James Patterson - 11th hour

Tears jumped into my eyes.

I was so glad to see my husband that I was mad — you could say irrationally pissed off — that he had been away for so long when I wanted him at home.

Joe put his arms around me. I gave him a peck and struggled to get out of his embrace, but he wouldn’t let me escape.

“Hey, hey, it’s me, Linds. I’m here.”

“Damn it. My hormones are mad at you. And they’re mad at me too.”

“I know, I know.”

I gave in and hugged him so hard, Joe gasped dramatically, then laughed at me, said, “Air. I need air.”

He put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to the couch, sat down beside me, untied my shoes. He pulled my feet into his lap and began giving me a foot massage from heaven.

“Can I get you anything to eat?” he asked me.

“I had dinner.”

“How’s our kid?”

“We’re both just fabulous.”

“You were going to work less, sleep more.”

“Joe. I’m lead investigator on two black-hole cases. What do you expect me to do?”

“Talk to me.”

“When did you get home?”

“An hour ago. Talk to me, Linds.”

“I’m so frustrated I cannot express it.”

“Give it a shot.”

My husband gave me a gorgeous smile, and finally I gave it up. I told Joe about the cop killer, everything that had happened since Chaz Smith, undercover federal agent, had been killed in the men’s room of the music academy.

I told him about the three drug dealers and our working hypothesis that they had been pulled over by a cop-like man with wigwag lights and probably grille lights too who had almost certainly shot them and torched the car. That he’d used the gun that had killed Chaz Smith, which had been stolen from the property room at the Hall.

Hardly taking a breath, I filled Joe in on the shooting of Raoul Fernandez in the mall last night. “Four shots to the face in a nice tight pattern, like the guy’s mug was a target and the shooter was standing five feet away.”

I told my husband about Brady’s theory, that Jacobi was the killer.

“Jacobi? Our Jacobi? Warren Jacobi?”

“He says that Jacobi is still holding a grudge about those drugged-up kids shooting us on Larkin Street. That what he’s heard is that Jacobi has never been the same. Brady says, and I have to agree, that Jacobi could have gotten the weapons out of the property room without anyone noticing.

“And then Brady says that while Jacobi was on leave getting his hip replaced, he had the time and opportunity to take out about eight dealers — that we know about. Oh yeah, and Jacobi had a meltdown last year when some kids OD’d because of some bad horse.”

“He threw a chair, as I remember.”

“Right. Big deal. I’ve thrown chairs.”

“Have you thrown a chair at a person during an interrogation? Have you?”

I sighed. “No.”

“When was the last time you saw Jacobi?”

“About a half an hour ago. I just had dinner with him.”

Joe said, “If Brady is right — I said if — and Jacobi has gone off the rails, he could be dangerous if he thinks you’re onto him, Lindsay. Dangerous to you.”

“Here’s why I think you’re wrong,” I said. We were in bed now. I rested my cheek on Joe’s chest and kept talking. “Jacobi believes in the law, and going vigilante is not just unlawful but criminal. It carries the death penalty.

“Jacobi just wouldn’t put himself into that kind of hole, not ever. By the way, he seemed fine to me,” I said. “Relaxed. Looked good. Lost some weight. He’s doing PT. He had a good appetite.”

Joe got a couple of words in.

“You asked him what he thought about this Revenge shooter?”

“I did. He said that Revenge is smart and has access to real-time information about where his victims are. That he might have a police-band radio. Maybe he has informants.”

“Good points,” said Joe.

“Jacobi said he thinks the shooter is on a mission, maybe a suicide mission.”

“That also makes sense. But it doesn’t rule Jacobi out.”

“I took a chance, Joe. I said that there was talk that the shooter could be a cop. Jacobi said, ‘Could be a cop. Could be a hired gun. Could be a rival drug dealer who is taking out the competition.’”

“So you didn’t get the feeling he was trying to steer you away? That he was hiding something?”

“No. But if Jacobi wanted to keep something from me, I think he could do it. I stopped short of asking him to account for his time last night, Joe. I just couldn’t do that.”

“Good. I’m glad. Keep your head down, blondie.”

He kissed my forehead. I hugged him tighter. I was scared, frightened about Jacobi, the shooter, and when there’d be another killing. But I felt safe in my husband’s arms. There was nowhere I’d rather be.

“I talked to Jacobi about the house of heads.”

“What did he think?”

“That the typical victim in a situation like this one would be a young streetwalker. You remember that case in Albuquerque?”

“Those young working girls who were buried in the desert?”

“That’s the one. I think there were about eighteen of them, late teens to midtwenties, buried without clothes, so they were just skeletons when they were found.

“There was no identification, no clues to their killer.

There was a cop in the missing-persons division who had collected DNA, though, so some of those girls were identified.”

“The killer wasn’t caught, as I remember.”

“No. Not yet. So, we have identified one of our Jane Does, Marilyn Varick. She wasn’t a known prostitute.”

“Maybe she was just never picked up for prostitution.”

“Agreed,” I said. “The stock profile for someone who preys on prostitutes is white male, thirty-five to fifty, has been in trouble with the law.”

Joe said, “Harry Chandler is about sixty, isn’t he?”

“Sixty-three. So, if he did it, he wants to be near his victims. And if that’s the case, I don’t see him as the one who dug them up. Someone else is leaving the message.”

“It’s a very frayed loose end,” said Joe.

“Isn’t it though?”

My mind went back to Jacobi. I saw him sitting across from me at LuLu’s, every bit my partner and friend of a dozen years.

I said, “Jacobi isn’t the shooter, Joe. He couldn’t be. I know him so well.”

“Do we ever really know anyone?” Joe said.

I swung my legs out of bed at six the next morning, left Joe snoozing as I got my running clothes from the hook behind the closet door.

Martha and I took a brisk and challenging run through the Presidio and when we got back, sunlight was splashing on the bedroom floor and Joe was still snoring, exactly as I’d left him.

I closed the bedroom door, showered, put on a pot of Blue Bottle roast, and booted up my laptop.

My mailbox was flooded with e-mail and spam. I mean flooded; I had mail in triple digits. It took me about fifteen minutes to clear my in-box and get to the day’s headlines. I clicked on the link to the Post and there was Jason Blayney’s front-page story about the Potrero Center shooting.

I skimmed the story quickly to see if Blayney, that rat, had come up with an angle I should be pursuing or denying, and son of a gun, his story linked to a piece about Joe Molinari.

When I clicked on the link, I expected to see a follow-up on the DEA task-force story, so I was nearly blown off my seat by the filthy piece of trash Blayney had run under the heading “Fed Takes the Night Off.”

Blayney was a snake and a liar, but there was no denying that the photo was real. And it was a killer.

It was a picture of Joe, my Joe, escorting a willowy brunette down a long flight of stone stairs. She was in a long, clingy black gown, her neck sparkling with diamonds, her arm threaded through the crook of Joe’s arm.