Nothing but the Truth Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  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

  PART TWO

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART THREE

  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

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  EPILOGUE

  Teaser chapter

  Praise for the Novels of John Lescroart

  “Stylish.” —People

  “A taut read.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “The superior element of Lescroart’s writing is his creation of lifelike characters ... a plot so compelling that even at four hundred pages plus, the book seems much too short.” —Houston Daily Sun

  “Dismas Hardy is such a likable main character that his very presence keeps the story grounded ... very entertaining. ” —Chicago Tribune

  “Excellent.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Lescroart is a master of courtroom fiction.”

  —South Carolina Herald

  “Terrific . . . [Lescroart] never wrote a bad page.”

  —USA Today

  “[An] original, well-crafted page-turner . . . blockbuster material.” —Library Journal

  “Crackling legal action . . . robust and intelligent entertainment. ” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Raymond Chandler once wrote that the test of a first-rate murder mystery is whether you would keep reading it if the last chapter—and the revelation of whodunit— were missing. In the matter of John Lescroart, I would keep reading any of his books, even without that last chapter.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram

  Nothing but the Truth

  “The novel’s pacing is reminiscent of classic Ross Macdonald, where a week’s worth of events are condensed into a few hours . . . [a] winning thriller.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy [is] at his most engaging here . . . a true star in the lawyer-hero firmament. ” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  The Mercy Rule

  “A thought-provoking and important novel. . . . Well written, well plotted, well done. A winner!”

  —Nelson DeMille, author of The Lion’s Game

  “A master’s take on a troubling social issue.” —People

  “Readers of The 13th Juror will already be off reading this book, not this review. Join them.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Very entertaining . . . a large and emotionally sprawling novel.” —Chicago Tribune

  Guilt

  “A great thriller: breakneck pacing, electrifying courtroom scenes, and a cast of richly crafted characters.”

  —People

  “Begin Guilt over a weekend. . . . If you start during the workweek, you will be up very, very late, and your pleasure will be tainted with, well, guilt.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A well-paced legal thriller . . . one of the best in this flourishing genre to come along in a while.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  A Certain Justice

  “A gifted writer with a distinctive voice. I read him with great pleasure.”

  —Richard North Patterson, author of Degree of Guilt

  “Electric ... Lescroart swings for the fences with a West Coast take on The Bonfire of the Vanities.... A richly satisfying thriller, and a breakthrough book for Lescroart.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Engrossing.” —San Francisco Examiner

  The 13th Juror

  “I double-dare you to begin reading John Lescroart’s new suspense trial novel The 13th Juror and put it down. The man is one of the best thriller writers to come down the pike, and this one is on the money.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  “A fast-paced test that sustains interest to the very end.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  Hard Evidence

  “Hard Evidence is a hefty, engrossing legal thriller . . . compulsively readable, a dense and involving saga of big-city crime and punishment.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Gripping. This author is a master of details . . . one never doubts the world he has created.”

  —West Coast Review of Books

  Also by John Lescroart

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Motive

  The Second Chair

  The Hunt Club

  The First Law

  The Oath

  The Hearing

  The Mercy Rule

  Guilt

  A Certain Justice

  The 13th Juror

  Hard Evidence

  The Vig

  Dead Irish

  Rasputin’s Revenge

  Son of Holmes

  Sunburn

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First Signet Printing, February 2001

  Copyright © The Lescroart Corporation, 1999

  Excerpt from Betrayal copyright © The Lescroart Corporation, 2008

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  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.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the produc
t 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.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3386-7

  To the Big Cactus and the little Gambas

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The research experience involved in this project has been singular. Although I interviewed close to twenty sources in the oil and ethanol industries, including lobbyists, engineers, lawyers, consultants, environmental toxicologists, and other professionals, not one individual consented to have his or her name mentioned in connection with this book. I thank these anonymous donors for their generosity and time.

  Many other fine people were no less helpful, and I owe them a debt of gratitude. These include, first and foremost, my friend and agent Barney Karpfinger and my pals Al Giannini and Don Matheson, who are continual stalwarts; Peter Dietrich, MD, MPH, Davis (California); Fire Marshal Bill Greene; Mark Detzer, PhD, and his wife (my sister), Kathy.

