Chapter 64
YUKI WAS AT the Whole Foods Market six blocks from her apartment, looking over the produce, thinking about a quick stir-fry for dinner, when she thought she glimpsed a familiar figure down the aisle. When she looked again, he was gone. She was hallucinating, she thought, so tired she could conjure up bogeymen anywhere. She dropped a head of broccoli into her cart and moved on toward the meat section.
There she selected a shrink-wrapped tray of tiger prawns —and got the feeling again that Jason Twilly was only yards away.
She looked up.
And there he was, dressed in navy blue pinstripes, pink shirt, wearing a full smirk and standing near the pile of frozen free-range turkeys. Twilly waggled his fingers but made no move toward her, though he didn’t turn away. He had no cart, no basket.
The bastard wasn’t shopping.
He was stalking her.
Yuki’s sudden fury gathered power and momentum, so that she saw only one possible course of action. She shoved her cart to the side of the aisle and marched toward Twilly, stopping a few feet from his sturdy English shoes.
“What are you doing here, Jason?” she said, stretching her neck to look up at his crazy-handsome face with the eight-hundred-dollar eyeglass frames and lopsided smile.
“Leave the groceries, Yuki,” he said. “Let me take you out to dinner. I promise I’ll behave. I just want to make up to you for our misunderstanding the last time —”
“I want to be very clear about this,” Yuki said, cutting him off, using her clipped, rapid-fire style. “Mistakes happen. Maybe the misunderstanding was my fault, and I’ve apologized. Again, I’m sorry it happened. But you have to understand. I’m not interested, Jason — in anyone. It’s all work, all the time, for me. I’m not available, okay? So please don’t follow me again.”
Jason’s odd, twisted smile blossomed into a full-blown laugh. “Nice speech,” he said, clapping his hands, an exaggerated round of mock applause.
Yuki felt a little shock of fear as she backed away. What was wrong with this guy? What was he capable of doing? She remembered Cindy’s warning to her to be careful of what she said around Twilly. Would he dirty her reputation when he wrote about the Junie Moon trial?
Whatever.
“Good-bye, Jason. Leave me alone. I mean it.”
“Hey, I’m writing a book, remember?” Twilly called out to her as she turned her back on him. She heard his voice as she pushed her cart down the aisle.
She wanted to hide. She wanted to disappear.
“You’re a key player, Yuki. Sorry if you don’t like it, but you’re the star of my whole freakin’ show.”
Chapter 65
WE WERE GATHERED on the deck of Rose Cottage, outside of Point Reyes, feeling the blessed night breeze on our cheeks. Yuki flipped on the heater for the hot tub, while Claire tossed a giant salad and made burgers for the grill.
This impromptu getaway was Cindy’s idea. She had corralled us in a conference call only hours before, saying, “Since our first attempt at a Women’s Murder Club Annual Getaway Weekend was canceled due to someone answering a call to return to work, we should grab this opportunity to drop everything and go now.”
Cindy added that she’d booked the cottage and that she would drive.
There was no saying no to Cindy, and for once I was glad to turn the wheel over to her.
Yuki and Claire had both slept in the backseat during the drive, and I’d ridden shotgun with Martha in my lap, her ears flapping in the wind. I listened to Cindy talk over the car’s CD player, my mind floating blissfully as we neared the ocean.
Once we’d arrived at the rose-covered hobbit house with its two snug bedrooms plus picnic table and grill in the clearing at the edge of a forest, we’d slapped each other high fives and dropped our bags on our beds. Yuki had left her box of files in her room and come with Martha and me as we took a short run up a moonlit trail to the top of a wooded ridge and back again.
And now I was ready for a meal, a margarita, and a great night’s sleep. But when we got back to Rose Cottage, my cell phone was ringing. Claire groused, “That damned thing’s been ringin’ its buttons off, girlfriend. Either turn it off or give it to me and I’ll stomp it to death.”
