Once there, she turned on the bedside lamp with its pink bulb and gauzy shade, stood in front of him, and lifted her arms like a little girl. He pulled off her sweater. He ran his fingers across the tops of her breasts, which were swelling out of her pink lace demibra, her nipples hardening behind the lace.
She unhooked her bra, breasts spilling out, sat down on the bed, and wriggled out of her pants. He ripped his shirttails from his waistband, and Cindy leaned forward to help with the last of his shirt buttons, undo his belt buckle, and hug him around the waist, resting her cheek against his zipper.
His clothing flew into the corner of the room, and then they were lying side by side in her bed, glued together, all panting and skin-on-skin, Rich slipping his hands into the flimsy fabric of her panties, making them disappear.
There was a fumbling moment, Cindy finding a square of foil in her nightstand, opening the packet with her teeth — and then he was inside her, making love to the beautiful woman with the curly blond hair who breathed, “Oh, oh, oh,” into his ear, and he held her tight until the shock waves overtook him and he cried out into her pillow.
Rich was awoken sometime later by the sound of the telephone on the nightstand, Cindy silky and warm in his arms, whispering, “Let’s not tell Lindsay.”
“Why not?”
“She’ll spoil it.”
Rich nodded his agreement — he would have agreed to anything — and then he heard Yuki’s voice coming over Cindy’s answering machine.
“Cindy. Cindy, pick up. Where are you? I have to talk to you. Damn. Call me, okay? Love you.”
Cindy held Rich’s face with one hand, reached down with the other hand and gave him a little tug, breathed, “Richie? Can you stay?”
Chapter 59
CLAIRE AND I were huddled around her office computer at seven fifteen in the morning, caffeine free, reading an e-mail to Claire from Michelle Koo, a senior herpetologist at Berkeley.
Claire read aloud, “ ‘Dear Claire, two of the most familiar families of venomous snakes are the Elapidae and the Viperidae,’ ” she said, neatly rounding the corners of the Latin, “ ‘or, rather, elapid snakes and viperid snakes. Kraits are in the Elapidae family. The venom of elapids are neurotoxins, are typically faster-acting than viperids, and leave better-looking corpses.’ ”
“Better-looking corpses, indeed,” I said, breathing over her shoulder. “You could even say museum quality.”
“ ‘The kraits’ bites are often painless,’ ” Claire read on, “ ‘and this gives the victim a false sense of security.’ ”
“So that’s why the Baileys didn’t call for help.”
“I’m thinking the same thing, Linds. Or maybe they never knew they were in trouble. The Baileys had high blood-alcohol. Needleman, too. In medicalspeak, they were all zonked.
“Here,” Claire went on, “Michelle writes, ‘The symptoms can include stomach cramps and dizziness, dilated pupils and slurred speech, inability to swallow, heart arrhythmia, respiratory failure, and falling into a coma. Death can come in six to eight hours.’ ”
I had stopped reading the text and had fastened on the photo of the krait, the same beguilingly lovely elapid I’d seen lined up along a yardstick in the Christopher Ross murder book.
“Michelle says, ‘Death is directly due to the neurotoxicity of the venom as it acts on fundamental chemical pathways that keep our muscles working.’ And that’s the main thing, girlfriend. The muscles can’t work. So the victim can’t breathe. And the neurotoxin is metabolized so fast, even if you knew what to look for — which we didn’t — nothing shows up on the tox screen.”
I said to my best friend, “So if there’s no neurotoxin left in the victims’ bodies by the time they die, how can you prove what killed them?”
Claire opened a desk drawer, rooted around, cried, “Gotcha!” and pulled out a magnifying glass the size of a saucer.
“I’m going to do precisely what old Doc Wetmore did. Go over my patients’ bodies with a glass and a bright light,” she said. “Look for itty-bitty puncture wounds that might’ve been caused by fangs.”
Chapter 60
WE WERE ALL crowded into Jacobi’s votive holder of an office, Cindy in the worn desk chair in front of Jacobi’s desk, Conklin and I squeezed in between stacks of paper on his credenza.
