Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

As I knocked on Tracchio's door, a meeting of the Emer-gency Task Force was already under way. I wasn't surprised to see Tom Roach, from the local FBI. They'd been all over things since Cindy got the e-mail that morning. Plus Gabe Carr, the deputy mayor in charge of police affairs, and Steve Fiori, the press liaison.

And someone with his back to me whom I didn't recog-nize: dark, with thick brown hair, solidly built. The guy had advance team for the G-8 meeting stamped all over him. Here we go, antacid lovers.

I nodded to the guys I had worked with, a quick glance toward the suit I didn't know. “You want to bring everyone up to date, Lieutenant?” the Chief said.

“Sure,” I said, nodding. My stomach churned. I hadn't exactly prepped for a presentation. I had the feeling I was being set up, Tracchio-style.

“A lot of things are pointing toward Berkeley,” I explained. I ran off the key angles we were working. Wendy Raymore, the demonstration today, Lemouz.

“You think this guy's involved?” Tracchio asked. “He's a professor, right?”

“I ran his name and it came back with nothing deeper than a couple of unlawful demonstrations and resisting arrests,” I said. “Both dropped. He's harmless. Or he's very, very smart.”

“Any trace on the taggants in the C-4?” Tracchio asked. It felt as if he was trying to make points with the Fed in the tan suit. Who the heck was he anyway?

“It's with ATF,” I said.

“And these people keep communicating on these public e-mail ports to threaten us,” he said.

“What do you want us to do, stake out every public-access computer in the Bay Area?” I asked. “You know how many we're talking, Chief?”

“Two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine,” the Fed in the suit suddenly chimed in. He flipped a sheet of paper. “Two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine public-access Internet access portals in the Bay Area, depending on how they're defined. Colleges, libraries, caf‚s, airports. That in-cludes two in army recruiting centers in San Jose, but I don't think they'll try there, if that narrows it down at all.”

“Yeah,” I said as our eyes finally met, “that starts to nar-row it down.”

“Sorry.” The man rubbed his temples and relaxed into a tired smile. “I just got off a plane from Madrid twenty min-utes ago, expecting to check through some security details for the G-8 next week. Now I'm wondering if I suddenly find myself in the middle of the Third World War.”

“Lindsay Boxer,” I said.

“I know who you are,” the Fed replied. “You worked that La Salle Heights church bombing last year. People in Justice took note. Any chance we can contain these people in the next week?”

“Contain?” The word had a Clancy-esque sound to it.

“Let's not play games, Lieutenant. We have a meeting of the heads of finance of the Free World coming here. Plus a threat to the public safety, and like the Chief said, we don't have much time.”

There was a directness about this guy I liked. Not the usual Washington type.

“So everything's still on?” Gabe Carr, the mayor's deputy, asked.

“On?” The Washington man looked around the room. “The locations are secure, right? We have adequate man-power, don't we, Chief?”

“Every uniformed man on the force at your disposal next week.” Tracchio's eyes lit up.

I cleared my throat. “What about the e-mail we received? What do we do with it?”

“What do you want to do with it, Inspector?” the Wash-ington guy asked.

My throat was dry. “I want to answer it,” I said. “I want to start a dialogue. Map out the contact points they respond from. See if they divulge something. The more we talk, the more they might reveal....”

There was one of those sticky, protracted silences, and I was hoping I wasn't about to be shoved off this case.

“Right answer.” The federal agent winked at me. “No need for all the melodrama, I just wanted to see who I was working with. Joe Molinari,” he said, smiling, and pushed across his card.

As I read it, as hard as I tried not to change my expression, my heart picked up a beat, maybe a couple of beats.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, the card read. JOSEPH P. MOLINARI. DEPUTY DIRECTOR.

Shit, this guy was all the way up!

“Let's start a dialogue with these bastards,” said the deputy director.

Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

Chapter 43

MY HEAD WAS STILL BUZZING from my meeting with Molinari as I headed back to my office. On the way, I stopped at Jill's.

A worker was vacuuming the corridor, but her lights were still on.

An Eva Cassidy CD was playing lightly in the back-ground. I heard Jill dictating into a recording device.

“Hey.” I knocked on the door. A look as apologetic as I could muster. “I know you left some messages. It probably won't help if I tell you about my day.”

“Well, I know how it began,” Jill said. Icicles.

Deserved.

“Look, I can't blame you for being mad.” I stepped in, placing my hands on the top of a high-backed chair.

“You could say I was a little mad,” Jill said, “earlier in the day.”

“And now?”

“Now...I guess you could call it very fucking mad, Lindsay.”

There wasn't a hint of humor in her face. When you needed someone to seriously bust some balls - to use the wrong metaphor - Jill was your gal.

“You're torturing me,” I said, and sat in the chair. “I real-ize what I did was way out of bounds.”

Jill laughed derisively. “I would say the part about send-ing a hit man after my husband seemed a bit wide of the lines - even for you, Lindsay.”

“It wasn't a hit man,” I corrected her. “It was a knee-cracker. But who's being technical. What can I say? You're married to a total SOB.” I pulled the chair up to the side of her desk. “Look, Jill, I know it was wrong. I didn't go there to threaten him. I went for you. But the guy was such a tight -assed creep.”

“Maybe what the guy didn't appreciate was our business being laid out like a laundry list in his face. What I told you was in confidence, Lindsay.”

“You're right.” I swallowed. “I'm sorry.”

Gradually, the little lines of anger in her brow began to soften. She pushed back her chair from the desk and rolled it to face me, almost knee to knee.

“Look, Lindsay, I'm a big girl. Let me fight my own battles. You're my friend in this case, not the police.”

“So everybody's telling me.”

“Then hear it, honey, because I need you to be my friend. Not the 101st Airborne.” She took my hands and squeezed them. “Usually a friend hears another out, invites her to lunch, maybe sets her up with a cute coworker.... Barging into her husband's office and threatening to have his knees capped... that sort of stuff... we call them enemies, Lindsay.”

I laughed. For the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile crack through Jill's ice. A glimmer.

“Okay, so as a friend, how are you and the SOB since he punched you?” I sniffed back a false smile.

Jill laughed, shrugged. “I guess we're okay.... We talked about counseling.”

“The only counseling Steve needs is from a lawyer, during an arraignment.”

“Be my friend, Lindsay, remember.... Anyway, there are more important matters to discuss. What's going on in this city?”

I told her about the message Cindy had received that morning, and how it ratcheted up the case. “You ever hear of an anti-terrorism guy named Joe Molinari?”

Jill thought. “I remember a Joe Molinari who was a prose-cutor back in New York. Top-notch investigator. Worked on the World Trade Center bombing. Not hard to look at, either. I think he went down to Washington in some capacity.”