7th Heaven

Chapter 100

HAWK AND PIDGE left the car around the corner from the huge Victorian house in Pacific Heights, the biggest in a neighborhood of impressive, multi-multimillion-dollar homes, all with stunning views of the bay.

Their target house was imposing and yet inviting, so American it was iconic – and at the same time, completely out of reach for everyone but the very wealthy.

The two young men looked up at the leaded windows, the cupolas, and the old trees banked around the house, separating it from the servant quarters over the garage and the neighbors on either side of the yard. They had studied the floor plans on the real estate brokers’ Web site and knew every corner of every floor. They were prepared, high on anticipation, and still cautious.

This was going to be their best kill and their last. They would make some memories tonight, leave their calling card, and fade out, blend back into their lives. But this night would never be forgotten. There would be headlines for weeks, movies, several of them. In fact, they were sure people would still be talking about this crime of all crimes into the next century.

“Do I look okay?” Pidge asked.

Hawk turned Pidge’s collar up, surveyed his friend’s outfit down to the shoes.

“You rock, buddy. You absolutely rock.”

“You too, man,” Pidge said.

They locked arms in the Roman forearm handshake, like Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd in Ben-Hur.

“Ubi fumus,” said Hawk.

“Ibi ignis,” Pidge answered.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

Pidge twisted the gold foil tight around the bottle of Cointreau, and then the two boys advanced side by side up the long stone walkway toward the front porch. There was a card taped to a glass panel on the front door. “To the members of the Press: Please, leave us alone.”

Hawk rang the bell.

Bing-bong.

He could see the gray-haired man through the small-paned living room windows, followed his silhouette as the famous figure walked through the house, turning on the lights in each room, making his way to the front door.

And then the door opened.

“Are you the boys who called?” Connor Campion asked.

“Yes, sir,” Pidge said.

“And what are your names?”

“Why don’t you call me Pidge for now, and he’s Hawk. We have to be careful. What we know could get us killed.”

“You’ve got to trust us,” Hawk said. “We were friends of Michael’s, and we have some information. Like I said on the phone. We can’t keep quiet any longer.”

Connor Campion looked the two boys up and down, decided either they were full of crap or maybe, just maybe, they’d tell him something he needed to know. They’d want money, of course.

He swung the door open wide and invited them inside.

Chapter 101

THE SIXTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLD MAN led the two boys through the vestibule and living room, into his private library. He switched on some lights: the stained-glass Tiffany lamp on the desk he’d used in the governor’s mansion, the down-lighting above the floor-to-ceiling bookcases of law books.

“Is your wife at home?” the one called Hawk asked him.

“She’s had a very stressful day,” Campion said. “She couldn’t wait up. Can I get you boys something to drink?”

“Actually, we brought you this,” Pidge said, handing over the bottle of Cointreau. Connor thanked the boy, slid down the foil bag, and looked at the label.

“Thanks for this. I’ll open this for you if you like, or maybe you’d like something else. I’m having scotch.”

“We’re good, sir,” said Pidge.

Campion put the bottle next to Michael’s picture on the ornately carved mantelpiece, then bent to open the bowed glass doors of the vitrine he used as a liquor cabinet. He took out a bottle of Chivas and a glass. When he turned, he saw the gun in Hawk’s hand.

Campion’s muscles clenched as he stared at the revolver; then he looked up at the smirk on Pidge’s face.

“Are you crazy? You’re holding me up?”

Behind Pidge, Hawk’s eyes were bright, smiling with anticipation, as he took a reel of fishing line out of his back pocket. Horror came over Campion as suspicion bloomed in his mind. He turned his back to the boys, said neutrally, “I guess I won’t be having this.” He made a show of putting the Chivas back inside the cabinet, while feeling around the shelf with the flat of his hand.

“We have to tie you up, sir, make it look like a robbery. It’s for our own protection,” Pidge said.

“And you need to get Mrs. Campion down here,” Hawk added firmly. “She’ll want to hear what we have to say.”

Campion whipped around, pointed his SIG at Hawk’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. Bang.

Hawk’s face registered surprise as he looked down at his pink shirt, saw the blood.

“Hey,” said Hawk.

Didn’t these punks know that a man like him would have guns stashed everywhere? Campion fired at Hawk again, and the boy dropped to his knees. He stared up at the older man and returned fire, his shot shattering the mirror over the fireplace. Then Hawk collapsed onto the rug facedown.

Pidge had frozen at the sound of the shooting. Now he screamed, “You shit! You crazy old shit! Look what you did!”

Pidge backed out of the room, and when he cleared the library’s doorway, he turned and raced for the front door. Campion walked over to Hawk, kicked the gun out of his outstretched hand, lost his footing, and fell, hitting his chin against the edge of the desk. He pulled himself up using the desk leg, then stumbled out to the vestibule and pressed the intercom that connected to the caretaker’s cottage.

“Glen,” he yelled. “Call 911. I shot someone!”

By the time Campion reached the front walk, Pidge was gone. The caretaker came running across the yard with a rifle, and Valentina stood in the front doorway, her eyes huge, asking him what in God’s name had happened.

Lights winked on in neighboring houses, and the wolfhound next door barked.

But there was no sign of Pidge.

Campion clamped his fist around the grip of his gun and shouted into the dark, “You killed my son, you son of a bitch, didn’t you? You killed my son!”

Chapter 102

I ARRIVED AT the Campions’ home within fifteen minutes of getting Jacobi’s call. A herd of patrol cars blocked the street, and paramedics bumped down the stone steps with their loaded gurney, heading out to the ambulance.

I went to the gurney, observed as much of the victim as I could. An oxygen mask half covered his face, and a sheet was pulled up to his chin. I judged that the young man was in his late teens or early twenties, white, with well-cut, dirty-blond hair, maybe five ten.

Most important, he was alive.

“Is he going to make it?” I asked one of the paramedics.

She shrugged, said, “He’s got two slugs in him, Sergeant. Lost a lot of blood.”

Inside the house, Jacobi and Conklin were debriefing the former governor and Valentina Campion, who sat together on a sofa, shoulder to shoulder, their hands entwined. Conklin shot me a look: something he wanted me to understand. It took me a few minutes to get it.

Jacobi filled me in on what had transpired, told me that there was no ID on the kid Campion had shot. Then he said to the former governor, “You say you can identify the second boy, sir? Help our sketch artist?”

Campion nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll never forget that kid’s face.”

Campion looked to be in terrible pain. He’d shot someone only minutes before, and when he asked me to sit down in the chair near the sofa, I thought he wanted to tell me about that. But I was wrong.

Campion said, “Michael wanted to be like his friends. Go out. Have fun. So I was always on his case, you know? When I caught him sneaking out at night, I reprimanded him, took away privileges, and he hated me for it.”

“No he didn’t,” Valentina Campion said sharply. “You did what I didn’t have the courage to do, Connor.”

“Sir?” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

Campion’s face sagged with exhaustion.

“He was being irresponsible,” Campion continued, “and I was trying to keep him safe. I was looking ahead to the future – a new medical procedure, a pharmaceutical breakthrough. Something.

“I told him, straight up, ‘When you decide to act like an adult, let me know.’ I wasn’t angry, I was afraid,” Campion said, his voice cracking. “So I lost him before I lost him.”

His wife tried to calm him, but Connor Campion wouldn’t be soothed. “I was a tyrant,” Campion said. “Mikey and I didn’t speak for the whole last month of his life. If I’d known he had a month to live… Michael told me, ‘Quality of life, Dad. That’s what’s important.’ ”

Campion fixed me with his bloodshot eyes.

“You seem to be a caring person, Sergeant. I’m telling you this so you understand. I let those hooligans into my house because they said they had information about Michael – and I had to know what it was.

“Now I think they killed him, don’t you? And tonight they were going to rob us. But why? Why?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

I told Campion that as soon as we knew anything, we’d let him know. That was all I had for him. But I got it now, why Conklin had given me that look when I’d walked in the door. My mind was running with it.

I signaled to my partner and we went outside.

Chapter 103

CONKLIN AND I leaned against the side of my car, facing the Campion house, staring at the lights glowing softly through a million little windowpanes. Campion and his wife didn’t know what kind of death Hawk and Pidge had planned for them tonight, but we knew – and thinking about that near miss was giving me the horrors.

