The 8th Confession

Chapter 50

THE MORNING AFTER Sara Needleman died, Chief Anthony Tracchio called to say, “The mayor’s on my ass. Drop everything except this case, and don’t screw up.”

I said, “Yes, sir, Tony. No screwing up,” but I wanted to scream, “What are we looking for?”

Lieutenant Michael Hampton, a twenty-year veteran of the Special Investigation Division (SID), had also been assigned to our dead- millionaires case, and he looked half as happy as I was. We met in Hampton ’s office, broke down the tasks, and divvied up the list.

Hampton deployed a team to Dr. Dweck’s office to collect Sara Needleman’s records and interview the doctor and his staff. Another SID team shot over to Needleman’s showroom and office to interview Sara’s personal assistant, Toni Reynolds, and the rest of Needleman’s staff.

Conklin and I drove out to Needleman’s house in Cow Hollow with my four guys caravanning behind. Conklin parked on the street. Chi and McNeil, Lemke and Samuels, started the neighborhood canvass while Conklin and I found the main entrance to Needleman’s house.

Sara Needleman’s place wasn’t as Architectural Digest as the Bailey manse, but by any standard, it was stunning. The caretaker, a twentysomething hipster sporting black denim and a goatee, name of Lucas Wilde, met us at the door. He took us through the eight-thousand-square-foot house, a home Sotheby’s would be listing as soon as Disaster Masters cleaned up CSU’s mess.

After the tour of the seven-bedroom house, including the bi-level Japanese garden in back, we invited Lucas Wilde to come to the squad room and tell us what he knew about Sara Needleman.

He willingly complied.

“I know everyone who comes and goes,” he said.

Conklin left us in Interview Room Number Two, ran Wilde’s name, got nothing on him, came back with a legal pad and coffees all around.

We spent another hour with Wilde, and he dumped all his thoughts about Sara Needleman and the company she kept.

“Poofs and phonies, mostly. And then there were her clients.”

The young man laboriously listed all of Sara’s visitors, both friends and workers, including the housekeeper, the dog walker, the Japanese gardener, the tile man, the koi keeper, the yoga teacher, and the caterer.

“What kind of relationship did you have with Sara?” I asked.

“We got along fine. But I was no Lady Chatterley’s lover, if that’s where you’re going. I was the gofer and the handyman, which is what she wanted, and I was happy to have the job and the cool place to live.”

Wilde told us that he saw Sara briefly on the morning of her death. He brought her newspaper in from the gate, and she seemed okay to him.

“She just cracked the door, took the paper. She wouldn’t have told me if she was sick.”

“Got any ideas?” I asked Wilde. “If Sara Needleman was killed, who would’ve killed her?”

“I wouldn’t know where to start,” Wilde said. “Sara was a snob. If you were a mover or a shaker, she was a sweetheart.

“Otherwise, man, she could be cold. I don’t know her friends from her enemies, and frankly I don’t think she knew either.”

Chapter 51

SARA NEEDLEMAN was still chilling in the morgue that evening when the teams working her case were summoned to Chief Anthony Tracchio’s office with its high view of Bryant Street and a photographic panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge mounted across from his mahogany desk.

Tracchio was a bureaucrat by trade, had come up through the ranks by political appointment. He had no street experience, was squishy around the middle, and had a silly hair-sprayed comb-over, but I was starting to appreciate that he was politically shrewd, a quality that I lack entirely.

Tracchio was agitated in a way I’d rarely seen him. He said, “People, tell your families you won’t be home until we’ve got this case wrapped up. And buck up. Whoever solves this thing is going to be a hero. Or heroine,” he said in my direction.

Teams reported, and Tracchio, Hampton, and I questioned them before they were tasked to new assignments.

Conklin and I collected the names of every person interviewed regarding Sara Needleman, then went back to our desks to compare them with a similar list on the Baileys.

“Compare and contrast” was eye-glazing work, but it had to be done. I pulled my chair over to Conklin’s desk and read off names.

Whenever we had a match, Conklin slapped the Staples Easy Button and it squawked, “That was easy.”

By nine that night, our empty pizza box was in the round file. We’d eliminated the Baileys’ live-in household staff and a few hundred others, but still the lists yielded dozens of overlapping names.

The Baileys and Sara Needleman went to the same gym, were all members of the opera society, frequented the same restaurants and clubs. They even shared the same dry cleaner.

“Sara Needleman was thirty-three and so was Isa Bailey. Bet they went to the same school,” said Conklin.

I nodded. It was something.

Something that expanded the search.

I drained my soda can, tossed it in the trash, and said, “I read about a lab experiment. First up were the rats. Two lights, one flashes green, one flashes red. Guess the light that’s about to flash, and if you go to the correct light, you get food. Eight out of ten times, the green one flashes.”

“Go on.”

“The green light flashes so many times, the rats go to that chute every time. Why not? They’re rewarded eighty percent of the time.

“Now the behaviorists did the same experiment with humans.”

“Never been high on rat chow myself.”

I laughed. “The humans got M amp;M’s.”

“I know this is going somewhere,” said my partner.

“The people tried to predict when each light would go on. They were looking for a pattern – so many reds before a green, like that. And they were rewarded only sixty-seven percent of the time.”

“Proving that rats are smarter than people.”

I shook my head no.

Conklin tried again. “Proving that we should interview every name on both lists whether they’re red people or green?”

I laughed, said, “Proving that sometimes people think too much.”

“You’re tired, Linds.”

“Let’s compare the lists again. And this time, we don’t overthink. We just pull the names of the rats who had keys to the victims’ houses.”

Rich hit the Staples button, and it yapped, “That was easy.”

Chapter 52

PET GIRL WAS handing over Sara Needleman’s dogs to the caretaker, Lucas Wilde-boy, she liked to call him, when the squad car pulled up to the curb and two familiar cops got out. The woman cop was tall, blond, looked like Sheryl Crow had landed a gig on Celebrity Cops.

The guy cop was a couple of inches taller than the blonde, buffed, maybe thirty.

Sheryl Crow showed her badge, reintroduced herself as Sergeant Boxer and her partner as Inspector Conklin, and asked if Pet Girl would mind coming with them to the Hall of Justice to answer some questions.

Pet Girl said, “Okay.”

She was cool. All she had to do was play along, and they’d move along – just like they’d done the last time, when they’d questioned her about Isa and Ethan Bailey.

She slid into the backseat of the squad car, thought about the night she’d done it, pretty sure she hadn’t forgotten anything.

She flashed on Wilde-boy, positive that he hadn’t seen her go into Sara’s house because he’d walked naked past his window, the light going on in his bathroom, and she’d heard the shower running before she’d gone in the main entrance.

She remembered doing it to Sara when “the dame with the golden needle” was so boozed up, she couldn’t even open an eye. Pet Girl felt a thrill, like she wanted to laugh or maybe pee.

And she listened to the two cops gabbing in the front seat, talking to Dispatch, joking and stuff, seemed to Pet Girl that they weren’t acting like they had a killer sitting behind them.

More like they’d already forgotten she was even there.

She stood silently between the two cops as they went up in the elevator, turned down the offer of a soft drink when they showed her to the interview room.

“Are you sure?” the sergeant asked her. “Maybe a bottle of water?” Like the cop cared instead of wanting to get a DNA sample, a trick so old it was amazing anyone ever fell for it.

“I want to help,” Pet Girl said sweetly. “Whatever you want to know.”

Inspector Conklin was cute, had light-brown hair that flopped over his eyes. He pushed it away as he read to himself whatever notes he had written about her. And then he asked her where she’d been over the last forty-eight hours.

Pet Girl knew they were locking in her story in case they ever interrogated her again, and hey, no problem.

“I walked the Baileys’ dogs four times, morning and evening both days. I wonder what’s going to happen to the dogs…”

Then she’d detailed her tight calendar of dog-walking and running errands, including walking Sara Needleman’s AKC champs this morning after Lucas Wilde called her to say that Sara Needleman was dead.

“See anything or anyone unusual in this neighborhood in the last week or so?” Sergeant Boxer asked her.

“Nope.”

“What do you think of Lucas Wilde?”

“He’s okay. Not my type.”

“What was your relationship like with Sara Needleman?” asked Inspector Conklin.

“I loved Sara,” she told him. Found herself giving him a flirty smile. Couldn’t hurt. “Sara was smart and funny and generous, too. She gave me samples from her collection. That’s just the way she was.”

“How often did you walk her dogs?”

“Maybe once a week. She liked to walk them herself. Anyway, if she got into a time crunch, she’d call me and I’d pitch in.”

“And the Baileys?”

“Same. Walk the dogs. Run errands. I work for a lot of people in their crowd. Dozens. I’ve got references.”

“Sounds pretty good,” Inspector Conklin said. “You make your own hours.” Then, “Did Sara have any enemies?”

“Christ, yeah. She had three ex-husbands and about thirty ex-boyfriends, but I’m not saying they’d want to kill her.”

“Anyone on that list of exes who may have also held a grudge against the Baileys?”

