15th Affair

CHAPTER 27

THAT EVENING, I parked the squad car next to my Explorer on Harriet Street under the overpass and headed out of the shadows. Claire had called, saying she had to see me right away. I was hungry, depressed, and worried sick on about six levels, but when Claire said she had to see me, I had to go.

I didn’t get far.

A BMW came squealing out of the dusk and braked in front of me. I had a thought that that BMW had been on my tail since I’d left the Mills-Peninsula Medical Center, but I couldn’t be sure. A man got out of the black car and walked directly toward me. He was Asian, thirties, had a wide face with a thin scar on his chin. He was wearing a black shirt and jeans.

“You police,” he said to me. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes. How can I help you?”

“My son inside there.”

Relatives of WW 888 passengers had heard that the deceased would be brought here, but that was only partly right.

The ME’s office was the first port of call. But after it had filled to capacity, bodies were distributed to hospital morgues all over the city. When the hospitals ran out of room, the deceased had been stored in refrigerated vans parked inside a hangar at SFO.

There was no way the man standing this close to me with bunched fists could know the location of his son’s body.

I said, “I’m very sorry, sir. But the ME’s office is off-limits now. Please call this number,” I added, taking a card out of my jacket pocket and handing it to him. “Someone will let you know where to find your son and when you may claim his body.”

“You lie. This number all bullshit. I need to go inside and see him now,” he said.

I could see the four cops stationed along the breezeway that runs from the rear exit of the Hall of Justice past the ME’s office and out to the street. Could they see me?

I told the Asian man again that I was sorry and to please call the central number I had given him, but he was radiating fury, cursing me in his own language. I thought he was going to take a swing at me.

I was prepared to throw him to the ground and cuff him if he got physical, when Inspector Monty McAllister broke from the breezeway detail and came toward me. He was big. Very fit.

“You need assistance, Sergeant?” he asked as he let me pass through the cordon.

“Thanks, McAllister.”

“No problem.”

Three more men got out of the BMW and came toward us.

I kept walking. Claire was waiting for me at the ambulance bay. As I reached her, I heard shouts at my back: McAllister’s crew threatening to put the Asian men under arrest.

Claire reached out her arms to me and brought me inside. We held on to each other.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “And I never want to see anything like this again.”

CHAPTER 28

IT WAS ABOUT 6 p.m. when I followed my best friend into the morgue and saw the double row of sheet-covered gurneys lining the stainless steel–clad room.

“I’ve got sixteen decedents here, all crash victims,” Claire said. “We’re officially full up, but we took on some overflow. Got six people in there,” she said, lifting her chin toward the autopsy suite.

“How are you holding up?”

“OK, considering that this is the most exhausting night of my life. Most of these victims don’t have ID. I’ve got a three-year-old with no name. Hope I can tag him tonight.”

Dr. Germaniuk, the seasoned on-call pathologist and Claire’s backup doc, was sliding a body into a drawer and three sweaty techs were cleaning up, setting up a body for her next autopsy.

Claire called out, “Dr. G. I’m gonna take a fifteen-minute break, OK?”

“Take twenty,” he said.

I followed Claire along the hallway to her office and she shut the door behind us. She took her desk chair and I dropped down hard into the seat across from her. Claire had made this room as homey as possible, meaning only passably.

A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on her desk, a few finger paintings were under the glass desktop, and framed photos hung on the wall behind Claire: her friends in the Women’s Murder Club and snapshots of her family. Her husband, Edmund. Her two grown-up sons. Her little girl, Rosie.

My eyes got stuck on the baby.

Claire’s eyes were on me. “Talk to me,” she said.

“Richie and I were tasked with escorting kids off school buses today,” I said. “The buses came up to a side entrance to Mills-Peninsula Medical. The parents were behind police lines and crazy with fear. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do, you know? They wanted to rush the buses.

“We had to get those tiny terrified, traumatized kids into the building, make sure they didn’t need emergency care. We got their names. Gave them water. Then we tried to match the kids’ names to the list of parents storming the barricades.

“When we had a match, Highway Patrol would call out the name over a megaphone. Rich and I would escort these five-year-olds outside into this freakin’ mob scene of moms and dads screaming at the child, ‘Do you know my daughter? Did you see my little boy?’

“We had all of the one-at-a-time parent-and-child reunions. Oh, my God, Claire. Each and every time a scraped-up little kid with ripped clothes broke away from me and started running toward loving arms, I thought my heart was going to blow through my chest.”

I had to stop speaking. Claire reached across her desk and grabbed my hand.

I said, “I kept thinking about Julie. How can I protect my own daughter when the world is like this?”

There was a long silence as we pondered the imponderable. Then Claire asked me, “Any word from Joe?”

I shook my head.

“What the fuck has happened to him? How could he not call me? He has to have a good reason, right, Claire? I have to trust that he would call me if he could. But what if he’s hurt? Or dead? No one is going to look for my missing husband in the thick of all this.”

Claire murmured comforting words. “He’s OK. He has a reason, sure. He’ll call soon.”

I looked up at my friend through the tears in my eyes. “I have to get home,” I said. “You haven’t said why you called.”

Claire said, “Right.” She opened a file drawer, took out a small sheaf of paper, and put it down on the desk facing me.

“This is the passenger manifest,” she said. “I’m looking, you know, to see if I can find the name of that little boy and maybe three people I’ve got here who still had wallets in their pockets. And I see this name, Michael Chan. I’m thinking, there’s probably a lot of people named Michael Chan.”

I stared at Claire, and I really didn’t understand what she was saying. Michael Chan had been chilling in this morgue since he was murdered in the Four Seasons Hotel three days ago.

But Claire was saying something different. She was tapping the passenger list where a name had been highlighted in yellow.

“Look at this, Linds,” she said. “Chan. Michael. Professorville, Palo Alto. This is your victim from the hotel shooting, am I right? He couldn’t have been on that plane. He’s here—in a drawer with his name and number on a toe tag. I double- and triple-checked. It’s him.”

My mouth was open. I tried to clear the smoke from my head and absorb the highlighted name on the passenger list. Who was this Michael Chan? Our dead man had been identified by his widow. Even with two shots in his face, he was a match for his DMV picture.

Claire’s incredulity mirrored mine.

“Where is this Michael Chan right now?” I asked, stabbing the highlighted name.

“Metropolitan Hospital,” she said. “He was sent to Metro’s morgue.”

CHAPTER 29

METROPOLITAN HOSPITAL IS a huge general hospital with a lab and morgue that occupies the entire basement level.

At 6:30 p.m., Metropolitan’s parking lot was nearly impassable. Claire carefully maneuvered her car up and down the aisles of hastily parked vehicles. There were no open spots, not for cops or doctors or patients. Meanwhile, Metro’s overextended director of pathology was waiting for us inside.

Claire said, “I’ll call Dr. Marshall, let her know what’s happened to us.”

She took out her phone and I used the moment to call Mrs. Rose—only to find that my phone battery was dead and that I’d left my charger in the squad car.

Claire was saying, “Fine. We’ll park on Valencia. Blue Chevy Tahoe.”

We left the hospital lot, parked on Valencia in the no parking zone in front of an auto repair shop. We didn’t have to wait long. A fantastically fit glossy-haired woman wearing a green leather coat over bloody blue scrubs knocked on Claire’s window.

