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 hunks 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 thi
s 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.”
“You put it down on the telephone table.”
“Didn’t think about it again until Jacobi called me,” Rich said miserably.
“Has Jacobi already spoken to Hanni?”
“No. He wanted to talk to me first. Hanni knows nothing about this.”
It took long seconds for me to sort it all out, put Chuck Hanni back into his role as friend, and realize that the essential truth hadn’t changed. I was shivering, and I wasn’t cold.
“Linds?” I heard Rich say.
“We still don’t know who set fire to my place or to any of the others,” I said. “We still don’t know anything.”
Chapter 72
THERE HAD BEEN a whole blessed week’s break while Judge Bendinger returned to physical rehab for his replaced knee. But the break was over. Bendinger was back. And Yuki now felt the tsunami effect of the whole freakin’ Junie Moon circus starting all over again, the out-of-control press, the pressure to win.
At nine o’clock sharp, court was called into session.
And the defense began to put on its case.
L. Diana Davis didn’t look up as her first witness came through the gate, passing so close she must have felt a breeze as his herringbone jacket nearly grazed her arm. Yuki saw Davis lean in and speak behind her hand to her client, all the while panning the gallery with her eyes. The TV cameras were running, and the reporters were packed in the rows at the back of the room.
Davis smiled.
Yuki whispered to Len Parisi, “There’s no place Davis would rather be. Nobody she’d rather defend.”
Red Dog smiled. “That beast is inside you, too, Yuki. Learn to love it.”
Yuki watched Davis pat her client’s hand as Lieutenant Charles Clapper, head of CSU, was sworn in. Then Davis stood and greeted her witness.
“Lieutenant Clapper, how long have you been head of the San Francisco Crime Scene Unit?”
“Fifteen years.”
“And what did you do before that?”
“I started with the San Diego PD right outta school, worked vice for five years, homicide for five. Then I joined the Las Vegas CSU before moving to San Francisco and joining the CSU here.”
“In fact, you’ve written books on trace evidence, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I’ve done a couple of books.”
“You appear on TV a few times a week, don’t you? Sometimes even more times than me,” Davis said, s
miling widely, getting the laugh she wanted from the gallery.
“I don’t know about that,” Clapper said, smiling too.
“Very good. And how many homicides have you investigated in the last twenty-five years, Lieutenant?”
“I have no idea.”
“Take a wild guess.”
“A wild guess? Maybe a couple of hundred a year.”
“So it’s reasonable to say you may have investigated as many as five thousand homicides, is that right?”
“Roughly.”
“I think we can accept ‘roughly,’ ” Davis said, good-naturedly. “And as well as investigating fresh crime scenes, you investigate crimes that happened months or even years ago, is that correct?”
“I’ve investigated cold cases, yes.”
“Now, in April of this year, were you called to the home of the defendant?”
“I was.”
“And did it have the appearance of a crime scene?”
“No. The rooms were orderly. There was no evident disturbance, no blood or shell casings, et cetera.”
Davis said, “Now, were you told that a man may have been dismembered in the bathtub of the defendant’s house?”
“I was.”
“And you did all the normal tests for trace evidence, did you not?”
“Yes, we did.”
“Come up with anything evidentiary?”
“No.”
“Find any evidence that showed that the blood had been cleaned up?”
“Nope.”
“No bleach or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Lieutenant Clapper, let me just give you the whole laundry list at once and save a little time here. The walls hadn’t been repainted, the rugs hadn’t been cleaned? You didn’t find an implement that could have been used to dismember a body?”
“No.”
“So it’s fair to say that you and your team did everything you could do to ascertain the manner in which a crime was committed — or even if a crime was committed?”
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