16th Seduction: (Women’s Murder Club 16) (Women's Murder Club)

by James Patterson

  What remained of Sci-Tron was a hazardous obstacle course of smashed glass and sheared-off metal tubing, overturned exhibits and exposed wiring. Joe carefully picked out a path through the pile of rubble by the light of his phone and the low-burning fires.

  He called out, “Hellooo. Can anyone hear me?”

  There was an answering moan ahead to his right. Joe called out, “I’m coming,” and headed toward the sound, when something snaked around his ankle. Reflexively he kicked his leg free, then made out the pale hand, the arm, the upper torso, of a woman lying facedown on the floor, half buried under a display case.

  She said, “I can’t … move.”

  Joe stooped to see her.

  “I’m going to help you out of this. What’s your name?”

  “Sophie Fields.”

  “I’m Joe. Sophie, are you in pain?”

  “I feel numb.”

  “Looks like an exhibit fell on you. I’m going to try to move it. Hang on.”

  “Tell my husband … Robbie … I love. Him. The key is in the tackle … box.”

  “You get to tell him yourself, Sophie. Listen. We’re a team now. I’m going to try to move this junk off you. The visibility in here really sucks. If anything hurts you, shout out.”

  Sophie moaned and then she was quiet again.

  Joe sized up the six-by-six-by-twelve-foot case, which was part metal, part glass, with jagged edges and what looked to be a heavy steel base. If he could get a decent angle and a good grip … if he could lift and shove at the same time … if Sophie weren’t pinned by something he couldn’t see underneath the display cabinet … a whole lot of ifs.

  He at least had to try.

  He told Sophie what he was going to do on the count of three, and then, hoping to God he could do it, Joe got his arms around the plastic backing, bent his knees under the base, and heaved.

  There was a good deal of creaking and rocking, but the exhibit shifted off the woman’s body and then stabilized. Joe was pretty sure Sophie should be able to move if her back wasn’t broken.

  He asked her, “Sophie, can you roll onto your side so that you’re facing me?”

  Joe never got an answer.

  There was a small blue flash up ahead, like an arc of electricity, followed immediately by a concussive boom. Something heavy struck the back of Joe’s head. Sparks flashed in front of his eyes as, weightless, he fell through the dark.

  CHAPTER 4

  I WAS IN a state of high anxiety as I stood upstream of the exodus from Pier 15, with a clear view of the halogen-lit incident scene.

  Uniformed cops moved barricades into place on the Embarcadero, closing it off from Bay Street to Market, shutting down local traffic.

  The incident commander, wearing a neon-yellow vest, directed ambulances toward the internal parking area inside Pier 9, which had now become a staging area for medical units.

  Fire trucks with lights flashing and sirens on full blast drove over the sidewalk and up to the entrance gate. Men and women wearing EMT vests gathered and stood ready as the firefighters went in.

  Joe had said, “Back in five.”

  Time was up. When he said that, had he truly believed that a quick look at the scene would take only five minutes? His estimate was off, but I resisted the fierce temptation to call him, telling myself that he was working hard and fast and couldn’t take time to call me. Still, I was in tremendous conflict. Was Joe in trouble? Had something happened to him inside that bomb site? Should I just stand here? Or should I get help?

  I looked at my watch. He’d been gone for twelve minutes. Now thirteen.

  I phoned Mrs. Rose, my neighbor, my friend and babysitter. I yelled over the noise that I was near Sci-Tron. That I wouldn’t be home until late. I was calling Brady when, as if tapping the keypad had triggered it, another bomb went off.

  The force of that explosion obliterated every other sound, including my own voice screaming, “Joe!”

  I broke for the entrance to the pier, but before I reached it, I was stopped by three firefighters, who blocked my way and pulled me off to the side and out of harm’s way.

  I fought back.

  “Jesus Christ. I’m a cop. My husband’s in there. Give me some help, would you please? I have to find him.”

  One of the firefighters said to me, “Officer, you can’t go in, not now. Please stand back. Stand there. We’ll get him out as soon as we can.”

