Women's Murder Club [05] The 5th Horseman Read online

  “I’m Dr. Garza,” he said to Yuki. “Your mother probably had a neurological insult, either what we call a TIA, a transient ischemic attack, or a mini-stroke. In plain English, it’s a loss of circulation and oxygen to the brain, and she may have had some angina—that’s pain caused by a narrowing of the coronary arteries.”

  “Is that serious? Is she in pain now? When will I be able to see her?”

  Yuki fired questions at Dr. Garza until he put up a hand to stop the onslaught.

  “She’s still incoherent. Most people recover within a half hour. Others, maybe your mother, take as long as twenty-four hours. Her condition is guarded. And visitors are off-limits right now. Let’s see how she does tonight, shall we?”

  “She is going to be all right though, right? Right?” Yuki asked the doctor.

  “Miss Castellano. Take a deep breath,” Garza said. “I’ll let you know when we know.”

  The door to the ER swung closed behind the unpleasant doctor, and Yuki sat down hard on a plastic chair, slumped forward, lowered her face into her hands, and began to sob. I’d never seen Yuki cry before, and it killed me that I couldn’t fix what was hurting her.

  I did all that I could do.

  I put my arm around Yuki’s shoulders, saying, “It’s okay, honey. She’s in good hands here. I know your mom will be better really soon.”

  Then I rubbed Yuki’s back as she cried and cried. She seemed so tiny and afraid, almost like a little girl.

  Chapter 6

  THERE WERE NO WINDOWS in the waiting room. The hands of the clock above the coffee machine inched around the dial, cycling the afternoon into night and midnight into morning. Dr. Garza never returned, and he never sent us any word.

  During those eighteen long hours, Yuki and I took turns pacing, getting coffee, and going to the ladies’ room. We ate vending-machine sandwiches for dinner, traded magazines, and, in the eerie fluorescent silence, listened to each other’s shallow breathing.

  At just after 3:00 a.m., Yuki fell sound asleep against my shoulder—waking with a start twenty minutes later.

  “Has anything happened?”

  “No, sweetie. Go back to sleep.”

  But she couldn’t do it.

  We sat shoulder to shoulder inside that synthetically bright, inhospitable place as the faces around us changed: the couple with linked hands staring into the middle distance, the families with young children in their arms, an elderly man sitting alone.

  Every time the swinging door to the ER opened, eyes would snap toward it.

  Sometimes a doctor would step out.

  Sometimes shrieks and cries would follow.

  It was almost 6:00 in the morning when a young female intern with weary eyes and a blood-smeared lab coat came out of the ER and mangled Yuki’s name.

  “How is she?” Yuki asked, bounding to her feet.

  “She’s more alert now, so she’s doing better,” said the intern. “We’re going to keep her for a few days and do some tests, but you can visit as soon as we settle her into her room.”

  Yuki thanked the doctor and turned to me with a smile that was far more radiant than was reasonable, given what the doctor had just told her.

  “Oh-my-God, Linds, my mom’s going to be okay! I can’t say how much it means to me that you stayed with me all night,” Yuki said.

  She grabbed both of my hands, tears filling her eyes. “I don’t know how I could have done this if you hadn’t been here. You saved me, Lindsay.”

  I hugged her, folded her in.

  “Yuki, we’re friends. Anything you need, you don’t even have to ask. You know that, right? Anything.

  “Don’t forget to call,” I said.

  “The worst is over,” said Yuki. “Don’t worry about us now, Lindsay. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  I turned to look behind me as I exited the hospital through the automatic sliding doors.

  Yuki was still standing there, watching me, smiling and waving good-bye.

  Chapter 7

  A CAB WAS IDLING in front of the hospital. Lucky me. I slid in and slumped into the backseat, feeling like total crap, only much worse. Pulling all-nighters is for college kids, not big girls like me.

  The driver was mercifully silent as we made our way across town to Potrero Hill at dawn.

  A few minutes later, I slipped my key into the front door of the pretty, blue three-story Victorian town house I share with two other tenants, and climbed the groaning staircase to the second floor, two steps at a time.

