7th Heaven

Chapter 1

WE SAT IN A CIRCLE around the fire pit behind our rental cottage near the spectacular Point Reyes National Seashore, an hour north of San Francisco.

“Lindsay, hold out your glass,” Cindy said.

I tasted the margarita – it was good. Yuki stirred the oysters on the grill. My border collie, Sweet Martha, sighed and crossed her paws in front of her, and firelight made flickering patterns on our faces as the sun set over the Pacific.

“It was one of my first cases in the ME’s office,” Claire was saying. “And so I was ‘it.’ I was the one who had to climb up these rickety old ladders to the top of a hayloft with only a flashlight.”

Yuki coughed as the tequila went down her windpipe, gasping for breath as Cindy and I yelled at her in unison, “Sip it!”

Claire thumped Yuki’s back and continued.

“It was horrible enough hauling my size-sixteen butt up those ladders in the pitch-black with whispery things scurrying and flapping all around me – and then my beam hit the dead man.

“His feet were hovering above the hay, and when I lit him up, I swear to God he looked like he was levitating. Eyes and tongue bugged out, like a freakin’ ghoul.”

“No way.” Yuki laughed. She was wearing pajama bottoms and a Boalt Law sweatshirt, her hair in a ponytail, already drunk on her one margarita, looking more like a college kid than a woman nearing thirty.

“I yelled down into the dark well of that barn,” Claire said, “got two big old boys to come up and cut the body down from the rafters and put Mr. Levitation into a body bag.”

Claire paused for dramatic effect – and right then my cell phone rang.

“Lind-say, no,” Cindy begged me. “Don’t take that call.”

I glanced at the caller ID, expecting it to be my boyfriend, Joe, thinking he’d just gotten home and was checking in, but it was Lieutenant Warren Jacobi. My former partner and current boss.

“Jacobi?”

Yuki shouted, “Don’t stop, Claire. She could be on the phone all night!”

“Lindsay? Okay, fine,” Claire said, and then she went on. “I unzipped the body bag… and a bat flew out of the dead man’s clothes. I peed my pants,” Claire squealed behind me. “I really did!”

“Boxer? You there?” said Jacobi, gruff in my ear.

“I’m on my own time,” I growled into my cell phone. “It’s Saturday, don’t you know that?”

“You’re going to want this. If not, tell me and I’ll give it to Cappy and Chi.”

“What is it?”

“The biggest deal in the world, Boxer. It’s about the Campion kid. Michael.”

Chapter 2

MY PULSE SHOT UP at the mention of Michael Campion’s name.

Michael Campion wasn’t just a kid. He was to Californians what JFK Jr. had been to the nation. The only child of our former governor Connor Hume Campion and his wife, Valentina, Michael Campion had been born into incredible wealth. He’d also been born with an inoperable heart defect and had been living on borrowed time for the whole of his life.

Through photos and newscasts, Michael’s life had been part of ours. He’d been a darling baby, a precocious and gifted child, and a handsome teenager, both funny and smart. His father had become a spokesman for the American Heart Association, and Michael was their adored poster boy. And while the public rarely saw Michael, they cared, always hoping that one day there would be a medical breakthrough and that California ’s “Boy with a Broken Heart” would be given what most people took for granted – a full and vigorous life.

Then, back in January of this year, Michael had said good night to his parents, and in the morning his bedroom was empty. There was no ransom note. No sign of foul play. But a back door was unlocked and Michael was gone.

His disappearance was treated as a kidnapping, and the FBI launched a nationwide search. The SFPD did its own investigation, interviewing family members and retainers, Michael’s teachers and school friends, and his virtual online friends as well.

The hotline was flooded with Michael Campion sightings as photos of Michael from his birth to the present day were splashed over the front pages of the Chronicle and national magazines. TV networks and cable news ran documentary specials on Michael Campion’s doom-shadowed life.

The tips had led nowhere, and months later, when there’d been no calls from a kidnapper, and no trace of Michael had surfaced, terror attacks, wildfires, politics, and new violent crimes pushed the Michael Campion story off the front page.

The case was still open, but everyone assumed the worst. That a kidnapping had gone terribly wrong. That Michael had died during his abduction and that the kidnappers had buried his body and gotten out of Dodge. The citizens of San Francisco mourned along with Michael’s famous and beloved family, and while the public would never forget him, they put the book of his life aside.

Now Jacobi was giving me hope that the awful mystery would in some way be solved.

“Michael’s body has been found?” I asked him.

“Naw, but we’ve got a credible lead. Finally.”

I pressed the phone hard against my ear, ghost stories and the first annual getaway of the Women’s Murder Club forgotten.

Jacobi was saying, “If you want in on this, Boxer, meet me at the Hall -”

“I can be there in an hour.”

Chapter 3

I MADE THE ONE-HOUR DRIVE back to the Hall of Justice in forty-five minutes, took the stairs from the lobby to the third floor, and strode into the squad room looking for Jacobi.

The forty-by-forty-foot open space was lit with flickering overhead fluorescent tubing, making the night crew hunched over their desks look like they’d just crawled out of their graves. A few old guys lifted their eyes, said, “Howsit goin’, Sarge?” as I made my way to Jacobi’s glassed-in corner office, with its view of the on-ramp to the 280 freeway.

My partner, Richard Conklin, was already there; thirty years old, six feet two inches of all-American hunk, one of his long legs resting on the edge of Jacobi’s junkyard of a desk.

I pulled out the other chair, bashed my knee, swore loudly and emphatically as Jacobi sniggered, “Nice talk, Boxer.” I sat down, thinking how this had been a functional workspace when Jacobi’s office had been mine. I took off my baseball cap and shook out my hair, hoping to hell that the guys wouldn’t smell tequila on my breath.

“What kind of lead?” I asked without preamble.

“It’s a tip kind of lead,” Jacobi said. “Anonymous caller using a prepaid cell phone – untraceable, naturally. Caller said he’d seen the Campion kid entering a house on Russian Hill the night he disappeared. The house is home to a prostitute.”

As Jacobi made room on his desk for the prostitute’s rap sheet, I thought about Michael Campion’s life at the time he’d disappeared.

There’d been no dates for Michael, no parties, no sports. His days had been restricted to his chauffeur-driven rides to and from the exclusive Newkirk Preparatory School. So it didn’t sound exactly crazy that he’d visited a prostitute. He’d probably paid off his driver and escaped the plush-lined prison of his parents’ love for an hour or two.

But what had happened to him afterward?

What had happened to Michael?

“Why is this tip credible?” I asked Jacobi.

“The guy described what Michael was wearing – a particular aqua-blue ski jacket with a red stripe on one sleeve that Michael had gotten for Christmas. That jacket was never mentioned in the press.”

“So why did this tipster wait three months before calling it in?” I asked Jacobi.

“I can only tell you what he said. He said he was leaving the prostitute’s house as Michael Campion was coming in. That he didn’t drop the dime until now because he has a wife and kids. Didn’t want to get caught up in the hullabaloo, but that his conscience had been needling him. Finally got to him, I guess.”

“Russian Hill is a nice neighborhood for a pross,” Conklin said.

And it was. Kind of like the French Quarter meets South Beach. And it was within walking distance of the Newkirk School. I took a notebook out of my handbag.

“What’s the prostitute’s name?”

“Her given name is Myrtle Bays,” Jacobi said, handing me her sheet. The attached mug shot was of a young woman with a girlish look, short blond hair, and huge eyes. Her date of birth made her twenty-two years old.

“A few years ago she legally changed her name,” said Jacobi. “Now she calls herself Junie Moon.”

“So Michael Campion went to a hooker, Jacobi,” I said, putting the rap sheet back down on his desk. “What’s your theory?”

“That the kid died in flagrante delicto, Boxer. In English that means ‘in the saddle.’ If this tip pans out, I’m thinking maybe Ms. Myrtle Bays, AKA Junie Moon, killed Michael with his first roll in the hay – and then she made his body disappear.”

Chapter 4

A YOUNG MAN in his twenties with spiky blond hair and a black sport coat whistled through his teeth as he left Junie Moon’s front door. Conklin and I watched from our squad car, saw the john lope across Leavenworth, heard the tootle as he disarmed his late model BMW.

As his taillights disappeared around the corner, Conklin and I walked up the path to the front door of what’s called a Painted Lady: a pastel-colored, gingerbread-decorated Victorian house, this one flaking and in need of repair. I pressed the doorbell, waited a minute, pressed it again.

Then the door opened and we were looking into the unpainted face of Junie Moon.

From the first moment, I saw that Junie was no ordinary hooker.

There was a dewy freshness about her that I’d never seen before in a working girl. Her hair was damp from the shower, a cap of blond curls that trailed into a wisp of a braid that had been dyed blue. Her eyes were a deep, smoky gray, and a thin white scar cut through the top lip of her cupid’s-bow mouth.

She was a beauty, but what grabbed me the most was Junie Moon’s disarming, childlike appearance. Junie pulled the sash of her gold silk dressing gown tightly around her narrow waist as my partner showed her his shield, said our names and “Homicide. Mind if we come in?”

“Homicide? You’re here to see me?” she asked. Her voice matched her appearance, not just young, but sweetened with innocence.

“We have some questions about a missing person,” Rich said, launching his amazing, babe-catcher smile.

Junie Moon invited us in.

The room smelled sweet, floral, like lavender and jasmine, and the light was soft, coming from low-watt bulbs under silk-draped lampshades. Conklin and I sat on a velvet upholstered loveseat while Junie took a seat on an ottoman, clasped her hands around her knees. She was barefoot, her nail polish the pale coral color of the inside of seashells.

“Nice place,” Conklin said.

“Thank you. I rent it. Furnished,” she said.

“Have you ever seen this man?” I asked Junie Moon, showing her a photo of Michael Campion.

“You mean for real? That’s Michael Campion, isn’t it?”

“That’s right.”

Junie Moon’s gray eyes grew even more huge. “I’ve never seen Michael Campion in my entire life.”

“Okay, Ms. Moon,” I said. “We have some questions we’d like to ask you at the police station.”

