Women's Murder Club [07] 7th Heaven Read online

“Hang on just a minute, will you please?” I asked the arson investigator. I borrowed a pen from Hanni, reached into the van, and as Hanni aimed his light over my shoulder, I used the pen to open the book resting on Alan Beam’s lap.

  What kind of message had Pidge left for us?

  The usual fortune cookie nonsense?

  Or was he mad now? Would he slip up and give us something that made sense? I stared at the title page, but all I saw were the printed words The New Testament. That was all. No scribbling in Latin, not even a name. I was backing out of the van when Rich said, “Lindsay, check that out.”

  I went back in for a second look and this time saw a bit of fire-blackened ribbon trailing out from the pages. Using the pen again, I opened the Bible to the bookmark. Matthew 3:11.

  A few lines of text had been underlined in ink.

  My cheek was nearly resting on the victim’s parched and naked bones as I read the underlined words out loud.

  “I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”

  Chapter 108

  CONKLIN GRUNTED, said, “Purification by fire. It’s a major biblical theme.”

  Just then the garage door opened behind us and I turned to see a chic forty-something woman wearing a business suit limned in the sunlight behind her. Her face was stretched in anger and fear.

  “I’m Alicia Beam. Who’s in charge here?”

  “I’m Paul Arcario,” the sheriff said to her, stretching out his hand. “We spoke earlier. Why don’t we go outside and talk?”

  Mrs. Beam pushed past him to the van, and although Conklin put an arm out to stop her, it was too late. The woman stared, then shrank away, screaming, “Oh, my God! Alan! What happened to you?”

  Then she snapped her head around and locked her eyes on me.

  “Where’s Valerie? Where’s my daughter?”

  I introduced myself, told Mrs. Beam that she had to leave the garage, and that I would come with her. She became compliant as soon as I put my hand on the small of her back, and we walked together out of the garage to the front of the house.

  “It’s my daughter’s weekend with her father,” she said.

  She opened the front door, and as she stepped over the threshold, she broke away from me, running through the rooms, calling her daughter’s name.

  “Valerie! Val. Where are you?”

  I followed behind her, and when she stopped she said to me, “Maybe Val spent the night with a friend.”

  The look of sheer hope on her face pulled at my heart and my conscience. Was that her daughter in the body bag? I didn’t know, and if it was, it was not my job to tell her. Right now I had to learn whatever I could about Alan Beam.

  “Let’s just talk for a few minutes,” I said.

  We took seats at a pine farm table in the kitchen, and Alicia Beam told me that her marriage of twenty years to Alan had been dissolved a year before.

  “Alan has been depressed for years,” Alicia told me. “He felt that his whole life had been about money. That he’d neglected his family and God. He became very religious, very repentant, and he said that there wasn’t enough time . . .”

  Alicia Beam stopped in midsentence. I followed her eyes to the counter, where an unfolded sheet of blue paper was lying beside an envelope.

  “Maybe that’s a note from Val.”

  She stood and walked to the counter, picked up the letter, began to read.

  “Dear Val, my dearest girl. Please forgive me. I just couldn’t take it any longer . . .”

  She looked up, said to me, “This is from Alan.”

  I turned as Hanni leaned through the doorway and asked me to step outside.

  “Lindsay,” he said. “A neighbor found a message from Alan Beam on her answering machine saying he was sorry and good-bye.”

  It was all coming clear, why there were no Latin come-ons. No fishing-line ligatures. And the victims were not a married couple.

  Pidge hadn’t done this.

  Pidge had nothing to do with these deaths. Any hope I had of tripping him up, finding a clue to his whereabouts, was dead — as dead as the man in the car.

  “Alan Beam committed suicide,” I said.

  Hanni nodded. “We’ll treat it as a homicide until we’re sure, but according to this neighbor, Beam had attempted suicide before. She said he was terminal. Lung cancer.”

  “And so he chained himself to the steering wheel and set himself on fire?”

