4th of July (9 page)

“I wish you guys were here,” I told my friends. “It’s all blue sky and yellow sand. And hey, Joe came and spent the night.”

Cindy had some news about her second date with the hockey player, prompting whistles, and I came back with the story of Keith, the sandy-haired gas station guy.

“He’s in his twenties, I think, Brad Pitt type. He actually put the moves on me.”

Claire said, “You two really make me feel like the boring old married woman.”

“I want to be as bored as you are with Edmund,” said Cindy. “That’s for sure.”

The laughing and teasing made me feel as if we were gathered around a dimly lit table at Susie’s.

And, as we always did at Susie’s, we talked shop.

“So, what about these murders I’ve been hearing about?” Claire asked.

“Aw, jeez. The town is freaking out. A young couple was killed a few weeks ago—and a woman was murdered about a mile from here this morning.”

“It was on the wire,” Cindy said. “A bloody scene.”

“Yeah. It’s starting to look like a killer on a spree, and you know it’s irking me that I can’t do anything. I want to comb the crime scene. I hate not being in the loop.”

“Well, you’ll be interested in this little tidbit,” Claire said. “I got this off the medical examiners’ list serve. That couple who were murdered in Crescent Heights a few weeks ago? They were whipped.”

I think I blanked out for a moment as my mind flew to John Doe #24.

He’d been slashed and whipped.

“They were whipped? Claire, you’re sure about that?”

“Absolutely sure. Back and buttocks.”

Just then, a beep came over the line and the name on the caller ID was like the past slamming into the present. I said, “Hold on, guys,” and I pressed the flash button.

“Lindsay, it’s Yuki Castellano. Got time to talk?”

It was good that I was still on the phone with Claire and Cindy. I needed some time to shift gears into talking to my lawyer about the shooting on Larkin Street. Yuki said she’d call back in the morning, and I got on the line with the girls again, but my mind was scrambling.

For the past few days, I’d gotten away from everything—except the upcoming trial of my life.

THE WATCHER WALKED ALONG the path through the dune grass under a slender crescent moon. He was wearing a wool cap and black sweats, and had his microcamera with the 103 zoom in hand.

He used it to watch a couple making out at the end of the beach, then he turned the lens toward the houses a hundred yards away on the outer loop of Sea View Avenue.

He narrowed his focus to one particular house: a blue Cape Cod with a lot of windows and a double set of sliders leading out to the deck. He could see Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer walking around in the living room.

Her hair was pinned up off her neck, and she was wearing a thin white T-shirt. Twirling a chain around her neck as she talked on the phone. He could see the outline of her breasts under that shirt.

Full but perky.

Nice tits, Lieutenant, sir.

The Watcher knew exactly who Lindsay was, what kind of work she did, and why she said she was in Half Moon Bay. But he wanted to know a lot more.

He wondered who she was talking to on the phone. Maybe the dark-haired guy who’d stayed over last night and had left in a black government-issue Town Car. He wondered about that guy: who he was and if he was coming back.

And he wondered where Lindsay kept her gun.

The Watcher took some pictures of Boxer, smiling, frowning, taking down her hair. Holding the phone between her shoulder and her chin, reaching, breasts moving as she did so, to put up her hair again.

As he watched, the dog crossed the room and lay down near the sliders, staring out through them—almost as if she were looking directly at him.

The Watcher walked a ways down the beach, toward the smooching lovers, then cut across the dune grass to a parking area where he’d left his car. Once inside, he took his notebook out of the glove box and turned to the tab with Lindsay’s name written in meticulous script.

Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer.

There was just enough glow from the streetlights to add to his notes.

He wrote: Wounded. Alone. Armed and dangerous.

Back in the Saddle Again

THE SUN WAS ONLY a blush on the dawn sky when a loud ringing jarred me out of sleep. I fumbled for the phone, nailed it on the fourth ring.

“Lindsay, it’s Yuki. I hope I didn’t wake you. I’m in the car and this is my only free minute, but I can tell you everything fast.”

