The 8th Confession Read online

  I rolled my eyes, but Conklin was shaking his head and grinning at Cindy. He liked her!

  I was ready to call Jacobi, let him straighten her out, when Claire blew through the gate, stomped toward us with a bad look in her eyes.

  “Dr. Washburn is on her way back,” Brenda’s electronic voice cawed from my intercom.

  Claire was busy. She didn’t like to pay house calls to Homicide. Cindy, oblivious, called out, “Claire! We’re off to Susie’s. Come with us.”

  Claire fixed her eyes on me.

  “I can’t go to Susie’s,” she said, “and neither can you. Another one just came in. Killed just like the Baileys.”

  Chapter 49

  THE DRAPED BODY on the autopsy table was female, thirty-three, her skin as white as my mom’s bone china. Her hair was a shimmering shoulder-length cut in four shades of blond. Her finger- and toenails had been lacquered recently, oxblood red, no chips.

  She looked like the sleeping princess in the fairy tale waiting for the prince to chop through the briars and kiss her awake.

  I read her toe tag. “Sara Needleman.”

  “Positively ID’d by her personal assistant,” said Claire.

  I knew Sara Needleman by her photographs in Vogue and W. She was a big-name clothing designer who made custom gowns for those who had thirty grand to throw down for a dress. I’d read in the Gazette that Needleman often did gangs of bridesmaids’ dresses, each gown related in color but distinctly different in style, and that during the debutante season, Needleman’s shop was in overdrive, designing for both the moms and the debs.

  Surely Sara Needleman knew the Baileys.

  Claire picked up her clipboard, said, “Here’s what I’ve got. Ms. Needleman called her personal assistant, Toni Reynolds, at eight this morning complaining of abdominal cramps. Ms. Reynolds says she told Sara to call her doctor and that she’d check in on her when she got to work.

  “Sara did call her doctor, Robert Dweck, internist, and was told she could come in at noon.”

  “She didn’t make the appointment,” Conklin said.

  “No flies on you,” Claire said to Conklin. “Sara Needleman called nine one one at ten-oh-eight. EMS got there at ten fifteen, found Sara dead in her bedroom.”

  “She died of stomach cramps? Something she ate?” I asked.

  Claire continued, “To be determined, girlfriend. To be determined. Stomach contents and blood are at the lab.

  “Meanwhile, I spoke with the medics who brought Sara in. There was no vomit or excrement in the house.”

  “Why do you think her death is like the Baileys’?”

  “At first I didn’t. There was a lull when she came in, so I got to her quick, thinking I knew what to look for.”

  Three of Claire’s assistants tried to look busy, but they were hanging close enough to hear her report. I could already see the words “Breaking News” under a glamour shot of Sara Needleman interrupting our regularly scheduled programming. I could feel the public linking Needleman’s death to the Baileys’, the barometric pressure falling.

  Big storm coming in.

  Claire ticked off the possible causes of Sara Needleman’s death.

  “Leaving poison aside for now, stomach cramps are often caused by a perforated ulcer or an ectopic pregnancy gone bust.”

  “But not this time,” Conklin guessed.

  “Correct, Mr. Man. So the cramps could’ve been unrelated to her death. I checked for aneurysms, stroke, heart attack – found nothing. I examined all her organs. You could gift wrap them, tie ’em with a bow. Show ’em to med students to let them know what normal organs look like.”

  “Huh.”

  “No marks on her body, no bruises of any kind. Nothing wrong with Sara Needleman except that she’s dead.”

  Conklin said, “She was on my list of names. I hadn’t gotten to her yet.”

  “Too late now,” I muttered.

  Claire said, “So now I’m thinking we’ve got the Baileys and Needleman. Same social circle. Could be same cause of death. So when I sent out Sara’s blood, I ordered the works. I’ve got sections holding at minus seventy for testing by someone who’s going to be looking for something other than the usual herbs and spices,” Claire said glumly. “What am I going to say now, compadres?”

  Conklin said it. “More police work.”

  “Bingo, Ricardo. Someone’s got to figure this out, because I’ve hit the wall.”

