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  “Lindsay,” I heard someone shout. “Are you okay?”

  I turned to see Chuck Hanni coming out of the bedroom.

  Did he have something to do with this?

  Had Rich been right all along?

  And then I saw Conklin right behind Hanni, and both of their faces were sagging with my pain.

  Rich opened his arms. I held on to him in the smoking black ruins of my home, so glad he was there. But as I rested my head on his shoulder, the stark realization hit me: if Cindy hadn’t called with her impromptu getaway plan, I would have been home with Martha when the fire broke out.

  I ripped myself away from Rich and called out to Hanni.

  My voice was trembling.

  “Chuck, what happened here? I have to know. Did someone try to kill me?”

  Chapter 68

  HANNI SNAPPED ON the portable lights inside what was left of my living room, and in that blinding moment, Joe burst through my splintered door frame. I flung myself at him, and he wrapped me in his arms, nearly squeezing the air out of me.

  I said, “I called and called -”

  “I turned off my damned cell at dinner -”

  “From now on, you’ve got to put it on vibrate -”

  “I’ll wear an electric shock collar, Linds. Whatever it takes. I’m sick that I didn’t know you needed me.”

  “You’re here now.”

  I broke down and cried all over his shirt, feeling safe and lucky that Joe was okay, that we both were. I only vaguely remember my friends and my partner saying good-bye, but I clearly recall Chuck Hanni telling me that as soon as it was daylight, he’d be all over the building, looking for whatever caused the fire.

  Don Walker, the SFFD captain, took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his glove, saying that Joe and I had to leave so he could secure the building.

  “Just a minute, Don, okay?” I said, not really asking him.

  I went to the bedroom closet and opened the door, stood there in a daze, until I heard Joe say behind me, “You can’t wear any of this, honey. It’s all a loss. You’ve got to walk away from it.”

  I turned and tried to take in the utter ruination of my four-poster bed and photo albums and the treasured box of letters that my mother wrote to me when I was away at school and she was dying.

  And then I focused my mind and scanned every inch of floor, looking for something specific, a book that might be out of place. I found nothing. I went to my dresser, pulled at the knobs of the top drawer – but the charred wooden drawer pulls crumbled in my hands.

  Joe strong-armed the dresser and the wood cracked. He gripped the drawer and heaved it open. I pawed through my underwear, Joe saying patiently behind me, “Sweetie, forget this. You’ll get new stuff…”

  I found it.

  I palmed the velvet cube in my right hand, held it into the light, and opened the box. Five diamonds in a platinum setting winked up at me, the ring that Joe had offered me when he asked me to marry him only a few months ago. I’d told Joe then that I loved him but needed time. Now I closed the lid of the box and looked into his worry-creased face.

  “I’d sleep with this under my pillow – if only I had a pillow.”

  Joe said, “Got lots of pillows at my place, Blondie. Even got one for Martha.”

  Captain Walker stood at the door waiting for us. I took one last look around – and that’s when I saw the book on the small telephone stand just inside my front door.

  I’d never seen that book before in my life.

  That book wasn’t mine.

  Chapter 69

  I STARED IN SHOCK and disbelief at the large 8½ by 11 paperback, tomato-red with thin white stripes running crosswise beneath the title: National Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigation.

  I started screaming, “That’s evidence. That’s evidence.”

  Captain Walker was worn out and he was also out of the loop. He said, “The arson investigator will be back in the morning, Sarge. I’m boarding up your place so it’ll be perfectly safe, you understand?”

  “NO,” I shouted. “I want a cop. I want this thing locked up in the evidence room tonight!”

  I ignored Walker ’s sigh and Joe’s hand on the small of my back. I dialed Jacobi’s number on my cell, already decided that if he didn’t pick up, I would call Clapper and then I would call Tracchio. And if I didn’t get Jacobi or CSI or the chief, I would call the mayor. I was hysterical and I knew it, but no one could stop me or tell me I was wrong.

  “Boxer, that you?” Jacobi said. His voice crackled from a poor connection.

  “I found a book in my apartment,” I shouted into the phone. “It’s clean. It didn’t burn. There could be prints. I want it bagged and tagged, and I don’t want to do it myself in case there’s any question down the road.”

  “I’m five minutes away,” Jacobi said.

  I stood in the hallway with Joe and Martha, Joe telling me that Martha and I were moving in with him. I held tightly to his hand, but my mind was running a slide show of all the fire-razed houses I’d walked through in the last month, and I was feeling the searing shame of having been so professional and so removed. I’d seen the bodies. I’d seen the destruction. But I hadn’t felt the terrible power of fire until now.

  I heard Jacobi’s voice and that of the building manager downstairs, then Jacobi’s ponderous footsteps as he huffed and wheezed up the stairs. I’d ridden thousands of miles in a squad car with Jacobi. I’d been shot with him, and our blood had pooled together in an alley in the Tenderloin. I knew him better than anyone in the world, and he knew me that way, too. That’s why when he arrived at the top landing, all I had to do was point to the book.

