James Patterson - The 9th Judgment

I was uploading Clapper’s footage of the scene when Cindy Thomas blew through the gates and headed toward Conklin and me.

“Look at this!” she shouted, her blond bedspring curls bouncing, blue lightning flashing in her eyes.

She was waving the Oakland Tribune, the smaller, foxier tabloid that competes with the Chronicle. The headline read, “Hello Kitty Kills.” Because Cindy had named this cat burglar and had reported on his heists, she considered him hers.

“Everyone’s on my story now,” she said, swiveling her fierce gaze from me to Conklin and back to me again. “Give me a break, please. I need something that the Trib doesn’t have.”

“We’ve got nothing,” I said. “Wish we did.”

“Rich?” she said to my partner.

Cindy is four years younger than I, more a little sister to me than my actual little sister. I love her, and even though she fights me, she also uses her keen intuition and bulldog tenacity to help me solve homicides. That’s in the plus column.

Cindy pulled over a chair, triangulating me and Conklin. It was a neat visual metaphor, and I didn’t like it.

“Why would Hello Kitty kill Casey Dowling?” she asked. “Kitty has never been violent. Why would he even be carrying a gun when armed robbery would get him life?”

“We’re working the case, Cindy,” I said. “Jeez. We haven’t stopped. I got all of two hours in the rack last night-”

“Rich?” Cindy cocked her head like a little yellow bird.

“Exactly what Lindsay said. We’ve got nothing. No prints. No gun. No witnesses.”

“Usual deal,” Cindy said. She batted her eyelashes at Conklin and gave him her best come-hither stare. “Off the record.”

Conklin waited a beat, then said, “What if Casey knew the intruder?”

Cindy leaped up, hugged Conklin around the neck, kissed him on the mouth, and then flew out of the squad room.

“BYE, CINDY,” I called after her.

Conklin laughed.

“I’M GOING TO see Claire,” I told my partner.

“Stay in touch,” he said.

I ran down three flights and worked my way through the Hall’s crowded lobby, out the back door, and down the breezeway to the medical examiner’s office.

I found Claire in the autopsy suite. She was wearing a floral shower cap and an apron over her XXL scrubs-still carrying some poundage from her pregnancy on her size-sixteen frame. I called out to her, and she looked up from the body of Barbara Ann Benton, who was lying eviscerated on the table.

“You just missed Cindy,” Claire said, putting Barbara Ann’s liver onto a scale.

“No, I didn’t. She stormed the squad room. Got Conklin into a lip-lock. Promised him favors in exchange for a headline, and he lapped it up. What’d she get out of you?”

“Breaking news. Casey Dowling was shot to death. Cindy has the best job, doesn’t she? She can focus on her one and only story and still have time to get it on with Inspector Hottie.”

“Anything interesting on Barbara Ann Benton?” I asked, staring into the dead woman’s abdominal cavity, hoping to head off a sore subject. To be precise, it was hard keeping Cindy out of confidential police business-and I wasn’t sleeping with her.

“No postmortem surprises,” said Claire. “Mrs. Benton took two slugs. Either one of them could have killed her, but the shot to the chest is the cause of death.”

“And the baby?”

“Cause of death, a nine millimeter through the temporal lobe. Calling it a homicide. That’s signed, stamped, and official. The slugs are at the lab.”

Claire asked her assistant to finish with Barbara Ann, then stripped off her gloves and mask and walked me out of the autopsy suite and into her office. She took the swivel chair, and I slumped into the seat across from her desk. She pulled two bottles of water out of the fridge and handed one to me.

Claire has a picture on her desk, and I turned it around so I could scrutinize the four of us on the front steps of the Hall of Justice. There was Yuki, all suited up, her dark hair parted in the middle, falling in two glossy wings to her chin; Cindy was grinning, her slightly overlapping front teeth drawing attention to how pretty she really is; and then there was Claire, buxom and beautiful in her midforties.

And there I was, towering over them all at five ten, wearing my blond hair in a ponytail and sporting a dead-serious look on my face. The thing is, I think of myself as lighthearted. I wonder where I got that idea.

“What’s wrong, Lindsay?”

“You don’t always get what you want,” I said, sort of smiling.

“The Benton case? Or the other thing?”

“Both. Listen, I’m supervising Chi on Benton, but he’s the primary.”

“I know. And you know Paul Chi will kill himself to solve the case.”

I nodded. “Tell me what you’ve got on Casey Dowling.”

“Her assailant used a forty-four.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I know. What’s a burglar doing with a cannon when a cute little nine would do? Lab didn’t get a hit from the database.”

“That was quick,” I said.

“I leaned on Clapper to rush it, and now I have to name my next child after him.”

“Clapper Washburn. Rough handle for a child.”

Claire laughed, then sobered. “Maybe I’ve got something.”

“Don’t make me beg.”

“When I did the rape kit on Casey Dowling, I found evidence of sexual intercourse. The little fishes were still swimming.”

WHEN I GOT back to my desk, Conklin said, “While you were out, seventy-two people called with tips about Casey Dowling’s murder. Look.” Brenda came over and dropped several pink message squares on his desk. “Ten more.”

“What did I miss?”

“Dowling’s lawyer went on the air, said he’s putting up fifty grand for info leading to the arrest of Casey Dowling’s killer.”

“So here’s the question, Rich. Is Dowling completely right to offer a reward? Or is he jamming us up with wacko tipsters so we can’t work the case?”

I called Yuki to discuss the possibility of getting a warrant for Dowling’s phone and computer records when Jacobi pulled a chair into the center of the bull pen, straddled it, and called the squad to attention.

I was struck again by how crappy he looked. Jacobi is a veteran of the force: he’s served roughly twenty years in Homicide, a survivor of both physical attacks and life’s vicissitudes. So what was so special that it was bothering the hell out of him?

Jacobi nodded at me, then swung his head and took in the rest of the day shift: Inspectors Chi, McNeil, Lemke, Samuels, and Conklin, and a couple of guys from the swing shift who’d been drafted to help us out. I guessed Jacobi was thinking about how few of us there were, how many cases we were working, and how small a number of those cases we would ever solve.

Jacobi asked Chi to make his report on Benton.

Chi stood, five feet eleven inches of canny brainiac. He reported that he and his partner had done a follow-up with Richard Benton, that Benton ’s alibi checked out, and that Barbara Ann Benton’s life insurance wouldn’t pay out enough to bury her.

Said Chi, “The surveillance tape from the garage is grainy. The shooter was wearing a cap. He kept his head down, but from what we can see of his neck, we think he’s white. Seems like he said something to the victim before he shot her and the baby. He took nothing, but maybe he panicked. It still looks like a holdup that went wrong.”

Jacobi asked him the questions that were on all our minds: “Why did the shooter kill the kid? And, Jesus, Paul, what’s WCF?”

“There’s no WCF in the database, Lieutenant. It’s not a gang or a known terrorist organization. Found about thirty phone listings for first names starting with ‘W,’ last names starting with ‘F,’ and six with the middle initial ‘C.’ We’re running them down.”