The Missing Piece by John Lescroart
John Lescroart is the author of a series of books featuring San Francisco lawyer Dismas Hardy and a cast of characters who have been with him for over 30 years in 19 books. A crime is at the center of all of the novels. Usually Hardy and crew are defending someone accused of murder. The city of San Francisco is a major character in the books, with Hardy and his friends sometimes bemoaning the fact that their city has become a bit too politically correct over the decades.
The book begins with Wes Farrell, former San Francisco district attorney, thinking about his life as he has a drink in a bar at lunch. He normally doesn’t do that but he is pondering his future. After Wes left the DA’s office, he went to work in Hardy’s firm which defends people accused of committing crimes. Since Farrell spent most of his professional life trying to put those people behind bars, he is conflicted at work, to say the least. As most prosecutors do, Wes believes that almost everyone who ends up in court is guilty. He is cross-pressured when he is defending people accused of a serious crime.
Paul Riley was convicted of rape and murder of his girlfriend, Dana Rush, and was sentenced to life in prison. Eleven years into his sentence, the Exoneration Initiative took his case and found sufficient evidence that Paul’s trial was not fair so he was released. He’s due about $500,000 in compensation from the state, but that will take years to process. Meanwhile, he’s working in a restaurant with a lot of other released offenders (or returning citizens, to use the new phrase) and living in a room on top of his father’s garage. Since the $500 he brings home every week doesn’t pay the bills, he breaks into apartments and houses and steals things to supplement his income
Paul is in his room, checking out the latest items he just stole, when someone knocks. Paul opened the door and was shot to death. Paul’s father heard something and went to check things out. He saw someone leaving as he went into the room where his son lay dead. Two police officers, Ken Yamashiro and Eric Waverly, show up and interview the father, James, who says he saw the killer. It was Doug Rush, the father of the murdered woman. This makes sense to the cops because the father of the victim would not be happy that the person convicted of killing his daughter was a free man.
Back at his office, Wes Farrell is meeting with a client, who Wes got off on an assault charge. The client is a rich, spoiled jerk who no doubt will continue to bully people because he got away with it this time. Wes is really not happy with his job. Wes meets with Dismas to talk about leaving the firm. Hardy understands but asks him to think about it a bit longer. Wes agrees.
The two police officers who talked to the deceased Paul Riley’s father go and talk to Doug Rush, who was identified as the killer. They aggressively interview Doug who pushes back and says that he didn't do anything. One of the cops, Eric, is going through a messy divorce, has a drinking problem, and has a reputation of beating up people he’s interrogating. Things escalate and Eric pummels the suspect while yelling at him. There was no provocation for doing this. Naturally, a good citizen recorded the beating with his cell phone.
Wes gets a call at home from Nick Halsey, a cop in the fraud division who met Doug Rush during Paul Riley’s trial. Doug spoke with Nick and asked him to ask Wes to be his defense attorney. Apparently, the defendant thought that Wes had been a good DA and trusted him with his defense.
Wes meets with Doug in the prison hospital where he’s recovering from being beaten up by Officer Waverly. Wes wants to know why the cops arrested Doug who says he has no idea. They talk about Paul Riley’s release from prison. Doug is happy that Paul’s dead and doesn’t believe that Riley is innocent despite the fact that the Exoneration Initiative got a confession out of an inmate in prison who claim to have murdered the woman. As a former DA, Wes also doesn’t trust sudden confessions from prisoners who can negotiate better treatment for lying about something.
Wes goes to court with his client for a bail hearing. They still don’t know why Doug was arrested. Wes is surprised that the district attorney who succeeded him, Amanda Jenkins, shows up in person for the proceeding. The actual DA almost never goes into a courtroom. DA Jenkins refuses Wes’s request for low bail and tells everyone why Doug was arrested. They have an eyewitness that saw the defendant running away from the murder scene. Doug is flabbergasted and insists that he wasn’t even in the city the night of the murder. The judge sets bail at one million dollars and the hearing is over. DA Jenkins offers Wes a deal - his client pleads to manslaughter in exchange for an eleven-year sentence. Doug rejects it and again proclaims his innocence.
