James Patterson - The 8th Confession

“Wonderful,” Conklin said. “So, Molly, this is square one. We need a list of everyone who was here last night, including the caterer, the delivery people, and whoever walks your dog.”

Molly looked at Conklin with her big red-rimmed eyes. There was dried spittle in the corners of her mouth.

“Tyco walked my dog. I cooked for the party, and Brian tended the bar. I didn’t know half the people who showed up, and that’s the truth. People brought people who brought other people.”

“Let’s start with the ones you know,” said Conklin.

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON when Conklin and I entered the autopsy suite and saw Tyco’s body lying on a slab. His eyes were closed, but his collection of nipple rings and studs winked from a stainless- steel bowl under the lights.

“I’d almost given up,” Claire said. “But look here.”

She raised the boy’s left arm, handed me the magnifying glass so I could see what she was calling “two defined pinpoint punctures.”

Beside me, Bunny Ellis, Claire’s number one assistant, pulled down the zipper on the second body bag, the one holding the remains of Brian Caine.

I turned – and for a terrifying moment I thought Brian Caine was alive.

The sheet Caine was wrapped in moved – but as I watched in horror, I saw that it wasn’t Caine that was moving. It was something slim and banded, barely discernible against the mottled pattern of the sheet.

I screamed, “Snake! That’s the snake!”

The animal seemed liquid as it poured out of the body bag and slid down one of the legs of the gurney onto the floor, head flattened in strike mode, winding across the gray ceramic tile toward Claire.

“Don’t move!” Conklin yelled out.

His gun was in his hand, and he fired at the swiftly moving target, once, twice, again and again, the weapon bucking, bullets pinging off the tiles, gunfire echoing in the suite.

He was oh for six.

My hands were over my ears, my eyes wide open. I stared as the snake kept coming, now only a yard away from the tips of Claire’s bootees.

I read the terror on her face. Moving would attract the snake, but Claire had no choice. She bolted for the stepladder that she used to shoot overhead pictures.

I broke for the hallway.

The firebox was on the wall. I smashed the glass with my gun butt, cleared the shards, reached for the fire ax, and ran back to the room.

Conklin was aiming again. Claire was standing on the ladder’s top rung, and her assistants were screaming, as good as climbing the walls.

I lifted the ax, brought the blade down on the snake, divided it neatly in two at midpoint.

Both halves of the snake continued to writhe.

“It’s dead, right?” I called out, my voice shrill, sweat pouring down the inside of my shirt. “It can’t do anything, can it?”

My mind was suddenly swamped with images of sharks lying on boat decks – presumed dead – that “came back to life” to clamp their jaws around fishermen’s legs.

This snake was still wriggling, mouth open, lethal fangs exposed.

We all stared, transfixed by the killer that wouldn’t die. Then Conklin came out of his trance, disappeared into Claire’s office, and returned with a metal trash can, which he upended over both parts of the snake.

He sat on the trash can.

The look on his face told me that he felt like he was sitting on a bomb.

“No, this is good,” he said to me, red-faced, perspiring, eyes bugging out just a little. “Good a time as any to get over my fear of snakes.”

Animal control arrived at the morgue forty minutes later. They relieved Conklin and lifted the trash can.

Both parts of the krait were still wriggling.

The front end gnashed at the air.

YUKI WAS CLEANING out her fridge, listening to Faith Hill, thinking about piebald ponies and long-legged strangers, when her cell phone rang.

Her stomach clenched instantly – Is it Doc?

She dropped the sponge in the sink, wiped her hands on the back of her jeans, and went for the phone that was warbling on her mom’s coffee table.

The caller ID read SF DOJ. Yuki stabbed the receive button with her thumb, said, “Castellano.”

An hour later she was sitting in a leather armchair in Judge Brendan J. Duffy’s chambers, waiting for Phil Hoffman to arrive.

Duffy looked perturbed, but he wouldn’t even hint to Yuki about why he’d called until Hoffman was present. So Yuki used the time to study the judge’s bookcase and consider the multiple possibilities. But only one possibility seemed probable, and that was that the damned, cursed jury who’d been charged with deliberating Stacey Glenn’s case hadn’t arrived at a verdict.

The jury had hung – again.

So it followed that Duffy would declare a mistrial and that the sassy beauty queen who’d bludgeoned her helpless, loving parents would do the catwalk strut out of the jailhouse.

Duffy didn’t make small talk. He had gone into work mode, opening files, making notes, tossing papers into his out basket as the rays of afternoon sun lengthened across his Persian rug, and Yuki’s heart continued to beat an SOS inside her ribcage.

Finally she heard Hoffman’s voice in the outer office.

He ducked as he walked in the doorway, ran a hand through his rumpled black hair, said, “Sorry, Your Honor. Yuki. My wife and I were in Sausalito. The ferry couldn’t be hurried.”

“Sit down, Phil,” Duffy said.

Hoffman sat in the second armchair, asked, “Did you hear from the jury?”

Yuki had already concluded that at this point Hoffman would be as happy with a mistrial as he would be with an acquittal. He’d spent too much time on this case. If there was a mistrial, his client would be released – and he could go back to getting paid.

“I’ve got bad news,” Duffy said. “There was a fight at the jail.”

“What happened?” Hoffman asked.

“Your client acquired a girlfriend over the last couple of weeks, and as I understand it, her girlfriend already had a girlfriend. There was a fight in the showers, and Stacey Glenn lost,” Duffy said. “Ms. Glenn’s girlfriend grabbed her around the neck, the other girl grabbed Stacey around the waist, and they both pulled.”

Duffy shook his head as they all imagined the scene, but Yuki still couldn’t visualize what had been so terrible.

“I’m sorry, I don’t get it, Your Honor.”

“My fault. I’m not explaining this well. Stacey Glenn’s head was separated from her spinal cord.” He put a hand around his own neck, said, “The neck itself – the muscles and so forth – was still in place, but the spine was severed. Medically speaking, Ms. Glenn suffered an internal decapitation.”

“I’ve never heard of an internal decapitation,” Hoffman said.

“First for me, too, but that’s what I got from the Department of Corrections, based upon their autopsy findings, and I quote,” Duffy said, reading from a notepad, “ ‘Those stupid bleeps turned Stacey Glenn into a bobblehead.’ ”

Yuki stood up, stumbled out of Judge Duffy’s office, kept going even as Phil Hoffman called her name. She went for the stairs, kept a firm grip on the handrail as she wobbled down the steps, thinking about how the case had ended.

By the time she reached the lobby, she knew that she had to get ahold of Parisi. They had to really think through what they would put out to the public, and he had to handle it, because it wouldn’t be right to let the public see her almost irrepressible elation.

Stacey Glenn had gotten the death penalty.

No conviction, no dismissal, no mistrial. This was the ultimate resolution.

It was over.

Yuki had not lost her case – and the sociopath Stacey Glenn was dead.