Unlucky 13 (6 page)

The two cops dressed as construction workers disappeared from
view. A couple minutes later, they returned to the front door of the house. The one named Morrison cupped his hands at the front window and looked in.

After that, Morrison gestured to his partner, who also
peered through the glass. Lawrence opened the mic and said, “What have you got, Morrison?”

“The house appears wired, Captain. Booby-trapped.”

“Get out of there now,” said Lawrence.

Cindy
listened to the rapid-fire radio communications between the captain, the men in the woods, and the undercover cops, who got back into their construction van.

Cindy’s mind was on fire. She saw how this story was going to start: right here, with Morrison telling Lawrence that the house was rigged to blow. This was a beautiful lede. A movie-style fricking opening.

Lawrence released the brake and
headed the car south toward the main road with the construction van following right behind.

He said, “Cindy, we have to talk.”

“Absolutely,” she said to the captain. “The house is wired. Booby-trapped. This means that she set up explosives so that if the law came in through the door—”

“I
mean
,” said Captain Lawrence, “we have to talk about our deal. If Morales is staying here, we can’t let
on. She may come back if she thinks her safe house is still
safe
. That’s what we want.

“Now I have to call the FBI. You can thank me later for keeping you out of
that
. They will not make a deal with you, but you
will
have to give up your source. Count on that.

“Also, Morales may have had nothing to do with wiring that house. And as I understand journalism, if you can’t verify it, you can’t write
it. Am I right?”

“You’re right as to the kind of journalism I do.”

“Okay, then. Bottom line, Cindy,” Lawrence said, turning to her as he negotiated the rutted road. “You cannot write a single word until or unless I say so. Not one single word.”

MY PHONE RANG
on the table next to the bed, cracking my deep sleep wide open.

I was pretty sure it was Saturday. I looked at the clock. 10:30 a.m. I had slept at least six hours straight and—hey, the baby wasn’t crying. Cause for celebration!

The phone was still ringing.

Joe groaned beside me. He said, “I’ll get her. My turn.”

I said to Joe, “It’s Brady,” and I reached for the phone.

I asked myself, why was Brady was calling me? He and Yuki were getting married today. I clicked to answer the call, hoping he just needed me to pick up something for the wedding and Yuki hadn’t gotten cold feet or there’d been a quadruple homicide and he was handing off the case to me.

I said my name into the phone.

“Boxer, someone just called in something that sounds like a belly bomb. You
want it? Or you want me to give it to Paul Chi? It’s your call.”

I said, “You know me too well.”

I took the address and said I’d be on scene in twenty minutes. I didn’t see how I could do that, but belly bombs were mine. I called Conklin, who said his car was in the shop. And he was at Tina’s house.

“Get dressed,” I said. “I mean now.”

I had fallen into bed last night thinking that Joe and
I were going to make love in the morning. Pretty sure that he’d been having similar thoughts.

I got out of bed and opened the closet. Pulled out a pair of jeans and a man-tailored white cotton, no-iron shirt. My usual.

“No fair,” Joe said.

“I’ll make it up to you, Joe. I swear I will.”

“I think I’ve heard that before. A few thousand times.”

I laughed. I got dressed, strapped on my shoulder
holster, and put on a jacket. My blue one. One of my three almost identical blue blazers.

Then, I took the dress I was going to wear to the wedding out of the closet—a gorgeous deep blue, almost-black dress with a swishy taffeta skirt, a cinched-in waist, and a pleated matte jersey bodice. My sapphire pendant on a chain would look good with this. Oh, my.

I hung my dress on the back of the door,
then rooted around the closet shelf and found the box with my barely-ever-worn black Stuart Weitzman shoes. I put the box on
the floor under the dress. I just couldn’t wait to put on some glam.

I said to my husband, “I’ll check out the scene, and with luck, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Right,” said Joe. “I’m not feeling lucky.”

“Will you make sure Maria Teresa is on to babysit for Julie?”

“You bet.”

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” Joe said. “What makes you happy, makes me, uh, happy enough.”

I told Joe that I loved him “this much” and spread my arms.

