The 9th Judgment

Chapter 1

PETER GORDON FOLLOWED the young mom out of Macy’s and into the street outside the Stonestown Galleria. Mom was about thirty, her brown hair in a messy ponytail, wearing a lot of red: not just shorts but red sneakers and a red purse. Shopping bags hung from the handles of her baby’s stroller.

Pete was behind the woman when she crossed Winston Drive, still almost on her heels as she entered the parking garage, talking to the infant as if he could understand her, asking him if he remembered where Mommy parked the car and what Daddy was making for dinner, chattering away, the whole running baby-talk commentary like a fuse lit by the woman’s mouth, terminating at the charge inside Petey’s brain.

But Petey stayed focused on his target. He listened and watched, kept his head down, hands in his pockets, and saw the woman unlock the hatch of her RAV4 and jam her shopping bags inside. He was only yards away from her when she hoisted the baby out of the stroller and folded the carriage into the back, too.

The woman was strapping the boy into the car seat when Pete started toward her.

“Ma’am? Can you help me out, please?”

The woman drew her brows together. What do you want? was written all over her face as she saw him. She got into the front seat now, keys in hand.

“Yes?” she said.

Pete Gordon knew that he looked healthy and clean and wide-eyed and trustworthy. His all-American good looks were an asset, but he wasn’t vain. No more than a Venus flytrap was vain.

“I’ve got a flat,” Pete said, throwing up his hands. “I really hate to ask, but could I use your cell phone to call Triple-A?”

He flashed a smile and got the dimples going, and at last she smiled, too, and said, “I do that-forget to charge the darned thing.”

She dug into her purse, then looked up with the cell phone in hand. Her smile wavered as she read Pete’s new expression, no longer eager to please but hard and determined.

She dropped her eyes to the gun he was holding-thinking that somehow she’d gotten it wrong-looked back into his face, and saw the chill in his dark eyes.

She jerked away from him, dropping her keys and her phone into the foot well. She climbed halfway into the backseat.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Don’t-do anything. I’ve got cash-”

Pete fired, the round whizzing through the suppressor, hitting the woman in the neck. She grabbed at the wound, blood spouting through her fingers.

“My baby,” she gasped.

“Don’t worry. He won’t feel anything. I promise,” Pete Gordon said.

He shot the woman again, poof, this time in the side of her chest, then opened the back door and looked at the bawler, nodding off, mouth sticky with cotton candy, blue veins tracing a road map across his temple.

Chapter 2

A CAR SCREAMED down the ramp and squealed around the corner, speeding past Pete as he turned his face toward the concrete center island. He was sure he hadn’t been seen, and anyway he’d done everything right. Strictly by the book.

The woman’s open bag was lying inside the car. With his hand in his jacket pocket, using it as a kind of glove, he dug around in her junk, looking for her lipstick.

He found it, then swiveled up the bright-red tube.

He waited as a couple of gabby women in an Escalade drove up the ramp looking for a spot, then he took the lipstick tube between his thumb and forefinger and considered what he would write on the windshield.

He thought of writing FOR KENNY but changed his mind. He laughed to himself as he also considered and rejected PETEY WAS HERE.

Then he got real.

He printed WCF in bold red letters, four inches high, and underscored the writing with a smeary red line. Then he closed the lipstick and dropped it into his pocket, where it clicked against his gun.

Satisfied, he backed out of the car, shut the doors, wiped down the handles with the soft flannel lining of his baseball jacket, and walked to the elevator bank. He stood aside as the door opened and an old man wheeled his wife out onto the main floor of the garage. He kept his head down, avoiding eye contact with the old couple, and they ignored him.

That was good, but he wished he could tell them.

It was for Kenny. And it was by the book.

Pete Gordon got into the elevator and rode it up to the third floor, thinking he was having a really good day, the first good one in about a year. It had been a long time coming, but he’d finally launched his master plan.

He was exhilarated, because he was absolutely sure it would work.

WCF, people. WCF.

Chapter 3

PETE GORDON DROVE down the looping ramp of the garage. He passed the dead woman’s car on the ground floor but didn’t even brake, confident that there was no blood outside the car, nothing to show that he’d been there.

With the garage as packed as it was, it could be hours before the mom and her bawler were found in that tidy spot near the end of the row.

Pete took it nice and slow, easing the car out of the garage and accelerating onto Winston, heading toward 19th Avenue. He reviewed the shooting in his mind as he waited at the light, thinking about how easy it had been-no wasted rounds, nothing forgotten-and how crazed it was going to make the cops.

Nothing worse than a motiveless crime, huh, Kenny?

The cops were going to bust their stones on this one, all right, and by the time they figured it out, he’d be living in another country and this crime would be one of the cold cases some old Homicide dick would never solve.

Pete took the long way home, up Sloat Boulevard, up and over Portola Drive, where he waited for the Muni train to pass with commuters all in a row, and finally up Clipper Street toward his crappy apartment in the Mission.

It was almost dinnertime, and his own little bawlers would be puffing up their cheeks, getting ready to sound the alarm. He had his key out when he got to the apartment. He opened the lock and gave the door a kick.

He could smell the baby’s diapers from the doorway, the little stinker standing in the kiddie cage in the middle of the floor, hanging on to the handrail, crying out as soon as he saw his dad.

“Daddy!” Sherry called. “He needs to be changed.”

“Goody,” Peter Gordon said. “Shut up, stink bomb,” he told the boy. “I’ll get to you in a minute.” He took the remote control from his daughter’s hand, switched from the cartoons, and checked the news.

The stock market was down. Oil prices were up. He watched the latest Hollywood update. Nothing was said about two bodies found in the Stonestown Galleria parking lot.

“I’m hungry,” Sherry said.

“Well, which is it first? Dinner or poop?”

“Poop first,” she said.

“All right, then.”

Pete Gordon picked up the baby, as dear to him as a sack of cement, not even sure the little shit was his, although even if he was, he still didn’t care. He put the baby on its back on the changing table and went through the ritual, holding the kiddo by the ankles, wiping him down, dusting his butt with powder, wrapping him up in Pampers, then putting him back in the kiddie cage.

“Franks and beans?” he asked his daughter.

“My absolute favorite,” Sherry said, putting a pigtail in her mouth.

“Put a shirt on the stink bomb,” Pete Gordon said, “so your mother doesn’t have a gas attack when she gets home.”

Gordon microwaved some formula for the stink bomb and opened the canned franks and beans. He turned on the undercabinet TV and the stove, what wifey should be doing instead of him, the bitch, and dumped the contents of the can into a pot.

The beans were burning when the breaking news came on.

Huh. Look at that, Pete thought.

Some dork from ABC was holding a microphone, standing in front of Borders. College kids mugged behind him as he said, “We have learned that there has been a shooting at the Stonestown garage. Sources report a gruesome double homicide that you will not believe. We’ll keep you posted as details are released. Back to you, Yolanda.”

Chapter 4

YUKI CASTELLANO STEPPED out of her office and called down the line of cubicles to Nicky Gaines, “You ready, Wonder Boy? Or do you want to meet me downstairs?”

“I’m coming,” Gaines said. “Who said I wasn’t coming?”

“How do I look?” she asked him, already moving toward the elevator that would take them from the DA’s office to the courtroom.

“You look fierce, Batwoman. Miss Hot Multicultural USA.”

“Shut up.” She laughed at her protégé. “Just be ready to prompt me if I blank, God forbid.”

“You’re not going to blank. You’re going to send Jo-Jo to the big house.”

“Ya think?”

“I know. Don’t you?”

“Uh-huh. I just have to make sure the jury knows it, too.”

Nicky stabbed the elevator button, and Yuki went back to her thoughts. In about twenty minutes, she was going to make her closing argument in the state’s case against Adam “Jo-Jo” Johnson.

Since she’d been with the DA’s office, she’d taken on more than a few crappy cases that the DA was determined to try: she’d work eighteen-hour days, earning “atta girls” from her boss, Leonard “Red Dog” Parisi, and score points with the jury, all of which would give her high expectations.

And then she’d lose.

Yuki was becoming famous for losing-and that stank because she was a fighter and a winner. And she just frickin’ hated to lose. But she never thought she’d lose-and this time was no different.

Her case was solid. She’d laid it out like a hand of solitaire. The jury had an easy job. The defendant wasn’t just guilty, he was guilty as sin.

