Hardy let out a long sigh. ‘So what now?’
‘I don’t know. We hang. She’ll…’ He stopped. Glitsky, who’d lost his own wife to cancer a few years before, wasn’t one for stoking false hopes. ‘She driving the Subaru?’
‘I’d guess so. If she’s driving.’
‘Give me the license and I’ll put it out over the dispatch – broaden the net.’
‘All right.’ Hardy hated the sound of that – broaden the net. It was getting official now. Objective. Harder to deny, even to himself.
Where was his wife?
3
Earlier that morning, Scott Randall was hosting an informal bull session with some law clerks in his tiny cubicle of an office on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. Even his most ardent admirers among these clerks would admit that Scott was the near embodiment of well-dressed, post-Gen-X arrogant disdain. But none of them viewed this as a negative. Indeed, the trait had allowed Scott, though only thirty-three, to rise to homicide prosecutor in the DA’s office, an eminence to which they all aspired.
This morning, Scott had a theme and he was rolling. ‘Listen up,’ he told the acolytes. ‘You are looking at someone who has gotten convictions on his first three murder cases – and I don’t need to tell you how difficult that is in our compassion-driven little burg.’ No false modesty for Scott Randall.
‘But do you know what those three convictions have done for my career? Or what the same kind of cases will do for yours?’ The question was rhetorical and he breezed ahead. ‘Zero, zilch, nada. You know why? Because no one cares about the people in them. Look.’ He held up a finger. ‘One, a motorcycle gang brawl over one of their common-law women; two,’ – another finger – ‘a drug dealer killed by an addict he’d tried to cheat; three, a bum stabbed after he’d stolen another bum’s grocery cart. This is not stuff over which newspaper readers salivate, believe me.’
One of the young men spoke up. ‘So what do you do?’