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

inspectors and Carl’s feelings be damned.
     
     
    But as it was, Griffin got the Beaumont case, and he was in his sixth day, and he hadn’t made an arrest.
     
     
    After receiving her doctorate from UC Berkeley in the early 80s, Bree had run that institution’s environmental toxicology lab for a couple of years before leaving academia to consult for the Western States Petroleum Association, and later to work for Caloco Oil.
     
     
    Only a few months before her death, though, she’d abandoned the oil company and changed sides in the volatile wars over the multibillion-dollar gasoline additive industry. Going public with her opposition to what she had come to believe were cancer-causing additives in California gasoline, Bree had aligned herself with the state assemblyman from San Francisco, Damon Kerry, now running for governor.
     
     
    The central plank of Kerry’s platform played on the public’s fears that these petroleum-based gasoline additives, particularly a substance called MTBE—methyl tertiary butyl ether—were seeping into California’s groundwater in alarming amounts. It was dangerous and had to be outlawed, but the government wouldn’t move on it.
     
     
    When Bree, the oil industry’s very photogenic baby, had agreed to join his campaign, it had given Kerry a terrific boost. And now, after her death, radio talk shows hummed with theories that the oil companies had killed Bree Beaumont, either in revenge for her defection or to keep her from giving Kerry more and better ammunition to use against them.
     
     
    With the election four weeks from tomorrow, Kerry trailed his opponent by half a dozen points. Bree’s death had become big news. And every time someone mentioned her name, Damon Kerry came up as well.
     
     
    But Carl Griffin wasn’t troubled. He had a plate full of active homicides and knew the suspects in three of them. He was simply assembling the packages.
     
     
    On Bree Beaumont, he was confident he was close to asking for a warrant. There was just one piece of information he had to verify and he’d have it tied up. And wouldn’t that just show Glitsky and the rest of them who thought he couldn’t do squat on this kind of case?
     
     
    That’s why he never told anybody about his progress or lack of it. He wasn’t good with criticism. It rankled when other inspectors second-guessed him about what they’d do differently, where they’d look, why they wouldn’t talk to the people Carl was talking to.
     
     
    Carl didn’t take this as good-natured ribbing, and maybe it wasn’t. He considered that he was an old-fashioned cop, a dog sniffing where his nose led, discarding anything that didn’t smell, following what did. His nose told him he was about a step away on Beaumont.
     
     
    He stood in Glitsky’s doorway on his way out of the office. He wore his black Raiders windbreaker over an orange and blue Hawaiian shirt that he tucked into a shiny pair of ancient black slacks. The shirt billowed over his belt. He looked about halfway to term.
     
     
    Griffin was telling his lieutenant that he was going to be seeing a snitch on a gang-related in the Western Addition first thing this morning. He was late for it now, which didn’t matter because the snitch would be late too. Then, depending on how things broke with the snitch, if he got time, he planned to try to find the knife in the Sanchez case—the crime scene investigators hadn’t been able to locate it in the house, but he’d bet it was somewhere on the block, so Griffin was going to poke around the shrubs and see what he came up with. His guess was she got out of the house and threw it somewhere and then came back before she dialed 911. Anyway, then—
     
     
    Glitsky interrupted him. “How we doin’ on Beaumont?”
     
     
    “Pretty good.”
     
     
    Glitsky waited.
     
     
    “Couple more days.”
     
     
    “You writing it all up?”
     
     
    Griffin lifted his windbreaker to show Glitsky the notebook tucked