Chapter 5

JUNIE MOON SAT ACROSS FROM US in Interview Two, a twelve-by-twelve-foot gray-tiled room with a metal table, four matching chairs, and a video camera affixed to the ceiling.

I’d checked twice to be sure. The camera was loaded and running.

Junie was now wearing an open-weave pink cardigan over a lace-trimmed cami, jeans, and sneakers, no makeup, and – I’m not overstating this – she looked like she was in the tenth grade.

Conklin had started the interview by reading Junie Moon her Miranda rights in a charming, “no big deal,” respectful manner. She initialed the acknowledgment of rights form without complaint, but still, it irked the hell out of me. Junie Moon wasn’t under arrest. We didn’t have to Mirandize her for a noncustodial interview, and Conklin’s warning might very well inhibit her from telling us something we urgently needed to know. I swallowed my pique. What was done was done.

Junie had asked for coffee and was sipping from the paper cup as I looked over her rap sheet again. I mentioned her three arrests for prostitution, and she told me that since she’d changed her name, she hadn’t been arrested for anything.

“I feel like a new person,” she said.

There were no track marks on her arms, no bruises that I could see, and that made it even less understandable. What was the draw? What was the hook?

Why would a pretty girl like Junie turn pro?

“I took my name from an old Liza Minnelli movie,” she was telling Conklin. “It was called Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon. A lot of my clients ask me to tell them that,” she said with a wistful smile.

Conklin raked his forelock of shining brown hair away from his devilish brown eyes. I was sure that Rich had never seen the movie or read the book. “Is that so?” he said. “That’s cool.”

“So, Junie,” I said, “most of your clients are prep school kids?”

“Tell me the truth, Sergeant Boxer. Should I get a lawyer? Because I think you’re trying to say that I have sex with underage boys, and that’s not true.”

“You ask for their driver’s licenses before you take off your pants?”

“We’re not interested in your, ah, social activities, Junie,” Conklin said, breaking in. “We’re only interested in Michael Campion.”

“I told you,” she said, her voice trembling just a bit. “I’ve never met him, and I think I would know.”

“Understand,” I said, “we’re not blaming you for anything. We know Michael was sick. Maybe his heart gave out while he was with you -”

“He was never a client,” Junie insisted. “I would have been honored, you know, but it just didn’t happen.”

Conklin turned off the dazzling smile, said, “Junie. Work with us and we’ll leave you and your business alone. Keep stonewalling us and vice is going to nail you to the wall.”

We played patty-cake with Junie for about two hours, using every legal technique in the book. We made her feel safe. We leaned on her, lied to her, reassured her, and threatened her. And after all that, Junie still denied any knowledge of Michael Campion. In the end, I played our only card, slamming my hand down on the table for emphasis.

“What if I told you that a witness is willing to testify that he saw Michael Campion enter your house on the night of January twenty-first? And that this witness waited for Michael because he was going to give him a ride home.

“But that never happened, Junie, because Michael never left your house.”

“A witness? But that’s impossible,” said the young woman. “It has to be a mistake.”

I was desperate to crack open this one miserable lead, but we were getting no traction at all. I was starting to believe that Jacobi’s anonymous tipster was yet another crank caller – and I was seriously considering waking Jacobi and peppering him with a few choice words – when Junie looked down at the table. Her eyes were moist and her face seemed pinched, actually transformed by grief.

“You’re right, you’re right, and I can’t take this anymore. If you turn that thing off, I’ll tell you what happened.”

I exchanged startled looks with Conklin. Then I snapped out of it. I reached up to the video camera and switched it off. “You can’t go wrong if you tell us the truth,” I said, my heart going ga-lump, ga-lump.

I leaned forward, folded my hands on the table.

And Junie began to tell us everything.

Chapter 6

“IT HAPPENED just like you said,” Junie said, looking up at us with an anguished expression I read as fear and pain.

“Michael died?” I asked her. “He is, in fact, dead?”

“Can I start at the beginning?” Junie asked Conklin.

“Sure,” Rich told her. “Take your time.”

“See, I didn’t know who he was at first,” Junie said. “When Michael called to make the date, he gave me a fake name. So when I opened the door and there he was – oh, my God. The boy in the bubble. He’d come to see me!”

“What happened next?” I asked.

“He was really nervous,” Junie said. “Shifting from one foot to the other. Looking at the window like someone could be watching him. I offered him a drink, but he said no, he didn’t want to forget anything. He said that he was a virgin.”

Junie bowed her head and tears spilled out of her eyes, dropped to the table. Conklin passed her the box of tissues, and we looked at each other in shock as we waited her out.

“A lot of boys are virgins when they come to me,” she said at last. “Sometimes they like to pretend that we’re having a date, and I make sure it’s the best date they ever had.”

“I’m sure,” Conklin murmured. “So is that what happened with Michael? He pretended he was on a date?”

“Yeah,” Junie said. “And as soon as we got into the bedroom, he told me his real name – and I told him mine!

“He got a real kick out of that, and then he started telling me about his life. He was a champion chess player on the Internet, did you know that? And he didn’t act like a celebrity. He was super real. I started to think we were on a date, too.”

“You got around to having sex with him, Junie?” I asked.

“Well, sure. He put the money on the night table, and I took off his clothes, and we had, you know, just started when – when he had to stop. He said he was in pain,” Junie said, touching her chest with the flat of her palm. “And I knew about his heart, of course, but I hoped it would pass.”

And then she broke down, put her arms on the table, her head in her arms, and sobbed as though she’d really cared.

“He got worse,” Junie choked out. “He was saying, ‘Call my dad,’ but I couldn’t move. I didn’t know how to call his father. And if I had, what would I say? That I was a prostitute? His dad was Governor Campion. He would’ve put me in jail forever.

“So I held Michael in my arms and sang to him,” Junie told us. “I hoped he’d start to feel better,” she said, lifting her tearstained face. “But he got worse.”

Chapter 7

THE MUSCLE TWITCHING in Conklin’s jaw was the only outward sign that he was as stunned by Junie’s confession as I was.

“How long did it take for Michael to die?” he asked Junie Moon.

“I don’t know. Maybe a couple of minutes. Maybe a little more. It was awful, awful,” Junie said, shaking her head at the memory. “About then, that’s when I called my boyfriend.”

“You called your boyfriend?” I shouted. “Is he a doctor?”

“No. But I needed him. And so Ricky came over, and Michael had passed away by then, so we put him into the bathtub. And then Ricky and I talked for a long time about what to do.”

I wanted to scream, You moron! You might have saved him! Michael Campion might have lived. I wanted to shake her. Slap her bimbo face – so I got a grip on myself, sat back, and let Conklin keep the ball rolling.

“So what did you do with his body, Junie? Where is Michael now?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I said, getting up from my chair, making a racket with it, taking a couple of laps around the table.

Junie started speaking quickly, as if by talking fast she’d get to the end of her story and it would all be over.

“After a few hours, Ricky decided to cut up his body with a knife. It was the most horrible thing I could ever imagine – and I grew up on a farm! I was throwing up and crying,” Junie said, looking as though she might do it now.

I pulled out my chair again, put my butt in the seat, determined not to scare the little hooker even as she shocked me to the bone.

“But once we started cutting, there was no way back,” Junie said, pleading to Conklin with her eyes. “I helped Ricky put Michael’s body into about eight garbage bags, and then we piled the bags into Ricky’s truck. It was like five in the morning. And no one was around.”

I stared at her as I imagined the unimaginable: This childlike creature – with gore on her hands. The body of Michael Campion in bloody chunks.

I heard Conklin say, “Go on, Junie. We’re with you. Get it all off your chest.”

“We drove up the coast a few hours,” Junie said, now telling the story as if she were recalling a dream. “I fell asleep, and when I woke up, Ricky was saying, ‘This is the end of the line.’ We were parked in the back of a McDonald’s, and there were some Dumpsters back there.

“That’s where we left the garbage bags.”

“What town? Do you know?” I asked.

“Not really.”

“Think,” I snapped.

“I’ll try.”

Junie gave us her boyfriend’s name and address, and I wrote it all down. Rich passed her a pad of paper and asked her if she’d like to make her statement official.

“Not really,” she said, seeming empty and exhausted. “So… will you drive me home now?”

“Not really,” I repeated back at her. “Stand up and put your hands behind your back.”

“You’re arresting me?”

“Yes. We are.”

Even on the tightest notch, the cuffs were loose around her wrists.

“But – I told you the truth!”

“And we appreciate it,” I said. “Thank you very much. You’re under arrest for tampering with evidence and interfering with a police investigation. That should hold you for now.”

Junie was crying again, telling Conklin how sorry she was and that it wasn’t her fault. I was scanning the map in my mind, imagining the towns along the coast, the six hundred McDonald’s restaurants in Northern California.

And I was wondering if there was a chance in the world that we’d ever recover Michael Campion’s remains.

Chapter 8

AT JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT, I was sitting on a kitchen stool watching Joe put pasta on to boil. Joe is a big, gorgeous guy, over six feet, dark hair, bright blue eyes, and now he was standing at the stove in his blue boxers, his hair rumpled and his dear face creased with sleep. He looked husband-y and he loved me.

I loved him, too.

That’s why Joe had just moved to San Francisco from DC, ending our tumultuous long-distance relationship in favor of starting something new and maybe permanent. And although Joe had rented a fantastic apartment on Lake Street, a month after his move he’d brought over his copper-bottomed cookware and started sleeping in my bed five nights a week. Luckily, I’d been able to move up to the third floor of my building to give us a little more room.

Our relationship had gotten richer and more loving, exactly what I’d hoped for.

So I had to ask myself – why was the engagement ring Joe had given me still in its black velvet box, diamonds blazing in the dark?

Why couldn’t I just say yes?

“What did Cindy tell you?” I asked him.

“Verbatim? She said, ‘Here’s Martha. Lindsay got a break in the Campion case and she’s on it. Tell. Her. She wrecked our weekend, and I’m calling her in the morning for a quote. And she’d better give me a good one.’ ”

I laughed at Joe’s imitation of Cindy, who is not only my friend, but also the top reporter on the Chronicle’s crime desk.