  Claire turned to Sara Needleman’s body, put her hand on the woman’s sheeted torso, and said, “I hear hoofbeats coming down the road, Sara darlin’, I’m thinking ‘horse.’ You are a definite zebra.”

  Part Three. PARTY ALL THE TIME

  Chapter 50

  THE MORNING AFTER Sara Needleman died, Chief Anthony Tracchio called to say, “The mayor’s on my ass. Drop everything except this case, and don’t screw up.”

  I said, “Yes, sir, Tony. No screwing up,” but I wanted to scream, “What are we looking for?”

  Lieutenant Michael Hampton, a twenty-year veteran of the Special Investigation Division (SID), had also been assigned to our dead- millionaires case, and he looked half as happy as I was. We met in Hampton ’s office, broke down the tasks, and divvied up the list.

  Hampton deployed a team to Dr. Dweck’s office to collect Sara Needleman’s records and interview the doctor and his staff. Another SID team shot over to Needleman’s showroom and office to interview Sara’s personal assistant, Toni Reynolds, and the rest of Needleman’s staff.

  Conklin and I drove out to Needleman’s house in Cow Hollow with my four guys caravanning behind. Conklin parked on the street. Chi and McNeil, Lemke and Samuels, started the neighborhood canvass while Conklin and I found the main entrance to Needleman’s house.

  Sara Needleman’s place wasn’t as Architectural Digest as the Bailey manse, but by any standard, it was stunning. The caretaker, a twentysomething hipster sporting black denim and a goatee, name of Lucas Wilde, met us at the door. He took us through the eight-thousand-square-foot house, a home Sotheby’s would be listing as soon as Disaster Masters cleaned up CSU’s mess.

  After the tour of the seven-bedroom house, including the bi-level Japanese garden in back, we invited Lucas Wilde to come to the squad room and tell us what he knew about Sara Needleman.

  He willingly complied.

  “I know everyone who comes and goes,” he said.

  Conklin left us in Interview Room Number Two, ran Wilde’s name, got nothing on him, came back with a legal pad and coffees all around.

  We spent another hour with Wilde, and he dumped all his thoughts about Sara Needleman and the company she kept.

  “Poofs and phonies, mostly. And then there were her clients.”

  The young man laboriously listed all of Sara’s visitors, both friends and workers, including the housekeeper, the dog walker, the Japanese gardener, the tile man, the koi keeper, the yoga teacher, and the caterer.

  “What kind of relationship did you have with Sara?” I asked.

  “We got along fine. But I was no Lady Chatterley’s lover, if that’s where you’re going. I was the gofer and the handyman, which is what she wanted, and I was happy to have the job and the cool place to live.”

  Wilde told us that he saw Sara briefly on the morning of her death. He brought her newspaper in from the gate, and she seemed okay to him.

  “She just cracked the door, took the paper. She wouldn’t have told me if she was sick.”

  “Got any ideas?” I asked Wilde. “If Sara Needleman was killed, who would’ve killed her?”

  “I wouldn’t know where to start,” Wilde said. “Sara was a snob. If you were a mover or a shaker, she was a sweetheart.

  “Otherwise, man, she could be cold. I don’t know her friends from her enemies, and frankly I don’t think she knew either.”

  Chapter 51

  SARA NEEDLEMAN was still chilling in the morgue that evening when the teams working her case were summoned to Chief Anthony Tracchio’s office wit
h its high view of Bryant Street and a photographic panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge mounted across from his mahogany desk.

  Tracchio was a bureaucrat by trade, had come up through the ranks by political appointment. He had no street experience, was squishy around the middle, and had a silly hair-sprayed comb-over, but I was starting to appreciate that he was politically shrewd, a quality that I lack entirely.

  Tracchio was agitated in a way I’d rarely seen him. He said, “People, tell your families you won’t be home until we’ve got this case wrapped up. And buck up. Whoever solves this thing is going to be a hero. Or heroine,” he said in my direction.

  Teams reported, and Tracchio, Hampton, and I questioned them before they were tasked to new assignments.

  Conklin and I collected the names of every person interviewed regarding Sara Needleman, then went back to our desks to compare them with a similar list on the Baileys.