  “I guess he wanted to make sure he didn’t change his mind this time. But whatever his reason,” said Hanni, “it looks to me now like his daughter tried to save him — but she never had a chance.

  “The poisonous gas and the superheated air brought her down.”

  Chapter 109

  BY THE TIME I got home that evening, I had too much to tell Joe and hoped I could stay awake long enough to tell him. He was in the kitchen, wearing running shorts and a T-shirt, what he wore when he went for a run with Martha. He was holding a wineglass, and from the scrumptious smell of garlic and oregano, it seemed he’d cooked dinner, too.

  But the look on Joe’s face stopped me before I could reach him.

  “Joe, I was at the hospital all night —”

  “Jacobi told me. If I hadn’t found wet footsteps on the bathmat this morning, I wouldn’t have even known you’d been home.”

  “You were sleeping, Joe, and I only had a few minutes. And is this a house rule? That I have to check in?” I said.

  “You call it checking in. I call it being thoughtful. Thinking of me and that I might worry about you.”

  I hadn’t called him. Why hadn’t I called?

  “I’m drinking merlot,” he said.

  Joe and I rarely fought, and I got that sickening gut-feel that told me that I was in the wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re totally right, Joe. I should have let you know where I was.” I walked over to him, put my arms around his waist — but he pulled away from me.

  “No flirting, Blondie. I’m steamed.”

  He handed me a glass of wine and I took it, saying, “Joe, I said I’m sorry, and I am!”

  “You know what?” he said. Martha whimpered and trotted out of the room. “I saw more of you when I lived in DC.”

  “Joe, that’s not true.”

  “So, I’m going to ask you flat out, Lindsay. One question. And I want the truth.”

  I thought, No, please, please don’t ask me if I really want to marry you, please don’t. I’m not ready. I looked into the storm raging in Joe’s deep blue eyes.

  “I want to know about you and Conklin. What’s going on?”

  I was flabbergasted.

  “You think I’m — Joe, you can’t think that!”

  “Look. I spent an hour with the two of you. You’ve got a little something special going on between you, and please don’t tell me you’re partners.

  “I worked with you once, Lindsay,” Joe went on. “We were partners. And now, here we are.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it without speaking. I felt so guilty I couldn’t even act offended. Joe was right about everything. That Rich and I had a special feeling for each other, that I was neglecting Joe, that the time we spent together was more focused on each other when Joe lived a couple of time zones away than it was now.

  Once Joe had made the commitment to move to San Francisco, he’d been mine, mine, totally mine. And I’d taken him for granted. I was wrong. And I had to admit it. But my throat was backed up with tears. This was the very thing that broke up cop marriages.

  The Job. The obsession and commitment to the Job.

  That’s what this was about — wasn’t it?

  I felt sick with shame. I never wanted to make Joe feel bad, never wanted to hurt him at all. I set my glass down on the counter and took Joe’s glass out of his hand, put that glass down, too.

  “There’s nothing going on,
Joe. It’s just the Job.”

  He looked into my eyes, and it was as though he was patting down my brain. He knew me that well.

  “Give the sauce a stir in a couple of minutes, okay, Linds? I’m going to take a shower.”

  I stood up on my toes and wrapped my arms around Joe’s neck, held on to the man I thought of as my future husband, pressed my cheek to his. I wanted him to hold me. And finally he did. He closed his arms around my waist and pulled me tight against him.

  I said, “I love you so much. I’m going to do a better job of showing you, Joe, I swear, I will.”

  Chapter 110

  RICH WAS ALREADY at the computer when I got to my desk. He looked like he was in fifth gear, his index fingers tapping a fast two-step over the keys. I thanked him for the Krispy Kreme he’d parked on a napkin next to my phone.

  “It was my turn,” Rich said, not looking up as I dragged out my chair and sat down. “Dr. Roach called,” Rich continued. “Said there were fifty-five ccs of gasoline in Alan Beam’s stomach.”