I grinned at my best friend, pulled the phone from my handbag, saw the number on the caller ID.
It was Jacobi.
I stabbed the send button, said hello, and heard traffic noise mixed in with the wail of fire engine sirens.
I shouted, “Jacobi. Jacobi, what’s up?”
“Didn’t you get my messages?”
“No, I just caught this ring on the fly.”
The sirens in the background, the fact that Jacobi was calling at all, caused me to imagine a new fire and another couple of charred bodies killed by a psycho looking for kicks. I pressed my ear hard to the phone, strained to hear Jacobi over the street noise.
“I’m on Missouri Street,” he told me.
That was my street. What was he doing on my street? Had something happened to Joe?
“There’s been a fire, Boxer. Look, there’s no good way to say this. You have to come home right now.”
Chapter 66
JACOBI DISCONNECTED the phone call, leaving static in my ear and a god-awful gap between what he’d said and what he’d left out.
“There’s been a fire on Missouri Street,” I announced to the girls. “Jacobi told me to come home!”
Cindy gave me the keys and we piled into her car. I floored the accelerator and we bumped down the twisting roads of the backwoods of Olema and out to the highway. I called Joe as I drove, ringing his apartment and mine, and I rang his cell, pressed redial again and again, never getting an answer.
Where was he? Where was Joe?
I don’t ask God for much, but as we neared Potrero Hill, I was praying that Joe was safe. When we reached Missouri at Twentieth, I saw that my street was roped off. I parked in the first empty spot, gripped Martha’s leash, and dashed up the steep residential block, leaving the girls to follow behind.
I was winded when I caught sight of my house, saw that it was fenced in by fire rigs, patrol cars, and bystanders filling the narrow street. I frantically scoured the faces in the crowd, saw the two female students who lived on the second floor and the building manager, Sonya Marron, who lived on the ground floor.
Sonya reached through the crowd and gripped my arm, saying, “Thank God, thank God.” There were tears in her eyes.
“Was anyone hurt?”
“No,” she said. “No one was home.”
I hugged her then, relieved at last that Joe had not fallen asleep in my bed. But I still had questions, a ton of them. “What happened?” I asked Sonya.
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
I looked for Jacobi, but I found Claire shouting at the fire captain, “I under-stand it may be a crime scene, but she’s a cop. With the SFPD!”
I knew the fire department captain, Don Walker, a thin man with a prominent nose, weary eyes peering out from the soot on his face. He threw up his hands, and then he opened the front door. Claire gathered me under her wing, and along with Yuki, Cindy, and Martha, we entered the three-story apartment house that had been my home for ten years.
Chapter 67
I WAS WEAK-KNEED as we mounted the stairs, but my mind was sharp. The stairs hadn’t burned, and the doors to the two lower apartments stood open. The apartments looked untouched by fire. This made no sense.
But it all became clear at the top of the stairs.
The door to my apartment was in shards. I stepped through the shattered door frame and saw the stars and the moon where my ceiling used to be. I lowered my eyes from the night sky, finding it hard to take in the grotesque condition of my little nest. The walls were black, curtains gone, the glass in my kitchen cabinets blown out. My crockery and the food in my pantry had exploded, making the place smell crazily like popcorn and Clorox.
My cozy living room furniture had melted down into hun
ks of sodden foam and wire springs. And then I knew — the fire had taken everything. Martha whined and I bent to her, buried my face in her fur.
“Lindsay,” I heard someone shout. “Are you okay?”
I turned to see Chuck Hanni coming out of the bedroom.
Did he have something to do with this?
Had Rich been right all along?
And then I saw Conklin right behind Hanni, and both of their faces were sagging with my pain.
Rich opened his arms. I held on to him in the smoking black ruins of my home, so glad he was there. But as I rested my head on his shoulder, the stark realization hit me: if Cindy hadn’t called with her impromptu getaway plan, I would have been home with Martha when the fire broke out.