“If you only knew how little those people told me about anything.”

“Do you have keys to the Needleman house and the Bailey house?” Sergeant Boxer asked her. Pet Girl reached into a side pocket of her backpack, pulled out a key ring the size of a boat anchor.

“I’ve got lots of keys. That’s kind of the point. I keep out of my clients’ way. I’m the silent type, and they like that about me. I come in, walk the pets, bring them back. Pick up my check. Most of the time, nobody even knows I’ve been there.”

Chapter 53

AFTER THE dog walker left, I said to Conklin, “You know, my dog sitter has had my keys and my alarm code for years and I’ve never thought a thing of it. Martha loves Karen. I trust her.”

“So what are you saying now, Sarge-of-My-Heart? You’re throwing out the ‘rats with keys’ theory?”

“I don’t know, bud. The dog walker’s got access, but what’s her motive? What’s she got to gain by killing her employers?” My intercom buzzed, and Brenda’s voice came over, sounding breathy and a little coy. “Lindsay, you have a visitor.”

I looked across the squad room. Didn’t see anyone.

I pressed the intercom button, asked Brenda, “Who is it?”

“He’s on his way back.”

I heard him before I saw him, the whir of rubber rolling over linoleum flooring, and then St. Jude was there, doing a wheelie, parking his chair up to my desk, a huge grin on his bearded face.

“Boxer, you look great, kid. Better and better.”

I got up and hugged the legendary Simon McCorkle, known around the state as “St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.” McCorkle had been shot in the back while on duty, was paralyzed from the waist down but refused to retire. Since that dark day twenty years ago, “St. Jude” had been in charge of cold cases, worked out of an office suite at the crime lab.

“Thanks, McCorkle. I see a little gray in your beard. Looks fine on you.”

“Give me your hand, Boxer. No, the left one. Not married? So I still have a chance.”

I laughed, introduced McCorkle to Conklin, and they gripped paws like long-lost brothers of the shamrock, and pretty soon we were telling St. Jude about the case of the deceased millionaires, an investigation that was driving us crazy.

McCorkle said, “That’s why I’m here, girl- o. When I saw Sara Needleman on the tube this morning, I added it to the Baileys – and guess what, Boxer?

“It rang a bell.”

Chapter 54

MCCORKLE REACHED BEHIND his chair with one of his massive, heavily tattooed arms and pulled a backpack onto his lap.

“I brought you a present,” he said, winking at me.

“I can’t even guess, but I’m hoping for chocolate.”

He took a murder book out of his backpack, a three-ring binder thick with notes and documents from a homicide case. The book was lettered across the cover with a broad-tip marker: PANGORN, 1982.

Two more murder books followed the first, one marked GODFREY, 1982, and the other, KENNEDY, 1982.

“What is all this?” I asked as McCorkle shifted the three binders to my overflowing desk.

“Patience, my pretty. This is the final one. Christopher Ross. He was the last to go, died in December nineteen eighty-two.”

“McCorkle, my man, fill me in.”

“I’m going to tell you everything, and maybe you, me, and Conklin here are all going to get some closure.”

I leaned back in my chair. There were people in the world who lived for an audience, and Simon McCorkle was one of them.

It partly came from being in that lab all the way out there on Hunters Point. It also came from obsessing about cold cases and colder bodies.

But there was another thing. Whether he solved the crime today or next month, St. Jude was always sinking free throws, scoring points that wouldn’t have been made without him. His job made for excellent storytelling.

“Here’s what these victims all had in common.” McCorkle leaned forward in his chair, put a beefy arm across the folders so that I was staring at a hairy, half- naked hula girl on his personal tattoo beach.

“The victims were all high-society types. They all died showing no signs of foul play. But the last victim, this Christopher Ross – the killer left the murder weapon at the crime scene. And a very distinctive weapon it was.”

I was just out of school when this terrible killing spree ended, so I hadn’t fastened on the particulars of this case – but it was coming back to me now, why those cases were unsolved.

McCorkle grinned as he watched the dawn breaking inside my poor, tired brain. I did remember.

“It was a distinctive murder weapon, all right,” I said to my Erin go bro. “Those victims were killed by snakes.”

Chapter 55

RICH CONKLIN had dinner that evening with Cindy at a Thai restaurant across the street from her apartment.

It was not a date, they’d both been very clear about that, but she was twinkling at him as she passed him the files she’d printed out, all the stories on the “high-society murders of nineteen eighty-two” that had run in the Chronicle before the personal computer was as common as the telephone.

“I’m trusting you,” she said. “If you tell anyone I gave you this stuff from our ‘morgue,’ I’m going to be in the soup.”

“Wouldn’t want any soup on you,” Conklin said.

“So fair’s fair,” said Cindy. “I share, you share.”

Cindy had a rhinestone clip in her hair. Very few girls older than eight could pull off rhinestone barrettes at the same time they were wearing pink, but Cindy somehow looked 100-percent delicious.

And Conklin was absolutely mesmerized watching her strip the meat from a chicken wing with her lips, so delicately and at the same time with such pleasure.

“Rich,” she said, “fair’s fair. It’s clear that you see a connection between the Baileys and Sara Needleman and the nineteen eighty-two society killings. But are you thinking that the killer from all those years ago has gone back into the murder business?”

“See, the question is, can I trust you, Cindy? Because, actually, you’re not so trustworthy.”

“Awwww. You just have to say the magic words.”

“Please, Cindy.”

“Richieee. What you want to say is ‘off the record.’ I’d go to jail before I’d go back on ‘off the record.’ ”

Rich laughed, sat back, let the waiter take away the remains of his sea bass, said, “Thanks for telling me. I don’t want you to go to jail. But you realize I’d be in more than soup if I leaked this story to your paper.”

“You don’t have to worry. Number one, I promise.” She made the Girl Scout oath hand sign, three fingers up, thumb over her pinky. “Two, you’re going off the record. And three, it’s not my story,” she said. “I’m working the Bagman Booker case, remember?”

“Okay, off the record, Cindy. You read the files. Back in eighty-two rich people were killed, turns out by snakebites, and yeah, maybe the killer is coming out of retirement. Maybe he’s bored. Wouldn’t be the first time. The BTK killer, for instance.”

“Oh man, that guy,” said Cindy, shaking her head, rhinestones flashing. “ ‘Bind them, torture them, kill them.’ That guy still gives me the creeps. Worked for a home-security company, I seem to remember. Mr. Regular Dad, Kiwanis Club, Rotary Club, whatever.”

“Yep. He was a homebody for about twenty-five years after his last killing. Then one day he realizes life had more punch when he was taunting cops, getting headlines. So he starts sending letters out to newspapers and TV stations. His ego trips him up and he gets nailed.”

“So you’re thinking the society killer of nineteen eighty-two is the same guy who killed the Baileys and Sara Needleman?”

Conklin signaled the waiter for the check. “Possibly.”

“Wouldn’t that be something?” Cindy said.

She was looking at him like he’d done something wrong, so he said, “Oh, sorry, did you want anything else? Ice cream or something?”

“I was just thinking. I’m not finished talking about this. I finally unpacked my cappuccino machine, Rich.”

Conklin watched her twirl a curl around her finger. He smiled and said, “Are you inviting me over for coffee?”

Chapter 56

MCCORKLE AND I were in the squad room having congealed Chinese take-out as we went over the murder books.

McCorkle flapped open the one marked PANGORN, said, “April Pangorn was a beautiful young widow, only twenty-eight and very wealthy. According to Inspector Sparks’s notes, she had many chums of both sexes.”

“Says here Ms. Pangorn was found dead in her bed, no marks or bruises,” I said. “Just like the Baileys and Sara Needleman.”

“Right you are, which is why it wasn’t considered a homicide until Frank Godfrey dropped dead.”

McCorkle gnawed on a cold sparerib, tossed the bone into the trash as I opened the Godfrey book, started flipping the pages to follow along as St. Jude narrated.

“Godfrey, Frank. White male, forty-five, retired prizefighter, owned a piece of Raleigh ’s.

“It’s closed now, but then it was a very old-school club, red velvet on the walls, humidors on the bar, gambling in the back room. Frankie kept busy in his deluxe apartment in the sky. Very busy. He liked women – in multiples – and he liked to spend money. Look here, Lindsay. The photo of the scene.”

The victim was lying facedown on the bedroom floor, looked to me like he might have been crawling to the bathroom just visible at the edge of the frame.

McCorkle was saying, “Homicide thought maybe Frank was murdered, but the ME couldn’t find the cause. Negative autopsy, negative toxicology. Positive mystery.

“Next up. Patrick Kennedy was a banker,” said McCorkle, reaching across the table, grabbing the third book. “He was gay, a top secret fact that came out when he died, because everything was shaking out.

“There were three ultrarich people dead in a couple of months under suspicious circumstances. Things got a little desperate here in the Southern Division. A Lieutenant Leahy took over for Inspector Sparks, spent about a month interviewing every gay man in San Francisco.” McCorkle laughed. “Half of them ‘knew’ Paddy. Sorry,” he said. “But think about it. And then, a month later, Christopher Ross died.”

