Women's Murder Club [08] The 8th Confession

by James Patterson

  Pet Girl found the tanned and yoga-toned Molly on a low-slung sofa, crouched over a mirrored table, doing lines through a silver straw. Slouched beside her, swaying two beats behind the music, was the legendary fifty-year- old software billionaire Brian Caine.

  “Look. Who’s. Here,” Caine said, giving Pet Girl a look so nakedly sleazy, she wanted to poke out his eyes.

  “Molly,” Pet Girl said, holding out a sixty-eight-dollar bottle of Moët & Chandon, “this is chilled.”

  “Just put it anywhere,” Molly said, turning away from Pet Girl as Tyco brought over a stack of Polaroids. She shrieked with delight as she pawed through the sex snaps her houseboy had taken of guests frolicking in her bedroom.

  As suddenly as Molly’s attention had been pulled away from Pet Girl, it boomeranged back.

  “Don’t you smell that?” Molly asked her. “Something’s burning. Why are you just standing there?”

  Pet Girl blunted her expression.

  She went to the kitchen, removed the pan of bite-size mushroom quiche from the oven, dumped a tray of Kobe beef on toast — worth three hundred dollars a pound — into the dog’s bowl. Then she stomped back into the party.

  She called Molly’s name, finally catching her unfocused stare beneath her blank, Botoxed forehead.

  Pet Girl said, “I fed Mischa. Are you going to remember to walk him?”

  “Tyco will do it.”

  “All right then. Au revoir, babycakes.”

  “But you just got here.” Brian Caine pouted. The front of his black silk pajamas had fallen open, revealing his disgusting, hairy man-boobs. “Stay,” he implored Pet Girl. “I want to get to know you better.”

  “Yeah, right after I figure out how to block my gag reflex,” Pet Girl said. She turned on the gold flats she’d bought for this occasion and made her way through the oblivious throng. She stopped to retrieve the bottle of champagne she’d brought, then quickly walked out the door.

  Chapter 70

  IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT when Pet Girl got out of the cab and walked four blocks under the stars, the warm, moist air blowing off the ocean as she approached the run-down apartments at the farthest end of the Presidio.

  She opened her front door, hung her backpack on a peg in the hallway, and went to the kitchen. There, she used a key to unlock the small pocket door, sliding it into its slot in the wall. Then she entered the long, narrow room that had once been a pantry and was now her private world.

  Pet Girl hit the switch, throwing light on the half dozen aquariums stacked on restaurant racks lining the back wall. She sensed her beauties uncoiling their sleek bodies even before she saw them slithering silently across the bark-and-leaf litter — alert, hungry, eager to feed.

  Pet Girl opened a cabinet and removed her tools: the tongs with the pistol grip, her steel-toed boots, and the welder’s gloves, which were made of deerskin, lined with Kevlar, and thick but flexible, with elbow-length cuffs.

  When she was dressed, she stepped over to Vasuki’s cage, admired the snake’s strong, muscular body, the intelligence in her eyes, feeling an almost telepathic communication with her favorite krait.

  She shifted the heavy lid capping Vasuki’s cage and captured the snake with her tongs, saying, “You can feed when we get back home, baby.”

  She dropped Vasuki carefully into a pillowcase, put the whole into a pet carrier, and snapped the locks closed.

  Then she removed one of the baby garter snakes from a breeder tank and dropped it into Vasuki’s cage so that her favorite pet’s reward would be waiting for her when they returned.

  Taking a last look around to make sure that all was well, Pet Girl exited her snake farm and locked the door.

  She reached into her blouse and pulled out the antique locket she wore on a solid-gold chain. It had been a gift from her father, and his picture was inside.

  Pet Girl raised the locket to her lips, kissed it, said, “Love you, Daddy,” then turned out the lights.

  Chapter 71

  THE SCENE IN Molly’s place had melted down since Pet Girl had been there two hours ago. Dozens of candles guttered in their holders, food trays were empty, and the party guests who’d passed out on the floor were snoring and twitching but were definitely out.

  There was a sound coming from the kitchen, metal scraping the floor. Pet Girl froze, ducked behind a sofa, prepared to pretend that she’d been here all along. But when a body slammed her in the dark, she almost screamed.

