Damage Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY JOHN LESCROART

  Treasure Hunt

  A Plague of Secrets

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Hunt Club

  The Motive

  The Second Chair

  The First Law

  The Oath

  The Hearing

  Nothing but the Truth

  The Mercy Rule

  Guilt

  A Certain Justice

  The 13th Juror

  Hard Evidence

  The Vig

  Dead Irish

  Rasputin’s Revenge

  Son of Holmes

  Sunburn

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, January 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by The Lescroart Corporation

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47526-3

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  To my consiglieri Al Giannini, and to my bride,

  Lisa Marie Sawyer, always and forever

  The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world

  is beyond all decent contemplation.

  —RICH ARD DAWKINS

  Life is a cheap thing beside a man’s work.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY

  PROLOGUE

  Felicia Nuñez saw him standing up against a building across the street from the stop where she normally got off her streetcar. With her heart suddenly pounding in her ears, she turned away from the streetcar door as it opened and sat down on one of the side-facing benches just at the front across from the driver.

  As the car started up again, passing him, she caught another glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye.

  Or maybe it was him. It looked very much like him. His hair maybe a little different, longer, from the last time she’d seen him in the courtroom, but the same attitude in the way he stood. He had one boot propped up against the building, his strong white arms crossed over his chest.

  She knew why he was there. He was waiting. Waiting for her.

  Back then she used to see him everywhere, even when her mind had known that he could not find her. She’d been in witness protection. No one even knew where she’d lived. So there was no way in reality that it could happen. And yet for a year or two, she thought she saw him every day.

  But today?

  This time it was exactly him. Most of the other times, whoever she saw reminded her of him—the hair, the arms, the set of the body. But today was all him, not a collection of similar parts that, in her terror, she could imagine into the monster that he was.

  At the next stop she descended out into the neighborhood and heard the streetcar’s door close behind her and then the brakes release and then the scraping sound as it moved ahead and left her standing alone at the curb.

  She did not like to spend extra money and knew she could make a cup of coffee for free at home, but he might still be there lurking and if he saw her, he might, or he would . . .

  She could not imagine.

  No. She could imagine.

  She went into the Starbucks and ordered a coffee—half an hour’s work at the cleaners where she was lucky to have a job, but she needed to sit quietly and to think, and also to give him time to leave if he was really waiting there to see her.

  How could he have found her?

  She took a seat at the front window where she could see him if he suddenly appeared among the pedestrians passing by.

  The first sip scalded her tongue and the pain seemed to break something within her. She put her paper cup down and blinked back the wave of emotion that threatened now to break over her.

  Bastardo! she thought. The life-destroying bastard.

  In her mind, she was eighteen again.

  The sun shines in her eyes as she leaves the school building where the Curtlees were letting her take the English classes two times a week, paying for her tuition as part of their deal. She comes all this way to work for them, they provide documentation and help her learn the language. She is going to become a citizen one day in the U.S., where her children can grow up educated and free.

  It is almost too much for her to believe, after her poverty in Guatemala and then her mother’s death, leaving Felicia an orphan at seventeen. But now it is actually happening. She has been here for five months now and in spite of her initial fears of slavery and bad treatment, nothing bad has happened.

  The son with greedy
hands is someone to avoid, but the Curtlees are clearly just what they seem—good people, wealthy beyond measure, who bring young Latinas here to work for them out of the goodness of their souls.

  And God for some reason had led their man in Guatemala to Felicia.

  Now she walks with her eyes down against the sunlight. It is a warm autumn evening and she wears a white cotton dress and red rope shoes that are so comfortable to walk in, especially on the hills here in San Francisco. She says good-bye to the last of her classmates, and turns uphill again and enters the forested area they call Presidio that she has to cross to get to the house.

  She is halfway through when he steps out from behind a bush in front of her. Here in the trees it is darker than the street, but light enough still to see that he is confident and smiling as he steps up to her.