  Sweet Martha, my border collie, greeted me at the door as if I’d been gone for a year. I knew her sitter had fed and walked her—Karen’s bill was on the kitchen table—but Martha had missed me and I’d missed her, too.

  “Yuki’s mom is in the hospital,” I told my doggy. Corny me. I wrapped my arms around her, and she gave me sloppy kisses, then followed me back to my bedroom.

  I wanted to fall into the downy folds of bedding for seven or eight hours, but instead I changed into a wrinkled Santa Clara U tracksuit and took Her Sweetness for a run as the glowing morning fog hovered over the bay.

  At eight on the nose I was at my desk looking through the glass walls of my cubicle out at the squad room as the morning tour sauntered in.

  The stack of files on my desk had grown since I’d seen it last, and the message light on my phone was blinking in angry red bursts. I was about to address these irritations, when a shadow fell across my desk and my unopened container of coffee.

  A large, balding man stood in my doorway. I knew his pug-ugly face almost as well as I knew my own.

  My former partner wore the time-rumpled look of a career police officer who had rounded the corner on fifty. Inspector Warren Jacobi’s hair was turning white, and his deep, hooded eyes were harder than they’d been before he’d taken those slugs on Larkin Street.

  “You look like you slept on a park bench last night, Boxer.”

  “Thanks, dear.”

  “I hope you had fun.”

  “Tons. What’s up, Jacobi?”

  “A DOA was called in twenty minutes ago,” he said. “A female, formerly very attractive, I’m told. Found dead inside a Cadillac in the Opera Plaza Garage.”

  Chapter 8

  THE OPERA PLAZA GARAGE is a cavernous indoor lot adjacent to a huge mixed-use commercial building that houses movie theaters, offices, and shops in the middle of a densely populated business district.

  Now, on a workday morning, Jacobi nosed our car up to the curb beside the line of patrol cars strategically parked to block access to the garage entrance on Golden Gate Avenue.

  No cars were coming in or going out, and a shifting crowd had gathered, prompting Jacobi to mutter, “The citizens are squawking. They know a hot case when they see one.”

  I excused our way through the throng as strident voices called out to me. “Are you in charge here?” “Hey, I’ve got to get my car. I’ve got a meeting in like five minutes!”

  I ducked under the tape and took up a position on the entry ramp, making good use of my five-foot-ten frame. I said my name and apologized for the inconvenience to one and all.

  “Please bear with us. Sorry to say, this garage is a crime scene. I hope as much as you do that we’ll be out of here soon. We’ll do our best.”

  I fielded some unanswerable questions, then turned as I heard my name and the sound of footsteps coming from behind me. Jacobi’s new partner, Inspector Rich Conklin, was heading down the ramp to meet us.

  I’d liked Conklin from the moment I’d met him a few years back, when he was a smart and dogged uniformed officer. Bravery in the line of duty and an impressive number of collars had earned him his recent promotion to Homicide at the ripe young age of twenty-nine.

  Conklin had also attracted a lot of attention from the women working in the Hall once he’d traded in his uniform for a gold shield.

  At just over six foot one, Conklin was buffed to a T, with brown eyes, light-brown hair, and the wholesome good looks of a college bas
eball player crossed with a Navy SEAL.

  Not that I’d noticed any of this.

  “What have we got?” I asked Conklin.

  He hit me with his clear brown eyes. Very serious, but respectful. “The vic is a Caucasian female, Lieutenant, approximately twenty-one or twenty-two. Looks to me like a ligature mark around her neck.”

  “Any witnesses so far?”

  “Nope, we’re not that lucky. The guy over there,” Conklin said, hooking a thumb toward the scraggly, long-haired ticket-taker in the booth, “name of Angel Cortez, was on duty all night, didn’t see anything unusual, of course. He was on the phone with his girlfriend when a customer came screaming down the ramp.

  “Customer’s name is”—Conklin flipped open his notebook—“Angela Spinogatti. Her car was parked overnight, and she saw the body inside the Caddy this morning. That’s about all she had for us.”

