I scrolled back over the past two days. “To the movies? To the marina this morning?”
She blushed slightly. “I was about to call it quits when your partner came by. I just tagged along for the ride.”
I pressed myself back in my seat and started to laugh. “Not so desperate,” I muttered. “Bad guys’ve been falling for it for years.” I was both embarrassed and relieved.
On the drive back to town, I fleshed out the rules of our agreement. I had done this before when a reporter got too close on a story and threatened an investigation. She couldn’t go out with this story until we had confirmation. When we did, I’d make sure she had it first. I’d keep her ahead of the story, but just slightly ahead.
“There’s a catch,” I said firmly. “What we have now is what you call a prioritized relationship. It goes past anything you already have — with your boyfriend or someone at work. Even your boss. Anything I give you is totally between us, and it stays with us, until I give you the okay to run with it.”
Cindy nodded, but I wanted to make sure she understood.
“Your boss asks you where any of this comes from, you just shrug. Some big shot in the department — I don’t care if it’s Chief Mercer himself — parks his limo outside your door and calls you in about some leak, you say, Thanks for the ride. The district attorney’s office calls you down to a grand jury, asks you to give up your sources, and a judge slaps you into a cell — you just make sure you bring enough reading material to fill the time.”
“I understand,” Cindy said. I could see in her eyes that she did.
The rest of the trip we talked about ourselves, our jobs and hobbies, and an unexpected development began to take shape. I started to like Cindy.
She asked me how long I’d been a cop, and I took her through more of the story than I had planned to. How my father was one, and how he’d left when I was thirteen. How I was sociology at SF State. How I wanted to prove I could make a difference in a man’s world. How a lot of who I was and what I did was simply trying to prove I belonged.
She came back that she was sociology, too, at Michigan. And before we even hit Marin, we had discovered a few other startling things we had in common.
Her younger brother was born on my birthday, October 5. She was also into yoga, and the woman who had first taught me, years before in South San Francisco, was now instructing her in Corte Madera. We both liked to read travel books and mysteries — Sue Grafton, Patricia Cornwell, Elizabeth George. We loved Gordon’s House of Fine Eats.
Cindy’s father had died early — some seventeen years ago — eerily, when she was only thirteen, too.
But the most chilling coincidence — the one that gave me an eerie feeling — was that he died of leukemia, cousin of the same degenerative disease that was coursing through me.
I thought of telling her my secret, but I stopped short. That was Claire’s to hear. But as we drew close to the Golden Gate, I had a premonition that I was riding with someone I was meant to be with, and definitely someone I liked to be with.
Approaching the city, I called Claire. It was hours after we were supposed to meet, but she still seemed eager to get together — and I had a lot to share.
We arranged to keep our date at Susie’s, this time for an early dinner instead of a brunch. She pressed me for what I had found during the day. “I’ll fill you in when I get there,” I told her.
Then I did the second thing that surprised me that day.
I asked, “Do you mind if I bring a friend?”
Chapter 33
CINDY AND I were already into our second margarita by the time Claire walked in. From ten feet away, her smile seemed to brighten the entire room. I stood up and gave her a big hug.
“Couldn’t wait for the old mom?” she said, eyeing the array of empty glasses.
“It’s been a long day,” I explained. “Say hey to Cindy.”
“Pleasure,” said Claire brightly, grasping Cindy’s hand. Though the date had been planned for just her and me, Claire was one of those people who rolled easily with whatever came up.
“Lindsay’s been telling me all about you,” Cindy said over the din.
“Most of it’s true, unless she’s been saying I’m some kind of crackerjack forensic pathologist,” Claire said, grinning.
“Actually, all she’s been saying is that you’re a real good friend.”
Susie’s was a bright, festive café with faux-painted walls and pretty good Caribbean food. They played a little reggae, a little jazz. It was a place where you could kick back, talk, shout, even shoot a rack of pool.
Our regular waitress, Loretta, came up, and we swayed Claire into a margarita for herself and ordered another round of spicy jerked wings.