If Connor Campion hadn’t fired his gun, Hawk and Pidge would have roasted him and his wife alive.

Rich pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one – and this time I took him up on it.

“Might be some prints on that foil around the bottle of booze,” he said.

I nodded, thinking we’d be lucky if those kids had records, if their prints were in AFIS, but I wasn’t counting on it.

“Hawk. Pidge. Crazy names,” Conklin said.

“I got a pretty good look at Hawk,” I said. “He matches Molly Chu’s description of the so-called angel who carried her out of the fire.”

Conklin exhaled a long stream of smoke into the night. He said, “And the governor’s description of Pidge sounds like the kid who pawned Patty Malone’s necklace.”

“And of course there’s the fishing line. So… what are we thinking?” I said to Conklin. “That Hawk and Pidge also killed Michael Campion? Because I don’t see two guys killing a kid when their MO is to tie up rich couples, leave a few words in Latin inside a book, and then burn the house down.”

Conklin said, “Nope. That doesn’t work for me, either. So why do you think these birds targeted the Campions?”

“Because the Campions are in the news. Big house. Big fire. Big headlines. Big score.”

Conklin smiled, said, “Only they screwed up.”

I smiled back, said, “Yeah.”

We were both starting to feel it, the kind of incomparable exhilaration that comes when after nothing but dead ends, A leads to B leads to C. I was sure that Hawk and Pidge were the sadists who did the arson killings, but not only couldn’t we prove that, we didn’t know who Hawk and Pidge were.

I stamped out my cigarette on the street, said to Conklin, “That Hawk bastard had better live.”

“At least long enough to talk,” said my partner.

Chapter 104

HAWK’S SURGEON, Dr. Dave Hammond, was a compact man with rusty hair and the tight manner of a perfectionist who’d spent the night stitching his patient’s guts back together. Conklin and I had spent the same eight hours in a small, dull waiting room at St. Francis Hospital, waiting for Hammond ’s report.

When the doctor entered the waiting room at 6:15 a.m., I shot to my feet, asked, “Is he awake?”

Hammond said, “Right now, the patient’s condition defines touch-and-go. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch when he came in. One slug punctured his lung and nicked his aorta. The other damn near pulverized his liver.”

Conklin said, “So, Doctor, when can we talk to him?”

“Inspector, you understand what I just said? We had to inflate the kid’s lungs, transfuse him, and remove a chunk of his liver. This is what we like to call major surgery.”

Conklin smiled winningly. “Okay. I hear you. Is he awake?”

“He just opened his eyes.” Hammond sighed with disgust. “I’ll give you one minute to get in and get out.”

One minute was all we’d need, enough time to wring two words from that bastard – his first name and his last. I pushed open the door marked RECOVERY and approached Hawk’s bed. It was a shocking sight.

Hawk’s body was lashed down in four-point restraints so that he couldn’t flail and undo the work his surgeons had just done. Even his head was restrained. IV bags dripped fluids into his body, a chest tube drained ooze out of his lungs, a catheter carried waste into a canister under the bed, and he was breathing oxygen through a cannula clipped to his nose.

Hawk looked bad, but he was alive.

Now I had to get him to talk.

I touched his hand and said, “Hi there. My name is Lindsay.”

Hawk’s eyes flickered open.

“Where… am I?” he asked me.

I told him that he’d been shot, that he was in a hospital, and that he was doing fine.

“Why can’t… I move?”

I told him about the restraints and why he was tied down, and I asked for his help. “I need to call your family, but I don’t know your name.”

Hawk scanned my face, then dropped his gaze to the badge on my lapel, the bulge of my gun under my jacket. He murmured something I had to strain to hear.

“My work here is finished,” Hawk said.

“No,” I shouted, gripping the kid’s hand with both of mine. “You are not going to die. You’ve got a great doctor. We all want to help you, but I have to know your name. Please, Hawk, tell me your name.”

Hawk pursed his lips, starting to form a word – and then, as though an electric current had taken over his body, his back bowed and he went rigid against his restraints. Simultaneously, the rapid, high-pitched beeping of an alarm filled the room. I wanted to scream.

I held on to Hawk’s hand as his eyes rolled back and a noise came from his throat like soda water pouring into a glass. The monitor tracking his vital signs showed Hawk’s heart rate spike to 170, drop to 60, and rocket again even as his blood pressure dropped through the floor.

“What’s happening?” Conklin asked me.

“He’s crashing,” Hammond shouted, stiff-arming the door. The rapid beeping turned into one long squeal as the green lines on the monitor went flat.

Hammond yelled, “Where’s the goddamned cart!”

As the medics rolled it in, Conklin and I were pushed away from the bed. A nurse closed the curtain, blocking our view. I heard the frenzy of doctors working to shock Hawk’s heart back into rhythm.

“Come on, come on,” I heard Dr. Hammond say. Then, “Crap. Time of death, 6:34 a.m.”

“Damn it,” I said to Conklin. “Damn it to hell.”

Chapter 105

AT 7:45 THAT MORNING, I took off my jacket, hung it over the back of my chair, opened my coffee container, and sat down at my desk across from Conklin.

“He died on purpose, that monster,” I said to my partner.

“He’s dead, but this is not a dead end,” Conklin muttered.

“Is that a promise?”

“Yeah. Boy Scout’s honor.”

I opened my desk drawer, took out two cello-wrapped pastries, not more than a week old. I lobbed one to Rich, who caught it on the fly.

“Oooh. I love a woman who bakes.”

I laughed, said, “Be glad for that coffee cake, mister. Who knows when we’ll see food again.”

We were waiting for phone calls. A blurry photo of Hawk being wheeled out of the Campion house was running in the morning Chronicle. It was unlikely someone could ID him from that, but not impossible. At just after eight, my desk phone warbled. I grabbed the receiver and heard Charlie Clapper’s voice.

“Lindsay,” he said, “there were a dozen prints on that bottle and the foil it was wrapped in.”

“Tell me something good.”

“I’d love to, my friend,” Clapper said. “But all we’ve got for sure is a match to Hawk’s prints, and he’s not in AFIS.”

“There’s a shock. So he’s still a John Doe and, I take it, so is Pidge.”

“Sorry, kiddo. The only other match I got was to Connor Campion.”

I sighed, said, “Thanks anyway, Charlie,” and stabbed the blinking button of my second line.

Chuck Hanni’s voice sounded wound-up, excited.

“Glad I got you,” Hanni said. “There’s been a fire.”

I pressed the speaker button so Conklin could hear.

“It just happened a few hours ago in Santa Rosa,” Chuck said. “Two fatalities. I’m on the way out there now.”

“It’s arson? You think it’s related to our case?”

“The sheriff told me that one of the vics was found with a book in his lap.”

I stared at Conklin, knowing he was thinking the same thing: that SOB Pidge hadn’t wasted any time.

“We’ll meet you there,” I said to Hanni.

I wrote down the address and hung up the phone.

Chapter 106

THE HOUSE WAS TUDOR-STYLE, surrounded by tall firs and located in a development of million-dollar-and-up homes bordering on a golf course in Santa Rosa. We edged our car into the pack of sheriff’s cruisers and fire rigs, all of which had been on the scene for hours. The firefighters were wrapping up as the ME and arson investigators came and went, ducking under the barrier tape that had been looped around the premises.

I was furious that Pidge had killed again, and once again, he’d taken his hellacious arson spree to a county where Rich, Chuck, and I had no official standing.

Chuck called out to us, and we walked toward the house.

“The fire was contained in the garage,” he said, massaging the old burn scar on his hand.

Hanni held the garage door open, and Conklin and I stepped inside. It was a three-car garage, tools and lawn equipment against the walls, and in the center of the floor was a late-model minivan that had been seared by flames, the exterior scorched black, blue, and a powdery gray. Hanni introduced us around to Sheriff Paul Arcario, to the ME, Dr. Cecilia Roach, and to the arson investigator, Matt Hartnett, who said he was a friend of Chuck’s.

“The homeowner is a Mr. Alan Beam,” Hartnett told us. “He’s still inside his vehicle. And there’s a second victim, a female. She was found on the floor next to the van. She’s in a body bag for safekeeping. Otherwise, everything is just as we found it.”