“And what was his story?” I asked. I broke open a fortune cookie, read the little squib of paper to McCorkle. “ ‘A good friend will give you the answer.’ ”

I gave McCorkle a soft punch to one of his humongous arms. “Get on with it, buddy. How did the cops find out about the snakes? Spill it, Jude.”

Chapter 57

MCCORKLE LAUGHED at me.

“Boxer, I’m talking as fast as I can.”

“Talk faster.”

I pounded the Godfrey murder book in jest, but I was starting to get really scared. Four society people had mysteriously died in ’82. We already had three similar, if not identical, deaths within the same week.

I hadn’t fully believed that our unmarked deaths were homicides – but I did now. And I could see that if we were looking at the same killer, he was slippery, smart, and very organized.

“Christopher Ross,” I said. “The final victim.”

“Christopher Ross,” said McCorkle, opening the fourth murder book to one of the morgue photos. “He was a forty-two-year-old white man. Rich as God. Born into old money. He was a family man who fooled around on the side. Some said he even had another family right here in town.

“Look at his kisser there, Boxer. Even dead, Chris Ross was a looker. His wife was one of those women who just put up with his breaking his vows. People said Chris was her lifelong sweetheart, and she loved him. And then, suddenly, he was found stone dead in his own bed – and this was why.”

McCorkle turned to the back of the Ross murder book.

“Here’s your murder weapon,” he said.

It was what I’d been waiting for – and it was nothing like what I expected. The snake was pinned to a board alongside a yardstick showing that the reptile was twenty-one inches long.

I just couldn’t drag my eyes away from that snake.

It was delicate, banded in bluish-gray and white, looked more like jewelry than a killer.

“This snake is a krait,” McCorkle was saying. “Incredibly lethal. Comes from India, so someone imported it. Illegally. No signs of a break-in at any of the victims’ houses.”

“So how did the snake get there?”

McCorkle shrugged expansively.

“And this one snake killed the other victims?” I asked.

“Maybe not this particular snake, Lindsay, but a snake just like it. The first three bodies were exhumed and examined microscopically. The ME, a Dr. Wetmore, found the bite marks on all four victims.

“And according to Dr. Wetmore, the marks were damned hard to see with the naked eye. They were like pinpricks, easily missed if you weren’t looking for them. And according to his report, there was no swelling or discoloration around the bite marks.”

“What about suspects?” I asked.

“Mrs. Christopher Ross inherited fifty million bucks. She was interrogated repeatedly, kept under surveillance. Her phones were tapped, but no one believed she did it. She had her own money. She had everything.”

“Is she still alive?”

“Died in a car accident two or three years after her husband’s death. And there never was another serious suspect.”

“Simon, did the victims know one another?”

“Some did, some didn’t, but one thing they all had in common was that they were all very rich. And something else, maybe you can use it.

“The lead investigator, Lieutenant Leahy, made an unfortunate aside to his deputy at a press conference and the mic was open. A reporter ran with it.”

“Don’t make me beg, McCorkle.”

“Leahy said, and I quote, ‘The victims were twisted – sexually and morally corrupt.’ ”

McCorkle was telling me that the sky fell on Leahy after his comment ran in the Chronicle, that he relocated to Omaha not long after that. But I was far from Omaha. I was thinking about a dainty little Indian snake that left almost imperceptible bite marks.

Claire didn’t know anything about this.

I had to call her.

Chapter 58

RICH’S EYES ADJUSTED to the dim light in Cindy’s apartment. He’d been here a year and a half ago when a murdering psycho was at large in the building – a situation that couldn’t possibly be more different from this.

He and Cindy were alone. They’d been drinking. And Cindy was fussing with her multipart cappuccino machine as if she were really going to make coffee.

How had this happened?

Had wishing made it true?

As Cindy piled coffee-machine parts onto the countertop, Rich’s mind deleted her pink sweater and her tight pants, ran his hands all over her, refusing to peer any farther into the future than, say, an hour from now.

He couldn’t think about later.

He hadn’t planned for this.

“What’s your bird’s name?” he asked, walking over to the large brass cage on a table near the window. The bird was white and peach, with scaly claws and a black beak. Reminded him of a junkyard dawg.

“That’s Peaches,” said Cindy, coming up behind Rich, standing so close he could feel her breasts pressing against his back. “He was lonely in the pet store…”

Rich turned to Cindy, and her arms went around his neck. He drew her close and kissed her.

It was a perfect first kiss, no clashing of noses or teeth, Rich smelling flowers, tasting watermelon lip gloss and white wine, Cindy’s strong little body pressing hard against him, making him feel like he was going to burst out of his clothes like the freaking Hulk, when Peaches shrieked, “Kill the bitch! Kill the bitch!”

“He was abused,” Cindy said softly, with a melting look on her face as much as saying, “Take me to bed.”

“That’s too bad,” Rich said.

He reached into her hair and unfastened the rhinestone clip, and a torrent of blond curls jumped into his hand.

“Ohhhh,” Cindy said.

Still standing in front of the bird, Rich gently removed Cindy’s diamond studs, placing first one and then the other on the table, seeing her skin flush from the V of her sweater up to her eyes as her breathing cranked to about sixty miles per hour.

She hooked her hand around his belt.

He kissed her again and she moaned, then opened her hazy blue eyes and said, “You’re a little fast for me, Rich, but please. Don’t stop.”

He grinned at her, said, “How about a coffee break?”

“Later,” she said, taking his hand, pulling him through the living room and back to her bedroom.

Once there, she turned on the bedside lamp with its pink bulb and gauzy shade, stood in front of him, and lifted her arms like a little girl. He pulled off her sweater. He ran his fingers across the tops of her breasts, which were swelling out of her pink lace demibra, her nipples hardening behind the lace.

She unhooked her bra, breasts spilling out, sat down on the bed, and wriggled out of her pants. He ripped his shirttails from his waistband, and Cindy leaned forward to help with the last of his shirt buttons, undo his belt buckle, and hug him around the waist, resting her cheek against his zipper.

His clothing flew into the corner of the room, and then they were lying side by side in her bed, glued together, all panting and skin-on-skin, Rich slipping his hands into the flimsy fabric of her panties, making them disappear.

There was a fumbling moment, Cindy finding a square of foil in her nightstand, opening the packet with her teeth – and then he was inside her, making love to the beautiful woman with the curly blond hair who breathed, “Oh, oh, oh,” into his ear, and he held her tight until the shock waves overtook him and he cried out into her pillow.

Rich was awoken sometime later by the sound of the telephone on the nightstand, Cindy silky and warm in his arms, whispering, “Let’s not tell Lindsay.”

“Why not?”

“She’ll spoil it.”

Rich nodded his agreement – he would have agreed to anything – and then he heard Yuki’s voice coming over Cindy’s answering machine.

“Cindy. Cindy, pick up. Where are you? I have to talk to you. Damn. Call me, okay? Love you.”

Cindy held Rich’s face with one hand, reached down with the other hand and gave him a little tug, breathed, “Richie? Can you stay?”

Chapter 59

CLAIRE AND I were huddled around her office computer at seven fifteen in the morning, caffeine free, reading an e-mail to Claire from Michelle Koo, a senior herpetologist at Berkeley.

Claire read aloud, “ ‘Dear Claire, two of the most familiar families of venomous snakes are the Elapidae and the Viperidae,’ ” she said, neatly rounding the corners of the Latin, “ ‘or, rather, elapid snakes and viperid snakes. Kraits are in the Elapidae family. The venom of elapids are neurotoxins, are typically faster-acting than viperids, and leave better-looking corpses.’ ”

“Better-looking corpses, indeed,” I said, breathing over her shoulder. “You could even say museum quality.”

“ ‘The kraits’ bites are often painless,’ ” Claire read on, “ ‘and this gives the victim a false sense of security.’ ”

“So that’s why the Baileys didn’t call for help.”

“I’m thinking the same thing, Linds. Or maybe they never knew they were in trouble. The Baileys had high blood-alcohol. Needleman, too. In medicalspeak, they were all zonked.

“Here,” Claire went on, “Michelle writes, ‘The symptoms can include stomach cramps and dizziness, dilated pupils and slurred speech, inability to swallow, heart arrhythmia, respiratory failure, and falling into a coma. Death can come in six to eight hours.’ ”

I had stopped reading the text and had fastened on the photo of the krait, the same beguilingly lovely elapid I’d seen lined up along a yardstick in the Christopher Ross murder book.

“Michelle says, ‘Death is directly due to the neurotoxicity of the venom as it acts on fundamental chemical pathways that keep our muscles working.’ And that’s the main thing, girlfriend. The muscles can’t work. So the victim can’t breathe. And the neurotoxin is metabolized so fast, even if you knew what to look for – which we didn’t – nothing shows up on the tox screen.”

I said to my best friend, “So if there’s no neurotoxin left in the victims’ bodies by the time they die, how can you prove what killed them?”