  “Mischa! Shhh.” She stroked the springer’s silky head, willing her heart rate to slow.

  “Did Tyco take you for a walk?” she whispered, unclipping the dog’s leash from his collar. Mischa wagged his tail, squatted, and piddled on the carpet, then ducked his head, expecting a reprimand — but he didn’t get one.

  Pet Girl told the dog to stay, then quickly ascended the staircase that wound dramatically up to the second floor. Molly’s bedroom was at the end of the hall, no light showing under the closed door.

  The brass knob turned in Pet Girl’s hand.

  What if someone wakes up?

  What then?

  She entered the room and closed the door behind her, stood silently in the shadows, her pulse throbbing in her ears, her senses sharpened by the danger — the incomparable thrill of it.

  The bed was directly in front of her, placed between two windows, crowded edge-to-edge with a tangle of naked bodies. A mottled sheet, some kind of animal print, was twisted almost like a rope, loosely tying the bodies together.

  Pet Girl tried to determine which body parts belonged to which person, and when she felt ready, she tugged on her gloves and lifted Vasuki out of the carrier.

  The snake, alert to the new environment, tensed in Pet Girl’s hands, and Pet Girl felt Vasuki’s pure lethal power. Like all kraits, Vasuki was nocturnal, aggressive at night. And she hadn’t eaten in three days.

  Vasuki’s head swayed as Pet Girl held her over the bed. She hissed — and her steel cable of a body suddenly twisted in her owner’s hands. It took only that one part of a second for the snake to slip from Pet Girl’s grasp, drop to the sheets, and slide between the folds of the bedding.

  She was instantly camouflaged. Completely invisible.

  Pet Girl gasped as if she were in actual pain.

  Vasuki was gone. Her plan had spiraled out of control.

  For one crazy moment, Pet Girl imagined turning on the lights to look for Vasuki and making up a story if someone woke up — but Molly wouldn’t buy anything she said.

  It just wouldn’t play.

  Disgusted with herself, horrified at what would happen to Vasuki if she was found, Pet Girl took a last futile look over the moonlight-washed bed. Nothing moved.

  She packed up the pet carrier and left Molly’s bedroom, closing the door again so that Mischa, at least, would be spared.

  Outside the house, beginning the long walk down Twin Peaks Boulevard, Pet Girl assured herself that everything would be okay. As awful as it was to lose Vasuki, there was no ID on that snake.

  No one could ever tie Vasuki to her.

  Chapter 72

  MOLLY CALDWELL-DAVIS LOOKED at me as though she were trying to break through a profound case of amnesia when Conklin and I interviewed her in her breakfast room. Her eyes were red, and she croaked out microsentences between long blank moments as she strained to remember the night before.

  Conklin said, “Molly, take it slow. Just start at the beginning and tell us about the party last night, okay?”

  “I want. My lawyer.”

  Footsteps thumped overhead.

  EMS had come and gone, but Molly’s bedroom swarmed with CSIs. Also, Claire and two of her assistants waited upstairs in the hallway for CSU to leave so that they could do their jobs.

  Claire’s voice floated down over the banister. “Lindsay, can you come up? You’ve got to see this.”

  “Do you need a lawyer, Molly?” Conklin was asking. “Because you’re not a suspect. We just want to understand what happened her
e, you see? Because something did happen.”

  Molly was staring over Conklin’s shoulder into the middle distance as I got up from the table and headed for the stairs. Charlie Clapper greeted me in the hallway, nattily dressed, good-natured, his irony freshly pressed this afternoon.

  “It’s a rerun, Lindsay. Lotsa fingerprints, no weapons, no blood, no suicide note, no signs of a struggle. We’ve bagged six bottles of prescription meds and some street junk, but I don’t think we’re looking at drug overdose. I think this was either Sodom or Gomorrah, and God weighed in.”

  “Honestly, I didn’t know you were so conversant with the Old Testament,” I said while peering around Clapper to better gawk at the vignette on the bed behind him.

  “I’m Old Testament on my mother’s side,” he said.

