Women's Murder Club [09] The 9th Judgment Read online

  I’d stopped by the courtroom to watch Yuki’s closing argument, and I had to agree. Dr. Lincoln Harris was dead slime, and while Jo-Jo Johnson was hardly better—he was alive. And he looked like a man without a clue.

  “Asher could actually win,” Yuki wailed. “I quit private practice for this? Help me, Linds. Should I find a good-paying job in a corporate law firm?”

  My phone vibrated on my hip again. I looked down at the caller ID. Jacobi. My ex-partner and current boss, whose gut reaction to everything is to call me. Old habits die hard. I keyed the button and said, “Boxer,” into the mouthpiece.

  “There’s been a double homicide, Lindsay. It’s got ‘psycho’ written all over it.”

  “Did you call Paul Chi? He’s back from vacation. I’ll bet he’s home right now.”

  “I want you on this,” Jacobi growled.

  After more than ten years of working together, we were almost able to read each other’s mind. Jacobi sounded freaked out, like someone had walked over his grave.

  “What’s this about, Warren?” I asked him, already knowing my best-laid plans for the evening were shot.

  “One of the vics is a young kid,” Jacobi said.

  He gave me the address—the parking garage near the galleria. “Conklin just left. He’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

  “I’m on my way,” I told him.

  Chapter 8

  I CLOSED MY phone and promised Yuki a longer, better talk about her career after the jury came back. I said, “Your closing was outstanding, girlfriend. Don’t quit.” I kissed her cheek and fled the bar.

  I drove my Explorer toward Market and got gridlocked. I put the Kojak light on my roof and hit the siren. Vehicles parted reluctantly, and I finally reached the entrance to the garage near the Stonestown Galleria.

  The mouth of the garage was cordoned off and blocked by a grumbling crowd of car owners. I held up my shield, ducked under the tape, and signed the log. Officer Joe Sorbero looked gray, as if he’d never seen death before.

  “You’re the first officer on the scene?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You okay, Joe?”

  “I’ve been better, Sergeant,” he said, smiling weakly. “I’ve got kids, you know.” He pointed out a blue RAV4 parked toward the far end of the row. “Your next nightmare is right over there.”

  I followed Sorbero’s finger and saw Inspector Rich Conklin standing between a couple of vehicles at the end of the aisle, peering into the driver’s-side window of the RAV4.

  When Jacobi moved up to lieutenant, Conklin became my partner. He’s smart and disturbingly handsome, and he’s got the makings of a first-class detective. It wouldn’t shock anyone if he made captain one day, but right now he reports to me.

  He came toward me before I could reach the scene.

  “Brace yourself, Linds.”

  “Fill me in.”

  “White female, about thirty, name of Barbara Ann Benton. The other victim is an infant. Might be a year old. Both were shot point-blank. The ME and CSU are on the way.”

  “Who called it in?”

  “A lady who was parked in the spot next to the RAV4. I interviewed her and sent her home. She didn’t see anything. So far, no one did. Unis are going through the trash cans, and we’ve collected the surveillance tape.”

  “Are you thinking the baby was collateral damage?”

  “No way,” Conklin said. “He was capped on purpose.”

  I approached the SUV and sucked in my breath as I looked inside. Barbara Ann Benton was slumped awkwardly in the front seat, half facing the rear as if she’d tried to climb over the divide.

  I saw two obvious gunshot wounds: one to the neck and another to the side of her chest. Then I forced myself to look past the mom to the child in his car seat.

  The baby boy had a glaze of pink candy on his lips and on the fingers of his right hand. The rear window was spattered with blood. The child had been shot through the temple at close range.

  Conklin was right.

  The baby’s death was no accident. In fact, the shot was so precise, the kid could have been the prime target.

  I hoped that the little boy hadn’t realized what was happening.

  I hoped he hadn’t had time to be afraid.

  Chapter 9

  “WHAT DO YOU make of this, Linds?”