“It’s either tell her everything,” I said, “or tell her nothing. And for now, it’s nothing.”

“So, fill me in, Blondie. Since I’m wide-awake.”

I took a deep breath and told Joe all about Junie Moon; how she’d denied everything for two hours before telling us to turn off the camera, then talking about her “date” with Michael and his apparent heart attack; and how instead of calling 911, Junie had sung Michael Campion a lullaby as his heart bucked to a halt and killed him.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

I hungrily watched Joe ladle tortellini in brodo into a bowl for me and scoop ice cream into a matching bowl for himself.

“Where’s the body?” Joe asked me, pulling out a stool and sitting beside me.

“That’s the sixty-million-dollar question,” I said, referring to the reported size of the Campion fortune. I told Joe the rest of it: Junie’s dazed speech about Michael Campion’s dismemberment, the subsequent run up the coast with her boyfriend, and the eventual body dump behind a fast food restaurant – somewhere.

“You know, Conklin read Junie her rights when we brought her in for questioning,” I mused. “And it pissed me off.

“Junie wasn’t in custody, and I was sure if she was Mirandized, she wouldn’t talk. And frankly, I believed what she said at first, that everything she knew about Michael Campion she’d read in People magazine. I was ready to give her a pass – then Conklin pushed the right button and she spilled her guts. It was a good thing that he’d read her her rights.”

I shook my head thinking about it. “Rich has such confidence for a young cop, not to mention an astonishing way with women,” I said, warming to the subject. “And it’s not just that he’s great-looking, it’s that he’s very respectful. And he’s very smart. And women just want to tell him everything…”

Joe reached for my empty bowl and stood up, abruptly.

“Honey?”

“It’s getting so I feel like I know this guy,” Joe said over the sound of water running in the sink. “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

“Sure -”

“What do you say we go to bed, Lindsay?” he said, cutting me off. “It’s been a long night.”

Chapter 9

AT AROUND EIGHT the next morning, we found Ricky Malcolm jiggling his key into the front door of a shabby apartment house on Mission Street. He made us as cops and tried to take off, so we scuffled with him on the sidewalk and convinced him to come to the Hall.

“You’re not under arrest,” I’d said, escorting him to our car. “We just want to hear your side of the story.”

Ricky was in “the box” now, glaring at me with his weird, wide-spaced green eyes, tattooed arms crossed over his chest, his face blanched with the nocturnal pallor of a man who hadn’t seen broad daylight in years.

Within the forest of tattoos on Malcolm’s right arm was a red heart with the initials R.M. The heart was impaled on the hook of a crescent moon. Malcolm looked predatory and violent, and now I was wondering if Junie’s story of Michael Campion’s death was true.

Had Campion really died of natural causes?

Or had this freak walked in on Michael and Junie – and killed him?

Malcolm’s sheet showed three arrests, one conviction, all for possession. I slapped the folder closed.

“What can you tell us about Michael Campion?” I asked him.

“What I read in the papers,” he said.

The interview went on in this vein for a couple of hours, and since Conklin’s charms had no effect on Ricky Malcolm, I took the lead. I was trying to get him to say anything, even lies that we could use to trip him up later, but Ricky was stubborn or cagey or both. He denied any knowledge of Michael Campion, alive or dead.

I blinked first.

“I think I understand what happened, Ricky,” I said. “Your girlfriend was in big trouble, and so you had to help her out. Pretty understandable, I guess.”

“What are you talking about?”

“The body, Ricky. You remember. When Michael Campion died in Junie’s bed.”

Malcolm snorted. “Is she saying that actually happened? And that I had something to do with it?”

“Junie confessed, you understand,” Conklin said. “We know what happened. The kid was dead when you got there. That wasn’t your fault, and we’re not putting that on you.”

“This is a joke, right?” Malcolm said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“If you’re innocent, help us,” I said. “Where were you on January twenty-first from midnight until eight that morning?”

“Where were you?” he shot back. “You think I remember where I was three months ago? I can tell you this. I wasn’t helping Junie out of a jam with a dead john. You guys really crack me up.” Malcolm sneered. “Don’t you know that Junie’s playing you?”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah! She’s romantic, you know? Like a girl in the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ commercial. Junie wants to believe that she did Michael Campion before he croaked -”

I heard the tap on the glass I’d been waiting for.

Malcolm was saying to Conklin, “I don’t care what she told you. I didn’t cut anyone. I never dumped any freaking body parts anywhere. Junie just likes the attention, man. You should know by now when a whore is lying to you. Charge me, dude, or I’m outta here.”

I opened the door, took the papers from Yuki’s hand. We exchanged grins before I closed the door and said, “Mr. Malcolm, you’re under arrest for tampering with evidence and interfering with a police investigation.”

I fanned the search warrants out on the table. “By this time tomorrow, dude, you won’t have a secret in the world.”

Chapter 10

WHILE RICKY MALCOLM SLEPT in a holding cell on the tenth floor at 850 Bryant, I opened the door to his second-floor, one-bedroom apartment over the Shanghai China restaurant on Mission. Then Conklin, McNeil, Chi, and I stepped inside. A faint stink of decomposing flesh hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold.

“Smell that?” I said to Cappy McNeil. Cappy had been on the force for twenty-five years and had seen more than his share of dead.

He nodded. “Think he left one of those bags of body parts behind?”

“Or maybe he just kept a souvenir. A finger. Or an ear.”

McNeil and his partner, the lean and resourceful Paul Chi, headed for the kitchen while Conklin and I took the bedroom.

There was a pull-shade in the one window. I gave it a yank and it rolled up with a bang, throwing Ricky Malcolm’s boudoir into a dim morning light. The room was a study in filth. The sheets were bunched to one side of the stained mattress, and cigarette butts floated inside a coffee mug on the nightstand. Dinner plates balanced on the dresser and the television set, forks congealed in the remains of whatever Malcolm had eaten in the last week or two.

I opened the drawer in the nightstand, found a couple of joints, assorted pharmaceuticals, a strip of Rough Riders. McNeil came into the room, looked around, said, “I like what he’s done with the place.”

“Find anything?”

“No. And unless Ricky dismembered Campion with a four-inch paring knife, the blade’s not in the kitchen. By the way, the smell is stronger in here.”

Conklin opened the closet, searched pockets and shoes, then went to the dresser. He tossed out T-shirts and porn magazines, but I was the one who found the dead mouse under a steel-toed work boot behind the door.

“Whoaaa. I think I found it.”

“Nice door prize,” McNeil cracked.

Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.

“There’s no weapon here.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”

We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.

Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner – your choice, Lindsay -”

I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.

“I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”

“I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”

Chapter 11

JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.

This time we had a search warrant.

The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.

“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”

“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”

“And I’d like to see Venice before it sinks into the sea. And as long as we’re wishing on stars here, I’m still pining for a Rolls Silver Cloud.”

There was a leaden sound as the CSI working behind and under the tub dismantled the trap. As the tech bagged the plumbing, Conklin and I went back to Junie’s bedroom.

It wasn’t the pigpen Ricky Malcolm slept in, but Junie wasn’t a tidy homemaker either. There were dust balls under the furniture, the mirrored walls were smudged, and the dense gray carpet had the oily look of a floor mat in a single dad’s minivan.

A CSI asked if we were ready, then closed the curtains and shut off the overhead light. She waved the wand end of the Omnichrome 1000 in a side-to-side pattern across the bedspread, carpet, and walls, each pass of her wand showing up pale blue splotches indicating semen stains everywhere. She shot me a look and said, “If the johns saw this, they’d never take off their clothes in this girl’s house, guaranteed.”

Conklin and I walked downstairs toward the sound of the vacuum cleaner, watched the CSIs work, Conklin shouting to me over the vacuum’s motor, “Three months after the fact, what do we expect? A sign saying, ‘Michael Campion died here’?”

That’s when we heard the clank of metal against the vacuum cleaner nozzle. The CSI turned off the motor, stooped, pulled a steak knife from under the skirt of a velvet-covered sofa – just where Conklin and I had been sitting last night.

The investigator held out the steak knife with his gloved hand so that I could see the rust-colored stain on the sharp, serrated blade.

Chapter 12

I WAS STILL SAVORING the discovery of the knife when my cell phone rang. It was Chief Anthony Tracchio, and his voice was unusually loud.

“What is it, Tony?”

“I need the two of you in my office, pronto.”

After a short volley of useless quibble, he hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin and I walked into Tracchio’s wood-paneled corner suite and saw two well-known people seated in the leather armchairs. Former governor Connor Hume Campion’s face looked swollen with rage, and his much younger wife, Valentina, appeared heavily sedated.

The front page of the Sunday Chronicle was on Tracchio’s desk. I could read the headline upside down and from ten feet away: SUSPECT QUESTIONED IN CAMPION DISAPPEARANCE.

Cindy hadn’t waited for my quote, damn it.

What the hell had she written?

Tracchio patted his Vitalis comb-over and introduced us to the parents of the missing boy as Conklin and I dragged chairs up to his massive desk. Connor Campion acknowledged us with a hard stare. “I had to read this in the newspaper?” he said to me. “That my son died in a whorehouse?”

I flushed, then said, “If we’d had anything solid, Mr. Campion, we would have made sure you knew first. But all we have is an anonymous tip that your son visited a prostitute. We get crank tips constantly. It could have meant nothing.”

“Could have meant? So what’s in this paper is true?”

“I haven’t read that article, Mr. Campion, but I can give you an update.”

Tracchio lit up a cigar as I filled the former governor in on our last eighteen hours: the interviews, our futile searches for evidence, and that we had Junie Moon in custody based on her uncorroborated admission that Michael had died in her arms. When I stopped talking, Campion shot out of his seat, and I realized that while we had assumed Michael was dead, the Campions hadn’t given up hope. My sketchy report had given the Campions more of a reality check than they’d expected.

It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Campion turned his red-faced glare on Tracchio, a man who’d become chief of police by way of an undistinguished career in administration.

“I want my son’s body returned to us if every dump in the state has to be picked through by hand.”

“Consider it done,” Tracchio said.