Yuki was passionate and smart, and I knew this about her—she always spoke at ninety miles an hour.

“Okay. I’m ready,” I said, flopping back into the bed.

“Sam Cabot is out of the hospital. I deposed him yesterday,” Yuki said, her voice a rhythmic rat-tat-tat. “He recanted his confession of the hotel murders, but that’s the DA’s problem. As for the action against you, he says you fired first, missed him, and that he and Sara returned fire in self-defense. Then you gunned them down. Crock of shit. We know it and they know it, but this is America. He can say whatever he wants.”

My sigh came out as a kind of strangled groan. Yuki kept on talking. “Our only problem is that he’s such a heartbreaker, that pathological little crud. Paralyzed, propped up in that chair with his neck in a brace, quivering lower lip. Looks like a cherub who’s been blindsided —”

“By a vicious, gun-happy chick cop,” I interrupted.

“I was going to say blindsided by a sixteen-wheeler, but whatever.” She laughed. “Let’s get together and strategize. Can we make a plan?”

My calendar was so sparkling clean it was practically virginal. Yuki, on the other hand, had booked depositions, meetings, and trials almost every hour for the next three weeks. Still, we picked a date a few days before the trial.

“Right now the media are churning up the waters,” Yuki continued. “We leaked to the press that you’re staying with friends in New York so they won’t hound you. Lindsay? Are you there?”

“Yep. I’m here,” I said, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan, ears ringing.

“I’d suggest that you relax if you can. Keep a low profile. Leave the rest to me.”

Right.

I showered, dressed in linen slacks and a pink T-shirt, and took a mug of coffee out to the backyard. I had a question for Penelope as I scooped breakfast into her trough: “How much chow can a big pig chow if a big pig chows pig chow?”

City girl talking to a pig. Who woulda thunk it?

I considered Yuki’s advice as the sea breeze wafted across the deck. Relax and keep a low profile. It made good sense, except that I was in the clutches of a monster desire to do something. I wanted to shake things up, bang heads, right wrongs.

I really couldn’t help myself.

I whistled to Martha and started up the Explorer. Then we headed out toward a certain house in Crescent Heights—the scene of a double homicide.

“BAD DOG,” I SAID to Martha. “You can’t keep out of trouble, can you?” Martha turned her melting brown eyes on me, wagged her tail, then resumed her surveillance of the boulder-sculpted highway.

As I drove south on Highway 1, I was bristling with excitement. Three miles down the road, I turned off at Crescent Heights, an idiosyncratic collection of houses freckling the face of the hill at the tip of Half Moon Bay.

I pointed the Explorer up the gravelly one-laner, feeling my way along until the scene of the crime nearly jumped out at me. I pulled over and turned off the engine.

The yellow clapboard-sided house was a charmer, with three gabled dormers, an overgrown flower garden, and a whirligig of a lumberjack sawing wood attached to the post-and-rail fence. The name Daltry was painted on the handmade mailbox, and a half mile of yellow plastic tape was still wrapped around this, the American dream.

Crime scene. Do not enter by order of the police.

I tried to imagine that two people had been brutally murdered in this homey little cottage, but the images didn’t fit together. Murder should never happen in a place like this.

What had drawn a killer to this particular house? Was it a targeted hit—or had the killer just happened on this home-sweet-home by chance?

“Stay, girl,” I told Martha as I got out of the car.

The murder had occurred more than five weeks ago, and by now the police had relinquished the crime scene. Anyone who wanted to snoop could do so, as long as they didn’t break into the house—and I saw signs of snoopers everywhere: footprints in the flower beds, cigarette butts on the pavement, soda cans on the lawn.

I stepped through the open gate, ducked under the tape, and walked around the house, slowly frisking the scene with my eyes.

There was an abandoned basketball under the shrubbery, and a single child’s sneaker on the back steps, still wet from last night’s dew. I noticed that one of the basement windows had been removed from its frame and was leaning against a wall of the house: the probable point of entry.