  Conklin called to my attention the vivid red letters printed on the windshield. I stared, riveted by the sight. This is what Jacobi had been talking about when he’d said that the crime scene had “‘psycho’ written all over it.”

  He hadn’t said it was written in lipstick.

  The letters “WCF” meant nothing to me, except the fact that only wacko killers deliberately leave a signature. It reminded me of cases I’d caught where the killer had signed his crimes. And it brought back the bad old days when the Backstreet Killer had terrified San Francisco in the ’90s, a murderer who took eight innocent lives, left signatures and notes for the police, and was never caught. A chill went down the back of my neck.

  “Those shopping bags in the rear,” I said to Conklin. “Were they looted?” I was hoping.

  My partner shook his head no and said, “Looks like a hundred bucks in the victim’s wallet. This wasn’t a robbery. This was an execution. Two of them.”

  Questions were flooding my mind. Why hadn’t gunshots been reported? Why had the killer targeted these people? Was it random or personal? Why had he killed a child?

  I turned toward the sound of an engine’s roar and saw the coroner’s van heading toward us, tires screeching as it braked twenty feet away.

  Dr. Claire Washburn got out of the van wearing blue scrubs and a Windbreaker—black with white letters spelling out MEDICAL EXAMINER front and back. Despite the odds of a black woman succeeding in her profession when she first got started, Claire had done it. In my opinion, she’s the finest forensic pathologist west of the Rockies. She’s also the friend of my heart, and although we work three flights and eighty feet away in adjoining buildings, I hadn’t seen her in more than a week.

  “Jesus God, what is this?” she asked as she hugged me and took in the scene over my shoulder.

  I walked Claire toward the RAV4 and stood next to her as she looked into the car and saw the dead woman in a crouch, half facing her baby.

  Claire jerked back as she took in the sight of the dead child, her face reflecting the same horror the rest of us were feeling, maybe more. “That baby is the same age as my Ruby,” she said. “Who kills a baby too young to tell what happened?”

  “Maybe it’s payback for something. Drug deal. Gambling debt. Or maybe the husband did it.”

  I was thinking, Please let it be something like that.

  Claire took her Minolta out of her kit and fired off two shots of Barbara Ann Benton from where we stood, then went around to the other side of the vehicle and took two more.

  When she started shooting pictures of the baby, I saw the tears in her eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Claire cry.

  “Mom let the killer get this close,” Claire said. “Gunpowder stippling is on her cheek and neck. She tried to shield her baby with her body, and still the bastard shot the child in the head. And here’s something new: I don’t recognize this stippling pattern.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means WCF has some rare kind of gun.”

  Chapter 10

  THE BENTONS’ HOUSE was a modest two-bedroom on 14th Avenue, blue with white trim, spray-on Fourth of July decorations still on the picture window and a pull toy on the steps. Conklin rang the bell, and when Richard Benton opened the front door, I knew that we were seeing the last happy moment of the man’s life.

  When a married woman is killed, her husband is involved more than half the time, but I found Richard Benton believably devastated when we told him the shocking news—and he had an alibi. He’d been home with his five-year-old when the shooting took place, had
roasted a chicken for dinner, and had sent a constant stream of e-mail to his office during that time.

  Benton was at first disbelieving and then shattered, but Conklin and I talked to him anyway, about his marriage, about Barbara’s friends and coworkers, and asked if there’d been any threats against her. He said, “Barbara is nothing but love. I don’t know what we’re going to do…” And then he broke down again.

  I checked in with Jacobi at nine. I told him that until I ran Richard Benton’s name through NCIC, he was in the clear, and that Benton didn’t know the initials “WCF.”

  “Barbara was a nurse’s aide,” I told Jacobi. “Worked at a nursing home. We’ll interview the others on her shift first thing in the morning.”

  “I’m going to hand that job off to Samuels and Lemke,” Jacobi said. He had a strangled sound in his voice for the second time in as many hours.

  “Hand it off? Excuse me? What’s that about?”

  “Something new just came in, Boxer.”

