James Patterson: 7th Heaven

Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner – your choice, Lindsay -”

I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.

“I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”

“I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”

JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.

This time we had a search warrant.

The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.

“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”

“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”

“And I’d like to see Venice before it sinks into the sea. And as long as we’re wishing on stars here, I’m still pining for a Rolls Silver Cloud.”

There was a leaden sound as the CSI working behind and under the tub dismantled the trap. As the tech bagged the plumbing, Conklin and I went back to Junie’s bedroom.

It wasn’t the pigpen Ricky Malcolm slept in, but Junie wasn’t a tidy homemaker either. There were dust balls under the furniture, the mirrored walls were smudged, and the dense gray carpet had the oily look of a floor mat in a single dad’s minivan.

A CSI asked if we were ready, then closed the curtains and shut off the overhead light. She waved the wand end of the Omnichrome 1000 in a side-to-side pattern across the bedspread, carpet, and walls, each pass of her wand showing up pale blue splotches indicating semen stains everywhere. She shot me a look and said, “If the johns saw this, they’d never take off their clothes in this girl’s house, guaranteed.”

Conklin and I walked downstairs toward the sound of the vacuum cleaner, watched the CSIs work, Conklin shouting to me over the vacuum’s motor, “Three months after the fact, what do we expect? A sign saying, ‘Michael Campion died here’?”

That’s when we heard the clank of metal against the vacuum cleaner nozzle. The CSI turned off the motor, stooped, pulled a steak knife from under the skirt of a velvet-covered sofa – just where Conklin and I had been sitting last night.

The investigator held out the steak knife with his gloved hand so that I could see the rust-colored stain on the sharp, serrated blade.

I WAS STILL SAVORING the discovery of the knife when my cell phone rang. It was Chief Anthony Tracchio, and his voice was unusually loud.

“What is it, Tony?”

“I need the two of you in my office, pronto .”

After a short volley of useless quibble, he hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin and I walked into Tracchio’s wood-paneled corner suite and saw two well-known people seated in the leather armchairs. Former governor Connor Hume Campion’s face looked swollen with rage, and his much younger wife, Valentina, appeared heavily sedated.

The front page of the Sunday Chronicle was on Tracchio’s desk. I could read the headline upside down and from ten feet away: SUSPECT QUESTIONED IN CAMPION DISAPPEARANCE.

Cindy hadn’t waited for my quote, damn it.

What the hell had she written?

Tracchio patted his Vitalis comb-over and introduced us to the parents of the missing boy as Conklin and I dragged chairs up to his massive desk. Connor Campion acknowledged us with a hard stare. “I had to read this in the newspaper ?” he said to me. “That my son died in a whorehouse ?”

I flushed, then said, “If we’d had anything solid, Mr. Campion, we would have made sure you knew first. But all we have is an anonymous tip that your son visited a prostitute. We get crank tips constantly. It could have meant nothing.”

“ Could have meant ? So what’s in this paper is true ?”

“I haven’t read that article, Mr. Campion, but I can give you an update.”

Tracchio lit up a cigar as I filled the former governor in on our last eighteen hours: the interviews, our futile searches for evidence, and that we had Junie Moon in custody based on her uncorroborated admission that Michael had died in her arms. When I stopped talking, Campion shot out of his seat, and I realized that while we had assumed Michael was dead, the Campions hadn’t given up hope. My sketchy report had given the Campions more of a reality check than they’d expected.

It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Campion turned his red-faced glare on Tracchio, a man who’d become chief of police by way of an undistinguished career in administration.

“I want my son’s body returned to us if every dump in the state has to be picked through by hand.”

“Consider it done,” Tracchio said.

Campion turned to me, and I saw his anger collapse. Tears filled his eyes. I touched his arm and said, “We’re on this, sir. Full-time. We won’t sleep until we find Michael.”

JUNIE MOON SLIPPED into the interview room at the women’s jail wearing an orange jumpsuit and new worry lines in her youthful face.

She was followed by her attorney, Melody Chado, a public defender who would make a reputation for herself with this case, no matter how the jury decided. Chado wore black – tunic, pants, jet-black beads – and was all business. She settled her client in a chair, opened her black leather briefcase, and looked at her watch several times as we waited. There were only four chairs in the small room, so when my good friend Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano entered a moment later, there was standing room only.

Yuki put down her briefcase and leaned against the wall.

Ms. Chado appeared to be just out of law school. She was probably only a couple of years older than her client, who looked so vulnerable I felt a little sorry for her – and that pissed me off.

“I’ve advised my client not to make any statements,” Ms. Chado said, setting her young face with a hard-ass expression that I found hard to take seriously. “This is your meeting, Ms. Castellano.”

“I’ve talked with the DA,” Yuki said. “We’re charging your client with murder two.”

“What happened to ‘illegal disposal of a body’?” Chado asked.

“That’s just not good enough,” Yuki snapped. “Your client was the last person to see Michael Campion alive. Ms. Moon never called medical emergency or the police – and why not? Because she didn’t care about Campion’s life or death. She only cared about herself.”

“You’ll never get an indictment for murder,” Chado said. “There’s enough reasonable doubt in your theory to fill the ocean.”

“Listen to me, Junie,” Yuki said. “Help us locate Michael’s remains. If it can be determined in autopsy that his heart attack would have killed him no matter what you did, we’ll drop the murder charge and pretty much get out of your life.”

“No deal,” Chado interjected. “What if she helps you find his body and it is so decomposed that his heart is just rotted meat? Then you’ll have a demonstrable connection to my client and she’ll be screwed .”