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

  Here’s what was known about Hello Kitty: he was fit, deft, and fast, and had a huge pair of stones.

  “Think about it,” Conklin said. “Hello Kitty seems to know when these wealthy people are having dinner parties. What if he’s part of the same social circle? If Casey Dowling recognized him, maybe shooting her was his only way out.”

  “Not a bad theory,” I said to Conklin as we took the walk up to the front steps of the manse next door. “But wait a sec. What did you make of Dowling’s wet hair?”

  “He washed off his wife’s blood.”

  “So he leaped into the shower after Casey was murdered,” I said. “It seems weird to me.”

  “So what’s your theory? Homicide One Oh One?”

  “Why not? Because Dowling’s a movie star? Something about him isn’t right. He told Clapper he heard two gunshots. He told us he heard a noise, and then sometime after that, he heard a second sound, and that time he was sure it was a shot.”

  My partner said, “Could be he was just summing up, telling the story in shorthand.”

  “Could be shorthand,” I said. “Or could be he’s making up the story as he goes along and can’t keep it straight.”

  Chapter 14

  THE HOME NEXT to the Dowlings’ was set back from the street and had a groundskeeper’s house in the side yard and two deluxe cars in the driveway.

  I pressed the bell, and chimes rang. The front door opened, and a brown-haired boy of about ten, wearing a rugby shirt over pajama bottoms, gazed up at us and asked who we were.

  “I’m Sergeant Boxer. This is Inspector Conklin. Are your parents at home?”

  “Kellll-yyyy!”

  The boy turned out to be Evan Richards, and Kelly was his babysitter, a woman in her midtwenties who had been watching Project Runway in the media room when she heard the sirens screaming up the street.

  “Casey Dowling was killed?” she asked. “That’s crazy. That burglar could have come here! Evan, can you grab the phone? I have to call your parents.”

  “I think I saw something,” the boy said. “I was staring out my bedroom window, and someone ran past the house. Like, in the shadows under the trees.”

  “Could you describe him?” Conklin asked the boy.

  Evan shook his head. “Just someone running. Wearing black. I heard him huffing as he ran.”

  I asked if this person was big or small, if there was anything special about the way he ran.

  “I thought he was just a jogger, you know? He was wearing a cap, I think. I was looking down at the top of his head.”

  Conklin left his card with the boy’s babysitter and asked Evan to please call if he remembered anything else. Then we headed down the block toward the next house.

  I said to Conklin, “So maybe we have a live witness to Kitty making a run for it.” And then my cell phone rang.

  Yuki, sending a text message: Call me.

  I hit the recall button, and Yuki picked up.

  “God! I know her!” Yuki said.

  “Know who?”

  “Casey Dowling.”

  Frickin’ grapevine. How could she have heard already?

  “We went to law school together, Lindsay. Damn it. Casey was a sweetheart. A doll. When you catch the shooter, I’m going to fight for the case, and then I’m going to send Casey Dowling’s killer straight to hell.”

  Chapter 15

  SARAH WELLS SHUT her bedroom door and locked it. She was still panting from her escapade, her hands still shaking. She stood in front of her mirror, fluffed up her hair, and looked at herself—hard.

  Did it show?

  Her skin was so white, it was almost transparent, and her brown eyes were huge. She thought about her husband telling her she could look good if she’d ever try, but when he told her that, she became even more determined to look exactly as she was: a twenty-eight-year-old schoolteacher with a second life. And she wasn’t even talking about the burglaries.

  Sarah put her two duffel bags down on the floor, then opened the bottom drawer of the big, old American Waterfall dresser. Like her, the dresser held secrets.

  Sarah took the piles of T-shirts and sweatpants out of the bottom drawer and pried up the drawer’s false bottom. She held her breath, hoping, as always, that the jewelry was still there.

  It was.

  Each of her hauls had its own soft fabric bag, five collections of astonishing jewelry, and now the Dowling take made an even half dozen.