  “What’s that? Three ounces? Geez. Is she saying he drank gasoline?”

  “Yeah. Probably directly out of the can. Beam really wanted to make sure he got it right this time. Doctor says the gas would’ve killed him if the fire hadn’t. She’s calling it a suicide. But look here, Lindsay.”

  “Whatcha got?” I said.

  “Come over here and see this.”

  I walked around our two desks and peered over Conklin’s shoulder. There was a Web site on his screen called Crime Web. Conklin pressed the enter key and an animation began. A spider dropped a line from the top of the page, made a web around the blood-red headline over the feature story, then skittered back to its corner of the page. I read the headline.

  Five Fatal Shootings This Week Alone

  When are the cops and the DA going to get it together?

  The text below was a sickening indictment of San Francisco’s justice system — and it was all true. Homicides were up, prosecutions were down, the result of not enough people or money or time.

  Rich moved the cursor to the column listing the pages on the site.

  “This one — here,” Rich said, clicking on a link called Current Unsolved Murders.

  Thumbnail photos came up.

  There was a family portrait of the Malones. Another of the Meachams. Rich clicked on the thumbnail of the Malones and said, “Listen to this.”

  And then he read the page to me:

  “ ‘Were the murders of Patricia and Bertram Malone committed by the same killers of Sandy and Steven Meacham?

  “ ‘We say yes.

  “ ‘And there have been other killings just as heinous with the same signature. The Jablonskys of Palo Alto and George and Nancy Chu of Monterey were also killed in horrific house fires.

  “ ‘Why can’t SFPD solve these crimes?

  “ ‘If you have any information, write to us at CrimeWeb .com. Diem dulcem habes.’ ”

  My God, it was Latin!

  “We never told the press about the Latin,” I said. “What does it mean?”

  “Diem dulcem habes means ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said. “Let’s hope it’s going to be even better than that.”

  I called the DA’s office, asked for Yuki, got Nick Gaines, told him we needed a warrant to get an Internet provider to give us the name of the Web site holder.

  “I’ll buck it up the line,” Gaines said. “Just asking, Sergeant: You’ve got probable cause?”

  “We’re working on it,” I said. I hung up, said, “Now what?” as Rich clicked on a box labeled Contact Us.

  He typed with two fingers: “Must speak with you about the Malone and the Meacham fires. Please contact me.” Conklin’s e-mail address showed that he was with the SFPD. If the Webmaster was Pidge, we could be scaring him off.

  On the other hand — there was no other hand.

  I needn’t have worried. Only a couple of minutes after firing off his e-mail, Rich had a response in his inbox.

  “How can I help you?” the e-mail read.

  It was signed Linc Weber, and it contained his phone number.

  Chapter 111

  THE MEETING WITH WEBER was set for four that afternoon. Conklin and I briefed Jacobi, assigned our team, and set out at two o’clock for a bookstore in Noe Valley called Damned Spot. Inspectors Chi and McNeil were in the van parked on Twenty-fourth Street, and I was wired for sound. Inspectors Lemke and Samuels were undercover, loitering in front of and behind the store.

  My palms were damp as I waited with Conklin in the patrol car. The Kevlar vest I was wearing was hot, but it was my racing mind that was causing the heat.

  Could this be it? Was Linc Weber also known as Pidge?

  At three thirty Conklin and I got out of the car and walked around the corner to the bookstore.

  Damned Spot was an old-fashioned bookstore, dark, filled with mystery books, secondhand paperbacks, a two-books-for-one section. It bore no resemblance to the air-conditioned chain stores with latte bars and smooth jazz coming over the speakers.

  The cashier was an androgynous twenty-something in black clothes, hair buzzed to a bristle, and multiple face piercings. I asked for Linc Weber, and the cashier told me in a sweet feminine voice that Linc worked upstairs.

  I could almost hear the scratching sound of mice nesting in the stacks as we crept along the narrow aisles and edged past customers who looked psychologically borderline. In the back of the store was a plain wooden staircase with a sign on a chain across the handrails reading NO ENTRY.

