James Patterson: 12th of Never

At the moment, Cindy had the talking stick.

“Just tell me that Richie isn’t showing up here, okay? Promise me that,” she said.

Last time the girls had been to Susie’s, Rich had crashed the party, after which he and Cindy had broken up. Since then, Cindy had been nursing regret and hope. Now she took us through her horrible encounter with Richie at the Marina Motel, reporting the dialogue between them verbatim.

I felt like I was in the room with her, watching Richie pull on his socks, then hug her and tell her it was over. The entire time she’d been wishing that he was in their bed, telling her that he was sorry, too, and not to worry anymore.

Claire put her arm around Cindy and Cindy wept against her bosom. I’d never seen Cindy cry in public before and it just killed me to see her in such pain.

Lorraine appeared at our table with a giant platter of Buffalo wings, placed them in front of us, and put a hand on Cindy’s shoulder.

She said, “I don’t think wings will take your mind off a man who probably wasn’t worth your time, Cindy, but the fact is they’re delicious. And they’re on the house.”

Cindy smiled through her tears, and after Lorraine had gone, Cindy said, “Will someone else talk? Please?”

Claire kept her arm around Cindy and told us about the latest affront she’d suffered at the incompetent hands of Dr. Morse. She said emphatically that she would give up chocolate for a year if she could just get a decent lead into the recovery of Faye Farmer’s body.

We batted the missing-body case around for a while, then Yuki took the floor to gloat—graciously—about the road trip to Bolinas, telling us how Brady reeled in Keith Herman and how insanely awesome it felt to have gotten that stupendous crud off the street.

Claire said, “I don’t think I get Lynnette Lagrande. Did she want Jennifer Herman out of the way or not?”

Yuki shrugged and said, “How can you comprehend crazy? I spent a lot of time with that woman, so trust me when I say she’s completely nuts. But her story is that she had nothing against Jennifer. She loved Keith, and after being strung along for a couple of years, she was over it—but at the same time still pissed off. And she wanted Keith to pay.”

I said, “Over it, but she still wanted payback?”

“Yeah,” said Yuki. “That’s what she says. So she set up the meeting for Keith with her new cop boyfriend, hoping Keith would be arrested for hiring a hit man. But Keith made the cop as a cop.”

“So he decided to take out Jennifer himself?” Claire said.

“Right. Divorce by homicide. According to Keith, he didn’t want his wife to end up with Lily. He’s a psycho, but he loves his little girl.”

I thought about Julie and looked at Claire. She had to be thinking about her little girl, Ruby Rose, too.

I sang a line from an old song: “Thank heaven for little girrrls.”

I raised my mug and clinked it against Claire’s.

Claire said solemnly, “And big girls, too. Getting bigger every day.”

Cindy cracked up and hoisted her beer. Yuki raised what remained of her second watermelon margarita and we touched glasses across the table.

Yuki said, “To us.”

We said it in unison and with feeling.

“To us.”

EPILOGUE

A BAD DAY FOR PRO FOOTBALL

Chapter 111

AT EIGHT THAT morning, I was working at my desk across from Conklin when Brenda called to me from the far side of the bull pen.

“Sarge, I’ve got incoming from a sheriff in Nevada. You want the call?”

Brady was out of the building, so I was in charge.

“Transfer it over,” I said.

The light on my phone console blinked. I picked up the receiver, tapped the button, and said my name and rank into the mouthpiece.

The man on the other end of the line said he was Sergeant Cosmo Rinker of the White Pine County, Nevada, sheriff ‘s department.

He said, “Sergeant, we’ve got two DBs out here, and you might be looking for them.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Well,” Rinker said, “what happened was, this UFO group saw a bright light on the horizon a couple of weeks ago, thought it was a close encounter of the little green kind. But when they got to it, turns out to be a vehicle completely consumed by fire.”

I wondered what an incinerated vehicle had to do with us. But the sergeant had hooked me, and the man liked to tell the story his way.

“After the highway patrol called us, we got to see what was inside this burned-up Escalade. It was the cremains of two bodies in the rear cargo area, both of them female.”

We were missing two female bodies, which was an inexcusable tragedy, an embarrassment to San Francisco law enforcement, and a very bad blow to a very good friend of mine.

“I’m listening, Sergeant. Please go on.”

“Sure, sure; I’m getting there. One of the females had a bullet that went into her head and out the other side. The other female also had a gunshot to the head, but the bullet was fragmented and forensically worthless. But our lab did get a hit on the dental work of that first female and that’s why I called you.”

“What’s the victim’s name?”

“She’s this Faye Farmer you’re looking for, got stolen from your ME’s office. We can’t ID the other victim.”

Rinker was still talking as I typed an instant message to Richie. FAYE FARMER FOUND. I sent it to his computer. He typed back !!!!!?????

I said, “Sergeant Rinker, where are the two bodies now?”

“They’re at the ME’s office in Las Vegas. But I think you should come see us here in Ely pretty soon. I think maybe we’ve got a lead on the doer.”

“Put the coffee on, Sergeant. We’ll be right there,” I said.

Chapter 112

IT TOOK FOUR hours for Conklin, Claire, and me to get to McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. Then it was a four-hour drive in a rental car to a speck of a place fifty miles north of nowhere on a small track of road leading out into the desert.

The White Pine County sheriff ‘s barracks were sided in white aluminum, with a line of small windows facing the road and a sign on the front reading PUBLIC SAFETY BUILDING.

We parked, stepped out into the blazing sun, and shielded our eyes with our hands so that we could view the distant blue hills at the farthest edge of the scrub and the endless open sky above us.

Moments later we went through the glass doors, identified ourselves to the desk officer, then waited in the dark reception room until a lanky man in a tan uniform opened an interior door.

“Good to see you all,” he said. “Come on back.”

Rinker’s office was lit with an overhead fluorescent fixture. File cabinets flanked his door, and his hat hung from a rack of antlers directly behind his chair. There was a framed picture of the Three Stooges in police uniforms and a dozen plaques on the walls.

We took seats around Rinker’s desk, and after introductions were made, the sergeant opened a file on his computer and turned the monitor around.

“Can everyone see?”

We looked at photos of the torched Escalade from all sides, including a close-up of what looked like a red Frisbee in the backseat. That red disk had once been a plastic five-gallon gas container, and was likely the fire’s point of origin.

Next Rinker showed us images of the interior of the cargo section at the back of the burned car. Along with the jack and the remains of the spare tire were two corpses, charred to the point of being what firefighters call crispy critters.

Rinker said, “Our ME removed the bodies. Usually, when you take the bodies out, there will be carpet or something under them—clothes, maybe—that didn’t burn. But this fire burned long and hot. All we got was ash and a few pieces of metal you can see in this picture here.