Claire opened a desk drawer, rooted around, cried, “Gotcha!” and pulled out a magnifying glass the size of a saucer.

“I’m going to do precisely what old Doc Wetmore did. Go over my patients’ bodies with a glass and a bright light,” she said. “Look for itty-bitty puncture wounds that might’ve been caused by fangs.”

Chapter 60

WE WERE ALL crowded into Jacobi’s votive holder of an office, Cindy in the worn desk chair in front of Jacobi’s desk, Conklin and I squeezed in between stacks of paper on his credenza.

“I’ve known you how long now?” Jacobi was saying to Cindy.

“Six years or so.”

“And I’ve never asked you for a favor before, have I?”

“ Warren, I told Rich and I told Lindsay that I’m not even working the high-society murder story.”

Jacobi leveled his hard gray eyes at my friend, and frankly I admired her ability to hold her own. He’d intimidated depraved killers with that same stony look.

“It’s not just that it’s not your story,” said Jacobi. “It’s that you know something we want to keep in the vault for now.”

“All of those files I pulled for Rich are in the public record,” Cindy said, showing Jacobi her palms. “Anyone could find out what I know, including someone else at the Chronicle.”

“It’s buried in the public record,” said Jacobi. “And we need it to stay buried for now. That’s why we’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”

Cindy laughed. “I love it when you guys offer me an exclusive when I’ve already done the work.”

“Cindy, let’s not start talking personal gain, okay? We’ve got four unsolveds from the eighties and three probable homicides from the last week. We’ll give you the first clear shot, and that’s a promise.”

My cell phone rang, and I glanced down at my hip. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let the phone ring again before I snatched the receiver off the hook and growled, “Boxer,” as I edged out of Jacobi’s office.

Joe was laughing.

“Ohh man, I’m sorry,” I said.

“Forget it, Blondie, it’s good to hear your voice, no matter how snarly you are.”

“I’ve got good reason to snarl.”

I caught Joe up fast, telling him about Sara Needleman’s death and that Jacobi was restraining Cindy in virtual handcuffs so that our snake killer didn’t slither down a hole.

“Any leads on the doer?”

“Too many and none,” I said. “We’re going to start throwing darts at the phone book pretty soon. And by the way, when are you coming home?”

As I paced a circle around Cappy McNeil’s desk, Joe said he was hoping that he’d be back in a week or so and that we should make plans to do something fun, dress up, celebrate his return.

I kissed the little holes in my cell phone, heard kisses in my ear, and then I went back to Jacobi’s office. I sat down next to Conklin cheek-to-cheek on the cheap credenza, the warmth of his hip and arm making me think about him and about Joe, and making me ask myself yet again why each man had a grip on me that clouded my feelings for the other.

Conklin leaned forward, almost parking his nose in Cindy’s hair, saying to her, “Like you said, it might be the same killer coming out of retirement. Or he might be a copycat.”

“Either way, he’s a repeater,” Jacobi growled. “We can’t tip him off. We need every advantage because we’re nowhere, Cindy, and I’ll give you any odds: if he can, this guy is going to kill again.”

Chapter 61

YUKI WAS SCARED out of her mind.

She couldn’t remember any day when she’d felt as special as she did with John “Doc” Chesney. And it seemed that the feeling was fantastically mutual.

Oh God. Twice now, he’d played his eyes over her face until her cheeks burned and she had to say something, anything, because she just couldn’t take so much attention.

Doc had met her early that morning out at the beach. He was wearing a navy-blue parka over his jeans, a color that turned his eyes bluer, his sandy hair blonder, the dazzling entirety of his being enough to make Brad Pitt jealous.

Yuki had cautioned herself not to get too gaga on their first real date, not to let her moony eyes show, reminded herself that she’d been a bitch when she’d first met Doc and he’d liked that about her.

And so she’d gotten a grip on herself and they’d spent the day exploring Crissy Field, a very pretty park that ran along the shoreline from Marina Green to Fort Point, a Civil War fort that was lodged underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

She’d jogged a bit faster along the path than Doc did, laughed at him for not keeping up until he sprinted past her, kicking up a little sandstorm and calling over his shoulder, “Hey, girlie, just try and catch me.”

She’d collapsed on a weathered bench, laughing and panting, and he’d come back to her, also blowing hard, dropping down beside her, the smell of him filling her up, making her knees shake.

“You’re a show-off, you know?” he’d huffed, staring at her until she’d said, “Oh, look,” and pointed to the bobbing heads in the bay.

“Coconuts?”

“You’re kidding me, right? Those are sea lions.”

“You like all this nature stuff?” he’d said, untying his Reeboks, shaking out the sand. “All this big sky, these creepy life-forms -”

“Crabs and jellyfish -”

“As I was saying, you nature-lover -”

“Oooooooh, Doc, that really hurts.” Yuki laughed. “By the way, New Yorkers don’t have a lock on skyscrapers. I like cities as much as you do.”

“Yeah? Prove it.” He’d grinned, showing her that his whole act was just that – an act.

But she’d proved it anyway, named her top-ten architects, seven of whom turned out to be his favorites, too, and told him about San Francisco landmarks, putting her Golden Gate Bridge up against his Throgs Neck any day of the week, her Folsom Street against his Fifth Avenue, and then she’d asked him what ocean he could see from midtown Manhattan.

Doc gave her props for “the ocean thing,” and they walked together to the Warming Hut, where they sat now at a small table, hot cocoa in hand, their cheeks flushed, grinning at each other as if their feelings were gold coins they’d found in the back pockets of their jeans, never having seen them before.

“You know, you’re gorgeous,” he said.

“Come on.”

“Yeah, you are.”

He reached over and rubbed her bristly head, and she touched the back of his hand and rested her cheek in his palm, waiting for the bubble to burst, which it did when his cell phone went off to “Somebody to Love.”

Doc sighed, removed his warm palm from her cheek, opened his phone, and announced, “Chesney,” into the speaker.

“I’m not on call,” he said. “Isn’t that his problem? Okay, okay. I can make it in an hour.”

Doc put his phone away and grabbed both of Yuki’s hands in his. “I’m sorry, Yuki. It’s going to be this way until I move up in the pecking order.”

“I understand,” she said.

They walked back to their cars together, arms around each other’s waists, covering new territory, Yuki liking the feeling so much and equally relieved that the day had closed at the best moment. She was attracted to Doc, and she was scared.

He draped an arm over her shoulder, brought her to him, and kissed her, sweetly, softly, so she kissed him again, even more so.

When they broke apart, Yuki blurted, “I haven’t had sex in almost two years.”

A look passed over Doc’s face that she couldn’t read. It was like an eclipse of the sun. He hugged her, got into his car, and said out the window, “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” she said, too softly for him to hear over the sound of the engine as he drove away.

What had she said to him?

Why had she said that?

Chapter 62

CINDY SAT IN a booth of a diner called Moe’s, just down the block from Bagman’s condemned Victorian house that had decayed into a crash pad for druggies.

Her grilled cheese and coffee were cooling, and Cindy was making notes for a sidebar: how many homeless died before the age of forty, how many were under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they died – 65 percent.

She was taking the data off the SFPD Web site, so it was automatic writing, not creative, but it was distracting her from the delicious aches and twinges caused by spending another entire night wrapped around Richard Conklin, this time at his place. And those memories only made her want to call him, make another date to wrap herself around him again.

She was in that luminous and dangerous state of mind when she felt a tug on her hair, turned to see a woman peering over the back of the booth at her and saying her name.

Cindy thought the woman looked familiar but at the same time didn’t recognize her.

“Sorry. Do I know you?”

“I’ve seen you at From the Heart.”

“Okay, sure,” Cindy said, pretty certain that she didn’t recognize this young woman from the soup kitchen – but she couldn’t place her anywhere else.

“Want to join me?” Cindy said, forcing herself to make the offer, because you just never knew. This woman with the messy blond hair could be the one who knew who killed Bagman Jesus.

“You look busy.”

“It’s okay,” Cindy said, shutting the lid of her laptop as the woman took the seat across from her.

Cindy could see the beginning of the woman’s decline into an extreme meth makeover: the graying skin, the huge pupils, the high agitation.

“I’m Sammy.”

“Hi, Sammy.”

“I read your last story. About Bagman being a guy named Rodney Booker. That he went to Stanford.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I went to Stanford, too.”

“You dropped out, I’m guessing.”

“School can’t compete,” Sammy said.

“With what?”

“With life.”

Cindy blinked into the young woman’s face. She was remembering the cautions, not to speak too fast, move too quickly, appear in any way a threat. That as long as the meth addict was talking, it was safe enough. Silence meant she might be getting paranoid – and dangerous.

Cindy tried not to look down at the fork and knife on the table. She said softly, “Do you know who killed Bagman, Sammy? Do you know we’re offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward?”

“What’s your life worth, Cindy?” Sammy said, her eyes darting all around the diner, then back to Cindy. “Would you sell your life for money you’ll never get to spend? That’s what I want to tell you. You’re wasting your time. No one’s going to say who the people are who killed Bagman Jesus. No one would dare.”

