The Motive Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter 14

  PART TWO

  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

  PART THREE

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Acknowledgements

  Teaser chapter

  “An unpredictable plot . . . engrossing from start to finish.” —The Albany Times Union

  With their park view and their old-fashioned detail, the Victorian houses on San Francisco’s Steiner Street were highly valuable. With their wooden construction, they were also highly vulnerable. So when Paul Hanover’s multimillion dollar home went up in flames, it was all over very quickly. And when the bodies of Hanover and his girlfriend were found in the charred debris, it appeared that the end came even more quickly for them—judging from the bullet holes in their heads.

  But this isn’t just any double homicide. Hanover was a friend—and donor—to the mayor. She wants answers, now. And she wants Abe Glitsky, Deputy Chief of Inspectors, to provide them. With the help of his close friend, attorney Dismas Hardy, Glitsky reluctantly jumps on the case—trying not to step on departmental toes along the way. Before it’s over, the pair will have to face an old lover and an old enemy—and follow a trail of evidence that stretches far beyond their usual jurisdiction. . . .

  “Superb . . . it should end up as one of the year’s most talked-about page-turners in this popular genre.”

  —Calgary Herald

  “Grisham and Turow remain the two best-known writers in the genre. There is, however, a third novelist at work today who deserves to be considered alongside Turow and Grisham. His name is John Lescroart. . . . If you haven’t yet discovered Lescroart, The Motive is an excellent place to start.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky are back and in more entertaining form than ever. . . . What separates Lescroart from the usual courtroom novelist is his characters. . . . They tend to come alive as people and not just action figures.” —Winston-Salem Journal

  “As always Lescroart can be relied on to produce nail-biting trial scenes.” —Orlando Sentinel

  “Dry wit. . . . The motive is as unusual as any I’ve come across in mystery novels.” —The Blade (Toledo, OH)

  Praise for John Lescroart’s Previous Novels

  The Second Chair

  “Lescroart gives his ever-growing readership another spellbinder to savor.” —Library Journal

  “Great characters and a wonderful sense of place.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  The First Law

  “With his latest, Lescroart again lands in the top tier of crime fiction.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Oath A People Page-Turner

  “A terrific crime story.” —People

  “Hardy and Glitsky are like good wine, improving with time.” —The Orlando Sentinel

  The Hearing

  “A spine-tingling legal thriller.”—Larry King, USA Today

  Nothing but the Truth

  “Riveting . . . one of Lescroart’s best tales yet.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  The Mercy Rule

  “Well written, well plotted, well-done.”

  —Nelson DeMille

  Guilt

  “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 Certain Justice

  “A West Coast take on The Bonfire of the Vanities . . . richly satisfying.” —Kirkus Reviews

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

  —Richard North Patterson

  The 13th Juror

  “Fast-paced . . . sustains interest to the very end.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  Hard Evidence

  “Engrossing . . . compulsively readable, a dense and involving saga of big-city crime and punishment.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  Dead Irish

  “Full of all the things I like. Lescroart’s a pro.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  ALSO BY JOHN LESCROART

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Hunt Club

  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

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Signet Printing, January 2006

  Copyright © The Lescroart Corporation, 2004

  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 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.

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

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  eISBN : 978-1-4406-2076-8

  To Lisa Sawyer

  Again, and again, and again . . .

  Out of the crooked tree of humanity no straight thing can ever be made.

  —Immanuel Kant

  PART ONE

  1

  By location alone, a block from Fillmore Street as it passes through the upwardly challenged Hayes Valley, Alamo Square would not be among the sexier neighborhoods in San Francisco. But one of the most popular and recognizable posters of the City by the Bay captures a row of beautifully restored and vibrantly painted three-and four-story Victorians that face the park on Steiner Street—the so-called “Painted Ladies.” The poster created a certain cachet for the area such that the cheapest of these houses now go for three-plus. Million.