We got out and I was introduced to Dr. Pamela Marshall. Right after that, we had an ad hoc meeting across the hood of Claire’s car.

“Busy night,” Marshall said, “following the most hellacious day ever.”

“I’ll second that,” Claire said. “Look. We just want to walk back to the morgue with you, get a quick look at Mr. Chan, and get out of your way.”

“Here’s the thing, Dr. Washburn,” said Marshall. “We’ve got sixty bodies and counting. I’ve got Jane and John Does in double digits. You’re lucky Mr. Chan had ID. I gotta be honest with you, I wish I had known and saved you the trip. I couldn’t show you Chan’s body right now if you offered me a million bucks and a house in Cannes.”

“Wish you’d known what?” asked Claire.

“Chan was in line to be autopsied,” Marshall said, “but someone moved his gurney somewhere. He’s been temporarily misplaced.”

I said “Dr. Marshall. You’re saying you lost Chan?”

“Misplaced. He’ll turn up. Don’t worry about that, and I’ll call you when he does. I’ve got to get back,” she said. “I’ll call you. Good night, ladies.”

“Wait,” I called after her. “I need to see his ID.”

Dr. Marshall kept walking.

Claire said, “If she doesn’t have his body, she doesn’t have his ID, either. His personal effects would be on his person.”

I didn’t want to believe this. Chan’s body and his ID had been misplaced? Was this for real?

“I don’t like this,” I said to Claire.

“Lindsay, nothing makes sense today. Go home. Marshall will call us in the morning.”

Yeah? What if she doesn’t?

CHAPTER 30

ALI MULLER PARKED her rented Lexus on Waverley Street in the Professorville section of Palo Alto. It was early morning and the lights were on in the sage-green house with the name Chan on the mailbox.

Ali fluffed her bangs, reapplied her lipstick, and put her makeup kit away. She took another moment to admire the cute house, the beagle digging in the flower beds, the trike on the walkway, lacy curtains in the windows. It was the very picture of a middle-class home in a middle-class neighborhood.

The American ideal.

She looked for security cameras on the Chan house and the ones across the street. When she was sure there were no cameras, no eyes, no traffic passing by, she got out of the car and locked it up.

Instead of going to the front door, she went to the side of the house and opened the little chain-link gate between the wall and the tall boundary-line hedge. As she expected, there was a short flight of stairs leading up to a door with panes from top to midpoint.

Ali walked up the steps and peered through the glass. Shirley Chan was unloading the dishwasher, putting dishes away. One of the children was sitting at the table in the breakfast nook eating cereal. It was the younger one, a girl.

Ali turned the doorknob and gave the door a little shove. It opened and she stepped inside.

Shirley Chan looked up, startled, trying to put it together.

Why was this woman in her house?

“Hey,” she said. “Are you a reporter? Because you have a lot of nerve. Get out of here now. Or I’ll call the police.”

“Shirley, don’t worry, I’m not with the press. I swear.”

“What is it? What do you want?”

“Calm down, please, please. I’m Ali Muller. I knew your husband, and I’m so sorry to hear about his death. We were working on a project together. Michael may have spoken of me. He told me that if anything ever happened to him, to give you this letter.”

Shirley Chan told her daughter to go get dressed. The little girl complained that the dog was still outside and Shirley said, “I’ll bring him in in a minute. Now, scoot.”

“Have a seat,” she said to the composed and well-dressed woman in her kitchen. “I only have a few minutes, but tell me how you like your coffee, and please—let me have that letter.”

“Yes, of course,” said Ali Muller. She put her bag on the floor and bent to open the closure.

Shirley went to the coffeemaker. “How do you like your coffee?” she asked again.

“With a splash of milk, if you don’t mind.”

“Don’t mind at all,” Shirley said.

She poured coffee into two blue earthenware mugs, filled the creamer with milk, and said to Ali Muller, “The police tell me you were the last person to see my husband alive. Is that true?”

She turned to look at the woman sitting at her table.

Ali Muller had the gun in her hand. She aimed. She fired. The bullets were silenced by the suppressor, making only two soft sounds, pffft-pffft, piercing Shirley Chan’s forehead.

Michael Chan’s widow fell dead to the kitchen floor.

CHAPTER 31

I GOT HOME as the Late Late Show was starting. Martha barreled toward me and Mrs. Rose swung her feet down off the sofa. While she searched for her shoes and straightened her clothes, she said, “Lindsay, the baby’s fine. Joe stopped by.”

“Joe was here? When?”

Mrs. Rose said, “He left an hour ago. He said that he got pulled into the crash investigation full-time and he doesn’t know when he’ll be home again.”

Mrs. Rose took a breath, put on her shoes, then continued. “He said to tell you he’s sorry he hasn’t called.”

“Was he okay?”

“He looked tired. I gave him a beer and he sat with Julie for maybe ten minutes. Then he changed his clothes and left. He said he had to get back. He was in a big hurry, Lindsay.”

“Did he say he was going to call later?”

Mrs. Rose said, “I’m sure he will. Of course, he will.”

I was still in stunned disbelief when Mrs. Rose said good night to me at the door.

I hardly slept.

My mind had writhed all night with all-too-realistic images of crash victims and other unsolved mysteries from both the job and personal fronts.

I was at my desk in the squad room at eight and ready to ambush Brady when he came through the gate an hour later. He waved me into his office and gave me the welcome news that Homicide was off airliner crash duty—the Feds were in charge—and we were back to solving homicides.

The Four Seasons murders in particular.

He said, “Yesterday morning we were talking about Joe. Have you seen him?”

“Yes. I mean, no. According to our nanny, he came home last night while I was still working. He changed his clothes, and he left me a phone message saying he’d been swept into the WW 888 investigation. That he was up to his eyebrows in it.”

Brady threw me a skeptical look.

“He’s an airport security consultant,” I said emphatically. “Formerly with Homeland Security.”

“I know that.”

“Listen, Brady, he’s not a fugitive. He will contact me again. And right now, we’ve got a new, very weird angle on the Michael Chan murder.”

I had Brady’s attention on Michael Chan, version 2.0.

I said, “Metropolitan’s head pathologist has misplaced this Michael Chan’s body. She could find him later today or sometime next week. She said she’d call when his body turns up. So I called Shirley Chan a little while ago. There was no answer at home or at her office, but I’ll try again. I want to talk to her again. Find out more about her marriage. Their financial situation. Anything odd about his behavior. She was in no condition to answer—”

“Go,” Brady said. “Go now.”

Thirty miles and forty minutes later, Conklin and I pulled up to the green house on Waverley. The old one-and-a-half story house was set squarely on its lot, everything neat except for the trike on the walk and a beagle-dachshund mix lying across the front steps. When the dog heard our car doors close, he got to his feet and set up a howl.

“Dogs love me,” I said. “Watch.”

I walked up to the dog, saying, “Hi, buddy,” and put out the flat of my hand. He wagged his tail, backed up, walked up to the door, and lifted his head toward the knob.

Conklin joined us. He pressed the doorbell. I knocked and called out, “Shirley? Anyone home?”

We were turning to go back down the walk when the lock clattered, the doorknob turned, and a little boy wearing pajama bottoms stood inside the doorway. I remembered the child’s name.

