Women's Murder Club [08] The 8th Confession Read online

  “That’s Bagman’s crucifix,” I said, staring at a piece of tramp art that had the patina of an ancient and valuable artifact.

  It was in fact as described: two bolts, copper wire, a toy baby lashed to the cross.

  “Could be some prints on the plastic baby,” I said. “Where did you find this?”

  “In Bagman’s gullet,” Claire told me, taking a swig of water. “Someone tried to ram it down his throat.”

  Chapter 8

  I WAS EAGER to hear Joe’s thoughts on Bagman Jesus.

  We were having dinner that night at Foreign Cinema. Although it is located on a crappy block in the city’s dodgiest neighborhood, surrounded by bodegas and dollar stores, Foreign Cinema’s marquis and fine design make it look as though a UFO picked it up in L.A. and dropped it down in the Mission by mistake.

  But apart from the way it looks, what makes Foreign Cinema a real treat are the picnic tables in the back garden, where old films are projected on the blank wall of a neighboring building.

  The sky was clear that early May night, the evening made even cozier by the heat lamps all around the yard. Sean Penn was at one of the tables with some of his pals, but the big draw for me was having a dinner date with Joe without either of us having to book a flight to do it.

  After so many gut-wrenching speed bumps, the roller-coaster ride of our formerly long-distance relationship had smoothed out when Joe moved to San Francisco to be with me. Now we were finally living together.

  Finally giving ourselves a real chance.

  As The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an old French film, flickered without sound against the wall, Joe listened intently as I told him about my astounding day: how Conklin and I had walked our feet off trying to find out who had murdered Bagman Jesus.

  “Claire took five slugs out of his head, four of them just under the scalp,” I told Joe. “The fifth shot was to the temple and was likely the money shot. Then Bagman took another slug to the back of the neck, postmortem. Kind of a personal act of violence, don’t you think?”

  “Those slugs. They were twenty-fives or twenty-twos?”

  “ Twenty-twos,” I said.

  “Figures. They had to be soft or they all would have gone through his skull. Were there any shell casings at the scene?”

  “Not a one. Shooter probably used a revolver.”

  “Or he used a semiautomatic, picked up those casings. That kind of guy was evidence-conscious. Thinking ahead.”

  “So, okay, that’s a good point.” I turned Joe’s thought around in my mind. “So maybe it was premeditated, you’re saying?”

  “It’s not hopeless, Linds. That soft lead could have striations. See what the lab says. Too bad you won’t be getting prints off the casings.”

  “There might be some prints on that plastic baby.”

  Joe nodded, but I could tell he didn’t agree.

  “No?” I asked him.

  “If the shooter picked up the casings, maybe he was a pro. A contract killer or a military guy. Or a cop. Or a con. If he was a pro —”

  “Then there won’t be any prints on the crucifix either,” I said. “But why would a pro kill a street dweller so viciously?”

  “It’s only day one, Linds. Give yourself some time.”

  I told him, “Sure,” but Jacobi had already pulled the plug on this case. I put my head in my hands as Joe called the waiter over and ordered wine. Then he turned a big, unreadable smile on me.

  I sat back and analyzed that smile, getting only that Joe looked like a kid with a secret.

  I asked him what was going on, waited for him to sample the wine. Then, when he’d made me wait plenty long enough, he leaned across the table and took my hands in his.

  “Well, Blondie, guess who got a call from the Pentagon today?”

  Chapter 9

  “OH MY GOD,” I blurted. “Don’t tell me.”

  I couldn’t help myself. My first thought was that Joe was being recruited back to Washington — and I just couldn’t stand even the idea of that.

  “Lindsay, take it easy. The call was about an assignment. Could be the beginning of other assignments, all lucrative, a great boost for my consulting business.”

  When I met Joe while working a case, his business card read, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, HOMELAND SECURITY. He was the best antiterrorism guy in Washington. And that was the job he’d given up when he’d moved out to the left coast to be with me.

  His credentials and his reputation were first-rate, but the opportunities hadn’t come to him in San Francisco as quickly as we’d expected.