After court, Wes meets with Dismas to discuss the case. Wes thinks that Doug probably did it, but Dismas argues that there still needs to be a fair trial to determine if that’s true. Wes reluctantly agrees.
Devin Juhle is the head cop of the city's Homicide Division. He’s called into his boss’s office because the video of Officer Waverly beating Doug Rush while arresting him has gone viral on YouTube. Devin calls in the two officers who arrested Rush. They insist that it wasn’t as bad as it looked on the video. They maintain that the killer was dangerous. Devin points out that at this point Rush has not been convicted of anything and that he was handcuffed and on the ground when he was being beaten up. The officers are put on administrative leave.
Eric is not supposed to do any police activities while on leave but he decides that he needs to get a definitive statement from the witness, James Riley. Eric starts the tape recorder and lies about the date, making it yesterday, before Eric was put on leave. The interview does not go smoothly. The witness didn’t really see the perpetrator’s face too clearly. Eric shows James six pictures, including Doug Rush, and asks him to pick out who he saw. James isn’t sure.
That didn’t go so well.
Abe Glitsky is a major character in all of Dismas Hardy’s cases. In this book, he is the retired head of homicide for the San Francisco Police Department. In retirement he works for Wyatt Hunt, the investigator for Hardy’s law office. Abe is half-Jewish and half-Black who was a no-nonsense cop. Abe and Wyatt are discussing what’s going on in the office. It turns out that Doug Rush did make bail several weeks ago and was out of jail. That morning he missed his first scheduled court appearance on his case, a bad thing to do if you want to stay out on bail until your trial.
Abe and Wyatt go to Doug’s condo and check around. The landlady says that she hasn’t seen him for a day or so. There is no sign that he skipped town. His beloved motorcycle is in the garage. He rides it everywhere so he’s probably still around she thinks.
Dismas, Wes, and Abe go to their favorite nearby restaurant to drink and discuss the case. No one can believe that Doug would walk out on a million-dollar bail secured by his condo, which he will lose if he skipped out. Wes muses that in San Francisco, it’s hard to get convicted of a crime even if you did it. Juries bend over backwards to find defendants not guilty, so Doug had an excellent chance of winning in court. Glitsky has a feeling that Doug did not choose to skip the hearing and that he’s probably dead.
Hardy goes over the case file to see if he can figure out what happened to Doug. Hardy sees a pretty weak case for the prosecution which makes it even more unlikely that Doug skipped out on bail. Hardy goes over to talk to the witness, James Riley, who now is not quite as sure that he saw Doug. Hardy does some digging and finds that Doug’s cell phone was turned off for two days, including the day that Paul Riley was killed. Hardy also goes to Doug’s condo and finds that the slain woman’s father was obsessed with Paul Riley’s release which he felt was unfair.
Abe Glitsky meets with Devin Juhle, the person who replaced him as homicide chief, and asks for access to Uber and taxi records in the city to try to track Doug Rush’s movements. That’s a no. When Abe calls Wyatt to report the refusal to turn over the records, he finds out that Doug’s body was found in a park by a wedding party that was celebrating there. Not a great way to start on the road towards marital bliss.
Abe’s hunch that Doug was dead was spot on. Now he’s trying to figure out who did it. The betting is that the same person who killed released con Paul Riley killed Doug Rush, the guy arrested for killing Riley. No one is quite sure why they feel that way but it seems to make sense since the same caliber bullet killed each of the victims. It also means that Doug probably didn’t kill Paul Riley. Doug might have been shot because he would have said something at the trial to incriminate the real murderer. That’s one theory.
The death of Doug, the client, means that Hardy’s law firm is off the case. Wes doesn’t have much else to do; he has an undemanding client load. Abe Glitsky also has not much to do, He’s part-time at the Hunt Club, the formal name for Wyatt Hunt’s investigative firm, and he only gets work when there’s more to do than the staff can handle.