  Sarah unzipped the bag with her latest haul and looked into the glorious tangle of jewels that had, until recently, belonged to a movie star’s wife. It was the most unbelievable stuff: totally insane and wonderful sapphires and diamonds; rings and necklaces and bracelets; jewelry that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

  She’d pulled off the burglary by the slimmest margin—a squeaker, for God’s sake. She was safe for now, but she still had a big problem: how to get rid of the goods.

  Maury Green, her mentor and fence, was dead, killed at the airport by a cop’s bullet meant for his client, a jewel thief who’d been running from the police. Maury had been a good teacher and friend. It was truly depressing that he hadn’t lived to celebrate her success and to collect his share.

  Maury, like other good fences, paid out about 10 percent of the jewelry’s retail value. It didn’t seem like a lot, considering the hell that would rain down on her if she got caught, but still, it was a ton of money compared to what she earned as a teacher. And now Maury was gone.

  The longer she held on to the jewelry, the greater her chance of getting caught with it. Sarah cupped a double handful of Casey Dowling’s treasure and rocked her hands under a table lamp so that the light bounced off the facets.

  Behind her locked bedroom door, Sarah Wells became mesmerized by the gorgeous refracting light.

  Chapter 16

  SARAH WELLS WASN’T the first cat burglar to do break-ins while dinner was on the table. She’d studied the greats, the Dinnertime Burglar and the Dinner Set Gang. Between them, they’d scored tens of millions in jewels using simple no-tech tools while their victims lingered over coffee and dessert on the floor below. Like her role models, Sarah thoroughly researched her intended targets and studied their movements. But with all the news about Hello Kitty, she marveled at how her victims felt so secure with the lights on that they didn’t set their security alarms.

  Their magical thinking was just amazing. And woo-hoo for that.

  As Sarah gloried in the Dowlings’ former riches, one special item reached out to her and hooked her in. It was a ring with a really large, pale-yellow stone, maybe twenty karats, cushion-cut and anchored in a thoroughly gaudy setting.

  She took a rough count of the pavé jewels surrounding the center stone and tallied 120 little diamonds.

  What a ring!

  This thing was a frickin’ gasper. It just shrieked romance. Marcus Dowling had undoubtedly given this ring to his wife for some special occasion, and now Sarah wondered what it could be worth.

  She had learned a lot about precious stones since she’d started moonlighting as a cat burglar, but she wasn’t a true gemologist and was really curious to know what she had.

  She stashed the rest of the Dowling loot and her bag of tools into the bottom drawer of the dresser, put back the false lid, and piled her clothes on top of it. Then she shut the drawer and fished a pictorial guide to gemstones out from under the armoire, taking it with her into the double bed.

  Paging through the book, she found a couple of matches to the stone. Possibly the ring was a topaz or a yellow tourmaline. No—there was a hint of green in Casey Dowling’s big, yellow stone. Which probably made it a citrine, a flashy but not supervaluable stone. That was even more reason Sarah wanted to keep this ring.

  While she knew that holding on to stolen merchandise could be a terrible mistake, she had to find a way to keep this one thing. She wanted more than a souvenir. She wanted a trophy. A reward. And now she was thinking that the thing to do was to
have the yellow stone reset as a pendant.

  She remembered something her grandmother had said to her mother, who had said it to her: “On some people, rhinestones look like diamonds. On others, diamonds look like rhinestones.”

  Sarah thought that, on her—with her T.J. Maxx wardrobe and plain looks—citrine would look like glass. She stood in front of the mirror and held the yellow stone to her black turtleneck, just under her collarbone.

  It looked much smaller when it wasn’t a ring.

  She was sure that, once reset, this stone would keep her secret. As Sarah stared at herself in the mirror, there was a loud knock on the door. It was her husband, Trevor.

  “Why is the door locked, missy? What are you doing? Having fun with yourself?”

  “You could say that,” Sarah said.

  “Let me in.”

  “No.”

  “Let me in!”

  Sarah put the ring under the hollowed-out base of the lamp on her night table.

  “Go to hell!” she shouted.

  He was shaking the door, kicking at it. Sarah went over and unlocked it. Just another day, she thought as she let Trevor into the bedroom. Just another day in the secret life of Sarah Wells.