“Brett? I’m Sergeant Boxer. I met you a couple of days ago. Do you remember me?”

He looked up at us and burst into tears.

I pushed the door open. The boy’s PJs were wet and his footprints on the wooden floor from the kitchen to the front door were red.

His hands and feet, his chest, and the sides of his face were red.

Brett Chan was covered with blood.

CHAPTER 32

“GIVE ME YOUR hand,” I said to the little boy. I remembered Shirley Chan telling me that Brett was seven. He was small for his age. Dark hair, his glasses askew, tears sheeting down his cheeks.

He held out his hand, which looked rusty with dry blood.

I grabbed his little wrist to pull him outside the house, closed the door, dropped to a crouch, and looked him over.

“Where do you hurt?” I asked him. He cried—bawled, actually—but I saw no injuries. The blood wasn’t his.

“Who’s inside the house?”

“My mom. And Haley.”

“No one else?” I asked. “Are they hurt?”

The little boy just sobbed.

Had the perp or perps fled? Or had Shirley Chan gone mad, shot up the place, including her daughter and herself? Had Brett been sent to the door under a threat: Don’t say anything or I’ll kill you?

Conklin said, “Brett? Let’s go out to our police car, OK, buddy? I’m going to call for more police. I need you to stay in the front seat and listen to the police band for us. OK?”

Brett Chan nodded.

Conklin put his hand on the boy’s small back and walked him twenty feet out to our unmarked. I saw my partner talking into the mic, locking up the car, getting a couple of vests out of the trunk, then coming back up to the front steps.

“Local PD is on the way,” he said. “We can’t wait.”

Brett Chan was covered in blood. He might be the last living member of his family, or someone inside could be bleeding out right now. No one would blame us if we waited for backup before going into a hot situation, but my partner and I would blame ourselves if someone died because we were too late.

We got our vests on and our guns in our hands, and I shouted at the doorway, “This is the police! We’re coming in.”

Then I nodded to Conklin and he kicked open the door.

The foyer and front room floors were crisscrossed with bloody footprints. Conklin took a right toward the bedrooms and I followed the tracks to the left.

As I approached the kitchen, the hair at the back of my neck lifted like I’d been brushed by cold, dead fingers. What would I find at the intersection of all those small footprints? Was I walking into a room where a shooter had his gun braced and was ready to fire again?

I hugged the doorway, and with gun extended, I peered into the kitchen.

Shirley Chan was lying faceup on the floor between the counter and the refrigerator, her blood forming a wide red halo around her head. I stooped beside her and felt for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find. Her skin was still warm, and the smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.

I looked around. There was no brass on the floor and no sign of forced entry through the kitchen door. A bowl of milky Cheerios was on the table. A broken coffee mug and a puddle of coffee were at my feet, and a matching blue earthenware mug was on the counter near the coffeemaker.

I saw how this had gone down. Shirley Chan had been making coffee for another person. Maybe she’d turned to say something when she was shot through her forehead. This was no suicide, no accident, no holdup gone wrong. No shots had been wasted. Mrs. Chan had been killed by a pro.

I heard Conklin saying, “You’re OK now, Haley. Let’s go find Brett, OK?”

I left the kitchen and shook my head, indicating to my partner, Do not take her in there. I lifted my arms and Conklin handed Haley to me, saying, “You were in the closet, weren’t you, sweetie?”

“Haley,” I said as Conklin checked out the scene in the kitchen. “I’m a police officer. Did you see someone in the house this morning? Someone who didn’t belong here?”

I took my phone from my pocket, pulled up a photo of Ali Muller, and showed it to the five-year-old.

“Haley? Do you know this woman? Have you seen her?”

The child tightened her hold on me and sobbed hot tears into the crook between my neck and shoulder. Poor little girl.

What was her life going to be like now?

CHAPTER 33

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER we’d parked in front of the Chan house, our car was hemmed in by cops, CSI, an ambulance, and the coroner’s van.

Six CSIs were processing the scene inside the house as Conklin and I met with Lieutenant Todd Traina of the Palo Alto Police Department.

Of course, Conklin and I wanted to work this crime. Not only had we been first on the scene, but we were also involved with Shirley, her murdered husband, and the mysterious wrinkle of a second dead Michael Chan, killed in the crash of WW 888.

Bottom line, we were thoroughly briefed and highly motivated.

But this hideous crime had happened in Palo Alto, not our turf. The best we could hope for was a free exchange of information between our department and the Palo Alto PD.

Conklin, Lieutenant Traina, and I stood under a tree on the parched grass between the sidewalk and the street, and we told the lieutenant how we’d happened upon a fresh murder scene in Professorville.

I said to the young lieutenant, “We wanted more time with Mrs. Chan. We hoped she might have remembered something that would help us with her husband’s murder. We knocked. Brett Chan answered the door.”

After describing the little boy’s heartbreaking appearance, I gave Lieutenant Traina my take on the crime scene.

“Looks to me like Mrs. Chan knew the shooter,” I said. “There was no forced entry and she was making coffee for two when she was shot in the forehead at close range. I saw no sign of a robbery—just a well-executed hit.”

Traina took notes and said, “Uh-huh. Please go on.”

Conklin said, “Haley, she’s five. She was eating her breakfast when a lady with ‘striped’ hair came in through the outside kitchen door. According to Haley, Mommy told her to get dressed for school. When she went back toward the kitchen, she heard ‘big bangs,’ so she ran to her room and hid.”

Traina asked, “Striped hair? What’s that mean to you?”

I said, “Like brown hair with blond streaks.”

“Hunh. Did she know this lady?”

“Never saw her before,” Conklin said.

“And the little boy? Brett?”

“He was in the shower when this went down,” I said.

I told Lieutenant Traina we would share information and he said he’d do the same, “Sure thing.”

We exchanged cards and were getting into our car as Child Protective Services arrived.

Why had Michael and Shirley Chan—two college professors—been targeted hits? And what, if anything, could this tell us about the dead man with Michael Chan’s name and address who’d been on WW 888 from Beijing?

Was there a connection?

Someone had to know.

CHAPTER 34

THE BEAUTIFUL AND expansive Stanford University campus is accessed by broad palm tree–lined avenues and dotted with hundreds of other varieties of trees. The handsome buildings are predominantly Mediterranean and Spanish-style sandstone with red-tile roofs. Just lovely.

We had an appointment with the history department chair, Michael Chan’s former boss, Eugene Levy. Levy was short, bearded, wearing thick eyeglasses. He got up from behind his desk, shook our hands, asked us to have seats, and closed his door.

Levy said, “What a tragedy. I only knew Michael professionally, but for more than eight years. I liked him. He was reliable. Conscientious. Knew his stuff cold. Although, in light of how he died, maybe I didn’t know him at all.”

Levy had prepared a list of several of Chan’s colleagues and students, in alphabetical order with phone numbers. He’d starred the names of a few people he thought had personal relationships with Chan.

“I’m just sick about this. The whole school is rocked. You’ll let me know if I can help further?”

I told Levy we would do that. After leaving his office, Conklin and I interviewed two dozen people over the rest of the morning, ending late in the afternoon.

We asked the standard questions: How well did you know Michael Chan? Had he been acting strangely? Did he have any enemies? Can you think of a reason why someone might have killed him last week in a five-star San Francisco hotel?