  “Compare and contrast” was eye-glazing work, but it had to be done. I pulled my chair over to Conklin’s desk and read off names.

  Whenever we had a match, Conklin slapped the Staples Easy Button and it squawked, “That was easy.”

  By nine that night, our empty pizza box was in the round file. We’d eliminated the Baileys’ live-in household staff and a few hundred others, but still the lists yielded dozens of overlapping names.

  The Baileys and Sara Needleman went to the same gym, were all members of the opera society, frequented the same restaurants and clubs. They even shared the same dry cleaner.

  “Sara Needleman was thirty-three and so was Isa Bailey. Bet they went to the same school,” said Conklin.

  I nodded. It was something.

  Something that expanded the search.

  I drained my soda can, tossed it in the trash, and said, “I read about a lab experiment. First up were the rats. Two lights, one flashes green, one flashes red. Guess the light that’s about to flash, and if you go to the correct light, you get food. Eight out of ten times, the green one flashes.”

  “Go on.”

  “The green light flashes so many times, the rats go to that chute every time. Why not? They’re rewarded eighty percent of the time.

  “Now the behaviorists did the same experiment with humans.”

  “Never been high on rat chow myself.”

  I laughed. “The humans got M amp;M’s.”

  “I know this is going somewhere,” said my partner.

  “The people tried to predict when each light would go on. They were looking for a pattern – so many reds before a green, like that. And they were rewarded only sixty-seven percent of the time.”

  “Proving that rats are smarter than people.”

  I shook my head no.

  Conklin tried again. “Proving that we should interview every name on both lists whether they’re red people or green?”

  I laughed, said, “Proving that sometimes people think too much.”

  “You’re tired, Linds.”

  “Let’s compare the lists again. And this time, we don’t overthink. We just pull the names of the rats who had keys to the victims’ houses.”

  Rich hit the Staples button, and it yapped, “That was easy.”

  Chapter 52

  PET GIRL WAS handing over Sara Needleman’s dogs to the caretaker, Lucas Wilde-boy, she liked to call him, when the squad car pulled up to the curb and two familiar cops got out. The woman cop was tall, blond, looked like Sheryl Crow had landed a gig on Celebrity Cops.

  The guy cop was a couple of inches taller than the blonde, buffed, maybe thirty.

  Sheryl Crow showed her badge, reintroduced herself as Sergeant Boxer and her partner as Inspector Conklin, and asked if Pet Girl would mind coming with them to the Hall of Justice to answer some questions.

  Pet Girl said, “Okay.”

  She was cool. All she had to do was play along, and they’d move along – just like they’d done the last time, when they’d questioned her about Isa and Ethan Bailey.

  She slid into the backseat of the squad car, thought about the night she’d done it, pretty sure she hadn’t forgotten anything.

  She flashed on Wilde-boy, positive that he hadn’t seen her go into Sara’s house because he’d walked naked past his window, the light going on in his bathroom, and she’d heard the shower running before she’d gone in the main entrance.

  She remembered doing it to Sara when “the dame with the golden needle” was so boozed up, she couldn’t even open an eye. Pet Girl felt a thrill, like she wanted to laugh or maybe pee.

  And she listened to the two cops gabbing in the front seat, talking to Dispatch, joking and stuff, seemed to Pet Girl that they weren’t acting like they had a killer sitting behind them.

  More like they’d already forgotten she was even there.

  She stood silently between the two cops as they went up in the elevator, turned down the offer of a soft drink when they showed her to the interview room.

  “Are you sure?” the sergeant asked her. “Maybe a bottle of water?” Like the cop cared instead of wanting to get a DNA sample, a trick so old it was amazing anyone ever fell for it.

  “I want to help,” Pet Girl said sweetly. “Whatever you want to know.”

  Inspector Conklin was cute, had light-brown hair that flopped over his eyes. He pushed it away as he read to himself whatever notes he had written about her. And then he asked her where she’d been over the last forty-eight hours.

  Pet Girl knew they were locking in her story in case they ever interrogated her again, and hey, no problem.

