then he’d gone to law school thinking he’d make a career taking bad people to trial and putting them behind bars—that had been his whole orientation, in work and in life. If a previous DA hadn’t fired him over office politics, he had little doubt he’d still be down at the hall working with Marlene and for Jackman. And though by now he’d been on the defense side long enough that he had grown used to it, part of him still longed for the purity of prosecution.

The law, as David Freeman was fond of saying, was a complicated and beautiful thing. And, Hardy thought, never more so than in this: while a not-guilty verdict did not always mean your client was factually innocent of committing the crime for which he or she had been charged, on the other hand a guilty verdict meant that he or she was. When Hardy the defense attorney got a client off with a good argument or some legal legerdemain, there was of course some satisfaction that he’d done his job, earned his pay. But only rarely did it compare to the soul-affirming righteousness he had sometimes felt when he’d convicted a truly evil miscreant and removed him or her from society.

He sat back down and took another sip of the cold coffee. His eyes went back down to his binder.

Here were interviews with several nurses at Portola. A quick perusal told him that Bracco and Fisk had done some basic footwork, which might save him some time. He noticed, though, that they didn’t seem to have identified anyone who had been present at or about the time Markham had died. He flipped more pages, but found no sign of this essential and fundamental information.

He looked up again, staring angrily at nothing into the space in front of him. His jaw was tight, his eyes hard.

Jackman was keeping his end of their bargain. He had sent him the discovery folders, all right, but they obviously weren’t complete. Hardy didn’t think this was an accident, but he didn’t see Jackman’s hand at work withholding his evidence. He saw Glitsky’s.

Bracco and Fisk had gotten into the office late in the day because, over Bracco’s objections, Fisk insisted that they keep trying to find some kind of lead on the car. So first they’d gone door to door in the neighborhood again, catching a few people who hadn’t been home a week ago, although coming away with about the same results. No one had seen the accident or noticed the car speeding away. Next—Fisk was at the wheel today—he’d driven Bracco crazy by making the rounds of his old hit-and-run connections: several body shops on Lombard, Van Ness, in the Mission. He’d put them on notice last week. Now he was following up.

One of them actually had a late sixties green Corvair in the shop, brought in late yesterday afternoon, damage to the right front bumper and the hood. The owner claimed his brake had released itself on one of the city’s famous hills and he hadn’t remembered to curb his wheels. The car had rolled twenty feet or so and hit a tree, a branch of which had then fallen on the hood. The owner of the shop, Jim Otis, had been planning to call hit and run sometime today, and certainly before he did any repair work on the vehicle.

But a quick spray with luminol pretty much eliminated the car from contention. Luminol was a nearly foolproof agent for revealing the presence of blood—even trace amounts, even after a washing—and there was none on the Corvair. Still, Fisk dutifully took down the owner’s name and address. Before this was over, he vowed, he’d find out if he had an alibi for 6:30 last Tuesday morning.

Now, after lunch and under Glitsky’s direction, they were finally on their way back to Portola for more interviews. The lieutenant had reviewed their work from Friday and now wanted to know about the two other doctors who’d been in the ICU last Tuesday. He also wanted the exact chronologies of people coming and going as far as the nurses at the ICU station could remember.

But it wasn’t turning out to be as simple as they’d hoped. Different ICU nurses had come on duty with the new week. Of the two that had been on duty when Markham and Lector had died, Rajan Bhutan had transferred to labor and delivery and was in the midst of a traumatic childbirth. Connie Rowe, assigned to general floor duty, was out at lunch.

Asking Fisk if he’d mind holding the fort for a few minutes while he took care of some business, Bracco left his partner to wait for her and went back upstairs. When he got back to the ICU nurses’ station, he introduced himself for a second time to the female nurse sitting at the console. When he asked, she explained that her shift partner was in with one of the doctors while he made his rounds. They’d both be back out shortly if he needed to talk to either of them.

But after making sure that the doctor was neither Cohn nor Waltrip, whom he
did
want to speak to, Bracco told her that what he really needed was a few minutes at a quiet spot—would she mind if he went to sit in the waiting room just down the hallway there?

A middle-aged couple sat miserably holding hands and whispering on one of the couches. Bracco took the upholstered chair near the hallway, where he could see both the entrance to the ICU and the nurses’ station. Sure enough, the other nurse emerged with her doctor in a couple of minutes. After a brief conversation in the middle of the hallway, the doctor left the nurse and turned to come this way, while the nurse returned to the station with her partner.

Standing up as the doctor entered the waiting room, Bracco went back into the hallway. One of the nurses—he didn’t know which one—still sat at the console, facing away from him, working at a computer terminal. The other was nowhere to be seen.

He crossed the hall and in ten steps was at the door to the ICU. A wired-glass pane afforded a clear view inside the room. He saw nothing but beds. A last look at the typing nurse, a glance toward the waiting room—no one was visible. In an instant he was inside.