  The blaze at Paul Hanover’s, in the middle of this block, began around 8:00 p.m. on May 12, although the first alarm wasn’t called in until nearly 8:30. Fires love old Victorians. Even though Hanover’s house had been stripped to the bare bones twenty years earlier— retrofitted for earthquakes and freshly insulated with fire-resistant material—it is the nature of Victorian design to have funky interior spaces, oddly shaped rooms, crannies and closets and unusual passages. Within the walls, since heat wants to travel up, fires employ the vertical stud lines as flues, almost as chimneys, to transport themselves effortlessly and quickly up and up into the roof spaces, where billowing smoke is most often noticed first.

  Even in a neighborhood of great sensitivity to the threat of fire—of old, very valuable wooden houses in wall-to-wall proximity—no one noticed anything amiss at Hanover’s until the fire had progressed to the unfinished attic. The late-arriving fog camouflaged the first appearance of the smoke, and the wind blew it away. By the time one of the local residents realized that what he was actually seeing was not fog but thick clouds of smoke pouring out from under the eaves of his neighbor’s roof, the fire was well advanced.

  As soon as the first alarm’s fire trucks arrived—three engines, two trucks, two battalion chiefs, an assistant chief and a rescue squad—the two-man aerial ladder team from the first engine began climbing to Hanover’s roof, intending to ventilate it by cutting a hole into it with axes and chainsaws. Meanwhile, four men in Nomex turnout pants and coats and wearing Scott Air-Paks—the initial attack squad—got to the front door, found it unlocked and opened it right up. Although they were armed with Akron fog nozzles that could spray water over a wide angle and get them closer to the flames, in this case they were greeted by a roiling cloud of hot thick black smoke, impossible to see through. They could make no progress.

  Al Daly, officer of the initial attack squad, spoke matter-of-factly into the headpiece of his walkie-talkie. “Front door is breached, Norm. We got a working fire here.” Daly was speaking to his battalion chief, Norm Shaklee, out front in the street. The words conveyed great urgency. A working fire meant they would need at least one more alarm—four more engines, another truck, two more chiefs. In a house this size with so much exposure to the homes on either side, this working fire could go to five alarms, San Francisco’s maximum.

  All four stories of Hanover’s home might already be— probably were—involved. Shaklee, in his white helmet, placed the next alarm call and looked up as the sound of chainsaws stopped. Over the roof, he saw a churning pillar of black smoke erupt into the sky, and spoke into his walkie-talkie. “They’re through on the roof, Al. Back out a minute.”

  He was telling Daly that ventilation was about to start working, potentially a very dangerous moment. If the smoke inside the house was hot enough—and no one knew if it was—the addition of oxygen to it might at this time cause a tremendous and often lethal backdraft explosion. So the initial attack squad waited in a kind of suspension down the front steps out in the street until, a minute and forty seconds later, the smoke column spewing from the roof suddenly exploded into a fireball that lit the night for blocks around and rose to heights of a hundred feet and more.

  By now, the first hoses had been attached to the hydrantat the corner, and eight firefighters on each of a couple of them were blasting six hundred gallons of water per minute into the open space. For all the apparent good the firefighters were doing, they might as well have been standing around spitting on the flames, but appearances in this case were deceiving. The hydrant water was lowering the temperature sufficiently so that Daly and his squad could advance again into the building.

  Because of the ventilation, the smoke that filled the foyer had now begun to dissipate upward, as did the thick cloud of steam generated by the water from the hoses. Within a few seconds after the hose teams stopped soaking the entryway, Daly and his squad were back at the front door. With his night helmet’s beam on and glowing, he had relatively clear sight lines through the foyer to the house beyond, to the flames still licking at the walls on all sides. Wielding his Akron, spraying in a wide arc, he advanced into the darkness, following the beam on his helmet. All around was noise and chaos—the rush of air behind him as the conflagration sucked it in, the roar of the actual fire, the creaking and splintering of wood, the hail of ax blows, disembodied voices yelling both within and outside the building.

