Free Damage by John Lescroart

old-fashioned notion called probable cause, without which Mr. Curtlee’s out again in forty-eight hours, and P.S., Lieutenant Glitsky here gets sued for false arrest.”
    “I think we’ve got probable cause,” Jenkins said.
    Farrell gave her the bad eye. “All right, let’s be wildly imaginative and say you do. Next up, as you know, is a preliminary hearing. Maybe you’ve heard of it? A guy gets arrested, charged by this office, makes it over the probable-cause hurdle, then there’s a hearing in ten days to look at the evidence. If it’s not there, he walks.”
    “Wes, come on.” Jenkins came forward in her chair. “How many PXs”—preliminary hearings—“have you seen where they let the guy go? Zero, am I right? Maybe one in a decade. It never happens. Standard of proof is again only probable cause, ‘a strong suspicion . . .’ ”
    Farrell patiently held up a hand. “Please, spare me. I know the law. The law reads that probable cause is defined as ‘a strong suspicion in the mind of a reasonable person that the offense was committed and that the defendant committed it.’ ”
    “So, think about it,” Jenkins continued. “We’ve got Ro’s past conviction, the connection to Nuñez, the threat of Nuñez coming up at his retrial, the shoes . . . my point, though, is that any reasonable person—which includes most of our judges—is going to strongly suspect Ro did Nuñez, and that’s all we need. It’s a simple call, Wes, and it’s all yours.”
    “It’s an unacceptable risk,” Farrell said.
    “It’s a small risk,” Jenkins countered. “Insignificant. Less than crossing the street. But if it’s beyond your comfort level, you’ve still got the grand jury.”
    Farrell knew that this was true, and in fact had already contemplated it, though it, too, of course, had risk associated with it. If he went and sold his weak case and got a grand jury indictment on Ro in the Nuñez murder, then he could avoid the possible pitfall of a preliminary hearing. A grand jury indictment obviated the need for a preliminary hearing; by itself, it was authority enough to bind a defendant over to trial. But if Farrell went that way, Ro’s attorneys, as was their right, would demand the trial begin within sixty days, and there would be no continuance. Farrell could ask the court to join the cases for trial, but the way things were going with Baretto, that motion might well be denied. Under those circumstances—that is, if Wes prosecuted Ro for the Nuñez murder only—a San Francisco jury would never convict him. He’d be freed again. Within two or three months. Making his retrial for the rape and murder of Sandoval—already hugely problematic—logarithmically more difficult.
    “But the grand jury,” Glitsky said, “you’re still looking at ten days, two weeks before they could even get to the indictment. Ro could do a lot of damage in that time.”
    “Which is why our vote’s for an arrest and indict before the prelim,” Jenkins said. “Short and sweet. Take him out.”

    When the meeting broke up, Glitsky went back upstairs to his office with a couple of ideas rattling around in his brain, both of them having to do with Arnie Becker. He wanted the identification of the murder victim to be rock solid and also to be accomplished as soon as possible. If the dead person was not, in fact, Felicia Nuñez, then the theory that Jenkins and he were betting on would not fly—there had to be an immediate connection to Ro Curtlee, and they had to establish it quickly. Possible dental records were okay, but Glitsky knew that he could wait a very long time for dental records, to say nothing of the fact that finding the victim’s dentist so that they even had a chance at a comparison might be flatly impossible. So they’d have to try to find another way to identify her.
    But when he reached Becker—the man apparently didn’t need to sleep—the arson inspector was at least a step ahead of him. The