Free The Motive by John Lescroart

exceeded the approved hours; another call that he was behind on his credit union payments; the arson guy, Becker, wondering how he wanted to arrange his pickup of last night’s witness list; a woman he’d stopped seeing recently.
    Barely audible to the other inspectors, he was humming the opening riff to “Satisfaction” over and over and over as he listened to the messages, writing notes and phone numbers on the pad he carried in his back pocket. Glitsky’s was the last message and, hearing it, Cuneo went silent. He played the message again, aware that a flush of anger was rising to his face, but otherwise trying to keep his expression neutral. He threw a quick glance around the room, wondering if any of his colleagues might have heard something, if they were watching for his reaction. But no one was paying him any mind.
    The recording told him that he’d finished with his last message, to press one if he’d like to hear it again, two if he’d like to save it, three to delete it. It told him the samething all the way through again. When it started to tell him for a third time, he finally heard it and slowly replaced the receiver.
    What the hell did this mean? The deputy chief of inspectors didn’t just call and say, “Oh, by the way, I’ll be working with you on your latest case.” Cuneo had never heard of anything like it. He’d been without a partner for almost three years now and didn’t think much about whether he was popular or not. He was under the impression he’d been doing a good job, making triable cases on five killers in the past eight months, had gotten the collars. It was much better than the average for the detail. Certainly it was the best stretch he’d ever enjoyed professionally.
    But what else could this be about except that somebody was checking up on him and his work? And on this of all cases, which on the face of it appeared very close to a slam dunk. It had to mean that they were going to begin some kind of bullshit documentation for moving him out of homicide, maybe out of the PD altogether.
    And why would Lanier or anybody else want to do that?
    Sitting back in his chair, he began tattooing the arms of it with a steady, rapid beat. It
couldn’t
be about his work product, he thought. If it was, Lanier was straight-shooter enough to have told him, even if it was true that he and Glitsky went way back, sometimes even saw each other socially. Cuneo wondered if his lieutenant even knew about the message Glitsky had left—if he did, he certainly would have given Cuneo some warning, or at least an explanation. This kind of thing just wasn’t done. It wasn’t right. More, it was an insult.
    And then he stopped his drumming, took in a lungful of air and let it out slowly. Suddenly, with a crystal clarity, he realized what this was really about, what it had to be about.
    And it wasn’t his work.
    Over the months and years since he’d started in homicide, Cuneo hadn’t made much of a secret of his feelings for Glitsky. When he’d been a newcomer to the detail, still partnered with Russell, one of his first cases had concerned the shooting of an old man named Sam Silverman, who ran a pawnshop a couple of blocks off Union Square. At thattime, the head of homicide was Barry Gerson, and Glitsky—nominally a lieutenant—worked in a sergeant’s position as supervisor of payroll. In the course of Cuneo’s investigation into Silverman’s death, this nobody Glitsky somehow insinuated himself into the detail’s business—butting in, offering his advice, getting in the way. He’d once run homicide, and the unwelcome interference struck Cuneo, Russell and Gerson as a power play to get his old job back.
    Eventually his investigation made it clear to Cuneo that Glitsky’s other motive for his involvement in that case was to help out a defense attorney friend of his named Dismas Hardy, whose client, John Holiday, was the chief suspect in the killing. When Gerson finally went out to Pier 70 to