Nicky held open the studded leather door to the courtroom, and Yuki walked smartly down the center aisle of the oak-paneled chamber. She noticed that the gallery was filling up with spectators, mostly press and law students. And as she approached the prosecution table, she saw that Jo-Jo Johnson and his attorney, Jeff Asher, were in their seats.

The stage was set.

She nodded to her opponent and noted the defendant’s appearance. Jo-Jo’s hair was combed and he was wearing a nice suit, but he looked dazed as only a mope who’d fried his brain on drugs could look. She hoped that very soon he would look worse, once she nailed him on manslaughter in the first degree.

“Jo-Jo looks like he’s been smoking ganja,” Nicky murmured to Yuki as he pulled out her chair.

“Or else he believes his lawyer’s bull,” Yuki said loud enough for her opponent to hear. “Jo-Jo may think he’s going to walk, but he’ll be busing it to Pelican Bay.”

Asher looked at her and smirked, showing Yuki with his body language that he thought he was going to whip her.

It was an act.

Yuki hadn’t gone up against Asher before, but after less than a year in the public defender’s office, Asher had gotten a reputation as a “bomb”-a killer attorney who blew up the prosecution’s case and got his client off. Asher was formidable because he had it all: charisma, boyish good looks, and a Harvard Law degree. And he had his father, a top-notch litigator who was coaching his son from the sidelines.

But none of that mattered today.

The evidence, the witnesses, and the confession were all on her side. Jo-Jo Johnson was hers.

Chapter 5

JUDGE STEVEN RABINOWITZ took a last look at the pictures of his new condo in Aspen, then turned off his iPhone, cracked his knuckles, and said, “Are the People ready, Ms. Castellano?”

“We are, Your Honor,” said Yuki.

She stood, her glossy black hair with the new silver streak in front falling forward as she straightened the hem of her suit jacket. Then she stepped quickly to the lectern in the center of the well.

She turned her eyes toward the jury box and gave the jurors a smile. A couple of them smiled back, but for the most part they were expressionless. She couldn’t read them at all.

But that was okay.

She just had to give the greatest closing of her life, as if the dead scumbag victim were the best and brightest of men, and as if this were the last case she would ever try.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” she said, “Dr. Lincoln Harris is dead because this man, Adam J. Johnson, knew Dr. Harris was in mortal danger and let him die with willful disregard for his life. In California, that’s manslaughter in the first degree.

“We know what happened on the night of March fourteenth because, after waiving his right to remain silent, after waiving his right to counsel, Mr. Johnson told the police how and why he let Dr. Harris expire when he could have easily saved his life.”

Yuki let her words resonate in the chamber, shuffling her cards on the lectern before continuing her closing argument.

“On the evening in question, the defendant, who had been employed by Dr. Harris as a handyman, went out to get cocaine for the doctor and himself.

“He returned within the hour, and the defendant and the plaintiff ingested this cocaine. Shortly after that, Dr. Harris OD’d. How do we know that?

“The defendant told the police-and it was borne out by medical experts-that it was clear Dr. Harris was in extremis. He was foaming at the mouth and eventually lost consciousness. But, rather than call an ambulance, the defendant used this opportunity to remove a thousand dollars and an ATM card from Dr. Harris’s wallet.

“Mr. Johnson then used Dr. Harris’s ATM card, took another thousand dollars, and bought himself a new leather jacket and a pair of boots at Rochester Big & Tall.

“After that,” Yuki told them, “the defendant bought more cocaine and hired a prostitute, Elizabeth Wu, whom he brought back to Dr. Harris’s home.

“Over the next several hours, Ms. Wu and Mr. Johnson snorted coke, had sex a few times, and at one point, according to Mr. Johnson’s statement, discussed how to dispose of Dr. Harris’s body once he died. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, shows ‘consciousness of guilt.’

“Adam Johnson absolutely knew that the doctor was dying. But he didn’t call for help for fifteen hours,” Yuki said, slapping the lectern. “Fifteen hours. Finally, at the behest of Ms. Wu, Mr. Johnson finally called nine one one, but it was too little, too late. Dr. Harris died in the ambulance en route to the hospital.

“Now, we all know that the defense has no defense.

“When facts are against them, defense lawyers resort to theatrics and to blaming the victim.

“Mr. Asher has told you that Dr. Harris lost his license to practice medicine because he used drugs. And that he cheated on his wife. That’s true, and so what? The victim wasn’t a saint, but even imperfect people have a right to humane treatment. And they have a right to justice.

“The defense has portrayed Adam Johnson as a hapless gofer who didn’t know an OD from a CD.

“That’s fiction. Adam Johnson knew what he was doing. He’s admitted to all of it: the willful disregard as well as the fun he had that night, stealing and shopping and snorting coke and having sex while Dr. Harris lay dying.

“That’s why there can be only one verdict. The People ask you to find Adam Johnson guilty on three counts: of grand larceny, of intent to deal narcotics, and of reckless disregard for the life of a human being-that is, manslaughter in the first degree.”

Chapter 6

YUKI HUDDLED WITH Gaines in the hallway outside the courtroom during the ten-minute recess.

“You knocked their socks off,” Gaines told her.

Yuki nodded. She combed her mind for mistakes and didn’t find any. She hadn’t blanked, hadn’t sputtered or blown her lines, hadn’t come off as rehearsed. She had no regrets. She only wished her mom could have been here to see her.

She said to her number two, “Jo-Jo did it. He said he did it, and we proved it.” Yuki’s heart was still pumping adrenaline, the good kind. A bit like champagne.

Nicky nudged her, and Yuki looked up. She saw that the bailiff had opened the leather-paneled door. The pair re-entered the courtroom and took their seats. Yuki’s mouth went suddenly dry as the court was called into session.

And now the fear factor started nibbling at her confidence. Asher would have the last word. Could he convince the jury to let Johnson off? She thought ahead to the worst possible result-a finding in favor of the defendant. After that, Asher’s dad would give his son a party at the Ruby Skye, and she would slink home alone.

The humiliation would be all hers.

Beside her, Nicky doodled a caricature of her with a star on her chest and a halo behind her head. She managed a smile, and then the room fell silent.

Judge Rabinowitz asked Asher if the defense was ready to close, and he answered, “Yes, Your Honor, we are.”

Like a Thoroughbred into the starting gate, Asher nearly pranced toward the jury box. He put his hand on the railing and-while standing no more than a yard away from the jurors in the front row, close enough for the foreperson to see the comb marks in his hair and the sparkle on his dental veneers-began his summation.

“Folks, I don’t have any notes because Adam Johnson’s defense is as simple and as clear as day.

“He’s not a doctor. He doesn’t know anything about sick people or about medicine. He didn’t know that Dr. Harris was in serious distress.

“Adam Johnson is a handyman.

“Lincoln Harris was a doctor of medicine.

“And, as the medical examiner told you, Lincoln Harris didn’t die from cocaine overdose. He died from cocaine and a self-injected dose of heroin.

“What happened is that those drugs interacted, and that proved fatal. Dr. Harris knew what drugs did to the body, and he took them anyway. For all anyone knows, he intended to die.

“I think Mr. Johnson would agree that if he had it to do again, when he saw that Dr. Harris was ill, he would have immediately called nine one one. He probably would have done everything different that night, but he made some mistakes.

“Yes, he’s guilty of stealing two thousand dollars from a rich boss who had given him his ATM pin number.

“Yes, he’s guilty of giving those drugs to Ms. Wu, a known drug user and a prostitute, and while this is true, it’s a technicality. He wasn’t actually dealing. He used drugs for recreation.

“As for consciousness of guilt, I submit to you folks that my client was just shooting the bull with Ms. Wu when they discussed ‘dumping the body.’

“They didn’t do it, did they?” Asher asked rhetorically. “Mr. Johnson called for an ambulance. The facts are clear. My client didn’t know if Dr. Harris was dying or if he was going to wake up with a bad headache. He’s no genius, but he’s not a bad guy.

“And so we ask you to find him ‘not guilty’ of manslaughter, because he simply did not do it.”

Chapter 7

I LEFT THE Homicide squad room in a hurry that evening, determined to get out of Jacobi’s line of sight before I got drafted into someone else’s case. I’d just stepped into the elevator when, damn it, my cell phone buzzed.

It was Yuki; she was funny, passionate, and going through a rough time, so I pressed the phone to my ear and she peppered me with her customary rat-a-tat speech.

“Lindsay, my head’s spinning off my neck. Can you meet me at MacBain’s? Like, now?”

“What’s wrong?”

“You’re busy.”

“I’ve got plans,” I said, “but I can have a quick beer-”

“I’ll meet you in five.”

MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub is a cops-and-lawyers hangout two blocks from the Hall of Justice. I got my car out of the all-day lot and headed east on Bryant, telling myself that I’d still have time to pick up the shrimp on the way home.

I entered the bar, found a tiny table near the window, and had just ordered two Coronas from the waitress when I saw Yuki elbowing her way through the crowd, coming toward me. She was talking before she sat down.

“You ordered? Good. How are you? Okay?”

The waitress brought the beer, and Yuki asked for a burger well-done with cheese fries.

“You’re not eating?” she said.

“I’m cooking a late dinner for Joe.”

“Ah.”

She put a hand to her brow as if shielding her eyes from the light bouncing off my engagement ring.

“Must be nice.”

“Yeah,” I said, grinning at her.

Being engaged was still new to me after months and months of a cross-country roller-coaster romance. Now Joe and I lived together, and we still hadn’t sat down to dinner at the same time in two weeks. I’d promised him shrimp pomodoro tonight, and I was looking forward to the whole deal: the cooking, the supping, the afterglow. “So what’s going on?” I asked Yuki.

She drained half her glass before answering. “My victim isn’t just scum, he’s dead scum, and Jo-Jo is cute and stupid. The women jurists looked at him, Linds, like they wanted to breast-feed him.”

I’d stopped by the courtroom to watch Yuki’s closing argument, and I had to agree. Dr. Lincoln Harris was dead slime, and while Jo-Jo Johnson was hardly better-he was alive. And he looked like a man without a clue.

“Asher could actually win,” Yuki wailed. “I quit private practice for this? Help me, Linds. Should I find a good-paying job in a corporate law firm?”

My phone vibrated on my hip again. I looked down at the caller ID. Jacobi. My ex-partner and current boss, whose gut reaction to everything is to call me. Old habits die hard. I keyed the button and said, “Boxer,” into the mouthpiece.

“There’s been a double homicide, Lindsay. It’s got ‘psycho’ written all over it.”

“Did you call Paul Chi? He’s back from vacation. I’ll bet he’s home right now.”

“I want you on this,” Jacobi growled.

After more than ten years of working together, we were almost able to read each other’s mind. Jacobi sounded freaked out, like someone had walked over his grave.

“What’s this about, Warren?” I asked him, already knowing my best-laid plans for the evening were shot.

“One of the vics is a young kid,” Jacobi said.

He gave me the address-the parking garage near the galleria. “Conklin just left. He’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

“I’m on my way,” I told him.

Chapter 8

I CLOSED MY phone and promised Yuki a longer, better talk about her career after the jury came back. I said, “Your closing was outstanding, girlfriend. Don’t quit.” I kissed her cheek and fled the bar.

I drove my Explorer toward Market and got gridlocked. I put the Kojak light on my roof and hit the siren. Vehicles parted reluctantly, and I finally reached the entrance to the garage near the Stonestown Galleria.

The mouth of the garage was cordoned off and blocked by a grumbling crowd of car owners. I held up my shield, ducked under the tape, and signed the log. Officer Joe Sorbero looked gray, as if he’d never seen death before.

“You’re the first officer on the scene?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You okay, Joe?”

“I’ve been better, Sergeant,” he said, smiling weakly. “I’ve got kids, you know.” He pointed out a blue RAV4 parked toward the far end of the row. “Your next nightmare is right over there.”

I followed Sorbero’s finger and saw Inspector Rich Conklin standing between a couple of vehicles at the end of the aisle, peering into the driver’s-side window of the RAV4.

When Jacobi moved up to lieutenant, Conklin became my partner. He’s smart and disturbingly handsome, and he’s got the makings of a first-class detective. It wouldn’t shock anyone if he made captain one day, but right now he reports to me.

He came toward me before I could reach the scene.

“Brace yourself, Linds.”

“Fill me in.”

“White female, about thirty, name of Barbara Ann Benton. The other victim is an infant. Might be a year old. Both were shot point-blank. The ME and CSU are on the way.”

“Who called it in?”

“A lady who was parked in the spot next to the RAV4. I interviewed her and sent her home. She didn’t see anything. So far, no one did. Unis are going through the trash cans, and we’ve collected the surveillance tape.”

“Are you thinking the baby was collateral damage?”

“No way,” Conklin said. “He was capped on purpose.”

I approached the SUV and sucked in my breath as I looked inside. Barbara Ann Benton was slumped awkwardly in the front seat, half facing the rear as if she’d tried to climb over the divide.

I saw two obvious gunshot wounds: one to the neck and another to the side of her chest. Then I forced myself to look past the mom to the child in his car seat.

The baby boy had a glaze of pink candy on his lips and on the fingers of his right hand. The rear window was spattered with blood. The child had been shot through the temple at close range.

Conklin was right.

The baby’s death was no accident. In fact, the shot was so precise, the kid could have been the prime target.

I hoped that the little boy hadn’t realized what was happening.

I hoped he hadn’t had time to be afraid.

Chapter 9

“WHAT DO YOU make of this, Linds?”

Conklin called to my attention the vivid red letters printed on the windshield. I stared, riveted by the sight. This is what Jacobi had been talking about when he’d said that the crime scene had “‘psycho’ written all over it.”

He hadn’t said it was written in lipstick.

The letters “WCF” meant nothing to me, except the fact that only wacko killers deliberately leave a signature. It reminded me of cases I’d caught where the killer had signed his crimes. And it brought back the bad old days when the Backstreet Killer had terrified San Francisco in the ’90s, a murderer who took eight innocent lives, left signatures and notes for the police, and was never caught. A chill went down the back of my neck.

“Those shopping bags in the rear,” I said to Conklin. “Were they looted?” I was hoping.

My partner shook his head no and said, “Looks like a hundred bucks in the victim’s wallet. This wasn’t a robbery. This was an execution. Two of them.”

Questions were flooding my mind. Why hadn’t gunshots been reported? Why had the killer targeted these people? Was it random or personal? Why had he killed a child?

I turned toward the sound of an engine’s roar and saw the coroner’s van heading toward us, tires screeching as it braked twenty feet away.

Dr. Claire Washburn got out of the van wearing blue scrubs and a Windbreaker-black with white letters spelling out MEDICAL EXAMINER front and back. Despite the odds of a black woman succeeding in her profession when she first got started, Claire had done it. In my opinion, she’s the finest forensic pathologist west of the Rockies. She’s also the friend of my heart, and although we work three flights and eighty feet away in adjoining buildings, I hadn’t seen her in more than a week.

“Jesus God, what is this?” she asked as she hugged me and took in the scene over my shoulder.

I walked Claire toward the RAV4 and stood next to her as she looked into the car and saw the dead woman in a crouch, half facing her baby.

Claire jerked back as she took in the sight of the dead child, her face reflecting the same horror the rest of us were feeling, maybe more. “That baby is the same age as my Ruby,” she said. “Who kills a baby too young to tell what happened?”

“Maybe it’s payback for something. Drug deal. Gambling debt. Or maybe the husband did it.”

I was thinking, Please let it be something like that.

Claire took her Minolta out of her kit and fired off two shots of Barbara Ann Benton from where we stood, then went around to the other side of the vehicle and took two more.

When she started shooting pictures of the baby, I saw the tears in her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Claire cry.

“Mom let the killer get this close,” Claire said. “Gunpowder stippling is on her cheek and neck. She tried to shield her baby with her body, and still the bastard shot the child in the head. And here’s something new: I don’t recognize this stippling pattern.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means WCF has some rare kind of gun.”

Chapter 10

THE BENTONS ’ HOUSE was a modest two-bedroom on 14th Avenue, blue with white trim, spray-on Fourth of July decorations still on the picture window and a pull toy on the steps. Conklin rang the bell, and when Richard Benton opened the front door, I knew that we were seeing the last happy moment of the man’s life.

When a married woman is killed, her husband is involved more than half the time, but I found Richard Benton believably devastated when we told him the shocking news-and he had an alibi. He’d been home with his five-year-old when the shooting took place, had roasted a chicken for dinner, and had sent a constant stream of e-mail to his office during that time.

Benton was at first disbelieving and then shattered, but Conklin and I talked to him anyway, about his marriage, about Barbara’s friends and coworkers, and asked if there’d been any threats against her. He said, “Barbara is nothing but love. I don’t know what we’re going to do…” And then he broke down again.

I checked in with Jacobi at nine. I told him that until I ran Richard Benton’s name through NCIC, he was in the clear, and that Benton didn’t know the initials “WCF.”