“I’ve known you how long now?” Jacobi was saying to Cindy.
“Six years or so.”
“And I’ve never asked you for a favor before, have I?”
“Warren, I told Rich and I told Lindsay that I’m not even working the high-society murder story.”
Jacobi leveled his hard gray eyes at my friend, and frankly I admired her ability to hold her own. He’d intimidated depraved killers with that same stony look.
“It’s not just that it’s not your story,” said Jacobi. “It’s that you know something we want to keep in the vault for now.”
“All of those files I pulled for Rich are in the public record,” Cindy said, showing Jacobi her palms. “Anyone could find out what I know, including someone else at the Chronicle.”
“It’s buried in the public record,” said Jacobi. “And we need it to stay buried for now. That’s why we’re going to make you an offer you can’t refuse.”
Cindy laughed. “I love it when you guys offer me an exclusive when I’ve already done the work.”
“Cindy, let’s not start talking personal gain, okay? We’ve got four unsolveds from the eighties and three probable homicides from the last week. We’ll give you the first clear shot, and that’s a promise.”
My cell phone rang, and I glanced down at my hip. I didn’t recognize the number, so I let the phone ring again before I snatched the receiver off the hook and growled, “Boxer,” as I edged out of Jacobi’s office.
Joe was laughing.
“Ohh man, I’m sorry,” I said.
“Forget it, Blondie, it’s good to hear your voice, no matter how snarly you are.”
“I’ve got good reason to snarl.”
I caught Joe up fast, telling him about Sara Needleman’s death and that Jacobi was restraining Cindy in virtual handcuffs so that our snake killer didn’t slither down a hole.
“Any leads on the doer?”
“Too many and none,” I said. “We’re going to start throwing darts at the phone book pretty soon. And by the way, when are you coming home?”
As I paced a circle around Cappy McNeil’s desk, Joe said he was hoping that he’d be back in a week or so and that we should make plans to do something fun, dress up, celebrate his return.
I kissed the little holes in my cell phone, heard kisses in my ear, and then I went back to Jacobi’s office. I sat down next to Conklin cheek-to-cheek on the cheap credenza, the warmth of his hip and arm making me think about him and about Joe, and making me ask myself yet again why each man had a grip on me that clouded my feelings for the other.
Conklin leaned forward, almost parking his nose in Cindy’s hair, saying to her, “Like you said, it might be the same killer coming out of retirement. Or he might be a copycat.”
“Either way, he’s a repeater,” Jacobi growled. “We can’t tip him off. We need every advantage because we’re nowhere, Cindy, and I’ll give you any odds: if he can, this guy is going to kill again.”
Chapter 61
YUKI WAS SCARED out of her mind.
She couldn’t remember any day when she’d felt as special as she did with John “Doc” Chesney. And it seemed that the feeling was fantastically mutual.
Oh God. Twice now, he’d played his eyes over her face until her cheeks burned and she had to say something, anything, because she just couldn’t take so much attention.
Doc had met her early that morning out at the beach. He was wearing a navy-blue parka over his jeans, a color that turned his eyes bluer, his sandy hair blonder, the dazzling entirety of his being enough to make Brad Pitt jealous.
Yuki had cautioned herself not to get too gaga on their first real date, not to let h
er moony eyes show, reminded herself that she’d been a bitch when she’d first met Doc and he’d liked that about her.
And so she’d gotten a grip on herself and they’d spent the day exploring Crissy Field, a very pretty park that ran along the shoreline from Marina Green to Fort Point, a Civil War fort that was lodged underneath the Golden Gate Bridge.
She’d jogged a bit faster along the path than Doc did, laughed at him for not keeping up until he sprinted past her, kicking up a little sandstorm and calling over his shoulder, “Hey, girlie, just try and catch me.”
She’d collapsed on a weathered bench, laughing and panting, and he’d come back to her, also blowing hard, dropping down beside her, the smell of him filling her up, making her knees shake.