  I blamed that on the current administration being PO’ed that super-well- liked Joseph Molinari had walked off the job in an election year. Apparently they were getting over their pique.

  That was good.

  I relaxed. I smiled. I said, “Whew. Scared me, Joe.” And I started to get excited for him.

  “So tell me about the assignment,” I said.

  “Sure, but let’s order first.”

  I don’t remember what I picked from the menu because when the food came, Joe told me that he was leaving for a conference in the Middle East — in the morning.

  And that he might be in Jordan for three weeks or more.

  Joe put down his fork, said, “What’s wrong, Lindsay? What’s troubling you?”

  He asked nicely. He really wanted to know, but my blood pressure had rocketed and I couldn’t tell him nicely why.

  “It’s your birthday tomorrow, Joe. We were going to Cat’s house for the weekend, remember?”

  Catherine is my sister, six years younger than me, lives in the pretty coastal town of Half Moon Bay with her two girls. It was supposed to be a family weekend, quality time, kind of a big deal for me, bringing Joe home to pretty much the only family I have.

  “We can stay with Cat some other time, hon. I have to go to this conference. Besides, Lindsay, all I want for my birthday is tonight and you.”

  “I can’t talk to you right now,” I said, tossing my napkin down on the table, standing up in front of the movie playing against the wall, hearing people shout at me to sit down.

  I walked through the restaurant and out the thirty-foot-long corridor lined on each side with a waist-high niche of votive candles, pulled my cell phone out of my pocket, and called for a taxi before I got to the street.

  I waited out there on Mission, smack in the middle of Dodge City, feeling outraged, then stupid, then really, really mad at myself.

  I’d behaved like the dumb-blonde stereotype that I’d always despised.

  Chapter 10

  I SAID TO MYSELF, You frickin’ bimbo. I leaned down, gave the cabbie a five, and waved him off.

  Then I made that romantic, candlelit march all by myself down the thirty-foot corridor, through the restaurant, and out to the back garden.

  I got there as the waiter was taking the plates away.

  “Down in front!” the person who’d yelled before yelled again. “You. Yes, you.”

  I sat down across from Joe, said, “That was stupid of me and I’m sorry.”

  Joe’s expression told me that he was really wounded. He said, “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have sprung that on you, but I didn’t imagine you’d react like that.”

  “No, don’t apologize. You were right and I was a complete idiot, Joe. Will you please forgive me?”

  “I’ve already forgiven you. But Lindsay, every time we fight, the elephant in our relationship does what it does.”

  “Trumpets?” I asked, trying to be helpful.

  Joe smiled, but it was a sad smile.

  “You’re going on forty.”

  “I know that. Thank you.”

  “I’ll be forty-seven, as you pointed out, tomorrow. Last year I asked you to marry me. The ring I gave you is still in a box in a drawer, not on your finger. What I want for my birthday? I want you to decide, Lindsay.”

  With the precisely inconvenient timing waiters around the world have perfected, a trio of young men grouped around ou
r table, a small cake in hand, candles burning, and began singing “Happy Birthday” to Joe. Just as I had planned.

  The song was picked up by other diners, and a lot of eyes turned on us. Joe smiled, blew out the candles.

  Then he looked at me, love written all over his face. He said, “Don’t beg, Blondie. I’m not going to say what I wished for.”

  Did I feel the fool for blighting our evening?

  I did.

  Did I know what to do about Joe’s wish and that diamond ring in its black velvet box?

  I did not.

  But I was pretty sure my indecision had nothing to do with Joe.

  Chapter 11

  WE WOKE UP before dawn and made urgent love without speaking. Hair was pulled, lips were bitten, pillows were thrown on the floor.

  The fierce lovemaking was true, heartfelt acknowledgment that we were stuck. That there was nothing either one of us could say that the other didn’t already know.

  Our skin glistening in the afterglow, we lay together side by side, our hands gripped tightly together. The high-tech clock on the nightstand projected the time and outside temperature on the ceiling in large red digits.

