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

My voice sounded sad to my own ears as I said to Jacobi, “We’re wrapping things up now.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 12

IT WAS ALMOST 6:00 that night, ten hours after we’d found Caddy Girl’s body.

The sheaf of paper in the center of my desk was a list of the 762 cars that had gone through the Opera Plaza Garage last night.

Since morning, we’d run the plates and registrations of those cars through the database, and no red flags had popped up, nothing even remotely promising.

We’d also struck out on Caddy Girl’s prints.

She’d never been arrested, or taught school, or joined the military, or worked for any government agency.

A half hour ago, we’d gotten a digital picture of her likeness out to the press, and depending on what else was happening in the world, she’d be in all the newspapers tomorrow.

I pulled the rubber band out of my hair, shook out my ponytail, threw a breathy sigh that riffled the papers in front of me.

Then I called Claire, who was still downstairs in the morgue.

I asked her if she was hungry.

“Meet me downstairs in ten,” she said.

I greeted Claire at her private parking spot on McAllister. She unlocked the car, and I opened the passenger-side door of her Pathfinder. Claire’s scene kit was on the seat, along with a pair of hip waders, a hard hat, a map of California, and her ancient 35mm Minolta.

I transferred the tools of her trade from the front into the back and wearily slid onto the passenger seat. Claire gave me an appraising look, then burst out laughing.

“What’s the joke, Butterfly?”

“You’ve got that third-degree look on your puss,” she told me. “And you don’t have to work me over, baby girl. I’ve got what you want right here.”

Claire waved some papers at me, then shoved them into her cowhide handbag.

Some people think Claire’s nickname is Butterfly because, like Muhammad Ali, she “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.”

Not so.

Claire Washburn has a bright golden Monarch butterfly tattooed on her left hip. Now I pinned her with my eyes.

“I’m sooooo ready to hear your verdict,” I said.

Claire gave it up at last.

“It’s a homicide, definitely,” she told me. “Lividity was inconsistent with a sitting position, so she was moved. And I found faint bruising across the tops of her arms, chest, and on her rib cage.”

“So the manner and cause of death?”

“I’m gonna say she was burked,” Claire told me.

I was familiar with the term.

In the 1820s, a couple of sweethearts named Burke and Hare were in the cadaver procurement business. For a while, they dug up bodies for sale to Edinburgh’s medical schools — until they realized how easy it was to produce fresh corpses by grabbing live victims and sitting on their chests until they died.

Burking was still in good standing today. Postpartum mommies do it to their kids more often than you’d ever want to know. Slip the child between the mattress and box spring, sit on the bed.

If you can’t expand your chest, you can’t breathe.

And the victim’s body shows little or no sign of trauma.

I buckled up as Claire backed the car out and headed to Susie’s.

“It was a horror show for this girl, Lindsay,” Claire told me. “What I’m thinking is, while one perp sat on her chest, another freak slipped a plastic bag over her head and smothered her. Rolled up the edge of the bag good and tight. That’s where the ligature mark came from. Maybe he pressed his hand to her nose and mouth at the same time.”

“She had two killers?”

“If you ask me, Lindsay, that’s the only way it could have been done.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 13

SAN FRANCISCO’S BUSINESS DISTRICT slipped by as Claire piloted the Pathfinder through evening rush-hour traffic. We were silent for a few minutes, the eeriness of that young woman’s death filling the space around us.

Images shifted in my mind as I tried to put it together one grisly piece at a time.

“Two killers,” I finally said to Claire. “Working as a team. Posing the victim inside a car after the fact. What’s the point of that? What’s the message?”

“It’s cold, for one thing,” Claire said.

“And sick, for another. The rape kit?”

“Is at the lab,” said Claire, “along with that pricey outfit Caddy Girl was wearing. By the way, the lab found a semen stain on the hem of her skirt.”

“Was she raped?”

“I didn’t see the kind of vaginal tearing or bruising you’d expect from a rape,” Claire mused. “We’ll have to wait to decide about that.”

Claire braked the car at the Muni rail crossing, and together we watched the train rattle by. Night was closing in over the city of San Francisco, and the commuters were all going home.

Questions were still flooding my little mind. Lots of them. About who Caddy Girl was. Who had killed her. How she and her killers might have crossed paths.

Had the killing been personal?

Or was Caddy Girl a victim of opportunity?

If it was the latter, we could be looking for a ritualistic killer, someone who liked to kill and was equally excited by patterns.

Someone who might like to do it again.

Claire made a left across a break in the oncoming traffic. A moment later, she executed a careful parallel-park maneuver between two cars on Bryant, right outside Susie’s.

She turned off the engine, turned to face me. “There’s more,” she said.

“Don’t make me beg, Butterfly.”

Claire laughed at me, meaning it took even longer for her to get it together and tell me what I was dying to know.

“The shoes,” she said. “They’re a size eight.”

“Couldn’t be. That little girl?”

“Could be and are. But you’re right that it’s crazy, Linds. Caddy Girl probably wore a size five. Those shoes weren’t hers. And the soles have never touched pavement.”

“Huh,” I said. “If they’re not her shoes, maybe those aren’t her clothes, either.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, Lindsay. I don’t know what it means, but those clothes are brand-new. No sweat stains, no body soil of any kind. Somebody carefully, I want to say artfully, dressed that poor girl after she was dead.”

Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman

Chapter 14

IT WAS STILL EARLY in the evening when Claire and I crossed the threshold to Susie’s, the boisterous, sometimes rowdy Caribbean-style eatery where a group of my friends meet for dinner every week or so.

The reggae band hadn’t yet arrived — which was fine, because when Cindy waved to us from “our” booth, I could see from her expression that she had something big on her mind.

And words were her thing.

Cindy is the hot-shit crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle these days. We met four years ago while I was working a particularly grisly case involving honeymoon murders, and she talked her way right into my crime scene. Her audacity and tenacity ticked me off enormously, but I came to respect those same qualities when her reporting helped me nail a vicious killer and send him to death row.

By the time Cindy crashed my next crime scene, we’d bonded and become trusting friends. I’d do anything for her now. Well, almost anything — she is a reporter after all.

Claire and I wriggled into the booth opposite Cindy, who looked both boyish and girly with her fluffy blond hair, man-tailored black suit jacket over a mauve sweater, and jeans. Her front two teeth overlap minutely, which only makes her face look even prettier. Her smile, when it comes, lights you up inside.