The Motive Read Online Free

“Before you go too far with her, maybe you should know that there was a gun under the larger torso, probably the man, maybe this Hanover. Also what looks like a bullet hole in one of the heads. Hers. Maybe in his, too, but I didn’t want to touch and turn him to find out.”
    “So murder/suicide?”
    Again, Becker shrugged. “Maybe. That’s one thing that fits, anyway. The gun was under his body.”
    “He did himself and fell on the gun?”
    “Maybe. Could be. That works. If the whole place goes up, I’ve got a roll of pictures I took you can look at tomorrow, then decide. Otherwise, if they can save the foyer, we might pull a break and be able to get in again by sunrise.” He glanced at the fire. “Not much before, I wouldn’t think.”
    Cuneo nodded, found his eyes drawn back across the street, where most of the firefighting activity had now come to be centered on the houses to either side of Hanover’s. Becker could be right. It looked to Cuneo as though part of the crime scene might be salvaged after all. “So where’d this woman come from?”
    “She said she was home watching TV and saw it on the news and recognized the place.”
    “Where’s the rest of her family?”
    “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. Maybe there isn’t any rest of it. I had just started talking to her when you got here.”
    “All right.” Cuneo cast a glance over to Mrs. Hanover, who was also staring at the blaze, hypnotized by it. He came back to Becker. “But it’s definitely arson?”
    “There was definitely gasoline residue under the smaller body.”
    “Anything else?”
    “That’s not enough?”
    “No, I didn’t mean that.”
    They had moved out in front of Mrs. Hanover, and now both men looked back to where she stood. Her coloring was high, unwitting excitement on her face, in the look in her eyes. With the heat from the fire, she’d removed her jacket and held it by a finger over her shoulder, a posture that emphasized her already generous bosom. “That’s a damn fine-looking woman,” Cuneo said.
    “You going to let her go home?” Becker asked.
    Cuneo kept his eyes on her. “Couple more minutes,” he said.



2

    F ifty-five-year-old Abraham Glitsky had worked his way up through the ranks of the San Francisco Police Department and was now its deputy chief of inspectors. In his days as a homicide inspector, and then later as lieutenant in charge of the homicide detail, he was a slacks-and-flight jacket kind of cop, but since assuming his latest rank—the only step up was chief—he wore his blues every day. And though he wasn’t aware of it, he cut quite a figure in them. A former tight end at San Jose State, Glitsky stood six feet two and went about 220, none of it padding. Jewish on his father’s side and black on his mother’s, his blue eyes were set off against light mocha skin. But a deep scar that ran between both his lips kept him from ever considering himself even remotely good-looking. If he thought about it at all, and he didn’t, he’d admit that he probably looked a little scary, especially when he wasn’t smiling, which was most of the time. And he wasn’t all wrong.
    At twelve minutes after seven on this fog-bound May morning, when Glitsky pulled his city-issued car to the curb at Alamo Square, he couldn’t have dredged up a smile on a bet. He’d routinely called his office from home for messages soon after he woke up and had learned about the double homicide and the five-alarm arson. The scene wasn’t much of a detour from his duplex above Lake on his route to work at the Hall of Justice, and he felt he needed to see it with his own eyes.
    Getting out of his car, he stood for a moment surveying the still-smoking disaster that had occurred here last night. Before most of the city’s firefighters had finally stopped the spread of flames at around 3:00 A.M. , all but two of the Painted Ladies had been affected to some degree or another.The one in the center was destroyed except for its