The case bothers Abe. As a career homicide investigator, he sees too many loose ends. He’s also bothered by the fact that no one seems interested in finding Doug’s murderer. Doug lost his daughter to murder eleven years ago and his wife died of cancer relatively young. As the case went on, it seemed less and less likely that Doug killed Paul Ryan, but Doug is dead and no one cares who did it.
Abe convinces Wes that his firm has a duty to find Doug's killer and perhaps find out who shot Paul Riley. There also is the fact that Doug Rush paid the firm $100,000 as a retainer. They've spent very little of that so there's enough money to forge ahead. Dismas Hardy is a decent soul who sees the merit in pursuing the investigation. Abe Glitsky is still on the case.
Abe calls up the Exoneration Institute and talks to Martin Dozier, a principal in the organization. Martin tells Abe what the group does but this seems to be a dead end. Once someone is released, the Exoneration Institute does not keep in touch with the client so there’s not much Martin can tell Abe about Paul Riley’s life as a free man. Martin and Abe do hit it off and they will stay in touch.
Next, Abe visits Doug Rush’s downstairs neighbor, Julie Bedford. As it turns out, she and Doug were occasional bedmates. Julie knows that Doug was angry about Paul Riley’s early release from prison but she is sure that Doug couldn’t kill anyone. Abe goes into Doug’s condo to look around. He finds lots of material on the Exoneration Initiative, including an article in The New Yorker that showed statistics about the work that the Initiative had done. Abe notices that the magazine’s subscription label has the address of a woman in the neighborhood where Doug said he had visited on the night Paul Riley was shot. Could this woman be Doug’s girlfriend? The plot thickens.
Abe and Wes head south to meet with Bridget Forbes, the name on the New Yorker label. Bridget is an attractive woman who does confirm that Doug was with her the night Paul Riley was killed. It’s a delicate situation that Doug did not want anyone to know about since Bridget is married. Her husband is an international pilot who is away for long stretches of time, giving his wife the opportunity to fool around. She insists that her husband, Theo, did not know about the relationship with Doug. Bridget and her husband went out to dinner the night that Doug was killed so Theo could not have killed Doug who lived 150 miles away. Former homicide chief Abe Glitsky doesn’t quite trust Bridget, so he still has Theo on the list of suspects for Doug’s murder. Both Abe and Wes noticed that Bridget did not seem too upset about Doug’s death. Maybe she did it.
When he gets back to San Francisco, Abe goes to police headquarters to talk to Jack Royce and Jill Gomez, the two detectives who are working on Doug’s murder. They are known as Jack and Jill in police circles. Abe tells them that Doug had an alibi for the time when Paul Riley was shot so he isn’t the murderer. That surprises the two detectives who hadn’t even considered the possibility that the guy they arrested wasn’t guilty. They have to rethink the case, as does Abe, who has no idea what really happened.
Abe’s next stop is at the Lily Pad Restaurant, which employs released offenders, including Paul Riley. The restaurant is run by Delancey House, a famous San Francisco non-profit that has done really good work helping people coming out of prison lead productive lives. Paul’s manager, Raymond Henry, says that the deceased was a jerk that few people liked. Paul recruited employees to skim money off credit card purchases. He also was lazy and irritated a lot of his co-workers. Abe wonders why Paul wasn’t fired, but Raymond says a tough case like Paul is what Delancey Street is working to change into a productive citizen. Raymond also tells Abe that workers at the restaurant thought that Paul was guilty of the crimes on which he was convicted, that the Exoneration Initiative got it wrong freeing Paul.
Abe is starting to rethink the case. He calls up Martin Dozier at the Exoneration Initiative to see if he has any sense that maybe they got it wrong in overturning Paul’s conviction. Martin pushes back on that, but he does say that the guy who confessed to the crime Paul was accused of was not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Martin also mentions that several high-profile people that his organization got released ended up dead soon after leaving prison.