  Honest to God, I was running out of gas, going into my thirteenth straight hour on the job. Behind me, in a room shimmering with anguish, Conklin was telling Richard Benton to come to the ME’s office to identify the victims.

  “Something new on the Benton case?” I asked Jacobi. Maybe the husband had a record for domestic violence. Maybe a witness had come forward, or perhaps CSI had found something inside the RAV4.

  Jacobi said, “No, this just happened. If you want me to give it to Chi and McNeil, I will. But you and Conklin are going to want in.”

  “Don’t be too sure, Jacobi.”

  “You’ve heard of Marcus Dowling?”

  “The actor?”

  “His wife was just shot by an intruder,” Jacobi told me. “I’m on my way over to the Dowling house now.”

  Chapter 11

  THE DOWLING HOUSE is on Nob Hill, a sprawling mansion taking up most of the block, ivy growing up the walls, potted topiaries on either side of the large oak door. It couldn’t have been more different from the Bentons’ humble home.

  Before Conklin could reach for the bell, Jacobi opened the door. His face was sagging from stress. His eyelids drooped, and he almost looked older tonight than he had when we’d both taken bullets on Larkin Street.

  “It happened in the bedroom,” he told me and my partner. “Second floor. After you’ve taken a look at the scene, join us downstairs. I’ll be in the library with Dowling.”

  The bedroom shared by Marcus and Casey Dowling looked like it had been ripped from the pages of a Neiman Marcus catalog.

  The bed, centered on the west-facing wall, was the size of Catalina, with a button-tucked bronze silk headboard, silk throw pillows, and rumpled satin bedding in bronze and gold. There were more tassels in this room than backstage at the Mitchell Brothers’ Girls, Girls, Girls!!! review.

  A dainty console table was on the floor, surrounded by broken knickknacks. Taffeta curtains swelled at the open window, but I could still smell the undertones of gunpowder in the air.

  Charlie Clapper, director of our Crime Scene Unit, was taking pictures of Casey Dowling’s body. He flapped his hand toward me and Conklin in greeting and said, “Frickin’ shame, a beautiful woman like this.” He stepped back so we could take a look.

  Casey Dowling was naked, lying faceup on the floor, her platinum hair splayed around her, blood on her palms. It made me think she’d clasped her hands to the chest wound before she fell.

  “Her husband says he was downstairs rinsing dinner dishes when he heard two gunshots,” Clapper told me. “When he came into the room, his wife was lying here. That table and the bric-a-brac were broken on the floor, and the window was open.”

  “Was anything taken?” Conklin asked.

  “There’s some jewelry missing from the safe in the closet. Dowling says the contents were insured for a couple of million.”

  Clapper walked to the window and held back the curtain, revealing a hole cut in the glass.

  “Intruder used a glass cutter, then opened the lock. Drawers look untouched. The safe wasn’t blown, so either he knew the combination or, more likely, the safe was already open. Bullets are inside the missus. No shell casings. This was a neat job until he knocked over the table on the way out. We’ve just gotten started. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find prints or trace.”

  Clapper is a pro, with some twenty-five years on the force, a good part of it in Homicide before he went over to crime scene investigation. He’s sharp, and he actually helps without getting in the way.

  I said, “So this was a burglary that went to hell?”

  Clapper shrugged. “Like all professional cat burglars, this one was organized, even fastidious. Maybe he carries a gun for emergencies, but packing goes against the type.”

  “So what happened?” I wondered out loud. “The husband wasn’t in the room. The victim wasn’t armed—she wasn’t even dressed. What made a cat burglar fire on a naked woman?”

  Chapter 12

  CONKLIN AND I took the curving staircase down to the main floor. I found the library by following the familiar, resonant, English-accented voice of Marcus Dowling.

  I’d seen all of his older films, the ones where he’d played a spy or was a romantic lead, and even some of his more recent films, where he’d played a heavy. I’d always liked him.