The longer I stayed at the Daltry house, the harder my heart pounded. I was creeping around a crime scene instead of taking charge of it, and that made me feel weird and bad, as though this crime was none of my business and I shouldn’t be here. At the same time, I felt driven by what Claire had told me on the phone last night.

The Daltrys of Crescent Heights weren’t the first murder victims to be whipped. Who else had been savaged this way? Did these killings connect with my unsolved case, John Doe #24?

Relax and keep a low profile, Yuki had said. I actually laughed out loud. I got into the Explorer, patted my furry sidekick’s flank, then bumped down the gravelly road to the highway.

We would be back in the center of Half Moon Bay in ten minutes. I wanted to see the O’Malley house.

OCEAN COLONY ROAD WAS lined with patrol cars on both sides of the street. The insignias on the car doors told me that the local cops were finally getting the help they badly needed. They’d called in the state police.

As I drove past, I saw that a uniformed officer was guarding the front door of the house and another cop was interviewing the UPS man.

Detectives and crime scene techs entered and left the house at irregular intervals. A media tent had been set up on a neighbor’s lawn, and a local reporter was going live from Half Moon Bay.

I parked my car down the block and walked toward the house, blending in with a clump of bystanders who were watching the police process the scene from the sidewalk across the street. It was a good enough vantage point, and as I stood there, I sifted through my impressions, hoping for a nugget of insight.

To start with, the houses of the victims were as different as chalk and cheese. Crescent Heights was a blue-collar community with Highway 1 whizzing between the unpretentious homes and their view of the bay. Ocean Colony backed up onto a private golf course. The O’Malley house and the others around it fairly glistened with all of the nicest things money could buy. What did the two homes and the people who’d lived in them have in common?

I studied the O’Malleys’ spiffy colonial, with its slate roof and boxwood topiaries in pots by the door, and once again I ran through the preliminary questions. What had drawn a killer here? Was it a personal hit or a random killing of opportunity?

I turned my eyes up to the blue-shuttered windows on the second floor, where Lorelei O’Malley had been stabbed to death in her bedroom.

Had she been whipped, too?

I was concentrating so intently, I must have attracted attention to myself. A young uniformed cop with a florid face and an excitable manner was headed toward me.

“Miss? Miss? I’d like to ask you some questions.”

Damn. If I had to show my badge, this cop would run me through the database. Pass the news along: Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD, was at the scene of the crime. In twenty minutes the media would be ringing the doorbell and camping out on Cat’s lawn.

I assumed my most innocent expression.

“Just passing through, Officer. I’m leaving now.”

I flipped a little wave, turned around, and walked quickly to the Explorer.

Nuts. I saw him do it.

That cop wrote down my plate number as I drove past.

THE QUAINT LITTLE WATERING hole was named for a soaring seabird, the Cormorant, an elegant facsimile of which hung from the ceiling over the bar.

The place had a raw bar, six kinds of beer on tap, loud music, and a full Friday-night crowd. I looked around until I spotted Carolee Brown at a table near the bar. She was dressed in slacks and a hot pink pullover; a gold crucifix glinted discreetly at her throat.

The Cookie Lady on her night off.

Carolee saw me a split second after I saw her, and she smiled broadly, gesturing for me to join her. I shimmied my way through the crowd and hugged her lightly as she stood to greet me.

We ordered Pete’s Wicked Ale and linguini with clams, and, as women sometimes do, we got personal within minutes. Carolee had been briefed by my sister, Cat, and knew about the shooting that had left me twisting slowly in the California legal system.

“I misjudged the situation because they were kids,” I told Carolee now. “After they shot my partner and me, I had to bring them down.”

“It really sucks, Lindsay.”

“Doesn’t it ever? Killing a kid. I never thought I could do such a thing.”

“They forced you to do it.”

“They were murderers, Carolee. They’d killed a couple of kids, and when we apprehended them, they saw only one way out. But you’d think kids with all the advantages these two had wouldn’t be so whacked.”

“Yeah, I know. But judging from the hundreds of kids who’ve come through my school, believe me, psychologically damaged kids come from everywhere,” Carolee said.