  I would have laughed, but my glimpse of the crime scene had suddenly made everything too real. I mumbled, “Keep in touch,” and walked past Clapper into Molly’s bedroom suite, where two naked men lay dead.

  The boy was lying on the floor, head to one side, looked to be in his teens. His platinum-blond hair was spiked, and his green eyes were still open. Looked as though he’d been crawling toward the door when he succumbed.

  The older man was on the bed in a half fetal position, his apron of belly fat obscuring his genitals. His eyes, too, were open. He hadn’t died in his sleep.

  This was what death by krait looked like. Central nervous system shut down, resulting in neuromuscular paralysis. The victims hadn’t been able to breathe.

  “When did they die?”

  “They’re still warm, Lindsay. Love to narrow it down for you, but I gotta say they died six to twelve hours ago. Did Molly volunteer anything useful?”

  “Nope. Just the four bad words: ‘I want my lawyer.’ ”

  Claire sighed. “Before she stopped talking, Molly told me that the dead kid was her houseboy, name of Jordan Priestly. She called him ‘Tyco.’ ”

  “Tyco, like the toy company? Oh. I get it. Boy toy.”

  “But I didn’t need her to identify this here father figure. He’s Brian Caine.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Yeah. That Brian Caine. Tony Tracchio better put on his cast-iron jockstrap,” Claire said, “because Caine Industries is going to be all over him.”

  Claire instructed her assistants to snap up the corners of the fitted bottom sheet, wrap it around Caine’s body to preserve any trace before putting it all in the body bag.

  Claire said to me, “You and Conklin can meet me at the morgue when you’re done here. I’m going to take my time with these gentlemen, give them a better external exam than their mamas gave them when they were born.”

  Chapter 73

  I WENT BACK down to the breakfast room, saw that Christine Rogers had joined Molly and Conklin.

  Rogers was a celeb in her own right, a rich person’s all-purpose attorney. She was trim and pretty, a gray-eyed blonde looking deceptively young for a senior partner in a big-time law firm that had her name on the door. Just guessing, but Ms. Rogers probably charged a thou an hour.

  I had to ask myself why Molly Caldwell-Davis needed a cannon when even a slingshot was overkill.

  We hadn’t been looking at Molly as the doer.

  Were we wrong?

  Questions darted through my mind like a school of minnows. Did Molly know the Baileys? Sara Needleman? Where was Molly when they were killed? Did she have any connection with the victims of the snake killings of the early ’80s?

  Was this half- stoned rich girl stealthy enough, smart enough, motivated enough, to be a serial killer?

  If so, what had possessed her to kill people in her own bed?

  Christine Rogers’s face was weary, but her hair shone, her blouse was starched, and her pin-striped Armani suit cost what I made in a month. She may have had the crazy schedule of a senior partner, but the attorney was all business.

  “Ms. Caldwell-Davis wants to cooperate completely,” she said. “When she went to bed around one thirty a.m., Brian Caine and Jordan Priestly were alive. When she woke up sometime after ten, they were dead.”

  I looked Rogers in the eye and said, “Maybe if she collects her thoughts, one or two of them will give us a clue.”

  “Whatever happened, my client slept through it and was miraculously spared,” Rogers said. “I want the police, the brass, the press, everyone, including God, to know that Molly had nothing to do with the deaths of her good friends. She’s sick that they’re dead. And she has nothing to hide.”

  “Wonderful,” Conklin said. “So, Molly, this is square one. We need a list of everyone who was here last night, including the caterer, the delivery people, and whoever walks your dog.”

  Molly looked at Conklin with her big red-rimmed eyes. There was dried spittle in the corners of her mouth.

  “Tyco walked my dog. I cooked for the party, and Brian tended the bar. I didn’t know half the people who showed up, and that’s the truth. People brought people who brought other people.”

  “Let’s start with the ones you know,” said Conklin.

  Chapter 74

  IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Conklin and I entered the autopsy suite and saw Tyco’s body lying on a slab. His eyes were closed, but his collection of nipple rings and studs winked from a stainless- steel bowl under the lights.

  “I’d almost given up,” Claire said. “But look here.”

  She raised the boy’s left arm, handed me the magnifying glass so I could see what she was calling “two defined pinpoint punctures.”

