15th Affair

by James Patterson

  Claire finished my sentence: “The crash of WW 888.”

  I said, “That night when I got home, Mrs. Rose said I had just missed Joe. He’d been home to change his clothes. He left me a message saying he’d been pulled into the plane crash nightmare, and, like, don’t wait up.”

  “So he’s definitely alive,” said Yuki. “He’s not hurt. He’s working.”

  “That’s what he said.”

  I believed what I was saying, but damn it, it was weird that Joe couldn’t get in touch at all. Actually, it was inexplicable. When our lunch was over and the last of my friends were gone, I bathed Julie, gave her some applesauce, and called Joe.

  “I’m sorry,” said the mechanical voice, “but the subscriber’s mailbox is full. Good-bye.”

  Honestly? This was killing me.

  CHAPTER 39

  I SPENT THE rest of the day doing laundry, and by dinnertime I was hungry and bored. I took Julie across the hall to Mrs. Rose, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and headed out to our local Asian grocery store.

  It was dark when I got down to the street. I was considering what kind of veg I wanted to go with last night’s pot roast when something happened—a shock or a blow.

  All I knew for sure was that my face was on the pavement so fast that I never got my hands down to break my fall. Had I tripped? Had I had a stroke?

  My head throbbed and my vision was distorted, but I made out the shapes around me as shoes.

  Lights flashed, headlights zooming past. Nothing made sense. I wanted to throw up. I had struggled up to my hands and knees when I took a blow to my side and was down again. I rolled into a ball and covered my eyes, and heard two voices, maybe more, speaking to me in heavily accented English.

  I looked through my fingers and saw four blurry Asian faces looking down at me. I thought I recognized the one who had confronted me in front of the ME’s office. Same guy who slammed into me after the NTSB press conference.

  He was wearing black, and he had a wide face, and he was shouting at me, something like “You know Chan?”

  Was I making that up?

  “Back off,” I said. “I’m a cop.”

  I reached for my gun at my hip, but it wasn’t there. There was another shout—“Who you work for?”

  “What? Get away from me.”

  I took another blow to the back of my head, and when I woke up, I was in an ambulance moving at high speed. The EMT at my side was saying, “Welcome back. What’s your name?”

  I called Conklin from the ambulance and, shouting painfully over the sirens, I asked him to call Mrs. Rose.

  Right after that, I was wheeled into the ER. My clothes were removed and stuffed into a plastic bag. A nurse took my blood pressure and temperature and layered on two blankets. Eventually a Dr. DiDonato appeared.

  He checked me out.

  “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being excruciating, how do you feel?”

  “I feel like someone beat me up.”

  “You remember that?”

  “Vividly.”

  “Have you ever had a CT scan before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, get ready for a new experience. I’ll let you know how your head looks, and then we’re going to keep you here overnight for observation.”

  “I left my one-year-old with a neighbor. Someone needs to look for witnesses.”

  “I’m on duty until eleven,” DiDonato said. “Dr. Santos will take over after that. Maybe he’ll release you in the morning.”

  Conklin arrived while I was waiting for my CT scan. He looked both scared and mad.

  “What happened? You were mugged? You?”

  “I was beaten up by four Asian guys, but I’m alive. I wasn’t robbed,” I said, waggling the ring finger of my left hand with its sparkling array of diamonds.

  “So why were you beaten? What did they want?”

  “Something about Chan, I think. I can’t swear, Richie. It happened too fast. Why me? I’ve got no idea,” I said.

  CHAPTER 40

  AT AROUND EIGHT the next morning, Rich wheeled me out of the hospital, helped me into his Bronco, and strapped me in.

  Then he let me have it.

  “You’re overtired. You could have been killed. You have nothing on the guys who beat you—nothing. No names, vague descriptions, and you didn’t get a lick in. You know what that tells me, Linds? That you’re off your game. It’s Sunday. Day of rest and you should take it. Go to bed and stay there. I can handle this by myself.”

