4th of July Read online

  I let Martha out back, put coffee on to perk, and booted up my laptop.

  I remembered that Bob Hinton had said that two other people had been killed in Half Moon Bay two years before: Ray and Molly Whittaker. They were summer people, Hinton had said. Ray was a photographer, Molly a bit player, an extra, in Hollywood.

  I went online to the NCIC database and looked them up. I was still in shock when I went into the bedrooms to rouse the girls.

  When they were dressed and had coffee and scones in front of them, I told them what I’d learned about Ray and Molly Whittaker.

  “They were pornographers, both of them. Ray was behind the camera, and Molly performed with kids. Boys, girls, it didn’t seem to matter,” I said. “They were busted for it and acquitted. Their lawyer? It was Brancusi, again.”

  The girls knew me too well. They got on my case, warning me to be careful, reminding me that for all intents and purposes I was a civilian and that even though it seemed logical to check out a possible connection between the Whittakers and Dennis Agnew, I was out of my territory, no one had my back, and I was heading for big trouble.

  I must have said “I know, I know” a half dozen times, and as we said good-bye in the driveway I made a lot of promises to be a good girl.

  “You should think about coming home, Lindsay,” said Claire finally, holding my face in her hands.

  “Right,” I said. “I’ll definitely think about it.”

  They both hugged me as though they would never see me again, and frankly, that got to me. As Claire’s car backed down the driveway, Cindy leaned out the window.

  “I’ll call you tonight. Think about what we said. Think, Lindsay.”

  I blew kisses and went inside the house. I found my handbag hanging from a doorknob and rooted around inside it until I felt my phone, my badge, and my gun.

  A minute later I started up the Explorer.

  It was a short drive into town, with my mind churning right up to the second I pulled my car into a parking spot outside the police barracks.

  I found the chief in his office, staring at his computer, coffee mug in hand, a box of sugared doughnuts on the side chair.

  “Those things will kill you,” I said. He moved the doughnuts so I could sit down.

  “If you ask me, death by doughnuts is a fine way to go. What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?”

  “This,” I said. I unfurled Dennis Agnew’s rap sheet and slapped it down on top of the messy pile of paper on the chief’s desk. “Ray and Molly Whittaker were whipped, weren’t they?”

  “Yup, they were the first.”

  “Did you like anyone for their murders?”

  The chief nodded.

  “Couldn’t prove it then, can’t prove it now, but we’ve been watching this guy for a long time.”

  He picked up Agnew’s rap sheet and handed it back to me. “We know all about Dennis Agnew. He’s our prime suspect.”

  Chapter 73

  I WAS ON THE porch at sunset, noodling a little tune on my guitar, when headlights at the bottom of the road crawled slowly up the street and stopped outside Cat’s house.

  I was already moving toward the car as the driver got out of the front seat and opened the rear passenger-side door.

  “I get it,” I said, my face glowing enough to light up the dusk. “You just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

  “Exactly,” Joe said, reaching an arm around my waist. “Thought I’d surprise you.”

  I put my hand on the front of his crisp white shirt.

  “Claire called you.”

  “And Cindy.” Joe laughed a little sheepishly. “Let me take you out to dinner.”

  “Hmm. What if I make dinner here?”

  “Deal.”

  Joe tapped the roof, and the sedan took off.

  “C’mere,” he said, folding me in his arms, kissing me, shocking me once again that a kiss could spark such a conflagration. I had one moderately sane thought as the heat surged through my body: Here we go again. Another drive-by romantic interlude on the roller-coaster affair of my life.

  Joe cupped my face in his hands and kissed me again, and my heart surrendered its feeble protestation. We entered the house, and I kicked the door shut behind us.

  I stood on tiptoe with my arms around Joe’s neck and let him walk me backward through the house until I was on my back in bed and Joe was taking off my clothes. He started with my shoes and kissed everything he exposed on his way up to my lips.

  Dear God, he melted everything but my Kokopelli.

  I gasped and reached for him, but he was gone.