“Tell me about Reggie’s graduation,” I said.
Claire stole a wing from our bowl and wistfully shook her head. “It’s nice to know after all those years of school, they can actually say a few words that aren’t ‘phat’ or ‘it’s the bomb.’ They looked like a bunch of street-struttin’ kids auditioning for the Grammys, but the principal swears they’ll come out of it eventually.”
“If they don’t, there’s always the Academy.” I grinned, feeling light-headed.
Claire smiled. “I’m glad to see you looking up. When we spoke the other day, it sounded like Cheery was pressing those big, ugly shoes of his all over your toes.”
“Cheery?” asked Cindy.
“My boss. We call him Cheery ’cause he inspires us with his humanistic concern for those entrusted to his command.”
“Oh, I thought you were talking about my city editor.” Cindy snickered. “The guy’s only truly happy when he can threaten someone with their benefits. He has no clue how demeaning and condescending he is.”
“Cindy’s with the Chronicle,” I said to Claire, seeing her react with surprise. There was an undeclared no-fly zone between the force and the press. To cross it, as a reporter, you had to earn your place.
“Writing your memoirs, child?” Claire asked me with a guarded smile.
“Maybe.” The short version. But with lots to tell.
Claire’s margarita arrived, and we raised our glasses.
“To the powers that be,” I toasted.
Cindy laughed. “Powers that be full of shit, powers that be pompous jerks, powers that be trying to keep you down.”
Claire yelped in approval, and we all clinked glasses as if we were old friends.
“Y’know, when I first came to the paper,” Cindy said, nibbling a wing, “one of the senior guys told me it was this particular editor’s birthday. So I e-mail him this happy birthday message. I figure, him being my boss and all, it’s a way to break the ice, maybe get a smile out of him. Later that day, the jerk calls me in. He’s all polite and smiley. He’s got bushy eyebrows as big as squirrels’ tails. He nods me into the seat across from him. I’m thinking, Hey… the guy’s human like everybody else.”
Claire smiled. Enthusiastically, I drained the last of my second drink.
“So then the bastard narrows his eyes and says, ‘Thomas, in the next hour and a half, I have sixty reporters trying to take everything that doesn’t make sense in this fucking world and somehow cram it into forty pages. But it’s reassuring to know that while everyone else is madly rushing against the clock, you’ve got the time to paste a happy little smiley face on my day.’ He ended up assigning me a week of picking a winner from a fifth-grade ‘Why I Want to Be an Editor for a Day’ contest.”
I laughed and coughed up a little of my drink. “Goes under the heading of ‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.’ What did you do?”
Cindy had a great smile. “E-mail it was the boss’s birthday to every guy in the department. Jerks were slumping out of his office with their faces white all day.”
Loretta came around again, and we ordered meals: chicken in a hot sauce, fajitas, and a large salad to share. Three Dos Equis to go with them. We poured this lethal Jamaican hot sauce, Toasty Lady, on our wings and watc
hed Cindy’s eyes glaze over from the first fiery blast.
“Rite of initiation.” I grinned. “Now you’re one of the girls.”
“It’s either the hot sauce or a tattoo,” Claire announced, straight-faced.
Cindy scrunched up her eyes in an evaluating sort of way, then turned around and rolled up a sleeve of her T-shirt. She exposed two small G clefs etched on the back of her shoulder. “The downside of a classical education,” she said with a crooked smile.
My eyes met Claire’s — and both of us hooted with approval.
Then Claire yanked up her own shirt with a blush. Just below her ample brown waist, she revealed the outline of a tiny butterfly.
“Lindsay dared me one day,” she admitted. “After you broke up with that prosecutor from San Jose. We went down to Big Sur overnight. Just the girls. To let off some steam. Ended up coming back with these.”
“So where’s yours?” Cindy turned to me and asked.
“Can’t show you.” I shook my head.
“C’mon,” she pressed. “Let’s see it.”
