Джеймс Паттерсон: 14th Deadly Sin:

There were no witnesses, and the friend who had been on the phone with Hayes had heard only the victim’s screams. Hayes hadn’t been robbed. The killer took his knife and left nothing behind; no note, no DNA, no skin cells under the victim’s nails. The leads were thin to nonexistent, and nothing panned out. Catherine Hayes left devastated friends and family, and her open file was still chilling.

So was the file of Yolanda Pirro, a poet who’d been seen competing in last year’s 12k Bay to Breakers Race, a huge attraction that had been run annually for over a hundred years. Many of the runners wore costumes; some even ran nude, or dressed like fish and ran backward, as if they were swimming upstream. Go figure.

Pirro’s body was found the day after the race in a thicket of shrubs at the end of the course. She’d been wearing runners’ gear, nothing that would make her stand out.

Pirro had multiple stab wounds, any one of which could have been fatal. Her devastated husband and close circle of friends said she had no enemies. She was a poet who worked as a volunteer at a community garden and liked to run.

She hadn’t known Catherine Hayes, and the two women had no common friends, family, or acquaintances. The Northern District had caught the case and had no suspects and no witnesses—and at the same time, tens of thousands of suspects who’d participated in the race or watched from the sidelines. And so, without a clue, Yolanda Pirro’s case went cold.

The Pirro case reminded me a lot of Strichler.

Lots of people in a crowd, but no witnesses.

Including Tina Strichler, all three victims who were killed on Claire’s birthday were attractive white females between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-two, living within three densely populated miles of one another.

Did anything connect them?

Well, yes. They’d all been knifed.

I was staring over my laptop, searching my mind for anything else that would link these three women’s deaths, when someone kissed my temple.

I put my arms up the way Julie does, and Joe gave me a big crinkly smile and another kiss. He came around the sofa and sat down next to me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Prowling around in some old case files.”

“Oh, yeah? Why?”

I told him all about it.

CHAPTER 11

MY EYES OPENED at 3:15 a.m. Maybe the spicy pizza had given me a bad dream. Or maybe I just sensed that Joe was lying beside me with his eyes open.

Either way, I knew something was wrong.

I rolled over to face my husband and put my hand on his pajama sleeve.

“Joe? Are you OK?”

He heaved a sigh that almost stirred the curtains across the room. Something was keeping him awake, but what? I quickly reviewed our evening at home, and apart from my asking him “How was your day?” to which he’d answered, “Pretty good,” our conversations had been all about my cases and me.

That made me feel terrible.

I shook his arm a little bit.

“Joe? What’s going on?”

He said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“You didn’t. What’s wrong?”

Joe sighed again, then plumped the pillows, rearranged the duvet, and drank some water.

Then he said, “Brooks Findlay, that little shit. He fired me. Man, I was not expecting that. ”

“ What? But why? ”

“He gave no real explanation. Just change of direction, blah-blah. Which was a lie. ‘You’re out. Your check’s in the mail.’”

I was shocked by the news and equally blown away by how coldly Findlay had axed my husband, and not just because what hurts Joe hurts me. I say this because Joe was deputy Homeland Security director. He is supremely knowledgeable, has a good bedside manner, and has top credentials from DC to the moon. Port authorities are his specialty.

Brooks Findlay, on the other hand, had gone from business school to an office job in LA. If you ask me, hiring Joe might have been the highlight of Findlay’s career. Maybe he didn’t like standing in Joe’s shadow.

“I can’t believe this, Joe. You were completely blindsided?”

“I had not a clue. If I’d screwed up, Findlay would have been happy to tell me what, when, and how. So it’s gotta be that Findlay doesn’t like me. Or someone above Findlay doesn’t like me. It stinks. But it doesn’t really matter.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because I’m not ready to retire. I’ll get something better, but I have to close the door properly before the next door opens.”

Joe grabbed his phone and tapped some keys.

Geez. It was still only 3:30 a.m. I heard a cracked voice at the end of the phone. My husband said, “Brooks, it’s Joe Molinari. Listen, you cut me off this morning, so I didn’t get a chance to tell you. I had a breakthrough on the project. Yeah. Big one. Key to the whole damned puzzle.

“But you reminded me that we have a confidentiality agreement, so I deleted the work. Don’t worry. I scrubbed the disc. The info is unrecoverable. No one will ever see it.”

I could hear a squeaky protest coming over the phone, but I couldn’t make out the words.

“No, no. That’s all. I wanted to tell you that you didn’t have to worry. It’s like it never even existed. Sleep tight.”

Joe clicked off the phone and said, “You little prick.”

He had a devilish Cheshire Cat grin on his face as he said to me, “Now, that was priceless.” Joe started to laugh and I did, too. Then he turned off the phone ringer and lay back down beside me.

I pictured Findlay cursing, trying to call back, getting the voice mail, getting nowhere.

I fell asleep in my husband’s arms and when I woke up, Joe was in the kitchen with Julie and Martha, and he was making apple pancakes.

It was a yummy start to what would turn out to be a very bumpy day.

CHAPTER 12

YUKI WAS WRESTLING with a bear of a conflict as she parked her car in the wide-open parking lot at Fort Mason Center. She had a job interview with the Defense League at ten, and although they’d called her , she’d been borderline nauseated since she’d agreed to talk with them.

The main reason for her queasiness was that she liked her job and she liked her boss, Leonard “Red Dog” Parisi, who had been her biggest booster. She hadn’t told him or anyone else at the office that she was thinking of making a switch. So going on a job interview made her feel sneaky.

Just as important, she also hadn’t told Brady about the interview. Her husband was decisive and opinionated, and she wanted to make up her own mind before Brady had his say. And she was pretty sure he would tell her, “Do not take that job.”

Yuki stared out at the always astonishing panoramic view of the bridge stretching across the glistening bay. Then she locked up her car and crossed the lot to a sidewalk running alongside one of the former fort’s barracks. She passed several identical rusty brown doors before she saw the one marked THE DEFENSE LEAGUE.

Entering the office, Yuki gave her name to the young woman behind the plain wooden desk, took a wrapped peppermint from the dish, and sat down on one of six identical wooden chairs. Apart from the receptionist, Yuki was the only person in the small, unadorned, pretty-close-to-shabby room.

She couldn’t help comparing this out-of-the-way place with the district attorney’s office in the Hall of Justice. There, she was one of hundreds of legal professionals and cops working both sides of criminal cases all day, and most nights and weekends, too. The DA’s office energized her, tested her, and plugged her into the heart of the San Francisco justice system, where she was finally beginning to distinguish herself.