“You’re a show-off, you know?” he’d huffed, staring at her until she’d said, “Oh, look,” and pointed to the bobbing heads in the bay.
“Coconuts?”
“You’re kidding me, right? Those are sea lions.”
“You like all this nature stuff?” he’d said, untying his Reeboks, shaking out the sand. “All this big sky, these creepy life-forms —”
“Crabs and jellyfish —”
“As I was saying, you nature-lover —”
“Oooooooh, Doc, that really hurts.” Yuki laughed. “By the way, New Yorkers don’t have a lock on skyscrapers. I like cities as much as you do.”
“Yeah? Prove it.” He’d grinned, showing her that his whole act was just that — an act.
But she’d proved it anyway, named her top-ten architects, seven of whom turned out to be his favorites, too, and told him about San Francisco landmarks, putting her Golden Gate Bridge up against his Throgs Neck any day of the week, her Folsom Street against his Fifth Avenue, and then she’d asked him what ocean he could see from midtown Manhattan.
Doc gave her props for “the ocean thing,” and they walked together to the Warming Hut, where they sat now at a small table, hot cocoa in hand, their cheeks flushed, grinning at each other as if their feelings were gold coins they’d found in the back pockets of their jeans, never having seen them before.
“You know, you’re gorgeous,” he said.
“Come on.”
“Yeah, you are.”
He reached over and rubbed her bristly head, and she touched the back of his hand and rested her cheek in his palm, waiting for the bubble to burst, which it did when his cell phone went off to “Somebody to Love.”
Doc sighed, removed his warm palm from her cheek, opened his phone, and announced, “Chesney,” into the speaker.
“I’m not on call,” he said. “Isn’t that his problem? Okay, okay. I can make it in an hour.”
Doc put his phone away and grabbed both of Yuki’s hands in his. “I’m sorry, Yuki. It’s going to be this way until I move up in the pecking order.”
“I understand,” she said.
They walked back to their cars together, arms around each other’s waists, covering new territory, Yuki liking the feeling so much and equally relieved that the day had closed at the best moment. She was attracted to Doc, and she was scared.
He draped an arm over her shoulder, brought her to him, and kissed her, sweetly, softly, so she kissed him again, even more so.
When they broke apart, Yuki blurted, “I haven’t had sex in almost two years.”
A look passed over Doc’s face that she couldn’t read. It was like an eclipse of the sun. He hugged her, got into his car, and said out the window, “I’ll call you.”
“Okay,” she said, too softly for him to hear over the sound of the engine as he drove away.
What had she said to him?
Why had she said that?
Chapter 62
CINDY SAT IN a booth of a diner called Moe’s, just down the block from Bagman’s condemned Victorian house that had decayed into a crash pad for druggies.
Her grilled cheese and coffee were cooling, and Cindy was making notes for a sidebar: how many homeless died before the age of forty, how many were under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they died — 65 percent.
She was taking the data off the SFPD Web site, so it was automatic writing, not creative, but it was distracting her from the delicious aches and twinges caused by spending another entire night wrapped around Richard Conklin, this time at his place. And those memories only made her want to call him, make another date to wrap herself around him again.
She was in that luminous and dangerous state of mind when she felt a tug on her hair, turned to see a woman peering over the back of the booth at her and saying her name.
Cindy thought the woman looked familiar but at the same time didn’t recognize her.
“Sorry. Do I know you?”
“I’ve seen you at From the Heart.”
“Okay, sure,” Cindy said, pretty certain that she didn’t recognize this young woman from the soup kitchen — but she couldn’t place her anywhere else.
“Want to join me?” Cindy said, forcing herself to make the offer, because you just never knew. This woman with the messy blond hair could be the one who knew who killed Bagman Jesus.
“You look busy.”
“It’s okay,” Cindy said, shutting the lid of her laptop as the woman took the seat across from her.
Cindy could see the beginning of the woman’s decline into an extreme meth makeover: the graying skin, the huge pupils, the high agitation.
