James Patterson: The 9th Judgment

Then he keeled over and dropped to the floor.

JESUS CHRIST! MARCUS Dowling was dying.

Conklin found the aspirin, Jacobi cushioned Dowling’s head with a throw pillow, and I called Dispatch. I repeated the house address and shouted, “Fifty-year-old male! Heart attack!”

Dowling was still writhing when the ambulance arrived, and the big man was loaded onto a gurney and carried out through the door. Jacobi rode with Dowling to the hospital, leaving me and Conklin to canvass the neighborhood.

Lights from fantastic neighboring homes punctuated the darkness along the tree-lined street. I was worried about this new case. Because Casey Dowling had been wealthy and famous, the public pressure to find her killer would squeeze the politicos, who would, in turn, squeeze us. The SFPD was already suffering from budget deficits and too little manpower. Add to that the public expectation that homicides could be solved in an hour between commercial breaks, and I knew we were in for a humongous, spotlighted nightmare.

I hoped Clapper would come up with a good lead in the lab, because right now, along with next to nothing to go on, I was getting a bad feeling that what Marcus had told us was all wrong.

“Why would a burglar shoot Casey Dowling?” I asked Conklin as we walked up the street.

“What Clapper said. The burglar carried a gun in case he ran into an emergency.”

“Like a surprised homeowner?”

“Exactly.”

“Casey Dowling wasn’t armed.”

“True. Maybe she recognized the intruder,” Conklin said. “You know those stories Cindy’s been doing on Hello Kitty?”

Cindy is Cindy Thomas, a crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and a friend to the end with a great mind for solving whodunits.

Recently Cindy had been writing about a cat burglar who’d been doing second-story jobs, always breaking in when the homeowners were having dinner on the first floor and the alarm system was turned off. This burglar made off with only jewelry-which had not turned up. Cindy had dubbed the cat burglar “Hello Kitty,” and it stuck.

Here’s what was known about Hello Kitty: he was fit, deft, and fast, and had a huge pair of stones.

“Think about it,” Conklin said. “Hello Kitty seems to know when these wealthy people are having dinner parties. What if he’s part of the same social circle? If Casey Dowling recognized him, maybe shooting her was his only way out.”

“Not a bad theory,” I said to Conklin as we took the walk up to the front steps of the manse next door. “But wait a sec. What did you make of Dowling’s wet hair?”

“He washed off his wife’s blood.”

“So he leaped into the shower after Casey was murdered,” I said. “It seems weird to me.”

“So what’s your theory? Homicide One Oh One?”

“Why not? Because Dowling’s a movie star? Something about him isn’t right. He told Clapper he heard two gunshots. He told us he heard a noise, and then sometime after that, he heard a second sound, and that time he was sure it was a shot.”

My partner said, “Could be he was just summing up, telling the story in shorthand.”

“Could be shorthand,” I said. “Or could be he’s making up the story as he goes along and can’t keep it straight.”

THE HOME NEXT to the Dowlings’ was set back from the street and had a groundskeeper’s house in the side yard and two deluxe cars in the driveway.

I pressed the bell, and chimes rang. The front door opened, and a brown-haired boy of about ten, wearing a rugby shirt over pajama bottoms, gazed up at us and asked who we were.

“I’m Sergeant Boxer. This is Inspector Conklin. Are your parents at home?”

“Kellll-yyyy!”

The boy turned out to be Evan Richards, and Kelly was his babysitter, a woman in her midtwenties who had been watching Project Runway in the media room when she heard the sirens screaming up the street.

“Casey Dowling was killed?” she asked. “That’s crazy. That burglar could have come here! Evan, can you grab the phone? I have to call your parents.”

“I think I saw something,” the boy said. “I was staring out my bedroom window, and someone ran past the house. Like, in the shadows under the trees.”

“Could you describe him?” Conklin asked the boy.

Evan shook his head. “Just someone running. Wearing black. I heard him huffing as he ran.”

I asked if this person was big or small, if there was anything special about the way he ran.

“I thought he was just a jogger, you know? He was wearing a cap, I think. I was looking down at the top of his head.”

Conklin left his card with the boy’s babysitter and asked Evan to please call if he remembered anything else. Then we headed down the block toward the next house.

I said to Conklin, “So maybe we have a live witness to Kitty making a run for it.” And then my cell phone rang.

Yuki, sending a text message: Call me.

I hit the recall button, and Yuki picked up.

“God! I know her!” Yuki said.

“Know who?”

“Casey Dowling.”

Frickin’ grapevine. How could she have heard already?

“We went to law school together, Lindsay. Damn it. Casey was a sweetheart. A doll. When you catch the shooter, I’m going to fight for the case, and then I’m going to send Casey Dowling’s killer straight to hell.”

SARAH WELLS SHUT her bedroom door and locked it. She was still panting from her escapade, her hands still shaking. She stood in front of her mirror, fluffed up her hair, and looked at herself-hard.

Did it show?

Her skin was so white, it was almost transparent, and her brown eyes were huge. She thought about her husband telling her she could look good if she’d ever try, but when he told her that, she became even more determined to look exactly as she was: a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher with a second life. And she wasn’t even talking about the burglaries.

Sarah put her two duffel bags down on the floor, then opened the bottom drawer of the big, old American Waterfall dresser. Like her, the dresser held secrets.

Sarah took the piles of T-shirts and sweatpants out of the bottom drawer and pried up the drawer’s false bottom. She held her breath, hoping, as always, that the jewelry was still there.

It was.

Each of her hauls had its own soft fabric bag, five collections of astonishing jewelry, and now the Dowling take made an even half dozen.

Sarah unzipped the bag with her latest haul and looked into the glorious tangle of jewels that had, until recently, belonged to a movie star’s wife. It was the most unbelievable stuff: totally insane and wonderful sapphires and diamonds; rings and necklaces and bracelets; jewelry that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

She’d pulled off the burglary by the slimmest margin-a squeaker, for God’s sake. She was safe for now, but she still had a big problem: how to get rid of the goods.

Maury Green, her mentor and fence, was dead, killed at the airport by a cop’s bullet meant for his client, a jewel thief who’d been running from the police. Maury had been a good teacher and friend. It was truly depressing that he hadn’t lived to celebrate her success and to collect his share.

Maury, like other good fences, paid out about 10 percent of the jewelry’s retail value. It didn’t seem like a lot, considering the hell that would rain down on her if she got caught, but still, it was a ton of money compared to what she earned as a teacher. And now Maury was gone.

The longer she held on to the jewelry, the greater her chance of getting caught with it. Sarah cupped a double handful of Casey Dowling’s treasure and rocked her hands under a table lamp so that the light bounced off the facets.