14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) Read online

  CHAPTER 9

  WHEN THE WRETCHED day finally ended and I came through the front door of our apartment, Martha wiggled her butt, barked, and sang me an excited welcome-home song. I hugged her, held her front paws, and danced a few steps with her. Then I called out to Joe.

  He called back.

  “I’m giving Julie a bath.”

  OK, then.

  I hung up my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and put my gun in the cabinet, locking it up. I walked with Martha to the open kitchen of our airy apartment on Lake Street, where I’d come to live with Joe as his bride. A year later, this was where I gave birth to Julie during a blacked-out and very stormy night while Joe was out of town.

  That was at the top of the list of the most memorable nights of my life.

  I topped up Martha’s dinner bowl and poured two chilled glasses of Chardonnay. With Martha trailing behind me, I went to the master bathroom.

  I knocked, opened the door, and saw the two people I love the most. My smile stretched out to my ears.

  “Awwww,” I cooed. “Look how cute and clean she is.”

  I leaned down and kissed Joe, who was kneeling beside the tub. Julie grinned her adorable face half off, lifted her arms, and squealed. I put the wineglasses on the vanity. Then I kissed Julie’s hand, making funny noises in her palm. I handed Joe the pink towel that was appliquéd with OUR BABY GIRL.

  I understand that first-time parents are a little goofy, but this towel had been a gift.

  “I need a bath myself,” I said as Joe lifted the damp baby into his arms.

  “You go ahead,” said my handsome and most wonderful husband. “You OK with Pizza Pronto? I’ll call in an order.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. “Sausage, mushrooms, onions, OK?”

  “You forgot the jalapeños.”

  “Those, too.”

  The pizza arrived, pronto.

  Over our down-and-dirty dinner, I told Joe about the Windbreaker cops. When the pizza box was in the trash, the baby was asleep, and Joe was working in his home office, a.k.a. the spare bedroom, I brought my laptop to the living room and took over the big leather sofa.

  I’d worked the Windbreaker cops case at both ends of my day, but I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Tina Strichler, the shrink who’d been gutted in the street.

  Now that I had a full belly and some free time, I felt compelled to check out the homicides that had happened on Claire’s birthday the two previous years.

  I was almost positive that these cases had somehow slipped through the cracks.

  CHAPTER 10

  MY HUSBAND STOOD behind me, his hands working on the clenched muscles in my neck.

  “Oooh, I think I like working at home,” I said.

  “Yes, well, I’m the legendary man with the slow hands.”

  I laughed. “Yes, you are.”

  “More wine?”

  “No, thanks. I’m good.”

  “OK, then,” he said, giving my shoulders a squeeze. “Martha and I are going for a run.”

  “I’ll wait up.”

  As soon as Joe and Martha had left the apartment, I checked on our sleeping little one, and then I went back to work.

  I typed in my password and opened the SFPD case log to kick off my search. The index to the files was little more than a list of the victims; each case was dated and marked either active, closed, or pending. The name of the lead inspector on each case was listed under the victim’s name.

  Since I was searching for murders on specific dates, it didn’t take long to find the two women who’d been killed on Claire’s birthday. I stared at the names, and I remembered the occasions.

  Just the way it had happened today, I’d been called from the table to go to the crime scene because I was a ranking officer, on duty, and near the location when the body had been discovered.

  I clicked open the older of the two unsolved cases.

  Two years ago a woman named Catherine Hayes had been killed outside her father’s coffee shop on Nob Hill. Hayes, who worked for her father during the day, went to night school for accounting and finance. On that twelfth day of May, she’d been having a smoke outside while talking to a friend on the phone when she’d been stabbed in the back. Then her throat had been slit.

  There were no witnesses, and the friend who had been on the phone with Hayes had heard only the victim’s screams. Hayes hadn’t been robbed. The killer took his knife and left nothing behind; no note, no DNA, no skin cells under the victim’s nails. The leads were thin to nonexistent, and nothing panned out. Catherine Hayes left devastated friends and family, and her open file was still chilling.

