4th of July (14 page)

“Lindsay, this is Dr. Bill Ramos, forensic pathologist. Bill, this is Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, Homicide, from SFPD. There may be a link between these murders and a cold case of hers.”

I was shaking Ramos’s hand when Chief Stark came over.

“Doc, tell her what you told me on the phone.”

Ramos said, “Why don’t I show you?”

He spoke to his assistant: “Hey, Samir, I want to take a look at the female’s back, so give me a half turn. Let’s put her on the side.”

Samir crossed Annemarie’s ankles left over right, and the doctor reached over and took her left wrist. Then the two of them pulled the corpse so that it rested on one side.

I peered at seven yellowish marks crossing over one another on the dead woman’s buttocks, each about three-quarters of an inch in width, approximately three inches long.

“Tremendous force in these blows,” said Ramos. “Still, you can barely make them out. Samir, let’s turn Mr. Sarducci now.”

The doctor and his assistant pulled the male onto his side, his head lolling back pathetically as they did so.

“Now, see,” the doctor said, “here it is again. Multiple faint rectangular patterns, pressure-type abrasions. They aren’t the red brown color you’d see if the section had been struck while he was still alive, and they’re not the yellow parchmentlike abrasions you’d get if the blows were administered postmortem.”

The doctor looked up to make sure I understood.

“Punch me in the face, then shoot me twice in the chest. There won’t be enough blood pressure for me to get a rip-roaring bruise on my face, but there’ll be something there if my heart pumps for a moment.”

The doctor took a scalpel to one of the marks on the male’s back, cutting through unmarked tissue and the pale strap mark. “You can see this light brownish color under the abrasions, what’s called a ‘well-circumscribed focal accumulation of blood.’

“In plain English,” Ramos continued, “and wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Washburn? The deep slash across the carotid artery and the vagus nerves stopped the heart almost instantly, but not instantaneously. This man had one last heartbeat when he was whipped.

“These blows were administered cum-mortem—just before or at the time of death. In the mind of the killer, the victim could still feel the lash.”

“Looks like it was personal,” said Stark.

“Oh, yes. I’d say the killers hated their victims.”

There was a hush in the room as the doctor’s words sank in.

“The marks on Joe are narrower than the marks on Annemarie,” Claire noted.

“Yes,” Ramos agreed again. “Different implements.”

“Like a belt,” I said. “Could these whippings have been made by two different belts?”

“I can’t say positively, but it’s certainly consistent,” said Ramos.

Claire looked not only focused but sad. “What are you thinking?” I asked her.

“I hate to say it, Lindsay, but this really brings me back. The marks look like what I remember seeing on your John Doe.”

IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when the Watcher headed inland from the beach. He climbed the sandy cliff, then stuck to the quarter mile of path that cut through the thistles and thick dune grasses and ran east from the cliffs. The Watcher could finally make out the serpentine bay-side road.

He was honing in on one particular house when he stumbled over a log in the path. He reached out to break his fall and went down hard, splaying on his belly, hands scraping packed sand and saw grass.

The Watcher got quickly to his knees, slapping his breast jacket pocket—his camera had flown.

“Fuck fuck fuck!” he yelled in frustration.

He crawled on all fours, patting the sand, feeling the sweat on his upper lip dry in the cool air.

Desperation clutched at him as the minutes leached away. At last, he found his precious camera, so small—lens-down in the sand.

He blew on the camera to dislodge the grit, pointed it at the houses, and peered into the viewfinder. He saw through a haze of fine scratches across the plastic lens.

This was bad.

Cursing under his breath, the Watcher checked the time—12:14 a.m.—and set out toward the house where Lindsay was staying.

Now that his zoom lens was useless, he would have to get closer, and on foot.

The Watcher stepped over the guardrail at the end of the field and stood square on the sidewalk with a streetlight blazing down on his head.

Two houses in from the end of the road, Cat Boxer’s house glowed with lamplight.

He ducked into shadows and approached the house obliquely by cutting through side yards, crouching at last in the lee of the privet hedge bordering the Boxer living room.