Hanni shined his light into the carcass of the van so that Conklin and I could get a better look at the victim’s incinerated body in the driver’s seat. The seat was tilted back. A heavy chain lay across the victim’s legs, and a small book rested on his lap, right above the pink and protruding coils of his large intestine.

I went weak at the knees.

The smells of burned flesh and gasoline were overpowering. I could almost hear the screaming, the pleading, the soft whick of a match, and the boom of the consuming fire. Rich asked me if I was okay, and I said that I was. But what I was thinking was that what had happened here in the small hours of the morning had been the ultimate in terror and agony.

That it had been nothing less than the horror of hell.

Chapter 107

DR. ROACH ZIPPED the body bag closed and asked her assistants to carry the female victim out to the van. Roach was petite, in her forties, wore her thick graying hair in a ponytail and her glasses on a beaded chain.

“There was no ID on her,” Dr. Roach told me. “All I can say is that she looks to be a juvenile, maybe a teenager.”

“Not Beam’s wife?”

“The ex-Mrs. Beam lives in Oakland,” said the sheriff, closing his cell phone. “She’ll be here in a few.”

Hanni began a run-through of the fire for our benefit.

“The fire started inside the passenger compartment,” he said. “Paper and wood were piled up in the backseat directly behind the driver. And this is a tow chain,” he said of the heavy links lying across the victim’s lap.

He pointed to a metal bar down in the driver-side foot well, explained that it was a steering wheel lock, like The Club, and that it had been passed through the chain and locked around the steering column. Hanni theorized that first the chains and The Club were locked, then the newspapers and wood were doused with gasoline.

“Then, probably, the gas was poured over the victims and the can was wedged behind the seats -”

“Sorry, folks, but I’ve got to start processing this scene,” Hartnett said, opening his kit. “I’m getting shit from the chief.”

“Hang on just a minute, will you please?” I asked the arson investigator. I borrowed a pen from Hanni, reached into the van, and as Hanni aimed his light over my shoulder, I used the pen to open the book resting on Alan Beam’s lap.

What kind of message had Pidge left for us?

The usual fortune cookie nonsense?

Or was he mad now? Would he slip up and give us something that made sense? I stared at the title page, but all I saw were the printed words The New Testament. That was all. No scribbling in Latin, not even a name. I was backing out of the van when Rich said, “Lindsay, check that out.”

I went back in for a second look and this time saw a bit of fire-blackened ribbon trailing out from the pages. Using the pen again, I opened the Bible to the bookmark. Matthew 3:11.

A few lines of text had been underlined in ink.

My cheek was nearly resting on the victim’s parched and naked bones as I read the underlined words out loud.

“I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

Chapter 108

CONKLIN GRUNTED, said, “Purification by fire. It’s a major biblical theme.”

Just then the garage door opened behind us and I turned to see a chic forty-something woman wearing a business suit limned in the sunlight behind her. Her face was stretched in anger and fear.

“I’m Alicia Beam. Who’s in charge here?”

“I’m Paul Arcario,” the sheriff said to her, stretching out his hand. “We spoke earlier. Why don’t we go outside and talk?”

Mrs. Beam pushed past him to the van, and although Conklin put an arm out to stop her, it was too late. The woman stared, then shrank away, screaming, “Oh, my God! Alan! What happened to you?”

Then she snapped her head around and locked her eyes on me.

“Where’s Valerie? Where’s my daughter?”

I introduced myself, told Mrs. Beam that she had to leave the garage, and that I would come with her. She became compliant as soon as I put my hand on the small of her back, and we walked together out of the garage to the front of the house.

“It’s my daughter’s weekend with her father,” she said.

She opened the front door, and as she stepped over the threshold, she broke away from me, running through the rooms, calling her daughter’s name.

“Valerie! Val. Where are you?”

I followed behind her, and when she stopped she said to me, “Maybe Val spent the night with a friend.”

The look of sheer hope on her face pulled at my heart and my conscience. Was that her daughter in the body bag? I didn’t know, and if it was, it was not my job to tell her. Right now I had to learn whatever I could about Alan Beam.

“Let’s just talk for a few minutes,” I said.

We took seats at a pine farm table in the kitchen, and Alicia Beam told me that her marriage of twenty years to Alan had been dissolved a year before.

“Alan has been depressed for years,” Alicia told me. “He felt that his whole life had been about money. That he’d neglected his family and God. He became very religious, very repentant, and he said that there wasn’t enough time…”

Alicia Beam stopped in midsentence. I followed her eyes to the counter, where an unfolded sheet of blue paper was lying beside an envelope.

“Maybe that’s a note from Val.”

She stood and walked to the counter, picked up the letter, began to read.

“Dear Val, my dearest girl. Please forgive me. I just couldn’t take it any longer…”

She looked up, said to me, “This is from Alan.”

I turned as Hanni leaned through the doorway and asked me to step outside.

“Lindsay,” he said. “A neighbor found a message from Alan Beam on her answering machine saying he was sorry and good-bye.”

It was all coming clear, why there were no Latin come-ons. No fishing-line ligatures. And the victims were not a married couple.

Pidge hadn’t done this.

Pidge had nothing to do with these deaths. Any hope I had of tripping him up, finding a clue to his whereabouts, was dead – as dead as the man in the car.

“Alan Beam committed suicide,” I said.

Hanni nodded. “We’ll treat it as a homicide until we’re sure, but according to this neighbor, Beam had attempted suicide before. She said he was terminal. Lung cancer.”

“And so he chained himself to the steering wheel and set himself on fire?”

“I guess he wanted to make sure he didn’t change his mind this time. But whatever his reason,” said Hanni, “it looks to me now like his daughter tried to save him – but she never had a chance.

“The poisonous gas and the superheated air brought her down.”

Chapter 109

BY THE TIME I got home that evening, I had too much to tell Joe and hoped I could stay awake long enough to tell him. He was in the kitchen, wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, what he wore when he went for a run with Martha. He was holding a wineglass, and from the scrumptious smell of garlic and oregano, it seemed he’d cooked dinner, too.

But the look on Joe’s face stopped me before I could reach him.

“Joe, I was at the hospital all night -”

“Jacobi told me. If I hadn’t found wet footsteps on the bathmat this morning, I wouldn’t have even known you’d been home.”

“You were sleeping, Joe, and I only had a few minutes. And is this a house rule? That I have to check in?” I said.

“You call it checking in. I call it being thoughtful. Thinking of me and that I might worry about you.”

I hadn’t called him. Why hadn’t I called?

“I’m drinking merlot,” he said.

Joe and I rarely fought, and I got that sickening gut-feel that told me that I was in the wrong.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re totally right, Joe. I should have let you know where I was.” I walked over to him, put my arms around his waist – but he pulled away from me.

“No flirting, Blondie. I’m steamed.”

He handed me a glass of wine and I took it, saying, “Joe, I said I’m sorry, and I am!”

“You know what?” he said. Martha whimpered and trotted out of the room. “I saw more of you when I lived in DC.”

“Joe, that’s not true.”

“So, I’m going to ask you flat out, Lindsay. One question. And I want the truth.”

I thought, No, please, please don’t ask me if I really want to marry you, please don’t. I’m not ready. I looked into the storm raging in Joe’s deep blue eyes.

“I want to know about you and Conklin. What’s going on?”

I was flabbergasted.

“You think I’m – Joe, you can’t think that!”

“Look. I spent an hour with the two of you. You’ve got a little something special going on between you, and please don’t tell me you’re partners.

“I worked with you once, Lindsay,” Joe went on. “We were partners. And now, here we are.”

I opened my mouth, closed it without speaking. I felt so guilty I couldn’t even act offended. Joe was right about everything. That Rich and I had a special feeling for each other, that I was neglecting Joe, that the time we spent together was more focused on each other when Joe lived a couple of time zones away than it was now.

Once Joe had made the commitment to move to San Francisco, he’d been mine, mine, totally mine. And I’d taken him for granted. I was wrong. And I had to admit it. But my throat was backed up with tears. This was the very thing that broke up cop marriages.

The Job. The obsession and commitment to the Job.

That’s what this was about – wasn’t it?

I felt sick with shame. I never wanted to make Joe feel bad, never wanted to hurt him at all. I set my glass down on the counter and took Joe’s glass out of his hand, put that glass down, too.

“There’s nothing going on, Joe. It’s just the Job.”

He looked into my eyes, and it was as though he was patting down my brain. He knew me that well.