Not one person offered a shadow of a clue.

By five in the afternoon, we were no closer to cracking open a door into Michael Chan’s death than we had been four days ago. We were heading for the car when a breathless voice called out, “Officers.”

A brawny twenty-something young man in shorts and a school T-shirt was jogging up the walkway behind us. When he caught up, he stopped and introduced himself as Stiles Paul Titherington, assistant football coach. According to Levy’s list, he was a friend of Michael Chan.

He said, “Got your message. Yeah, Michael and I were tight.”

The man was bouncing on his feet, seemed hot to tell us what he knew.

“OK, I don’t know who the hell killed him, but I can tell you this: he was having an affair, like made-in-Hollywood in-love. Michael was not, like, an emotional guy and suddenly, he meets this woman, and she’s the meaning of life.”

Titherington went on to say that Michael hadn’t been planning to leave Shirley and that apparently Alison was also married with children.

The name Alison hooked me.

“He had plans to meet her a couple days ago,” said Titherington. “He was going to let me know how it went. Next thing, I heard that Michael was dead.”

I said, “Did Michael tell you Alison’s last name?”

“I’ve told you what he said. She’s gorgeous, smart, funny, a total package.”

After leaving Titherington, Conklin and I talked nonstop on the drive back to the city. We had some leads to go on, but we couldn’t tie them into a bow. Alison Muller had gone to Michael Chan’s room at the Four Seasons. He was in love with her. Both were married; it was an assignation.

Many questions remained. Why hadn’t Muller called the police when her lover was shot? Had she been abducted? Was she dead? Or had she killed Chan and had gone into hiding?

I was calling Brady to tell him about our day at Stanford when Conklin’s phone rang.

He said, “OK, sure. Thanks, Cin. We’ll meet you there.”

“What was that?” I asked him. “We’ll meet Cindy where?”

CHAPTER 35

THE GRAND PACIFIC Hotel was just south of the airport on Old Bayshore Highway. Folding doors between three adjoining conference rooms on the mezzanine level had been opened to create a hall big enough to accommodate the hordes who had come to hear NTSB’s update on the investigation into the crash of WW 888.

The cream-and-maroon room was packed, standing room only, no chairs at all. I stood off to the right of the room with Conklin and Cindy, in view of the rear exit.

At six o’clock on the dot, a blond-haired woman in a charcoal-gray suit with an NTSB patch over her breast pocket walked smartly along a hastily built stage at the front of the room. She took her place behind a podium, tapped the microphone, and, without waiting for the room to quiet down, she began to speak.

“My name is Angela Susan Anton and I’m chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. I know you’ve been waiting since our initial announcement, but we have been working hard to gather meaningful information in the face of the near-total destruction of the aircraft and the tragic deaths of the passengers and crew.”

Waves of weeping swept the room as friends and family of dead passengers heard once more and with official certainty that they would never see their loved ones again.

Chairman Anton resumed her presentation.

“I’ve been working closely with our chief investigator, Mr. Jan Vanderleest, who heads our team of twenty-five investigators. The work so far includes interviews with those who knew the four pilots and relief pilots.”

Anton described the pilots’ seventy-two-hour preflight work-rest history, concluding that the flight crew had been rested and in good physical and mental health, all of which was borne out by the progress of the flight from Beijing up to the moment of the incident.

The chairman pushed through the shouted questions, saying that the air traffic controllers who were in SFO’s control tower when the tragedy occurred had reported that the pilot had checked in on San Francisco tower frequency for landing on runway 28 Left at 8:56 Thursday morning. That landing clearance was issued to WW 888 about a mile and a half from the threshold.

She said, “This is what the air traffic looked like just prior to the incident.”

Anton flicked on her PowerPoint and a large screen to her right depicted a simulation of WW 888’s approach to ward the runway, including the explosion and a graphic interpretation of the breakup of the falling aircraft.

She said, “There have been reports of a flash in the sky just seconds before the aircraft failed. Because of the direction and altitude of the plane in its last moments, we don’t have a clear angle on the right wing, which was the point of impact. And when the fuel inside the wing exploded, the wing failed upward, which can look from the ground like the contrail of a missile.

“That said, the possibility of a missile strike exists….”

The chairman was interrupted by a tsunami of questions and screams and shoving as photographers jostled for a view of the projected visuals. Anton shouted into her mic, “Chief Vanderleest has additional details. Thank you.”

Anton was barely offstage when Vanderleest took the lectern. He stood like a block of stone until the room was silent again.

Then he spoke. “As the chairman said, the possibility exists that WW 888 was brought down by a missile, but until the flight recorders are found and the remains of the 777 are assembled and analyzed—the reason for the crash of WW 888 is still undetermined. Information on the location of those of the deceased who have been identified is on our website and with Worldwide Airlines, who will give daily briefings.

“Thank you for your attention.”

Conklin called out to me and Cindy over the tidal raging of the crowd, “Stay with me.”

We were in the hallway outside the ad hoc auditorium when an Asian man in jeans and a black jacket body-slammed me. I staggered back into a group of people, somehow getting my balance before I fell. I looked around wildly to see who had assaulted me and for a half second, I got a clear look at his face: wide forehead, thin, white scar across his chin.

Just then, the doors opened at the back of the room and hundreds of people stampeded toward the exit, carrying us along with them.

CHAPTER 36

I WAS OUT of gas when I came through the doorway that night. Martha charged me and I held her back by her shoulders and called out, “Honey,” forgetting that I hadn’t seen Joe in days, or maybe just hoping he would answer.

Mrs. Rose sang out a sweet hello and appeared in the foyer, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Joe isn’t here, but Julie is fine. Are you OK?”

I nodded and tried to block the images of Shirley Chan’s body and the complete devastation of her children’s lives.

Where was Joe?

I wanted my husband. I wanted him to be all right. To be innocent of what felt like betrayal. To spend the night holding me and being held and talking and making love.

“Lindsay, I wasn’t sure when you’d be home.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said to Mrs. Rose. “The day got away from me.”

“Not a problem. I made a roast—”

“I love you,” I blurted.

“I love you, too,” she said. She opened her arms and hugged me and she told me to go see my daughter. “She’s really chatting up a storm.”

She brought a glass of wine into the baby’s room and I rocked Julie and stared out the window and told myself that I was fine, I just needed to sleep.

By nine, Julie and I were alone. She said, “Story,” and it was a demand, not a request. Joe had taught her that word. I took her and Martha into bed with me and told Julie the story of finding Martha at a border collie rescue league.

“We fell in love at first sight, didn’t we, Boo?”

Martha barked and Julie laughed, and I had a few laughs myself. First time in a few days, that’s for sure.

I intended to return Julie to her crib in just a few moments, but she woke me around three with the little distressed cry that usually precedes a meltdown.

“Sweetie, sweetie, Mommy’s here.”

Where was Daddy? Where was Joe?

CHAPTER 37

CLAIRE WAS RAGING as she left Metropolitan Hospital.

It was definite. Dr. Marshall had lost Michael Chan’s body. Her earlier statement, “I’ll call you,” had been amended to “Damned if I know what happened to him,” and a moment later escalated to “I’m starting to wonder if we actually had Mr. Chan, or if we just had his wallet in a plastic bag.”

“So where’s his wallet?” Claire had asked.