I ripped myself away from Rich and called out to Hanni.
My voice was trembling.
“Chuck, what happened here? I have to know. Did someone try to kill me?”
Chapter 68
HANNI SNAPPED ON the portable lights inside what was left of my living room, and in that blinding moment, Joe burst through my splintered door frame. I flung myself at him, and he wrapped me in his arms, nearly squeezing the air out of me.
I said, “I called and called —”
“I turned off my damned cell at dinner —”
“From now on, you’ve got to put it on vibrate —”
“I’ll wear an electric shock collar, Linds. Whatever it takes. I’m sick that I didn’t know you needed me.”
“You’re here now.”
I broke down and cried all over his shirt, feeling safe and lucky that Joe was okay, that we both were. I only vaguely remember my friends and my partner saying good-bye, but I clearly recall Chuck Hanni telling me that as soon as it was daylight, he’d be all over the building, looking for whatever caused the fire.
Don Walker, the SFFD captain, took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his glove, saying that Joe and I had to leave so he could secure the building.
“Just a minute, Don, okay?” I said, not really asking him.
I went to the bedroom closet and opened the door, stood there in a daze, until I heard Joe say behind me, “You can’t wear any of this, honey. It’s all a loss. You’ve got to walk away from it.”
I turned and tried to take in the utter ruination of my four-poster bed and photo albums and the treasured box of letters that my mother wrote to me when I was away at school and she was dying.
And then I focused my mind and scanned every inch of floor, looking for something specific, a book that might be out of place. I found nothing. I went to my dresser, pulled at the knobs of the top drawer — but the charred wooden drawer pulls crumbled in my hands.
Joe strong-armed the dresser and the wood cracked. He gripped the drawer and heaved it open. I pawed through my underwear, Joe saying patiently behind me, “Sweetie, forget this. You’ll get new stuff . . .”
I found it.
I palmed the velvet cube in my right hand, held it into the light, and opened the box. Five diamonds in a platinum setting winked up at me, the ring that Joe had offered me when he asked me to marry him only a few months ago. I’d told Joe then that I loved him but needed time. Now I closed the lid of the box and looked into his worry-creased face.
“I’d sleep with this under my pillow — if only I had a pillow.”
Joe said, “Got lots of pillows at my place, Blondie. Even got one for Martha.”
Captain Walker stood at the door waiting for us. I took one last look around — and that’s when I saw the book on the small telephone stand just inside my front door.
I’d never seen that book before in my life.
That book wasn’t mine.
Chapter 69
I STARED IN SHOCK and disbelief at the large 8½ by 11 paperback, tomato-red with thin white stripes running crosswise beneath the title: National Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigation.
I started screaming, “That’s evidence. That’s evidence.”
Captain Walker was worn out and he was also out of the loop. He said, “The arson investigator will be back in the morning, Sarge. I’m boarding up your place so it’ll be perfectly safe, you understand?”
“NO,” I shouted. “I want a cop. I want this thing locked up in the evidence room tonight!”
I ignored Walker’s sigh and Joe’s hand on the small of my back. I dialed Jacobi’s number on my cell, already decided that if he didn’t pick up, I would call Clapper and then I would call Tracchio. And if I didn’t get Jacobi or CSI or the chief, I would call the mayor. I was hysterical and I knew it, but no one could stop me or tell me I was wrong.
“Boxer, that you?” Jacobi said. His voice crackled from a poor connection.
“I found a book in my apartment,” I shouted into the phone. “It’s clean. It didn’t burn. There could be prints. I want it bagged and tagged, and I don’t want to do it myself in case there’s any question down the road.”
“I’m five minutes away,” Jacobi said.
I stood in the hallway with Joe and Martha, Joe telling me that Martha and I were moving in with him. I held tightly to his hand, but my mind was running a slide show of all the fire-razed houses I’d walked through in the last month, and I was feeling the searing shame of having been so professional and so removed. I’d seen the bodies. I’d seen the destruction. But I hadn’t felt the terrible power of fire until now.