“Give the sauce a stir in a couple of minutes, okay, Linds? I’m going to take a shower.”

I stood up on my toes and wrapped my arms around Joe’s neck, held on to the man I thought of as my future husband, pressed my cheek to his. I wanted him to hold me. And finally he did. He closed his arms around my waist and pulled me tight against him.

I said, “I love you so much. I’m going to do a better job of showing you, Joe, I swear, I will.”

Chapter 110

RICH WAS ALREADY at the computer when I got to my desk. He looked like he was in fifth gear, his index fingers tapping a fast two-step over the keys. I thanked him for the Krispy Kreme he’d parked on a napkin next to my phone.

“It was my turn,” Rich said, not looking up as I dragged out my chair and sat down. “Dr. Roach called,” Rich continued. “Said there were fifty-five ccs of gasoline in Alan Beam’s stomach.”

“What’s that? Three ounces? Geez. Is she saying he drank gasoline?”

“Yeah. Probably directly out of the can. Beam really wanted to make sure he got it right this time. Doctor says the gas would’ve killed him if the fire hadn’t. She’s calling it a suicide. But look here, Lindsay.”

“Whatcha got?” I said.

“Come over here and see this.”

I walked around our two desks and peered over Conklin’s shoulder. There was a Web site on his screen called Crime Web. Conklin pressed the enter key and an animation began. A spider dropped a line from the top of the page, made a web around the blood-red headline over the feature story, then skittered back to its corner of the page. I read the headline.

Five Fatal Shootings This Week Alone

When are the cops and the DA going to get it together?

The text below was a sickening indictment of San Francisco ’s justice system – and it was all true. Homicides were up, prosecutions were down, the result of not enough people or money or time.

Rich moved the cursor to the column listing the pages on the site.

“This one – here,” Rich said, clicking on a link called Current Unsolved Murders.

Thumbnail photos came up.

There was a family portrait of the Malones. Another of the Meachams. Rich clicked on the thumbnail of the Malones and said, “Listen to this.”

And then he read the page to me:

“ ‘Were the murders of Patricia and Bertram Malone committed by the same killers of Sandy and Steven Meacham?

“ ‘We say yes.

“ ‘And there have been other killings just as heinous with the same signature. The Jablonskys of Palo Alto and George and Nancy Chu of Monterey were also killed in horrific house fires.

“ ‘Why can’t SFPD solve these crimes?

“ ‘If you have any information, write to us at CrimeWeb.com. Diem dulcem habes.’ ”

My God, it was Latin!

“We never told the press about the Latin,” I said. “What does it mean?”

“Diem dulcem habes means ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s going to be even better than that.”

I called the DA’s office, asked for Yuki, got Nick Gaines, told him we needed a warrant to get an Internet provider to give us the name of the Web site holder.

“I’ll buck it up the line,” Gaines said. “Just asking, Sergeant: You’ve got probable cause?”

“We’re working on it,” I said. I hung up, said, “Now what?” as Rich clicked on a box labeled Contact Us.

He typed with two fingers: “Must speak with you about the Malone and the Meacham fires. Please contact me.” Conklin’s e-mail address showed that he was with the SFPD. If the Webmaster was Pidge, we could be scaring him off.

On the other hand – there was no other hand.

I needn’t have worried. Only a couple of minutes after firing off his e-mail, Rich had a response in his inbox.

“How can I help you?” the e-mail read.

It was signed Linc Weber, and it contained his phone number.

Chapter 111

THE MEETING WITH WEBER was set for four that afternoon. Conklin and I briefed Jacobi, assigned our team, and set out at two o’clock for a bookstore in Noe Valley called Damned Spot. Inspectors Chi and McNeil were in the van parked on Twenty-fourth Street, and I was wired for sound. Inspectors Lemke and Samuels were undercover, loitering in front of and behind the store.

My palms were damp as I waited with Conklin in the patrol car. The Kevlar vest I was wearing was hot, but it was my racing mind that was causing the heat.

Could this be it? Was Linc Weber also known as Pidge?

At three thirty Conklin and I got out of the car and walked around the corner to the bookstore.

Damned Spot was an old-fashioned bookstore, dark, filled with mystery books, secondhand paperbacks, a two-books-for-one section. It bore no resemblance to the air-conditioned chain stores with latte bars and smooth jazz coming over the speakers.

The cashier was an androgynous twenty-something in black clothes, hair buzzed to a bristle, and multiple face piercings. I asked for Linc Weber, and the cashier told me in a sweet feminine voice that Linc worked upstairs.

I could almost hear the scratching sound of mice nesting in the stacks as we crept along the narrow aisles and edged past customers who looked psychologically borderline. In the back of the store was a plain wooden staircase with a sign on a chain across the handrails reading NO ENTRY.

Conklin unlatched the chain, and we started up the stairs, which opened into an attic room. The ceiling was cathedral-style, but low, only eight feet high under the peak, tapering to about three feet high at the side walls. In the back of the room was a desk where high piles of magazines, papers, and books surrounded a computer with two large screens.

And behind the desk was a black kid, maybe fifteen, reed-thin, with black-rimmed glasses, no visible tattoos, and no jewelry, unless you counted the braces on his teeth, which I saw when he looked up and smiled.

My high hopes fell.

This wasn’t Pidge. The governor’s description of Pidge was of a stocky white kid, long brown hair.

“I’m Linc,” the boy said. “Welcome to CrimeWeb dot com.”

Chapter 112

LINC WEBER SAID he was “honored” to meet us. He indicated two soft plastic-covered cubes as chairs, and he offered us bottled water from the cooler behind his desk.

We sat on his cubes, turned down the water.

“We read your commentary on the Web site,” said Conklin, casually. “We were wondering about your take on whoever set the Malone and Meacham fires.”

The kid said, “Why don’t I start at the beginning?”

Normally that was a good idea, but today my nerves were so close to the snapping point, I just wanted two questions answered, and as succinctly as possible: Why did you use a Latin phrase on your Web site? Do you know someone who goes by the name of Pidge?

But Weber said he’d never had a visit from cops before, and meeting in his office had legitimized his purpose and his Web site beyond his expectations. In fifteen minutes, he told us that his father owned Damned Spot, that he’d been a crime-story aficionado since he was old enough to read. He said that he wanted to publish crime fiction and true-crime books as soon as he got out of school.

“Linc, you said ‘Have a nice day’ in Latin on your Web site. Why did you do that?” I said, breaking into his life’s story.

“Oh. The Latin. I got the idea from this.”

Linc shuffled the piles on his desk, at last finding a soft-cover book, about 8½ by 11, with an elegant font spelling out the words 7th Heaven. He handed the book to me. I held my breath as I flipped through the pages. Although it resembled a big, fat comic book, it was a graphic novel.

“It was published first as a blog,” Weber told us. “Then my dad staked the first edition.”

“And the Latin?” I asked again, my throat tightening from the strain and the possibilities I could almost see.

“It’s all in there,” Weber told me. “The characters in this novel use Latin catchphrases. Listen, can I say on my Web site that you used me as a consultant? You have no idea what that would mean to me.”

I was looking at the title page of the book I held in my hands. Under the title were the names of the illustrator and the writer.

Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson.

There was an icon under each of their names.

Hans Vetter was the pigeon and Brett Atkinson, a hawk.

Chapter 113

BY FIVE THAT EVENING, Conklin and I were back at our desks in the squad room. Conklin clicked around the Internet, researching Atkinson and Vetter – and I couldn’t stop turning the pages of their novel.

I was hooked.

The drawings were stark black and white. The figures had huge eyes, and called to mind the manga style of violent borderline pornography imported from Japan. The dialogue was edgy, all-American slang punctuated by Latin sayings. And the story was actually crazy but somehow compelling.

In this book, “Pidge” was both the brains and the muscle. “Hawk” was the dreamer. They were depicted as righteous avengers, their mission to save America from what they viewed as an obscene fantasy world for the very rich. They referred to this American “piggishness” as 7th Heaven and described it as a never-ending spiral of gluttony, gratification, and waste. The Pidge-Hawk solution was to kill the rich and the greedier wannabes, to show them what real consumption was – consumption by fire.

Pidge and Hawk dressed all in black: T-shirts, jeans, riding boots, and sleek black leather waist jackets with logos of their name-birds front and back. Sparks flew from their fingertips. And their motto was “Aut vincere aut mori.”