  I opened my eyes and watched him undress. He was gorgeous. Fit, tanned, hard. And all for me.

  I smiled with sheer delight. Five minutes ago, I’d been looking forward to a Law & Order marathon. Now this! I opened my arms, and Joe covered my body with his.

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “Shut up,” I said. I bit his lower lip, not too hard, then opened my mouth to his and wrapped my limbs around him.

  When we emerged from the bedroom an hour later, barefoot and disheveled, it was pitch-black outside. Martha thumped her tail, plainly meaning, Feed me, which I did.

  Then I made a luscious tricolor salad with a mustard vinaigrette and thinly shaved Parmesan, and I put some pasta on to boil while Joe stirred basil, oregano, and garlic into tomato sauce. Soon a divine aroma filled the air.

  We ate at the kitchen table, exchanging our headlines of the past week. Joe’s headlines were a lot like CNN’s. Horrifying car bombs, airport infiltrations, and political dustups that I didn’t need to have top-secret clearance to hear about. As we washed the dishes together, I told Joe the briefest, least inflammatory version of my encounters with Agnew.

  His jaw clenched as I laid it out for him.

  “Pretend I didn’t tell you,” I said, kissing his brow as I refilled his glass with wine.

  “Pretend I’m not mad at you for putting yourself in that kind of danger.”

  Jeez, had everyone forgotten that I was a cop? And a smart one, by the way. First female lieutenant in San Francisco and so on and so forth.

  “How do you feel about Cary Grant?” I asked him. “How does Katharine Hepburn grab you?”

  We cuddled together on the sofa and watched Bringing Up Baby, one of my favorite screwball comedies. I cracked up as I always did at the scene where Cary Grant crawls around after a terrier with a dinosaur bone in its mouth, and Joe laughed along with me, holding me in his arms.

  “If you ever catch me doing that with Martha, don’t ask.”

  I laughed.

  “I love you so much, Lindsay.”

  “I love you so much, too.”

  Later that night, I fell asleep inside the curve of Joe’s body thinking, This is so right. I just can’t get enough of this man.

  Chapter 74

  JOE COOKED BACON AND scrambled eggs in the dazzling light pouring through the kitchen windows. I filled mugs with coffee, and Joe read the squint in my eyes for the unspoken question that it was.

  “I’m here until I get the call. If you want, I’ll help you brainstorm the murders.”

  We got into the Explorer with Joe at the wheel and Martha on my lap. I filled Joe in on the Sarduccis as we slowly cruised past their glass house beside the bay.

  Then we headed up to Crescent Heights, taking the snaking dirt road to the door of the Daltrys’ abandoned little house.

  If ever a house looked devastated by murder, this was it. The front lawn had gone to seed, boards had been hammered over the windows and the doors, and scraps of crime scene tape fluttered like little yellow birds in the bushes.

  “Very different socioeconomic class from the Sarduccis,” said Joe.

  “Yeah. I don’t think these murders have anything to do with money.”

  We pointed the Explorer down the mountain and within a few minutes we entered Ocean Colony, the golf course–bordered community where the O’Malleys had lived and died. I p
ointed out the white colonial with blue shutters as we neared it. Now there was a For Sale sign in the front yard and a Lincoln in the driveway.

  We parked at the curb and saw a blond woman in a pink Lilly Pulitzer dress exit the house and lock the front door. When she saw us, her face stretched into a heavily lipsticked smile.

  “Hello,” she said, “I’m Emily Harris, Pacific Homes Real Estate. I’m sorry; the open house is Sunday. I can’t show you the home now because I have an appointment in town. . . .”

  My face must have shown disappointment, and I saw Ms. Harris size us up as likely prospects.

  “Listen. Replace the key in the lockbox on your way out. Okay?”

  We got out of the car, and I linked my arm through Joe’s. Looking every bit the married couple shopping for our new home, Joe and I climbed the front steps and unlocked the O’Malleys’ front door.