  I wasn’t having it.

  “What am I going to do at home, Rich? Watch the plane crash over and over again on TV?”

  “That. And sleep.”

  “Look. I admit I was stupid, OK? I should have had my piece with me. I should have had my head on straight. But I repeat. I was just going to the store for a minute. And, by the way, I outrank you. You don’t get to bench me.”

  “You want Brady to put you on medical? Because I have him on speed dial,” said my partner, my brother, my backup, my comrade, my friend. When I didn’t answer immediately, he said, “You need to listen to me. Stay home.”

  “No way.”

  I held on to his arm as he helped me into my apartment building’s creaky elevator. Mrs. Rose opened the front door and told us to hush. “Julie is sleeping.”

  “Can you stay? I have to go to work,” I said.

  Rich gave me a scalding look, but Mrs. Rose didn’t catch it. She stepped up once again, saying, “Of course, Lindsay. At this rate I’ll be able to retire to the South of France pretty soon.”

  “Before you retire, I’m promoting you to captain of the Emergency Baby Care Squad.”

  “Fine. I’d like a salute,” she said. “No one’s ever saluted me before.”

  I did it and she laughed so hard that I laughed, too.

  Which really hurt.

  While she made coffee, I hit the rain box. I examined myself as I stood under the spray. I was bruised from armpit to knee, from midriff to halfway around my back. But I had no internal injuries and my brain was OK, too. Thank God. I concluded that the four Asian hoods hadn’t tried to kill me. If it was a warning, they might work me over again.

  I dressed, hiding the scrape along my jaw and cheek with makeup, and strapped on my gun. Locked and loaded, I went back out to the living room. Julie was awake, wearing a sunflower-yellow onesie and bobbing up and down in her bouncy chair.

  She looked adorable and like she’d grown an inch or two since yesterday. My little girl. She stretched out her arms to me and howled. My heart just lurched.

  What if I had been killed last night?

  What then?

  I picked her up and hugged her, cooing a little bit, before handing her off to Mrs. Rose.

  I had work to do, and at the same time, I was leaving my heart, my precious little girl, with the nice lady from across the hall.

  “You coming or not?” Rich said.

  I followed him out the front door.

  CHAPTER 41

  MY PARTNER OPENED the passenger-side door and helped me into the Bronco with the care one might give to a baby chick.

  I buckled up, plugged in my phone charger, and knocked back a couple of Advil, already thinking about Alison Muller.

  We were days late to be following up on our only suspect in the Four Seasons killings. But the airplane crash had bumped all other cases, even this quadruple homicide, to the back of the line.

  Because of the crash that was immobilizing a section of the city and nearly every member of law enforcement, a wide range of criminals, from shoplifters to psychopathic serial killers, had been given a cop-free holiday. And that might include Alison Muller—wherever she was.

  As we headed out, Conklin told me he had worked last night scanning social media and websites of companies where Muller had worked during her corporate career. He had downloaded an assortment of her photos onto his phone, and while he drove, I checked out versions of “Ali” with her hair in different lengths, styles, an
d colors. Even the “striped” look was represented.

  “Rich, you’re one of a kind, you know?”

  “That’s two of us,” he laughed. “I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”

  We took 101 South, passing through that stretch of road bounded on the right by scorched grass and littered with airplane parts and on the left by San Francisco Bay before we hit the straightaway that hugs our famous coastline.

  We turned off the radio and used this time to examine the ragged edges of our case, starting with Michael Chan and the three other victims at the hotel. We wondered if the crash of the airliner and the missing body of the second Michael Chan were in any way connected to the death of Michael Chan, the First. We discussed Joe’s video appearances and his uncharacteristic disappearance and how the Asian men who had knocked me around last night fit into this mess of mismatched parts.

  All we knew for sure was that Alison Muller was a central figure. And without her, we didn’t have a clue in the world.