  I stepped through the open door to the library, and Dowling was standing there barefoot, wearing blue trousers and an unbuttoned white shirt. I admit to feeling a little starstruck. Marcus Dowling, the next best thing to Sean Connery. He was telling Jacobi about the senseless murder of his wife when Conklin and I came through the door.

  Jacobi introduced us, telling Dowling that the three of us would be working the case together.

  I shook hands with the film legend, then sat at the edge of a leather sofa. Dowling was clearly distraught. And I noticed something else. His hair was wet.

  Dowling didn’t sit down. He repeated his story as he paced around the book-lined room.

  “Casey and I had the Devereaus over for dinner. François and his wife, Sheila—he’s directing my new film.”

  “We’ll need their contact numbers,” I said.

  “I’ll give you all the numbers you want,” he said, “but they had already left when this happened. Casey had gone upstairs to dress for bed. I was tidying up down here. I heard a loud bang coming from upstairs.” His forehead rumpled. “It didn’t even occur to me that it was a gunshot. I called out to Casey. She didn’t answer.”

  “What happened next, Mr. Dowling?”

  “I called her again, and then as I was heading upstairs, I heard another bang. This time I thought it was a gunshot, and right after that, I heard glass breaking.

  “I was all emotional by this time, Inspectors. I don’t know what happened after… after I saw my girl lying on the floor. I grabbed her in my arms,” he said, his voice cracking.

  “Her head fell back, and she wasn’t breathing. I must have called the police. I saw my bloody handprint on the phone. Afterward, I realized that the safe was nearly empty.

  “Whoever did this must have known Casey,” Dowling continued, weeping now. “He must have known that she didn’t always lock the safe, because dialing the combination was just… too bloody boring.

  “Killing Casey was so insane,” Dowling went on. He was rubbing his chest when he said to Jacobi, “Just tell me what I can do to help you catch the animal who did this.”

  I was about to ask Marcus Dowling why he’d showered while waiting for the police to arrive when Conklin got ahead of me, inquiring, “Mr. Dowling, do you own a gun?”

  Dowling turned a wild-eyed stare on Conklin. His face went rigid with pain. He clutched his left arm and said, “Something’s wrong.”

  Then he keeled over and dropped to the floor.

  Chapter 13

  JESUS CHRIST! MARCUS Dowling was dying.

  Conklin found the aspirin, Jacobi cushioned Dowling’s head with a throw pillow, and I called Dispatch. I repeated the house
address and shouted, “Fifty-year-old male! Heart attack!”

  Dowling was still writhing when the ambulance arrived, and the big man was loaded onto a gurney and carried out through the door. Jacobi rode with Dowling to the hospital, leaving me and Conklin to canvass the neighborhood.

  Lights from fantastic neighboring homes punctuated the darkness along the tree-lined street. I was worried about this new case. Because Casey Dowling had been wealthy and famous, the public pressure to find her killer would squeeze the politicos, who would, in turn, squeeze us. The SFPD was already suffering from budget deficits and too little manpower. Add to that the public expectation that homicides could be solved in an hour between commercial breaks, and I knew we were in for a humongous, spotlighted nightmare.

  I hoped Clapper would come up with a good lead in the lab, because right now, along with next to nothing to go on, I was getting a bad feeling that what Marcus had told us was all wrong.

  “Why would a burglar shoot Casey Dowling?” I asked Conklin as we walked up the street.

  “What Clapper said. The burglar carried a gun in case he ran into an emergency.”

  “Like a surprised homeowner?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Casey Dowling wasn’t armed.”

  “True. Maybe she recognized the intruder,” Conklin said. “You know those stories Cindy’s been doing on Hello Kitty?”

  Cindy is Cindy Thomas, a crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle and a friend to the end with a great mind for solving whodunits.

  Recently Cindy had been writing about a cat burglar who’d been doing second-story jobs, always breaking in when the homeowners were having dinner on the first floor and the alarm system was turned off. This burglar made off with only jewelry—which had not turned up. Cindy had dubbed the cat burglar “Hello Kitty,” and it stuck.