  So was the file of Yolanda Pirro, a poet who’d been seen competing in last year’s 12k Bay to Breakers Race, a huge attraction that had been run annually for over a hundred years. Many of the runners wore costumes; some even ran nude, or dressed like fish and ran backward, as if they were swimming upstream. Go figure.

  Pirro’s body was found the day after the race in a thicket of shrubs at the end of the course. She’d been wearing runners’ gear, nothing that would make her stand out.

  Pirro had multiple stab wounds, any one of which could have been fatal. Her devastated husband and close circle of friends said she had no enemies. She was a poet who worked as a volunteer at a community garden and liked to run.

  She hadn’t known Catherine Hayes, and the two women had no common friends, family, or acquaintances. The Northern District had caught the case and had no suspects and no witnesses—and at the same time, tens of thousands of suspects who’d participated in the race or watched from the sidelines. And so, without a clue, Yolanda Pirro’s case went cold.

  The Pirro case reminded me a lot of Strichler.

  Lots of people in a crowd, but no witnesses.

  Including Tina Strichler, all three victims who were killed on Claire’s birthday were attractive white females between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-two, living within three densely populated miles of one another.

  Did anything connect them?

  Well, yes. They’d all been knifed.

  I was staring over my laptop, searching my mind for anything else that would link these three women’s deaths, when someone kissed my temple.

  I put my arms up the way Julie does, and Joe gave me a big crinkly smile and another kiss. He came around the sofa and sat down next to me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Prowling around in some old case files.”

  “Oh, yeah? Why?”

  I told him all about it.

  CHAPTER 11

  MY EYES OPENED at 3:15 a.m. Maybe the spicy pizza had given me a bad dream. Or maybe I just sensed that Joe was lying beside me with his eyes open.

  Either way, I knew something was wrong.

  I rolled over to face my husband and put my hand on his pajama sleeve.

  “Joe? Are you OK?”

  He heaved a sigh that almost stirred the curtains across the room. Something was keeping him awake, but what? I quickly reviewed our evening at home, and apart from my asking him “How was your day?” to which he’d answered, “Pretty good,” our conversations had been all about my cases and me.

  That made me feel terrible.

  I shook his arm a little bit.

  “Joe? What’s going on?”

  He said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  “You didn’t. What’s wrong?”

  Joe sighed again, then plumped the pillows, rearranged the duvet, and drank some water.

  Then he said, “Brooks Findlay, that little shit. He fired me. Man, I was not expecting that.”

  “What? But why?”

  “He gave no real explanation. Just change of direction, blah-blah. Which was a lie. ‘You’re out. Your check’s in the mail.’”

  I was shocked by the news and equally blown away by how coldly Findlay had axed my husband, and not just because what hurts Joe hurts me. I say this because Joe was deputy Homeland Security director. He is supremely knowled
geable, has a good bedside manner, and has top credentials from DC to the moon. Port authorities are his specialty.

  Brooks Findlay, on the other hand, had gone from business school to an office job in LA. If you ask me, hiring Joe might have been the highlight of Findlay’s career. Maybe he didn’t like standing in Joe’s shadow.

  “I can’t believe this, Joe. You were completely blindsided?”

  “I had not a clue. If I’d screwed up, Findlay would have been happy to tell me what, when, and how. So it’s gotta be that Findlay doesn’t like me. Or someone above Findlay doesn’t like me. It stinks. But it doesn’t really matter.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “Because I’m not ready to retire. I’ll get something better, but I have to close the door properly before the next door opens.”

  Joe grabbed his phone and tapped some keys.

  Geez. It was still only 3:30 a.m. I heard a cracked voice at the end of the phone. My husband said, “Brooks, it’s Joe Molinari. Listen, you cut me off this morning, so I didn’t get a chance to tell you. I had a breakthrough on the project. Yeah. Big one. Key to the whole damned puzzle.

