Women's Murder Club [08] The 8th Confession Read online

  Copyright © 2009 by James Patterson

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

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  First eBook Edition: April 2009

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN: 978-0-316-05265-8

  Contents

  Cover

  Copyright Page

  Prologue: BUS STOP

  One

  Two

  Three

  Part One: BAGMAN JESUS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Two: THE UPPER CRUST

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Part Three: PARTY ALL THE TIME

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Part Four: DOC

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Epilogue: HAPPY AT LAST

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  The Women’s Murder Club

  The 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro)

  7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro)

  The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro)

  4th of July (with Maxine Paetro)

  3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross)

  2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross)

  1st to Die

  A complete list of books by James Patterson can be found here.

  For previews of upcoming books by James Patterson and more information about the author, visit www.JamesPatterson.com.

  To Suzie and Jack And to John, Brendan, and Alex

  Prologue

  BUS STOP

  One

  THE OLD CHROME-YELLOW school bus crawled south on Market Street at half past seven that May morning. Its side and back windows were blacked out, and a hip-hop hit throbbed into the low- lying mist that floated like a silk veil between the sun and San Francisco.

  Got my ice

  Got my smoke

  Got my ride

  Ain’t got no hope

  Hold ya heads up high

  Don’t know when

  Ya gonna die….

  The traffic light changed to yellow at the intersection of Fourth and Market. The stop-sign arm at the driver’s side of the school bus swung out, the four-way hazard lights burned amber, and the vehicle came to a halt.

  To the right of the bus was a shopping mall, a huge one: Bloomingdale’s, Nordstrom, the windows papered with large Abercrombie posters of provocative half- naked teens in black and white.

  To the left of the bus was a blue Ford van and then one of two islands splitting the road — a staging area for bus passengers and tourists.

  Two cars behind the school bus, Louise Lindenmeyer, office manager, late for work, braked her old gray Volvo. She buzzed down her window and glared at that goddamned school bus.

  She’d been stuck on its tailpipe since Buena Vista Park, then watched it pull away from her at the light at Fifth and Market as a stream of traffic took the turn and pulled in front of her.

  And now that bus had stuck her at a light… again.

  Louise heard a shout. “Hey, asshole!”

  A man in his shirtsleeves, tie flapping, face bunched up, dried shaving cream under his left ear, walked past her car to give the bus driver hell.

  A horn honked, and another, and then a cacophony of horns.

  The light was green.

  Louise took her foot off the brake and at that instant felt a concussive shock, her ears ringing as she saw the roof of the school bus explode violently upward.

  Chunks of burning metal, steel-and-glass shrapnel, shot out in all directions faster than gunfire. A mushroom cloud like that of a small A-bomb formed above the bus, and the box-shaped vehicle became a fireball. Oily smoke colored the air.

  Louise saw the blue van in the lane to the left of the bus bloom with flame, then blacken in front of her eyes.

  No one got out of the van!

  And now the blaze rushed at the silver Camry directly in front of her. The gas tank blew, and fire danced over the car, consuming it in vivid, leaping flames.

  The bunch-faced man pulled himself up off the pavement to the hole where her passenger-side window had been. His shirt was gone. His hair was black fr
izz. The skin of his face was draped over his collarbone like tissue paper.

  Louise recoiled in horror, grappled with her door handle as fire lapped at the hood of her Volvo. The car door opened and the heat rushed in.

  That’s when she saw the skin of her own arm still on the steering wheel, as if it were a glove turned inside out. Louise couldn’t hear the businessman’s horrified screams or her own. It was as though her ears had been plugged with wax. Her vision was all dancing spots and blurry shapes.

  And then she was sucked down into a well of black.

  Two

  MY PARTNER, RICH CONKLIN, was at the wheel of our unmarked car and I was sugaring my coffee when I felt the concussion.

  The dashboard shook. Hot coffee slopped over my hand. I shouted, “What the hell?” A few moments later the radio sputtered, the dispatcher calling out, “Reports of an explosion at Market and Fourth. Nearby units identify and respond.”

