'Then I'd think they would have arrested somebody. That's what they do, Frannie. They find bad guys and put them away.'
'Except if this one time they, in fact, didn't.'
'Why wouldn't they?'
'For the same reasons you just gave me why they didn't tell the DA about these interviews you're pretty sure they had.' She ticked them off on her fingers. 'They didn't have to, they didn't want to, or they were ordered not to.'
Hardy acknowledged the point with a small nod. 'Well,' he said, 'I've got to believe there's a quantum difference between not turning over interview notes and not arresting someone they knew was a killer.'
'Dismas.' She put her fork down and met his eyes. 'I never actually thought I'd say this, but you don't watch enough television. On
He nodded again. 'True. It just seems a ways off on this case. At least at this point when everything's speculation.'
'Do me a favor, would you?'
'Anything, my love.'
'If it moves beyond speculation, take a little extra care. If these people killed Nolan, they could kill you.'
Hardy knew that she might be right, but so was he-this was a long way from being established. 'I'm not a threat to the Khalils,' he said. 'I don't want to prove anything about what they did or didn't do. I just want to know if the FBI talked to them and didn't tell the Redwood City cops about it. So I don't think we have to worry too much about anything happening to me.'
'Oh, okay,' she said with an edge, 'then I'll be sure not to.'
Another of the changes in Frannie's life after her own children had moved out was that she had turned into a baby junkie, so after dinner, since they would be driving right by the Glitskys' flat on their way home anyway, she suggested that they should call their friends and see if they wanted company. Back a few years ago when Date Night had been truly sacred, especially during Rachel's first year, this postprandial visit had become a weekly ritual.
Now, while Frannie and Treya and even Rachel passed the infant Zachary back and forth with suitable enthusiasm in the living room, the two men sat on the steps overlooking their swingset project in Glitsky's small backyard and talked quietly, very quietly, about Charlie Bowen.
'You really think he's a homicide?' Glitsky was nowhere near as defensive as he might have been if either Bowen or his wife had disappeared on his watch, rather than on Marcel Lanier's. So Hardy's theories were interesting and maybe even fun to talk about, but they weren't-yet-Glitsky's problems.
'Not exactly,' Hardy said. 'It's just suddenly I'm finding myself a little more curious about what happened to the guy.'
'You're building the whole thing on a bunch of ifs. You see that, don't you?'
'Well, not all of them are ifs. Scholler didn't kill the Khalils, for example. That just didn't happen.'
'That doesn't mean Nolan did.'
'No. That's true.' Hardy rubbed his palms together. 'But let's say that a homicide professional such as yourself had a hunch somebody had been killed, even if there was no body and no evidence. How would you go about finding out if you were right?'
Glitsky didn't hesitate. 'I'd trace his last days, his last hours if I could.'
'So do you know anything about Bowen's? Last days? Last hours?'
In the light from the bulb over the back door, Glitsky turned to his friend. His face, partly in shadow, with its hatchet nose and the whitish scar coursing through both of his lips, might have been some kind of terrible tribal mask, fearsome and powerful. 'I don't know anything about Bowen, period, Diz. As far as I'm concerned, he's a missing person.'
Hardy sat, musing. He wasn't here to argue.
An animal scurried through the brush on the Presidio's grounds.
'Your man Bracco came by my office today too,' Hardy said. 'On this Bowen thing.'
'Charlie?'
'No, the wife.'
'Right,' Glitsky said. 'He wanted this alleged diary.'
'He did. But he also had a few other concerns that had just come up.' Hardy went into it in some detail, Bracco's discoveries that the very light Hanna Bowen had broken her neck in a relatively short fall without a hangman's noose, that she'd come to believe her husband had been murdered. Bracco also apparently did not think it inconceivable that Charlie Bowen had been murdered, and that it might have had something to do with one of the cases he'd been working on.
'I told him,' Hardy concluded, 'that Charlie had a couple of hundred cases and identifying any one of them as connected with murder was going to take a bit of doing.'
'But now,' Glitsky said, 'you're starting to think it might be Scholler.'
'I don't know if I'd go that far yet. I wouldn't try to take it to the bank, but there's starting to be a hell of a lot of questions, don't you think?'
After a minute, Glitsky nodded. 'It's interesting,' he said. 'I'll go that far.' Then, 'You want me to do anything?'
Hardy shook his head. 'I don't know what it would be, Abe. Bracco's already on it, even without the diary. Since you trained him, he's probably doing that last-hours-and-last-days thing with Mrs. Bowen. Maybe he'll come up with something.'
'If Darrel finds something that leads back to Charlie, Diz, and he starts to look like a homicide, I'll jump all over it.'
'That'd be good. I'd appreciate it.' Hardy fell into a silence again.
'What are you thinking?' Glitsky asked after a minute.
'Nothing.'
'Yeah, but it's a loud nothing.'
Hardy took a breath. 'I was just wondering if it was possible that the FBI knew who killed the Khalils and didn't say anything about it because it was part of a bigger case.'
Glitsky looked over at him. 'I missed a segue here. I thought we were talking about the Bowens.'
'Now we're talking about the FBI. But it's still Scholler.'
'Guy gets around.'
Hardy shrugged. 'It's a complicated case. But part of it is how much the FBI didn't tell the DA. Or even if they had another suspect they forgot to mention.'
'Whatever it is,' Glitsky said, 'you'll never know.'
'But you think it's possible they'd deliberately withhold that kind of evidence?'
'As my father would say, 'Anything's possible.' If it's the FBI, I'd go a little further. Nothing is impossible.'
'They'd screw up a murder case on purpose?'
'Not every day, certainly. Not usually. But for the right reason…'
'Like what?'
'I don't know. Say maybe the guy's a valuable snitch. Or he's a mole in a terrorist group.' Glitsky snapped his fingers. 'There you go. He's giving the Feebs good information on a terrorist cell, I bet they wouldn't blink if he killed his girlfriend on the side. Say 'national security' to these guys and anything goes.'
'You think?'
Glitsky chewed his cheek. 'Would I bet on it in this case? Maybe not. Do I think it's ever happened? Definitely, and more than once.'
And if it happened here with the Khalils, Hardy thought, perhaps Charlie Bowen hadn't figured it out in time as he was preparing his appeal. Maybe the Khalils had seen him-justifiably-as a threat, a loose cannon who
