Alan Jacobson: Inmate 1577

Vail feigned innocence.

“What’s that?” Manette asked. “Vail’s ASAC’s your father?” She looked back and forth at both of them. “Man, Kari. You don’t tell me nothin’. Sounds like I missed some juicy shit wasting away in this here hospital.”

“Juicy shit, indeed.” Vail turned and answered the call.

“Karen,” Thomas Gifford said. “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday. But something’s come up.”

“I think this is the part where I make believe there’s static on the line and then press the END button.”

“I’m serious, Karen. I’ve got something here.”

“And you’ve got at least eleven other profilers you can call.”

“The one I really need has retired. And he’s out of the country so I can’t even give him a shout. So you’re it.”

“Robby and I have plans with Jonathan for a movie later.”

“Take a rain check. A detective just called the unit with a fresh eighty-two-year-old female, sexually assaulted and murdered.”

“So you want Mark Safarik. He’s the world expert on the sexual homicide of elderly females-”

“Yes, yes,” Gifford said. “But like I said, he’s unreachable. And I know you worked with him before he retired and coauthored his last paper.”

Vail sighed. “So I’m the pinch hitter.”

“For lack of a better term, yeah.”

Vail looked at Robby and gave him a thumbs down sign. “Where and when?”

“We’ve got you booked on a flight to San Francisco leaving out of Reagan in two hours.”

“San Francisco? Wait, I get it. This is a joke, right? I had the nightmare of my life in Napa, so you’re sending me back there a few months after I got out of that godforsaken place. Good one, sir.” She pressed END and disconnected the call.

“Problem?” Robby asked.

Her BlackBerry rang again seconds later. Vail looked at the phone, then at Robby. Brought the handset to her ear. “You weren’t kidding, were you.”

“No, Karen, I wasn’t. I’m emailing you the flight information. Pack whatever you need and get over to Reagan ASAP.”

“Fine.”

“And-please, promise me one thing.”

“Only one thing, sir?”

“Only one thing,” Gifford repeated. “But it’s a big one. Stay out of trouble. This one time. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

Karen Vail arrived at San Francisco International Airport at 11pm. Her connecting flight in Atlanta was delayed due to weather somewhere over the country, so she’d picked up a copy of Nelson DeMille’s latest novel at an airport bookstore and devoured half of it by the time she touched down at SFO.

Robby had turned her on to DeMille. He’d said DeMille’s main character, John Corey, was a lot like her-a sarcastic, wise-cracking former detective. She told Robby he had his head up his ass. But now that she’d read DeMille’s novels, she realized that maybe she did share a few similar characteristics with John Corey-but she wouldn’t give Robby the satisfaction.

“First of all, I’m not a wiseass,” she started. He merely squinted at her. Fine, that wasn’t too convincing an argument. I wouldn’t believe that one, either. “Second, I’m a lot better cop than Corey.”

That was when Robby tilted his head and said, “You’re comparing your skill set to a fictional character?” And then he delivered his zinger, designed to put her in her place: “Besides. Come to think of it, I think maybe Corey’s a little smarter than you are.”

At that point, Vail fell back on the only card she had left to play. “Who would you rather sleep with. Fictitious John Corey, or me?”

Robby didn’t have a comeback for that-or he chose to keep it to himself. Wise choice.

Vail took a cab to the Hyatt Regency in the city, left a message for Inspector Lance Burden that she had arrived later than she had anticipated, and told him she would meet him at 8 AM at the Hall of Justice’s Homicide Detail on Bryant Street. Then she sent an email to her friend, Roxxann Dixon, an investigator with the Napa County District Attorney’s office, who served with her on the Crush Killer task force a few months back. Vail didn’t know if they would be able to coordinate a dinner together, but she wanted her to know that she was working a serial killer case in the city in case they had a chance to see one another.

The wind coming off the Bay struck her as she got out of the cab on California Street. Vail walked past the cable car, loading passengers in front of the Hyatt, and strode up to the hotel’s entrance, where the escalators carried her up to the third floor. As the moving stairs lifted her toward the lobby, the grandness of the central atrium left her jaw slack. Ahead, a massive sculpture-it looked like a swirling copper sphere-sat atop a black marble base with water cascading down its sides. To her left, thousands of tiny lights, suspended from above, stretched what must’ve been a hundred feet in length by a hundred feet in width.

“Wow,” she said under her breath.

After so many sleepless nights on this coast, Vail was relieved to enjoy a restful evening, in a comfortable bed and no middle-of-the-night pages, texts, or calls. She dreamt of Robby and was disappointed when she awoke early to find that he wasn’t beside her. Despite the momentary letdown, she felt refreshed and ready to go to work.

After showering, while still wrapped in a bath sheet, she pulled open the curtains and peered out the window for the first time. Her view was the finest she had ever seen: the room was on the fourteenth floor and overlooked the Embarcadero and Port of San Francisco. Maybe this trip won’t be so bad after all.

To her right stood the steel blue Bay Bridge, stretching from an island on the left all the way to the furthest reaches of her window’s field of vision on the right. A cargo ship marked Hanjin in enormous white letters set against a dark body ferried blue and red containers on its back. An escort tug tailed it a safe distance astern as both vessels passed beneath the farthest span of the bridge.

The sky was a thick gray, remnants of fog hanging low in the distance. While pondering the weather and what to wear, her wakeup call came, the automated voice welcoming her and informing her that the high temperature was expected to be a nippy 52 degrees. Actually, the recording omitted the adjective.

In her haste to pack-Gifford hadn’t left her much time-she’d neglected to check the weather. She pulled out the pair of form-fitting jeans that she had worn on the plane and snuggled into a tight-knit black sweater. She stepped into the cylindrical, windowed elevator and again marveled at the curtain of hanging lights as the car descended to the lobby. Curbside, she was about to hail a taxi when a text message from Inspector Burden hit her BlackBerry. He wanted to meet instead at the crime scene, in an area he called the Marina District.

Vail gave the cab driver the address and asked how long till they arrived. It was only a few miles-a ten-minute ride, traffic permitting.

She arrived as promised, in front of a well-appointed line of charming row houses, decked out in muted colors of butterscotch and sapphire, each sporting their own variation of wrought iron-wrapped balconies.

Standing out front of a creamy avocado building marked with a brass “114” was a tall, thin man chomping on a slice of gum. Vail paid the taxi driver, then walked up to the house. “Karen Vail. Are you Burden?”

The inspector extended a hand. “With a lot of things, yeah.”

Vail took it. His grip was soft and quick. “A sense of humor. A bad one, but a sense of humor. That’s good.”

“My kids give me shit too.”

“About the weak handshake or your bad jokes?”