  A really terrific group of friends helps more than they know: Karen Kijewski and Tom Jessen; Dick and Sheila Herman; Bill Wood; Dennis and Gayle Lynds; Max Byrd. I’m also grateful for the generosity of Nelson DeMille, T. Jefferson Parker, Jon and Faye Kellerman, Richard North Patterson, Debbie Macomber, and Dixie Reid.

  Anita Boone is a wonderful assistant and great person. Nancy Berland’s tireless enthusiasm keeps the spark alive. Jackie Cantor and Anne Williams are great friends as well as the best editors a writer could have.

  Finally, JR & JS, you guys are, like, totally awesome.

  “No mask like open truth to cover lies, As to go naked is the best disguise.”

  —William Congreve

  PART ONE

  1

  At the tail end of a dog of a morning, Dismas Hardy was beginning to fear that he would also be spending the whole stiflingly dull afternoon in municipal court on the second floor of the Hall of Justice in San Francisco.

  He was waiting—interminably since nine a.m.—for his client to be admitted into the courtroom. This would not have been his first choice for how to celebrate his forty-eighth birthday.

  Now again the clerk called out someone not his client—this time a young man who looked as though he’d been drinking since he’d turned twenty-one and possibly two or three years before that. Maybe he was still drunk—certainly he looked wasted.

  The judge was Peter Li, a former assistant district attorney with whom Hardy was reasonably friendly. The prosecuting attorney was Randy Huang, who sat at his table inside the bar rail as the defendant went shuffling past. The public defender was a ten-year veteran named Donna Wong.

  Judge Li’s longtime clerk, another Asian named Manny See, read the charge against the young man as he stood, swaying, eyes opening and closing, at the center podium. The judge addressed him. “Mr. Reynolds, you’ve been in custody now for two full days, trying to get to sober, and your attorney tells me you’ve gotten there. Is that true?”

  “Yes, Your Honor,” Donna Wong declared quickly.

  Judge Li nodded patiently, but spoke in a firm tone. “I’d like to hear it from Mr. Reynolds himself, Counsellor. Sir?”

  Reynolds looked up, swayed for a beat, let out a long breath, shook his head.

  “Mr. Reynolds.” Judge Li raised his voice. “Look at me, please. Do you know where you are?”

  Donna Wong prodded him with her elbow. Reynolds looked down at her, up to the judge and his clerk, across to Huang sitting at the prosecution table. His expression took on a look of stunned surprise as he became aware of his surroundings, of the Asian faces everywhere he turned. “I don’t know.” A pause. “China?”

  But the courtroom humor, such as it was, mingled uneasily with tragedy and the sometimes cruel impersonality of the law. Twenty-five very long minutes after the drunken Mr. Reynolds had been removed from the courtroom, another case had been called, another defendant—not Hardy’s—brought in. He was beginning to think that his own client wouldn’t get his hearing and that another entire day would have been wasted. This was not all that unusual an occurrence. Everyone bitched about it, but no one seemed to be able to make things better.

  The new defendant was Joshua Bonder, and from the Penal Code section read out by the clerk, Hardy knew the charge was dealing amphetamines. But before things got started, Judge Li wanted to make sure that the three material witnesses in the case were in the building and ready to testify.

  Hardy was half nodding off, half aware of the jockeying between Judge Li and the attorneys, when suddenly the back door by the judge’s bench opened. At the sound of rattling chains—shades of the Middle Ages—Hardy looked up as a couple of armed bailiffs escorted three children into the courtroom.

  The two boys and a girl seemed to range in age from about ten to fourteen. All of them rail-thin, poorly dressed, obviously terrified. But what sent an almost electric buzz through the courtroom was the fact that they were all shackled together in handcuffs and leg chains.

  Joshua Bonder, whose own handcuffs had been removed for the hearing, screamed out, “You sons of bitches!” and nearly knocked over the defense table, jumping up, trying to get to the kids. “What have you done to my children?”

  Hardy had seen many murderers walk into the courtroomon their own, without any hardware. He thought he’d seen most of everything here, but this shocked him to his roots.

  And he wasn’t alone. Both of the courtroom bailiffs had leapt to restrain Mr. Bonder, and now held him by the defense table. But Judge Li himself was up behind the bench, his normal calm demeanor thrown to the winds at this outrage.