  Chapter 75

  THE INSIDE OF THE house had been sanitized, spiffed up, and repainted—whatever it took to get top dollar for a very challenging property. I lingered in the center hall, then followed Joe up the winding staircase.

  When I got to the master bedroom, I found him staring at the closet door.

  “There was a small hole here, at eye level—see, Linds? It was patched.” He dented the still-malleable Spackle with his fingernail.

  “A peephole?”

  “A peephole in a closet,” said Joe. “That’s odd, don’t you think? Unless the O’Malleys were making home movies.”

  My mind whirled for a moment as I grappled with a possible connection between homemade porn and the Randy Long variety. Had the cops seen the camera setup?

  And if they had, so what?

  There was nothing illegal about consenting adults at play.

  I stepped inside the newly painted closet, batted the wire coat hangers aside, then grabbed them to stop their jangling.

  That’s when I saw another patch of Spackle visible under the fresh paint.

  I prodded it with a finger and felt my heart start to hammer. There was another peephole at the back of the closet and it went right through the wall.

  I took one of the hangers off the rod and straightened it into a long wire, which I inserted into the hole.

  “Joe, could you go find where this comes out?”

  The wire felt like a living thing as I waited for the tug that finally came from the other end. Joe returned seconds later. “It goes through to another bedroom. You should see this, Lindsay.”

  The room next door was still partly furnished, with a ruffled four-poster, matching vanity, and an ornate full-length mirror affixed to the wall. Joe pointed out the hole disguised as a floral detail in the mirror’s carved wooden frame.

  “Shit, Joe. This is their daughter’s room. Were those bastards spying on Caitlin? Were they filming her?”

  I stared out the car window as Joe drove us back to Cat’s house. I couldn’t stop thinking about that second peephole. What kind of people had the O’Malleys been? Why would they have trained a camera on that child?

  Had it been some kind of nanny-cam in the past?

  Or was it something far more sinister?

  My mind did pretzel loops around that peephole as I tried on every possibility. But it all came back to one question: Did any of this tie in with the murders?

  Chapter 76

  IT WAS ONLY NOON when we got back to Cat’s house. Joe and I went into my nieces’ bedroom so that we could use their wall-size corkboard to plot out what we knew about the murders.

  I found marking pens and construction paper, and pulled up two small red plastic stools to sit on.

  “So what do we know?” Joe asked, tacking yellow paper across the board.

  “Circumstantial evidence suggests three killers. The ME says it looks to him as though various knives and belts were used, backing up my theory that there were multiple perps, but there’s really nothing else. Not a hair, not a fiber, not a print, not a speck of DNA. It’s like working a case in the 1940s. CSU wouldn’t help crack this one.”

  “What do you see as a pattern? Talk it out for me.”

  “It’s not coming in clear,” I said, moving my hands over a make-believe crystal ball. “Stark told me that the victims were all married. Then he says, ‘That doesn’t mean anything. Eighty percent of the population here is married.’”

  Joe printed the victims’ names on the sheets of paper.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  “All of the couples had children except the Whittakers. The Whittakers made kiddie porn, and Caitlin O’Malley may have been a victim. That’s pure speculation. The porn angle makes me think there may be some connection to the local porn guys, and through them to organized crime—speculation again. And lastly, my John Doe doesn’t seem to match the victim profile.”

  “Maybe the first murder was an impulse,” said Joe, “and the later murders were premeditated.”

  “Hmm,” I said, letting my gaze drift to the windowsill, where sweet potatoes grew in water glasses, sending out tendrils and fresh green leaves along the ledge.

  “That makes sense. Maybe my John Doe was killed in a crime of passion. If so, the killer or killers didn’t feel the urge again for quite a long time. Same signature. But what’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know yet. Try boiling it down for me.”

  “We’ve got eight related murders within a ten-mile radius. All the victims had their throats slit, except for Lorelei O’Malley, who was gutted. All eight plus John Doe were whipped. Motive unknown. And there’s a prime suspect who’s an ex-porn stud and a Teflon-coated sleazeball.”