I heard Jacobi’s voice and that of the building manager downstairs, then Jacobi’s ponderous footsteps as he huffed and wheezed up the stairs. I’d ridden thousands of miles in a squad car with Jacobi. I’d been shot with him, and our blood had pooled together in an alley in the Tenderloin. I knew him better than anyone in the world, and he knew me that way, too. That’s why when he arrived at the top landing, all I had to do was point to the book.
Jacobi stretched latex gloves over his large hands, gingerly opened the red cover. I was panting with fear, sure that I’d see an inscription inside, another mocking Latin saying. But there was only a name printed inside the front page.
The name was Chuck Hanni.
Chapter 70
IT WAS 1:03 A.M. and sixty-eight degrees outside.
I was lying next to Joe tucked inside the cool, white envelope of his six-hundred-thread-count sheets, wearing one of his T-shirts, staring up at the time and temperature projected onto his ceiling by a clock made for insomniacs and former G-men who needed to have this critical info the second they opened their eyes.
Joe’s hand covered mine. He had listened to my fears and my ranting for hours, but as he drifted off, his grip loosened, and now he was snoring softly. Martha, too, was in the land of nod, her fluttery breaths and dream-yips providing a stereophonic accompaniment to Joe’s steady snores.
As for me, sleep was on the far side of the moon.
I couldn’t stop thinking how the fire skipped the first two floors but had torched my apartment out to the walls. It was undeniable. I was the target of a vicious, premeditated killer who’d already deliberately burned eight people to death.
Had he thought I was home? Or had he watched me leave with Martha and sent me a warning? How could Chuck Hanni be that person?
I’d had meals with Chuck, worked crime scenes with him, confided in him. Now I was reconfiguring him in my mind as a killer who knew everything there was to know about setting fires. And everything there was to know about getting away with murder.
But why would a man who was this smart leave his damned calling card in my apartment?
The signature of a killer was actually his signature?
It made no sense.
The pounding in my temples was building up to a five-alarm headache. If there’d been anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it up. When the phone rang at 1:14, I read the caller ID and grabbed the receiver on the first ring. Joe stirred beside me. I whispered, “It’s Conklin,” and Joe mumbled, “Okay,” and dropped back down into sleep.
“You got something?” I asked my partner.
; “Yeah. You’re not going to like this.”
“Just tell me. Tell me what you’ve got,” I half whispered, half shouted. I got out of bed, stepped over Martha, and walked out into Joe’s living room with its night view of Presidio Park, its tall eucalyptus trees swaying eerily in the moonlight. Martha’s nails clacked on hardwood as she followed me, slurped water from a bowl in the kitchen.
“About the book . . .” Rich said.
“You found Latin written inside?”
“No. It’s Chuck’s book, all right —”
“Man oh man.”
“Let me finish, Linds. He didn’t leave it in your apartment. I did.”
Chapter 71
MY MIND SCRAMBLED as I tried to understand what Conklin was telling me. “Say that again,” I demanded. When he answered, his voice was contrite.
“I left the book at your place.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
He had to be. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which Conklin would leave a fire and explosion manual in my fire-ravaged apartment.
“What happened is, I got together with Chuck, like you said to do,” Rich told me in measured tones. “We had a no-hard-feelings dinner and I picked up the tab. And I told him I’d like to learn more about fire investigation from him. I mean, he’s the pro.”
Rich paused for breath and I shouted at him, “Go on!”
“We went out to his car, Lindsay, he practically lives in that thing. Pop-Tarts wrappers all over the seats, his computer, clothes hanging from the —”
“Rich, for God’s sake!”
“So, just as he finds the fire investigations manual to lend me, Jacobi calls and tells me your apartment went up. I told Hanni, and he said, ‘I’ll drive,’ and I was still holding that book when we entered your place.”