  I dumped my coffee out the window, grabbed the mic, and told Dispatch we were two blocks away as Conklin accelerated up the hill, then braked so that our car slewed across Fourth Street, blocking traffic.

  We bolted from the car, Conklin yelling, “Lindsay, watch out. There could be secondary explosions!”

  The air was opaque with roiling smoke, rank with burning rubber, plastic, and human flesh. I stopped running, wiped my sleeve across my stinging eyes, and fought against my gag reflex. I took in the hellish scene — and my hair literally lifted away from the back of my neck.

  Market Street is a major artery. It should have been pulsing with commuter traffic, but instead it looked like Baghdad after a suicide bomb. People were screaming, running in circles, blinded by panic and a screen of smoky haze.

  I called Chief Tracchio, reported that I was the first officer on the scene.

  “What’s happening, Sergeant?”

  I told him what I saw: five dead on the street, two more at the bus stop. “Unknown number of victims alive or dead, still in their cars,” I coughed into the phone.

  “You okay, Boxer?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I signed off as cruisers, fire rigs, and EMS units, their sirens whooping, streamed onto Market and formed a perimeter at Third and at Fifth, blocking off oncoming traffic. Moments later, the command vehicle rolled up, and the bomb squad, covered top to toe in gray protective suits, poured onto the debris field.

  A bloodied woman of indeterminate age and race staggered toward me. I caught her as her knees buckled, and Conklin and I helped her to a gurney.

  “I saw it,” the victim whispered. She pointed to a blackened hulk at the intersection. “That school bus was a bomb.”

  “A school bus? Please, God, not kids!”

  I looked everywhere but saw no children.

  Had they all been burned alive?

  Three

  WATER STREAMED from fire hoses, dousing flame. Metal sizzled and the air turned rancid.

  I found Chuck Hanni, arson investigator and explosion expert, stooping outside the school bus’s side door. He had his hair slicked back, and he wore khakis and a denim shirt, sleeves rolled up, showing the old burn scar that ran from the base of his right thumb to his elbow.

  Hanni looked up, said, “God-awful disaster, Lindsay.”

  He walked me through what he called a “catastrophic explosion,” showed me the two adult-size “crispy critters” curled between the double row of seats near the driver’s side. Pointed out that the bus’s front tires were full of air, the back tires, flat.

  “The explosion started in the rear, not the engine compartment. And I found this.”

  Hanni indicated rounded pieces of glass, conduction tubes, and blue plastic shards melted into a mass behind the bus door.

  “Imagine the explosive force,” he said, pointing to a metal projectile embedded in the wall. “That’s a triple beam balance,” he said, “and I’m guessing the blue plastic is from a cooler. Only took a few gallons of ether and a spark to do all this…”

  A wave of his hand to indicate the three blocks of utter destruction.

  I heard hacking coughs and boots crunching on glass. Conklin, his six-foot-two frame materializing out of the haze. “There’s something you guys should see before the bomb squad throws us outta here.”

  Hanni and I followed Conklin across the intersection to where a man’s body lay folded up against a lamppost.

  Conklin said, “A witness saw this guy fly out of the bus’s windshield when it blew.”

  The dead man was Hispanic, his face sliced up, his hair in dyed-red twists matted with blood, his body barely covered in the remnants of an electric-blue sweatshirt and jeans, his skull bashed in from his collision with the lamppost. From the age lines in his face, I guessed this man had lived a hard forty years. I dug his wallet out of his hip pocket, opened it to his driver’s license.

  “His name is Juan Gomez. According to this, he’s only twenty-three.”

  Hanni bent down, peeled back the dead man’s lips. I saw two broken rows of decayed stubs where his teeth had once been.

  “A tweaker,” Hanni said. “He was probably the cook. Lindsay, this case belongs to Narcotics, maybe the DEA.”

  Hanni punched buttons on his cell phone as I stared down at Juan Gomez’s body. First visible sign of methamphetamine use is rotten teeth. It takes a couple of years of food- and sleep-deprivation to age a meth head twenty years. By then, the drug would have eaten away big hunks of his brain.