Abe does a Google search for the people who were released through the efforts of the Exoneration Initiative over the past five years. He finds 400 names and starts to check each one to see how many met violent deaths soon after being released.
Abe talks to Nick Halsey, the former homicide investigator who became friendly with Doug Rush during Paul Riley’s trial for killing Dana Rush. Doug needed help navigating the criminal justice system during the trial so Nick helped him. Nick, like Doug, believes that Paul Riley killed Doug’s daughter and that the EI got this one wrong.
Doug was an avid motorcycle aficionado so Abe heads off to the local motorcycle club. The bikers liked Doug and were shocked that he was arrested for murder and that he was killed. Abe notices that several of Doug’s biker friends look like him and may have been the person Paul Riley’s father saw leaving the murder site. The list of suspects is growing.
Abe can’t let the case go so he heads off to see Martin Dozier at the Exoneration Initiative to find out more about exonerees who ended up dead after being released. Martin says that there are 23 guys who died within ten years after being released. Many of the deaths were due to natural causes, but four men, from all over the country, met violent deaths soon after leaving prison. Martin reviewed his files on these cases and found that the four men may well have been guilty of the crimes they were accused of. Abe doesn’t believe in coincidences so he’s beginning to think that maybe there's a vigilante going around to permanently fix the Exoneration Initiative’s mistakes.
Abe returns to his desk at the Hunt Club, the investigation agency where he works, and finds out that Bridget Forbes, Doug Rush’s semi-girlfriend, is dead in a murder/suicide. Bridget’s husband, Theo the pilot, killed her and then shot himself. Apparently, he did know that Bridget was cheating on him. Abe heads south to Miramar where he and Wes had visited Bridget a few days earlier. Abe talks his way into the crime site and sees that Jack and Jill, the two San Francisco detectives who are working on Doug Rush’s murder, are already there. The detectives feel somewhat responsible for the deaths since they had interviewed Bridget the day before, with Theo present. He may have confronted his wife, with the situation escalating into violence. The pistol Theo used was a Glock, the same caliber as the weapon that killed Doug. It’s beginning to look like Theo did know about his wife’s affair and killed Doug.
Abe is still trying to figure out what really happened. He returns to interview Doug's condo neighbor and sometimes bedmate, Julia Bedford. Abe asks her a few questions about her relationship with Doug and whether she owns a gun. She flips out, thinking that Abe is accusing her of Doug’s murder. Abe assures her that he’s not accusing her of anything and tells her that they may have a good suspect, the deceased Theo.
Julia calms down and says that she doesn’t think Theo killed Doug. If Theo went ballistic about the affair, he would have killed Doug and then gone back to his home and killed his wife and himself soon after, in a fit of passion. Doug was murdered a week before the murder/suicide. so that theory may be wrong. Abe sees that she has a good point. Back to the drawing board. Julia makes a pass at Abe as he is leaving but Abe, being happily married and seeing what fooling around did to the deceased Bridget Forbes, decides to go home.
Back at the Hunt Club, Abe reads the four files on the exonerees who met violent ends. He’s pretty sure that each of them was guilty. That would establish a motive for murder, although they were killed all over the county over a period of six years.
Abe goes back to the motorcycle club and pushes the guys for information. He irritates some of the members so he decides to leave. Abe hears footsteps behind him and ends in the hospital with a mild concussion. Bikers have their own rules.
Abe leaves the ER under doctor’s orders to take it easy for a few days. Back at the law office, Dismas Hardy and Wes Farrell decide to pull Abe off the case before he gets really hurt. With Doug’s death, the firm technically doesn’t have a client so it’s no big deal to close down the investigation.
Abe of course will not slow down. Detective Jack Royce, of Jack and Jill fame, calls and says that Theo had a solid alibi for the night Doug Rush was killed, so Theo did not do it. Abe has figured this out but it’s good to get confirmation.
