16th Seduction: (Women’s Murder Club 16) (Women's Murder Club) Read online

  I didn’t recognize the guy behind the reception desk. This wasn’t so unusual. On account of overexposure to death and no opportunity for advancement, Claire’s receptionists tended to turn over every couple of months of their own accord.

  The new receptionist was middle-aged, male, wearing a jacket and tie. He had folded a sheet of paper into a nameplate and written GREGORY MARK PETERS.

  I badged Gregory, introduced myself, and said, “Dr. Washburn asked to see me.”

  There were about eight cops and as many civilians in the waiting room, all of them waiting to see Claire.

  Gregory said, “She’s awfully busy right now, Sergeant. Why don’t you take a seat.”

  I gave him a look that could bore through stone.

  “Hit the buzzer,” I said.

  He did it. I strong-armed the glass door, marched past Claire’s office, and went directly into the autopsy suite.

  I found Claire gloved up, gowned, masked, and bloodied, leaning over a body on the autopsy table. She dropped her scalpel into a bowl, stripped off her gloves, and said to her assistant, “Bunny, I’m taking a five-minute break.”

  She put a hand on my waist and walked me to her office, then settled in behind her desk as I took the chair across from her. Claire is African American, bosomy, and warmhearted, although how she manages warmth when she performs or oversees twelve hundred autopsies a year is kind of a mystery.

  She said, “I can’t stop thinking about Joe. How’s he doing?”

  I had called her while I was waiting for Joe to reappear from his trip into Sci-Tron and again from the hospital, but I updated her now.

  “His doctor tells me it’s still too soon to know.”

  “I’m so sorry about this, Linds. But he’s going to pull through. It’s Joe we’re talking about.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “One minute he’s raising his glass to ‘happy days.’ Next minute …”

  I put my hands over my eyes, breathing deeply, willing myself not to cry. When I looked up, my friend was watching me with deep concern.

  She reached over the desk and grabbed my hands. “Let me know how I can help. I can call the doctor. Look at film. Go with you to the hospital. Whatever you need. Anything.”

  “Thanks, Claire. Very much.”

  I gave her Dr. Dalrymple’s card and she put it next to her phone.

  I said, “You wanted to talk to me?”

  “Yeah, well, obviously we’re full up here and overflowing. But something rare came in last night. And I need to tell you about it.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “A forty-year-old white woman in nice clothes was found in the street just off the Embarcadero and brought in with the blast victims. She had some bruises that make me think she was hit by a car, but not the kinds of lacerations people got who were inside Sci-Tron or close to it.

  “Her handbag was missing,” Claire said, “so no ID. I thought she’d died from cardiac arrest. That scene last night could cause some people to have a heart attack, you know?”

  “Don’t I ever.”

  “I did the post. Her heart was perfect, Lindsay.”

  “She had a stroke maybe? Or an aneurysm?”

  “Before I went there, something was nagging at me. I gave her another external exam. Found something that reminded me of a case that came in a few months back.”

  “Don’t stop now,” I said.

  “She had a nice bruise on her left hip and a scrape on her arm, probably got bumped by a car. This wasn’t fatal. But there was a puncture wound on her right buttock centered on a bruise the size of a quarter. I have seen a nearly identical puncture and bruise once before.”

  Claire had my attention, but I felt urgently that I had to get into my car and switch on the sirens. I needed to get to the hospital. I had to meet with Joe’s brothers. I had to see Joe.

  I said, “What are you saying, Claire?”

  “I’ve sent out the victim’s blood. I’ll know more soon. Right now I’m calling her manner of death undetermined. But what I’m thinking is that this nice-looking lady was killed. That her death was a homicide.”

  CHAPTER 14

  AFTER AN EMOTIONALLY wrenching meeting with Joe’s brothers at my husband’s bedside, I cried all the way back to the Hall. I washed my face, reset my ponytail. Then I joined Conklin for a meeting in Brady’s office.

  It was a tough transition.

  I was still with Joe, not knowing if he would slip away before I saw him again. At the same time I was needed here and now.

  Brady was keyed up and focused. He had taped up an enlargement of Sci-Tron’s final moments on the wall facing his desk, where he could see it all the time. He offered us chairs, booted up his computer, and pulled up the video of our interrogation of Connor Grant that morning.

  The three of us watched it together, looking for something we’d missed. Something we should have asked. We strained for something useful or revealing. Straining through the nothing Grant had given us for any kind of lead.

  Brady said, “One more time.”

  He reversed the video, hit Play. We watched again.

  Then we kicked it around for a while, concluding that, based on our combined decades of cop experience and gut instinct, the science teacher was not a team player. He was a textbook megalomaniac working alone.

  That said, we’d all been wrong before.

  Did he do it?

  No idea.

  Meeting over, Conklin and I headed out at high speed through Bayview, a gentrifying, mixed-use area that was once home to Candlestick Park, currently home to Connor Grant, our suspected mass murderer.

  I hardly spoke as Rich drove us toward Grant’s house on Jamestown Avenue. I was thinking about having seen Joe, being with his devastated brothers. We had tried to buck one another up, but it hadn’t worked. Joe was still deep in the woods without a compass. He could die. Our daughter would lose her father. And I would never be able to forgive myself for not making peace with my husband while I had the chance.