  Conklin unlatched the chain, and we started up the stairs, which opened into an attic room. The ceiling was cathedral-style, but low, only eight feet high under the peak, tapering to about three feet high at the side walls. In the back of the room was a desk where high piles of magazines, papers, and books surrounded a computer with two large screens.

  And behind the desk was a black kid, maybe fifteen, reed-thin, with black-rimmed glasses, no visible tattoos, and no jewelry, unless you counted the braces on his teeth, which I saw when he looked up and smiled.

  My high hopes fell.

  This wasn’t Pidge. The governor’s description of Pidge was of a stocky white kid, long brown hair.

  “I’m Linc,” the boy said. “Welcome to CrimeWeb dot com.”

  Chapter 112

  LINC WEBER SAID he was “honored” to meet us. He indicated two soft plastic-covered cubes as chairs, and he offered us bottled water from the cooler behind his desk.

  We sat on his cubes, turned down the water.

  “We read your commentary on the Web site,” said Conklin, casually. “We were wondering about your take on whoever set the Malone and Meacham fires.”

  The kid said, “Why don’t I start at the beginning?”

  Normally that was a good idea, but today my nerves were so close to the snapping point, I just wanted two questions answered, and as succinctly as possible: Why did you use a Latin phrase on your Web site? Do you know someone who goes by the name of Pidge?

  But Weber said he’d never had a visit from cops before, and meeting in his office had legitimized his purpose and his Web site beyond his expectations. In fifteen minutes, he told us that his father owned Damned Spot, that he’d been a crime-story aficionado since he was old enough to read. He said that he wanted to publish crime fiction and true-crime books as soon as he got out of school.

  “Linc, you said ‘Have a nice day’ in Latin on your Web site. Why did you do that?” I said, breaking into his life’s story.

  “Oh. The Latin. I got the idea from this.”

  Linc shuffled the piles on his desk, at last finding a soft-cover book, about 8½ by 11, with an elegant font spelling out the words 7th Heaven. He handed the book to me. I held my breath as I flipped through the pages. Although it resembled a big, fat comic book, it was a graphic novel.

  “It was published first as a blog,” Weber told us. “Then my dad staked the first edition.”

/>   “And the Latin?” I asked again, my throat tightening from the strain and the possibilities I could almost see.

  “It’s all in there,” Weber told me. “The characters in this novel use Latin catchphrases. Listen, can I say on my Web site that you used me as a consultant? You have no idea what that would mean to me.”

  I was looking at the title page of the book I held in my hands. Under the title were the names of the illustrator and the writer.

  Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson.

  There was an icon under each of their names.

  Hans Vetter was the pigeon and Brett Atkinson, a hawk.

  Chapter 113

  BY FIVE THAT EVENING, Conklin and I were back at our desks in the squad room. Conklin clicked around the Internet, researching Atkinson and Vetter — and I couldn’t stop turning the pages of their novel.

  I was hooked.

  The drawings were stark black and white. The figures had huge eyes, and called to mind the manga style of violent borderline pornography imported from Japan. The dialogue was edgy, all-American slang punctuated by Latin sayings. And the story was actually crazy but somehow compelling.

  In this book, “Pidge” was both the brains and the muscle. “Hawk” was the dreamer. They were depicted as righteous avengers, their mission to save America from what they viewed as an obscene fantasy world for the very rich. They referred to this American “piggishness” as 7th Heaven and described it as a never-ending spiral of gluttony, gratification, and waste. The Pidge-Hawk solution was to kill the rich and the greedier wannabes, to show them what real consumption was — consumption by fire.

  Pidge and Hawk dressed all in black: T-shirts, jeans, riding boots, and sleek black leather waist jackets with logos of their name-birds front and back. Sparks flew from their fingertips. And their motto was “Aut vincere aut mori.”

  Either conquer or die.

  Hawk — the boy, not the character — had done both.