  We were still sixty miles out from Monterey, just south of San Jose, when I wadded up my jacket, tucked it between my face and the window, and napped for about an hour. I woke to nauseating stop-and-go traffic, and then Conklin was asking, “You going to file a report on your beatdown?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  The car stopped. I looked out at a sunny street lined with beautiful homes.

  “Now that I’ve thought about it,” I said, “I don’t think it would be a good idea. Do you?”

  He shrugged. “There are pros and cons. Like I said, Brady will sideline you, pronto.”

  “I’m fine, Rich. I’m perfectly fine.”

  He turned to face me, looking at me with heartbreaking kindness and concern. “You tell me if you don’t feel perfectly fine, Lindsay. I don’t want anything bad to happen to you.”

  “I know.”

  My partner turned off the engine.

  “We’re here,” he said.

  CHAPTER 42

  ALI MULLER’S 1920S Mediterranean-style home on Ocean View Boulevard was stunning. The many-windowed white stucco house was roofed in terra-cotta tiles and punctuated by a six-sided tower at the right-angle juncture between two wings.

  I looked up through the windows of the squad car at the spiky native plantings on a rising slope up to the carved oak front door and I felt—warned off. The place was beautiful, and as welcoming as a fortress.

  Conklin said, “You OK, Linds?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Fine. Let’s go.”

  The man who opened the front door was handsome, just over six feet, in his midforties, wearing a cashmere pullover, dark trousers, slippers, and a gold wedding band. He looked well put together and not happy to see us.

  He said, “Yes? What can I do for you?”

  Conklin introduced us, showed his badge, and said we were looking into Alison Muller’s disappearance because she might have been a witness to a homicide.

  “I am Khalid Khan,” said the man in the doorway. “Alison is my wife. Come in.”

  We followed Khan past a spiral staircase inside the entrance and into a blond and airy great room ripped from the cover of California Living. It had a high ceiling, and the tall windows I’d admired from the street offered a ten-million-dollar view of the bay.

  Khan offered us seats on the pale leather sofas, and he took a matching armchair. Soft music surrounded us, a string composition I didn’t recognize. There were no paintings or photographs or anything personal in the room. Again, I felt that forbidding air about the house.

  I said, “We’re investigating four killings that took place early in the week in the Four Seasons Hotel.”

  I showed Khan my phone with the still shot of Muller from the hotel security footage. Khan scrutinized the image.

  He said, “I could see how someone might think that’s Ali, but this woman’s hair covers her face except for her nose. I don’t believe this is my wife.”

  “Do you recognize her coat, Mr. Khan? Could it be Alison’s?”

  He shrugged, just as two girls came down the stairs and entered the great room. They were beautiful children with thick, glossy hair, one about thirteen, the other about five. Khan said, “Caroline and Mitzi, these are police inspectors from San Francisco. They are looking for Mama.”

  The younger child, Mitzi, said sternly, “I hope you are looking very hard.”

  I said we were, and after the children ran off toward the kitchen, Conklin continued questioning Khan.

  He said, “When was the last time you spoke with your wife?”

  “She phoned me on Monday, saying she’d be home that night. She didn’t come home, but this is not unusual for Alison. She has a very busy life.”

  Conklin asked, “You’re not afraid something has happened to her?”

  Khan answered no to all of Conklin’s questions without apparent emotion or curiosity. No to ransom demands, unusual behavior, strangers in the neighborhood, hang-up phone calls, and whether he knew the name Michael Chan.

  Why was Khan so unperturbed when his wife had been missing for almost a week?

  So I asked him. “You don’t seem concerned, Mr. Khan. Why is that?”

  Said Khan, “This isn’t the first time Ali has taken off for a few days without leaving word. They’re walkabouts. What she calls focus downs. She just checks out to think by herself.”

  Really? Without saying a word?

  “I trust my wife,” he said.

  I asked Khan if anyone might have wanted to hurt her: a coworker, a competitor, a stalker, or a jealous friend.