“Damned if I know. Look, I haven’t slept in three days.”

It was Saturday morning and Lindsay wasn’t answering her phone, and Claire didn’t want to wake her.

Still.

Claire got into her car and called again, and this time Lindsay picked up.

“What time is it?” Lindsay asked with a scratchy voice.

“Quarter to eleven,” Claire said. “You’re asleep. I’ll make it quick. Michael Chan’s body is still missing and Metropolitan has stopped looking for him. This isn’t over until I have his body in my morgue.”

“Never mind,” Lindsay said to her. “They tried.”

“They tried? What’s wrong with you, Lindsay?” Claire said.

“Nothing. Everything’s fine,” Lindsay told her.

“Joe? He’s come home?”

“Nope. He’ll turn up.”

Claire said, “OK,” hung up, and started her car. It was time to do something about this weird and unhealthy state of affairs. She called Cindy and Yuki, and by the time she arrived at Lindsay’s address, both of them were waiting for her in Cindy’s car.

Claire knocked on the window.

“Ready?”

“You betcha,” said Cindy. “It’s a good day for an intervention.”

The three of them, carrying shopping bags, went to the doorway of Lake Street and Twelfth, and Claire pressed the buzzer. When Lindsay answered the intercom to say, “No one’s home,” Claire shouted, “It’s me, lazybones. Open up.”

The buzzer sounded and Claire, Cindy, and Yuki entered the old residential building and climbed the wide stairs to the third floor, and Claire rang the bell.

Barking preceded the clacking of locks and the opening of the door.

“Claire, what? Can’t I sleep in once in a while?” Then Lindsay saw the rest of the gang and threw the door open. Claire saw that Lindsay was wearing maternity pajamas and gave her a questioning look.

“No, I’m not expecting,” she said. “This is all I have that’s clean.”

Martha danced, the baby cried from somewhere inside, and Lindsay said, “Just so you know, I’m not leaving this apartment until Monday. I might not leave then.”

“Agreed,” said Claire. “Time for us to all have a good visit.”

“We got sandwiches and cookies. Also coffee,” said Yuki.

Cindy said, “Linds, just so you know. Anything anyone says here is off the record. Even if you know who really shot Kennedy. Even if you know the location of the Holy Grail.”

Lindsay laughed and Yuki got the baby out of her crib and handed her to her mom.

“Lindsay, sit your ass down,” said Claire. “Let the feast begin.”

When the four best friends had gathered around the finger food on the coffee table, Claire announced, “Now that we’re all settled in, Lindsay, let’s have it. When was the last time you saw Joe?”

CHAPTER 38

IF CLAIRE HAD called first, I would have said, “Thanks, but no way. I’m going to sleep in, all day long.”

But she didn’t ask, and without warning or my permission, my well-earned deep funk was shattered by Yuki’s infectious laughter, Claire’s bossy mothering, and Cindy’s genuine joie de vivre.

Plus food.

Julie loved a crowd and was super-glad of the company. I put her in her bouncy chair about five feet from the action and Martha curled up at my feet, so it was all girls and all good. Correction, it was great.

Claire said, “Time to work, Linds. When did you last see Joe? When did you last hear from him?”

“And what do you think is going on?” Cindy added. “No matter how bad this is, you know we’re not going to judge.”

“We just want to clear up the mystery,” said Yuki. “We need to know what we’re dealing with, am I right?”

Yuki, her legal mind at work, asked for a calendar of events. So I started from the beginning and proceeded in chronological order.

I started with the remarkable fact that Joe hadn’t come home Monday night but had been snoring beside me on Tuesday morning. I told them he’d been perfectly fine—in fact, romantic. He’d made breakfast for me and Julie Anne, and I’d left him home with her as I ran out to work.

I said, “Monday was the day of the shootings at the Four Seasons. Rich and I were consumed with it. We got an ID on Michael Chan the next day and went out to see his widow.”

My friends were nodding, saying “Uh-huh, uh-huh” and encouraging me to keep talking.

I said, “I spoke to Joe on Tuesday while Rich and I were driving Shirley Chan back to the Hall. Late that night, I reviewed the surveillance video from our van we had sitting on the Chan house from across the street. He was on that tape.

“Wait, I’ll show you.”

I woke up my laptop, and as the girls stood around me, I showed them the clip of Joe stopping his car on Waverley and staring directly into the SFPD’s dedicated spy cam. And I told them about Richie picking out a guy in the hotel’s lobby footage who looked like Joe.

“Joe’s face on that tape—that’s the last I’ve seen of him.”

A lot of questions came at me from my clever, mystery-solving friends, but they were questions I couldn’t answer.

“Here’s what I think,” said Cindy. “He’s involved in this, Lindsay. I don’t mean in a bad way, but his drive-by in Palo Alto can’t be a coincidence.”

“I don’t know, Cindy,” I said. “I agree it means something, but we may not know all the angles.”

“Meaning?”

“He’s a consultant. He knows everything about port security. He could be working some kind of hush-hush job. He might be prohibited from contacting me. Maybe phones are being hacked.”

“Did you call the people he works for?”

“I would if I knew who they were.”

Cindy was undeterred.

“So keep going with your ticktock,” she said.

“OK, OK.”

I told the girls about the mysterious blond woman who’d been seen entering Chan’s room at the Four Seasons. Cindy jumped in, saying, “I posted her picture on our site and got a tip.”

“The next day,” I said, throwing my hands into the air, “before we could follow up—”

Claire finished my sentence: “The crash of WW 888.”

I said, “That night when I got home, Mrs. Rose said I had just missed Joe. He’d been home to change his clothes. He left me a message saying he’d been pulled into the plane crash nightmare, and, like, don’t wait up.”

“So he’s definitely alive,” said Yuki. “He’s not hurt. He’s working.”

“That’s what he said.”

I believed what I was saying, but damn it, it was weird that Joe couldn’t get in touch at all. Actually, it was inexplicable. When our lunch was over and the last of my friends were gone, I bathed Julie, gave her some applesauce, and called Joe.

“I’m sorry,” said the mechanical voice, “but the subscriber’s mailbox is full. Good-bye.”

Honestly? This was killing me.

CHAPTER 39

I SPENT THE rest of the day doing laundry, and by dinnertime I was hungry and bored. I took Julie across the hall to Mrs. Rose, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and headed out to our local Asian grocery store.

It was dark when I got down to the street. I was considering what kind of veg I wanted to go with last night’s pot roast when something happened—a shock or a blow.

All I knew for sure was that my face was on the pavement so fast that I never got my hands down to break my fall. Had I tripped? Had I had a stroke?

My head throbbed and my vision was distorted, but I made out the shapes around me as shoes.

Lights flashed, headlights zooming past. Nothing made sense. I wanted to throw up. I had struggled up to my hands and knees when I took a blow to my side and was down again. I rolled into a ball and covered my eyes, and heard two voices, maybe more, speaking to me in heavily accented English.

I looked through my fingers and saw four blurry Asian faces looking down at me. I thought I recognized the one who had confronted me in front of the ME’s office. Same guy who slammed into me after the NTSB press conference.

He was wearing black, and he had a wide face, and he was shouting at me, something like “You know Chan?”

Was I making that up?

“Back off,” I said. “I’m a cop.”

I reached for my gun at my hip, but it wasn’t there. There was another shout—“Who you work for?”