  The firefighters were doing their best to control an unstable situation, and I didn’t hold it against them. I stood where I’d been directed to stand, out of the path of the rescue squads and with a pretty good view of what had been Sci-Tron’s entrance. I prayed that Joe would walk out onto the sidewalk.

  Please, God. Let Joe be safe.

  That’s what was in my mind when the medical examiner’s refrigerated trailer rumbled through an opening in the barricades and parked on the trolley tracks that ran down the middle of the Embarcadero.

  I turned away from the mobile morgue and looked out over the bay as I called Joe’s number again and again, hitting the Redial button incessantly and getting no reply.

  Since Joe wasn’t answering, I called my friends and my partner, and I know they heard the terror in my voice. They could do nothing but say, “How can I help?”

  I said to each, “I’ll call you later.”

  And then I was fresh out of lifelines.

  For the next hour in that horrible, stinking night I watched as EMTs ran empty stretchers through the museum’s shattered entrance and carried bagged bodies out to the sidewalk. There the dead were lifted into the medical examiner’s van.

  As for the living, firefighters helped some of the blast victims walk out of the museum. Others were carried out on stretchers.

  I dialed Joe’s number.

  Joe, answer your phone.

  This time I thought I heard his ring tone, five familiar notes, getting louder as EMTs rolled a stretcher through the gate and out toward the curb. I ran toward that stretcher, feeling hopeful and terrified at what I might find. I heard the ringtone again.

  “Joe?”

  The face of the man on the stretcher was horribly swollen, bruised, and smeared with blood. His left arm rolled out from under the blanket that covered his body, and I saw the wedding ring I had placed on his finger when we were standing together inside a gazebo facing Half Moon Bay. We’d vowed to love each other in sickness and in health.

  I gripped his shoulder and said, “Joe. It’s Lindsay. I’m here.”

  He didn’t answer. Was he alive?

  I ran alongside his stretcher, stayed with him in the triage area, where he was swiftly assessed and lifted through the open doors of an ambulance.

  I fumbled for my badge and said hoarsely, “That’s my husband. I’m his wife.”

  An EMT nodded and offered her hand and forearm. I got a good grip and she pulled me inside.

  CHAPTER 5

  I HELD JOE’S hand as the EMTs gave him oxygen, and I answered their questions about Joe’s age, blood type, and occupation. “Private security contractor.”

  Despite the police barricades and traffic jams, it was a short, wild ride to the hospital. Joe was brought directly from the ER into surgery, and I took a seat in the waiting room. It was filled with people who had emergencies unrelated to the blast, and there were also friends and the families of those victims who’d been caught in the explosion.

  The overhead TV in the corner was muted, but there was closed-captioning and a crawl at the bottom of the screen.

  Bomb blast destroys Sci-Tron.

  Death toll rises to 20 dead, 30 injured.

  No comment yet from police or Homeland Security, but GAR is suspected as the terrorist organization responsible for this bombing.

  No one has claimed responsibility.

  There were video clips of the blast, of the crowds, of the traffic, of the EMTs racing toward the disaster. The clips were horrific, and they triggered my own vivid memories of the explosion I had seen a
nd felt, images that were playing on a closed loop inside my mind.

  I was watching the TV when another clip came on. A microphone was put up to the incident commander’s face. A reporter shouted a question, and the IC agreed to speak to the press.

  He gave his name and spelled it, said that he was the commander in charge of managing and coordinating personnel across the board, across several disciplines.

  He said, “Fire, medical, and law enforcement are on the scene. It’s much too early to arrive at any conclusions as to what exactly happened here, to identify the victims. We’ve got great people here. The best. I’ve got to get back to them. The public will get an update as soon as we have something to report.”

  Next came a clip of the mayor speaking from outside Pier 15.

