Nothing but the Truth by John Lescroart

often without a food or water or bathroom break, asking leading questions, doing whatever it took to get his evidence onto the record, because that’s what the grand jury was for.
     
     
    And though Scott Randall was certainly abusing it now, Hardy had to remember that the grand jury had come into existence, and still functioned, as a vehicle to protect civil rights. Because of its secrecy provisions and the teeth with which infractions against them were enforced, the grand jury was the only place where prosecutors could get answers from scared or recalcitrant witnesses, where the truth could come out. Nobody could ever know you were even there or what you might have said. You were safe—from your enemies, from corrupt officials, from the prying media.
     
     
    In theory, anyway.
     
     
    But now Frannie. He would not have dreamed this could ever happen to someone in his personal life. And never to his wife. Frannie wasn’t living on the edge of the law. She wasn’t like the others. Except that now, to Marian Braun and Scott Randall, it appeared that she was.
     
     
    Even after all of his experience with the law, this perspective hit him with almost a concussive force. The law could happen to anybody. Again, Freeman’s analogy with the weather. A hurricane had just swept Frannie up, and now she was in it.
     
     
    But Freeman was resolutely moving ahead, as he did. Problem solving. “Have you talked to anybody yet who’s found the husband, what’s his name?”
     
     
    “Beaumont. Ron Beaumont. No, Glitsky wasn’t around. I left him a note. I’m going back up after we’re done here. But let’s not leave Frannie.”
     
     
    “I’m not leaving her. I think we ought to go to the newspapers with this after all. Even if Randall and Pratt don’t fold, Marian might be responsive to that kind of pressure. At least it’s worth a shot.” He drank some coffee. “But I think we need to consider cutting our losses.”
     
     
    “Which are?”
     
     
    “The four days. Unless they locate Mr. Beaumont and can get him to talk, she’s got herself a bigger problem than four days.”
     
     
    Scott Randall was sitting comfortably in a folding chair, his legs crossed comfortably. With him in the large but spartan expanse of Sharron Pratt’s office were homicidelieutenant Abe Glitsky, homicide sergeants Tyler Coleman and Jorge Batavia, and Randall’s own DA’s investigator, Peter Struler. Randall was having himself a fine morning. At last, things were moving along on Beaumont, and all because of this Frannie Hardy woman.
     
     
    Sometimes, he reflected, you just had to take prisoners.
     
     
    And if it got to that, as it had here, then invariably you alienated some people. In this case, it was Glitsky and his sergeants. Well, Randall thought, maybe next time they got a hot homicide they would try to keep their investigation alive even if there happened to be a crisis in the department. For now, they just had their noses out of joint because Randall and Struler had actually made progress on a case they considered all but closed. Turf wars. Too bad for them.
     
     
    But Glitsky, as head of the homicide detail, naturally had to put a different face on it. Now he was barking at Pratt. “I know this woman, Sharron. She is a close personal friend. She watched my kids for a month after my wife died. She should not be in jail.”
     
     
    “Evidently Judge Braun doesn’t agree with you, Lieutenant. I’m not sure I do, either.”
     
     
    Pratt didn’t like Glitsky. She thought the police were out to undermine her authority, make her look bad whenever and wherever they could. For her part, the DA took every opportunity to criticize the force. She’d run for office on a platform of stomping out police brutality— nowhere near the greatest of the city’s many problems. The PD union had supported her opponent and she wasn’t likely to forget it.
     
     
    She would often choose not to have her office prosecute a suspect