Either conquer or die.

Hawk – the boy, not the character – had done both.

My guess? They never expected any of their victims to live long enough to give away their pseudonyms.

The motives and the methods the killers used were clearly drawn in their book, but it was all disguised as make-believe. And that was making me crazy with anger. Eight real people had died because of this arrogant nonsense, and we had virtually no evidence to prove that the real-life Hawk and Pidge were their killers.

I flipped the book to the back cover, scanned the rave reviews from social critics and the high-profile bloggers. I said to Rich, “The sickest part yet? This book has been picked up by Bright Line.”

“Hmmm?” Rich muttered, still tapping his keyboard.

“Bright Line is an indie studio,” I said. “One of the best. They’re turning this screed into a movie.”

“Brett Atkinson,” Rich said, “is a junior at Stanford U, majoring in English lit. Hans Vetter also goes to Stanford. He’s in the computer department. These creeps both live at home, only two blocks apart in Mountain View, a couple of miles from Stanford.”

Rich turned his computer monitor around, saying, “Check out Brett Atkinson’s yearbook photo.”

Brett Atkinson was Hawk, the boy Connor Campion had shot, the handsome, blond-haired boy with patrician features we’d seen in the hospital just before he died.

“And now,” Rich said, “meet Pidge.”

Hans Vetter was a good-looking tough, an illustrator, computer sciences major, now polishing his extracurricular activities as a serial killer.

“We will get warrants,” I croaked. I cleared my throat and said, “I don’t care who I have to beg.”

Rich looked as serious as I’d ever seen him.

“Absolutely. No mistakes allowed.”

“Aut vincere aut mori,” I said.

Rich smiled, reached over the desk, and bopped my fist. I called Jacobi, and he called Chief Tracchio, who called a judge, who reportedly said, “You want an arrest warrant based on a comic book?”

I barely slept that night, and in the morning Rich and I went to the judge’s chambers with 7th Heaven, the crime scene photos of the Malones, the Meachams, and the Jablonskys, and the morgue photos of the Chus. I brought Connor Campion’s statement that the boys who’d come to his house with a gun and fishing line had said their names were Hawk and Pidge, and I showed the judge their yearbook photos, captioned with their real names.

By ten a.m. we had signed warrants and all the manpower we’d need.

Chapter 114

STANFORD UNIVERSITY, an A-list university for the best and brightest, is located 33.5 miles south of San Francisco, just off Highway 280, near Palo Alto.

Hans Vetter, AKA Pidge, spent his days in the video lab of the Gates Computer Science Building, a pale five-story, L-shaped building with a tiled roof and a rounded bulge at the entranceway. The labs and research offices were clustered around three major classrooms, and the building itself was isolated on an island of its own, separated from other school buildings by service roads.

Conklin and I had gone over the floor plans of the Gates Building with the U.S. marshals, who were coordinating with campus security. With windows on all sides of the building, the law enforcement team would be seen by anyone sitting near a window.

We parked our vehicles out of sight on the curve of a service road and moved in on foot. Conklin and I wore Kevlar under our SFPD jackets and had our guns drawn, but we were taking direction from U.S. marshals.

Adrenaline surged through me as we were given the signal to go. While others stood by side entrances, twelve of us charged up the front steps and entered the high-ceilinged lobby, then went to the stairwells and landings.

Pairs of marshals peeled off as we took each floor, clearing the open spaces, locking classrooms down.

My thoughts raced ahead.

I was worried that we were too loud, that we’d already been seen, and that if Vetter had smuggled a weapon past the metal detectors, he could take his classmates hostage before we could bring him down. Conklin and I reached the top-floor landing and marshals took up stances on both sides of the doorway to the video lab. Conklin peered through the sidelight of the door, then turned the knob, swung the door wide open.

Backed by Conklin and the U.S. marshals armed with automatic rifles, I stepped through the doorway and bellowed, “FREEZE. Everyone stay still and no one will get hurt.”

A female student screamed, then the room erupted into chaos. Kids bolted from their stools and hid under workstations. Cameras and computers crashed to the floor. Glass shattered.

Kaleidoscopic images spun around me, and shrieks of terror ricocheted off the walls. The situation went from bad to out of control. I kept scanning the room, trying to pick out a stocky boy with long brown hair, square jaw, the eyes of a killer – but I didn’t see him.

Where was Hans Vetter?

Where was he?

Chapter 115

THE LAB INSTRUCTOR stood transfixed at the front of the room, his blanched face going livid as shock turned to outrage. He was in his thirties, balding, wearing a green cardigan and what looked like bedroom slippers under the cuffs of his trousers. He shoved his hands out in front of himself as if to push us out of his classroom. He announced his name – Dr. Neal Weinstein – and demanded, “What the hell? What the hell is this?”

If it weren’t so damned terrifying, it would’ve been almost funny to watch Weinstein, armed with only his flapping hands and his PhD, face down adrenaline-pumped federal law enforcement officers primed to blow the place apart.

“I have a warrant for the arrest of Hans Vetter,” I said, holding both the warrant and my gun in front of me.

Weinstein shouted, “Hans isn’t here.”

A white female student with black dreads, a ring in her lower lip, peeked out from behind an overturned table. “I spoke to Hans this morning,” she said. “He told me he was going away.”

“You saw him this morning?” I asked.

“I talked to him on his cell.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

She shook her head. “He only told me because I wanted to borrow his car.”

I left marshals behind to interview Weinstein and his students, but as Conklin and I left the building, I felt terra firma shimmy beneath my feet.

Hawk’s death last night had sent Pidge underground.

He could be anywhere in the world by now.

In the parking lot across from the Gates Building, some kids were clinging together in clumps, others dazed and wandering. Still others were laughing at the unexpected excitement. News choppers circled overhead, reporting to the world on an incident that was a total disaster.

I called Jacobi, covered one ear, and summed up the situation. I didn’t want him to know how scared I was that we’d blown it and that Vetter was still out there. I tried to keep my voice even, but there was no fooling Jacobi.

I heard him breathing in my ear as he took it all in.

Then he said, “So, what you’re saying, Boxer, is that Pidge has flown the coop.”

Chapter 116

THE SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT and their SWAT team rolled up alongside our squad car as we braked on a crisp, well-shorn lawn. In front of us was a three-story colonial-style house only a couple of miles from the Stanford campus. The detailing on the house was authentic to the period, and the neighborhood was first class. The mailbox was marked VETTER.

And Hans Vetter’s car was in the driveway.

Walkie-talkies chattered around us, and radio channels were cleared. Perimeters were set up, and SWAT got into position. Conklin and I got out of our car. I said, “Everything about this place reminds me of the homes Hawk and Pidge burned to the ground.”

Using a car door as body armor, Conklin called out to Hans Vetter with a bullhorn. “Vetter. You can’t get away, buddy. Come out, hands on your head. Let’s end this peacefully.”

I saw movement through the second-story windows. It was Vetter, moving from room to room. He seemed to be shouting to someone inside, but we couldn’t make out his words.

“Who’s he talking to?” Conklin asked me over the roof of the squad car.

“Has to be his mother, goddamn it. She’s gotta be inside.”

A TV went on in the house and was turned up loud. I could hear the announcer’s voice. He was describing the scene we were living. The announcer said, “A tactical maneuver that began two hours ago at Stanford University has changed location and is centered in the upscale community of Mountain View, a street called Mill Lane -”

“Vetter? Can you hear me?” Rich’s voice boomed out through the bullhorn.

Sweat rolled down my sides. The last pages in 7th Heaven depicted a shootout with cops. I recalled the images: bloody bodies on the ground, Pidge and Hawk getting away. They had shielded themselves with a hostage.

Conklin and I conferred with the SWAT captain, a sandy-haired pro and former U.S. Marine named Pete Bailey, and we worked out a plan. Conklin and I moved quickly to the Vetter house and flanked the front door, prepared to grab Vetter when he opened it. SWAT was positioned to take the kid out if anything went wrong.

As I neared the house, I caught a whiff of smoke.

“Is that fire?” I asked Rich. “Do you smell it?”

“Yeah. Is that stupid fuck burning his house down?”