  “Hola,” she says, with a tiny false smile, hoping he will leave her alone, and she goes to move around him.

  But he steps to the side with her.

  “You are so beautiful,” he says. Still smiling, he is breathing very hard. He makes some motion with his head that makes her look down and she sees that he has let himself out of his pants.

  “No, por favor,” she says. She repeats it. “Por favor.”

  And always smiling, though his eyes are deadly cold, he moves quickly now, both hands at her waist, pulling her toward him, holding her against him.

  “Don’t fight,” he rasps out. “Don’t fight me. I’ll kill you.”

  She struggles and he slaps her face hard, never letting go of her dress with his other hand. He now grabs her by the throat with the one free hand he’d slapped her with. Up against her, he pushes her back and back until she falls and then he is on top of her, holding her throat, opening her legs under him, forcing himself against and against and against and finally inside her and she screams out and he covers her mouth with one hand and tells her again that he will kill her and she believes him with all her heart. And she takes it in silence.

  And then it is over and he stands up and smiles down at her, tucking himself in, and tells her that he likes her shoes and he’s glad that she kept them on for him—that was sexy, he says, the fact that she couldn’t even wait to take them off she wanted it so bad—and then he tells her that he will see her around and maybe they will do this again.

  Her coffee had gone cold. She’d been sitting here now for twenty-five minutes. Outside, the fog advanced in bleary wisps.

  If he was waiting for her, he would be very cold by now. She would wrap her coat up tightly and walk by at the end of the block to see if he was still there, and if he was, she would keep going and decide where she would hide.

  But when she got there, he was gone.

  She crossed the street and continued past until the next corner. She came up around the block and at it from the opposite direction.

  He was gone.

  Still, she kept herself bundled into her coat, her head down and the collar up as she passed first one building and then the next, darting quick looks into the doorways where he might be hiding. At her apartment’s front door recess, she stopped to make sure that the door was locked. It was.

  Turning around, she chanced another look out to the street. The asphalt shimmered in light rain. Seeing her name, NUÑEZ, clearly labeled under the mailboxes as the resident in number six, she clicked her tongue.

  Not careful enough.

  Inside the door, she began the trudge up the three steep flights of stairs, finally making it to the top and through her door to safety—a bedroom, a tiny living room, a kitchen.

  She closed the door and threw the dead bolt. Going to the front window, she again looked down at the rain-glistening street. Turning, she wondered if she had pulled the bedroom door closed behind her this morning. She didn’t specifically remember doing that.

  But then finally she allowed herself a small smile. It might not even have been him to begin with. She’d let herself get all worked up again over something that had happened so very long ago. The paranoia, the memories, the relived fear had happened before and would happen again.

  She couldn’t let it dominate her life.

  She had to get over it. Maybe there was still time to change and not live in the shadow of that one moment of horror and despair. People had survived worse and gone on to do great things.

  She let out a long breath and crossed the three steps over to the bedroom door. Gently, gently, she kicked it open.

  See? she told herself. No one is here. Her apartment door was locked when she came in just now. The front door was locked downstairs.

  What could he possibly want with her out of all the women in the world anyway?

  She was no longer the beauty she’d been at eighteen. She didn’t want to be pretty and mostly avoided the temptation of trying to be.

  Pretty had ruined her life.

  She walked through the bedroom door.

  1

  On the morning of what was going to be his first day at his new job, a good-looking, well-built man with his hair trimmed to just over his ears stood in front of his bedroom closet in a pair of Jockey shorts. He pulled a T-shirt from the top of a large pile of them on their special shelf. Putting it on, he checked himself in the dresser’s mirror, sucked in an imagined gut, then turned around with a small flourish. The T-shirt read: SHOTGUN WEDDING: A CASE OF WIFE OR DEATH.

  “No.” His girlfriend sat up against the bed’s headboard. “Absolutely not.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Wes, you like them all.”

  “True. It’s a foolish man who buys a shirt he doesn’t like.”