  Chapter 17

  SARAH SLAMMED THE front door of her apartment and marched out to the car thinking about frickin’ Trevor, who had begged her, “Wait just another minute.” Only it was an unbearable twenty minutes under his fat, nasty body, and now she was borderline late to work—again.

  Sarah headed her Saturn onto Delores Street and got onto the freeway, making up lost time. She switched on the radio and found “Good Morning with Lisa Kerz and Rosemary Van Buren, the place for traffic, weather, and local news.”

  Lisa Kerz was saying, “Rosemary, this is the latest on Casey Dowling, who we’ve just learned was shot last night.”

  Shot. What was that? Sarah gripped the wheel.

  “Do the police have a lead on who killed her?” Van Buren asked.

  Killed her?

  Sarah’s heart thundered in her chest. What kind of lie was this? Casey Dowling was alive and screaming when she had escaped from the Dowling house.

  Casey had been alive.

  “No, this is about Marcus Dowling,” said Kerz. “Breaking news. Mr. Dowling’s lawyer, Tony Peyser, made a statement ten minutes ago—”

  Sarah stared at the radio as if it were a person, listening to Lisa Kerz saying that Mr. Dowling’s lawyer had gone live on KQED asking for help from the people of San Francisco. She ripped her eyes back to the road just in time to miss the guardrail.

  “Okay, now here’s the statement, hot off the wire,” Van Buren added. “Says here, quoting Mr. Peyser, ‘Mr. Dowling is offering a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever killed Casey Dowling.’”

  Sarah saw her exit ramp rushing toward the car, jerked the steering wheel without signaling, and left rubber on the roadway as she made the turn. Once off the freeway, she drove without seeing, eventually finding herself in the parking lot at Booker T. Washington High.

  Sarah shut off the car, grabbed her backpack, and headed through the red iron gates and into the main building, entering the teacher’s lounge for her customary pick-me-up before facing the day.

  The bell had rung. The lounge was nearly empty except for one person: Heidi Meyer, who was standing by the coffee machine, stirring her cup. Sarah called out, “Hey, Heidi.”

  “Hey, yourself. Whoa. You okay, Sarah?”

  “Bah. Trevor’s a bastard. Heard enough?”

  Heidi put down her cup and opened her arms to give Sarah a hug. Sarah walked into the embrace and was enveloped by the scent of lilacs. She buried her face in the soft cloud of Heidi’s red hair and just held on.

  Could Heidi hear her blood roaring? God. The implications of what she’d just heard were inescapable. The police would be seriously focused on finding Sarah, and they’d be looking to charge her for killing Casey Dowling. That was just insane.

  “We’re late to class,” Heidi said, rubbing Sarah’s back, “and the monsters will be revolting.”

  “As always.” Sarah laughed.

  Heidi gave Sarah a peck on the lips—and Sarah kissed Heidi back, but harder and with feeling, Heidi’s sweet mouth opening under hers as Sarah put her whole heart into it.

  If only she could tell Heidi everything.

  Chapter 18

  THE MORNING AFTER their murders, Barbara Ann and Darren Benton, along with Casey Dowling, were chilling in the morgue while Conklin and I stared at each other across our overloaded desks, not knowing whether to spit or go blind.

  We were working the Dowling case because Jacobi had been absolutely clear when he said, “Dowling trumps Benton. Dowling trumps everything.” Because Casey Dowling was a high-profile victim and the Bentons were not.

  I told Jacobi that the lunatic killer who’d left a message in the Bentons’ RAV4 made me feel like I’d put my finger in a live electric socket. That I was sure their killer was signaling a pattern in the making. That Conklin and I should be on the Benton case now, full-time.

  Jacobi showed me his palms. What do you want from me? No manpower. No budget. I want to keep my job. Do what I tell you.

  Conklin looked fresh, his brown eyes sparkling in the gloom of the bull pen, his shining brown hair falling across his forehead as we studied Stolen Property’s case notes on Hello Kitty and scoured crime scene photos of the Dowlings’ master bedroom.