  Daly sprayed and advanced, sprayed and advanced. One foot or so at a time. The foyer was circular, high-ceilinged and quite large, perhaps fourteen feet in diameter. He could make out the shapes of burning furniture along the walls—what appeared to have been a coatrack, a sideboard, maybe an umbrella stand or wastebasket. Drapes over a pair of windows, curved to the shape of the house, were all but incinerated. One opening to Daly’s right led into another open room, and directly ahead of him another doorway fed into a hall. Everywhere he looked there was flame—total involvement of the ground floor.

  Despite the hose’s soaking, the fire was growing again, heating up. It was excruciatingly hot, dangerously hot. Daly felt a sloshing like water in his ear, but knew that it wasn’t water. It was his earwax, melting. He had to get out of here, right now. He wasn’t going to be able to check for potential rescue victims until the fire died somewhat, and by then—by now, he knew—anything living in the structure would have died as well.

  Still he pushed forward, forcing himself for another step or two, spraying as he went. It was full night, his only light his helmet beam. Looking down at the entrance to the hallway, he suddenly became aware of two shapes that stopped him where he stood. Leaning in for a closer look, not that he needed it, he forced himself to speak in his most neutral tone. “There’s two bodies in here, Norm. In the foyer.”

  Out in the street, the second-alarm units had begun to arrive and Shaklee was issuing orders to nine people at once back by the rehab station, which itself was already nearly overwhelmed supplying drinks, fresh air bottles and first aid. He asked Daly to repeat what he’d just said, and he did, adding, “No ambulance needed.” Which meant they were obviously dead.

  Shaklee took only another second to process the information,then turned and spoke to his operator-aide, who functioned as gopher in the field. “Find Becker,” he said, “and put in a call to homicide.”

  Arnie Becker, the forty-three-year-old lead arson investigator attached to the Bureau of Fire Investigation, arrived with the second-alarm unit. In situations like this, Becker’s task was to determine the origin of the blaze. To do that, he’d have to enter the building and investigate all the indicators—“V” patterns on walls, decalcification of Sheetrock, “alligatoring” of s
tuds, condition of electrical components and so on—and by doing so, hope to locate the spot where the fire began, and if possible determine what might have caused it.

  Becker was a twenty-year veteran of the fire department. In San Francisco his whole working life, he was particularly familiar with Victorians, and he knew that this house, with all the places in which a fire could hide, would in all likelihood burn through the night and perhaps well into the next morning. He wasn’t going to have an answer anytime soon.

  But that didn’t mean he didn’t have a lot to do. A huge crowd of onlookers had coalesced on the block, and more were streaming out of houses both up and down the street and across the open space of Alamo Square behind them. This was his potential witness pool—people he and his team would need to talk to. Some percentage of them might live on the block, might have seen something suspicious.

  He needed all the information he could find from a near-infinite universe of possibilities, the most tantalizing one being that if this fire was arson, if someone had started it, then that person was probably among the crowd, enjoying his handiwork, possibly even sitting in one of the cypress trees in Alamo Square getting sexual satisfaction from it. Becker had seen it before.

  In San Francisco, police officers from the hit-and-run detail are assigned to fire investigation, so Becker had a staff of helpers and he sent them out to talk to everybody they could. They would not conduct formal interviews—not now, anyway—but he wanted names and phone numbers of everybody. If people didn’t want to provide that, that could be instructive. If still others wouldn’t shut up, that might tell him something as well. Becker didn’t know anything, including what he didn’t know. So this was his chance to start gathering information from whatever source presented itself, and he took it very seriously indeed. His men fanned out to either end of the crowd and were working it to the inside and from behind.

  Becker himself was on his way to talk to the neighbor who’d called in the fire and who had waited around to help guide the trucks when they’d arrived, not that they had needed it by then. But suddenly Becker’s partner in the Arson Unit, J. P. Dodd—twenty-eight years old, Army-trained, competent yet relaxed, appeared at his elbow. The night around them was a kaleidoscope of lights in the darkness—the yellow flickering fire, the red bubbles on the trucks, the white glare from the firemen’s helmets, now the kleigs of the TV camera crews. Dodd’s earnest face looked particularly grave. “They’ve found two bodies, Arn. Shaklee needs you to come on up.”