Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July

Full but perky.

Nice tits, Lieutenant, sir.

The Watcher knew exactly who Lindsay was, what kind of work she did, and why she said she was in Half Moon Bay. But he wanted to know a lot more.

He wondered who she was talking to on the phone. Maybe the dark-haired guy who’d stayed over last night and had left in a black government-issue Town Car. He wondered about that guy: who he was and if he was coming back.

And he wondered where Lindsay kept her gun.

The Watcher took some pictures of Boxer, smiling, frowning, taking down her hair. Holding the phone between her shoulder and her chin, reaching, breasts moving as she did so, to put up her hair again.

As he watched, the dog crossed the room and lay down near the sliders, staring out through them—almost as if she were looking directly at him.

The Watcher walked a ways down the beach, toward the smooching lovers, then cut across the dune grass to a parking area where he’d left his car. Once inside, he took his notebook out of the glove box and turned to the tab with Lindsay’s name written in meticulous script.

Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer.

There was just enough glow from the streetlights to add to his notes.

He wrote: Wounded. Alone. Armed and dangerous.

Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July

Part Three

Back in the Saddle Again

Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July

Chapter 46

THE SUN WAS ONLY a blush on the dawn sky when a loud ringing jarred me out of sleep. I fumbled for the phone, nailed it on the fourth ring.

“Lindsay, it’s Yuki. I hope I didn’t wake you. I’m in the car and this is my only free minute, but I can tell you everything fast.”

Yuki was passionate and smart, and I knew this about her—she always spoke at ninety miles an hour.

“Okay. I’m ready,” I said, flopping back into the bed.

“Sam Cabot is out of the hospital. I deposed him yesterday,” Yuki said, her voice a rhythmic rat-tat-tat. “He recanted his confession of the hotel murders, but that’s the DA’s problem. As for the action against you, he says you fired first, missed him, and that he and Sara returned fire in self-defense. Then you gunned them down. Crock of shit. We know it and they know it, but this is America. He can say whatever he wants.”

My sigh came out as a kind of strangled groan. Yuki kept on talking. “Our only problem is that he’s such a heartbreaker, that pathological little crud. Paralyzed, propped up in that chair with his neck in a brace, quivering lower lip. Looks like a cherub who’s been blindsided —”

“By a vicious, gun-happy chick cop,” I interrupted.

“I was going to say blindsided by a sixteen-wheeler, but whatever.” She laughed. “Let’s get together and strategize. Can we make a plan?”

My calendar was so sparkling clean it was practically virginal. Yuki, on the other hand, had booked depositions, meetings, and trials almost every hour for the next three weeks. Still, we picked a date a few days before the trial.

“Right now the media are churning up the waters,” Yuki continued. “We leaked to the press that you’re staying with friends in New York so they won’t hound you. Lindsay? Are you there?”

“Yep. I’m here,” I said, eyes fixed on the ceiling fan, ears ringing.

“I’d suggest that you relax if you can. Keep a low profile. Leave the rest to me.”

Right.

I showered, dressed in linen slacks and a pink T-shirt, and took a mug of coffee out to the backyard. I had a question for Penelope as I scooped breakfast into her trough: “How much chow can a big pig chow if a big pig chows pig chow?”

City girl talking to a pig. Who woulda thunk it?

I considered Yuki’s advice as the sea breeze wafted across the deck. Relax and keep a low profile. It made good sense, except that I was in the clutches of a monster desire to do something. I wanted to shake things up, bang heads, right wrongs.

I really couldn’t help myself.

I whistled to Martha and started up the Explorer. Then we headed out toward a certain house in Crescent Heights—the scene of a double homicide.

Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July

Chapter 47

“BAD DOG,” I SAID to Martha. “You can’t keep out of trouble, can you?” Martha turned her melting brown eyes on me, wagged her tail, then resumed her surveillance of the boulder-sculpted highway.

As I drove south on Highway 1, I was bristling with excitement. Three miles down the road, I turned off at Crescent Heights, an idiosyncratic collection of houses freckling the face of the hill at the tip of Half Moon Bay.

I pointed the Explorer up the gravelly one-laner, feeling my way along until the scene of the crime nearly jumped out at me. I pulled over and turned off the engine.

The yellow clapboard-sided house was a charmer, with three gabled dormers, an overgrown flower garden, and a whirligig of a lumberjack sawing wood attached to the post-and-rail fence. The name Daltry was painted on the handmade mailbox, and a half mile of yellow plastic tape was still wrapped around this, the American dream.

Crime scene. Do not enter by order of the police.

I tried to imagine that two people had been brutally murdered in this homey little cottage, but the images didn’t fit together. Murder should never happen in a place like this.

What had drawn a killer to this particular house? Was it a targeted hit—or had the killer just happened on this home-sweet-home by chance?

“Stay, girl,” I told Martha as I got out of the car.

The murder had occurred more than five weeks ago, and by now the police had relinquished the crime scene. Anyone who wanted to snoop could do so, as long as they didn’t break into the house—and I saw signs of snoopers everywhere: footprints in the flower beds, cigarette butts on the pavement, soda cans on the lawn.

I stepped through the open gate, ducked under the tape, and walked around the house, slowly frisking the scene with my eyes.

There was an abandoned basketball under the shrubbery, and a single child’s sneaker on the back steps, still wet from last night’s dew. I noticed that one of the basement windows had been removed from its frame and was leaning against a wall of the house: the probable point of entry.

The longer I stayed at the Daltry house, the harder my heart pounded. I was creeping around a crime scene instead of taking charge of it, and that made me feel weird and bad, as though this crime was none of my business and I shouldn’t be here. At the same time, I felt driven by what Claire had told me on the phone last night.

The Daltrys of Crescent Heights weren’t the first murder victims to be whipped. Who else had been savaged this way? Did these killings connect with my unsolved case, John Doe #24?

Relax and keep a low profile, Yuki had said. I actually laughed out loud. I got into the Explorer, patted my furry sidekick’s flank, then bumped down the gravelly road to the highway.

We would be back in the center of Half Moon Bay in ten minutes. I wanted to see the O’Malley house.

Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July

Chapter 48

OCEAN COLONY ROAD WAS lined with patrol cars on both sides of the street. The insignias on the car doors told me that the local cops were finally getting the help they badly needed. They’d called in the state police.

As I drove past, I saw that a uniformed officer was guarding the front door of the house and another cop was interviewing the UPS man.

Detectives and crime scene techs entered and left the house at irregular intervals. A media tent had been set up on a neighbor’s lawn, and a local reporter was going live from Half Moon Bay.