Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

The two inspectors left my glass-walled cube, and I called out to Brenda, who settled into the side chair and flapped a notepad open on her lap.

I began to dictate a memo-to-staff about my meeting with Tracchio, but I found it hard to focus.

I wanted to do something today, something that mattered. I wanted to be out on the street with Conklin and Jacobi, showing Caddy Girl’s picture around “fancy beauty salons” and prospecting good neighborhoods for clues.

I wanted to wear out my shoes on this case.

I wanted to work in a way that made me feel as if I was doing my job instead of dictating useless, worthless memos.

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 24

AT ABOUT 7:30 that evening, Claire called, saying, “Lindsay, come on down. I have something to show you.”

I tossed the Chronicle with Cindy’s front-page story about the Municipal trial into the file basket. Then I locked up for the night. I jogged downstairs to the morgue hoping for a breakthrough.

Hoping for something!

One of Claire’s assistants, a smart cookie named Everlina Ferguson, was closing a drawer on a gunshot victim when I got there. Ug-ly.

Claire was washing up. “Give me half a minute,” she said.

“Take the full minute,” I replied.

I poked around the place until I found Caddy Girl’s photos tacked to the wall. God, this case was bugging the hell out of me.

“What did you make of that perfume she was wearing?” I called out to Claire.

“Funny thing about that. It was only evident on her genitalia,” Claire called back. She turned off the faucets, dried her hands, then extracted two bottles of Perrier from the little fridge under her desk.

She opened them and handed one to me.

“Lots of girls these days like to perfume their gardens,” she went on. “So normally I wouldn’t even mention it in my report. But this girl, she didn’t dab it anywhere else. Not on her cleavage or wrists or behind the ears.”

We clinked bottles, each took a long drink.

“Struck me as unusual, so I sent a swab of the perfume to the lab. They kicked it back,” Claire said a moment later. “They can’t ID it. Don’t have the right equipment. Don’t have the time.”

“No time to solve the crime,” I groused.

“It’s always a three-legged sack race around here,” Claire said, pushing papers around on her desk.

“But I got back the labs on the sexual-assault kit. Hang on. It’s right here.”

Eyes glinting, she seized a brown envelope, pulled out the sheet of paper, and pinned it to her desk with a forefinger, saying, “The stain on her skirt was, in fact, semen, and it matched one of the two semen samples that showed up inside Caddy Girl.”

I followed Claire’s finger down the results of the toxicology screen. She stabbed the letters ETOH with her index finger. “This is what I wanted to show you. Her blood was positive for alcohol. Point one three.”

“So she was wasted,” I said.

“Uh-huh, but that’s not all. Look here. She was also positive for benzodiazepine. It’s unusual to have booze and Valium in your system, so I had tox run her bloods again, this time looking for zebras. They narrowed it down to Rohypnol.”

“Aw. No. The date-rape drug.”

“Yeah, she didn’t know where she was, who she was, what was happening, even if it was happening.”

The ugly pieces were there, but I still couldn’t make sense of the whole picture. Caddy Girl had been doped up, assaulted, and murdered with mind-boggling care and precision.

Claire turned to the wall of photos. “It’s no wonder she didn’t have vaginal bruising and defensive wounds, Lindsay. Caddy Girl couldn’t fight back if she wanted to. Poor child never had a chance.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 25

I DROVE MY EXPLORER home in the dark, feeling female, not female cop. I had to see the world through Caddy Girl’s eyes if I wanted to understand what had happened to her. But it was horrific to imagine being that vulnerable to the will of violent men. Two of them, two animals.

I grabbed my Nextel out of its clip on my belt and called Jacobi before more time passed. He answered on the first ring, and I filled him in on what Claire had told me.

“So I’m guessing she found herself in a room with a couple of guys who had sex on their mind,” I said, braking for a light at the next street corner. “They got pushy — and Caddy Girl resists, rebuffs them. So one of the guys puts roofies into her Chardonnay.”

“Yeah,” Jacobi agreed. “Now she’s so stoned she can’t move. Maybe she even blacks out. They take her clothes off, spray her with perfume, take turns having sex on her.”

“Maybe they’re afraid she might remember the assault,” I said, my thoughts neatly in sync with those of my former partner. “They’re not totally stupid. Maybe they’re very smart, actually. They want to kill her without leaving a lot of evidence. One guy burks her; the other makes sure she’s dead by suffocating her with a plastic bag. A nice clean kill.”

“Yup, sounds right, Boxer. Maybe after she’s dead, they reload and do her again,” Jacobi said. “Figure a little necrophilia never hurt anyone. Then what? They dress her in five thousand bucks’ worth of clothes and take her for a ride? Drop her off in Guttman’s Seville?”

“That’s the craziest part of it all,” I said. “I don’t get it about the clothes. The clothes thing throws everything off for me.”

“Claire didn’t have the results on the DNA?”

“Not yet. You know, if Caddy Girl was the mayor’s wife, we’d know something by now. But since nobody’s even reported her missing . . .”

“Good-looking girl like that,” said Jacobi. I could hear a tinge of sadness in his voice. Some small revelation of loneliness. “Someone should be missing her.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 26

I OPENED THE FRONT DOOR to my apartment and exchanged sloppy hellos with Martha.

“Hey, Boo. Howzmygirl?”

I hugged her squirming body as she yapped her enthusiastic approval of my return from the wars.

As exhausted as I was, jogging with my girl was the greatest encouragement I had to keep fit.

I leashed her, and soon after, we were running across Missouri in the dark, around the rec center, down and back up the hill, endorphins lifting my mood and giving me a slightly more positive outlook on Caddy Girl’s murder investigation.

The perp’s DNA was cooking in the lab right at this moment.

Cops were canvassing with her picture in hand.

There was hope after all.

Someone had to be missing her by now and would make a call soon. Or a witness would step forward who’d seen her likeness in the Chronicle or on our Web site.

Once we had a name, we’d have a chance to solve her murder. We could all stop thinking of her as Caddy Girl.

A half hour later I was back at home. I slugged down a cold beer and ate a Swiss and Hellmann’s on sourdough in front of the TV while catching up on the news of the world on CNN, CNBC, and FOX. Then I stripped down, turned on the shower, and waggled my hand in the water to test the temperature.

That’s when the phone rang.

Figures. Now what — another murder? Better yet, a break in the case?

The caller ID flashed his name.

“Hey,” I said, feigning nonchalance, heart going boom, da-boom, da-boom.

“God, you’re gorgeous.”

“I don’t have a picture phone, Joe.”

“I know what you look like, Lindsay.”

I laughed.

“That’s a very naked laugh,” said my fella. He wasn’t clairvoyant. He could hear the shower running. I turned off the water, put my robe on.