“Barbara was a nurse’s aide,” I told Jacobi. “Worked at a nursing home. We’ll interview the others on her shift first thing in the morning.”

“I’m going to hand that job off to Samuels and Lemke,” Jacobi said. He had a strangled sound in his voice for the second time in as many hours.

“Hand it off? Excuse me? What’s that about?”

“Something new just came in, Boxer.”

Honest to God, I was running out of gas, going into my thirteenth straight hour on the job. Behind me, in a room shimmering with anguish, Conklin was telling Richard Benton to come to the ME’s office to identify the victims.

“Something new on the Benton case?” I asked Jacobi. Maybe the husband had a record for domestic violence. Maybe a witness had come forward, or perhaps CSI had found something inside the RAV4.

Jacobi said, “No, this just happened. If you want me to give it to Chi and McNeil, I will. But you and Conklin are going to want in.”

“Don’t be too sure, Jacobi.”

“You’ve heard of Marcus Dowling?”

“The actor?”

“His wife was just shot by an intruder,” Jacobi told me. “I’m on my way over to the Dowling house now.”

Chapter 11

THE DOWLING HOUSE is on Nob Hill, a sprawling mansion taking up most of the block, ivy growing up the walls, potted topiaries on either side of the large oak door. It couldn’t have been more different from the Bentons ’ humble home.

Before Conklin could reach for the bell, Jacobi opened the door. His face was sagging from stress. His eyelids drooped, and he almost looked older tonight than he had when we’d both taken bullets on Larkin Street.

“It happened in the bedroom,” he told me and my partner. “Second floor. After you’ve taken a look at the scene, join us downstairs. I’ll be in the library with Dowling.”

The bedroom shared by Marcus and Casey Dowling looked like it had been ripped from the pages of a Neiman Marcus catalog.

The bed, centered on the west-facing wall, was the size of Catalina, with a button-tucked bronze silk headboard, silk throw pillows, and rumpled satin bedding in bronze and gold. There were more tassels in this room than backstage at the Mitchell Brothers’ Girls, Girls, Girls!!! review.

A dainty console table was on the floor, surrounded by broken knickknacks. Taffeta curtains swelled at the open window, but I could still smell the undertones of gunpowder in the air.

Charlie Clapper, director of our Crime Scene Unit, was taking pictures of Casey Dowling’s body. He flapped his hand toward me and Conklin in greeting and said, “Frickin’ shame, a beautiful woman like this.” He stepped back so we could take a look.

Casey Dowling was naked, lying faceup on the floor, her platinum hair splayed around her, blood on her palms. It made me think she’d clasped her hands to the chest wound before she fell.

“Her husband says he was downstairs rinsing dinner dishes when he heard two gunshots,” Clapper told me. “When he came into the room, his wife was lying here. That table and the bric-a-brac were broken on the floor, and the window was open.”

“Was anything taken?” Conklin asked.

“There’s some jewelry missing from the safe in the closet. Dowling says the contents were insured for a couple of million.”

Clapper walked to the window and held back the curtain, revealing a hole cut in the glass.

“Intruder used a glass cutter, then opened the lock. Drawers look untouched. The safe wasn’t blown, so either he knew the combination or, more likely, the safe was already open. Bullets are inside the missus. No shell casings. This was a neat job until he knocked over the table on the way out. We’ve just gotten started. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find prints or trace.”

Clapper is a pro, with some twenty-five years on the force, a good part of it in Homicide before he went over to crime scene investigation. He’s sharp, and he actually helps without getting in the way.

I said, “So this was a burglary that went to hell?”

Clapper shrugged. “Like all professional cat burglars, this one was organized, even fastidious. Maybe he carries a gun for emergencies, but packing goes against the type.”

“So what happened?” I wondered out loud. “The husband wasn’t in the room. The victim wasn’t armed-she wasn’t even dressed. What made a cat burglar fire on a naked woman?”

Chapter 12

CONKLIN AND I took the curving staircase down to the main floor. I found the library by following the familiar, resonant, English-accented voice of Marcus Dowling.

I’d seen all of his older films, the ones where he’d played a spy or was a romantic lead, and even some of his more recent films, where he’d played a heavy. I’d always liked him.

I stepped through the open door to the library, and Dowling was standing there barefoot, wearing blue trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt. I admit to feeling a little starstruck. Marcus Dowling, the next best thing to Sean Connery. He was telling Jacobi about the senseless murder of his wife when Conklin and I came through the door.

Jacobi introduced us, telling Dowling that the three of us would be working the case together.

I shook hands with the film legend, then sat at the edge of a leather sofa. Dowling was clearly distraught. And I noticed something else. His hair was wet.

Dowling didn’t sit down. He repeated his story as he paced around the book-lined room.

“Casey and I had the Devereaus over for dinner. François and his wife, Sheila-he’s directing my new film.”

“We’ll need their contact numbers,” I said.

“I’ll give you all the numbers you want,” he said, “but they had already left when this happened. Casey had gone upstairs to dress for bed. I was tidying up down here. I heard a loud bang coming from upstairs.” His forehead rumpled. “It didn’t even occur to me that it was a gunshot. I called out to Casey. She didn’t answer.”

“What happened next, Mr. Dowling?”

“I called her again, and then as I was heading upstairs, I heard another bang. This time I thought it was a gunshot, and right after that, I heard glass breaking.

“I was all emotional by this time, Inspectors. I don’t know what happened after… after I saw my girl lying on the floor. I grabbed her in my arms,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Her head fell back, and she wasn’t breathing. I must have called the police. I saw my bloody handprint on the phone. Afterward, I realized that the safe was nearly empty.

“Whoever did this must have known Casey,” Dowling continued, weeping now. “He must have known that she didn’t always lock the safe, because dialing the combination was just… too bloody boring.

“Killing Casey was so insane,” Dowling went on. He was rubbing his chest when he said to Jacobi, “Just tell me what I can do to help you catch the animal who did this.”

I was about to ask Marcus Dowling why he’d showered while waiting for the police to arrive when Conklin got ahead of me, inquiring, “Mr. Dowling, do you own a gun?”

Dowling turned a wild-eyed stare on Conklin. His face went rigid with pain. He clutched his left arm and said, “Something’s wrong.”

Then he keeled over and dropped to the floor.

Chapter 13

JESUS CHRIST! MARCUS Dowling was dying.

Conklin found the aspirin, Jacobi cushioned Dowling’s head with a throw pillow, and I called Dispatch. I repeated the house address and shouted, “Fifty-year-old male! Heart attack!”

Dowling was still writhing when the ambulance arrived, and the big man was loaded onto a gurney and carried out through the door. Jacobi rode with Dowling to the hospital, leaving me and Conklin to canvass the neighborhood.

Lights from fantastic neighboring homes punctuated the darkness along the tree-lined street. I was worried about this new case. Because Casey Dowling had been wealthy and famous, the public pressure to find her killer would squeeze the politicos, who would, in turn, squeeze us. The SFPD was already suffering from budget deficits and too little manpower. Add to that the public expectation that homicides could be solved in an hour between commercial breaks, and I knew we were in for a humongous, spotlighted nightmare.

I hoped Clapper would come up with a good lead in the lab, because right now, along with next to nothing to go on, I was getting a bad feeling that what Marcus had told us was all wrong.

“Why would a burglar shoot Casey Dowling?” I asked Conklin as we walked up the street.

“What Clapper said. The burglar carried a gun in case he ran into an emergency.”

“Like a surprised homeowner?”

“Exactly.”

“Casey Dowling wasn’t armed.”

“True. Maybe she recognized the intruder,” Conklin said. “You know those stories Cindy’s been doing on Hello Kitty?”

Cindy is Cindy Thomas, a crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and a friend to the end with a great mind for solving whodunits.

Recently Cindy had been writing about a cat burglar who’d been doing second-story jobs, always breaking in when the homeowners were having dinner on the first floor and the alarm system was turned off. This burglar made off with only jewelry-which had not turned up. Cindy had dubbed the cat burglar “Hello Kitty,” and it stuck.

Here’s what was known about Hello Kitty: he was fit, deft, and fast, and had a huge pair of stones.

“Think about it,” Conklin said. “Hello Kitty seems to know when these wealthy people are having dinner parties. What if he’s part of the same social circle? If Casey Dowling recognized him, maybe shooting her was his only way out.”

“Not a bad theory,” I said to Conklin as we took the walk up to the front steps of the manse next door. “But wait a sec. What did you make of Dowling’s wet hair?”