I could still hear the sound of the TV inside the Vetter house. The news announcer was getting a feed from the chopper overhead and was keeping up with the action on the ground. It made sense that Vetter was watching the television coverage. And if Rich and I were in the camera’s-eye view, Vetter knew where Conklin and I were standing.

Captain Bailey called to me on our Nextels, “Sergeant, we’re going in.” But before he could give the order, a woman’s voice cried out from behind the front door.

“Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.”

“Hold your fire,” I shouted to Bailey. “Hostage coming out.”

The knob turned.

The door opened and gray smoke swirled out into the dull, overcast day. There was the sound of a well-oiled motor, and under the shifting plume of pale gray smoke, I saw the leading edge of a power chair bump and maneuver, then stall on the threshold.

The woman in the chair was small and frail, maybe palsied. She wore a long yellow shawl draped over her head, fanning out over her shoulders, bunched loosely across her bony knees. Her face looked pinched, and diamonds sparkled on the fingers of her hand.

She turned her frightened blue eyes on me.

“Don’t shoot,” she pleaded. “Please don’t shoot my son!”

Chapter 117

I STARED INTO Mrs. Vetter’s ice-blue eyes until she broke the spell. She turned her head to the side and cried out, “Hans, do what they tell you!” As she turned her head, the yellow shawl dropped away. My heart bucked as I realized that there were two people sitting in that wheelchair.

Mrs. Vetter was sitting in her son’s lap.

“Hans, do what they tell you,” Vetter mimicked.

The chair rolled forward onto the lawn. I saw clearly now. Vetter’s huge right hand was on the chair’s power controls. His left arm crossed his mother’s body, and he held the muzzle of a sawed-off, double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun hard against the soft underside of his mother’s jaw.

I lowered my Glock 9 and forced a level of calm into my voice that I didn’t remotely feel.

“Hans, I’m Sergeant Boxer, SFPD. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. So just throw that gun down, okay? There’s a safe way out of this situation, and I want to get there. I won’t shoot if you put down that gun.”

“Yeah, right,” Vetter said, laughing. “Now listen to me, both of you,” he said, pointing his chin at me and then at Conklin. “Stand between my mom and the cops. Now, drop your guns, or people are going to die.”

I wasn’t afraid. I was terrified.

I tossed my gun to the ground, and Conklin did the same. We stepped in front of the wheelchair, shielding Mrs. Vetter and her wretched son from the SWAT team at the edge of the lawn. My skin prickled. I felt cold and hot at the same time. We stood locked in this horrifying vignette as the smoke around us thickened.

With a muted boom, flames broke through the windows at the front of the house as the living room flashed over. Shards of glass exploded into the front yard, and sparks rained down on our heads. Conklin held his hands out so that Vetter could see them.

He shouted, “Vetter, we’ve done what you said. Now, drop your damned gun, man. I’ll take care of you. We’ll surround you all the way in, make sure you’re okay. Just put down the gun.”

There was the roar of the backdraft and then the whine of sirens as fire trucks neared the scene. Vetter wasn’t giving up. Not if I was right that the wild glint in his eye was defiance.

But Pidge had given himself no exit.

What the hell would he do?

Chapter 118

VETTER LAUGHED LOUDLY.

For a split second, all I could see were the beautiful, open-mouthed choppers of a kid who’d had the best dentistry in the world. He said to Conklin, “Can’t you just see Francis Ford Coppola directing this scene?”

I heard a faint click and then a thunderous KABOOM.

I’d never seen anything like it before.

One minute I was looking into Mrs. Vetter’s eyes, and in the next moment her head exploded, the top of her skull opening like a flower. The air darkened with a bloody mist that coated me and Conklin and Vetter with a red sheen.

I screamed, “No!”

And Vetter laughed again, his smile blinding white, his face a mask of blood. He used the barrel of his gun to shove his mother’s body out of the chair so that she tumbled and rolled, coming to a stop at my feet. Vetter aimed through the space between me and Conklin and fired again, the second horrific boom of double-aught buck sailing over the heads of cops and SWAT twenty yards away at the edge of the lawn.

I tried to wrap my mind around the horror of what I’d just seen. Instead of using his mother as a ticket to safety, Vetter had blown her up. And SWAT couldn’t get a bead on Vetter without hitting us.

Vetter thumbed the breech release, cracked the muzzle, and reloaded. He flipped his gun shut with a snap of his wrist and it clacked as it closed. It was a sharp and unmistakable sound.

Vetter was ready to shoot again.

There was no doubt in my mind. I was in the last moments of my life. Hans Vetter was going to kill us. I’d never reach my gun in time to stop him.

The air was heavy with smoke. The fire blazed. Flames leaped from the second floor up through the roof. The heat dried my sweat and the dead woman’s blood on my face.

“Step aside,” Vetter said to me and Conklin. “If you want to live, step aside.”

Chapter 119

FEELING CAME BACK into my fingertips, and hope rushed into the chambers of my heart. Now I understood. Vetter wanted SWAT to take him down in a superhero-style blaze of glory. He wanted to die, but I wanted him to pay.

As if my thoughts had caused it, Vetter suddenly screamed and jerked in the wheelchair like he was having a grand mal seizure.

I saw the wires and looked up at Conklin.

While Vetter’s attention had been focused on the SWAT team, Rich had unhooked his Taser from his belt and fired. The Taser’s electrified prongs had pierced Vetter’s right arm and thigh. Conklin kept the juice flowing as he shoved the wheelchair onto its side, kicked Vetter’s shotgun downhill.

While Vetter jerked in agony, SWAT swarmed up the slope to where we stood. I choked out to Rich, “You’re smart. Anyone ever tell you that?”

“Never.”

“Are you okay?”

He grunted. “Not yet.”

I fumbled in the grass for my Glock, then held the muzzle to Vetter’s forehead. Only then did Rich let up on the Taser. Still twitching, Vetter grinned up at me, said, “Am I in heaven?”

I was panting, my pulse beating a deafening tattoo against my eardrums, the smoke making my eyes stream with tears.

“You asshole,” I screamed.

Fire rigs drove up to the curb, and the SWAT team surrounded us. Captain Bailey saw the look of fury in Conklin’s eyes. He said slowly, deliberately, “I’ve got something in the van you can use to clean yourselves up.”

He turned his back and so did the rest of his team. With the rising blanket of smoke blocking out the news chopper’s view, Rich kicked Vetter in the ribs.

“This is for the Malones,” he said. He kicked Vetter again and again, until that psycho stopped grinning and started spitting teeth.

“That’s for the Meachams and the Jablonskys and the Chus,” Rich said. He kicked Vetter hard in the hams.

“This, you scum. This one’s for me.”

Chapter 120

CONKLIN AND I had scrubbed at our faces with damp paper towels, but the stench of fire and death clung to us. Jacobi stood upwind and said, “You two smell like you’ve been wading through a sewer.”

I thanked him, but my mind was churning.

Two blocks away, a raging fire was burning the Vetter house to the ground. There might have been evidence inside that house, something that would have tied Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson to the arson murders.

Now all of that was gone.

We stood in front of the house where the dead boy, Brett Atkinson, had lived with his parents. It was a soaring contemporary with cantilevered decks and hundred-mile views. Very, very wealthy people lived here.

Hawk’s parents, the Atkinsons, hadn’t answered repeated knocks by patrolmen, never returned our calls, and their son’s body was still lying unclaimed in the morgue. A canvass of the neighborhood had confirmed their absence. No one had seen or heard from the Atkinsons in days, and they hadn’t told anyone they were leaving home.

The engines on the Atkinsons’ cars were cold. There was mail in the mailbox a couple of days old, and the fellow who’d stopped mowing the lawn when we arrived said he hadn’t seen Perry or Moira Atkinson all week.

While Vetter’s house was a total loss, I still had hope that the Atkinsons’ house might hold evidence of the horrific killings the boys had done. Thirty-five minutes had passed since Jacobi phoned Tracchio for a search warrant.

Meanwhile, Cindy had called me, saying that she and a handful of TV news vans were parked behind the barricade at the top of the street. Conklin pushed a bloody clump of his hair away from his eyes, said to Jacobi, “If this isn’t ‘exigent circumstances,’ I don’t know what is.”

Jacobi growled, “Cool it, Conklin. Understand? If we blow this, we’re freakin’ buried. I’ll be retired, and you two will be working for Brink’s Security. If you’re lucky.”