  Five fifteen a.m.

  Fifty-two degrees.

  Joe said, “I had a good dream. Everything is going to be okay.”

  Was he assuring me? Or reassuring himself?

  “What was the dream?”

  “We were swimming together, naked, under a waterfall. Water. That’s sex, right?”

  He released my hand. The mattress shifted. He shook out the blanket and covered my body.

  I heard the shower running as I lay in the dark, feeling pent-up and tearful and unresolved. I dozed, waking to Joe’s hand touching my hair.

  “I’m going now, Lindsay.”

  I reached up and put my arms around his neck, and we kissed in the dark.

  I said, “Have a good trip. Don’t forget to write.”

  “I’ll call.”

  It was all the wrong tone to let Joe leave on this cool note. The front door closed. The locks clicked into place.

  I bolted out of bed.

  I dressed in jeans and one of Joe’s sweaters, ran barefoot out into the hallway. I pressed the down button at the elevator station, one long push until the car made the climb back up to the eleventh floor and jumped open.

  I despaired as the elevator dropped me slowly down. In my mind’s eye, Joe’s bags were in the trunk, the car moving now along Lake Street, picking up speed as it headed toward the airport.

  But when the elevator finally released me into the lobby, I saw Joe through the glass front doors, standing beside a Lincoln sedan. I blew past the doorman and ran out into the street, calling Joe’s name.

  He looked up and opened his arms, and I fell against him, pressed my face to his jacket, felt the tears slip out of my eyes.

  “I love you so much, Joe.”

  “I love you, too, Blondie.”

  “Joe, when we were in that waterfall, was I wearing my ring?”

  “Yeah. Big old sparkler. Could see it from the Moon.”

  I laughed into his shoulder. We kissed and hugged, did it again, until the driver joked, “Save a little for later, okay?”

  “I’d better go,” Joe said.

  I stepped back reluctantly, and Joe got into the car.

  I waved and Joe waved back as the black Lincoln took my lover away.

  Chapter 12

  YUKI WAS IN HER OFFICE, one of the dozens of windowless, grubby warrens for assistant district attorneys in the Hall of Justice. She was prepped, primed, and in full court dress: a gray Anne Klein suit, ice-pink silk shirt, three-hundred-dollar shoes she’d gotten half off at Neiman.

  It was half past six in the morning.

  In about three hours she would be making her closing argument in the bloody awful and complex murder trial of Stacey Glenn, a twenty-five-year-old former pageant queen who’d managed to be both a beauty and a beast.

  What Stacey Glenn had done to her parents was revolting, unprovoked, and unforgivable, and Yuki was determined to nail that psycho-bitch and send her away for good. But for all of Yuki’s determination and gifts for bringing the strongest argument to life, she was becoming famous around the DA’s office — famous for losing. And that was killing her.

  So this was it.

  If Stacey Glenn got off, as much as she’d hate to do it, Yuki would go back to civil law, handle rich people’s divorces and contract negotiations. That’s if she wasn’t fired before she could quit.

  Yuki hunched forward in her creaky chair and shuffled a packet of index cards, each one highlighting a point she would make in summing up the People’s case.

  Item: Stacey Glenn had left her apartment in Potrero Hill at two in the morning and driven her distinctive candy-apple-red Subaru Forester to her parents’ house forty miles away in Marin, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

  Item: Stacey Glenn entered her parents’ house between three and three fifteen a.m., using a key that was kept hidden under a particular heart-shaped stone by the front door. She went through the kitchen to the garage, brought a crowbar upstairs to the master bedroom, and bludgeoned her parents, beating both their heads in.

  Item: A neighbor testified that around three that morning she saw a red Subaru Forester with off-road tires in the Glenns’ driveway and recognized it as belonging to Stacey.

  Item: Leaving her parents for dead, Stacey Glenn drove toward her home, going through a tollbooth on her return trip at approximately four thirty-five.

  This timeline was crucial to Yuki’s case because it established Stacey Glenn’s movements on the night in question and decimated her alibi that she was home alone and asleep when her parents were attacked.