“What? Get away from me.”

I took another blow to the back of my head, and when I woke up, I was in an ambulance moving at high speed. The EMT at my side was saying, “Welcome back. What’s your name?”

I called Conklin from the ambulance and, shouting painfully over the sirens, I asked him to call Mrs. Rose.

Right after that, I was wheeled into the ER. My clothes were removed and stuffed into a plastic bag. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and layered on two blankets. Eventually a Dr. DiDonato appeared.

He checked me out.

“On a scale of one to ten, with ten being excruciating, how do you feel?”

“I feel like someone beat me up.”

“You remember that?”

“Vividly.”

“Have you ever had a CT scan before?”

“No.”

“Well, get ready for a new experience. I’ll let you know how your head looks, and then we’re going to keep you here overnight for observation.”

“I left my one-year-old with a neighbor. Someone needs to look for witnesses.”

“I’m on duty until eleven,” DiDonato said. “Dr. Santos will take over after that. Maybe he’ll release you in the morning.”

Conklin arrived while I was waiting for my CT scan. He looked both scared and mad.

“What happened? You were mugged? You?”

“I was beaten up by four Asian guys, but I’m alive. I wasn’t robbed,” I said, waggling the ring finger of my left hand with its sparkling array of diamonds.

“So why were you beaten? What did they want?”

“Something about Chan, I think. I can’t swear, Richie. It happened too fast. Why me? I’ve got no idea,” I said.

CHAPTER 40

AT AROUND EIGHT the next morning, Rich wheeled me out of the hospital, helped me into his Bronco, and strapped me in.

Then he let me have it.

“You’re overtired. You could have been killed. You have nothing on the guys who beat you—nothing. No names, vague descriptions, and you didn’t get a lick in. You know what that tells me, Linds? That you’re off your game. It’s Sunday. Day of rest and you should take it. Go to bed and stay there. I can handle this by myself.”

I wasn’t having it.

“What am I going to do at home, Rich? Watch the plane crash over and over again on TV?”

“That. And sleep.”

“Look. I admit I was stupid, OK? I should have had my piece with me. I should have had my head on straight. But I repeat. I was just going to the store for a minute. And, by the way, I outrank you. You don’t get to bench me.”

“You want Brady to put you on medical? Because I have him on speed dial,” said my partner, my brother, my backup, my comrade, my friend. When I didn’t answer immediately, he said, “You need to listen to me. Stay home.”

“No way.”

I held on to his arm as he helped me into my apartment building’s creaky elevator. Mrs. Rose opened the front door and told us to hush. “Julie is sleeping.”

“Can you stay? I have to go to work,” I said.

Rich gave me a scalding look, but Mrs. Rose didn’t catch it. She stepped up once again, saying, “Of course, Lindsay. At this rate I’ll be able to retire to the South of France pretty soon.”

“Before you retire, I’m promoting you to captain of the Emergency Baby Care Squad.”

“Fine. I’d like a salute,” she said. “No one’s ever saluted me before.”

I did it and she laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

Which really hurt.

While she made coffee, I hit the rain box. I examined myself as I stood under the spray. I was bruised from armpit to knee, from midriff to halfway around my back. But I had no internal injuries and my brain was OK, too. Thank God. I concluded that the four Asian hoods hadn’t tried to kill me. If it was a warning, they might work me over again.

I dressed, hiding the scrape along my jaw and cheek with makeup, and strapped on my gun. Locked and loaded, I went back out to the living room. Julie was awake, wearing a sunflower-yellow onesie and bobbing up and down in her bouncy chair.

She looked adorable and like she’d grown an inch or two since yesterday. My little girl. She stretched out her arms to me and howled. My heart just lurched.

What if I had been killed last night?

What then?

I picked her up and hugged her, cooing a little bit, before handing her off to Mrs. Rose.

I had work to do, and at the same time, I was leaving my heart, my precious little girl, with the nice lady from across the hall.

“You coming or not?” Rich said.

I followed him out the front door.

CHAPTER 41

MY PARTNER OPENED the passenger-side door and helped me into the Bronco with the care one might give to a baby chick.

I buckled up, plugged in my phone charger, and knocked back a couple of Advil, already thinking about Alison Muller.

We were days late to be following up on our only suspect in the Four Seasons killings. But the airplane crash had bumped all other cases, even this quadruple homicide, to the back of the line.

Because of the crash that was immobilizing a section of the city and nearly every member of law enforcement, a wide range of criminals, from shoplifters to psychopathic serial killers, had been given a cop-free holiday. And that might include Alison Muller—wherever she was.

As we headed out, Conklin told me he had worked last night scanning social media and websites of companies where Muller had worked during her corporate career. He had downloaded an assortment of her photos onto his phone, and while he drove, I checked out versions of “Ali” with her hair in different lengths, styles, and colors. Even the “striped” look was represented.

“Rich, you’re one of a kind, you know?”

“That’s two of us,” he laughed. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

We took 101 South, passing through that stretch of road bounded on the right by scorched grass and littered with airplane parts and on the left by San Francisco Bay before we hit the straightaway that hugs our famous coastline.

We turned off the radio and used this time to examine the ragged edges of our case, starting with Michael Chan and the three other victims at the hotel. We wondered if the crash of the airliner and the missing body of the second Michael Chan were in any way connected to the death of Michael Chan, the First. We discussed Joe’s video appearances and his uncharacteristic disappearance and how the Asian men who had knocked me around last night fit into this mess of mismatched parts.

All we knew for sure was that Alison Muller was a central figure. And without her, we didn’t have a clue in the world.

We were still sixty miles out from Monterey, just south of San Jose, when I wadded up my jacket, tucked it between my face and the window, and napped for about an hour. I woke to nauseating stop-and-go traffic, and then Conklin was asking, “You going to file a report on your beatdown?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

The car stopped. I looked out at a sunny street lined with beautiful homes.

“Now that I’ve thought about it,” I said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea. Do you?”

He shrugged. “There are pros and cons. Like I said, Brady will sideline you, pronto.”

“I’m fine, Rich. I’m perfectly fine.”

He turned to face me, looking at me with heartbreaking kindness and concern. “You tell me if you don’t feel perfectly fine, Lindsay. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

“I know.”

My partner turned off the engine.

“We’re here,” he said.

CHAPTER 42

ALI MULLER’S 1920S Mediterranean-style home on Ocean View Boulevard was stunning. The many-windowed white stucco house was roofed in terra-cotta tiles and punctuated by a six-sided tower at the right-angle juncture between two wings.

I looked up through the windows of the squad car at the spiky native plantings on a rising slope up to the carved oak front door and I felt—warned off. The place was beautiful, and as welcoming as a fortress.

Conklin said, “You OK, Linds?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Fine. Let’s go.”

The man who opened the front door was handsome, just over six feet, in his midforties, wearing a cashmere pullover, dark trousers, slippers, and a gold wedding band. He looked well put together and not happy to see us.

He said, “Yes? What can I do for you?”

Conklin introduced us, showed his badge, and said we were looking into Alison Muller’s disappearance because she might have been a witness to a homicide.

“I am Khalid Khan,” said the man in the doorway. “Alison is my wife. Come in.”