Campion turned to me, and I saw his anger collapse. Tears filled his eyes. I touched his arm and said, “We’re on this, sir. Full-time. We won’t sleep until we find Michael.”

Chapter 13

JUNIE MOON SLIPPED into the interview room at the women’s jail wearing an orange jumpsuit and new worry lines in her youthful face.

She was followed by her attorney, Melody Chado, a public defender who would make a reputation for herself with this case, no matter how the jury decided. Chado wore black – tunic, pants, jet-black beads – and was all business. She settled her client in a chair, opened her black leather briefcase, and looked at her watch several times as we waited. There were only four chairs in the small room, so when my good friend Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano entered a moment later, there was standing room only.

Yuki put down her briefcase and leaned against the wall.

Ms. Chado appeared to be just out of law school. She was probably only a couple of years older than her client, who looked so vulnerable I felt a little sorry for her – and that pissed me off.

“I’ve advised my client not to make any statements,” Ms. Chado said, setting her young face with a hard-ass expression that I found hard to take seriously. “This is your meeting, Ms. Castellano.”

“I’ve talked with the DA,” Yuki said. “We’re charging your client with murder two.”

“What happened to ‘illegal disposal of a body’?” Chado asked.

“That’s just not good enough,” Yuki snapped. “Your client was the last person to see Michael Campion alive. Ms. Moon never called medical emergency or the police – and why not? Because she didn’t care about Campion’s life or death. She only cared about herself.”

“You’ll never get an indictment for murder,” Chado said. “There’s enough reasonable doubt in your theory to fill the ocean.”

“Listen to me, Junie,” Yuki said. “Help us locate Michael’s remains. If it can be determined in autopsy that his heart attack would have killed him no matter what you did, we’ll drop the murder charge and pretty much get out of your life.”

“No deal,” Chado interjected. “What if she helps you find his body and it is so decomposed that his heart is just rotted meat? Then you’ll have a demonstrable connection to my client and she’ll be screwed.”

I reevaluated Melody Chado as she fought with Yuki. Chado had either had a great education, grown up in a family of lawyers – or both. Junie fell back in her chair, turned a shocked face toward her breathless attorney. I guessed that Chado’s description had blown off whatever romance was left of Junie’s memory of Michael Campion.

“I want to hear about the knife, Junie,” Rich said, steering the interview to our only piece of evidence.

“The knife?” Junie asked.

“We found a knife under your sofa. Looks like bloodstains on the blade. It’ll take a few days to get the DNA results, but if you help us, Ms. Castellano will take that as another sign of your cooperation.”

“Don’t answer,” said Melody Chado. “We’re done.”

Junie was looking at Rich, and she was talking over her attorney. “I thought the knife went into one of the garbage bags,” she said to my partner. “So I don’t know what knife you found. But listen, I remember the name of the town.”

“Junie, that’s enough. That’s all!”

“I think it was Johnson,” Junie said to Rich. “I saw a sign when we got off the highway.”

“ Jackson?” I asked. “Was it Jackson?”

“Yes. That’s right.”

“You’re sure about that? I thought you said you drove up the coast.”

“I’m pretty sure. It was late, I got confused. I wasn’t trying to remember,” she told me, her eyes downcast. “I was trying to forget.”

Chapter 14

THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs. It also had a sizable dump. It was just after noon, and the smell of rot was rising as the sun cooked the refuse. Gulls and buzzards circled the trash dunes that filled our view out to the foothills.

Sheriff Oren Braun pointed out the square acre of landfill he’d had cordoned off – the approximate section where waste had been unloaded at the end of January.

“Soon as I got the call from the governor I had my boys on it,” Braun told me and Conklin. “ ‘Pull out the stops,’ that’s what he said.”

We were looking for eight black plastic garbage bags in a sea of black plastic garbage bags. A hundred yards uphill, a dozen members of the sheriff’s department were picking very slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the dump foreman was assisting the dog handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site.

I was trying to maintain some optimism, but that was tough to do in this grim landscape. I mumbled to Rich, “After three months out here, all that’ll be left of Michael’s corpse will be ligaments and bones.”

And then, as if I’d telepathically cued them, the dogs alerted.

Conklin and I joined the sheriff in stepping cautiously toward the frenzied, singing hounds.

“There’s something in this bag,” their handler said.

The hounds had located a plastic shopping bag, the thin supermarket kind. I stooped down, saw that the plastic had been ripped, that the contents were wrapped in newspaper. I parted the newspaper wrapper. Saw the decomposing remains of a newborn child. The baby’s skin was loose and greenish, the soft tissues eaten by rats, so that it was no longer possible to tell if it was a boy or a girl. The date on the newspaper was only a week old.

Someone hadn’t wanted this child. Had it been smothered? Was it stillborn? At this stage of decomposition, the ME might never know. Rich was crossing himself and saying a few words over the baby’s remains when my Nextel rang.

I walked downhill as I answered the call, glad to turn my eyes from the terrible sight of that dead child.

“Tell me something good, Yuki,” I begged her. “Please.”

“Sorry, Lindsay. Junie Moon has recanted her confession.”

“No. Come on! Michael didn’t die in her arms?” My roiling innards sank. Right now, all we had was Junie’s confession.

How could she take that back?

“Yeah. Now she says that she had nothing to do with Michael Campion’s death and disappearance. She’s saying that her confession was coerced.”

“Coerced? By whom?” I asked, still not getting it.

“By you and Conklin. The mean ol’ cops made her confess to something that never, ever happened.”

Chapter 15

SUSIE’S CAFÉ IS KIND OF a cross between Cheers and a tiki hut bar on a beach in St. Lucia. The food is spicy, the steel drums are live, the margaritas are world-class, and not only do the waitresses know our names, they know enough to leave us alone when we’re into something – as Cindy and I were now.

We were in our booth in the back room, and I was glaring at Cindy over my beer.

“You understand? Talking to you off the record is ‘leaking.’ Just saying to you that I was working a new lead on the Campion case could jam me up!”

“I swear, Lindsay, I didn’t use what you said. I didn’t need a quote from you because I got the story from upstairs.”

“How is that possible?”

“Management has a source and I did an interview and I am not telling you with whom,” she said, setting down her beer mug hard on the table. “But the point is, you can hold your head up, Linds, because you told me nothing. Okay? That’s the truth.”

I’m several years older than Cindy, and we’ve had a big sister, little sister thing since she crashed my crime scene a few years back and then helped me close the case.

It’s hard to be friends with reporters when you’re a cop. Their rationalized “public’s need to know” gives bad guys the heads-up and messes up jury pools.

You can’t truly trust reporters.

On the other hand, I love Cindy, and I trusted her 99 percent of the time. She sat across from me in her snow-white silk sweater, blond curls bouncing like mattress springs, her two overlapping front teeth making her pretty features look even prettier. She looked totally innocent of my accusation, and she was holding her ground.

“Okay,” I said through clenched teeth.

“Okay and I’m sorry?”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“Good. You’re forgiven. So, can you tell me what’s happening on this case?”

“You’re a funny girl, Cindy,” I said, laughing and waving my hand so that Yuki and Claire could see us from the doorway.

Claire was so far along in her pregnancy she couldn’t fit in the booth anymore. I got up, moved a chair to the head of the table for Claire, as Yuki slipped in beside Cindy. Lorraine took our orders, and as soon as she’d left us, Yuki said to Cindy, “Whatever I say, even if it’s in the public domain, it’s off the record.”

Claire and I cracked up.

“What a pain. See, people think it’s actually an advantage that I know you guys,” Cindy said, sighing dramatically.

“The hearing to suppress Junie Moon’s confession? It went great,” Yuki told us. “Since Junie had been Mirandized when she confessed, the judge says it’s admissible.”

“Excellent,” I said, letting out my breath. “A break for the good guys.”

“Yuki, you’re trying her for a murder and you don’t have a body?” Claire asked.

“It’s a circumstantial case, but circumstantial cases are won all the time,” Yuki said. “Look, I’d be happier with physical evidence. I’d be happier if Ricky Malcolm made any kind of a corroborating statement.

“But the powers that be are piling on the pressure. Plus, we can win.”

Yuki stopped to gulp down some beer, then carried on.

“The jury is going to believe Junie’s confession. They’re going to believe her, and they’re going to hold her responsible for Michael Campion’s death.”

Chapter 16

I WAS AT MY DESK in the squad room the next day when Rich came in after lunch smelling of garbage.

“Tough morning in Jackson?”

“Yeah, but I think the sheriff’s digging for his fifteen minutes of fame before the Feds take over the search. He’s got it under control.”

I pinched my nose as Rich pulled out his chair, folded his long legs under his side of the desk, and opened his container of coffee.

“Phone records show that yes, Junie did call Malcolm at 11:21 on the night Michael went missing. And she called him every night at about that time.”

“Girl stays in touch with her boyfriend.”

“And Clapper called,” I told my partner. “The prints on the knife are Malcolm’s.”

“Yeah? That’s excellent!”

“But the blood is bovine,” I said.

“It’s a steak knife. He ate a steak.”

“Yep. It gets worse.”

“Hang on.” Rich dumped a couple of sugars into his coffee, stirred, slugged it down. “Okay. Hit me.”

“There’s no blood or tissue in the bathtub, and the hair we sent out came back with no match. Furthermore, there’s no sign that anyone tried to cover up the blood. No bleach.”

“Great,” my partner said, scowling. “What is this? The perfect crime?”

“There’s more and worse. There’s no trace of blood in or on Malcolm’s vehicle, no hairs consistent with Michael’s.”

“So I was wrong about the truck. You should have bet me, Lindsay. We’d be having dinner tonight – on me.”

I grinned and said, “You would have showered first, I suppose.”

But my mood could hardly be lower. I was going to have to call the Campions and tell them that we still had no physical evidence, and that Junie Moon had recanted her confession and we’d had to kick Ricky Malcolm.

“You want to call Malcolm and tell him he can have his truck back?”

Rich picked up his phone, called Malcolm, got no answer.

