14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (3 page)

She called out over the loud conversation that was bouncing off the tile and steel surfaces: “Lindsay, over here.”

I headed toward my pals, and Claire stood up for my hug. She looked gorgeous, wearing black pants, a V-neck sweater, and a diamond pendant shaped like a butterfly around her neck. Claire is usually trying to lose a few pounds, but she always looks perfect to me.

I said, “Love you, Butterfly. Happy birthday, girlfriend.”

She laughed. “Love you, too, Linds.”

She hugged me back, and I swung into a chair across from her and next to Yuki. Small-boned Yuki was impeccably dressed in a blue suit, her sleek hair falling to her creamy silk collar. A string of pale angel skin coral beads at her throat. When I’d last seen Yuki a week ago, she’d looked a little happier than she did now.

“You OK?” I asked.

“I’m good,” she said.

We embraced, and I had just hung my jacket over the back of my chair when Cindy sailed up to the table, glowing like a rose at sunrise.

There was more hugging and kissing all around, Cindy adding a gift to the growing pile of sparkly paper and ribbons in the center of the table. We high-fived each other and I signaled to the waiter.

I was hungry for the specialty of the house: a hamburger made with Niman Ranch beef, topped with caramelized onions, bacon, cheese, and horseradish aioli, nestled between halves of a hot, buttered bun. With fries. And even more than that upcoming delight, I was very glad to be with my best friends.

It was Cindy who had named our little group the Women’s Murder Club. It was kind of a joke, and at the same time entirely for real, because the four of us certainly surrounded the subject of murder: me in Homicide; Claire, San Francisco’s medical examiner; Yuki, a rising star in the DA’s Office; and Cindy Thomas, a top-tier crime reporter at the
San Francisco Chronicle
.

Cindy was a new author, too. Her nonfiction book,
Fish’s Girl: A True Story of Love and Serial Murder
, was grounded in a case Conklin and I had worked and two killers we had both known very well. Cindy had followed up the case and helped bring one of those killers down.

Her book was coming out at the end of the week. I was pretty sure that was why she was glowing.

After we’d ordered drinks, Claire piped up. “Yuki’s quitting her job.”

Cindy and I both said, “No way!” at the same time.

“I’m
thinking
about it,” Yuki said, “just
thinking
about it. It’s, like, an idea, you know? Geesh, you guys.”

Cindy jumped in with what I was imagining.

“Oh. My. God. I know what’s going on with you. You’re
pregnant.
”

Yuki was married to my boss, the tough but fair Lieutenant Jackson Brady—but they’d only been married for four
months.
I didn’t have a chance to get my mind around the idea of Yuki and Brady having a child, because Yuki was answering Cindy in her typical rapid-fire style.

“No, no,
no
, I’m not pregnant, but if you don’t mind, all of you, we have to order lunch
now
, because I absolutely have to be in a deposition in an hour.”

And that was when my phone rang.

I looked at the caller ID while everyone stared bullets at me. We had one rule for our no-holds-barred get-togethers.

No phone calls.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to take this.”

And I did.

I LEFT THE girls and found a niche where I could take the call in private.

“What’s wrong?” I said to Lieutenant Brady.

“A dead body at Twenty-Fourth and Balmy Alley,” he said. “I need you and Conklin to do a preliminary workup. Lock down the scene and sit tight until replacements arrive. Jacobi wants you and Conklin on the check-cashing heist, nothing else.”

I rejoined my friends.

I said, “Sorry, guys. That was the boss. I’ve got to go.”

Yuki tossed her napkin a few inches into the air in exasperation.

Cindy said, “What can you tell me?”

You can take the reporter out of the
Chronicle
, but you can’t take the reporter out of Cindy.

“Nothing,” I said. “I can’t tell you even one little thing.”

“How many times do I have to prove I’m trustworthy?” said Cindy. “Plus, you owe me.”

Actually, Cindy was right. On both counts. I trusted her. And a few months ago, she’d saved my life.

“I still can’t tell you anything. Not a word.”