We followed Khan past a spiral staircase inside the entrance and into a blond and airy great room ripped from the cover of California Living. It had a high ceiling, and the tall windows I’d admired from the street offered a ten-million-dollar view of the bay.

Khan offered us seats on the pale leather sofas, and he took a matching armchair. Soft music surrounded us, a string composition I didn’t recognize. There were no paintings or photographs or anything personal in the room. Again, I felt that forbidding air about the house.

I said, “We’re investigating four killings that took place early in the week in the Four Seasons Hotel.”

I showed Khan my phone with the still shot of Muller from the hotel security footage. Khan scrutinized the image.

He said, “I could see how someone might think that’s Ali, but this woman’s hair covers her face except for her nose. I don’t believe this is my wife.”

“Do you recognize her coat, Mr. Khan? Could it be Alison’s?”

He shrugged, just as two girls came down the stairs and entered the great room. They were beautiful children with thick, glossy hair, one about thirteen, the other about five. Khan said, “Caroline and Mitzi, these are police inspectors from San Francisco. They are looking for Mama.”

The younger child, Mitzi, said sternly, “I hope you are looking very hard.”

I said we were, and after the children ran off toward the kitchen, Conklin continued questioning Khan.

He said, “When was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

“She phoned me on Monday, saying she’d be home that night. She didn’t come home, but this is not unusual for Alison. She has a very busy life.”

Conklin asked, “You’re not afraid something has happened to her?”

Khan answered no to all of Conklin’s questions without apparent emotion or curiosity. No to ransom demands, unusual behavior, strangers in the neighborhood, hang-up phone calls, and whether he knew the name Michael Chan.

Why was Khan so unperturbed when his wife had been missing for almost a week?

So I asked him. “You don’t seem concerned, Mr. Khan. Why is that?”

Said Khan, “This isn’t the first time Ali has taken off for a few days without leaving word. They’re walkabouts. What she calls focus downs. She just checks out to think by herself.”

Really? Without saying a word?

“I trust my wife,” he said.

I asked Khan if anyone might have wanted to hurt her: a coworker, a competitor, a stalker, or a jealous friend.

“Ali is successful, yes. And there are always jealous people, but she is a wonderful woman. She’ll be home when she’s ready. I’ll have her call you the minute she comes home,” he said without a shred of sincerity.

Khan was sure Alison was alive. Or he didn’t give a damn about her.

I said, “We have video of the woman we believe is Alison. If you can identify her, we can at least establish her whereabouts last Monday afternoon.”

“Naturally, I’ll look at the film.”

I asked if I might use the bathroom and he said, “You mean you’d like to snoop around my house? By all means, have at it,” and he turned his back to me.

By all means, I would.

CHAPTER 43

WITH KHAN’S PERMISSION, I gave the second floor a thorough visual inspection, concentrating on the marital bedroom. Like the great room, the bedroom looked like a photo in a lifestyle magazine: expensively furnished and entirely untouched.

The bed was precisely made. There were no clothes on the floor, no clutter on the dressers, no sign of pets, handcuffs, dust bunnies, or bloodstains.

We had one possible witness to the Four Seasons bloodbath: Alison Muller. She was also our only suspect. In the absence of the flesh-and-blood woman, and without a warrant, this was my only chance to frisk her clothes.

I walked past the tower view of the bay to the far wall, slid open the closet doors, and turned on the lights.

Alison’s closet looked like a designer showroom: twenty-five feet long by ten feet deep, with built-in drawers and treed shoes under the eighty linear feet of clothing racks.

Her executive wardrobe filled one section with silk blouses, expensive suits, boots made in Italy, and six-hundred-dollar red-soled high-heeled pumps. Next to her office apparel was a frankly dazzling evening wear collection—casual, formal, all with European designer labels. Above and below the racks were shelves of wraps, bags, and boxes of strappy heels.

I saw no A-line, knee-length black leather coat.

While the presence of that coat might confirm Alison Muller as the blond-haired woman at the Four Seasons, the absence of the coat proved nothing. She might still be wearing it. Or she might have been buried in it.

As I was wrapping up my tour of Ali’s wardrobe, I saw an anomaly: a nearly hidden seam between two sections of built-in drawers.

I pressed on one side of the seam and a door sprang open—revealing a stash of racy, lacy, extremely fine lingerie.

I was examining a boned bustier when Khan came through the closet doorway.

“Find anything, Sergeant? A murder weapon, perhaps? Or a pile of bloody clothes?”

He stopped short when he saw the display of sexy underthings.

“What is this?” he asked.

“You haven’t seen it before?”

“That’s not Ali’s style at all.”

“And still, here it is, in a secret closet. Have any thoughts on this, Mr. Khan?”

He blinked at the lingerie, then returned to the bedroom door and stood there until I made my exit. He followed me down the staircase, and when Conklin and I were standing at the open front door, I thanked Mr. Khan and gave him my card, saying, “Call me if you hear from Alison.”

“Absolutely,” Khan said stiffly. “The very first thing.”

CHAPTER 44

EVEN MEN WHO’D killed their wives had demonstrated more concern for their missing spouse than Khalid Khan, the man in the fortress overlooking the bay.

“Nice guy,” I said to my partner once we were inside the car. “What’s your take?”

“You first.”

“OK,” I said. “Once again, I’m wondering if Alison is the doer, or if she’s moldering in a dump somewhere. And does her husband give a crap either way?”

“Cultural affect, maybe. What is he?”

“Arrogant. For starters. Here’s a thought.”

Conklin had taken out his phone and was checking his messages. I kept going.

“Say Khan found out about Alison’s thing with Chan and paid a pro to make her disappear? Maybe Chan was part of the contract, too. Looks like Khan could afford the very best. The snoops and the housekeeper were collateral damage.”

“Brady called.”

“OK. Give me another minute, here.”

I was telling Conklin about Khan’s reaction to Muller’s lingerie collection when a sharp rapping sound on the windshield made me jump. What the hell?

I twisted my head around to see Caroline, the older of Khan and Muller’s daughters, knocking on the glass.

Conklin buzzed down the window.

“Quick,” Caroline said. “I don’t want him to see me.”

Conklin unlocked the back door, and Caroline got in, slipped down below window level, and asked Conklin to drive. He took the car one block down Ocean View, pulled around the corner, and braked on another residential street.

Caroline said, “Listen. My father is an idiot. I’ve told him, but he’s brain-dead when it comes to her. My mother is a psycho. She has no feelings and she lies all the time.”

Conklin said, “That must be pretty rough, Caroline. Does she lie to you?”

“All the time.”

“Give me an example.”

“There’s like four million examples.”

Conklin smiled and said, “Pick one.”

By now, the girl was pressing her face to the grille between the front and backseat. She was talking fast. She wanted to have her say and get out of the car.

She said, “Like, she’ll say she’s working late. And I’ll call her and there’s no answer. And she’ll come home just before we have to get up for school, and she’ll put on a robe and pretend she’s been home all night. And when I look at her speedometer, she’s driven like five hundred miles.

“So I’m thinking, OK, she has a boyfriend somewhere. A couple of times I heard her talking all flirty on the phone. I go and hit Redial and an international area code jumps up. Her job is here. Who could she know in Berlin?”

I said, “Caroline, your mom hasn’t called or texted?”

She shook her head, her long hair slapping her cheeks. Tears wet her face and she wiped them away, fast and hard, with the flat of her hand.