  I was uploading Clapper’s footage of the scene when Cindy Thomas blew through the gates and headed toward Conklin and me.

  “Look at this!” she shouted, her blond bedspring curls bouncing, blue lightning flashing in her eyes.

  She was waving the Oakland Tribune, the smaller, foxier tabloid that competes with the Chronicle. The headline read, “Hello Kitty Kills.” Because Cindy had named this cat burglar and had reported on his heists, she considered him hers.

  “Everyone’s on my story now,” she said, swiveling her fierce gaze from me to Conklin and back to me again. “Give me a break, please. I need something that the Trib doesn’t have.”

  “We’ve got nothing,” I said. “Wish we did.”

  “Rich?” she said to my partner.

  Cindy is four years younger than I, more a little sister to me than my actual little sister. I love her, and even though she fights me, she also uses her keen intuition and bulldog tenacity to help me solve homicides. That’s in the plus column.

  Cindy pulled over a chair, triangulating me and Conklin. It was a neat visual metaphor, and I didn’t like it.

  “Why would Hello Kitty kill Casey Dowling?” she asked. “Kitty has never been violent. Why would he even be carrying a gun when armed robbery would get him life?”

  “We’re working the case, Cindy,” I said. “Jeez. We haven’t stopped. I got all of two hours in the rack last night—”

  “Rich?” Cindy cocked her head like a little yellow bird.

  “Exactly what Lindsay said. We’ve got nothing. No prints. No gun. No witnesses.”

  “Usual deal,” Cindy said. She batted her eyelashes at Conklin and gave him her best come-hither stare. “Off the record.”

  Conklin waited a beat, then said, “What if Casey knew the intruder?”

  Cindy leaped up, hugged Conklin around the neck, kissed him on the mouth, and then flew out of the squad room.

  “BYE, CINDY,” I called after her.

  Conklin laughed.

  Chapter 19

  “I’M GOING TO see Claire,” I told my partner.

  “Stay in touch,” he said.

  I ran down three flights and worked my way through the Hall’s crowded lobby, out the back door, and down the breezeway to the medical examiner’s office.

  I found Claire in the autopsy suite. She was wearing a floral shower cap and an apron over her XXL scrubs—still carrying some poundage from her pregnancy on her size-sixteen frame. I called out to her, and she looked up from the body of Barbara Ann B
enton, who was lying eviscerated on the table.

  “You just missed Cindy,” Claire said, putting Barbara Ann’s liver onto a scale.

  “No, I didn’t. She stormed the squad room. Got Conklin into a lip-lock. Promised him favors in exchange for a headline, and he lapped it up. What’d she get out of you?”

  “Breaking news. Casey Dowling was shot to death. Cindy has the best job, doesn’t she? She can focus on her one and only story and still have time to get it on with Inspector Hottie.”

  “Anything interesting on Barbara Ann Benton?” I asked, staring into the dead woman’s abdominal cavity, hoping to head off a sore subject. To be precise, it was hard keeping Cindy out of confidential police business—and I wasn’t sleeping with her.

  “No postmortem surprises,” said Claire. “Mrs. Benton took two slugs. Either one of them could have killed her, but the shot to the chest is the cause of death.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Cause of death, a nine millimeter through the temporal lobe. Calling it a homicide. That’s signed, stamped, and official. The slugs are at the lab.”

  Claire asked her assistant to finish with Barbara Ann, then stripped off her gloves and mask and walked me out of the autopsy suite and into her office. She took the swivel chair, and I slumped into the seat across from her desk. She pulled two bottles of water out of the fridge and handed one to me.

  Claire has a picture on her desk, and I turned it around so I could scrutinize the four of us on the front steps of the Hall of Justice. There was Yuki, all suited up, her dark hair parted in the middle, falling in two glossy wings to her chin; Cindy was grinning, her slightly overlapping front teeth drawing attention to how pretty she really is; and then there was Claire, buxom and beautiful in her midforties.

  And there I was, towering over them all at five ten, wearing my blond hair in a ponytail and sporting a dead-serious look on my face. The thing is, I think of myself as lighthearted. I wonder where I got that idea.