  “You ID’d the Caddy’s plates?” Jacobi asked.

  Conklin nodded his head once, turned a page in his notebook. “The car belongs to a Lawrence P. Guttman, DDS. No sheet, no warrants. We’ve got calls into him now.”

  I thanked Conklin and asked him to collect the parking-garage tickets and the surveillance tapes.

  Then Jacobi and I headed up the ramp.

  I’d had way too little sleep, but a thin, steady flow of adrenaline was entering my bloodstream. I was imagining the scene before I saw it, thinking about how a young white female came to be strangled inside a parking garage.

  Footsteps echoed overhead. Lots and lots of them. My people.

  I counted a dozen members of the SFPD strung around the upward-coiling concrete-ribbon parking area. Officers were going through the trash, taking down plate numbers, looking for anything that would help us before the crime scene was returned to the public domain.

  Jacobi and I rounded the bend that took us to the fourth floor and saw the Caddy in question, a black late-model Seville, sleek, unscratched. Its nose was pointing over the railing toward the Civic Center Garage on McAllister.

  “Zero to sixty in under five seconds,” Warren muttered, then did a fair imitation of the Cadillac musical sting from their TV commercials.

  “Down, boy,” I said.

  Charlie Clapper, head of CSU, was wearing his usual non-smile and a gray herringbone jacket that casually matched his salt-and-pepper hair.

  He put his camera down on the hood of an adjacent Subaru Outback and said, “Mornin’, Lou, Jacobi. Meet Jane Doe.”

  I tugged on latex gloves and followed him around the car. The trunk was closed because the victim wasn’t in there.

  She was sitting in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her pale, wide-open eyes staring out through the windshield expectantly.

  As if she were waiting for someone to come.

  “Aw, shit,” Jacobi said with disgust. “Beautiful young girl like this. All dressed up and no place to go. Forever.”

  Chapter 9

  “I DON’T SEE a handbag anywhere,” Clapper was telling me. “I left her clothing intact for the ME. Nice duds,” he said. “Looks like a rich girl. You think?”

  I felt a shock of sadness and anger as I looked into the victim’s dreamy face.

  She was fair-skinned, a light dusting of powder across her face, a hint of blush on the apples of her cheeks. Her hair was cut in a Meg Ryan-style mop of tousled blond lights, and her nails had been recently manicured.

  Everything about this woman spoke of privilege and opportunity, and money. It was as if she’d been just about to step down the runway of life when some psycho had ripped it all away from her.

  I pressed the victim’s cheek with the back of my hand. Her skin was tepid to the touch, telling me that she’d been alive last night.

  “Larry, Moe, and Curly didn’t whack this little lady,” Jacobi commented.

  I nodded my agreement.

  When I first got into Homicide, I learned that crime scenes generally come in two types. The kind where the evidence is disorganized: blood spatter, broken objects, shell casings scattered around, bodies sprawled where they fell.

  And then there were the scenes like this one.

  Organized. Planned out.

  Plenty of malice aforethought.

  The victim’s clothes were neat, no bunching, no buttonholes missed. She was even wearing a seat belt, which was drawn snug across her lap and shoulder.

  Had the killer cared about her?

  Or was this tidy scene some kind of message for whoever found her?

  “The passenger-side door was opened with a slim jim,” Clapper told us. “The surfaces have all been wiped clean. No prints to be found inside or out. And look over here.”

  Clapper pointed up toward the camera mounted on a concrete pylon. It faced down the ramp, away from the Caddy.

  He lifted his chin toward another camera that was pointed up the ramp toward the fifth level.

  “I don’t think you’re going to catch this bird doing the vic on tape,” Clapper said. “This car is in a perfect blind spot.”

  I like this about Charlie. He knows what he’s doing, shows you what he sees, but the guy doesn’t try to take over the scene. He lets you do your job, too.

  I directed my flashlight beam into the interior of the car, checking off the relevant details in my mind.

  The victim looked healthy, weighed about 110, stood maybe five foot or five one.

