James Patterson - The 8th Confession

But she’d proved it anyway, named her top-ten architects, seven of whom turned out to be his favorites, too, and told him about San Francisco landmarks, putting her Golden Gate Bridge up against his Throgs Neck any day of the week, her Folsom Street against his Fifth Avenue, and then she’d asked him what ocean he could see from midtown Manhattan.

Doc gave her props for “the ocean thing,” and they walked together to the Warming Hut, where they sat now at a small table, hot cocoa in hand, their cheeks flushed, grinning at each other as if their feelings were gold coins they’d found in the back pockets of their jeans, never having seen them before.

“You know, you’re gorgeous,” he said.

“Come on.”

“Yeah, you are.”

He reached over and rubbed her bristly head, and she touched the back of his hand and rested her cheek in his palm, waiting for the bubble to burst, which it did when his cell phone went off to “Somebody to Love.”

Doc sighed, removed his warm palm from her cheek, opened his phone, and announced, “Chesney,” into the speaker.

“I’m not on call,” he said. “Isn’t that his problem? Okay, okay. I can make it in an hour.”

Doc put his phone away and grabbed both of Yuki’s hands in his. “I’m sorry, Yuki. It’s going to be this way until I move up in the pecking order.”

“I understand,” she said.

They walked back to their cars together, arms around each other’s waists, covering new territory, Yuki liking the feeling so much and equally relieved that the day had closed at the best moment. She was attracted to Doc, and she was scared.

He draped an arm over her shoulder, brought her to him, and kissed her, sweetly, softly, so she kissed him again, even more so.

When they broke apart, Yuki blurted, “I haven’t had sex in almost two years.”

A look passed over Doc’s face that she couldn’t read. It was like an eclipse of the sun. He hugged her, got into his car, and said out the window, “I’ll call you.”

“Okay,” she said, too softly for him to hear over the sound of the engine as he drove away.

What had she said to him?

Why had she said that?

CINDY SAT IN a booth of a diner called Moe’s, just down the block from Bagman’s condemned Victorian house that had decayed into a crash pad for druggies.

Her grilled cheese and coffee were cooling, and Cindy was making notes for a sidebar: how many homeless died before the age of forty, how many were under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they died – 65 percent.

She was taking the data off the SFPD Web site, so it was automatic writing, not creative, but it was distracting her from the delicious aches and twinges caused by spending another entire night wrapped around Richard Conklin, this time at his place. And those memories only made her want to call him, make another date to wrap herself around him again.

She was in that luminous and dangerous state of mind when she felt a tug on her hair, turned to see a woman peering over the back of the booth at her and saying her name.

Cindy thought the woman looked familiar but at the same time didn’t recognize her.

“Sorry. Do I know you?”

“I’ve seen you at From the Heart.”

“Okay, sure,” Cindy said, pretty certain that she didn’t recognize this young woman from the soup kitchen – but she couldn’t place her anywhere else.

“Want to join me?” Cindy said, forcing herself to make the offer, because you just never knew. This woman with the messy blond hair could be the one who knew who killed Bagman Jesus.

“You look busy.”

“It’s okay,” Cindy said, shutting the lid of her laptop as the woman took the seat across from her.

Cindy could see the beginning of the woman’s decline into an extreme meth makeover: the graying skin, the huge pupils, the high agitation.

“I’m Sammy.”

“Hi, Sammy.”

“I read your last story. About Bagman being a guy named Rodney Booker. That he went to Stanford.”

“Yes, he did.”

“I went to Stanford, too.”

“You dropped out, I’m guessing.”

“School can’t compete,” Sammy said.

“With what?”

“With life. ”

Cindy blinked into the young woman’s face. She was remembering the cautions, not to speak too fast, move too quickly, appear in any way a threat. That as long as the meth addict was talking, it was safe enough. Silence meant she might be getting paranoid – and dangerous.

Cindy tried not to look down at the fork and knife on the table. She said softly, “Do you know who killed Bagman, Sammy? Do you know we’re offering a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward?”

“What’s your life worth, Cindy?” Sammy said, her eyes darting all around the diner, then back to Cindy. “Would you sell your life for money you’ll never get to spend? That’s what I want to tell you. You’re wasting your time. No one’s going to say who the people are who killed Bagman Jesus. No one would dare. ”

I WAS IN THE squad car with Conklin, heading toward a dive of a bar in the Mission, where our new and only suspect was said to work from three p.m. until midnight.

Henry Wallis’s name had come to us by way of an anonymous tip, but what made this tip different than the hundreds of others that had fried our phone lines was that Henry Wallis was on our short list.

He was a bartender, had worked the Baileys’ parties, and had dated Sara Needleman – until she dumped him. And the tipster said he’d seen Wallis driving down Needleman’s street, passing in front of her house several times in his one-of-a-kind junker the night before Needleman died.

Wallis’s sheet listed his arrests for violent crimes.

He’d been convicted of domestic violence and assault and battery, and he’d been charged with attempted murder when he and a couple of other drunken bullies had worked over a customer in an alley behind the bar and nearly killed him.

The witnesses to the beating had differing stories. The evidence was thin. Wallis was found not guilty. Case dismissed.

Stats said that Wallis was white, five ten, 165 pounds, and, most important, forty-six years of age. That meant he was old enough to have read about the high-society murders in the ’80s.

Hell, he was old enough to have committed them.

Conklin and I wondered if Wallis had keys to both the Bailey and Needleman houses. It seemed probable, even likely.

The photo we had of Wallis was four years old, but he was good-looking, even in the scathing high-contrast flash of the Polaroid camera.

He had muscular arms, jailhouse tats on his knuckles.

But what had sent me and Conklin out to the car was the tattoo on Wallis’s left shoulder: that of a snake twining through the vacant eyes of a skull.

Conklin was quiet as he drove, and I understood why.

We were both imagining the variety of ways the scene could play out in the Torchlight Bar: what we’d do if Wallis drew a weapon, if he ran, how we’d manage whatever came down without causing collateral damage.

Conklin parked on Fifteenth between Valencia and Guerrero in front of the Torchlight Bar and Grill, a white clapboard building surrounded by bookstores and cafés.

I unbuttoned my jacket, touched the butt of my gun. Conklin did the same. And we entered the dark atmosphere of the bar. There was a TV overhead, tuned to a recap of yesterday’s ball game – the A’s were getting pounded.

The bartender was six-foot-two, weighed one eighty, and was bald. It was gloomy in that bar – dim light cast by neon signs – but even so, I could see from thirty feet away that the bartender wiping beer mugs with a dirty towel wasn’t Henry Wallis.