  “I walked the Baileys’ dogs four times, morning and evening both days. I wonder what’s going to happen to the dogs…”

  Then she’d detailed her tight calendar of dog-walking and running errands, including walking Sara Needleman’s AKC champs this morning after Lucas Wilde called her to say that Sara Needleman was dead.

  “See anything or anyone unusual in this neighborhood in the last week or so?” Sergeant Boxer asked her.

  “Nope.”

  “What do you think of Lucas Wilde?”

  “He’s okay. Not my type.”

  “What was your relationship like with Sara Needleman?” asked Inspector Conklin.

  “I loved Sara,” she told him. Found herself giving him a flirty smile. Couldn’t hurt. “Sara was smart and funny and generous, too. She gave me samples from her collection. That’s just the way she was.”

  “How often did you walk her dogs?”

  “Maybe once a week. She liked to walk them herself. Anyway, if she got into a time crunch, she’d call me and I’d pitch in.”

  “And the Baileys?”

  “Same. Walk the dogs. Run errands. I work for a lot of people in their crowd. Dozens. I’ve got references.”

  “Sounds pretty good,” Inspector Conklin said. “You make your own hours.” Then, “Did Sara have any enemies?”

  “Christ, yeah. She had three ex-husbands and about thirty ex-boyfriends, but I’m not saying they’d want to kill her.”

  “Anyone on that list of exes who may have also held a grudge against the Baileys?”

  “If you only knew how little those people told me about anything.”

  “Do you have keys to the Needleman house and the Bailey house?” Sergeant Boxer asked her. Pet Girl reached into a side pocket of her backpack, pulled out a key ring the size of a boat anchor.

  “I’ve got lots of keys. That’s kind of the point. I keep out of my clients’ way. I’m the silent type, and they like that about me. I come in, walk the pets, bring them back. Pick up my check. Most of the time, nobody even knows I’ve been there.”

  Chapter 53

  AFTER THE dog walker left, I said to Conklin, “You know, my dog sitter has had my keys and my alarm code for years and I’ve never thought a thing of it. Martha loves Karen. I trust her.”

  “So what are you saying now, Sarge-of-My-Heart? You’re throwing out the ‘rats with keys’ theory?”

  “I don’t know, bud. The dog walker’s got
access, but what’s her motive? What’s she got to gain by killing her employers?” My intercom buzzed, and Brenda’s voice came over, sounding breathy and a little coy. “Lindsay, you have a visitor.”

  I looked across the squad room. Didn’t see anyone.

  I pressed the intercom button, asked Brenda, “Who is it?”

  “He’s on his way back.”

  I heard him before I saw him, the whir of rubber rolling over linoleum flooring, and then St. Jude was there, doing a wheelie, parking his chair up to my desk, a huge grin on his bearded face.

  “Boxer, you look great, kid. Better and better.”

  I got up and hugged the legendary Simon McCorkle, known around the state as “St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.” McCorkle had been shot in the back while on duty, was paralyzed from the waist down but refused to retire. Since that dark day twenty years ago, “St. Jude” had been in charge of cold cases, worked out of an office suite at the crime lab.

  “Thanks, McCorkle. I see a little gray in your beard. Looks fine on you.”

  “Give me your hand, Boxer. No, the left one. Not married? So I still have a chance.”

  I laughed, introduced McCorkle to Conklin, and they gripped paws like long-lost brothers of the shamrock, and pretty soon we were telling St. Jude about the case of the deceased millionaires, an investigation that was driving us crazy.

  McCorkle said, “That’s why I’m here, girl- o. When I saw Sara Needleman on the tube this morning, I added it to the Baileys – and guess what, Boxer?

  “It rang a bell.”

  Chapter 54

  MCCORKLE REACHED BEHIND his chair with one of his massive, heavily tattooed arms and pulled a backpack onto his lap.

  “I brought you a present,” he said, winking at me.

  “I can’t even guess, but I’m hoping for chocolate.”

  He took a murder book out of his backpack, a three-ring binder thick with notes and documents from a homicide case. The book was lettered across the cover with a broad-tip marker: PANGORN, 1982.