Fifteen more minutes crawled by.

I was about to lie and say I smelled decomp when an intern from the district attorney’s office arrived in a Chevy junker. She sprinted up the front walk a half second before Conklin caved in the front window of the Atkinson house with a tire iron.

Chapter 121

THE INSIDE OF the Atkinson house was like a museum. Miles of glossy hardwood floors, large modern canvases hung on two-story-high white walls. Lights came on when we stepped into a room.

It was like a museum after hours: no one was home.

And it was creepy. No pets, no newspapers or magazines, no dishes in the sink, and except for the food in the refrigerator and a precise lineup of clothing in each closet, there was little sign that anyone had ever lived in this place.

That is, until we reached Hawk’s room in a wing far from the master suite.

Hawk’s roost was large and bright, the windows looking west over the mountains. The bed was the least of the room. It was single, with a plain blue bedspread, speakers on each side, and a headset plugged into a CD player. One long side of the room was lined with a built-in Formica desk. Several computers and monitors and high-tech laser printers were set up there and the adjacent wall was lined with thick corkboard.

Pidge’s drawings, many of which I recognized from 7th Heaven, were pinned to the board. But there were new drawings, too, and they looked to be works in progress for a second graphic novel.

“I’m thinking that this was their workshop,” I said to Conklin. “That they cooked it all up in here.”

Conklin took a seat at the desktop, and I examined the corkboard. “Book number two,” I said to Conklin. “Lux et Veritas. Got any idea what that means?”

“Easy one,” Rich said, lowering the seat of the hydraulic chair. “Light and truth.”

“Catchy. Sounds like more fires in the making -”

Rich called out, “Hawk’s got a journal. I touched the mouse and it came up on the screen.”

“Fantastic!”

As Rich scrolled through Brett Atkinson’s journal, I continued my study of the drawings on the wall. One of them nailed me as if I, too, were pinned to the corkboard. The drawing depicted a middle-aged man and woman, arms around each other’s waist, but their faces were flat, expressionless. A caption was written beneath the drawing.

I recognized the handwriting.

It was the same as the printing we’d seen on the title pages of the books left at the houses of the arson victims.

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said, sounding out the syllables. “Rest in what?”

Rich wasn’t listening to me.

“This map on Atkinson’s computer,” he said. “He’s starred San Francisco, Palo Alto, Monterey. Unreal. Look at this! Photos of the houses they burned down. This is evidence, Lindsay. This is frickin’ evidence.”

It was.

I peered over Conklin’s shoulders as he opened Web pages, scanned research on each of the victim couples, including the names of their kids and the dates of the fires. Long minutes went by before I remembered the peculiar drawing pinned to the corkboard and was able to grab Rich’s attention.

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said again.

Rich came over to the wall and looked at the drawing of a couple who might be the Atkinsons. He read the caption.

“Leguminibus,” Rich said. “Means legumes, I think. Aren’t they a kind of vegetable? Like beans and peas?”

“Peas?” I yelled. “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!”

“What?” Conklin asked me. “What is it?”

I hollered out to Jacobi, who was working the rest of the house with the sheriff’s department. With Conklin and Jacobi behind me, I found the stairs to the basement. The freezer was of the trunk variety, extra large.

I opened the lid and cool air puffed out.

“Requiescat in leguminibus,” I said. “Rest in peas.”

I started moving the bags of frozen vegetables aside until I saw a woman’s face.

“This freezer is deep enough for two,” Jacobi muttered.

I said, “Uh-huh,” and stopped digging.

From her approximate age, I was pretty sure I was looking at Moira Atkinson, dressed in her finest, frozen to death.

Chapter 122

I WAS WEARING my new blue uniform, and I’d washed my hair thirteen times and once more for good luck when I walked into the autopsy suite the next day. Claire was standing at the top of a six-foot ladder, her Minolta focused down on Mieke Vetter’s decapitated and naked body. Claire looked huge and wobbly up there.

“Can’t someone else do that?” I asked her.

“I’m done,” she said. She climbed down the ladder, one ponderous step at a time.

I gestured to the woman on the table. “I can save you some time,” I said to Claire. “I happen to know this victim’s cause and manner of death.”

“You know, Lindsay, I still have to do this for evidentiary purposes.”

“Okay, but just so you know. Yesterday, your patient sprayed me with blood, bone fragments, hair, not to mention brains. You have any idea what dripping brains feel like?”

“Warm gummy bears? Am I right?” Claire said, grinning at me.

“Uh. Yeah. Exactly.”

“One of my first cases was a suicide,” Claire said, getting on with her work, drawing a Y incision with her scalpel from each of Ms. Vetter’s clavicles to her pubis.

“This old soldier ends it all with a twelve-gauge shotgun under his chin. So I come into his RV, fresh out of training, ya know? And I’m leaning over his body in the La-Z-Boy, taking photos, and the cops are yukking it up.”

“Because?”

“I had no idea. You see, that’s the point, girlfriend.”

I started laughing for the first time in a long while.

“So as I’m leaning over the body, about a quarter of the guy’s brain has been slowly peeling off the ceiling – it falls and smacks me right behind my ear.”

She slapped her neck to show me, and I rewarded her story with a good guffaw.

“Like I said, warm gummy bears. So, how’d it go?” she asked me.

“How did which go? The interview with your patient’s devil spawn? Or the meeting with the mayor?”

“Both of ’em, baby girl. I’m going to be here all night, thanks to your bird friends filling up my vault all over again.”

“Well, Vetter first, short and to the point,” I told Claire. “He lawyered up, pronto. Got nothing to say. But when he does get around to saying something, I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he says his buddy tortured and killed all those people and he just watched.”

“Won’t really matter, will it? Killer or accessory, he still gets the needle. Plus, you witnessed him killing this poor woman.”

“Me and thirty other cops. But for the sake of the victims’ families, I still want him convicted for killing them all.”

“And your meeting with the mayor?”

“Hah! First Conklin and I get the high fives and Jacobi almost cries, he’s so proud of us, and I think, ‘Whoa, we’re gonna pull our horrible crime-solution rate out of the basement up to maybe the ground floor’ – when the whole conversation devolves into which jurisdiction has the first bite at Vetter since the killings took place in Monterey and Santa Clara Counties as well as – Claire? Honey? What is it? What’s wrong?”

Claire’s face had twisted in pain. She dropped her scalpel, and it rang out against the stainless steel table. She grabbed her belly, looked at me with shock in her eyes.

“My water just broke, Lindsay. I’m not due for three weeks.”

I called for an ambulance, helped my friend into a chair. A minute later the doors to the ambulance bay banged open and two brawny guys strode into the autopsy suite carrying a stretcher.

“What’s up, doc?” said the biggest one.

I said, “Guess who’s having a baby?”

Chapter 123

BECAUSE LITTLE RUBY ROSE was premature, we all wore sterile pink paper hospital gowns, hats, and masks for the occasion. Claire looked like she’d been dragged a quarter of a mile in a tractor pull, but the baby-glow was there under her pallor. And since baby-glow was contagious, we were all euphoric and giggly.

Cindy was crowing about her interview with Hans Vetter’s uncle, and Yuki, having put on a couple of ounces since recovering from being drugged with LSD and almost killed by Jason Twilly, chortled at Cindy’s jokes. The girls told me that I looked hot and possibly happy, the way I should look, since I was living with the perfect man.

“How long is she going to keep us waiting?” I asked Claire again.

“Patience, girlfriend. They’ll roll her in when they’re good and ready. Have another cookie.”

I’d just folded a gooey double chocolate chip with walnuts into my maw when the door to Claire’s room opened – and Conklin came in. He was wearing matching gown, hat, and mask in blue, but he was one of the few men I’d ever known who could look goofy and great at the same time. I could see his gorgeous brown eyes, and they were shining.

Rich held a big bunch of flowers behind his back, and he went around the room saying hello, kissing Cindy and Yuki on their cheeks, squeezing my shoulder, kissing Claire, and then he dramatically produced red roses.

“They’re ruby roses,” he said, with a shy version of his brilliant smile.

“My God, Richie. Three dozen long stems. You know I’m married, right?”

When the laughter stopped, Claire said, “I thank you. And when my little girl gets here, she’ll thank you, too.”