He laughed, and I kissed him, then looked in on the baby and blew her a kiss so that I didn’t wake her. Martha followed me out to the door and yipped. She also gave me the big, pleading eyes.

I nipped back into the kitchen
and filled her bowl.

“Okay, Boo?”

Christ.

I was still at home and the crime scene was waiting.

CONKLIN GOT INTO
my car, combed back his brown forelock with his fingers, and said, “Brady said it’s a belly bomb?”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

We drove to Scott Street near O’Farrell and parked in front of a brown-shingled, two-story house, one of a dozen just like it that squatted under a tangle of overhead lines on a tree-lined street in the Western Addition.

Officer Shelly
Adler, one of the cops at the door, ran the scene for us, saying that the victim was a white female, dead on the kitchen floor in a world of blood. There were no signs of a break-in or any kind of altercation between the single mom and the son who lived with her.

“As for belly bombs, Sergeant,” Adler said, “I’ve got no idea. She’s still warm, so she hasn’t been dead long. Her
name is Belinda
Beadle. Her son, Wesley, is upstairs in his room with my partner. The kid is sixteen.”

Conklin and I signed the log and had just walked through the door, when a brown-haired teenage boy burst down the stairs and came toward us. Adler’s partner called from the top floor, too late.

“Wes. You can’t go down there.”

The boy looked bad: pale, wide-eyed, maybe in shock. There was blood on his hands
and smeared on his cheeks, and his T-shirt was soaked with it.

He grabbed my arm. Hard.

“It’s my
mom
,” he said. “She
exploded
. Like those people on the
bridge
.”

“Tell me what happened, Wes,” I said.

His chest heaved, and he put his hands to his eyes and cried. After a minute, he used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eyes and said, “I came home late last night or this morning, and was sleeping
in my room. I heard a sound, like
boom
. And so I got up and ran down and found my mom on the floor with blood pouring out of her, from here.”

Wes Beadle grabbed his stomach with hands.

“I tried to get her to speak to me. I tried to wake her up, but she was
dead
. She was
dead
.”

He looked horrified. Devastated. And it hurt me to think that he would never be able to forget what he’d seen this
morning. That he’d relive the sight of his dead mother for the rest of his life.

Conklin and I left Wes with Officer Adler and, after clearing the barrier tape between the front room and the
rest of the house, found Belinda Beadle on the kitchen floor near the sink, lying in an odd position. She was sitting on her left side but leaning about thirty degrees toward the floor. Her light brown hair
had been brushed. She was barefoot and wearing makeup and a navy-blue bathrobe.

As Adler had said, there was a lot of blood. It had soaked through the front of her robe and made a wide pool on the floor. The blood appeared to have come from her midsection, but the way her body was leaning, I couldn’t see where she’d been wounded. But I did see that her robe was intact. Unlike like the clothing
of the belly bomb victims in the Jeep, the garment hadn’t been shredded.

I conferred with Conklin and then called Clapper and the weekend ME, Dr. Massimo. I reported in to Brady, and my partner and I returned to the front room.

I had more questions for Wesley, who was sitting in a chair flanked by two uniformed police officers.

I asked him, “Do you know of anyone who wanted to hurt your mom?
Did she have a boyfriend? Did you or your mom bring home hamburgers? Or any takeout food?”

He answered: No, no, no, and no.

When the Crime Lab van pulled up, I asked Officer Adler to take Wes out to his cruiser and keep him company for a while.

Crime scene analysts streamed into the small house. Conklin and I stood off to the side as they took photos of the body and everything that surrounded
it. I asked them
to open the kitchen trash bin. I saw no hamburger wrappers. No fast-food packaging of any kind.

The ME arrived and the body was turned and lifted onto a sheet.

That’s when one of Clapper’s techs found the Glock under Ms. Beadle’s body.

I said to the tech, “Do an instant GSR, will you?”

As the tech swabbed the back of Ms. Beadle’s hand, Dr. Massimo opened the woman’s robe.

He said, “Don’t hold me to it, but at first look, death was caused by a bullet to the heart at close range.”

If the wound was self-inflicted, as it appeared to be, Belinda Beadle wanted to have an open-casket funeral. And maybe she thought her teenage son wasn’t home when she took her life.