Abe calls up police departments in the cities where the four exonerees were murdered and finds out that there were no clues left by the killer, a very unusual situation. Abe is starting to believe that the perpetrator is a cop who knows how to leave no evidence at a crime scene.
Abe got a call from Raymond Henry, the manager of the Lily Pad Restaurant where Paul Riley worked with a lot of released prisoners. One employee there, Donovan Keating, got busted for a parole violation, possession of a firearm. Paul Riley had a fight with Keating and was the one who told Keating’s parole officer about the gun. Now we have one more person who has a motive for killing Riley. Donovan Keating looks a lot like Doug Rush who was identified as the killer, and Keating was not working when Riley was shot. This case keeps getting more confusing.
Abe Glitsky is still feeling the effects of being whacked on the head so he took a nap at home. While he was sleeping, an idea percolated in his dreams. He went down to the San Francisco Hall of Justice and had a friend who works in the records department pull a file for him. Reading the file convinces him that he’s figured it out. Abe calls Devin, the chief of homicide who had gone home for the day home for the day. Abe calls him at home and leaves a message. Devin really does not want to talk to crazy Abe, but he calls him back. They chat.
Abe goes back to talk to Julia Bedford, Doug Rush’s downstairs neighbor. He asks her to make a call to a certain person who was a friend of Doug’s and Julia’s and tell him that Doug told her that the mutual friend had killed Paul Riley. Julia doesn’t believe this, but she needs to be reassured in person.
Abe calls in homicide chief Devin and Jack and Jill to stake out Julia’s condo and wait for her invited guest to show up. He does and the visitor is police officer Nick Halsey. He knocks on the door and before Julia lets him in, he pulls out his pistol and threatens her. The police show up. Nick makes the poor choice of deciding to shoot it out with the cops. Abe gets shot by Nick before Nick is gunned down. Abe had a bulletproof vest on so all he had was a bruised chest.
Abe had checked Nick’s personnel files and found that he was on vacation when each of the four guilty exonerees was murdered. Abe also came up with some other evidence that implicated Nick in the exoneree murders.
Abe also knew that Nick and Doug were very close and that Nick may well have implied or stated that he took care of Paul Riley. Once Nick was arrested for the murder, he might have been implicated by Doug’s testimony at the trial. That was a loose end that had to be eliminated. That wasn’t enough evidence to get a conviction, so Abe had to set the trap with Julia.
Back at Dismas Hardy’s law office, Wes and his colleagues are discussing the case that involved the death of three people in California and four wrongly released exonerees around the country. Wes has regrets that he had thought that his client, Doug, was guilty even as Wes went through the motions of defending him.
Maybe this idea of the presumption of innocence really does make sense.
Bob’s Take
Each Dismas Hardy book features a different star. Dismas is the main one, but others get to shine. For most of the books, Abe Glitsky was either a homicide investigator or chief of that department, so he was a major player in the series. Now Abe is retired but still doing his thing.
San Francisco is a major character as is Boston in Dennis Lehane’s earlier novels. Many years ago, Lehane made a presentation at our local branch library on one of his early books, which were mysteries featuring a couple who did investigations. He stressed that Boston’s neighborhoods were major elements in those books. John Lescroart does the same thing with the City by the Bay. There’s lots of cool weather and mist.
It’s interesting how authors of book series age their characters. The major players in John Lescroart’s books age a little less rapidly than the real time between books. Based on the age changes of his kids, in this book Dismas Hardy probably is about 20 years older than when he first showed up in 1989, which was 33 years ago. On the other hand, Robert Parker’s Spenser first appeared in 1973 in The Godwulf Manuscript as a 40-year old. The last Spenser book I read was Someone to Watch Over Me, written in 2021 (not by Robert Parker) in which Spenser is probably in his late 40’s.
The Dismas Hardy books are short, easy reads that are very well written with intriguing plots. They are fun.