  “But you reminded me that we have a confidentiality agreement, so I deleted the work. Don’t worry. I scrubbed the disc. The info is unrecoverable. No one will ever see it.”

  I could hear a squeaky protest coming over the phone, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “No, no. That’s all. I wanted to tell you that you didn’t have to worry. It’s like it never even existed. Sleep tight.”

  Joe clicked off the phone and said, “You little prick.”

  He had a devilish Cheshire Cat grin on his face as he said to me, “Now, that was priceless.” Joe started to laugh and I did, too. Then he turned off the phone ringer and lay back down beside me.

  I pictured Findlay cursing, trying to call back, getting the voice mail, getting nowhere.

  I fell asleep in my husband’s arms and when I woke up, Joe was in the kitchen with Julie and Martha, and he was making apple pancakes.

  It was a yummy start to what would turn out to be a very bumpy day.

  CHAPTER 12

  YUKI WAS WRESTLING with a bear of a conflict as she parked her car in the wide-open parking lot at Fort Mason Center. She had a job interview with the Defense League at ten, and although they’d called her, she’d been borderline nauseated since she’d agreed to talk with them.

  The main reason for her queasiness was that she liked her job and she liked her boss, Leonard “Red Dog” Parisi, who had been her biggest booster. She hadn’t told him or anyone else at the office that she was thinking of making a switch. So going on a job interview made her feel sneaky.

  Just as important, she also hadn’t told Brady about the interview. Her husband was decisive and opinionated, and she wanted to make up her own mind before Brady had his say. And she was pretty sure he would tell her, “Do not take that job.”

  Yuki stared out at the always astonishing panoramic view of the bridge stretching across the glistening bay. Then she locked up her car and crossed the lot to a sidewalk running alongside one of the former fort’s barracks. She passed several identical rusty brown doors before she saw the one marked THE DEFENSE LEAGUE.

  Entering the office, Yuki gave her name to the young woman behind the plain wooden desk, took a wrapped peppermint from the dish, and sat down on one of six identical wooden chairs. Apart from the receptionist, Yuki was the only person in the small, unadorned, pretty-close-to-shabby room.

  She couldn’t help comparing this out-of-the-way place with the district attorney’s office in the Hall of Justice. There, she was one of hundreds of legal professionals and cops working both sides of criminal cases all day, and most nights and weekends, too. The DA’s office energized her, tested her, and plugged her into the heart of the San Francisco justice system, where she was finally beginning to distinguish herself.

  And thinking about all that made her wonder once again what in God’s name she was doing here. But she knew.

  The one thing that nagged at her conscience was her growing awareness that people with money got far better representation in court than those without. Light-years better. Nearly every day, some poor guy who’d been represented by an overworked and overwhelmed postgraduate public defender got out of jail after twenty long years because the DNA evidence came back saying he wasn’t guilty.

  Yuki couldn’t ignore her feeling that two-tiered justice wasn’t really just.

  She’d been thinking quite often, really, that perhaps she should be doing something about this inequity—and then she’d gotten a call last week from Zac Jordan at the Defense League.

  Jordan had said, “I’ve heard what a fighter you are, Ms. Castellano. I think we should talk.”

  It was ten to ten, so Yuki used the few minutes of utter silence to review what she knew about this not-for-profit foundation sponsored by a secret-Santa megabucks philanthropist. And she remembered a scrap of headhunter wisdom she’d relied on when she was looking for her first job.

  Get the job offer. Then you can always turn it down.

  A phone buzzed on the receptionist’s desk.

  The young woman answered the call, then said, “Ms. Castellano? I can take you back to see Mr. Jordan now.”

  It was showtime.

