Chapter 106

THERE WAS A MOODY gray sky overhead when Martha and I left my apartment and headed out of San Francisco. I turned on the car radio and caught the weather report, listening with half an ear as I negotiated the stop-and-go snarl of the usual commuter traffic.

As I bumped along Potrero Street, I was thinking about Chief Tracchio. Yesterday, when we’d met at the Hall of Justice, he’d asked me to come back to work, and I’d gotten as flustered as if he’d asked me for a date.

All I’d had to do was shake his hand on it.

If I’d done that, I would have been driving to the Hall this morning, making a speech to the troops about going forward, diving into the mountain of paperwork on my desk, unsolved cases. I would’ve taken back my command.

But, although the chief had laid it on really thick, I’d turned him down.

“I still have some vacation time, Chief. I need to take it.”

He said he understood, but how could he? I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and I had a sense that I wouldn’t know until I’d gotten to the bottom of the killings in Half Moon Bay.

Those unsolved murders were a part of me now, too.

My gut told me that if I did what I was good at, if I persevered, I would find the SOB who had killed my John Doe and all those others.

Right now, that was all I really cared about.

I took 280 southbound and, once clear of the city, I rolled down the windows and changed the channel.

By 10:00 a.m., my hair was whipping across my face, and Sue Hall was spinning my favorite oldies on 99.7 FM.

“It’s not raining this morning,” she purred. “It’s the first of July, a beautiful gray San Francisco day—just floating in pearly fog. And isn’t the fog something that we love about San Francisco?”

Then, the perfect song poured through the speakers: “Fly Like an Eagle.”

I sang along in full voice, the tune pumping oxygen into my blood, sending my mood right through the ozone layer.

I was free.

The horrific trial was in my rearview mirror, and suddenly my future was as open as the highway ahead.

Eighteen miles out of the city, Martha needed a rest stop, so I pulled over into the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Pacifica. It was a wooden shack built in the sixties before the zoning commission knew what was happening. And now there stood one of the tackiest buildings in the world on one of the most beautiful spots on the coastline.

Unlike most of the highway, which streamed high above the ocean, the fast-food restaurant parking lot was at sea level. A row of rocks separated the asphalt from the beach, and beyond it the deep blue Pacific flowed over the rim of the horizon.

I bought an irresistible cinnamon-sugared churro and a container of black coffee and took a seat on the boulders. I watched tattooed, hard-bodied surfers riding the waves as Martha ran over the luminous gray sand until the sun had nearly burned off the fog.

When this great moment was sealed in my memory, I called Martha back to the car. Twenty minutes later, we entered the outskirts of Half Moon Bay.

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