He checked his watch and moved. Forcing himself to an almost leisurely pace, he walked the periphery marked by the beds, stopping while he counted to five—the most he could bear—at each one. The entire circuit took him forty-eight seconds.

Again, he checked the door’s central windowpane. Then he pushed at it, was back in the hall, and let it close behind him.

At the nurses’ station, he cleared his throat and the same woman he’d originally spoken to turned from her work at the computer. “Did your partner come back out yet? I notice that a doctor just came into the waiting room. I was wondering if she’d come out with him?”

The nurse smiled at him. “I think she may have just run to the bathroom for a minute. She ought to be right back.” She, too, glanced down the hall to where the doctor had gone. “When she does, it might be a good time for those questions you said you had for us.”

“That’s what I was just working on back there.” He motioned to the waiting room. “As it turns out, I don’t think I’m going to need them after all. But thanks for your time. Sorry to have bothered you.”

“No problem,” she said. “Anytime.”

Downstairs, Bracco learned that Connie Rowe had returned from lunch and that she and Inspector Fisk had gone back to the cafeteria where they could talk without too much interruption. By the time he sat down with them, Fisk had started. They sat kitty-corner to one another and the tiny tape recorder was on the table between them. Praying that Fisk had remembered to turn it on, Bracco pulled up his chair.

 

Q:
You know Inspector Bracco? From last week? Ms. Rowe was just telling me about her partner, Rajan is it?

A: Rajan Bhutan.

Q:
What about him?

A: Well, as I was telling Inspector Fisk, it’s nothing really specific. The way the shifts break, I only wind up working with him in the ICU about ten times a year, but it seems as though every time he’s on, something bad happens.

Q:
Do you mean somebody dies?

A: No, not just that. People are always dying there because they’re usually critical when they come in. But

I haven’t worked a shift with Rajan without incident in at least the last year. I don’t mean to speak badly of him, but…it’s just really creepy.
He’s
really creepy, just skulking around, never talking to anybody really.

Q:
Do you think he had anything to do with Mr. Markham’s death?

A: I don’t know about that. That’s such a strong accusation. But then when you all came in on Friday and started asking us questions, and you notice he barely said a word? Didn’t it seem that way to you? And he knows how the shifts work as well as anybody. And what happened that day. Who was there.

Q:
Ms. Rowe, excuse me for butting in, but when Inspector Fisk asked you if you meant that people died in the ICU when Rajan was on, you said ‘not just that,’ isn’t that right? What did you mean by that? Not just what?

A: Not just dying.

Q:
But that, too.

A: Yes, but as I say, a week doesn’t go by without that.

But things—supplies, I mean—they go missing. And he hovers. Do you know what I’m saying? He
lurks
, and he
hovers.
You’ll be coming around a corner and he’ll suddenly just be there. Standing there. It’s very creepy. Nobody can stand him.

Q:
Was he there last Tuesday? In the ICU when Mr. Markham died? Is that what you’re saying?

A: We were both in there for both the code blues. I know that. Before that, I was at the desk—

Q:
Were you at the computer?

A: I think so, it’s a little jumbled now, but I think I was placing some orders, but I don’t know where he was.

Q:
Ms. Rowe, when you got the signal—the code blue, is it?—and you went into the ICU, was he already there?

A: Yes. By Mr. Lector. The other man that died.

Q:
Was there anybody else in the room?

A: Just Dr. Kensing.

Q:
And where was he?

A: With Rajan. By Mr. Lector. He was the first code blue.

Q:
In other words, they were not by Mr. Markham.

A: No. His monitor went off a few seconds later.

 

At one o’clock, Hardy picked up the phone on his desk and heard the drawl of the medical examiner. “Y’all owe me a thousand dollars. I assumed you were in some kind of hurry, seein’ as you had the body delivered straight from the wake, so I worked all day yesterday, Sunday, an’ brought in my best lab person. Then a couple of hours this morning. Mr. Lector died because his heart stopped beatin’ and nothin’ more.”

“No potassium?”

“Nothin’, Diz. I ran all the scans down to the C level. There wasn’t so much as a wayward aspirin he shouldn’t’a had in him.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I’d hoped.”

“I know that, you made it clear enough. But look at the bright side. No matter what, your client didn’t kill Mr. Lector.”

This brought a dry chuckle. “Thanks, John. That eases my mind considerably.”

“You’re welcome. And Diz?”

“Yo.”

“While I do love my work, there don’t seem to be no shortage. This here is your wild-goose allotment for the year.”

Rajan Bhutan spoke through his hang-dog face with the clipped, singsong formality of the subcontinent’s accent. “The woman is an idiot,” he said with resignation in his tone. He was alone in the nurses’ lounge with Bracco and Fisk. “I’ve had nothing but trouble from her from when she began here, because she is lazy and prejudiced against me. And now you tell me she accuses me of killing these gentlemen? This is really intolerable. I will have to speak with her. And perhaps with the administration.”