Free The Hearing by John Lescroart Page A

and she’d see me tomorrow. She was always going to meetings.”
    “And she didn’t seem upset? Did she act as if anything was bothering her?”
    Treya hesitated, met Glitsky’s eyes again. “It’s so hard to say now, knowing what happened. Everything has a different feel. You wonder if you saw something or not.”
    “But you think you did?”
    She shook her head. “I’m not sure. If she’d come in on Monday, smiling and happy, I never would have given it a thought. I know I didn’t think about it when I got home Sunday night. I just thought she was overbooked, like she gets. Got.” The tense shift bothered her, and she stopped.
    “It’s okay.” Glitsky had to fight the urge to reach over and touch her, offer her some comfort. Instead, he sat back, no threat and no push, and let her find the thread again. “It’s okay,” he repeated.
    “I know, I know.” Her look was grateful, and she held it on him for an instant. Then she nodded and sighed. “Now I’d say that, yes, something might have been bothering her. She seemed a little . . . detached.” Treya hastened to protect her boss. “But she’d get that way sometimes. She always had a lot on her mind, on her plate.”
    Suddenly Treya’s expressive face took on a different look—a sudden impatience with all this, an almost angry frustration.
    “What are you thinking?” Glitsky asked.
    “I’m thinking she didn’t know her killer. This is stupid. Her murder wasn’t connected to anything. Nobody she knew could have wanted to kill her.” She raised her eyes, a challenge with some barb in it that he didn’t quite understand. “You had to know her.”
    “I did,” Glitsky replied. “I thought she was fantastic.”
    “She never mentioned you as a friend.” Suddenly the barb in her voice was pronounced, unmistakable—all of her protective instincts on display from out of nowhere.
    “Well, no, not exactly a friend. I knew her when she worked at the Hall.”
    “I knew that. I knew who you were. I was there then, too, as a clerk.”
    Glitsky had no response to this, although Treya seemed in some way to hold it against him. He attempted to get beyond it. “In any event, that’s another reason why I’d like to know what she might have been working on. I’ve got kind of a personal interest as well.”
    But if he thought this admission would ally him with Treya, he was mistaken. “So you’ve kept up on her career since she’d left the Hall?”
    He answered guardedly. “A little bit, yes.”
    “In a kind of a hands-off way.”
    Glitsky raised his shoulders awkwardly. “I guess you’d say I admired her from a distance.” He wondered how suddenly everything had gone so wrong with this interview. “I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.”
    “Not at all,” she said. “You’re only doing your job. But Elaine is very personal to me. I know who her friends were and it’s a little insulting to pretend you were close to her, too, so maybe I’d tell you more.”
    “That wasn’t what I was doing.”
    “Really?” she asked with ill-concealed disbelief. “Then I’m sorry I got that impression. Perhaps I overreacted.” All business now, Treya cut off further inquiry as she stood, signaling—although it was not her place to do so—that the interview was over. “I’m sure the firm wouldn’t object if you got a warrant for her files or to go over her client list. You might find something there that you’re looking for.”
    Glitsky rarely felt either inept or out of his depth, but now he felt both, and acutely. Perhaps it was a sense of foolishness because he found her so physically attractive and at such an inappropriate time. Whatever it was, he was standing along with her, not willing to risk falling any further in her esteem.
    He hadn’t gotten anywhere here, and in fact he’d had little confidence that any real evidence was going to come from this quarter. But it had been the only place he could think of to begin, to connect with