  He was in shirtsleeves and wearing a hard hat. He said, “This is a terrible day for our city and for the United States. We grieve with the families of the deceased and we pray for the injured. We ask for your patience as we get to the bottom of this savage act of terrorism. Federal agencies have joined with our brave emergency responders and the SFPD. We will get whoever is responsible for this tragedy. You can count on it.”

  People sitting around me in the waiting room collapsed into the arms of their family and friends and wept.

  Connor Grant had told me, “I created this—this magnificent event.”

  Someone called my name.

  I jumped to my feet and saw the doctor, a dark-haired surgeon in blue scrubs, mask hanging loosely around her neck. I searched her face for reason to hope for good news, but all I saw was sadness.

  She introduced herself as Dr. Janet Dalrymple. I walked with her into the hallway, and she told me that Joe had an acute subdural hematoma that was rapidly expanding, that it was putting pressure on his brain.

  “I put in a shunt to drain the fluid buildup,” she told me. “He’s on medication to keep the swelling down. What we’ll do now is watch him closely, keep checking the pressure.”

  I had to ask. “What are his chances, Doctor?”

  “I don’t operate on chances, Lindsay. Every patient with a head injury responds differently. I don’t want to give you false hope. His injuries are serious. Still, he could be past the worst in hours. We’re taking him now to intensive care.”

  I returned to the waiting room thinking about the bombshell that had broken up our marriage.

  Six months ago I’d learned that my husband had been lying to me for—I had no idea how long. When I confronted him, he admitted that he’d been keeping things from me and he said that he couldn’t tell me what he was doing. That it was all strictly classified. He said that he had to put country first.

  “I couldn’t tell you what I was doing, Lindsay. It was all strictly classified. I had to put country first.”

  Although I maybe still loved him, the words “country first” changed so many things that I had believed in without question. While I had thought my husband was a work-from-home dad, he had actually been working for the CIA. There was a woman involved. I wasn’t sure what they had meant to each other, but it wasn’t casual. I was married to a spy. And that meant that I hadn’t really known Joseph Molinari—ever. And that I could never truly trust him.

  Despite how angry I had been with Joe, right now I would do anything if he would survive his injury with his mind intact. I made deals with God and I waited for news.

  CHAPTER 6

  NEWS DID ARRIVE, but it was not the news I was hoping for.

  The TV in the soothing ICU waiting room cut away from a rerun of The Big Bang Theory to a bright-red BREAKING NEWS card that spiraled and filled the screen. Then Channel 5’s Susan Margulies Steinhardt appeared on set, looking as though she’d just bolted from her bed, put on her lipstick while driving to the studio, and gone directly on-air.

  “We’ve got breaking news,” she said.

  She read from a sheet of paper in front of her.

  “GAR has taken responsibility for the bomb that blew up Sci-Tron, resulting in twenty-five deaths and forty-five injuries, by recent count.”

  I had been slumped and dozing, but I shot upright and gripped the arms of the chair.

  The anchorwoman went on. “KPIX 5 cannot verify the authenticity of this video message that was posted on the internet moments ago.”

  A silhouette of a man appeared on-screen. His face was in deep shadow and there seemed to be a circle behind his head, almost like a halo. His voice was unaccented, digitally altered, could have been completely fabricated by a synthesizer.

  The man with the distorted voice said, “GAR is proud of our devoted soldier SF65 in the Great Antiestablishment Reset. He has shown true courage in bringing down Sci-Tron, a frivolous endeavor fed by corrupt corporate and university sponsors.

  “GAR works in secret and explodes in public. And we will continue our work until all people around the world have achieved authority over themselves.”

  The video went to black, and Ms. Steinhardt reappeared on-screen.

  She said, “This is all we have at the moment, but we will continue to update our viewers as new information comes in. And now we are suspending our scheduled programming and taking you to our studios in New York for commentary on the news as it unfolds.”

  Six people in the ICU waiting room were watching this jaw-dropping news along with me.

  “I knew it,” said one. “Had to be GAR.”

  “Evil bastards,” said another.