With heart pounding, he stood and peered through the picture window.

The gang was all there: Lindsay in her SFPD T-shirt and tights; Claire, the black ME from the city, in a gold caftan; and Cindy, her blond hair bunched on top of her head, a chenille robe covering all but the legs of her pink pajamas and her feet.

The women were talking intensely, sometimes laughing loudly, then getting serious again. If only he could make out what the hell they were saying.

The Watcher ran through the facts, recent events, the circumstances. The chair in the kid’s room. It didn’t connect any of them to anything, but it was a mistake that he’d made.

Was it safe to go forward?

There was so much more to do.

The Watcher felt the accumulating effects of stress on his body. His hands were shaking, and his chest burned with acid. He couldn’t stay here any longer, he just could not.

He looked around, making sure no one was walking a dog or taking out the garbage, then he stepped from behind the hedge and briefly into the streetlight. He jumped the guardrail and started along the darkened path to the beach.

A decision had to be made about Lindsay Boxer.

A tough one.

The woman was a cop.

I WOKE EARLY IN the morning with a thought that surfaced in my mind like a porpoise breaking from beneath the waves.

I let Martha out back, put coffee on to perk, and booted up my laptop.

I remembered that Bob Hinton had said that two other people had been killed in Half Moon Bay two years before: Ray and Molly Whittaker. They were summer people, Hinton had said. Ray was a photographer, Molly a bit player, an extra, in Hollywood.

I went online to the NCIC database and looked them up. I was still in shock when I went into the bedrooms to rouse the girls.

When they were dressed and had coffee and scones in front of them, I told them what I’d learned about Ray and Molly Whittaker.

“They were pornographers, both of them. Ray was behind the camera, and Molly performed with kids. Boys, girls, it didn’t seem to matter,” I said. “They were busted for it and acquitted. Their lawyer? It was Brancusi, again.”

The girls knew me too well. They got on my case, warning me to be careful, reminding me that for all intents and purposes I was a civilian and that even though it seemed logical to check out a possible connection between the Whittakers and Dennis Agnew, I was out of my territory, no one had my back, and I was heading for big trouble.

I must have said “I know, I know” a half dozen times, and as we said good-bye in the driveway I made a lot of promises to be a good girl.

“You should think about coming home, Lindsay,” said Claire finally, holding my face in her hands.

“Right,” I said. “I’ll definitely think about it.”

They both hugged me as though they would never see me again, and frankly, that got to me. As Claire’s car backed down the driveway, Cindy leaned out the window.

“I’ll call you tonight. Think about what we said. Think, Lindsay.”

I blew kisses and went inside the house. I found my handbag hanging from a doorknob and rooted around inside it until I felt my phone, my badge, and my gun.

A minute later I started up the Explorer.

It was a short drive into town, with my mind churning right up to the second I pulled my car into a parking spot outside the police barracks.

I found the chief in his office, staring at his computer, coffee mug in hand, a box of sugared doughnuts on the side chair.

“Those things will kill you,” I said. He moved the doughnuts so I could sit down.

“If you ask me, death by doughnuts is a fine way to go. What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

“This,” I said. I unfurled Dennis Agnew’s rap sheet and slapped it down on top of the messy pile of paper on the chief’s desk. “Ray and Molly Whittaker were whipped, weren’t they?”

“Yup, they were the first.”

“Did you like anyone for their murders?”

The chief nodded.

“Couldn’t prove it then, can’t prove it now, but we’ve been watching this guy for a long time.”

He picked up Agnew’s rap sheet and handed it back to me. “We know all about Dennis Agnew. He’s our prime suspect.”

I WAS ON THE porch at sunset, noodling a little tune on my guitar, when headlights at the bottom of the road crawled slowly up the street and stopped outside Cat’s house.

I was already moving toward the car as the driver got out of the front seat and opened the rear passenger-side door.

“I get it,” I said, my face glowing enough to light up the dusk. “You just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

“Exactly,” Joe said, reaching an arm around my waist. “Thought I’d surprise you.”

I put my hand on the front of his crisp white shirt.