Chapter 63

I WAS IN THE squad car with Conklin, heading toward a dive of a bar in the Mission, where our new and only suspect was said to work from three p.m. until midnight.

Henry Wallis’s name had come to us by way of an anonymous tip, but what made this tip different than the hundreds of others that had fried our phone lines was that Henry Wallis was on our short list.

He was a bartender, had worked the Baileys’ parties, and had dated Sara Needleman – until she dumped him. And the tipster said he’d seen Wallis driving down Needleman’s street, passing in front of her house several times in his one-of-a-kind junker the night before Needleman died.

Wallis’s sheet listed his arrests for violent crimes.

He’d been convicted of domestic violence and assault and battery, and he’d been charged with attempted murder when he and a couple of other drunken bullies had worked over a customer in an alley behind the bar and nearly killed him.

The witnesses to the beating had differing stories. The evidence was thin. Wallis was found not guilty. Case dismissed.

Stats said that Wallis was white, five ten, 165 pounds, and, most important, forty-six years of age. That meant he was old enough to have read about the high-society murders in the ’80s.

Hell, he was old enough to have committed them.

Conklin and I wondered if Wallis had keys to both the Bailey and Needleman houses. It seemed probable, even likely.

The photo we had of Wallis was four years old, but he was good-looking, even in the scathing high-contrast flash of the Polaroid camera.

He had muscular arms, jailhouse tats on his knuckles.

But what had sent me and Conklin out to the car was the tattoo on Wallis’s left shoulder: that of a snake twining through the vacant eyes of a skull.

Conklin was quiet as he drove, and I understood why.

We were both imagining the variety of ways the scene could play out in the Torchlight Bar: what we’d do if Wallis drew a weapon, if he ran, how we’d manage whatever came down without causing collateral damage.

Conklin parked on Fifteenth between Valencia and Guerrero in front of the Torchlight Bar and Grill, a white clapboard building surrounded by bookstores and cafés.

I unbuttoned my jacket, touched the butt of my gun. Conklin did the same. And we entered the dark atmosphere of the bar. There was a TV overhead, tuned to a recap of yesterday’s ball game – the A’s were getting pounded.

The bartender was six-foot-two, weighed one eighty, and was bald. It was gloomy in that bar – dim light cast by neon signs – but even so, I could see from thirty feet away that the bartender wiping beer mugs with a dirty towel wasn’t Henry Wallis.

I stood just inside the doorway as Conklin went to the bartender, flashed his badge, talked quietly under the television’s blare. The bartender’s eyes went to me, then back to Conklin.

Then he pointed to a man at the head of the bar who was sipping a beer and looking up at the TV screen, unaware that we’d come through the door.

Conklin signaled to me, and we approached Henry Wallis. Maybe he had eyes in the back of his head, or maybe the guy next to him saw us and gave Wallis a nudge, but he whipped his head around, saw my hand going for my piece, and made for the rear exit.

Conklin yelled, “Freeze! Wallis, stay where you are.”

But the man took a turn around the kitchen and kept running until he reached the back door, which banged shut behind him.

When we opened the door seconds later, Wallis was inside his rusty black Camaro and was shooting down Albion Street like a cannonball.

Chapter 64

I CALLED DISPATCH, requested backup as Conklin floored our car up the deserted street.

The no-nonsense voice of the dispatcher Jackie Kam came over the radio and declared a code 33 – silence on our wave band – and alerted all cars in the area that we were in pursuit of a black Camaro heading up Sixteenth toward Market.

This was bad.

School was out, the worst time for a high-speed chase, dangerous for me and Conklin, potentially lethal for other drivers and pedestrians.

I flipped on our sirens and grille lights. Wallis had at least thirty seconds on us, and as he pulled away going seventy, it was clear that he wasn’t slowing down for anything or anybody.

“I can’t read his plate,” I said to Dispatch. But we were almost close enough when the harsh screech of metal on metal, accompanied by panicky horns, preceded the sight of a taco van tipping over.

Wallis’s car backed up, then hauled ass, whipping around the fallen van, fishtailing across both lanes, and caroming off a parked station wagon. Then Wallis jammed down the pedal, leaving rubber on the asphalt and the disabled van in the middle of Market.

I called in the collision, urgently requested EMS. As we blew past the van, the driver staggered out into the street with blood on his forehead, trying to flag us down.

We couldn’t stop. I swore at the son of a bitch Wallis as Conklin floored our car toward the intersection of Market and Castro.

I had the plate number now, and I called it in: “Foxtrot Charlie Niner Three One Echo heading toward Portola.”

Portola is a twisting grade, and we were flying around those turns at fifty, the Camaro getting even farther out in front of us. All along Portola, vehicles ran up on the curb and bikes hugged the sides of buildings.

We assumed more patrol cars were on their way, but for now we were still alone following Wallis.

“Dispatch! Any casualties?”

“Walking wounded only, Sergeant. What’s your location?”

I told Kam we were on Twin Peaks Boulevard, the top of a small mountain in the center of the city. I’d busted teenagers making out under our main radio tower on that spot, but now I was hanging on to the dashboard as Conklin screamed, “Bastard!” and sped up the insanely treacherous road lined with two-foot-high guardrails, dented where cocky drivers had gone ballistic.

We were closing in on Wallis as he began his high-speed descent toward Clayton, a snaky and steep slide that sent my guts into my throat. I clenched the microphone so hard I put fingernail marks in the plastic.

I called in our location again: we were heading into the Upper Haight, a residential area of Tudor and Victorian houses occupied by young families who lived on the genteel tree-lined streets.

A child, a woman, and a dog appeared in our windshield. I screamed, “Noooo!” Conklin leaned on the horn and the brakes, took us up on the sidewalk, our wheels flying over the curb, our siren wailing like a wounded banshee as we slammed back onto the street.

Conklin grunted. “Everything’s under control.”

Who was he kidding?

I looked behind us and saw no bodies in the street, but still my heart was airborne. Were we going to survive this joyride? Would we kill people today?

“Where is this asshole taking us?” I asked the air.

“To hell. He’s taking us to hell,” Conklin said.

Did he know?

I think he did. Somehow Conklin instinctively knew where Henry Wallis was heading.

It took me another minute to get it.

Chapter 65

I GRIPPED THE DASHBOARD, stared out as the streets blew by and we played dodge ’em with innocent bystanders, wondering if Henry Wallis was our man. Had he killed three people last week?

Had he killed a total of seven?

How many more would he kill before we stopped him?

“Hang on, Linds,” Conklin said, wrenching the steering wheel hard. We squealed onto Haight Street, where the likelihood of mowing down punks, retired flower children, old people getting in or out of their cars, was close to 100 percent.

“Haight dead-ends at Stanyan!” I shouted.

We followed the fool in the Camaro, speeding a hundred feet in front of us, sparks coming off his right rear bumper, which now dragged in the street.

Wallis still outran us because he simply didn’t care what he hit – and he refused to be boxed in. He made the right turn down Stanyan, drove nearly a block before pulling an illegal left across two lanes of traffic to go into Golden Gate Park.

The imposing Conservatory of Flowers, a giant greenhouse originally from another century, rose up on our right. I envisioned a colossal spinout in my mind, a James Bond-worthy scene of that greenhouse exploding into a trillion shards.

But Wallis skidded and avoided a crash.

I yelled, “Rich, look out!”

We followed the Camaro into a cacophony of horns and squealing tires, the bumper-car chase carrying us forward because we had no choice.

In the heart-stopping minutes we’d been on the Camaro’s tail, I hadn’t seen another cop car, marked or otherwise. I could hear sirens in the distance, but we were alone, powering our Crown Vic at warp speed, Wallis’s junker a half block ahead of us as he took the park drive toward Ocean Beach.

We drafted behind him as the terrain sloped sharply downward. Runners with dogs jumped out of the way. My God, I wanted to cover my eyes, but I couldn’t.

The boat pond was on our right, filled with seniors and kids driving remote-control ships, and then our two cars screamed past soccer fields with high-school teams standing openmouthed as we passed.

We were climbing again, the road heading straight up to Sutro Heights, almost to land’s end, when Wallis veered out of the park and onto Point Lobos Avenue, four fast-moving lanes.

As I yelled our location into the mic, Wallis took a hard left over the median strip and pointed his car like a rocket up toward the Cliff House, a landmark restaurant perched on the western edge of the continent over a rocky cliff that plunged straight down to the Pacific.

I could see it now: Wallis was going for a dramatic Thelma amp; Louise exit, but his would be a solo flight. As the Camaro crashed through guardrails and left the road, I saw the frankly unbelievable: the driver’s- side door opened and Wallis jumped out.

But he’d mistimed his jump.

As the Camaro made its wobbly one-way passage off the cliff toward the gray water below, Wallis plummeted alongside his car, both vehicle and man dropping in slow-motion, as if in a dream.

Rich braked our car in front of the broken wall, and we peered over the promontory in time to see the Camaro explode in flames.

“There,” I said. “He’s there!”