  Jacobi stretched latex gloves over his large hands, gingerly opened the red cover. I was panting with fear, sure that I’d see an inscription inside, another mocking Latin saying. But there was only a name printed inside the front page.

  The name was Chuck Hanni.

  Chapter 70

  IT WAS 1:03 A.M. and sixty-eight degrees outside.

  I was lying next to Joe tucked inside the cool, white envelope of his six-hundred-thread-count sheets, wearing one of his T-shirts, staring up at the time and temperature projected onto his ceiling by a clock made for insomniacs and former G-men who needed to have this critical info the second they opened their eyes.

  Joe’s hand covered mine. He had listened to my fears and my ranting for hours, but as he drifted off, his grip loosened, and now he was snoring softly. Martha, too, was in the land of nod, her fluttery breaths and dream-yips providing a stereophonic accompaniment to Joe’s steady snores.

  As for me, sleep was on the far side of the moon.

  I couldn’t stop thinking how the fire skipped the first two floors but had torched my apartment out to the walls. It was undeniable. I was the target of a vicious, premeditated killer who’d already deliberately burned eight people to death.

  Had he thought I was home? Or had he watched me leave with Martha and sent me a warning? How could Chuck Hanni be that person?

  I’d had meals with Chuck, worked crime scenes with him, confided in him. Now I was reconfiguring him in my mind as a killer who knew everything there was to know about setting fires. And everything there was to know about getting away with murder.

  But why would a man who was this smart leave his damned calling card in my apartment?

  The signature of a killer was actually his signature?

  It made no sense.

  The pounding in my temples was building up to a five-alarm headache. If there’d been anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it up. When the phone rang at 1:14, I read the caller ID and grabbed the receiver on the first ring. Joe stirred beside me. I whispered, “It’s Conklin,” and Joe mumbled, “Okay,” and dropped back down into sleep.

  “You got something?” I asked my partner.

  “Yeah. You’re not going to like this.”

  “Just tell me. Tell me what you’ve got,” I half whispered, half shouted. I got out
of bed, stepped over Martha, and walked out into Joe’s living room with its night view of Presidio Park, its tall eucalyptus trees swaying eerily in the moonlight. Martha’s nails clacked on hardwood as she followed me, slurped water from a bowl in the kitchen.

  “About the book…” Rich said.

  “You found Latin written inside?”

  “No. It’s Chuck’s book, all right -”

  “Man oh man.”

  “Let me finish, Linds. He didn’t leave it in your apartment. I did.”

  Chapter 71

  MY MIND SCRAMBLED as I tried to understand what Conklin was telling me. “Say that again,” I demanded. When he answered, his voice was contrite.

  “I left the book at your place.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  He had to be. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which Conklin would leave a fire and explosion manual in my fire-ravaged apartment.

  “What happened is, I got together with Chuck, like you said to do,” Rich told me in measured tones. “We had a no-hard-feelings dinner and I picked up the tab. And I told him I’d like to learn more about fire investigation from him. I mean, he’s the pro.”

  Rich paused for breath and I shouted at him, “Go on!”

  “We went out to his car, Lindsay, he practically lives in that thing. Pop-Tarts wrappers all over the seats, his computer, clothes hanging from the -”

  “Rich, for God’s sake!”

  “So, just as he finds the fire investigations manual to lend me, Jacobi calls and tells me your apartment went up. I told Hanni, and he said, ‘I’ll drive,’ and I was still holding that book when we entered your place.”

  “You put it down on the telephone table.”

  “Didn’t think about it again until Jacobi called me,” Rich said miserably.

  “Has Jacobi already spoken to Hanni?”

  “No. He wanted to talk to me first. Hanni knows nothing about this.”

  It took long seconds for me to sort it all out, put Chuck Hanni back into his role as friend, and realize that the essential truth hadn’t changed. I was shivering, and I wasn’t cold.

  “Linds?” I heard Rich say.

  “We still don’t know who set fire to my place or to any of the others,” I said. “We still don’t know anything.”

  Chapter 72

  THERE HAD BEEN a whole blessed week’s break while Judge Bendinger returned to physical rehab for his replaced knee. But the break was over. Bendinger was back. And Yuki now felt the tsunami effect of the whole freakin’ Junie Moon circus starting all over again, the out-of-control press, the pressure to win.

  At nine o’clock sharp, court was called into session.

  And the defense began to put on its case.

  L. Diana Davis didn’t look up as her first witness came through the gate, passing so close she must have felt a breeze as his herringbone jacket nearly grazed her arm. Yuki saw Davis lean in and speak behind her hand to her client, all the while panning the gallery with her eyes. The TV cameras were running, and the reporters were packed in the rows at the back of the room.

  Davis smiled.

  Yuki whispered to Len Parisi, “There’s no place Davis would rather be. Nobody she’d rather defend.”

  Red Dog smiled. “That beast is inside you, too, Yuki. Learn to love it.”

  Yuki watched Davis pat her client’s hand as Lieutenant Charles Clapper, head of CSU, was sworn in. Then Davis stood and greeted her witness.