  On the TV the scene cut away from the small local station to a slick set in New York. Images of the blast were displayed on large screens behind an angular table seating news correspondents and terrorism analysts familiar to everyone with access to a TV.

  News anchor Dallas Greer asked the opinions of the experts, and the majority accepted GAR’s statement as true.

  Roger Watkins, CBS’s crusty international correspondent, was the dissenting voice. He said, “Although Sci-Tron was funded by corporate donors, it was managed by an ecumenical group of educators. See, that doesn’t jibe as I see it. Sci-Tron was not authoritarian in any way. It’s a museum that was principally designed for kids. Blowing it up sends a very confusing signal and is off message for GAR.”

  Alexander Carter disagreed. He had been analyzing and reporting on domestic terrorism since McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in 1995.

  Said Carter, “Roger, with all due respect, are you suggesting that GAR is taking credit for someone else’s bomb? Or could this be more likely? GAR is known for ditching the traditional terrorist playbook. They don’t have a headquarters, nor a spokesperson or leader. They thrive on their open-source recruitment and management. Equal bombs for all.

  “How can anyone, without certain knowledge, say that Sci-Tron was a random act of terror unrelated to GAR?”

  Both men had made good points, and I was weighing their arguments against what I knew of Connor Grant.

  Was he a partner in GAR? Was he a lone wolf who had been inspired by GAR? Or, if he was in fact the bomber, as I believed, had he acted entirely by himself for his own sick reasons?

  Or was he innocent of all charges and just a lying piece of crap?

  I pictured him in a small cinder-block interrogation room contemplating a possible death sentence. I thought I could get him to tell me the truth again.

  CHAPTER 7

  IT WAS ALMOST midnight when Rich Conklin found me in the waiting room outside the ICU.

  He sat down beside me and I updated him on Joe’s condition.

  “They put him into a coma to stop him from thrashing. Along with the bleeding around his brain, he’s got a lot of broken bones. Right leg is fractured in two places, right arm burned and snapped just above the wrist. He’s got three or four cracked ribs.”

  Richie is more than a partner. He’s like a sibling with no rivalry between us. A couple of years back he fell in love with and is now living with Cindy Thomas, one of my dearest and closest friends. He is family.

&nbs
p; Now he walked with me to the glass-walled intensive care unit down the hall, where Joe lay in a hospital bed, tubes going into and out of him. He was wired up to monitors, with his leg in traction, bandages around his head.

  I said, “Why did he have to go inside that place? Why?”

  “I know. I know,” Richie said.

  We both knew. We’d both gone into no-win firefights with eyes wide open, gotten shot, and gone back for more.

  Richie put his arms around me and I cried against his chest. He said all the right things: that Joe was strong, that he was in great hands, that he was going to live to kick ass. “With his broken leg.”

  And then he said, “You heard that GAR took credit?”

  “I heard.”

  “We should go, Linds. Brady is waiting for your debrief.”

  I left my number with the nurse’s station and followed Richie back to the Hall of Justice, a gray granite building that houses the criminal court, the DA’s offices, a jail, and the Southern Station of the SFPD.

  We parked on Gilbert Street and entered the building through the main entrance, a set of double glass-and-steel doors leading to a marble-lined lobby. We cleared night shift security and headed up the back stairs to the Homicide squad room, on the fourth floor.

  The squad room was a fairly grim place on the best of days, but at night it was like a crypt. The lighting was stark, the green walls looked gray, and so did the dear old-timers and rookies and guys on their second shift sharing desks to answer the incessant ringing of the tip lines. Some of them looked up and said, “Hey, Boxer. You okay?”

  The bull pen was gritty, but there was no place on earth I’d rather work.

  At the back of the room was a glass-walled office with a princely view of the interstate. This was the lieutenant’s office and he was there now.

  Jackson Brady, formerly of Miami PD, had transferred to our Homicide Unit a few years back. It hadn’t taken long for him to earn his promotion to lieutenant and become the boss. I’d had issues with Brady at first, but despite his nofrills style, I had come to like him.