We took a drive out to the crime lab at Hunter’s Point Naval Yard, opened all the car windows on the way, and let the wind air out my partner’s clothes. At the lab, I signed a release for the truck, and after three more unanswered calls to Ricky Malcolm, we drove to his apartment.

Rich yelled, “Police,” and knocked loudly on Malcolm’s door until a small Chinese man came out from the restaurant downstairs.

He shouted up to us, “Mr. Malcolm gone. He paid his rent and leave on motorcycle. You want to see mess upstairs?”

“We’ve seen it, thanks.”

“He’s gone, all right,” I muttered to Conklin as we got into the squad car. “Ricky Malcolm. Sleaze. Slob. Easy rider. Criminal freakin’ mastermind. Coming soon to a town near you.”

Chapter 17

I WAS RIPPED out of a dream and my lover’s arms by Jacobi’s voice on the phone saying, “Get dressed, Boxer. Conklin is five blocks away. He’s picking you up at your door.”

Jacobi clicked off before giving me details, but this much I knew: someone had died.

It was just after midnight when Conklin nosed our squad car onto the lawn of a smoldering house in the 3800 block of Clay Street in Presidio Heights. Four fire rigs and an equal number of patrol cars were already parked in front of the Greek Revival, the wind whipping smoke into a vortex at an inside corner of the house. Dazed bystanders clustered across the street, watching the firefighters douse the charred remains of what had once been a beautiful home in this upscale neighborhood.

I pulled my canvas jacket closed, ducked under the water spouting from a fire hose just as the generators on the front lawn fired up. Conklin was ahead of me as we mounted the front steps. He badged the cop at the door and we entered the scorched carcass of the house.

“Two victims, Sarge,” said Officer Pat Noonan. “First doorway on your right. DRT.”

Dead right there.

I asked, “Has the ME been called?”

“She’s on her way.”

It was darker inside the house than out. The room Noonan indicated had been a large den or family room. I flicked my flashlight beam over piles of furniture, bookshelves, a large TV. Then my light caught a pair of legs on the floor.

They weren’t attached to a body.

I screamed, “Noonan! Noonan! What the hell is this?” I waved my torchlight around, catching a second body a few feet from the torso of the first, just inside the doorway.

Noonan came into the den with a firefighter behind him, a young guy with the name Mackey stenciled on his turnouts.

“Sarge,” Mackey said, “it was me. I was trying to reel in my line, but it caught. That’s how I discovered the DB.”

“So you dragged the body?”

“I, um, didn’t know that if I picked up the body by the legs, it would fall apart,” Mackey said, his voice cracking from smoke inhalation and probably fear.

“Did you move the entire victim, Mackey, or just the legs? Where was the body lying?”

“He, she, or it was in the doorway, Sarge. Sorry.”

Mackey backed out of the room, and he was right to get away from me. What the fire hadn’t destroyed, the water and the firefighters had. I doubted we’d ever know what had happened here. I heard someone call my name, and I recognized his voice as the glare of a handheld lantern came toward me.

Chuck Hanni was an arson investigator, one of the best. I’d met him for the first time a few years ago when he’d come to a fire directly from a Rotary Club dinner.

He’d been wearing pale khakis at the time, and he’d walked through a smoking house from the least burned rooms to the fire’s point of origin. He’d taught me a lot about crime detection at a fire scene that night, but I still didn’t know how he’d kept those khakis clean.

“Hey, Lindsay,” Hanni said now. He was wearing a jacket and tie. There were comb marks in his fine black hair and burn scars running from his right thumb up into his sleeve. “I’ve got a working ID on this couple.”

My partner stood up from where he’d been crouched beside one of the victims.

“Their names are Patty and Bert Malone,” Conklin said, something in his voice I couldn’t read. The corpses were so burned, they were featureless. He saw the question in my eyes.

“I’ve been in this house before,” Conklin told us. “I used to know these people.”

Chapter 18

I STARED AT MY PARTNER as embers fell from the ceiling of the den and the crackle of water against smoking wood competed with the radio static and the shouts of the firefighters.

“I was close to their daughter when I was in high school,” Conklin said. “Kelly Malone. Her parents were great to me.”

“I’m so sorry, Rich.”

“I haven’t seen them since Kelly went off to the University of Colorado,” Conklin said. “This is going to kill her.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, knowing that we were going to treat the Malones’ deaths as homicides unless it was proven otherwise. Upstairs, the fire crew was doing mop-up and overhaul, dismantling the second-story ceiling, putting out hot spots under the eaves.

“The security system was off,” Hanni said, joining us. “The fire department got the call from a neighbor. The fire started in this room,” he said, pointing out the furniture that had been burned low to the ground.

He looked around the room at the mounds of plaster and debris. “After we sift through all this, I’ll let you know if I find anything, but I think you can pretty much kiss off any notes or fingerprints.”

“But you’ll try anyway, right?” Conklin said.

“I said I would, Rich.”

Last thing we needed was for Conklin to get into a fight. I asked him what the Malones were like.

“Kelly said her dad could be a prick,” Rich said, “but when you’re eighteen, that could’ve meant he wouldn’t let her stay out with me past eleven.”

“Tell me whatever else you remember.”

“Bert sold luxury cars. Patty was a homemaker. They had money, obviously. They entertained a lot. Their friends seemed nice – regular parents, you know.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time regular people turned out to be twisted,” Hanni muttered.

A sweep of headlights drew my eyes toward the broken plate glass window. The coroner’s van joined the fleet of law enforcement and fire department vehicles on the street.

Noonan called out to me. “I checked out the bedroom on the second floor, Sarge. There’s a safe in the closet. The lock and the safe are intact, but the door is open – and the safe is empty.”

Chapter 19

“ROBBERY WAS THE MOTIVE for this?” Conklin shouted as Claire stepped into the den with her assistant in tow.

Before Claire could say, “Who died?” I reached out to her for a hug, said into her ear, “Conklin knew the victims.”

“Gotcha,” she said.

As Claire unpacked her scene kit, I told her about the manhandled corpse. Then I stepped out of her way as she took pictures of both bodies with her old Minolta, two shots from every angle.

“There are two doors to this room,” she said as her camera flashed. “Chuck, you say that this room was the point of origin. But the victims stayed in here. Why was that?”

“They could’ve been caught by surprise,” Hanni said. He was cutting samples from the carpet, putting fibers into K-packs.

“If they were drinking and fell asleep, maybe a cigarette dropped down into the couch cushions.”

Hanni explained what was still so hard to believe – that a fire could fill a room this size with smoke in less than a minute, that sleeping people could wake up coughing, be unable to see, get disoriented.

Chuck said, “Someone says, ‘Let’s go this way.’ Other person says, ‘No, it’s this way.’ Maybe someone falls. Smoke inhalation gets them. Boom, they’re down, and they’re unconscious. These two people were dead inside a couple of minutes.”

Conklin came back into the room holding a book in his gloved hand. “I found this on the staircase.”

He handed the book to me. “Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame. Charles Bukowski. Is this poetry?”

I opened the book to the title page, saw an inscription written there in ballpoint pen.

“This is Latin,” I said to my partner, sounding out the words. “Annuit Cœptis.”

“That’s pronounced chep-tus,” Conklin said. “It’s a motto inscribed on the dollar bill right above that symbol of the pyramid thing with the eye. Annuit Cœptis. ‘ Providence favors our undertaking.’ ”

“You know Latin?”

He shrugged. “I went to Catholic school.”

I said, “So, what do you think, Rich? Is the firebug leaving us a message? That God’s okay with this?”

Conklin looked around at the destruction, said, “Not the God I believe in.”

Chapter 20

AT THREE THAT MORNING, Hanni, Conklin, and I watched the fire department board up the Malones’ windows and put a lock on the front door. The onlookers were back in their beds, and as the sounds of hammering cracked through the otherwise silent neighborhood, Hanni said, “There was a fire four months ago in Palo Alto, reminds me of this one.”

“How so?”

“Big, expensive house. The alarm was turned off. Two people died in the living room, and I had the same question in my mind: Why didn’t they leave?”

“Panic, disorientation, like you were saying.”

“Yeah, it happens. But since I wasn’t called in until a couple of days after the fire, I couldn’t know for sure. Drives me crazy when the fire department decides the fire’s accidental without an arson investigator present. Anyway, the bodies were cremated at the funeral home by the time I was called.”

“You thought the fire was suspicious?” Conklin asked.

Hanni nodded. “I still think so. The victims were good people, and they had money. But no one could come up with a motive for anyone to kill Henry and Peggy Jablonsky – not revenge, not insurance fraud, not even ‘I hate your face.’ So I was left with a bad feeling and no way to tell if the fire was arson or a spark flew out of the fireplace and lit up the Christmas tree.”

“I guess you didn’t find a book with Latin written inside,” I said.

“By the time I got there, the ‘evidence eradication unit’ had tossed a mountain of soaked household goods into the front yard. I guess I wasn’t looking for a book.”

Hanni took his car keys out of his pocket. “Okay, guys, I’m done. See you in a few hours.”

Rich and I stood back from his van as the arson investigator drove off.

“Were you able to reach Kelly?” I asked my partner.

“Got her answering machine. I didn’t know what to say.” He shook his head. “I finally said, ‘It’s Rich. Conklin. I know it’s been a long time, Kelly. But. Um. Could you call me right away?’ ”

“That’s good. That’s fine.”

“I don’t know. She’ll either think I’m a psycho for calling her at one in the morning to say hello after twelve years. Or, if she knows that I’m a cop, I just scared the hell out of her.”

Chapter 21

THE ME’S OFFICE is in a building connected to the Hall of Justice by a breezeway out the back door of the lobby. Claire was already working in the chilly gray heart of the autopsy suite when I got there at 9:30 that morning. She said, “Hey, darlin’,” barely looking up as she drew her scalpel from Patty Malone’s sternum to her pelvic bone. The dead woman’s hands were clenched and her legless body was carbonized.

“She hardly looks like a person,” I said.

“Bodies burn like candles, you know,” Claire said. “They become part of the fuel.” She clamped back the burned tissue.

“Did the blood tests come back from the lab?”