I grabbed for my jacket and had just about secured it when Claire said, “I cannot believe this is happening
again
.”

The expression on her face stopped me. She was pissed. Highly.

“
What’s
happening again?” I asked her.

“This is almost exactly what happened last year on my birthday,” said Claire. “And the year before
that.
”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m
damned
sure. Although as I recall, last year we actually ate most of our lunch before you bolted from the table. Check your memory, Lindsay. When was the last time you saw me blow out the candles?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t get out of this. I’ll make it up to you, Claire. To everyone. Including myself. That’s an iron-clad promise.”

I apologized some more, blew kisses, and fled the restaurant. I called Rich Conklin from the street, and while I walked to my car, I said, “I’m ten minutes away.”

“Same here.”

The engine started right up. I peeled out and pointed the Explorer toward a busy intersection in the Mission.

BALMY ALLEY AND Twenty-Fourth looked like a freeway pileup.

I counted three hastily parked cruisers, and another one was coming in behind me. Both streets were cordoned off, causing traffic to back up in the one open lane on Twenty-Fourth. Pedestrians had gathered three deep at the barrier tape with cell phones in hand, evidently having nothing better to do than gawp at a bleeding corpse in the crosswalk.

I parked on the sidewalk, got my point-and-shoot Nikon out of the console, and found Conklin, who was talking to a young cop. He introduced me to Officer Martin Einhorn, a rookie who’d been writing up a parking ticket when the incident occurred.

Einhorn’s black eyes flashed back and forth between Conklin and me as he walked us through the scene. He was sweating through his uniform and his speech was high-pitched and staccato. Very likely he’d never seen a body before, and now he’d been this close to an actual murder as it happened.

He said, “I was putting a ticket on that red Mazda over there. The victim was crossing the street. There were a lot of people crossing at the same time, both ways. Tourists mostly,” he said, pointing his chin in the general direction of the sightseer magnet: vividly colored murals protesting human rights abuses over the last fifty years.

“I didn’t see the attack,” said the rookie. “I heard the screaming, and when everyone scattered, I saw … her.” He took a moment to get himself together before continuing.

“I called it in and the EMTs got here like a minute later. They said the victim was dead and I told them to leave her body in place. That this is a crime scene.”

“Exactly right,” I said.

Einhorn nodded, then said a squad car had arrived after a few minutes and the officers had strung tape. “We got as many names as we could, but people were trying to get out of here and we didn’t have enough manpower to detain them. Those two witnesses hung in. Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Gosselin, right over there. Mrs. Gosselin saw the attack.”

While Conklin approached the couple standing outside a smoke shop, I took a wide-angle view of the crime scene and got a fix on where the victim lay in relation to cars, buildings, and people. Then I ducked under the tape and identified myself to the officers who were protecting the body and the scene.

One of the cops said, “Right this way, Sergeant. Mind the blood.”

“Got it,” I said.

I gloved up, then moved closer so that I could get a good look at the victim.

IT WAS A terrible sight.

The dead woman was lying on her side. She was white, had shoulder-length brown hair, and looked to be in her late forties or early fifties.

She had cared about her appearance, and wore expensive clothing: an unbuttoned tan raincoat over blood-soaked beige knit separates. The source of the blood looked to be a long slice through her clothes from her lower abdomen up to her rib cage that had likely required strength, determination, and a long, sharp blade.

The victim had bled out fast. She might never have known what had happened to her.

I trained my camera on the conspicuous wound. Then I shot close-ups of the victim’s hands—no wedding band—and of her face, and of her stockinged feet, which lay like beached fish where she’d fallen out of her shoes.

An authentic and pricey large Louis Vuitton handbag lay beside her. I opened the bag and photographed the contents: a pair of good running shoes, a makeup kit, a Jimmy Choo sunglass case, a paperback novel, and a brown leather wallet, new and of good quality.

When I opened her wallet, I learned that the victim’s name was Tina Strichler. Her driver’s license listed her age as fifty-two, and her home address was about six blocks from the scene of her death. Strichler had a full deck of credit cards, and business cards identifying her as a psychiatrist. She also had receipts for recent purchases and two hundred twenty-two dollars in cash.