“He washed off his wife’s blood.”

“So he leaped into the shower after Casey was murdered,” I said. “It seems weird to me.”

“So what’s your theory? Homicide One Oh One?”

“Why not? Because Dowling’s a movie star? Something about him isn’t right. He told Clapper he heard two gunshots. He told us he heard a noise, and then sometime after that, he heard a second sound, and that time he was sure it was a shot.”

My partner said, “Could be he was just summing up, telling the story in shorthand.”

“Could be shorthand,” I said. “Or could be he’s making up the story as he goes along and can’t keep it straight.”

Chapter 14

THE HOME NEXT to the Dowlings’ was set back from the street and had a groundskeeper’s house in the side yard and two deluxe cars in the driveway.

I pressed the bell, and chimes rang. The front door opened, and a brown-haired boy of about ten, wearing a rugby shirt over pajama bottoms, gazed up at us and asked who we were.

“I’m Sergeant Boxer. This is Inspector Conklin. Are your parents at home?”

“Kellll-yyyy!”

The boy turned out to be Evan Richards, and Kelly was his babysitter, a woman in her midtwenties who had been watching Project Runway in the media room when she heard the sirens screaming up the street.

“Casey Dowling was killed?” she asked. “That’s crazy. That burglar could have come here! Evan, can you grab the phone? I have to call your parents.”

“I think I saw something,” the boy said. “I was staring out my bedroom window, and someone ran past the house. Like, in the shadows under the trees.”

“Could you describe him?” Conklin asked the boy.

Evan shook his head. “Just someone running. Wearing black. I heard him huffing as he ran.”

I asked if this person was big or small, if there was anything special about the way he ran.

“I thought he was just a jogger, you know? He was wearing a cap, I think. I was looking down at the top of his head.”

Conklin left his card with the boy’s babysitter and asked Evan to please call if he remembered anything else. Then we headed down the block toward the next house.

I said to Conklin, “So maybe we have a live witness to Kitty making a run for it.” And then my cell phone rang.

Yuki, sending a text message: Call me.

I hit the recall button, and Yuki picked up.

“God! I know her!” Yuki said.

“Know who?”

“Casey Dowling.”

Frickin’ grapevine. How could she have heard already?

“We went to law school together, Lindsay. Damn it. Casey was a sweetheart. A doll. When you catch the shooter, I’m going to fight for the case, and then I’m going to send Casey Dowling’s killer straight to hell.”

Chapter 15

SARAH WELLS SHUT her bedroom door and locked it. She was still panting from her escapade, her hands still shaking. She stood in front of her mirror, fluffed up her hair, and looked at herself-hard.

Did it show?

Her skin was so white, it was almost transparent, and her brown eyes were huge. She thought about her husband telling her she could look good if she’d ever try, but when he told her that, she became even more determined to look exactly as she was: a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher with a second life. And she wasn’t even talking about the burglaries.

Sarah put her two duffel bags down on the floor, then opened the bottom drawer of the big, old American Waterfall dresser. Like her, the dresser held secrets.

Sarah took the piles of T-shirts and sweatpants out of the bottom drawer and pried up the drawer’s false bottom. She held her breath, hoping, as always, that the jewelry was still there.

It was.

Each of her hauls had its own soft fabric bag, five collections of astonishing jewelry, and now the Dowling take made an even half dozen.

Sarah unzipped the bag with her latest haul and looked into the glorious tangle of jewels that had, until recently, belonged to a movie star’s wife. It was the most unbelievable stuff: totally insane and wonderful sapphires and diamonds; rings and necklaces and bracelets; jewelry that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

She’d pulled off the burglary by the slimmest margin-a squeaker, for God’s sake. She was safe for now, but she still had a big problem: how to get rid of the goods.

Maury Green, her mentor and fence, was dead, killed at the airport by a cop’s bullet meant for his client, a jewel thief who’d been running from the police. Maury had been a good teacher and friend. It was truly depressing that he hadn’t lived to celebrate her success and to collect his share.

Maury, like other good fences, paid out about 10 percent of the jewelry’s retail value. It didn’t seem like a lot, considering the hell that would rain down on her if she got caught, but still, it was a ton of money compared to what she earned as a teacher. And now Maury was gone.

The longer she held on to the jewelry, the greater her chance of getting caught with it. Sarah cupped a double handful of Casey Dowling’s treasure and rocked her hands under a table lamp so that the light bounced off the facets.

Behind her locked bedroom door, Sarah Wells became mesmerized by the gorgeous refracting light.

Chapter 16

SARAH WELLS WASN’T the first cat burglar to do break-ins while dinner was on the table. She’d studied the greats, the Dinnertime Burglar and the Dinner Set Gang. Between them, they’d scored tens of millions in jewels using simple no-tech tools while their victims lingered over coffee and dessert on the floor below. Like her role models, Sarah thoroughly researched her intended targets and studied their movements. But with all the news about Hello Kitty, she marveled at how her victims felt so secure with the lights on that they didn’t set their security alarms.

Their magical thinking was just amazing. And woo-hoo for that.

As Sarah gloried in the Dowlings’ former riches, one special item reached out to her and hooked her in. It was a ring with a really large, pale-yellow stone, maybe twenty karats, cushion-cut and anchored in a thoroughly gaudy setting.

She took a rough count of the pavé jewels surrounding the center stone and tallied 120 little diamonds.

What a ring!

This thing was a frickin’ gasper. It just shrieked romance. Marcus Dowling had undoubtedly given this ring to his wife for some special occasion, and now Sarah wondered what it could be worth.

She had learned a lot about precious stones since she’d started moonlighting as a cat burglar, but she wasn’t a true gemologist and was really curious to know what she had.

She stashed the rest of the Dowling loot and her bag of tools into the bottom drawer of the dresser, put back the false lid, and piled her clothes on top of it. Then she shut the drawer and fished a pictorial guide to gemstones out from under the armoire, taking it with her into the double bed.

Paging through the book, she found a couple of matches to the stone. Possibly the ring was a topaz or a yellow tourmaline. No-there was a hint of green in Casey Dowling’s big, yellow stone. Which probably made it a citrine, a flashy but not supervaluable stone. That was even more reason Sarah wanted to keep this ring.

While she knew that holding on to stolen merchandise could be a terrible mistake, she had to find a way to keep this one thing. She wanted more than a souvenir. She wanted a trophy. A reward. And now she was thinking that the thing to do was to have the yellow stone reset as a pendant.

She remembered something her grandmother had said to her mother, who had said it to her: “On some people, rhinestones look like diamonds. On others, diamonds look like rhinestones.”

Sarah thought that, on her-with her T.J. Maxx wardrobe and plain looks-citrine would look like glass. She stood in front of the mirror and held the yellow stone to her black turtleneck, just under her collarbone.

It looked much smaller when it wasn’t a ring.

She was sure that, once reset, this stone would keep her secret. As Sarah stared at herself in the mirror, there was a loud knock on the door. It was her husband, Trevor.

“Why is the door locked, missy? What are you doing? Having fun with yourself?”

“You could say that,” Sarah said.

“Let me in.”

“No.”

“Let me in!”

Sarah put the ring under the hollowed-out base of the lamp on her night table.

“Go to hell!” she shouted.

He was shaking the door, kicking at it. Sarah went over and unlocked it. Just another day, she thought as she let Trevor into the bedroom. Just another day in the secret life of Sarah Wells.

Chapter 17

SARAH SLAMMED THE front door of her apartment and marched out to the car thinking about frickin’ Trevor, who had begged her, “Wait just another minute.” Only it was an unbearable twenty minutes under his fat, nasty body, and now she was borderline late to work-again.

Sarah headed her Saturn onto Delores Street and got onto the freeway, making up lost time. She switched on the radio and found “Good Morning with Lisa Kerz and Rosemary Van Buren, the place for traffic, weather, and local news.”

Lisa Kerz was saying, “Rosemary, this is the latest on Casey Dowling, who we’ve just learned was shot last night.”

Shot. What was that? Sarah gripped the wheel.

“Do the police have a lead on who killed her?” Van Buren asked.

Killed her?

Sarah’s heart thundered in her chest. What kind of lie was this? Casey Dowling was alive and screaming when she had escaped from the Dowling house.

Casey had been alive.