  “Lieutenant Clapper, how long have you been head of the San Francisco Crime Scene Unit?”

  “Fifteen years.”

  “And what did you do before that?”

  “I started with the San Diego PD right outta school, worked vice for five years, homicide for five. Then I joined the Las Vegas CSU before moving to San Francisco and joining the CSU here.”

  “In fact, you’ve written books on trace evidence, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, I’ve done a couple of books.”

  “You appear on TV a few times a week, don’t you? Sometimes even more times than me,” Davis said, smiling widely, getting the laugh she wanted from the gallery.

  “I don’t know about that,” Clapper said, smiling too.

  “Very good. And how many homicides have you investigated in the last twenty-five years, Lieutenant?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “A wild guess? Maybe a couple of hundred a year.”

  “So it’s reasonable to say you may have investigated as many as five thousand homicides, is that right?”

  “Roughly.”

  “I think we can accept ‘roughly,’ ” Davis said, good-naturedly. “And as well as investigating fresh crime scenes, you investigate crimes that happened months or even years ago, is that correct?”

  “I’ve investigated cold cases, yes.”

  “Now, in April of this year, were you called to the home of the defendant?”

  “I was.”

  “And did it have the appearance of a crime scene?”

  “No. The rooms were orderly. There was no evident disturbance, no blood or shell casings, et cetera.”

  Davis said, “Now, were you told that a man may have been dismembered in the bathtub of the defendant’s house?”

  “I was.”

  “And you did all the normal tests for trace evidence, did you not?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Come up with anything evidentiary?”

  “No.”

  “Find any evidence that showed that the blood had been cleaned up?”

  “Nope.”

  “No bleach or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “Lieutenant Clapper, let me just give you the whole laundry list at once and save a little time here. The walls hadn’t been repainted, the rugs hadn’t been cleaned? You didn’t find an implement that could have been used to dismember a body?”

  “No.”

  “So it’s fair to say that you and your team did everything you could do to ascertain the manner in which a crime was committed – or even if a crime was committed?”

  “We did.”

  “Based on your experience and your examination of the so-called crime scene, please tell the jury – did you find any evidence, direct or indirect, that links Junie Moon to the alleged murder of Michael Campion?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you. That’s all I have for this witness, Your Honor.”

  Chapter 73

  YUKI WAS STILL STEAMING from Red Dog’s rebuke. Or maybe she was hot under the collar because he’d been right.

  Learn to love the beast.

  Yuki slapped her pen down on her notepad, straightened her jacket as she stood, and approached Charlie Clapper at the stand.

  “Lieutenant, I won’t keep you long.”

  “No problem, Ms. Castellano.”

  “You’re a member of law enforcement, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And in the course of your twenty-five-year-long career in vice, homicide, and crime scene investigation, have you been involved in matters concerning prostitutes?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Are you familiar, generally speaking, with the lives of prostitutes and their customs?”

  “I’d say so.”

  “Would you agree that in exchange for a fee, a prostitute engages in sexual relations with any number of men?”

  “I’d say that’s the job description.”

  “Now, there are many subsets of that job description, wouldn’t you say? From streetwalker to call girl?”

  “Sure.”

  “And some prostitutes work mostly out of their homes?”

  “Some do.”

  “And is it your understanding that Ms. Moon falls into that last category?”

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “Okay. And would you also agree that as a matter of hygiene and practicality, a prostitute working at home would do her best to shower af
ter her sexual encounters?”

  “I would say that would be a common and hygienic practice.”

  “Do you happen to know how much water is typically used by a person taking a shower?”

  “Twenty gallons, depending.”

  Yuki nodded, said to Charlie, “Now, based on your general knowledge of prostitutes, and given that Ms. Moon worked at home, would you agree that she probably showered after having sex with each of her tricks, maybe six to ten times a day, seven days a week -”

  “Objection,” Davis called out. “Calls for speculation on the part of the witness, and furthermore, I strongly object to the way counsel is characterizing my client.”

  “Your Honor,” Yuki protested. “We all know that Ms. Moon is a prostitute. I’m only asserting that she’s probably a clean one.”

  “Go ahead, Ms. Castellano,” Judge Bendinger said, snapping the rubber band on his wrist. “But get to the point today, will you?”

  “Thanks, Your Honor,” Yuki said, sweetly. “Lieutenant Clapper, could you tell us this?” Yuki drew a breath and launched into what was becoming her trademark – an uninterruptible run-on question.

  “If a man was dismembered in a bathtub, and in the three months between the day the crime was committed and the time you examined the bathtub a large amount of soap and shampoo and water passed through that two-inch drain – by my calculations, 100 gallons of soapy water daily – and now let’s double that for the johns who took a shower before going back to their dorm or office or home to their wives – so even if Ms. Moon practices ‘Never on Sunday,’ that would still be about 130,000 gallons by the time CSU examined the drains – could that activity have completely cleansed that bathtub of residual trace evidence?”

  “Well, yes, that’s very possible.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. Thank you very much.”

  Yuki smiled at Charlie Clapper as the judge told him that he could step down.