With a sigh, I rolled onto my left buttock and patted my right. “It’s a one-inch gecko. With this really cute little tail. When some suspect’s giving me a hard time, I push him up against a wall and I tell him I’ll stick it in his face so tight it’s gonna look as large as Godzilla.”
A warm silence fell over us. For a moment, the faces of David and Melanie Brandt, even Negli’s, seemed a million miles away. We were just having fun.
I felt something happening, something that hadn’t happened in a long time, that I desperately needed.
I felt connected.
Chapter 34
“SO NOW THAT WE’RE ALL FRIENDS …,” said Claire, after we had eaten, “how’d the two of you meet up, anyway? Last I heard, you were going out to Napa to check on some missing newlyweds.”
Michael and Becky DeGeorge, who a moment ago had seemed so far away, came hurtling back with a crash.
I had so much to tell her, but the day had changed so subtly from what I had planned. I almost felt deceitful, withholding, filling her in on what had taken place in Napa yet leaving out the important development that was going on inside of me.
Claire took it in, digesting it all with that sharp mind of hers. She had consulted on several serial-homicide cases, both as a lead examiner and an expert witness.
An idea was rolling through my head. In my weakened condition, I didn’t relish the responsibility of running a media-intensive investigation into multiple homicides alone. What I came back with surprised even me.
“How’d you like to lend me some help?”
“Help?” Claire blinked with surprise. “How?”
“This thing is about to explode, Claire,” I said. “If there’s a bride and groom killer out there, the attention will be national. We all have an interest in this case. Maybe we could meet like this. The three of us…off the record.”
Claire looked at me warily. “You’re suggesting we do this on our own?”
“We’ve got the top guns of the M.E.’s office, Homicide, even the press, eye-deep in margaritas at this table.” The more I thought it out, the more I knew it could work.
We could reassemble whatever clues came out of the official investigation, share what we had, cut through the political cover-your-ass and the bureaucracy. Three women, who would get a kick out of showing up the male orthodoxy. More important, we shared a heartfelt empathy for the victims.
Suddenly, the idea seemed lit with brilliance.
Claire shook her head in an incredulous way.
“C’mon,” I pressed, “you don’t think it would work? You don’t think we’d be good at this?”
“That’s not it at all,” she replied. “It’s that I’ve known you for ten years, and never once, on anything, have I ever heard you ask for help.”
“Then surprise,” I said, looking straight into her eyes. “’Cause I’m asking now.”
I tried to let her see that something was troubling me, something maybe larger than the case. That I wasn’t sure I could handle it. That I could use the help. That there was more to it.
Claire gradually broke into the slimmest acquiescent grin. “In margaritas veritas. I’m in.”
I beamed back, grateful, then turned to Cindy.
“How about you? You in?”
She stammered, “I-I have no idea what Sid Glass would say — but fuck him. I’m in.”
We clinked glasses.
The Women’s Murder Club was born.
Chapter 35
THE NEXT MORNING, I arrived at the office straight from an eight o’clock transfusion, feeling light-headed, slightly woozy. First thing I did was scan the morning Chronicle. To my relief, there was nothing on the front page about anything relating to the disappearance in Napa. Cindy had kept her word.
I noticed Raleigh coming out of Roth’s office. His sleeves were rolled up, exposing his thick forearms.
He gave me a guarded smile — one that told me of his discomfort at my cutting a deal yesterday with Cindy. With a flick of his blue eyes, he motioned me outside to the corridor.
“We have to talk,” he said, as we huddled near the staircase.
“Listen, Raleigh,” I said. “I’m really sorry about yesterday. I thought it would buy us some time.”
His dark eyes smoldered. “Maybe you should tell me why she was worth compromising control of this case.”
I shrugged. “You see anything about Napa in the papers this morning?”
“You contramanded a direct order from the chief of police. If that doesn’t leave you in a hole, it sure digs one for me.”
“So you’d rather be digging out of a story in the Chronicle about a serial killer?”
He backed against the wall. “That’s Mercer’s call.”