Wallis’s body was fifty feet below us, a tangle of bloodied flesh. It was an impossible climb down, a straight 180 degrees over wet and jagged rocks. Conklin took my hand and I gripped his, stood hypnotized as the fire crackled and burned.

I heard Jackie Kam’s voice behind me, calling over the car radio, “Sergeant Boxer, what is your location? Lindsay? Lindsay, please answer me.”

Rich let go of my hand and leaned over the cliff, facing into the wind as he called down to Henry Wallis’s fresh corpse.

“Did you enjoy yourself, asshole? Get what you wanted?”

I used my cell phone to call Dispatch, but the cars were already screaming to a halt all around Point Lobos.

Jacobi jumped out of one of them before it came to a stop. He ran toward us, calling, “You okay? You okay?”

I was so shaken I couldn’t talk.

“Take it easy, Boxer,” Jacobi said, putting his hands on my shoulders. My good friend. “Try to breathe.”

Tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes, but I wasn’t sad. It was something else – surprise and relief that I was alive.

I breathed in the smoke-filled air and said, “I don’t get it, Warren. Wallis jumped out of his car! Was he trying to escape? Or was that how he wanted to die?”

“Whatever,” Conklin said beside me.

I nodded. Whatever. Henry Wallis, the man with the snake-and-skull tattoo on his shoulder, was dead.

Chapter 66

JACOBI TOOK ME and Conklin out to dinner at Restaurant LuLu, the place for homey Provençal cooking, rich casseroles and pizzas grilled in a hickory-wood oven. The sunken dining room was packed, conversation was humming all around us, and our waiter really knew the wine list, long considered one of the best in town.

I knew why Jacobi was celebrating.

The chief and the mayor had given him a big ol’ “attaboy.” TV newscasters were brimming with the drama: the chopper shots and the news that life was safe again for the rich and famous.

But I couldn’t stand this, and I had to say it. “ Warren, is everyone crazy? You feel comfortable saying that Henry Wallis is the guy who killed our millionaires?”

Jacobi answered with a question: “Can’t you let something good into your life, Boxer?” And then another: “Can’t you just be happy for an hour?”

“I guess not,” I said, scowling at him. “What’s wrong with me? Or am I just too smart for this charade?”

Conklin nudged me under the table with his knee, and I didn’t know what the hell was wrong with him either.

A man had died.

We’d almost followed him off a cliff.

We were lucky we weren’t looking up at Claire from her table or seeing a story on TV of dead children, their tearful parents threatening to sue the city for another fatal high-speed chase, the sad-faced anchorperson saying, “The funeral services for the little Beckwith children will be at Our Sisters of the Sacred Heart on Sunday.”

The waiter poured the wine, and Jacobi tasted it, pronounced it excellent, and, over the clamor of fat-walleted diners chatting happily all around us, raised his glass to me and Conklin.

“Thanks,” he said, “from the chief, the mayor, and especially from me. I love you guys.”

Jacobi smiled, something I’ve seen him do maybe twice in the last ten years, and he and Conklin tucked into their pan-roasted mussels and rotisserie duck.

I had no appetite.

The muscles in my face had gone rigid, but my mind was whirling around on its brain stem.

Was Henry Wallis really the high-society killer?

Or was he just some loser of an ex-con with something to hide – so he’d freaked out and ended his life?

Did anyone care but me?

Chapter 67

AGAINST EVERYONE’S GOOD JUDGMENT, I found an ADA in her office at nine that night, the indefatigable Kathy Valoy. She called a judge and got us a search warrant for Henry Wallis’s apartment, and now, at midnight, Conklin and I were there.

Wallis had lived in a three-story walk-up on Dolores Street, a few blocks from the Torchlight Bar.

We rang the buzzer until we woke up the building’s owner, a squat man by the name of Maury Silver. He was balding, with loose dentures, bad breath, and a stained work shirt hanging long over his boxers.

Silver looked at our warrant through the cracked door, read every page back and front, and then let us enter the building.

“What happened to Henry?” he asked. “Oh no. You telling me he’s the one who drove off the cliff? Henry’s a killer?”

Wallis’s apartment was on the ground floor, rear.

We flicked on the ceiling lights, closed the door on Mr. Silver, and simply tossed the place. Didn’t take long.

Like a lot of ex-cons, Henry Wallis kept his furniture minimal and his few possessions neat.

Conklin took the bedroom and bath while I searched the small living room and kitchen. We called out to each other from time to time: when Conklin found the plastic-wrapped bricks of pot in the kitty-litter box and when I found a book on tattoos, corners folded down on the pages featuring snakes.

But that was it.

No old newspaper clippings, no new newspaper clippings, no shrines to himself, no trophies from rich people. And most of all no snakes.

No snake figurines, no snake artifacts, no books on snakes.

“No reptiles other than these,” I said, showing Conklin the tattoo book.

He said, “Take a look at this.”

I followed him into the bedroom and checked out his find: a drawerful of XL women’s underwear.

“Unless he had a big girlfriend, and I don’t see any pictures, cosmetics, anything that would indicate that,” Conklin said, “Henry Wallis was a cross-dresser.”

“A cross-dressing drug dealer. Kudos to Sara Needleman for dumping him. Let’s lock this joint up,” I said.

“I live only a few blocks from here,” said Rich as we closed and padlocked the door. “Come have a drink. Talk all this out.”

I said, “Thanks anyway. This has been the longest day of my life, Rich. I need to go home. Get naked. Go to bed.”

Conklin laughed. “Is that an order, Sergeant?”

I laughed along with him as I walked to my car, feeling just a little silly, thinking maybe Dr. Freud was having the real laugh.

“Okay,” I said, one hand on my door, being very careful when I stepped up on the running board. “One drink only.”

Chapter 68

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN Conklin’s place and Henry Wallis’s dump was extreme. Conklin lived on a similar block, both streets lined with unremarkable two- and three-story houses from the ’50s made of cheap and ordinary materials, but once we were inside, Conklin’s place felt lived-in and warm.

His living room was welcoming: good lighting, deep couches grouped around a fireplace, and the requisite bachelor must-have – a fifty-two-inch plasma- screen TV.

Rich stooped down near the entertainment unit, flipped through a stack of CDs, said, “Van Morrison okay with you?”

I said, “Sure,” and looked at the photos on the wall, black-and-white blowups of sailboats on the bay, their spinnakers full of summer wind, light spangling the waves, three different shots, all of them breathtaking.

“You take these, Rich?”

“ Uh-huh.”

“They’re wonderful.”

Van Morrison was singing “Brown Eyed Girl,” a tune that made me want to sing along. I smiled when Rich handed me a glass of wine, and I watched him sit down on the far end of the couch, put his feet up on a burnished hatch cover he’d turned into a coffee table.

I sipped from the frosty glass of chardonnay, kicked off my shoes, and sat on the other side of the same oversize couch. The tension left my body as the wine slid down my throat, cold and dry and good.

“See, what I’m wondering is, how could this be over?”

Conklin nodded, encouraging me to go on.

“A man is dead. There’s going to be fallout that Tracchio and Jacobi just don’t want to see. Wallis is going to have a family somewhere. There are going to be questions, and we both know, Rich, that Wallis didn’t do it. Here’s what I think happened: we just contributed to the death of a red herring.”

Conklin laughed, said, “You paint a wonderful word picture.”

I told him, “And you’ve got a great laugh, Rich. I love to hear you laugh.”

He held my eyes until I blinked first.

The only clock in the room was on the DVR, and I was too far from it to read the flashing digits, but I knew that it was late. Had to be somewhere around two in the morning, and I was feeling keyed up, starting to get some ideas about seeing the rest of Rich’s apartment. And maybe the rest of Rich.

My mind and body were overheating, and I don’t think Rich meant to cool me down when he went to the kitchen to retrieve the chilled bottle. While he was gone, I undid a shirt button.

And then another.

In the process, I adjusted my position on the couch, felt something hard and sharp down between the cushions. I wrapped my fingers around the object, pulled it out, and saw a hair clip, a rhinestone barrette between my fingers.

The shock of that two-inch sparkler chilled me to the core. Cindy’s barrette could have found its way to this couch only if Rich and Cindy had been grappling on it.

I placed the barrette on the coffee table, looked up as Rich returned with the bottle. He saw the barrette, saw the look in my eyes. Opened his mouth to say something – but nothing came out.

I averted my eyes, made sure he wouldn’t see my pain.

I muttered that it was late and thanks for the wine. That I’d see him in the morning.

I left with my shoes half tied and my heart half broken. I found my car on the street where I’d left it, and I talked to myself as I drove home.

“What are you, jealous?” I shouted. “Because being jealous is stupid! Attention, brain cells: Rich plus Lindsay? That is really, really stupid!”

Chapter 69

BY THE TIME Pet Girl arrived at Molly Caldwell-Davis’s Twin Peaks house with its astounding city view, the party had been going on for hours. Pet Girl pressed the doorbell, banged the knocker until “Tyco” opened the door and the postdisco camp of the Scissor Sisters boomed out into the night.