“No, this is about Marcus Dowling,” said Kerz. “Breaking news. Mr. Dowling’s lawyer, Tony Peyser, made a statement ten minutes ago-”

Sarah stared at the radio as if it were a person, listening to Lisa Kerz saying that Mr. Dowling’s lawyer had gone live on KQED asking for help from the people of San Francisco. She ripped her eyes back to the road just in time to miss the guardrail.

“Okay, now here’s the statement, hot off the wire,” Van Buren added. “Says here, quoting Mr. Peyser, ‘Mr. Dowling is offering a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever killed Casey Dowling.’”

Sarah saw her exit ramp rushing toward the car, jerked the steering wheel without signaling, and left rubber on the roadway as she made the turn. Once off the freeway, she drove without seeing, eventually finding herself in the parking lot at Booker T. Washington High.

Sarah shut off the car, grabbed her backpack, and headed through the red iron gates and into the main building, entering the teacher’s lounge for her customary pick-me-up before facing the day.

The bell had rung. The lounge was nearly empty except for one person: Heidi Meyer, who was standing by the coffee machine, stirring her cup. Sarah called out, “Hey, Heidi.”

“Hey, yourself. Whoa. You okay, Sarah?”

“Bah. Trevor’s a bastard. Heard enough?”

Heidi put down her cup and opened her arms to give Sarah a hug. Sarah walked into the embrace and was enveloped by the scent of lilacs. She buried her face in the soft cloud of Heidi’s red hair and just held on.

Could Heidi hear her blood roaring? God. The implications of what she’d just heard were inescapable. The police would be seriously focused on finding Sarah, and they’d be looking to charge her for killing Casey Dowling. That was just insane.

“We’re late to class,” Heidi said, rubbing Sarah’s back, “and the monsters will be revolting.”

“As always.” Sarah laughed.

Heidi gave Sarah a peck on the lips-and Sarah kissed Heidi back, but harder and with feeling, Heidi’s sweet mouth opening under hers as Sarah put her whole heart into it.

If only she could tell Heidi everything.

Chapter 18

THE MORNING AFTER their murders, Barbara Ann and Darren Benton, along with Casey Dowling, were chilling in the morgue while Conklin and I stared at each other across our overloaded desks, not knowing whether to spit or go blind.

We were working the Dowling case because Jacobi had been absolutely clear when he said, “Dowling trumps Benton. Dowling trumps everything.” Because Casey Dowling was a high-profile victim and the Bentons were not.

I told Jacobi that the lunatic killer who’d left a message in the Bentons’ RAV4 made me feel like I’d put my finger in a live electric socket. That I was sure their killer was signaling a pattern in the making. That Conklin and I should be on the Benton case now, full-time.

Jacobi showed me his palms. What do you want from me? No manpower. No budget. I want to keep my job. Do what I tell you.

Conklin looked fresh, his brown eyes sparkling in the gloom of the bull pen, his shining brown hair falling across his forehead as we studied Stolen Property’s case notes on Hello Kitty and scoured crime scene photos of the Dowlings’ master bedroom.

I was uploading Clapper’s footage of the scene when Cindy Thomas blew through the gates and headed toward Conklin and me.

“Look at this!” she shouted, her blond bedspring curls bouncing, blue lightning flashing in her eyes.

She was waving the Oakland Tribune, the smaller, foxier tabloid that competes with the Chronicle. The headline read, “Hello Kitty Kills.” Because Cindy had named this cat burglar and had reported on his heists, she considered him hers.

“Everyone’s on my story now,” she said, swiveling her fierce gaze from me to Conklin and back to me again. “Give me a break, please. I need something that the Trib doesn’t have.”

“We’ve got nothing,” I said. “Wish we did.”

“Rich?” she said to my partner.

Cindy is four years younger than I, more a little sister to me than my actual little sister. I love her, and even though she fights me, she also uses her keen intuition and bulldog tenacity to help me solve homicides. That’s in the plus column.

Cindy pulled over a chair, triangulating me and Conklin. It was a neat visual metaphor, and I didn’t like it.

“Why would Hello Kitty kill Casey Dowling?” she asked. “Kitty has never been violent. Why would he even be carrying a gun when armed robbery would get him life?”

“We’re working the case, Cindy,” I said. “Jeez. We haven’t stopped. I got all of two hours in the rack last night-”

“Rich?” Cindy cocked her head like a little yellow bird.

“Exactly what Lindsay said. We’ve got nothing. No prints. No gun. No witnesses.”

“Usual deal,” Cindy said. She batted her eyelashes at Conklin and gave him her best come-hither stare. “Off the record.”

Conklin waited a beat, then said, “What if Casey knew the intruder?”

Cindy leaped up, hugged Conklin around the neck, kissed him on the mouth, and then flew out of the squad room.

“BYE, CINDY,” I called after her.

Conklin laughed.

Chapter 19

“I’M GOING TO see Claire,” I told my partner.

“Stay in touch,” he said.

I ran down three flights and worked my way through the Hall’s crowded lobby, out the back door, and down the breezeway to the medical examiner’s office.

I found Claire in the autopsy suite. She was wearing a floral shower cap and an apron over her XXL scrubs-still carrying some poundage from her pregnancy on her size-sixteen frame. I called out to her, and she looked up from the body of Barbara Ann Benton, who was lying eviscerated on the table.

“You just missed Cindy,” Claire said, putting Barbara Ann’s liver onto a scale.

“No, I didn’t. She stormed the squad room. Got Conklin into a lip-lock. Promised him favors in exchange for a headline, and he lapped it up. What’d she get out of you?”

“Breaking news. Casey Dowling was shot to death. Cindy has the best job, doesn’t she? She can focus on her one and only story and still have time to get it on with Inspector Hottie.”

“Anything interesting on Barbara Ann Benton?” I asked, staring into the dead woman’s abdominal cavity, hoping to head off a sore subject. To be precise, it was hard keeping Cindy out of confidential police business-and I wasn’t sleeping with her.

“No postmortem surprises,” said Claire. “Mrs. Benton took two slugs. Either one of them could have killed her, but the shot to the chest is the cause of death.”

“And the baby?”

“Cause of death, a nine millimeter through the temporal lobe. Calling it a homicide. That’s signed, stamped, and official. The slugs are at the lab.”

Claire asked her assistant to finish with Barbara Ann, then stripped off her gloves and mask and walked me out of the autopsy suite and into her office. She took the swivel chair, and I slumped into the seat across from her desk. She pulled two bottles of water out of the fridge and handed one to me.

Claire has a picture on her desk, and I turned it around so I could scrutinize the four of us on the front steps of the Hall of Justice. There was Yuki, all suited up, her dark hair parted in the middle, falling in two glossy wings to her chin; Cindy was grinning, her slightly overlapping front teeth drawing attention to how pretty she really is; and then there was Claire, buxom and beautiful in her midforties.

And there I was, towering over them all at five ten, wearing my blond hair in a ponytail and sporting a dead-serious look on my face. The thing is, I think of myself as lighthearted. I wonder where I got that idea.

“What’s wrong, Lindsay?”

“You don’t always get what you want,” I said, sort of smiling.

“The Benton case? Or the other thing?”

“Both. Listen, I’m supervising Chi on Benton, but he’s the primary.”

“I know. And you know Paul Chi will kill himself to solve the case.”

I nodded. “Tell me what you’ve got on Casey Dowling.”

“Her assailant used a forty-four.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I know. What’s a burglar doing with a cannon when a cute little nine would do? Lab didn’t get a hit from the database.”

“That was quick,” I said.

“I leaned on Clapper to rush it, and now I have to name my next child after him.”

“Clapper Washburn. Rough handle for a child.”

Claire laughed, then sobered. “Maybe I’ve got something.”

“Don’t make me beg.”

“When I did the rape kit on Casey Dowling, I found evidence of sexual intercourse. The little fishes were still swimming.”

Chapter 20

WHEN I GOT back to my desk, Conklin said, “While you were out, seventy-two people called with tips about Casey Dowling’s murder. Look.” Brenda came over and dropped several pink message squares on his desk. “Ten more.”

“What did I miss?”

“Dowling’s lawyer went on the air, said he’s putting up fifty grand for info leading to the arrest of Casey Dowling’s killer.”

“So here’s the question, Rich. Is Dowling completely right to offer a reward? Or is he jamming us up with wacko tipsters so we can’t work the case?”

I called Yuki to discuss the possibility of getting a warrant for Dowling’s phone and computer records when Jacobi pulled a chair into the center of the bull pen, straddled it, and called the squad to attention.