  “I’ll make some calls,” Joe said.

  Chapter 77

  WHEN JOE GOT OFF the phone with the FBI, I picked up the marking pen and Joe summarized his notes.

  “None of the victims raised any red flags: no felonies, no changed names, no connections with Dennis Agnew. As for the Playmate Pen guys,” Joe said, “Ricardo Montefiore, aka Rick Monte, has been convicted of pandering, lewd public behavior, and assault, and that’s it for him.

  “Rocco Benuto, the bouncer at your porn shop, is a lightweight. One count of possession. One count of breaking and entering a convenience store in New Jersey when he was nineteen. Unarmed.”

  “Hardly the typical profile of a serial killer.”

  Joe nodded, then continued. “All three come up as ‘known associates’ of various low-to-midlevel mobsters. They attended a few wiseguy parties, provided girls. As for Dennis Agnew, you already know about the murder charge in 2000 that was dismissed.”

  “Ralph Brancusi was the lawyer who got him off.”

  Joe nodded again. “The victim was a porn starlet from Urbana, Illinois. She was in her twenties, a heroin addict, busted a few times for prostitution. And she was one of Agnew’s girlfriends before she disappeared for good.”

  “Disappeared? As in, no body was found?”

  “Sorry, Lindsay. No body.”

  “So we don’t know if her throat was slit.”

  “No.”

  I put my chin in my hands. It was frustrating to be so close to the very heart of this horror show and yet have not one decent lead to run with.

  But one pattern was clear. The murders were coming closer together. My John Doe had been killed ten years ago, the Whittakers eight years later, the Daltrys a month and a half ago. Now two double homicides in one week.

  Joe sat down on the little stool next to mine. He took my hand, and we stared at the notes tacked to the corkboard. When I spoke, my voice seemed to echo in the girls’ small room.

  “They’re ratcheting up their timetable, Joe. Right now, they’re planning to do it again.”

  “You know this for a fact?” Joe said.

  “I do. I can feel it.”

  Chapter 78

  I AWOKE TO THE jarring sound of the bedside phone. I grabbed it on the second ring, noticing that Joe was gone and that there was a note on the chair where his clothes had been.

  “Joe?”


  “It’s Yuki, Lindsay. Did I wake you?”

  “No, I’m up,” I lied.

  We talked for five minutes at Yuki’s trademark warp speed, and after we hung up, there was no falling back to sleep. I read Joe’s sweet good-bye note, then I pulled on some sweats, put a leash on Martha, and together we jogged to the beach.

  A cleansing breeze whipped in off the bay as Martha and I headed north. We hadn’t gotten very far when I heard someone calling my name. A small figure up ahead came running toward me.

  “Lindseee, Lindseee!”

  “Allison! Hey, girl.”

  The dark-eyed little girl hugged me hard around the waist, then dropped to the sand to embrace Martha.

  “Ali, you’re not here alone?”

  “We’re having an outing,” she said, pointing to a clump of people and umbrellas a ways up the beach. As we got closer, I heard kids singing “Yolee-yolee-yolee,” the theme song from Survivor, and I saw Carolee coming toward me.

  We exchanged hugs, and then Carolee introduced me to “her” kids.

  “What kind of mutt is that?” an eleven- or twelve-year-old with a sandy mop of Rasta hair asked me.

  “She’s no mutt. Sweet Martha is a border collie.”

  “She doesn’t look like Lassie,” said a little girl with strawberry curls and a healing black eye.

  “Nope. Border collies are a different breed. They come from England and Scotland, and they have a very serious job,” I said. “They herd sheep and cattle.”

  I had their attention now, and Martha looked up at me as if she knew that I was talking about her.

  “Border collies have to learn commands from their owners, of course, but they’re very smart dogs who not only love to work, they feel that the animals in the herd are theirs—and that they are responsible for them.”

  “Do the commands! Show how she does it, Lindsay,” Ali begged me. I grinned at her.

  “Who wants to be a sheep?” I asked.