“Her right hand is positive for GSR,” said the tech, showing me the test vial.

Conklin and I took Wes
Beadle down to the Hall and gave him a clean SFPD sweatshirt. Then we interviewed him with tape rolling. He told us, yes, his mom had a gun. Yes, that was her gun. Yes, she’d been sad lately. But he didn’t know she was
so
sad. And, no, he didn’t always come home on Friday nights.

Wes was crying, blaming himself for being a bad kid, and I just had to do it. I got up and opened my arms to him,
and he fell into me, hugged me hard.

Child Protective Services came about then. Wes had an Uncle Robert who lived up the coast, and I promised I would keep calling him until I reached him.

I was speaking with Robert Beadle and had just told him
about the morning’s events, when my phone alarm beeped an alert I had programmed into my phone. What was it?

I could hardly believe it. The wedding
was starting in forty-five minutes—and Conklin and I were both in work clothes.

Speaking for myself, I could not miss Yuki’s wedding.

I just couldn’t let that happen.

I GAVE CONKLIN
the keys to my car and called my husband. “This is an emergency, Joe. SOS.”

It took Joe almost a half hour to get to the Hall. He was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit that he hardly got to wear anymore, and my hot designer dress was hanging from the hook in the backseat of his Mercedes.

He’d even remembered to bring my shoes.

And my makeup kit.

I love my husband.
Love
him.

I got into the backseat, and Joe took the famous roller-coaster streets of San Francisco at pretty close to the speed of sound.

I struggled in back with undergarments, snaps, and fasteners as the car climbed and swooped. It was almost a riot. The makeup, well, that was an
actual
riot. I viewed
my face in a two-inch-square mirror and did my best to color within the lines. I sprayed myself
with fragrance and got a little on Joe.

“Hey,” he said. “Watch out, Blondie.”

We arrived at City Hall and parked in the underground lot with two or three seconds to spare. It was so perfect that Yuki was getting married in City Hall, a stunning building, so familiar to all of us in law enforcement, who passed through constantly.

And she was getting married in the Ceremonial Rotunda.

Joe grabbed
my hand and we ran upstairs to the beautiful round hall laid entirely in Tennessee pink marble. About fifty people were clustered at the foot of the staircase waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin.

I saw Brady, taller than almost everyone there, his pale blond hair hanging loose to his shoulders. He was wearing a slate-blue suit that made him look like a movie star.

Brady turned toward me,
and I saw Yuki, outrageously beautiful in a white satin sheath, her hair swept up and held with pearl combs. Her bouquet was a great bunch of creamy peonies with trailing pink ribbons. Oh, my.

Together, Brady and Yuki looked like they should be in the Style section of the
Chronicle
as the most beautiful couple of the year.

Yuki called out, “Okay, we can start now. Lindsay is here.” And then
her laughter echoed in the round, and Yuki did a little dance of her own devising. Brady doesn’t laugh out loud too much. In fact, this might have been the first time I’d ever heard his hearty “Ahahaha.”

Judge James Devine wore a black suit and a yellow bow tie. He cleared his throat, and as the wedding guests grouped at the foot of the stairs, Yuki and Brady climbed them in tandem. They stood
opposite the judge under the grand 24-karat gold dome like figures on the top tier of an extraordinary pink wedding cake.

The vows were simple, time-honored.

“Dearly beloved, friends and family, we are gathered today to witness the joining of this man and this woman in matrimony.”

I thought of my own wedding, not so long ago, and my heart was there with Yuki and Brady when they exchanged vows
and rings.

Judge Devine said, “On the east wall, there is a wonderful engraving of Father Time. The inscription reads: ‘San Francisco, O glorious City of our hearts that has been tried and found not wanting. Go through with like spirit to make the future thine.’

“That is what I wish for the two of you.

“And now I pronounce you, Jackson, and you, Yuki, husband and wife. Jackson, you may kiss
your bride.”

Brady took Yuki’s face in both his hands and kissed her and then he lifted her into his arms. To a wonderful echoing cheer, Brady carried our dear friend down the stairs.