Nothing but the Truth by John Lescroart Read Free Book Online Page A

What secret?”
     
     
    Frannie ignored Abe. “They could just ask Ron. You , Dismas, could ask Ron. Go to his house and wake him up. Call him from here even. If he knew I was in jail, he’d tell them what they want to know. He wouldn’t let this happen to me.”
     
     
    “What is this secret?” Glitsky asked again.
     
     
    Frannie finally raised her voice. “The secret isn’t the issue!” Then, more quietly, “The secret’s nothing.” Her eyes pleaded with her husband, trying to tell him something, but what it was remained shrouded in mystery.
     
     
    Then she shifted her glance quickly to Abe. “I promisedRon. I gave him my word. It’s his secret. Dismas, maybe if you could call him or go to his apartment and tell him what’s going on . . . I’m sure he’ll tell you. Then you come back and get me out of here.”
     

 
    5
     
     
    Abe was sifting through an armful of files he’d brought in from one of the desks in the homicide detail. He found the file he wanted and pitched it across his desk to Hardy. “As you recall from your days as a prosecutor, the address is there on the top right. Broadway.”
     
     
    Hardy glanced down, then looked up. “No phone number? A phone number would be nice.”
     
     
    “A lot would be nice in that file, Diz. There’s next to nothing there.” He sighed. “My first inspector got himself killed about a week into the case. You might remember him, Carl Griffin?”
     
     
    Hardy nodded. “Yeah. He got killed how?” He didn’t want to talk about any dead policemen, especially to his best friend the live one, but this might bear on Frannie and he had to know.
     
     
    “Some witness meeting went bad, we think.”
     
     
    Sergeant Inspector Carl Griffin didn’t know it, but when he got up from his desk in the homicide detail on the fourth floor of San Francisco’s Hall of Justice on Monday morning, October 5th, it was for the last time.
     
     
    He was the lone inspector working the murder of Bree Beaumont, a thirty-six-year-old environmental and, recently, political consultant. He’d been on the case for six days. Griffin had been a homicide inspector for fourteen years and knew the hard truths by now—if you didn’t have a murderer in your sights within four days of the crime, it was likely you never would.
     
     
    Carl was a plodder with a D in personality. Everybody in homicide, including his lieutenant, Abe Glitsky, considered him the dullest tack in the unit. Loyal and hardworking, true, but also slow, culturally ignorant, hygienically suspect.
     
     
    Still, on occasion Carl did have his successes. He would often go a week, sometimes ten days, conducting interviews with witnesses and their acquaintances, gathering materials to be fingerprinted and other physical evidence, throwing everything into unlabeled freezer bags in the trunk of his city-issued car. When he was ready, he’d assemble all his junk into some semblance of coherence, and sometimes wind up with a convictable suspect.
     
     
    Not that he often got assigned to cases that needed brains to solve. In San Francisco, nine out of ten homicides were open books. A woman kills a man who’s beating her. A jealous guy kills a wandering girlfriend. Dope deals go bad. Gang bangs. Drunken mistakes.
     
     
    Lowlifes purifying the gene pool.
     
     
    In these cases, homicide inspectors collected the evidence that a jury would need to convict the completely obvious suspect and their job was done. Carl was useful here, connecting the dots.
     
     
    Once in a while, since homicides came in over the transom and got assigned to whoever was on call, Griffin would draw a case that had to be worked. This hadn’t happened in over two years when the call came in about a politically connected white woman on Broadway, so Glitsky really had no choice. It wasn’t apparent at the outset that the case was high profile and if the lieutenant had suspected that it would go ballistic, he would have assigned other