Tyco was wearing his party clothes: a feather boa around his slender shoulders, nipple rings, and a black satin thong. He handed Pet Girl a flute of champagne, kissed her on the lips, said, “Hi, sexy,” in a jokey way, so that Pet Girl laughed instead of saying thank you.

Pet Girl pushed past Tyco and entered the main room with its dizzying decor: tables and sofas in stepped-Alice-in-Wonderland heights, black-painted walls, leopard-print carpeting, bodies entwined on the floor pillows, the whole place feeling more like a bordello than the home of a girl who worked in a tea shop and had an eight-digit trust fund.

Pet Girl found the tanned and yoga-toned Molly on a low-slung sofa, crouched over a mirrored table, doing lines through a silver straw. Slouched beside her, swaying two beats behind the music, was the legendary fifty-year- old software billionaire Brian Caine.

“Look. Who’s. Here,” Caine said, giving Pet Girl a look so nakedly sleazy, she wanted to poke out his eyes.

“Molly,” Pet Girl said, holding out a sixty-eight-dollar bottle of Moët amp; Chandon, “this is chilled.”

“Just put it anywhere,” Molly said, turning away from Pet Girl as Tyco brought over a stack of Polaroids. She shrieked with delight as she pawed through the sex snaps her houseboy had taken of guests frolicking in her bedroom.

As suddenly as Molly’s attention had been pulled away from Pet Girl, it boomeranged back.

“Don’t you smell that?” Molly asked her. “Something’s burning. Why are you just standing there?”

Pet Girl blunted her expression.

She went to the kitchen, removed the pan of bite-size mushroom quiche from the oven, dumped a tray of Kobe beef on toast – worth three hundred dollars a pound – into the dog’s bowl. Then she stomped back into the party.

She called Molly’s name, finally catching her unfocused stare beneath her blank, Botoxed forehead.

Pet Girl said, “I fed Mischa. Are you going to remember to walk him?”

“Tyco will do it.”

“All right then. Au revoir, babycakes.”

“But you just got here.” Brian Caine pouted. The front of his black silk pajamas had fallen open, revealing his disgusting, hairy man-boobs. “Stay,” he implored Pet Girl. “I want to get to know you better.”

“Yeah, right after I figure out how to block my gag reflex,” Pet Girl said. She turned on the gold flats she’d bought for this occasion and made her way through the oblivious throng. She stopped to retrieve the bottle of champagne she’d brought, then quickly walked out the door.

Chapter 70

IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when Pet Girl got out of the cab and walked four blocks under the stars, the warm, moist air blowing off the ocean as she approached the run-down apartments at the farthest end of the Presidio.

She opened her front door, hung her backpack on a peg in the hallway, and went to the kitchen. There, she used a key to unlock the small pocket door, sliding it into its slot in the wall. Then she entered the long, narrow room that had once been a pantry and was now her private world.

Pet Girl hit the switch, throwing light on the half dozen aquariums stacked on restaurant racks lining the back wall. She sensed her beauties uncoiling their sleek bodies even before she saw them slithering silently across the bark-and-leaf litter – alert, hungry, eager to feed.

Pet Girl opened a cabinet and removed her tools: the tongs with the pistol grip, her steel-toed boots, and the welder’s gloves, which were made of deerskin, lined with Kevlar, and thick but flexible, with elbow-length cuffs.

When she was dressed, she stepped over to Vasuki’s cage, admired the snake’s strong, muscular body, the intelligence in her eyes, feeling an almost telepathic communication with her favorite krait.

She shifted the heavy lid capping Vasuki’s cage and captured the snake with her tongs, saying, “You can feed when we get back home, baby.”

She dropped Vasuki carefully into a pillowcase, put the whole into a pet carrier, and snapped the locks closed.

Then she removed one of the baby garter snakes from a breeder tank and dropped it into Vasuki’s cage so that her favorite pet’s reward would be waiting for her when they returned.

Taking a last look around to make sure that all was well, Pet Girl exited her snake farm and locked the door.

She reached into her blouse and pulled out the antique locket she wore on a solid-gold chain. It had been a gift from her father, and his picture was inside.

Pet Girl raised the locket to her lips, kissed it, said, “Love you, Daddy,” then turned out the lights.

Chapter 71

THE SCENE IN Molly’s place had melted down since Pet Girl had been there two hours ago. Dozens of candles guttered in their holders, food trays were empty, and the party guests who’d passed out on the floor were snoring and twitching but were definitely out.

There was a sound coming from the kitchen, metal scraping the floor. Pet Girl froze, ducked behind a sofa, prepared to pretend that she’d been here all along. But when a body slammed her in the dark, she almost screamed.

“Mischa! Shhh.” She stroked the springer’s silky head, willing her heart rate to slow.

“Did Tyco take you for a walk?” she whispered, unclipping the dog’s leash from his collar. Mischa wagged his tail, squatted, and piddled on the carpet, then ducked his head, expecting a reprimand – but he didn’t get one.

Pet Girl told the dog to stay, then quickly ascended the staircase that wound dramatically up to the second floor. Molly’s bedroom was at the end of the hall, no light showing under the closed door.

The brass knob turned in Pet Girl’s hand.

What if someone wakes up?

What then?

She entered the room and closed the door behind her, stood silently in the shadows, her pulse throbbing in her ears, her senses sharpened by the danger – the incomparable thrill of it.

The bed was directly in front of her, placed between two windows, crowded edge-to-edge with a tangle of naked bodies. A mottled sheet, some kind of animal print, was twisted almost like a rope, loosely tying the bodies together.

Pet Girl tried to determine which body parts belonged to which person, and when she felt ready, she tugged on her gloves and lifted Vasuki out of the carrier.

The snake, alert to the new environment, tensed in Pet Girl’s hands, and Pet Girl felt Vasuki’s pure lethal power. Like all kraits, Vasuki was nocturnal, aggressive at night. And she hadn’t eaten in three days.

Vasuki’s head swayed as Pet Girl held her over the bed. She hissed – and her steel cable of a body suddenly twisted in her owner’s hands. It took only that one part of a second for the snake to slip from Pet Girl’s grasp, drop to the sheets, and slide between the folds of the bedding.

She was instantly camouflaged. Completely invisible.

Pet Girl gasped as if she were in actual pain.

Vasuki was gone. Her plan had spiraled out of control.

For one crazy moment, Pet Girl imagined turning on the lights to look for Vasuki and making up a story if someone woke up – but Molly wouldn’t buy anything she said.

It just wouldn’t play.

Disgusted with herself, horrified at what would happen to Vasuki if she was found, Pet Girl took a last futile look over the moonlight-washed bed. Nothing moved.

She packed up the pet carrier and left Molly’s bedroom, closing the door again so that Mischa, at least, would be spared.

Outside the house, beginning the long walk down Twin Peaks Boulevard, Pet Girl assured herself that everything would be okay. As awful as it was to lose Vasuki, there was no ID on that snake.

No one could ever tie Vasuki to her.

Chapter 72

MOLLY CALDWELL-DAVIS LOOKED at me as though she were trying to break through a profound case of amnesia when Conklin and I interviewed her in her breakfast room. Her eyes were red, and she croaked out microsentences between long blank moments as she strained to remember the night before.

Conklin said, “Molly, take it slow. Just start at the beginning and tell us about the party last night, okay?”

“I want. My lawyer.”

Footsteps thumped overhead.

EMS had come and gone, but Molly’s bedroom swarmed with CSIs. Also, Claire and two of her assistants waited upstairs in the hallway for CSU to leave so that they could do their jobs.

Claire’s voice floated down over the banister. “Lindsay, can you come up? You’ve got to see this.”

“Do you need a lawyer, Molly?” Conklin was asking. “Because you’re not a suspect. We just want to understand what happened here, you see? Because something did happen.”

Molly was staring over Conklin’s shoulder into the middle distance as I got up from the table and headed for the stairs. Charlie Clapper greeted me in the hallway, nattily dressed, good-natured, his irony freshly pressed this afternoon.

“It’s a rerun, Lindsay. Lotsa fingerprints, no weapons, no blood, no suicide note, no signs of a struggle. We’ve bagged six bottles of prescription meds and some street junk, but I don’t think we’re looking at drug overdose. I think this was either Sodom or Gomorrah, and God weighed in.”

“Honestly, I didn’t know you were so conversant with the Old Testament,” I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.

“I’m Old Testament on my mother’s side,” he said.

I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, “Keep in touch,” and walked past Clapper into Molly’s bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.

The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he’d been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.

The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn’t died in his sleep.

This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The victims hadn’t been able to breathe.

“When did they die?”

“They’re still warm, Lindsay. Love to narrow it down for you, but I gotta say they died six to twelve hours ago. Did Molly volunteer anything useful?”

“Nope. Just the four bad words: ‘I want my lawyer.’ ”

Claire sighed. “Before she stopped talking, Molly told me that the dead kid was her houseboy, name of Jordan Priestly. She called him ‘Tyco.’ ”

“Tyco, like the toy company? Oh. I get it. Boy toy.”