“I’m Sammy.”
“Hi, Sammy.”
“I read your last story. About Bagman being a guy named Rodney Booker. That he went to Stanford.”
“Yes, he did.”
“I went to Stanford, too.”
“You dropped out, I’m guessing.”
“School can’t compete,” Sammy said.
“With what?”
“With life.”
Cindy blinked into the young woman’s face. She was remembering the cautions, not to speak too fast, move too quickly, appear in any way a threat. That as long as the meth addict was talking, it was safe enough. Silence meant she might be getting paranoid — and dangerous.
Cindy tried not to look down at the fork and knife on the table. She said softly, “Do you know who killed Bagman, Sammy? Do you know we’re offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward?”
“What’s your life worth, Cindy?” Sammy said, her eyes darting all around the diner, then back to Cindy. “Would you sell your life for money you’ll never get to spend? That’s what I want to tell you. You’re wasting your time. No one’s going to say who the people are who killed Bagman Jesus. No one would dare.”
Chapter 63
I WAS IN THE squad car with Conklin, heading toward a dive of a bar in the Mission, where our new and only suspect was said to work from three p.m. until midnight.
Henry Wallis’s name had come to us by way of an anonymous tip, but what made this tip different than the hundreds of others that had fried our phone lines was that Henry Wallis was on our short list.
He was a bartender, had worked the Baileys’ parties, and had dated Sara Needleman — until she dumped him. And the tipster said he’d seen Wallis driving down Needleman’s street, passing in front of her house several times in his one-of-a-kind junker the night before Needleman died.
Wallis’s sheet listed his arrests for violent crimes.
He’d been convicted of domestic violence and assault and battery, and he’d been charged with attempted murder when he and a couple of other drunken bullies had worked over a customer in an alley behind the bar and nearly killed him.
The witnesses to the beating had differing stories. The evidence was thin. Wallis was found not guilty. Case dismissed.
Stats said that Wallis was white, five ten, 165 pounds, and, most important, forty-six years of age. That meant he was old enough to have read about the high-society murders in the ’80s.
Hell, he was old enough to have committed them.
Conklin and I wondered if Wallis had keys to both the Bailey and Needleman houses. It seemed pro
bable, even likely.
The photo we had of Wallis was four years old, but he was good-looking, even in the scathing high-contrast flash of the Polaroid camera.
He had muscular arms, jailhouse tats on his knuckles.
But what had sent me and Conklin out to the car was the tattoo on Wallis’s left shoulder: that of a snake twining through the vacant eyes of a skull.
Conklin was quiet as he drove, and I understood why.
We were both imagining the variety of ways the scene could play out in the Torchlight Bar: what we’d do if Wallis drew a weapon, if he ran, how we’d manage whatever came down without causing collateral damage.
Conklin parked on Fifteenth between Valencia and Guerrero in front of the Torchlight Bar and Grill, a white clapboard building surrounded by bookstores and cafés.
I unbuttoned my jacket, touched the butt of my gun. Conklin did the same. And we entered the dark atmosphere of the bar. There was a TV overhead, tuned to a recap of yesterday’s ball game — the A’s were getting pounded.
The bartender was six-foot-two, weighed one eighty, and was bald. It was gloomy in that bar — dim light cast by neon signs — but even so, I could see from thirty feet away that the bartender wiping beer mugs with a dirty towel wasn’t Henry Wallis.
I stood just inside the doorway as Conklin went to the bartender, flashed his badge, talked quietly under the television’s blare. The bartender’s eyes went to me, then back to Conklin.
Then he pointed to a man at the head of the bar who was sipping a beer and looking up at the TV screen, unaware that we’d come through the door.
Conklin signaled to me, and we approached Henry Wallis. Maybe he had eyes in the back of his head, or maybe the guy next to him saw us and gave Wallis a nudge, but he whipped his head around, saw my hand going for my piece, and made for the rear exit.
Conklin yelled, “Freeze! Wallis, stay where you are.”
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