  CHAPTER 13

  YUKI GATHERED HER impressions of the long-haired Mr. Jordan as he rose from his desk chair to greet her. He was in his late twenties, casually dressed in a nubby beige cotton pullover and jeans. He wore a wedding band and had a firm handshake, and his diploma from Harvard Law was inconspicuously placed on the wall, almost hidden by the hat rack.

  He definitely looked the part of a liberal-leaning do-gooder. In fact, Yuki liked him immediately.

  The two exchanged “nice to meet yous,” and Mr. Jordan said, “Please. Call me Zac. Thanks for coming in. Have a seat.”

  “I haven’t taken an interview in a long time, Zac. But I am aware of the Defense League and what you do here. I have to say I’m intrigued.”

  “Intrigued by the opportunity to work long hours for low pay in a grubby office? Because I always find that to be a good recruiting tool.”

  Yuki laughed. “Actually, my current job provides some of the same benefits.”

  Jordan smiled, then said, “We’ve got a few perks I’ll tell you about some other time, but first, let’s talk about you. I’ve read your résumé, and I have a few questions.”

  “OK, shoot,” Yuki said.

  And then the laughs were over and the real interview began. Zac Jordan asked about her first job in corporate law and her reasons for going to the DA’s Office, and then he started drilling down on the cases she’d worked from the beginning of her time with the DA.

  Yuki had lost nearly all the cases she’d prosecuted in her first three years, and Zac Jordan seemed to know each case as well as if he’d been sitting in the courtroom. He questioned her on every soft opening statement, every missed opportunity, every time opposing counsel had trampled her with superior litigation experience.

  Well, yeah, she’d been outgunned in several cases, but there were usually contributing factors: faulty police work, a witness who changed her testimony, a defendant who committed suicide before Yuki made her closing argument. Depressing, deflating “not guilty” verdicts had made her even more determined to sharpen her game. Which she had done.

  Meanwhile, here she sat, having to defend her fairly pathetic win/loss ratio to a man she didn’t know, who might or might not offer her a job she didn’t necessarily want.

  When Zac Jordan dug into the infamous Del Norte ferry shooter’s trial, in which the defendant had killed four people and had been found legally insane, Yuki really had had enough.

  By definition, the shooter was crazy.

  But she had to try him for multiple homicides. That was her job.

  So she forced a smile and said to the hotshot across the desk from her, “Well, gee, Zac. I have always done my best, and I’
ve been promoted several times. I really don’t understand why you asked to see me. Did you just bring me in so you could stick it to me?”

  “Not at all. I needed to hear your side of these cases because we’re always the underdogs. How would you feel about defending the poor, the hapless, and the hopeless?”

  “I don’t know,” Yuki said, abandoning her plan to get the job offer knowing that if she didn’t want it, she could turn it down.

  “See if this is of interest to you, Yuki,” Zac said, handing her a file. “I have a case that desperately needs to be tried. The victim was arrested outside a crack house where some dope slingers had been shot. He was running. He had a gun. The cops had probable cause to arrest him, but this kid was fifteen and had a low IQ and for some damned reason, his parents weren’t there. Although he maintained that he only found the gun, that it wasn’t his, the cops muscled him into waiving his rights, and then he was squeezed until he gave a confession.

  “While this poor schnook was awaiting trial, maybe a week after his arrest, he was murdered in jail. If he’d had a trial, he might have proven his innocence, and I do believe he was innocent. I believe he was victimized by the cops who interrogated him and that he should never have gone to jail at all.

  “I’m going to have to ask something of you, Yuki. Think about this overnight and see how you feel tomorrow morning. You’re my first choice for this job, but I’m talking to someone else, too, and I have to make a hire right away.

  “Give me a call either way, OK?”

  CHAPTER 14

  YUKI HAD BEEN lying awake in bed since Brady got up at four and started bumping into things as he tried to dress in the dark.

  “You can turn on the light,” she said.

  “I’m good. My socks. I can’t tell if they’re blue or black even when the light is on.”