  Item: Stacey Glenn was a degenerate shopper, heavily in debt. Her parents were worth nothing to her alive. They were worth a million dollars to her dead.

  Item: Stacey Glenn had the means, the motive, and the opportunity — and there was also a witness to the crime itself.

  And that witness was 90 percent of Yuki’s case.

  Yuki wrapped her cards with a rubber band, dropped the pack into her purse. Then she folded her hands under her chin and beamed her thoughts to her own mother, Keiko Castellano, who had died before her time and who was highly ticked off about it. Keiko had loved her only daughter fiercely, and Yuki felt her mom’s comforting presence around her now.

  “Mommy, stay with me in court today and help me win, okay?” Yuki said out loud. “Sending kisses.”

  With hours to kill, Yuki cleaned out her pencil drawer, emptied her trash can, deleted old files from her address book, and changed her too-sweet pink blouse to the stronger, more confident teal man-tailored shirt that was in dry cleaner’s plastic behind her door.

  At eight fifteen, Yuki’s second chair, Nicky Gaines, ambled down the corridor calling her name. Yuki stuck her head out of her doorway, said, “Nicky, just make sure the PowerPoint works. That’s all you have to do.”

  “I’m your man,” said Nicky.

  “Good. Zip up your fly. Let’s go.”

  Chapter 13

  YUKI STOOD UP from her seat at the prosecutors’ table as the Honorable Brendan Joseph Duffy entered the courtroom through a paneled door behind the bench and took his seat between the flags and in front of the great seal of the State of California.

  Duffy had a runner’s build, graying hair, windowpane glasses worn low on the slope of his nose. He yanked out his iPod earbuds, popped the top on a can of Sprite, then, as those in attendance sat down, asked the bailiff to bring in the jury.

  Across the aisle, Yuki’s opponent, the well-regarded criminal defense attorney Philip R. Hoffman, exchanged whispers with his client, Stacey Glenn.

  Hoffman was tall, stooped, six-foot-four, forty-two years old, with unruly dark hair. He wore a midnight-blue Armani suit and a pink satin tie. His nails were manicured.

  Like Yuki, Hoffman was a perfectionist.

  Unlike her, Hoffman’s win-to
-loss ratio put him in the all-star league. Normally, he commanded fees upwards of nine hundred bucks an hour, but he was currently representing Stacey Glenn pro bono. Hoffman was no altruist. The courtroom was packed with press, and their coverage of this case was worth millions to his firm.

  Stacey Glenn was a stunning blue-eyed brunette with two spots of blush on her cheeks emphasizing her jailhouse pallor. She wore a frumpy suit in an unflattering olive-toned plaid, conveying schoolteacher or statistician rather than the calculating, murdering, moneygrubbing psychopath that she was.

  Beside Yuki, Nicky Gaines, with his perpetual adenoidal wheeze, breathed noisily as the jurors entered the small courtroom from a side door and settled into their seats in the jury box.

  Judge Duffy greeted the jurors, explained that today both sides would summarize their cases and that afterward, the jury could begin its deliberations.

  Duffy took a long pull of soda right out of the can, then asked, “Ms. Castellano, are the People ready to proceed?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Taking her notes from the table, Yuki walked to the lectern in the center of the oak-lined courtroom. She smiled at the twelve jurors and two alternates she’d come to know by their tics, grimaces, laughter, and eye-rolling over the past six weeks, said, “Morning, everyone,” then, pointing to the defendant, spoke from her heart.

  “Stacey Glenn is a depraved and unrepentant murderer.

  “She killed her father, who adored her. She did her level best to kill her mother and thought she had. She bludgeoned her parents without mercy because she wanted to collect their life-insurance payout of a million dollars.

  “She did it for the money.”

  Yuki went over the timeline she’d established during the trial — the tollbooth attendant’s testimony and that of the Glenns’ neighbor — and she reminded them of the insurance broker Stacey had called to check on the status of her parents’ policy.