“Please don’t ask me if I love her.”

I didn’t have to ask. Obviously, she did.

I said, “Show her the picture, Rich.”

He swiped at his phone, pulling up the photo of the striking blond-haired woman in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel.

“Is that your mom?” I asked.

“A hundred percent. Those glasses are her Guccis. That’s her Zak Posen coat. And check out her hand on the phone. What did I tell you? She’s not wearing her wedding ring.”

Conklin showed Caroline the DMV photo of Michael Chan. He asked, “Have you ever seen this man?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Duh. It’s all over the Internet. I can read. You think my mom had something to do with him?”

“We’re asking everyone if they know him,” Conklin said.

My partner thanked the girl, gave her his card, and told her to call anytime. Then she got out of the car. I got out, too, and watched her walk up the block with her chin tucked down. When she turned up the walk to her house, I got back into the passenger seat.

My partner said, “Here’s what I think. Alison Muller is a cheat, a narcissist, and a terrible mother. Going out on a limb, here, she’s also a pathological liar. You know where that leaves us?”

He touched his thumb and forefinger together, held up the zero for me to see.

“Exactly,” I said.

I called Brady to check in.

He said, “Monterey PD forwarded the Muller file to me an hour ago. They’re treating her as a missing person. Detectives talked with neighbors, friends, business associates. They’ve got nothing.”

That made all of us.

CHAPTER 45

I HAD TOLD Conklin that I was just fine after my beating last night, that I was cleared by the hospital and fit for duty. But even the pressure of buckling my seat belt caused a starburst of pain to radiate out from my ribs, wrap around my back, and shoot up to the top of my head.

I did my best not to wince. Or scream.

We were heading north on Ocean View Boulevard, Conklin saying we should stop off somewhere and grab something to eat.

I said, “Fine,” but I was preoccupied.

I was looking into the side-view mirror, seeing a black BMW crossover holding steady a few car lengths behind us. I thought I’d seen that car parked across the street from the Muller-Khan house through the bedroom windows. And now I was thinking I’d glimpsed it peripherally when I was watching Caroline Khan return to her home.

“Rich, the BMW behind us. The Asian guys who got into my face outside Claire’s office the other night. They were driving a vehicle like that.”

Conklin flicked his eyes to the mirror and said, “OK, we’ll keep our eyes on it,” adding that there might be a few thousand identical cars in this town.

I tried to relax.

Monterey Bay was on our left, with gorgeous houses along the right, as we headed in the direction of downtown Monterey. The view was a fine backdrop for my roiling mind. I was thinking about Ali Muller, wondering where the hell my husband was and what made Joe any different than Ali Muller. I didn’t like where my thoughts were going, so I glanced into the side-view mirror again.

The BMW had dropped back behind a panel van, but it was still keeping up with us when we passed Lovers Point Park and veered right onto the arterial.

“It’s still on our tail,” I said to my partner when we stopped at a light in downtown Pacific Grove. We took a right down a street lined with shops and restaurants, most of them closed on a Sunday, and yes, there it was. The black BMW was two cars behind our taillights.

The Pacific Grove post office was ahead on our right.

“Rich. Pull up over there.”

Conklin braked at the curb, and while the SUV had time and distance enough to slow and cruise past, the driver freaked. He jerked the wheel hard, then hit the gas and shot through the stop sign at the corner.

“Go,” I said to my partner.

As we tore up the asphalt, I radioed dispatch, saying to notify Monterey PD that we were in pursuit of a suspicious vehicle. I gave them the make, the model, and the two numbers I’d been able to grab off the plate.

Conklin switched on the lights and siren and I gripped the armrest. We flew along Lighthouse Avenue, following the BMW onto a residential block called Ridge Road. Ridge T’d into another block of homey houses with front yards, and as Conklin took a two-wheeled turn, I prayed that no dogs, cars, or children would get between us and the SUV.

I switched the mic to bullhorn mode, leaned out the window, and shouted, “This is the police! Pull over. Now.”

The BMW kept on going.

CHAPTER 46

THE DRIVER OF the BMW had the bit in his teeth, and also a solid lead. He sped past the gate in the residents’ lane and switched around on the winding roads, taking us out to 17 Mile Drive, the scenic route that goes around the peninsula and through Carmel.

I was beat up again from the chase, slammed from side to side against the straps, feeling like I’d been thrown into a commercial-grade clothes dryer.

But as soon as we hit the divided two-lane drive, our speed was cut in half. Traffic filled in between the treed divider on our left and the vegetation and backyard fencing on our right.

Our lights and sirens flashed and screamed, and as cars scrambled to get out of our way, we passed Rip Van Winkle Open Space at a jerky forty miles per hour. Conklin was doing a fine job under the circumstances, weaving around the balky cars and the ones that were hugging the edge of the golf course on our right.

It was clear to me that the guy we were chasing knew his way around this town when he pulled hard to the right, cut across scrub terrain, and skirted the Pacific shoreline before clipping a pickup truck at a stop sign and making a breathtaking and hazardous left onto Ocean Road.

Horns blew. Brakes squealed and pileups ensued. I radioed dispatch again, reporting that we were still in pursuit and needed assistance. Forthwith.

The driver of the black BMW took Bird Rock Road, a narrow and winding road that passed through a forested stretch of yet another golf course, and he did it at seventy. Then he broke from the road and cut across the links.

We followed into chaos and panic as golf carts tipped and golfers scattered. Flags were mown down and sand sprayed out from under tires before the BMW got back onto Bird Rock Road, taking a wide loop toward 17 Mile Drive again.

We lost ground on the links.

Our well-used Ford was a repurposed drug dealer’s ride that had been ridden hard for three hundred thousand miles. It was no match for the spanking-new four-wheel-drive crossover. By the time we got out to the drive, there were dozens of cars between us, but I spotted our BMW stuck in the same traffic up ahead.

My partner focused on the road and the BMW buried inside a pack of other vehicles a hundred fifty feet in front of us. We passed Pebble Beach at a crawl, then merged onto Highway 1 heading north.

And now the traffic was so thick that our bleating sirens couldn’t budge it.

Where were the patrol cars we needed to assist us?

Where was the roadblock? The choppers?

Was the driver of the BMW a deadbeat dad or a dope dealer? Or was he one of the men who had attacked me? My gut said he was one of my attackers—and not to let him get away.

I counted three black SUVs in the near distance, any of which could have been the BMW we were chasing, but I couldn’t make out the plates.

We stopped and started and gained ground where we could, but after we passed the Highway 68 exit toward Salinas, I recognized the long gash in the passenger-side door of a BMW crossover cruising at high speed down the off-ramp.

“Ah, shit, Richie, we lost him.”

“Christ,” Conklin said. “Sorry about that, Linds.”

Just then, a couple of cherry-lit Highway Patrol cruisers came up from behind. They weren’t after the BMW. They were signaling us to pull over.

My partner said, “What now?” and cursed as he braked the car on the verge.

We buzzed down our windows, put our hands where they could be clearly seen, and waited for the cops. Gravel crunched under hard-soled boots. A pair of uniformed Sheriff’s Department officers approached our windows.

“We’re on the job,” I said to the one who appeared two yards off my right shoulder. “I’m opening my jacket to show you my badge.”