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

The driver was mercifully silent as we made our way across town to Potrero Hill at dawn.

A few minutes later, I slipped my key into the front door of the pretty, blue three-story Victorian town house I share with two other tenants, and climbed the groaning staircase to the second floor, two steps at a time.

Sweet Martha, my border collie, greeted me at the door as if I’d been gone for a year. I knew her sitter had fed and walked her — Karen’s bill was on the kitchen table — but Martha had missed me and I’d missed her, too.

“Yuki’s mom is in the hospital,” I told my doggy. Corny me. I wrapped my arms around her, and she gave me sloppy kisses, then followed me back to my bedroom.

I wanted to fall into the downy folds of bedding for seven or eight hours, but instead I changed into a wrinkled Santa Clara U tracksuit and took Her Sweetness for a run as the glowing morning fog hovered over the bay.

At eight on the nose I was at my desk looking through the glass walls of my cubicle out at the squad room as the morning tour sauntered in.

The stack of files on my desk had grown since I’d seen it last, and the message light on my phone was blinking in angry red bursts. I was about to address these irritations, when a shadow fell across my desk and my unopened container of coffee.

A large, balding man stood in my doorway. I knew his pug-ugly face almost as well as I knew my own.

My former partner wore the time-rumpled look of a career police officer who had rounded the corner on fifty. Inspector Warren Jacobi’s hair was turning white, and his deep, hooded eyes were harder than they’d been before he’d taken those slugs on Larkin Street.

“You look like you slept on a park bench last night, Boxer.”

“Thanks, dear.”

“I hope you had fun.”

“Tons. What’s up, Jacobi?”

“A DOA was called in twenty minutes ago,” he said. “A female, formerly very attractive, I’m told. Found dead inside a Cadillac in the Opera Plaza Garage.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 8

THE OPERA PLAZA GARAGE is a cavernous indoor lot adjacent to a huge mixed-use commercial building that houses movie theaters, offices, and shops in the middle of a densely populated business district.

Now, on a workday morning, Jacobi nosed our car up to the curb beside the line of patrol cars strategically parked to block access to the garage entrance on Golden Gate Avenue.

No cars were coming in or going out, and a shifting crowd had gathered, prompting Jacobi to mutter, “The citizens are squawking. They know a hot case when they see one.”

I excused our way through the throng as strident voices called out to me. “Are you in charge here?” “Hey, I’ve got to get my car. I’ve got a meeting in like five minutes!”

I ducked under the tape and took up a position on the entry ramp, making good use of my five-foot-ten frame. I said my name and apologized for the inconvenience to one and all.

“Please bear with us. Sorry to say, this garage is a crime scene. I hope as much as you do that we’ll be out of here soon. We’ll do our best.”

I fielded some unanswerable questions, then turned as I heard my name and the sound of footsteps coming from behind me. Jacobi’s new partner, Inspector Rich Conklin, was heading down the ramp to meet us.

I’d liked Conklin from the moment I’d met him a few years back, when he was a smart and dogged uniformed officer. Bravery in the line of duty and an impressive number of collars had earned him his recent promotion to Homicide at the ripe young age of twenty-nine.

Conklin had also attracted a lot of attention from the women working in the Hall once he’d traded in his uniform for a gold shield.

At just over six foot one, Conklin was buffed to a T, with brown eyes, light-brown hair, and the wholesome good looks of a college baseball player crossed with a Navy SEAL.

Not that I’d noticed any of this.

“What have we got?” I asked Conklin.

He hit me with his clear brown eyes. Very serious, but respectful. “The vic is a Caucasian female, Lieutenant, approximately twenty-one or twenty-two. Looks to me like a ligature mark around her neck.”

“Any witnesses so far?”

“Nope, we’re not that lucky. The guy over there,” Conklin said, hooking a thumb toward the scraggly, long-haired ticket-taker in the booth, “name of Angel Cortez, was on duty all night, didn’t see anything unusual, of course. He was on the phone with his girlfriend when a customer came screaming down the ramp.

“Customer’s name is” — Conklin flipped open his notebook — “Angela Spinogatti. Her car was parked overnight, and she saw the body inside the Caddy this morning. That’s about all she had for us.”

“You ID’d the Caddy’s plates?” Jacobi asked.

Conklin nodded his head once, turned a page in his notebook. “The car belongs to a Lawrence P. Guttman, DDS. No sheet, no warrants. We’ve got calls into him now.”

I thanked Conklin and asked him to collect the parking-garage tickets and the surveillance tapes.

Then Jacobi and I headed up the ramp.

I’d had way too little sleep, but a thin, steady flow of adrenaline was entering my bloodstream. I was imagining the scene before I saw it, thinking about how a young white female came to be strangled inside a parking garage.

Footsteps echoed overhead. Lots and lots of them. My people.

I counted a dozen members of the SFPD strung around the upward-coiling concrete-ribbon parking area. Officers were going through the trash, taking down plate numbers, looking for anything that would help us before the crime scene was returned to the public domain.

Jacobi and I rounded the bend that took us to the fourth floor and saw the Caddy in question, a black late-model Seville, sleek, unscratched. Its nose was pointing over the railing toward the Civic Center Garage on McAllister.

“Zero to sixty in under five seconds,” Warren muttered, then did a fair imitation of the Cadillac musical sting from their TV commercials.

“Down, boy,” I said.

Charlie Clapper, head of CSU, was wearing his usual non-smile and a gray herringbone jacket that casually matched his salt-and-pepper hair.

He put his camera down on the hood of an adjacent Subaru Outback and said, “Mornin’, Lou, Jacobi. Meet Jane Doe.”

I tugged on latex gloves and followed him around the car. The trunk was closed because the victim wasn’t in there.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her pale, wide-open eyes staring out through the windshield expectantly.

As if she were waiting for someone to come.

“Aw, shit,” Jacobi said with disgust. “Beautiful young girl like this. All dressed up and no place to go. Forever.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 9

“I DON’T SEE a handbag anywhere,” Clapper was telling me. “I left her clothing intact for the ME. Nice duds,” he said. “Looks like a rich girl. You think?”

I felt a shock of sadness and anger as I looked into the victim’s dreamy face.

She was fair-skinned, a light dusting of powder across her face, a hint of blush on the apples of her cheeks. Her hair was cut in a Meg Ryan-style mop of tousled blond lights, and her nails had been recently manicured.

Everything about this woman spoke of privilege and opportunity, and money. It was as if she’d been just about to step down the runway of life when some psycho had ripped it all away from her.

I pressed the victim’s cheek with the back of my hand. Her skin was tepid to the touch, telling me that she’d been alive last night.

“Larry, Moe, and Curly didn’t whack this little lady,” Jacobi commented.