  Beside me, Bunny Ellis, Claire’s number one assistant, pulled down the zipper on the second body bag, the one holding the remains of Brian Caine.

  I turned — and for a terrifying moment I thought Brian Caine was alive.

  The sheet Caine was wrapped in moved — but as I watched in horror, I saw that it wasn’t Caine that was moving. It was something slim and banded, barely discernible against the mottled pattern of the sheet.

  I screamed, “Snake! That’s the snake!”

  The animal seemed liquid as it poured out of the body bag and slid down one of the legs of the gurney onto the floor, head flattened in strike mode, winding across the gray ceramic tile toward Claire.

  “Don’t move!” Conklin yelled out.

  His gun was in his hand, and he fired at the swiftly moving target, once, twice, again and again, the weapon bucking, bullets pinging off the tiles, gunfire echoing in the suite.

  He was oh for six.

  My hands were over my ears, my eyes wide open. I stared as the snake kept coming, now only a yard away from the tips of Claire’s bootees.

  I read the terror on her face. Moving would attract the snake, but Claire had no choice. She bolted for the stepladder that she used to shoot overhead pictures.

  I broke for the hallway.

  The firebox was on the wall. I smashed the glass with my gun butt, cleared the shards, reached for the fire ax, and ran back to the room.

  Conklin was aiming again. Claire was standing on the ladder’s top rung, and her assistants were screaming, as good as climbing the walls.

  I lifted the ax, brought the blade down on the snake, divided it neatly in two at midpoint.

  Both halves of the snake continued to writhe.

  “It’s dead, right?” I called out, my voice shrill, sweat pouring down the inside of my shirt. “It can’t do anything, can it?”

  My mind was suddenly swamped with images of sharks lying on boat decks — presumed dead — that “came back to life” to clamp their jaws around fishermen’s legs.

  This snake was still wriggling, mouth open, lethal fangs exposed.

  We all stared, transfixed by the killer that wouldn’t die. Then Conklin came out of his trance, disappeared into Claire’s office, and returned with a metal trash can, which he upended over both parts of the snake.

  He sat on the trash can.

  The look on his face told me that he felt like he was sitting on a bomb.

  “No, this is goo
d,” he said to me, red-faced, perspiring, eyes bugging out just a little. “Good a time as any to get over my fear of snakes.”

  Animal control arrived at the morgue forty minutes later. They relieved Conklin and lifted the trash can.

  Both parts of the krait were still wriggling.

  The front end gnashed at the air.

  Chapter 75

  YUKI WAS CLEANING out her fridge, listening to Faith Hill, thinking about piebald ponies and long-legged strangers, when her cell phone rang.

  Her stomach clenched instantly — Is it Doc?

  She dropped the sponge in the sink, wiped her hands on the back of her jeans, and went for the phone that was warbling on her mom’s coffee table.

  The caller ID read SF DOJ. Yuki stabbed the receive button with her thumb, said, “Castellano.”

  An hour later she was sitting in a leather armchair in Judge Brendan J. Duffy’s chambers, waiting for Phil Hoffman to arrive.

  Duffy looked perturbed, but he wouldn’t even hint to Yuki about why he’d called until Hoffman was present. So Yuki used the time to study the judge’s bookcase and consider the multiple possibilities. But only one possibility seemed probable, and that was that the damned, cursed jury who’d been charged with deliberating Stacey Glenn’s case hadn’t arrived at a verdict.

  The jury had hung — again.

  So it followed that Duffy would declare a mistrial and that the sassy beauty queen who’d bludgeoned her helpless, loving parents would do the catwalk strut out of the jailhouse.

  Duffy didn’t make small talk. He had gone into work mode, opening files, making notes, tossing papers into his out basket as the rays of afternoon sun lengthened across his Persian rug, and Yuki’s heart continued to beat an SOS inside her ribcage.

  Finally she heard Hoffman’s voice in the outer office.

  He ducked as he walked in the doorway, ran a hand through his rumpled black hair, said, “Sorry, Your Honor. Yuki. My wife and I were in Sausalito. The ferry couldn’t be hurried.”