  “What the hell is this?” he boomed at the guards. “Uncuff those children at once!” His eyes raked the room, stopping at the prosecution table. “Mr. Vela”— the assistant DA who’d drawn Joshua Bonder—“what is the meaning of this?”

  Vela, too, was on his feet, stammering. “Your Honor, you yourself issued the body attachments for these children as witnesses. We were afraid they would flee. They wouldn’t testify against their father—he’s their only guardian. So we have been holding them in Youth Guidance.”

  “For how long?”

  Vela clearly wished the floor would open up and swallow him. “Two weeks, Your Honor. You must remember . . . ’’

  Li listened, then went back to shouting. “I remember the case, but I didn’t order them shackled, for God’s sake!”

  Vela the bureaucrat had an answer for that, too. “That’s the mandated procedure, Your Honor. When we transfer inmates from Juvenile Hall and we think there’s a flight risk, we shackle them.”

  Judge Li was almost stammering in his rage. “But look at these people, Mr. Vela. They’re children, not even teenage—”

  The father’s attorney, a woman named Gina Roake, decided to put in her two cents’ worth. “Your Honor, am I to understand that these children have been at the YGC for two weeks?”

  Vela mumbled something about how Ms. Roake shouldn’t get on her high horse. It was standard procedure. But Roake was by now truly exercised, her voice hoarse with disgust. “You locked up these innocent children in the company of serious juvenile offenders? Is that what you’re telling me, Mr. Vela?”

  “They are not innocent—”

  “No? What was their crime? Reluctance to testify against their father? That’s all? And for this they’re shackled?”

  Vela tried again. “The judge ordered—”

  But Li wasn’t having any part of that. Exploding
, he pointed his whole hand at the prosecutor, now booming at the top of his voice. “I ordered the least restrictive setting that would ensure the children’s return to court. Least restrictive, Mr. Vela. You know what that means?”

  The smallest of the three kids had started crying, and the girl had moved over, putting her arm around him. As the bailiff moved in to separate them, Gina Roake cried out, “Don’t you dare touch them. Your Honor?” A plea.

  Which Li accepted. “Let them alone.”

  A moment of relative quiet ensued. Into it, Gina Roake inserted a heartfelt reproach. “Your Honor, this is the inevitable outcome when children are drawn into the criminal justice system. There has to be a better way. This is a travesty.”

  At long last, it was Hardy’s turn.

  His client, a thirty-two-year-old recent Dallas transplant named Jason Trent, made his living laying carpet and was now in custody charged with three counts of mayhem and inflicting grievous bodily injury pursuant to a fight in the 3Com Stadium parking lot after a 49er game.

  Trent’s story, and Hardy believed it, was that a trio of local boys had taken exception to his Dallas Cowboys attire and, after the Niners had been soundly thrashed, thought they would work out some of their frustrations by ganging up on the lone cowboy. This, in common with most of the other Niner decisions on the field during the game, turned out to be a bad idea for the home team.

  Jason Trent had black belts in both karate and aikido and had also been a Golden Gloves champion in his teens back in Fort Worth. After being sprayed with beer and pushed from two directions at once, and all the while warning his assailants about his various defense skills, Jason had finally lost his temper. In a very short fight, he put all three boys on the ground. Then—his real mistake—he’d gone around with a few more rage-drivenpunches, in the process breaking two arms, one collarbone, and one nose.

  “You should have stopped when they were down,” Hardy had told him.

  To which Jason had shrugged. “They started it.”

  Even so, the story probably would have ended there had not one of the three “victims” been the son of Richard Raintree, a San Francisco supervisor and political ally of District Attorney Sharron Pratt. Raintree contended that Jason Trent had overreacted to what amounted only to good-natured hazing and was himself drunk on beer. Sharron Pratt agreed—she’d ordered Jason arrested and charged. Now Hardy addressed Judge Li. “Your Honor,” he said, “this is my client’s first alleged offense. He has no criminal record, not even a parking ticket. He holds a steady job. He’s married and has three young children. He shouldn’t even be here in this courtroom. His alleged victims started this fight and he was forced to defend himself.”