  “Ali is successful, yes. And there are always jealous people, but she is a wonderful woman. She’ll be home when she’s ready. I’ll have her call you the minute she comes home,” he said without a shred of sincerity.

  Khan was sure Alison was alive. Or he didn’t give a damn about her.

  I said, “We have video of the woman we believe is Alison. If you can identify her, we can at least establish her whereabouts last Monday afternoon.”

  “Naturally, I’ll look at the film.”

  I asked if I might use the bathroom and he said, “You mean you’d like to snoop around my house? By all means, have at it,” and he turned his back to me.

  By all means, I would.

  CHAPTER 43

  WITH KHAN’S PERMISSION, I gave the second floor a thorough visual inspection, concentrating on the marital bedroom. Like the great room, the bedroom looked like a photo in a lifestyle magazine: expensively furnished and entirely untouched.

  The bed was precisely made. There were no clothes on the floor, no clutter on the dressers, no sign of pets, handcuffs, dust bunnies, or bloodstains.

  We had one possible witness to the Four Seasons bloodbath: Alison Muller. She was also our only suspect. In the absence of the flesh-and-blood woman, and without a warrant, this was my only chance to frisk her clothes.

  I walked past the tower view of the bay to the far wall, slid open the closet doors, and turned on the lights.

  Alison’s closet looked like a designer showroom: twenty-five feet long by ten feet deep, with built-in drawers and treed shoes under the eighty linear feet of clothing racks.

  Her executive wardrobe filled one section with silk blouses, expensive suits, boots made in Italy, and six-hundred-dollar red-soled high-heeled pumps. Next to her office apparel was a frankly dazzling evening wear collection—casual, formal, all with European designer labels. Above and below the racks were shelves of wraps, bags, and boxes of strappy heels.

  I saw no A-line, knee-length black leather coat.

  While the presence of that coat might confirm Alison Muller as the blond-haired woman at the Four Seasons, the absence of the coat proved nothing. She might still be wearing it. Or she might have been buried in it.

  As I was wrapping up my tour of Ali’s wardrobe, I saw an anomaly: a nearly hidden seam between two sections of built-in drawers.

  I pressed on one side of the seam and a door sprang o
pen—revealing a stash of racy, lacy, extremely fine lingerie.

  I was examining a boned bustier when Khan came through the closet doorway.

  “Find anything, Sergeant? A murder weapon, perhaps? Or a pile of bloody clothes?”

  He stopped short when he saw the display of sexy underthings.

  “What is this?” he asked.

  “You haven’t seen it before?”

  “That’s not Ali’s style at all.”

  “And still, here it is, in a secret closet. Have any thoughts on this, Mr. Khan?”

  He blinked at the lingerie, then returned to the bedroom door and stood there until I made my exit. He followed me down the staircase, and when Conklin and I were standing at the open front door, I thanked Mr. Khan and gave him my card, saying, “Call me if you hear from Alison.”

  “Absolutely,” Khan said stiffly. “The very first thing.”

  CHAPTER 44

  EVEN MEN WHO’D killed their wives had demonstrated more concern for their missing spouse than Khalid Khan, the man in the fortress overlooking the bay.

  “Nice guy,” I said to my partner once we were inside the car. “What’s your take?”

  “You first.”

  “OK,” I said. “Once again, I’m wondering if Alison is the doer, or if she’s moldering in a dump somewhere. And does her husband give a crap either way?”

  “Cultural affect, maybe. What is he?”

  “Arrogant. For starters. Here’s a thought.”

  Conklin had taken out his phone and was checking his messages. I kept going.

  “Say Khan found out about Alison’s thing with Chan and paid a pro to make her disappear? Maybe Chan was part of the contract, too. Looks like Khan could afford the very best. The snoops and the housekeeper were collateral damage.”

  “Brady called.”

  “OK. Give me another minute, here.”

  I was telling Conklin about Khan’s reaction to Muller’s lingerie collection when a sharp rapping sound on the windshield made me jump. What the hell?