“About ten minutes ago. Mrs. Malone had had a couple of drinks. Mr. Malone had antihistamine in his blood. That could have made him sleepy.”

“And what about carbon monoxide?” I was asking as Chuck Hanni came through reception and back to where we stood over the table.

“I picked up the Malones’ dental records, Claire,” he said. “I’ll put them in your office.”

Claire nodded, said, “I was about to tell Lindsay that the Malones lived long enough to get a carbon monoxide in the high seventies. The total body X-rays are negative for projectiles or obvious broken bones. But I did find something you’re going to want to see.”

Claire adjusted her plastic apron, which just barely spanned her ever-thickening girth, and turned to the table behind her. She pulled back the sheet exposing Patricia Malone’s legs and touched a gloved finger to a thin, barely discernible pink line around one of the woman’s ankles.

“This unburned skin right here?” said Claire. “Same thing on Mr. Malone’s wrists. The skin was protected during the blaze.”

“Like from a ligature?” I asked.

“Yes, ma’am. If it was just the ankles, I’d say maybe Mrs. Malone was wearing socks, but on her husband’s wrists, too? I’m saying these are from ligatures that burned away in the fire. And I’m calling the cause of death asphyxia from smoke inhalation,” Claire said. “Manner of death, homicide.”

I stared at the fire-ravaged body of Patty Malone.

Yesterday morning she’d kissed her husband, brushed her hair, made breakfast, maybe laughed with a friend on the telephone. That night she and her husband of thirty-two years had been tied up and left to die in the fire. For some period of time, maybe hours, the Malones had known they were going to die. It’s called psychic horror. Their killers had wanted them to feel fear before their horrible deaths.

Who had committed these brutal murders – and why?

Chapter 22

JACOBI AND I would have cared about the Malones’ deaths even if Conklin hadn’t known them. The fact that he had been close to them once made us feel as if we’d known them, too.

Jacobi was my partner today, standing in for Conklin, who was picking up Kelly Malone at the airport. We stood on the doorstep of a Cape Cod in Laurel Heights only a dozen blocks from where the Malone house waited for the bulldozer. I rang the bell and the door was opened by a man in his early forties wearing a sweatshirt and jeans, looking at me like he already knew why we were there.

Jacobi introduced us, said, “Is Ronald Grayson at home?”

“I’ll get him,” said the man at the door.

“Mind if we come in?”

Grayson’s father said, “Sure. It’s about the fire, right?” He opened the door to a well-kept living room with comfy furniture and a large plasma-screen TV over the fireplace. He called out, “Ronnie. The police are here.”

I heard the back door slam hard, as if it were pulled closed by a strong spring.

I said, “Shit. Call for backup.”

I left Jacobi in the living room, ran through the kitchen and out the back door. I was on my own. Jacobi couldn’t run anymore, not with his bad lungs and the twenty pounds he’d put on since his promotion to lieutenant.

I followed the kid in front of me, watched him leap the low hedge between his house and the one next door. Ronald Grayson wasn’t an athlete, but he had long legs and he knew the neighborhood. I was losing ground as he took a hard right behind a detached garage.

I yelled out, “Stop where you are. Put your hands in the air,” but he kept running.

I was in a jam. I didn’t want to shoot at him, but clearly the teenager had a reason for running. Had he set that fire?

Was this boy a killer?

I called in my location and kept running, clearing the garage in time to see Grayson Jr. cross Arguello Boulevard and slam into the hood of a patrol car. He slid down to the pavement. A second cruiser pulled up as two uniforms got out of the first. One officer grabbed the kid by the back of his shirt and threw him over the hood, while another kicked the boy’s legs apart and frisked him.

That’s when I noticed that Ronald Grayson’s face had turned blue.

“Oh, Christ!” I yelled.

I pulled Grayson off the car and bent him over. I grabbed the kid from behind, wrapped my right hand around my left fist, found the spot under his rib cage, and gave him three hard abdominal thrusts. He coughed, and three small bags fell from his mouth to the asphalt. The bags were filled with rock cocaine.

I was heaving, too. And I was furious. I cuffed the kid roughly, arrested him for possession with intent to sell. And I read him his rights.

“You idiot,” I panted. “I have a gun. Get it? I could have shot you.”

“Fuck you.”

“You mean ‘thank you,’ don’t you, asshole?” said one of the uniforms. “The sergeant here just saved your worthless life.”

Chapter 23

JACOBI AND I already knew two things about Ronald Grayson: that he’d had crack in his possession when we arrested him, and that this kid had called in the Malone fire.

Had he also set that fire?

Sitting in the interrogation room across from Ronald Grayson, I thought about another teenager, Scott Dyleski. Dyleski was sixteen when he’d broken into a woman’s home in Lafayette, stabbed her dozens of times, and mutilated her body because in his twisted mind, he imagined that she’d taken delivery of his drug paraphernalia and was keeping it from him. Dyleski was wrong, psychotic, and the murder should never have happened.

But it had.

And so, as I looked at fifteen-year-old Ronald Grayson with his clear skin and dark hair, drumming his fingers on the tabletop as though we were wasting his time, I wondered if he had doomed Pat and Bert Malone to horrific deaths so he could steal their stuff in order to buy drugs. I used my most patient and friendly tone of voice.

“Ron, why don’t you tell us what happened?”

“I have nothing to say.”

“That’s your right,” Jacobi grumbled menacingly.

Jacobi is five eleven, over two hundred pounds of well-marbled muscle, with lumpy features, hard gray eyes, gray hair, and a shiny gold badge. I would have expected the kid to show either fear or deference, but he seemed unfazed by our bad lieutenant.

“I don’t want to talk to you about the cocaine, you little shit,” Jacobi said, breathing into Grayson’s face. “But, man-to-man, tell us about the fire and we’ll help you with the coke charge. Do you understand me? I’m trying to help you.”

“Leave me alone, you fat fuck,” Grayson said.

Before Jacobi could smack the back of the kid’s head, his father, Vincent Grayson, and his lawyer blew through the door. Grayson was livid. “Ronnie, don’t say anything.”

“I didn’t, Dad.”

Grayson turned his fury on Jacobi. “You can’t talk to my son unless I’m with him. I know the law.”

“Save it, Mr. Grayson,” Jacobi growled. “Your imbecile son is under arrest for using and dealing, and I haven’t talked to him about the drugs at all.”

The lawyer’s name was Sam Farber, and from his business card I gathered that he had a one-man practice doing wills and real estate closings.

“I’m telling you and you and you,” Jacobi said, pointing his finger at the kid, his father, and the lawyer in turn. “I’ll lobby the DA on Ronald’s behalf if he helps us with the fire. That’s our only interest in him right now.”

“My client is a good Samaritan,” Farber said, dragging up a chair, squaring his leather briefcase with the edge of the table before opening it. “His father was with him when he made the call to 911. That’s all he had to do with it, end of story.”

“Mr. Farber, we all know that the person who calls in the fire has to be cleared of setting it,” I said. “But Ronald hasn’t convinced us that he had nothing to do with it.”

“Go ahead, Ron,” said Farber.

Ron Grayson’s eyes slid across mine and up to the camera in the corner of the room. He mumbled, “I was in the car with my dad. I smelled smoke. I told Dad which way to drive. Then I saw the fire coming out of that house. I dialed 911 on my cell and reported it. That’s all.”

“What time was this?”

“It was ten thirty.”

“Mr. Grayson, I asked your son.”

“Look. My son was sitting next to me in the car! The guy at the gas station can vouch for Ronnie. They cleaned the windshields together.”

“Ronnie, did you know the Malones?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The people who lived in the house.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Did you see anyone leaving the house?”

“No.”

“Ever been to Palo Alto?”

“I’ve never been anywhere in Mexico.”

“Do you have enough, Inspectors?” Farber said. “My client has cooperated fully.”

“I want to take a look at his room,” I said.

Chapter 24

SHRINKS SAY THAT ARSON is a masculine sexual metaphor; that setting the fire is the arousal phase, the blaze itself is the consummation, and the hoses putting out the blaze are the release. It may be true, because almost all arsonists are male, and half of them are teenage boys.

Jacobi and I left young Ronnie Grayson in lockup and returned to the Grayson house with Ron’s father. We parked again in the driveway of the small house, wiped our feet on the welcome mat, and said hello to Grayson’s mother, who looked frightened and eager to please. We turned down an offer of coffee, then excused ourselves so that we could thoroughly search Ronald Grayson’s bedroom.

I had a few objects in mind, specifically a reel of fishing line, fire accelerant, and anything that looked like it had belonged to the Malones.

Ronnie’s dresser was of the hand-me-down Salvation Army kind: chipped wood, four big drawers and two small ones. There was a lamp on the top surface, some peanut jars full of coins, a pile of scratched-off lottery tickets, a car magazine, and a red plastic box holding the kid’s orthodontic retainer. There was a night-light in the socket near the door.

Jacobi grunted as he tipped the mattress over, then took the drawers from the dresser and systematically dumped them onto the box springs of Ronnie’s bed. The search resulted in a half-dozen girlie magazines, a small bag of pot, and a crusty pipe. Then we opened his closet and upended his hamper of dirty laundry.

We examined it all, the tighty-whiteys, the jeans, and the dirty socks, all smelling of sweat and youth, but not of gasoline or smoke. I looked up to see that Vincent Grayson was now watching from the doorway.

“We’re almost done here, Mr. Grayson,” I said, smiling. “We just need a sample of Ronnie’s handwriting.”

“Here,” Grayson said, picking up a spiral notebook from the stack of books on the night table.

I opened the notebook and could see without having to turn it over for handwriting analysis that Ron Grayson’s elaborate, artsy lettering was not a match for the Latin inscription I’d seen on the flyleaf of the book of poetry left on the Malones’ stairs. Ron Grayson had a solid alibi, and I had to reluctantly accept that he’d told us the truth. But what bothered me about this boy, more than his being a smart-ass punk with a drug habit, was that he hadn’t asked about the Malones.

Was it because he’d lied about knowing them?

Or because he just didn’t care?

“What about my son?”

“He’s all yours,” said Jacobi over his shoulder just before he slammed the screen door on his march out of the house.