  “It’s a more foolish man who goes to work as the district attorney of San Francisco wearing a shirt that can only be misinterpreted, and will be.”

  “By who?”

  “Everybody. And all for different reasons.”

  “Sam.” Wes walked across the room, sat on the bed, and put a hand on her thigh. “Nobody’s going to see it. It’s not like I’m wearing it outside with my tie. And besides, if I have a heart attack and they have to rip open my dress shirt and somebody sees it, so what? It’s not exactly inflammatory. It’s just a pun, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s not just a pun. It’s a political statement.”

  “Saying what?”

  “That you’re in favor of shotgun weddings. That getting married isn’t sacred. That you don’t think women are equal. Pick one. That you’re not sensitive enough in a general way.”

  “Well, we already know that.”

  “You laugh, but it’s nothing to laugh at. Everything you do, innocent or not, is going to be a political statement from now on. Don’t you see that? I thought you would have learned that during the election.”

  “Nope. I guess not. And, might I remind you, I won.”

  Sam made a face. “Wes, you won by ninety votes out of three hundred and fifteen thousand after your opponent died the week before the election.”

  “As though it’s a bad thing. No, listen. It’s proof that God wanted me to win. He wouldn’t have taken Mr. Dexter back into His bosom if He didn’t want me to win. It’s self-evident. Maybe even cosmic.”

  “It’s hopeless.”

  “Well, I hope not that. It’s only my first day. I’m sure I’ll be way more hopeless as time goes by.” He got up and crossed back to the closet. “But if you really think it’s going to matter,” he said, “I’ll consider going with tomorrow’s T-shirt instead.”

  “You’re wearing one tomorrow, too?”

  “Sam, I wear a T-shirt every day. It provides clues to my secret persona.”

  “Not so secret. The press is going to start wanting to see it if word gets out.”

  “Good. That’ll just make me more je ne sais quoi. Quirky and lovable. But if you want, for the inaugural, I’ll trade out this one with tomorrow’s.” He turned and held out the next shirt on the pile: HEAVILY MEDICATED FOR YOUR SAFETY.

  “Much better. No, really, I mean it.” Her head fell forward an
d she sighed. “Never mind,” she said. “Never, never, never mind.”

  “Hey, Sam,” he said. “If you can’t have fun with all this, what’s the point?”

  Four days later, the fun part wasn’t much in evidence.

  Wes Farrell’s office on the third floor of the Hall of Justice looked more like a janitor’s space. A couple dozen unpacked moving boxes lay stacked by the windows that looked out on Bryant Street. His predecessor’s comfortable and elegant furnishings were gone. Meanwhile, Farrell had commandeered a desk and several chairs from some offices down the hall. He’d also brought the Nerf ball basket from his old office and mounted it on the bookshelf.

  Sitting in two of the folding chairs across from Farrell, Cliff and Theresa Curtlee had already congratulated him on his election victory. Now they exchanged glances with each other. Owners of San Francisco’s number-two newspaper, the Courier, the Curtlees had a lot of experience getting what they wanted in several different businesses—waste management, towing, import/export—and their tag-team approach had a long history of success. For this current campaign, their expectations were high because they had been large donors to Farrell’s campaign. Additionally the Courier had run some flattering profiles of him before the election and in the end had endorsed him.

  Farrell had done as much homework as he could. The Curtlees’ son, Ro, had spent the past nine years in prison serving a twenty-five-to-life term for the rape and murder of one of their housekeepers, Dolores Sandoval. On the day before Farrell’s election, the U.S. Supreme Court had refused to review the decision of the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal that had sent the case back to San Francisco for a new trial. The Ninth Circuit had reversed the conviction, overruling both the California Court of Appeal and the California Supreme Court.

  Cliff evidently gave Theresa the green light to begin. Her face, rigid with Botox, twitched in a semblance of a smile, and she cleared her throat. “We wanted to talk to you about our son, Roland, as you may have already guessed.”

  Farrell grinned to make himself look amicable. “I thought that might be what it was.”