“Claire called you.”

“And Cindy.” Joe laughed a little sheepishly. “Let me take you out to dinner.”

“Hmm. What if I make dinner here?”

“Deal.”

Joe tapped the roof, and the sedan took off.

“C’mere,” he said, folding me in his arms, kissing me, shocking me once again that a kiss could spark such a conflagration. I had one moderately sane thought as the heat surged through my body: Here we go again. Another drive-by romantic interlude on the roller-coaster affair of my life.

Joe cupped my face in his hands and kissed me again, and my heart surrendered its feeble protestation. We entered the house, and I kicked the door shut behind us.

I stood on tiptoe with my arms around Joe’s neck and let him walk me backward through the house until I was on my back in bed and Joe was taking off my clothes. He started with my shoes and kissed everything he exposed on his way up to my lips.

Dear God, he melted everything but my Kokopelli.

I gasped and reached for him, but he was gone.

I opened my eyes and watched him undress. He was gorgeous. Fit, tanned, hard. And all for me.

I smiled with sheer delight. Five minutes ago, I’d been looking forward to a Law & Order marathon. Now this! I opened my arms, and Joe covered my body with his.

“Hey,” he said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

“Shut up,” I said. I bit his lower lip, not too hard, then opened my mouth to his and wrapped my limbs around him.

When we emerged from the bedroom an hour later, barefoot and disheveled, it was pitch-black outside. Martha thumped her tail, plainly meaning, Feed me, which I did.

Then I made a luscious tricolor salad with a mustard vinaigrette and thinly shaved Parmesan, and I put some pasta on to boil while Joe stirred basil, oregano, and garlic into tomato sauce. Soon a divine aroma filled the air.

We ate at the kitchen table, exchanging our headlines of the past week. Joe’s headlines were a lot like CNN’s. Horrifying car bombs, airport infiltrations, and political dustups that I didn’t need to have top-secret clearance to hear about. As we washed the dishes together, I told Joe the briefest, least inflammatory version of my encounters with Agnew.

His jaw clenched as I laid it out for him.

“Pretend I didn’t tell you,” I said, kissing his brow as I refilled his glass with wine.

“Pretend I’m not mad at you for putting yourself in that kind of danger.”

Jeez, had everyone forgotten that I was a cop? And a smart one, by the way. First female lieutenant in San Francisco and so on and so forth.

“How do you feel about Cary Grant?” I asked him. “How does Katharine Hepburn grab you?”

We cuddled together on the sofa and watched Bringing Up Baby, one of my favorite screwball comedies. I cracked up as I always did at the scene where Cary Grant crawls around after a terrier with a dinosaur bone in its mouth, and Joe laughed along with me, holding me in his arms.

“If you ever catch me doing that with Martha, don’t ask.”

I laughed.

“I love you so much, Lindsay.”

“I love you so much, too.”

Later that night, I fell asleep inside the curve of Joe’s body thinking, This is so right. I just can’t get enough of this man.

JOE COOKED BACON AND scrambled eggs in the dazzling light pouring through the kitchen windows. I filled mugs with coffee, and Joe read the squint in my eyes for the unspoken question that it was.

“I’m here until I get the call. If you want, I’ll help you brainstorm the murders.”

We got into the Explorer with Joe at the wheel and Martha on my lap. I filled Joe in on the Sarduccis as we slowly cruised past their glass house beside the bay.

Then we headed up to Crescent Heights, taking the snaking dirt road to the door of the Daltrys’ abandoned little house.

If ever a house looked devastated by murder, this was it. The front lawn had gone to seed, boards had been hammered over the windows and the doors, and scraps of crime scene tape fluttered like little yellow birds in the bushes.

“Very different socioeconomic class from the Sarduccis,” said Joe.

“Yeah. I don’t think these murders have anything to do with money.”

We pointed the Explorer down the mountain and within a few minutes we entered Ocean Colony, the golf course–bordered community where the O’Malleys had lived and died. I pointed out the white colonial with blue shutters as we neared it. Now there was a For Sale sign in the front yard and a Lincoln in the driveway.