“But I didn’t need her to identify this here father figure. He’s Brian Caine.”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. That Brian Caine. Tony Tracchio better put on his cast-iron jockstrap,” Claire said, “because Caine Industries is going to be all over him.”

Claire instructed her assistants to snap up the corners of the fitted bottom sheet, wrap it around Caine’s body to preserve any trace before putting it all in the body bag.

Claire said to me, “You and Conklin can meet me at the morgue when you’re done here. I’m going to take my time with these gentlemen, give them a better external exam than their mamas gave them when they were born.”

Chapter 73

I WENT BACK down to the breakfast room, saw that Christine Rogers had joined Molly and Conklin.

Rogers was a celeb in her own right, a rich person’s all-purpose attorney. She was trim and pretty, a gray-eyed blonde looking deceptively young for a senior partner in a big-time law firm that had her name on the door. Just guessing, but Ms. Rogers probably charged a thou an hour.

I had to ask myself why Molly Caldwell-Davis needed a cannon when even a slingshot was overkill.

We hadn’t been looking at Molly as the doer.

Were we wrong?

Questions darted through my mind like a school of minnows. Did Molly know the Baileys? Sara Needleman? Where was Molly when they were killed? Did she have any connection with the victims of the snake killings of the early ’80s?

Was this half- stoned rich girl stealthy enough, smart enough, motivated enough, to be a serial killer?

If so, what had possessed her to kill people in her own bed?

Christine Rogers’s face was weary, but her hair shone, her blouse was starched, and her pin-striped Armani suit cost what I made in a month. She may have had the crazy schedule of a senior partner, but the attorney was all business.

“Ms. Caldwell-Davis wants to cooperate completely,” she said. “When she went to bed around one thirty a.m., Brian Caine and Jordan Priestly were alive. When she woke up sometime after ten, they were dead.”

I looked Rogers in the eye and said, “Maybe if she collects her thoughts, one or two of them will give us a clue.”

“Whatever happened, my client slept through it and was miraculously spared,” Rogers said. “I want the police, the brass, the press, everyone, including God, to know that Molly had nothing to do with the deaths of her good friends. She’s sick that they’re dead. And she has nothing to hide.”

“Wonderful,” Conklin said. “So, Molly, this is square one. We need a list of everyone who was here last night, including the caterer, the delivery people, and whoever walks your dog.”

Molly looked at Conklin with her big red-rimmed eyes. There was dried spittle in the corners of her mouth.

“Tyco walked my dog. I cooked for the party, and Brian tended the bar. I didn’t know half the people who showed up, and that’s the truth. People brought people who brought other people.”

“Let’s start with the ones you know,” said Conklin.

Chapter 74

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Conklin and I entered the autopsy suite and saw Tyco’s body lying on a slab. His eyes were closed, but his collection of nipple rings and studs winked from a stainless- steel bowl under the lights.

“I’d almost given up,” Claire said. “But look here.”

She raised the boy’s left arm, handed me the magnifying glass so I could see what she was calling “two defined pinpoint punctures.”

Beside me, Bunny Ellis, Claire’s number one assistant, pulled down the zipper on the second body bag, the one holding the remains of Brian Caine.

I turned – and for a terrifying moment I thought Brian Caine was alive.

The sheet Caine was wrapped in moved – but as I watched in horror, I saw that it wasn’t Caine that was moving. It was something slim and banded, barely discernible against the mottled pattern of the sheet.

I screamed, “Snake! That’s the snake!”

The animal seemed liquid as it poured out of the body bag and slid down one of the legs of the gurney onto the floor, head flattened in strike mode, winding across the gray ceramic tile toward Claire.

“Don’t move!” Conklin yelled out.

His gun was in his hand, and he fired at the swiftly moving target, once, twice, again and again, the weapon bucking, bullets pinging off the tiles, gunfire echoing in the suite.

He was oh for six.

My hands were over my ears, my eyes wide open. I stared as the snake kept coming, now only a yard away from the tips of Claire’s bootees.

I read the terror on her face. Moving would attract the snake, but Claire had no choice. She bolted for the stepladder that she used to shoot overhead pictures.

I broke for the hallway.

The firebox was on the wall. I smashed the glass with my gun butt, cleared the shards, reached for the fire ax, and ran back to the room.

Conklin was aiming again. Claire was standing on the ladder’s top rung, and her assistants were screaming, as good as climbing the walls.

I lifted the ax, brought the blade down on the snake, divided it neatly in two at midpoint.

Both halves of the snake continued to writhe.

“It’s dead, right?” I called out, my voice shrill, sweat pouring down the inside of my shirt. “It can’t do anything, can it?”

My mind was suddenly swamped with images of sharks lying on boat decks – presumed dead – that “came back to life” to clamp their jaws around fishermen’s legs.

This snake was still wriggling, mouth open, lethal fangs exposed.

We all stared, transfixed by the killer that wouldn’t die. Then Conklin came out of his trance, disappeared into Claire’s office, and returned with a metal trash can, which he upended over both parts of the snake.

He sat on the trash can.

The look on his face told me that he felt like he was sitting on a bomb.

“No, this is good,” he said to me, red-faced, perspiring, eyes bugging out just a little. “Good a time as any to get over my fear of snakes.”

Animal control arrived at the morgue forty minutes later. They relieved Conklin and lifted the trash can.

Both parts of the krait were still wriggling.

The front end gnashed at the air.

Chapter 75

YUKI WAS CLEANING out her fridge, listening to Faith Hill, thinking about piebald ponies and long-legged strangers, when her cell phone rang.

Her stomach clenched instantly – Is it Doc?

She dropped the sponge in the sink, wiped her hands on the back of her jeans, and went for the phone that was warbling on her mom’s coffee table.

The caller ID read SF DOJ. Yuki stabbed the receive button with her thumb, said, “Castellano.”

An hour later she was sitting in a leather armchair in Judge Brendan J. Duffy’s chambers, waiting for Phil Hoffman to arrive.

Duffy looked perturbed, but he wouldn’t even hint to Yuki about why he’d called until Hoffman was present. So Yuki used the time to study the judge’s bookcase and consider the multiple possibilities. But only one possibility seemed probable, and that was that the damned, cursed jury who’d been charged with deliberating Stacey Glenn’s case hadn’t arrived at a verdict.

The jury had hung – again.

So it followed that Duffy would declare a mistrial and that the sassy beauty queen who’d bludgeoned her helpless, loving parents would do the catwalk strut out of the jailhouse.

Duffy didn’t make small talk. He had gone into work mode, opening files, making notes, tossing papers into his out basket as the rays of afternoon sun lengthened across his Persian rug, and Yuki’s heart continued to beat an SOS inside her ribcage.

Finally she heard Hoffman’s voice in the outer office.

He ducked as he walked in the doorway, ran a hand through his rumpled black hair, said, “Sorry, Your Honor. Yuki. My wife and I were in Sausalito. The ferry couldn’t be hurried.”

“Sit down, Phil,” Duffy said.

Hoffman sat in the second armchair, asked, “Did you hear from the jury?”

Yuki had already concluded that at this point Hoffman would be as happy with a mistrial as he would be with an acquittal. He’d spent too much time on this case. If there was a mistrial, his client would be released – and he could go back to getting paid.

“I’ve got bad news,” Duffy said. “There was a fight at the jail.”

“What happened?” Hoffman asked.

“Your client acquired a girlfriend over the last couple of weeks, and as I understand it, her girlfriend already had a girlfriend. There was a fight in the showers, and Stacey Glenn lost,” Duffy said. “Ms. Glenn’s girlfriend grabbed her around the neck, the other girl grabbed Stacey around the waist, and they both pulled.”

Duffy shook his head as they all imagined the scene, but Yuki still couldn’t visualize what had been so terrible.

“I’m sorry, I don’t get it, Your Honor.”

“My fault. I’m not explaining this well. Stacey Glenn’s head was separated from her spinal cord.” He put a hand around his own neck, said, “The neck itself – the muscles and so forth – was still in place, but the spine was severed. Medically speaking, Ms. Glenn suffered an internal decapitation.”

“I’ve never heard of an internal decapitation,” Hoffman said.

“First for me, too, but that’s what I got from the Department of Corrections, based upon their autopsy findings, and I quote,” Duffy said, reading from a notepad, “ ‘Those stupid bleeps turned Stacey Glenn into a bobblehead.’ ”

Yuki stood up, stumbled out of Judge Duffy’s office, kept going even as Phil Hoffman called her name. She went for the stairs, kept a firm grip on the handrail as she wobbled down the steps, thinking about how the case had ended.

By the time she reached the lobby, she knew that she had to get ahold of Parisi. They had to really think through what they would put out to the public, and he had to handle it, because it wouldn’t be right to let the public see her almost irrepressible elation.

Stacey Glenn had gotten the death penalty.

No conviction, no dismissal, no mistrial. This was the ultimate resolution.

It was over.

Yuki had not lost her case – and the sociopath Stacey Glenn was dead.