I said to Grayson, “Ron will be in your custody until he’s arraigned on the coke charge, and we’ll speak to the DA on his behalf like we said we’d do.

“But I’d ground Ronnie, if I were you, Mr. Grayson. He’s breaking the law and doing business with criminals. If he were my son, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight for a minute.”

Chapter 25

FOR THE NEXT FOUR HOURS, Jacobi and I rang doorbells in the Malones’ neighborhood, badging the rich and richer, scaring them brainless with the questions we asked. Rachel Savino, for instance, lived next door to the Malones in a sprawling Mediterranean-style house. She was an attractive brunette of about forty, wearing tight slacks, a tighter blouse, the break in the tan line on her ring finger telling me she was a recent divorcée.

She wouldn’t let us inside her door.

Savino eyed my dusty blue trousers, man-tailored shirt, and blazer, and did a double take when she noticed my shoulder holster. She barely acknowledged Jacobi. I guess we didn’t look like residents of Presidio Heights. So Jacobi and I stood on her terra-cotta steps while her pack of corgis jumped and yelped around us.

“Have you ever seen this young man?” I asked, showing her a Polaroid of Ronald Grayson.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Have you seen anyone hanging around or driving by who may have seemed out of place in the neighborhood?” asked Jacobi.

“ Darwin! Shut up! I don’t think so, no.”

“Any kids or cars that don’t belong here? Anyone ring your bell who seemed out of place? Any suspicious phone calls or deliveries?”

No. No. No.

And now she was asking questions. What about the fire at the Malones’? Was it an accident as she had assumed? Were we suggesting that it was deliberately set?

Had the Malones been murdered?

Jacobi said, “We’re just doing an investigation, Ms. Savino. No need to get your bowels in an -”

I cut him off. “What about your dogs?” I asked. “Did they set up any kind of an uproar last night at around ten thirty?”

“The fire trucks made them crazy, but not before.”

“Do you find it unusual that the Malones didn’t arm their security system?” I asked.

“I don’t think they even locked their doors,” she said. And that was her final word. She opened her door, let in the pack, then closed it firmly behind her, locks and bolts clicking into place.

Over four hours and a dozen interviews later, Jacobi and I had learned that the Malones were churchgoing, well liked, generous, friendly, and got along well together, and not one soul knew of anyone who hated them. They were the perfect couple. So who had killed them, and why?

Jacobi was grousing about his aching feet when my cell phone rang. Conklin, calling from the car.

“I looked up that pyramid symbol on the dollar bill,” he said. “It has to do with the Masons, a secret society that goes back to the 1700s. George Washington was a Mason. So was Benjamin Franklin. Most of the Founding Fathers.”

“Yeah, okay. How about Bert Malone? Was he a Mason?”

“Kelly says no way. She’s with me now, Lindsay. We’re heading over to her parents’ house.”

Chapter 26

WE PULLED UP to the curb at the same time Conklin’s car arrived. His passenger-side door swung open before he’d come to a full halt and a young woman sprang out, dashed across the lawn toward the remains of the Malone house.

Conklin called out to her, but she didn’t stop. For a second she turned her face into our headlights and I saw her clearly. She was a whip-slim thirty-year-old in tights, a tiny skirt, a brown leather jacket. Her hair was copper-red, worn in a braid down her back long enough to sit on. Wisps of hair had escaped the braid, haloing her face in our headlights. Halo was the right word.

Kelly Malone had the face of a Madonna.

Conklin ran to catch up to her, and by the time Jacobi and I reached them, Conklin had opened the fire department lock on the front door. With dusky light filtering in through the caved-in roof, we walked Kelly Malone through the skeleton of her parents’ house. It was a wrenching tour, Conklin staying close to Kelly’s side as she cried out, “Oh, God, oh, God. Richie, no one could have hated them this much. I just don’t believe it.”

Kelly avoided the library where her parents had died. Instead she walked upstairs into a smoky cone of light. Conklin was beside Kelly when she crossed the threshold into what remained of the master suite. The ceiling had been punched out with pike poles. Soot and water had destroyed the furnishings, the carpeting, and the photos on the walls.

Kelly lifted a wedding portrait of her parents from the floor, wiped it with her sleeve. The glass hadn’t broken, but water had seeped in along the edges.

“I think this can be restored,” she said, tears cracking her voice.

“Sure. Sure, that can be done,” Conklin said.

He showed Kelly the open safe in the closet, asked her if she knew what her parents had kept there.

“My mom had some antique pieces that my grandmother left her. I guess the insurance company will have a list.”

Jacobi asked, “Miss Malone. Anyone you can think of who might have had a grudge against your parents?”

“I haven’t lived here since I was eighteen,” she said. “My dad could throw his weight around at the dealership, but if there’d been any serious threats, my mom would’ve told me.

“Are you sure this wasn’t an accident?” she asked, turning pleading eyes on my partner.

Conklin said, “I’m sorry, Kelly. This was no accident.”

He put his arms around her and Kelly sobbed against his chest. Her pain was breaking my own heart. Still, I had to ask. “Kelly, who stands to benefit the most from your parents’ death?”

The young woman recoiled as if I’d struck her.

“Me,” she shouted. “I do. And my brother. You got us. We hired a hit man to kill our parents and torch the house so that we could inherit our parents’ money.”

I said, “Kelly, I’m sorry. I wasn’t implying that you had anything to do with this.” But she talked only to Conklin after that.

As I stood downstairs with Jacobi, I overheard Rich tell Kelly about the note in Latin written on the flyleaf of a book.

“Latin? I don’t know anything about that. If Mom or Dad wrote anything in Latin, it would have been the first and only time,” said Kelly Malone.

Chapter 27

HAWK HAD TRAPPED the roach under an eight-ounce drinking glass upended on top of the worktable he used as a desk in his room at home. The roach was a Blatta orientalis, the oriental cockroach, about an inch long and shiny black, commonly found in all the swank houses of Palo Alto.

But although this bug was common, he was special to Hawk.

“You’re doing very well, Macho,” Hawk said to the roach. “It’s not much of a bug’s life, I have to admit, but you’re worthy of the challenge.”

Behind Hawk, Pidge lay on Hawk’s bed reading background material on an upcoming class project: a three-dimensional fax, something that had probably been inspired by the “beam me up, Scotty” technology from Star Trek and was now becoming manifest in the real world.

How it worked was, a machine scanned an object at point A, and an identical object was created by a laser carving out a replica from another material at point Z. But Pidge knew all of this. He’d seen the demo. So what he was doing was busywork while he waited for Hawk to get his lazy ass in gear.

“You’re behind on the dialogue,” Pidge grumbled. “Instead of talking to that bug, you should do the dialogue before your stupid parents come home.”

“Why don’t you like Macho?” Hawk asked. “He’s been living on air and whatever body oil might have been on the desk for, um, sixteen days. Haven’t you, Macho? It’s damned admirable, Pidge. Seriously.”

“Seriously, bro, you’re an asshole.”

“You’re missing the nobility of the experiment,” Hawk continued, unfazed. “A creature descended from insects that’ve been around since the first ass crack of time. Macho is living on air. And if he lives for four more days, I’m going to release him. That’s the deal I made with him. I’m thinking up his reward right now.

“Macho,” Hawk said, bending over to examine his captive. He tapped on the glass. The roach’s antennae waved at him. “I’m thinking chocolate brownie, dude.”

Pidge got up off the bed, strode to the desk, reached over Hawk’s shoulder, and removed the glass. He made a fist, pounded it down on the bug, squashing it on the Formica table. One of Macho’s legs moved in a postterminal reflex.

“Hey! Why’d you do that, man? Why’d you -”

“Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, dude. Life is short. Write the dialogue for the freaking chapter, bug man, or I’m outta here.”

Chapter 28

CONKLIN AND I had been working pawnshops all day, hoping one of Patricia Malone’s pieces of jewelry would turn up – and if it did, maybe we’d have a lead we could work with. The last shop on our list was a hole between two bars on Mission, the Treasure Coop.

I’m not sure the owner heard the bell ring over the door when Conklin and I came in, but he picked up our reflection from one of the dozens of mirrors hanging on the walls and came out from the back of the store. His name was Ernie Cooper. He was a slablike man from the Vietnam era and seemed to fill up his store. Cooper had a gray ponytail and an iPod in his shirt pocket, cords dangling from his ears. There was the bulge of a gun under his jacket.

While Conklin showed Cooper the insurance company’s photos of Patricia Malone’s Victorian jewelry, I looked around at the innumerable trophies, guitars, and out-of-date computers, and at the stuffed monkey with a lamp coming out of its back perched on a plant stand. A collection of fetal pigs was lined up on one of the four counters, which were filled with wedding bands, watches, military medals, and junk gold chains.

Ernie Cooper whistled when he saw the photos.

“What’s all this worth, a couple hundred thou?”

“Something like that,” Conklin said.

“Nobody brings this kind of stuff to me, but who am I looking for, anyway?”

“Maybe him,” Conklin said, slapping down a photocopy of the Polaroid of Ronald Grayson.

“I can keep this?” Cooper asked.

“Sure, and here’s my card,” Rich said.

“Homicide.”

“That’s right.”

“So, this was what? Armed robbery?”

Conklin smiled. “If this kid comes in, if anyone comes in with this stuff, we want to know.”

I noticed a small black-and-white snapshot stuck to the cash register. It was a photo of Ernie Cooper coming down the steps of the Civic Center Courthouse, and he was wearing the uniform of the SFPD. Cooper saw me looking at the photo, said, “I notice your shield says Boxer on it. I used to work with a guy by that name.”

“Marty Boxer?”

“That’s the guy.”

“He’s my father.”

“No kidding? I couldn’t stand him, no offense.”

“No offense taken,” I said.

Cooper nodded, rang up a “no sale,” and put the photocopies of Grayson’s picture and the Malone jewelry along with Conklin’s card inside the cash register, under the tray.

“I’ve still got the instincts, maybe even better than when I was on the Job. I’ll put out the word. If I hear anything,” Ernie Cooper said, shoving the cash drawer shut, “I’ll be in touch. That’s a promise.”