  Gomez was on his way out before the explosion.

  “So the bus was a mobile meth lab?” said Conklin.

  Hanni was on hold for Narcotics.

  “Yep,” he said. “Until it blew all to hell.”

  Part One

  BAGMAN JESUS

  Chapter 1

  CINDY THOMAS BUTTONED her lightweight Burberry trench coat, said, “Morning, Pinky,” as the doorman held open the front doors of the Blakely Arms. He touched his hat brim and searched Cindy’s eyes, saying, “Have a good day, Ms. Thomas. You take care.”

  Cindy couldn’t say that she never looked for trouble. She worked the crime desk at the Chronicle and liked to say, “Bad news is good news to me.”

  But a year and a half ago a psycho with an illegal sublet and an anger-management problem, living two floors above her, had sneaked into apartments and gone on a brutal killing spree.

  The killer had been caught and convicted, and was currently quarantined on death row at the “Q.”

  But still, there were aftershocks at the Blakely Arms. The residents triple-locked their doors every night, flinched at sudden noises, felt the loss of common, everyday security.

  Cindy was determined not to live with this kind of fear.

  She smiled at the doorman, said, “I’m a badass, Pinky. Thugs had better watch out for me.”

  Then she breezed outside into the early May morning.

  Striding down Townsend from Third to Fifth — two very long blocks — Cindy traveled between the old and new San Francisco. She passed the liquor store next to her building, the drive-through McDonald’s across the street, the Starbucks and the Borders on the ground floor of a new residential high-rise, using the time to return calls, book appointments, set up her day.

  She paused near the recently rejuvenated Caltrain station that used to be a hell pit of homeless druggies, now much improved as the neighborhood gentrification took hold.

  But behind the Caltrain station was a fenced-off and buckled stretch of sidewalk that ran along the train yard. Rusted junkers and vans from the Jimi Hendrix era parked on the street. The vehicles were crash pads for the homeless.

  As Cindy mentally geared up for her power walk through that “ no-fly zone,” she noticed a clump of street people ahead — and some of them seemed to be crying.

  Cindy hesitated.

  Then she drew her laminated ID card out of her coat, held it in front of her like a badge, pushed her way into the crowd — and it parted for her.

  The ailanthus trees shooting up thr
ough cracks in the pavement cast a netted shade on a pile of rags, old newspapers, and fast-food trash that was lying at the base of the chain-link fence.

  Cindy felt a wave of nausea, sucked in her breath.

  The pile of rags was, in fact, a dead man. His clothes were blood-soaked and his face so beaten to mush, Cindy couldn’t make out his features.

  She asked a bystander, “What happened? Who is this man?”

  The bystander was a heavyset woman, toothless, wearing many layers and textures of clothes. Her legs were bandaged to the knees and her nose was pink from crying.

  She gave Cindy a sidelong look.

  “It’s B-B-Bagman Jesus. Someone killed him!”

  Cindy thumbed 911 on her Treo, reported what had clearly been a murder, and waited for the police to arrive.

  As she waited, street people gathered around her.

  These were the unwashed, the uncounted, the unnoticed, fringe people who slipped through the cracks, lived where the Census Bureau feared to tread.

  They stank and they twitched, they stammered and scratched, and they jockeyed to get closer to Cindy. They reached out to touch her, talked over and corrected one another.

  They wanted to be heard.

  And although a half hour ago Cindy would have avoided all contact with them, she now wanted very much to hear them. As time passed and the police didn’t come, Cindy felt a story budding, getting ready to bloom.

  She used her cell again, called her friend Lindsay at home.

  The phone rang six times before a masculine voice rasped, “Hello?” Sounded to Cindy like maybe she’d interrupted Lindsay and Joe at an inopportune moment.

  “Beautiful timing, Cindy,” Joe panted.

  “Sorry, Joe, really,” said Cindy. “But I’ve got to speak to Lindsay.”