I was struck again by how crappy he looked. Jacobi is a veteran of the force: he’s served roughly twenty years in Homicide, a survivor of both physical attacks and life’s vicissitudes. So what was so special that it was bothering the hell out of him?

Jacobi nodded at me, then swung his head and took in the rest of the day shift: Inspectors Chi, McNeil, Lemke, Samuels, and Conklin, and a couple of guys from the swing shift who’d been drafted to help us out. I guessed Jacobi was thinking about how few of us there were, how many cases we were working, and how small a number of those cases we would ever solve.

Jacobi asked Chi to make his report on Benton.

Chi stood, five feet eleven inches of canny brainiac. He reported that he and his partner had done a follow-up with Richard Benton, that Benton ’s alibi checked out, and that Barbara Ann Benton’s life insurance wouldn’t pay out enough to bury her.

Said Chi, “The surveillance tape from the garage is grainy. The shooter was wearing a cap. He kept his head down, but from what we can see of his neck, we think he’s white. Seems like he said something to the victim before he shot her and the baby. He took nothing, but maybe he panicked. It still looks like a holdup that went wrong.”

Jacobi asked him the questions that were on all our minds: “Why did the shooter kill the kid? And, Jesus, Paul, what’s WCF?”

“There’s no WCF in the database, Lieutenant. It’s not a gang or a known terrorist organization. Found about thirty phone listings for first names starting with ‘W,’ last names starting with ‘F,’ and six with the middle initial ‘C.’ We’re running them down.”

Next into the buzz saw was me.

I briefed the squad on the whole nine yards of the nothing we had on the death of Casey Dowling, saying that we were looking at five recent burglaries with the same MO.

“In all six incidents, the homeowners were home, and no one ever saw the burglar. This time there’s a fatality,” I said, “and maybe a witness. A ten-year-old neighbor saw someone in black running from the scene. Right now, it looks like the victim surprised the burglar, and he shot her.”

Jacobi nodded, and then he dropped the bomb.

“The chief called me in this morning and said it would be more efficient to combine our unit with the Northern Division Homicide Section.”

“What does that mean, ‘combine’?” I asked, dumbfounded at the idea of doubling up in our twenty-by-thirty-foot work space.

“The thinking upstairs is to have more bodies working the cases, more collaborative problem solving, and, hell, probably a new chain of command.”

So that’s why Jacobi looked like he’d been dragged behind a truck. His job was in danger, and that would affect us all.

“It’s not a done deal,” Jacobi said. “Let’s close these cases. I can’t fight if we’re losing.”

The meeting ended with a collective sigh, after which Jacobi invited me and Conklin to join him in what we jokingly call his corner office: a small, glass-walled cell with a window overlooking the freeway.

Conklin took the side chair and I leaned against the door frame, assessing the horizontal grooves that had appeared overnight on Jacobi’s forehead.

“Dowling didn’t have a heart attack,” Jacobi told us. “Chest pains. Rapid breathing. It’s being called a stress attack. Could be. It fits. Or maybe he was acting. Maybe this time he’ll get that Oscar. Meanwhile, he’s just been released from the hospital.”

I told Jacobi that the ME’s report said Casey Dowling had had sex before she died. “We’re on our way to see Dowling.”

“I’ll be waiting by the phone,” Jacobi said.

Chapter 21

MARCUS DOWLING OPENED his door and showed us to a sitting room decorated to the hilt with English-style roll-arm sofas, Flow Blue platters on the walls, and Foo dogs on the mantel. Mayfair meets the City on the Bay.

A woman in a black dress, not introduced, offered beverages and quietly left the room, returning with bottled water for Conklin and me, Chivas for our host.

I said, “Mr. Dowling, tell us again what happened last night.”

He said, “Jesus Christ, I told you everything, didn’t I? I thought you were coming here to tell me something.”

Conklin, who is a sensational good cop to my badass bitch, said, “We apologize, sir. The thing is, your telling us what happened again might trigger a memory or a new thought about who did this.”

Dowling nodded, leaned back in his leather chair, and put down a healthy swig of scotch. “The Devereaus had gone,” he said. “As I told the other officer, I was putting things into the sink-”

“The lady who brought the beverages,” I interrupted. “She wasn’t here to help?”

“Vangy only works days. She has a child.”

Dowling repeated how his wife had gone upstairs before him, how he heard shots, how he found his wife on the floor, not breathing, and how he’d called the police.

I said, “Mr. Dowling, I noticed last night that your hair was wet. You took a shower before the police came?”

He grunted and gripped his glass. I was watching for a tell-a guilty look-and I thought I saw it. “I was devastated. I stood weeping in the shower because I didn’t know what else to do.”

“And your clothes, sir?” Conklin asked.

“My clothes?”

“Mr. Dowling, let me be honest with you,” Conklin said. “We know you’re a victim here, but there are certain protocols. We take your clothes to the lab, and it puts down any questions that might come up later.”

Dowling gave Conklin a furious look and called out, “Van-gy! Take Inspector Conklin upstairs and give him whatever he wants.”

When Conklin and the housekeeper left the room, I asked, “Mr. Dowling, when was the last time you had intimate relations with your wife?”

“My God. What are you getting at?”

“Someone had sex with your wife,” I said, pressing on. “If it was her killer, he left evidence that could help us-”

“Casey had sex with me!” Dowling shouted. “We made love before dinner. Now what exactly does that tell you?”

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin and I left Dowling’s house with a printout of his phone contact list, a cheek swab, and all the unlaundered clothing he owned. Presumably that included what he was wearing when his wife was shot.

“I took everything in the clothes hamper and whatever was on the hook behind the bathroom door,” Conklin said as we walked out to the car. “If he shot her, we’ll have gunpowder. We’ll have blood spatter. We’ll have him.”

Chapter 22

IT WAS THE end of a very long day when Claire and I came in from the dark street into Susie’s, with its splashy sponge-painted walls, spicy aromas, and the plinking drumbeat of the steel band.

Cindy and Yuki were holding down our favorite table in the back room, Yuki in her best go-to-court suit while Cindy had swapped out her denims for something flirty in baby-blue chiffon under a short, cream-colored jacket. They were putting away plantain chips and beer and were in deep conversation about the Dowling case.

Claire and I slid into the booth as Cindy said, “Casey Dowling owned a twenty-karat canary diamond ring worth a million bucks. Known as the Sun of Ceylon. Maybe she fought to keep it. What do you think, Linds? Possible motive for Hello Kitty to go ballistic?”

“Casey didn’t have any defensive wounds,” said Claire.

“And she didn’t scream for her husband,” I added.

I poured beer from the pitcher for Claire and myself, then asked Cindy, “Where’d you get that info about the diamond?”

“I’ve got my sources. But I wouldn’t get too excited, Linds. That rock will have been chopped into pebbles by now.”

“Maybe,” I said to Cindy. “Listen, I have a thought. Since you know who’s who, maybe you could run your fingers through the social register, flag anyone young and athletic enough to do second-story jobs.”

Yuki asked, “You’re thinking Hello Kitty is high-society?”

“Rich does,” Cindy and I said in unison.

Yuki tucked her hair behind her ears. “If Kitty travels with that crowd, he’d know Casey had this huge yellow diamond, and if she recognized him-”

“Yeah, I admit, it makes sense,” I said. “There was a forced-window entry into the Dowling bedroom, identical to the other five break-ins. There’s a witness who saw someone making a getaway on foot. Clapper says there’s no gunpowder or blood spatter on Dowling’s clothing. So if Casey knew Kitty-”

And then Claire thumped the table with her fist. Chips jumped. Beer sloshed. She got everyone’s complete attention.

“I’m sorry, but the Benton killings give me the creeps. WCF. What’s that? It’s crazy. Sinister crazy. Mystery gunpowder stippling. Mystery motive. Dead baby, shot execution-style.

“So let me be clear: I don’t care whose case it is, and I know it’s not right to care more about one murder victim over another. I said I’m sorry, and I am, but this dead baby hurts me. Deeply. And now I’m going home to my man and my little girl.”

Chapter 23

YUKI PAID THE tab and told Lorraine to keep the change. She realized suddenly that she’d never given the others her news. Usually girls’ night out at Susie’s was laughing and venting and dinner. But tonight everyone got intense and then-they were gone.

Yuki stood up, buttoned her jacket, and walked past the kitchen and into the main room. Her hand was on the front door handle when, on impulse, she turned and walked back to the bar.

The bartender had dark curly hair, an easy smile, and a name tag stitched onto the fabric of his wild-printed shirt.

“Miles?”