  No wedding band or engagement ring.

  She was wearing a crystal bead necklace, which hung below a ligature mark.

  The mark itself was shallow and ropy, as if it had been made with something soft.

  I saw no defensive cuts or bruises on her arms and, except for the ligature mark, no signs of violence.

  I didn’t know how or why this girl had been killed, but my eyes and my gut told me that she hadn’t died in this car.

  She had to have been moved here, then posed in a tableau that somebody was meant to admire.

  I doubted that someone had gone to all of this trouble for me.

  I hoped not.

  Chapter 10

  “HAVE YOU GOT your pictures?” I asked Clapper.

  There wasn’t much room to work, and I wanted to get in close for a better look at the victim.

  “I’ve got more than enough for my collection,” he said. “The camera loves this girl.”

  He stowed his digital Olympus in his case, snapped the lid closed.

  I reached into the car and gingerly fished out the labels from the back of the victim’s pale-pink coat and then her slim black party dress.

  “The coat is Narciso Rodriguez,” I called out to Jacobi. “And the dress is a little Carolina Herrera number. We’re looking at about six grand in threads here. And that’s not counting the shoes.”

  Since Sex and the City, when it came to shoes, Manolo Blahnik was the man. I recognized a pair of his trademark sling-backs on the victim’s feet.

  “She even smells like money,” said Jacobi.

  “You’ve got a good nose, buddy.”

  The fragrance the victim wore had a musky undertone calling up ballrooms and orchids, and maybe moonlit trysts under mossy trees. I was pretty sure I’d never smelled it before, though. Maybe some kind of pricey private label.

  I was leaning in for another sniff, when Conklin escorted a short, fortyish white man up the steep ramp. He had a ruff of frizzy hair and small, darting eyes, almost black dots.

  “I’m Dr. Lawrence Guttman,” the man huffed indignantly to Jacobi. “And yes. Thanks for asking. That is my car. What are you doing to it?”

  Jacobi showed Guttman his badge, said, “Let’s walk down to my car, Dr. Guttman, take a ride to the station. Inspector Conklin and I have some questions for you, but I’m sure we can clear this all up, PDQ.”

  It was then that Guttman saw the dead woman in the passenger seat of his Seville. He snapped his eyes back to Jacobi.

  “My God! Who is that woman? She’s dead! W-what are you thinking?” he sputtered. “That I killed
someone and left her in my car? You can’t think. . . . Are you crazy? I want my lawyer.”

  Guttman’s voice was squelched by the roar and echo of a large engine coming toward us. Wheels squealed as a black Chevy van wound up and around the helix of the parking-garage ramp.

  It stopped twenty feet away from where we stood, and the side doors slid open.

  A woman stepped out of the driver’s seat.

  Black, just over forty, substantial in every way imaginable, Claire Washburn carried herself with the dignity of her office and the confidence of a well-loved woman.

  The ME had arrived.

  Chapter 11

  CLAIRE IS SAN FRANCISCO’S chief medical examiner, a superb pathologist, a master of intuition, a pretty fair cellist, a happily married lady of almost twenty years, a mother of two boys, and, quite simply, my best friend in the universe.

  We’d met fourteen years ago over a dead body, and since then had spent as much time together as some married couples.

  We got along better, too.

  We hugged right there in the garage, drawing on the love we felt for each other. When we broke from our hug, Claire put her hands on her ample hips and took in the scene.

  “So, Lindsay,” she said, “who died on us today?”

  “Right now, she goes by Jane Doe. Looks like she was killed by some kind of freako perfectionist, Claire. There’s not a hair out of place. You tell us, though.”

  “Well, let’s see what we can see.”

  Claire walked to the car with her kit and in short order took her own photos, documenting the victim from every angle, then taped paper bags over the young woman’s hands and feet.

  “Lindsay,” she finally called for me, “come have a look here.”

  I wedged into the narrow angle between Claire and the car door as Claire rolled up the girl’s upper lip, then rolled down the lower one, showing me the bruising by the beam of her penlight.