I typed Strichler’s name into my phone, using an app that linked up to SFPD databases—and got nothing back. Which didn’t surprise me. So far, I had nothing to explain why this woman of means had not been robbed. She’d been gutted in broad daylight on a busy street where cell phone cameras were pointing in every direction.

I circled the body and took photos of the crowd on the sidewalks on the chance that whoever had killed this woman was watching the activity at the crime scene.

Conklin came toward me and summarized the witness statements, using his hands to point out the direction the victim had been coming from.

“The Gosselins were crossing Balmy Alley toward the victim,” he said. “Mrs. Gosselin didn’t notice the killer until he struck or punched out at the victim’s midsection. All she saw was a medium-size white guy in a black jacket or coat or shirt with the tails out. She
thinks
he had brown hair.”

Conklin looked exasperated, and I felt the same way. So many pairs of eyes, and one of the only two witnesses had seen practically nothing.

My partner went on.

“After the attack, the doer kept going and disappeared into the crowd. Mr. Gosselin saw none of this. He went to his wife when she started screaming. The rest was chaos. A stampede.”

An unmarked car pulled up and two guys from our squad got out: Fred Michaels and Alex Wang, both new hires by Brady.

Conklin and I greeted them and brought them up to date on the details of the crime as we knew it. I told them I’d send them a typed version of my notes and the photos as soon as I got back to the Hall. And then, as sorry as I was to do it, I turned the case over to the new guys.

Conklin and I had our own horrible murder waiting for us at our desks. We got back into our separate cars and were headed back to the Hall when, as I turned onto Bryant Street, something came to me. It was a realization that just about reached out and hit me like a slap across the face.

Claire had been
right.

There
had
been murders on each of her birthdays for the previous two years. And I was almost positive that those cases hadn’t been solved.

WHEN THE WRETCHED day finally ended and I came through the front door of our apartment, Martha wiggled her butt, barked, and sang me an excited welcome-home song. I hugged her, held her front paws, and danced a few steps with her. Then I called out to Joe.

He called back.

“I’m giving Julie a bath.”

OK, then.

I hung up my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and put my gun in the cabinet, locking it up. I walked with Martha to the open kitchen of our airy apartment on Lake Street, where I’d come to live with Joe as his bride. A year later, this was where I gave birth to Julie during a blacked-out and very stormy night while Joe was out of town.

That was at the top of the list of the most memorable nights of my life.

I topped up Martha’s dinner bowl and poured two chilled glasses of Chardonnay. With Martha trailing behind me, I went to the master bathroom.

I knocked, opened the door, and saw the two people I love the most. My smile stretched out to my ears.

“Awwww,” I cooed. “Look how cute and clean she is.”

I leaned down and kissed Joe, who was kneeling beside the tub. Julie grinned her adorable face half off, lifted her arms, and squealed. I put the wineglasses on the vanity. Then I kissed Julie’s hand, making funny noises in her palm. I handed Joe the pink towel that was appliquéd with
OUR BABY GIRL
.

I understand that first-time parents are a little goofy, but this towel had been a
gift
.

“I need a bath myself,” I said as Joe lifted the damp baby into his arms.

“You go ahead,” said my handsome and most wonderful husband. “You OK with Pizza Pronto? I’ll call in an order.”

“Brilliant,” I said. “Sausage, mushrooms, onions, OK?”

“You forgot the jalapeños.”

“Those, too.”

The pizza arrived, pronto.

Over our down-and-dirty dinner, I told Joe about the Windbreaker cops. When the pizza box was in the trash, the baby was asleep, and Joe was working in his home office, a.k.a. the spare bedroom, I brought my laptop to the living room and took over the big leather sofa.

I’d worked the Windbreaker cops case at both ends of my day, but I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Tina Strichler, the shrink who’d been gutted in the street.

Now that I had a full belly and some free time, I felt compelled to check out the homicides that had happened on Claire’s birthday the two previous years.