A policeman I knew skipped up the stairs past us, grunting hello. I barely nodded back.
“Okay,” I said, “so how do you want to play it? You want me to go in and spill my guts to Sam Roth? I will.”
He hesitated. I could see he was torn, clicking through the consequences. After what seemed like a minute, he shook his head. “What’s the point? Now.”
I felt a wave of relief. I touched his arm and smiled at him for a couple of long beats. “Thanks.”
“Lindsay,” he added, “I checked with the state highway patrol. No record of any limos reported stolen in the past week.”
That news, the dead end that it represented, discouraged me.
A voice shouted out from the squad room. “Boxer out there?”
“I’m here,” I hollered back.
It was Paul Chin, one of the bright, efficient junior grades assigned to our team. “There’s a Lieutenant Frank Hartwig on the line. Says you know him.”
I ran back in, grabbed the phone on our civilian clerk’s desk. “This is Lindsay Boxer.”
“We found them, Inspector,” Hartwig said.
Chapter 36
“CARETAKER DISCOVERED THEM,” Hartwig muttered with a grim shake of his head. We were walking up a dirt path leading to a small Napa winery. “I hope you’re ready for this. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. They were killed making love.”
Raleigh and I had rushed up to St. Helena, turning east off 29, “the wine road,” onto Hawk Crest Road until it wound high into the mountains, no longer paved. We had finally come upon an obscure wooden sign: Sparrow Ridge.
“Caretaker comes up here twice a week. Found them at seven this morning. The place’s no longer in regular use,” Hartwig continued. I could tell he was nervous, shook up.
The winery was barely more than a large corrugated shed filled with shiny, state-of-the-art equipment: crushers, fermenting tanks, staggered rows of stacked, aging barrels.
“You’re probably used to this sort of homicide,” Hartwig said as we walked in. The sharp, rancid smell hit our nostrils. My stomach rolled. You never get used to homicide scenes.
They were killed making love.
S
everal members of the local SCU team were huddled over the open bay of a large, stainless grape presser. They were inspecting two splattered mounds. The mounds were the bodies of Michael and Becky De-George.
“Awhh, shit, Lindsay,” Raleigh muttered.
The husband, in a blazer and khakis, stared up at us. A dime-sized penetration cut the center of his forehead. His wife, whose black dress was pushed up to her neck, was on top of him. White-eyed fear was frozen on her face. Her bra was pulled down to her waist, and I could see blood-spattered breasts. Her panties were down to her knees.
It was an ugly, nauseating sight. “You have an approximate time?” I asked Hartwig. He looked close to being sick.
“From the degeneration of the wounds, the M.E. thinks they’ve been dead twenty-four to thirty-six hours. They were killed the same night they disappeared. Jesus, they were just kids.”
I stared at the sad, bloodied body of the wife, and my eyes fell to her hands.
Nothing there. No wedding band.
“You said they were killed in the act?” I asked. “You’re sure about that?”
Hartwig nodded to the assistant medical examiner. He gently rolled Becky DeGeorge’s body off her husband’s.
Sticking out of Michael DeGeorge’s unfastened khakis was the perfectly preserved remainder of his final erection.
A smoldering rage ripped through me. The De-Georges were just kids. Both were in their twenties, like the Brandts. Who would do such a terrible thing?
“You can see over here how they were dragged,” Hartwig said, pointing to smears of dried blood visible on the pitched concrete floor. The smears led to car tracks that were clearly delineated in the sparsely traveled soil. A couple of sheriff’s men were marking off the tracks in yellow tape.
Raleigh bent down and studied them. “Wide wheel base, but fourteen-inch tires. The tread is good, kept up. An SUV would have sixteen-inch wheels. I would guess some kind of large luxury sedan.”
“I thought you were just a desk cop,” I said to him.
He grinned. “I spent a summer in college working in the pit crew on the NASCAR circuit. I can change a tire faster than a beer man at 3Com can change a twenty. My guess would be a Caddy. Or a Lincoln.” Limo, his eyes were saying.