Chapter 29

THE SKY HAD TURNED GRAY while Conklin and I were inside Ernie Cooper’s pawnshop. Muted thunder grumbled as we walked to Twenty-first Street, and by the time we got into the squad car, the first fat drops of rain splattered against the windshield. I cranked up the window, pinching the web between my thumb and forefinger. I shouted, “Damn,” with more vehemence than was absolutely necessary.

I was frustrated. So was Rich. The long workday had netted us exactly nothing. Rich fumbled with the keys, his brow wrinkled, exhaustion weighing him down like a heavy coat.

“You want me to drive?”

My partner turned off the ignition and sighed, threw himself back into the seat.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Give me the keys.”

“I can drive. That’s not the problem.”

“What is?”

“It’s you.”

Me? Was he mad at me for questioning Kelly?

“What did I do?”

“You just are, you know?”

Aw, no. I tried to ward off this conversation by imploring him with my eyes and thinking, Please don’t go there, Richie. But the pictures flashed into my mind, a strobe-lit sequence of images of a late work night in LA that had turned into a reckless, heated clinch on a hotel bed. My body had been screaming yes, yes, yes, but my clearer mind slammed on the brakes – and I’d told Richie no.

Six months later, the memory was still with us inside the musty Crown Victoria, crackling like lightning as the rain came down. Richie saw the alarm on my face.

“I’m not going to do anything,” he insisted. “I would never do anything – I’m just not good at keeping what I feel to myself, Lindsay. I know you’re with Joe. I get it. I just want you to know that I’ve got this arrow through my heart. And I would do anything for you.”

“Rich, I can’t,” I said, looking into his eyes, seeing the pain there and not knowing how to make it right.

“Aw, jeez,” he said. He covered his face with his hands, screamed, “Aaaaaargh.” Then he pounded the steering wheel a couple of times before reaching for the keys and starting up the car again.

I put my hand on his wrist. “Rich, do you want another partner?”

He laughed, said, “Delete the last forty-two seconds, okay, Lindsay? I’m an idiot, and I’m sorry.”

“I’m serious.”

“Forget it. Don’t even think about it.”

Rich checked the rearview mirror and turned the car into the stream of traffic. “I just want to remind you,” he said, cracking a strained smile, “when I worked with Jacobi, nothing like this ever happened.”

Chapter 30

THE POPULATION OF COLMA, California, is heavily skewed toward the dead. The ratio of those below the ground to those breathing air is about twelve to one. My mom is buried at Cypress Lawn in Colma, and so is Yuki’s mom, and now Kelly Malone and her brother, Eric, were burying their parents here, too.

It would appear to the casual observer that I was alone.

I’d put flowers at the base of a pink granite stone engraved with “Benjamin and Heidi Robson,” two people I didn’t know. Then I sat on a bench a hundred feet from where the grass-scented breeze puffed out the tent flaps where the Malones’ funeral was in progress.

My Glock was holstered under my blue jacket, and the microphone inside my shirt connected me to the patrol cars at the entrance to the cemetery. I was watching for a gangly kid named Ronald Grayson, or someone else who looked out of place, a stranger with a penchant for torture and murder. It didn’t happen every time, but some killers just had to see the end of the show, give themselves a psychic round of applause.

I hoped we’d get lucky.

As I watched, Kelly Malone stood in front of the group of fifty, her back to the pair of coffins. And I saw Richie, his eyes on Kelly as she gave her eulogy. I couldn’t hear any of the words, just the sound of a lawn mower in the distance and soon enough, the squeal of the winch lowering the coffins into the ground. Kelly and her brother each tossed a handful of earth into their parents’ graves and turned away.

Kelly went into Rich’s arms and he held her.

There was something touching and familiar about the way they fit together, as if they were still a couple. I felt a painful pull in my gut and tried to shut it down. When Kelly and Rich left the tent and walked with the priest in my direction, I turned before they came close enough to see my eyes.

I spoke into the collar of my shirt, said, “This is Boxer. I’m coming in.”

Chapter 31

LOCATED TWO BLOCKS AWAY and across the street from the Hall of Justice, MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub is the eatery of choice for lawyers and cops, anyone who doesn’t mind sitting at a table the size of a dinner napkin and shouting over the noise.

Cindy and Yuki had a table by the window, Yuki with her back against the doorjamb, Cindy’s chair rocking whenever the man sitting behind her moved his rump. Cindy was mesmerized by the perpetual motion of Yuki’s hands as she talked. Yuki had twenty minutes to eat and run, and she’d stepped up her usual warp-speed conversational style to fit the time allowed.

“I begged for this case,” Yuki said, folding one of Cindy’s french fries into her mouth, telling Cindy what she’d told her many, many times before. “Three people were in line ahead of me, and Red Dog is letting me run with it because of Brinkley.”

Red Dog was Yuki’s boss, Leonard Parisi, the red-haired and legendary bulldog deputy DA, and Brinkley was Alfred Brinkley, “the Ferry Shooter,” and Yuki’s first big case for the DA’s office. The Brinkley trial had been heated, the public enraged that a mentally disabled man with a gun had mowed down five citizens who’d been enjoying a Saturday afternoon ferry ride out on the bay.

“It’s so ironic,” Yuki said to Cindy. “I mean, with Brinkley, I had nothing but evidence. The gun, the confession, two hundred eyewitnesses, the fricking videotape of the shootings. With Junie Moon it’s just the opposite.” She stopped talking long enough to slurp her diet cola through a straw down to the bottom of the glass.

“We’ve got no murder weapon, no body, no witnesses – just a recanted confession from a girl who is so dim it’s hard to believe she’s bright enough to boil eggs. I don’t dare lose, Cindy.”

“Take it easy, hon. You’re not going to -”

“I could. I could. But I’m not going to do it. And now, Junie’s got a new lawyer.”

“Who?”

“L. Diana Davis.”

“Oh man, oh man, oh man.”

“Yep. Cherry on top. I’m up against a big-time feminist bone crusher. Oh! I forgot. This writer is doing a book on Michael Campion. He’s been following me around all week. His name is Jason Twilly, and he wants to talk to you.”

“Jason Twilly? The author of those true-crime blockbusters?”

“Yep. That’s the one.”

“Yuki. Jason Twilly is a giant. He’s a star!”

“That’s what he says.” Yuki laughed. “I gave him your number. He just wants some background on me. I don’t care what you tell him as long as you don’t tell him that I’m freaking out.”

“You’re a piece a’ work, ya know?”

Yuki laughed. “Oops. Gotta go,” she said, putting a twenty under a corner of the bread basket.

“Got a meeting with Red Dog,” Yuki said. “There were three people in line in front of me, Cindy. You know, if he’d assigned this case to anyone but me, I would’ve offed myself. So I only have one option. I have to win.”

Chapter 32

CINDY ENTERED THE BAR inside the St. Regis Hotel at the corner of Third and Mission in the vibrant SoMa district. Jason Twilly was staying there for the course of the trial, and it was definitely the place to be.

Twilly stood as Cindy approached his table. He was tall, thin, a young forty-three, with striking features Cindy recognized from his book jackets and recent profile in Entertainment Weekly.

“Jason Twilly,” he said, stretching out his hand.

“Hi, I’m Cindy Thomas.” She slipped into the chair Twilly pulled out for her. “Sorry I’m late.”

“No problem. I was glad to have a minute to do some quiet thinking.”

She’d researched Twilly before this meeting, adding to what she already knew – that he was very smart, calculating, talented, and a little ruthless. One journalist had written that Twilly was picking up where Truman Capote left off with In Cold Blood, noting that Twilly had a rare talent for getting into the minds of killers, humanizing them so that readers regarded the killers almost as friends.

Cindy wanted to let herself enjoy the ambience of the place and the fun of being with Jason Twilly, but she couldn’t let down her guard. She was worried for Yuki, wondered how Twilly would depict her and if it was a good or bad thing for her friend that Twilly’s next book would be about Michael Campion. Even though Yuki didn’t seem to care, Cindy knew that Twilly would use anything she said to benefit himself.

“I just finished Malvo,” Cindy said, referring to Twilly’s bestselling account of the DC sniper who, with his manipulative partner, had killed ten people and terrified the capital in a month-long crime spree.

“What did you think?” Twilly smiled. It was a charming smile, lopsided, the left side of his mouth twitching up, making the corners of his eyes crinkle.

“Made me think about teenage boys in a whole new way.”

“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” Twilly said. “What can I get you to drink?”

Twilly called the waitress over, ordered wine for Cindy, mineral water for himself, and told Cindy that since Yuki was going to be prosecuting Junie Moon, he wanted to get some sense of her from her closest friend.

“I spoke with some of her professors at Boalt Law,” Twilly told Cindy. “And a couple of her former colleagues at Duffy and Rogers.”

“She was really on the fast track to partnership there,” Cindy said.

“So I’ve heard. Yuki told me that after her mother was killed at Municipal Hospital, she lost her taste for civil cases and went over to the prosecutorial side.”

“Exactly.”

“So what does that make her? Fierce? Vengeful?”

“You’re baiting me,” Cindy said, laughing. “Did Yuki strike you as vindictive?”

“Not at all,” Twilly said, giving her another of his electrifying smiles. “Well, maybe the fierce part is true,” he said. “I’ve seen Yuki in action at the Brinkley thing.”

Twilly told Cindy that he already had a contract from his publisher to do the unauthorized biography of Michael Campion when, suddenly, Michael disappeared.

“It looked like an unsolved mystery until the cops found a suspect and indicted Junie Moon,” Twilly said. “And when I heard that Yuki Castellano was going to try Moon for Michael’s murder, it just couldn’t get any better. It should be a hell of a trial. And what I love about Yuki Castellano is that she’s passionate and she’s fearless.”

Cindy nodded in agreement, said, “L. Diana Davis had better bring her best game.”

“That’s interesting,” said Twilly. “Because what I was thinking is that it’s good that Yuki has a friend like you, Cindy. I mean, with all due respect to Yuki, Davis is going to slaughter her.”