“That’s my name,” he told her. “Wait. I’ve seen you before. You and your friends-beer and margaritas, right?”

“I’m Yuki Castellano,” she said, shaking his hand. “What do you drink to celebrate a good day in court?”

“You beat a traffic ticket?”

Yuki laughed.

“Do that again,” Miles said. “I think the sun just came out.”

“I’m a prosecutor,” she said. “Things turned out fine for the good guys today. So what do you think? What am I drinking?”

“Classic. Traditional. Always in style.”

“Perfect,” Yuki said as Miles poured champagne. “You know, today was stupendous, except for the one stone in my shoe.”

“Tell me about it.”

Yuki ordered a spicy crab salad, then told Miles about the case against Jo-Jo Johnson and how the victim, the dead Dr. Harris, was a very bad dude but that Jo-Jo was worse. He’d let the man die in his own vomit over the course of fifteen hours.

“Should have taken the jury about five minutes to find Jo-Jo guilty,” Miles said.

“Shoulda, but it took a day and a half. Jo-Jo’s lawyer is very smooth, and Jo-Jo is disarmingly simple. Like, you could believe that he really didn’t know that Harris was dying if you totally squinted your eyes and put your common sense in the deep freeze.”

“So it’s terrific that you won.”

“Yeah. I’ve been at this a couple of years. I’ve had a lot of losses.”

“So you didn’t say. What’s the stone in your shoe?”

“His name’s Jeff Asher. Opposing counsel. He came up to me after his client was taken out in handcuffs and said, ‘Congratulations on your win, Yuki. What is that? One in a row?’”

“He’s a sore loser,” the bartender said. “You hurt him, Yuki. Definitely. Guess what? Your champagne’s on the house.”

“Thanks, Miles. Yeah. You’re right. He’s a sore loser.”

“Bartenders never lie,” Miles said.

Yuki laughed.

“Here comes the sun,” he said.

Chapter 24

CINDY’S BLOUSE WAS a cloud of silk chiffon in the rear foot well of Rich Conklin’s car. Her skirt was rolled up to her waist, and her panty hose dangled from one foot. She was damned uncomfortable, but she wouldn’t change a thing.

She rested her hand on Rich’s chest, damp from the romp, and felt his heart thudding. He pulled her in tight and kissed her.

“What a concert,” he said.

“Tremendous rhythm section,” she said, both of them cracking up.

They were parked in an alley near the Embarcadero, where Rich had pulled the car into the shadows because Cindy’s hand on his leg had made it impossible to wait.

He said now, “I can almost hear the cop knocking on the window with his flashlight, saying, ‘Hey, what’s going on in there?’”

“And you putting your shield to the glass, saying, ‘Officer down.’”

Conklin started laughing. “I don’t have any idea where my shield is. You are so witchy, Cin, and I mean that in the nicest possible way.”

She gave him a sly smile and ran her hand over his naked chest and slid it down, then kissed him, starting up his breathing, and there he was, hard again, kissing her, pulling her on top of him.

“Keep your head down,” he panted. “Headlights.”

Cindy leaned over and fastened her mouth to his, broke away, raised and lowered her hips, and worked him with her eyes open, watching his face change, letting him see her, really see her. She slid up and away from him, and he put his hands around her waist and pulled her down on him, hard.

“You drive me crazy, Cin.”

She put her cheek down on his collarbone, letting him drive the action, feeling secure and at risk the whole time, a powerfully explosive combination. And then she was calling his name, and he released himself into her.

“Oh my God,” she said, panting, then fading, wanting to fall asleep in Rich’s arms. But there was something bothering her, something she’d never felt it was okay to ask him until now.

“Rich?”

“Want to go for three?” he asked her.

“Dare you,” she said, and they both laughed, and then she just blurted it out. “Rich, have you ever-”

“Maybe, once or twice before.”

“No, listen. Did you ever do it with Lindsay?”

“No. No. C’mon, Cindy. She’s my partner.”

“So that’s what-illegal?”

“I think my arm’s dead,” he said to her.

Cindy shifted her weight, and then there was a whole lot of looking for articles of clothing and deciding where to spend the night.

She’d spoiled the mood, Cindy thought, buttoning her blouse. And she wasn’t even sure he’d told her the truth.

Chapter 25

PETE GORDON WAS standing in the kitchen, whipping up some instant mashed potatoes on the stove while watching the baseball game on the undercabinet TV, when his wife came through the door.

“Whatcha burning?” she asked.

“Listen, princess, I don’t need your frickin’ cooking tips, and now you made me miss that pitch.”

“So why don’t you rewind it, sweetie?”

“Do you see a DVR in here? Do you?”

“Sorry, Mr. Cranky. I’m just saying you could save that if you put a little milk in it and turned down the flame.”

“For Christ’s sake,” Pete said, switching off the gas, scraping the potatoes into a bowl. “You just can’t let me have a single simple pleasure, can you?”

“Well, I have a surprise.”

“Let’s hear it.” He dialed up the volume and ate the potatoes standing in front of the set. He spit into the sink as the food burned his mouth, glancing up in time to see the opposing team crossing the plate. “NO!” he screamed. “Goddamn Giants. How could they lose this game?”

“My aunt said she’d like to take all of us out to dinner tomorrow. Special treat-on her.”

“Yippee. Sounds like fun. Your fat-assed aunt and all of us around a table at the Olive Garden.”

“Pete.”

No answer.

“Pete,” she said, reaching up and turning off the television. He swung his head around and glared at her.

“It’s not about you, handsome. It’s about the kids having dinner with their family.”

“You guys can get along without me. Just wing it, princess,” Petey said, not quite believing it when she took the remote off the counter, jammed it down the disposal, and hit the switch.

“Go to hell, Petey,” she said as the machine gnawed on the plastic. “No, I really mean it.”

Pete shut off the grinder and watched his fucking wife flounce out of the room. He reran the last scene in his mind, only this time he put wifey’s hand into the grinder. Yeah. The metal teeth chomping through muscle and bone as she screamed her head off.

He was going to get her.

He was going to get her and Sherry and the stink bomb one day really soon.

WCF, people. Wait for it.

Chapter 26

MY EYELIDS FLEW open at 5:52 a.m. exactly. I know because Joe has a projection clock, a high-tech gadget that shows the time and temperature in red digits on the ceiling.

I like knowing this information by simply opening my eyes. But this morning, I saw the red numerals and thought, WCF.

That goddamned baby-killing psycho had infiltrated my mind, and I didn’t hold it against Claire one bit that she was so incensed and freaked and practically murderous herself. The insidious lipstick letters-the clue that led to nothing-were like the freight train heading toward the house when there was no place to run.

I wondered how Chi and McNeil were doing with the phone list that matched those initials. Man, it would be great if it led to the shooter, but a killer signing his work with his actual initials? Forget it.

I closed my eyes, but Martha was on to me. She put her snoot on the mattress, pinned me with her gorgeous brown eyes, and started thumping her tail. Then Joe turned over. He wrapped his arms around me, brought me into a bear hug, and said, “Linds. Try to sleep.” It was now 6:14.

“Okay,” I said, turning away from him so that he could hold me in the hollow of his body. He was breathing softly over my shoulder, so I sent my mind back to the days when I lived in my own place on Potrero Hill. My life had been very different then, jogging with Martha most mornings, running the squad, coming home to Martha at night. I remembered the microwaved, one-dish cooking, a little too much vino, wondering when I’d hear from Joe. Wondering when I’d see him.

And then my apartment burned down.

And now Joe was living here, and I was wearing his ring. At this moment it felt almost as though he were riding along with my thoughts. He held me closer and cupped my breasts. He got hard against me, and then he ran his hand down to my belly and pressed me to him.

As his breathing sped up, so did mine, and then he was turning me as though I were a tiny thing-a feeling that I just love. I squirmed from his touch, heating up under this new kind of loving that felt so different from the roller-coaster craziness of the time before Joe and I finally committed to a shared life.

I faced him and wrapped my arms around his neck, and he pulled my legs up to his waist, and this incredible, breathtaking moment bloomed. I waited through the tension of those long seconds before he entered me. I looked into his deep-blue eyes-and gave myself over to him.

“I love you, Blondie,” he said.

I nodded because I couldn’t speak. Tears were in my eyes and my throat ached as we joined together. He held me and rocked me, and I was happy. I loved this man. Our lives were finally blending in a delicious and balanced way.

So what was nagging me from a cul-de-sac in my mind? Why did I feel that I was letting myself down?