Cindy was looking at Conklin like she’d never seen a man before. “Pull up a chair,” she said. “Richie, we’re going to Susie’s for dinner in a while. Why don’t you come with?”

“Good idea,” I said. “We’ve got to toast our little associate member of the Women’s Murder Club – and you can be the designated driver.”

“I’d like to help you guys out,” Rich said. “But I’ve got a plane to catch in” – he looked at his watch – “in two hours.”

“Where’re you going?” Cindy asked.

I wondered, too. He hadn’t mentioned a trip to me.

“ Denver. For the weekend,” Rich told Cindy.

I looked away, my eyes sliding across Claire’s face. She caught it. Saw that I’d taken an unanticipated blow.

“Going to see Kelly Malone?” Cindy asked, the reporter in her refusing to just shut up.

“Uh-huh,” Rich said. And unless he’d caught the baby-glow from Claire, he was excited.

“I’d really better go. Don’t want to get caught in traffic. Claire, I just wanted to congratulate you on this great news. I’ll want a picture of Ruby as a screen saver.”

“Sure thing,” Claire said, patting Conklin’s hand, thanking him again for the flowers.

I said, “Have a good weekend.”

And Rich said, “You too. All of you guys.”

And then he was gone.

As soon as he was out of the room, Cindy and Yuki started talking about what a rock star Rich was and wasn’t Kelly Malone his high school sweetheart? And then the door opened again. A nurse rolled a tiny cart up to Claire’s bed and all of us peered inside.

Ruby Rose Washburn was a beauty.

She yawned, then opened her dark, long-lashed eyes and looked straight at her mom, my glorious, beaming friend Claire.

We four held hands, made a circle around the cart, each saying a silent prayer for this new child. Claire released our hands so she could hold her baby.

“Welcome to the world, little girl,” said Claire, hugging and kissing her everywhere.

Cindy turned to me, asked, “What did you pray for?”

I snorted a laugh. “Is nothing sacred, you bulldog? Can’t I even talk to God without you asking for a quote?”

Cindy cracked up, put a hand over those cute overlapping front teeth of hers. “Sorry. Sorry,” she said, tears coming out of her eyes.

I put my hand on Cindy’s shoulder and said, “I prayed that Ruby Rose would always have good friends.”

Chapter 124

YUKI GOT OUT of Lindsay’s car, saying, “Now I know what they mean about feeling no pain.”

“We couldn’t stop you from downing two margaritas, sweetie, and God knows we tried. You’re way too little for that much octane. I’ll walk you inside.”

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” Yuki laughed. “I’m going straight to bed. So I’ll talk to you on Monday, ’kay?”

She said good night to Lindsay and walked into the lobby of the Crest Royal, said hello to Sam, the doorman, and wobbled up the three steps to the mail alcove. On the third try, she managed to get the tiny key into the tiny lock, pulled out the banded packet of mail, and took the elevator up to her apartment.

The apartment was empty, but since the ghost of her mother lingered in the furnishings, Yuki talked to Mommy as she dropped the mail on the console in the foyer. An envelope slipped out of her fingers onto the floor. Yuki peered down at it. It was a padded envelope, not very big, dark brown with a handwritten label.

She kicked off her high heels and said, “Mommy, whatever it is, it can wait. Your daughter is smashed.”

But the envelope was intriguing.

Yuki put one hand on the console, bent and picked up the envelope, stared at the unfamiliar handwriting in ballpoint pen. But the return address on the left-hand corner grabbed her. It was just a name: Junie Moon. Yuki ripped open the envelope as she walked unsteadily to her mom’s green sofa.

Junie had been acquitted of Michael Campion’s death. Why would Junie be writing to her?

Sitting on the sofa, Yuki shook the contents of the envelope out onto the glass coffee table. There was a letter and a second envelope with her name on it.

Yuki unfolded the letter impatiently.

Dear Ms. Castellano,

By the time you get this I will be on the road somewhere, I don’t even know where. I want to see America because I have never been outside of San Francisco.

I guess you’re wondering why I’m writing to you, so I’ll get to the point.

The evidence you wanted is in the second envelope, and you’ll probably want to use it to give the Campions some closure.

I hope you understand why I can’t say any more.

Take care,

Junie Moon

Yuki read the letter again.

Her mind was swimming, trying to follow what Junie had said. “The evidence you wanted is in the second envelope.”

Yuki tore open the plain white envelope and emptied two items onto the tabletop. Item one was a shirt cuff, ripped from its sleeve, monogrammed with Michael Campion’s initials. The cuff was saturated with dried blood.

Item two was a small clump of dark hair, about three inches long, roots attached.

Yuki’s hands were shaking, but she was sobering up, starting to think about the call she would make to Red Dog. Wondering, if they put a rush on it, how much time it would take for the lab to process the DNA that would surely match to Michael Campion.

And she thought about how even if they were able to find Junie Moon and bring her in, the law was clear: she couldn’t be tried for Campion’s death again. They could charge her with stuff – perjury, obstruction, hindering prosecution. But unless they could establish how the evidence came into Junie’s possession, odds were that the DA wouldn’t even try to indict her.

Yuki looked at the gruesome evidence that had now dropped literally into her lap. She picked up the phone and called Lindsay. As she listened to the phone ring, she thought about Jason Twilly.

He was charged with attempted murder on the life of a peace officer, and if convicted he could go to prison for the rest of his life without possibility of parole. Or he could hire the best criminal defense attorney money could buy and maybe win.

Maybe he’d go free.

Yuki saw Twilly in her mind, sitting in some café in LA writing his book with everything he needed for his big-bang, gazillion-dollar ending. The news would get out about the bloody cuff, the hank of hair, the DNA matching to Michael Campion.

Who dunnit?

Twilly wouldn’t have to prove it. He could make her a character in his book. And then he could simply point his finger at Junie Moon.

The ring tone stopped.

“Yuki?” she heard Lindsay say.

“Linds, can you come back? I’ve got something you have to see.”

Chapter 125

JUNIE MOON LOOKED out the window and marveled again at the feeling of flight and at the amazing bright turquoise water below. And there, just coming into view, was a little town by the sea. She couldn’t even pronounce its name.

The pilot’s voice came over the speaker. Junie put up her tray table and tightened her seat belt, still staring out the window, seeing the beaches now, and the little boats and the people.

Oh, my God, this was just too fantastic.

She started to think again about that long-ago night when Michael Campion wasn’t a client anymore. They’d talked about their love and how hopeless it all was.

Michael had playfully tugged at the little braid hanging down the back of her neck.

“I have an idea,” he said. “A way for us to be together.”

“I’d do anything,” she’d said. “Anything.”

“Me too,” Michael had said.

It was a pledge.

They’d made plans over the next few weeks, plans that would take place six months in the future. And one night when everything was in place, Michael left her house and just disappeared. Three months later, someone called the police saying he’d seen Michael at her house. And then the police had come and she’d gotten confused and made up a story – and talked herself into a huge mess.

It had been hell: jail and the trial and especially not being able to get mail or phone calls. But she’d known he would wait for her. And if she’d been convicted, he would have come forward. But Junie had hung in, used the brains and the lawyer God had given her, and played her role to the hilt.

And thank you, God, she’d been acquitted.

Three days ago she’d taken the blood and hair he’d sent her and put it into that letter to Yuki Castellano. Now the hard part was over and Junie was traveling light. She had worn boy’s clothes on the bus from San Francisco to Vancouver, the flight to Mexico City, and now she was on another plane, on her way to a little village on a beach in Costa Rica.

This remote and enchanted place would be their new home, and Junie Moon hoped with her whole being that someday Michael’s heart would be fixed and that paradise would last for-fricking-ever.

She’d changed into a cute little sundress in the bathroom, fluffed up her newly straightened dark brown hair, put on the chic cat’s-eye glasses. The wheels of the plane bounced on the landing strip and all the passengers began to clap. Junie clapped, too, as the plane rolled to a stop.

Moments later the cabin door opened and Junie stepped carefully down the steps that had been wheeled up to the aircraft. Junie scanned the many faces peering out at the plane from the small outdoor terminal.

And there he was.

He’d shaven his head, had grown a goatee, and he was brown all over from the sun. He was wearing a bright striped shirt and cutoffs, grinning and waving, calling, “Baby, baby, over here!”

No one would ever recognize him, no one but her.

This was her real life.

And it was starting now.