  Conklin’s voice broke into my thoughts: “Linds, up ahead on the right.”

  Behind a thicket of law enforcement vehicles, positioned between two old cinder-block buildings and sitting far back on its lot, was a tidy blue wood-frame house with white trim.

  Conklin parked in the midst of the cruisers, and as he turned off the engine, there was a knock on the glass. CSI director Charlie Clapper was standing between his car and ours, bending down to say hello.

  Clapper is a former Homicide cop and one of SFPD’s most valuable players. As always, he was well dressed—jacket, no tie, his salt-and-pepper hair slicked back—and his expression showed that he was itching to getting into the house.

  The three of us stood in the sunshine as the bomb squad did their work, and we talked about the monstrous incident on Pier 15, the numbers of dead and seriously wounded—including Joe. I told Clapper that Joe was still in a medically induced coma but holding his own in the ICU.

  A door slammed and I looked toward the house to see three bomb squad techs in full protective gear come outside. One of them pushed up his face shield and signaled a thumbs-up.

  “All clear,” said Clapper. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 15

  GRANT’S HOUSE WASN’T a crime scene, but Clapper’s techs treated it that way. It was a potentially invaluable source of evidence, and they would be comparing traces from the house with whatever they could scrape off Pier 15. They took pictures, lifted prints, and swabbed hard surfaces. When they’d covered a room and moved on to the next, Conklin and I stepped in.

  We were looking for something tangible that would crash Grant’s cat-and-mouse game—a manifesto, a foreign flag, GAR-related or any radical literature, a blueprint of Sci-Tron, a thread to follow, proof of something either to force a confession out of Grant or to blow up his fanciful story.

  Conklin went upstairs, and I went through the cramped living room, frisking the TV console and the bookshelves. Grant had the complete DVD coll
ections of Law & Order and The Sopranos. His books were nonfiction, subjects ranging from ancient civilization to law, architecture, art history, military weapons, and of course, everything you ever wanted to know about bombs. He also had about fifty biographies of artists, writers, and politicians, none of them seditious.

  The guy had a wide range of deep interests.

  The laptop in the office would be taken back to the forensics lab, but meanwhile, I checked out his stack of unopened mail on the credenza with my gloved hand. I found bills, fliers, assorted catalogs for school chemistry supplies. I flipped through the catalogs and saw only consumer-grade beakers and microscopes for sale in bulk amounts.

  Conklin came down the stairs, saying to me, “Second floor has two bedrooms and a bath. One of the bedrooms is in active use, the other is a spare. I tossed the hell out of both of them. He’s a neat guy. No weapons. No bombs. No clutter. Nothing under the mattresses. I didn’t find anything stronger than Advil in the medicine chest.”

  He shrugged and turned his attention to the fifties-style kitchen. I watched from the pass-through as he removed the pots and pans from the cabinets, and looked under the range hood and inside the stove, fridge, freezer, and drawers. Everything looked dull and old and normal.

  I went into the half bath next to the kitchen. The medicine cabinet had a half-used container of Tums, a pack of razor blades, and a bottle of expired antibiotics. I made note of the doctor’s and pharmacist’s names, checked the cabinet to see if it was possibly a door to a stash hole. It was not. The trash can held an empty bottle of Listerine, used dental floss, used Q-tips.

  More work for the crime lab and maybe a lead to DNA in a database.

  Conklin and I went to the basement with a CSI, who passed an ALS wand over every square foot of the walls and floor, finding no blood or organic trace. After that we examined the tools, paint cans, canned food on neat wire shelving, but found no secret doors or hidden rooms or 3-D models of the science museum.

  Overall, my impression of Connor Grant’s small, dark house was that the man was bookish, organized, isolated, without a speck of whimsy. There were no weapons, no sign of a woman’s presence, nothing to point to Grant being an anarchist or a murderer. And there I was again, still wondering if we’d arrested the wrong man, if Connor Grant had been delusional or a jackass when he told Joe and me that he’d blown up the science museum for artistic expression.

  I shared that thought with Richie.

  “Actually, delusional jackass is a definite possibility.”

  We took a last look around the house, Conklin snapping pictures to take back to Brady and Jacobi, and we left by the back door. Clapper was standing outside waiting for us.

  He pointed at the wood-frame garage at the end of the driveway adjacent to the house and at the three-person bomb squad standing outside the roll-up doors.

  Clapper said, “Well, my friends, wait’ll you see this.”

  CHAPTER 16

  IT WAS ALMOST five when Rich Conklin said to Lindsay, “I’ll call you after the meeting,” and dropped her at her car in the All-Day lot across from the Hall. He parked the squad car in front of the building, then headed inside and took the elevator to the fifth floor.

  Brady was already waiting in Jacobi’s corner office.

  “We might have found something, Lieu,” Conklin said.

  He had just taken a seat next to Brady on the tufted leather sofa when Chief Jacobi came in, straightening his gray hair with both hands, wincing from an old gunshot injury to his hip as he angled his body and dropped into the chair behind his big cherrywood desk.

  Jacobi’s new assistant, Toni Reynolds, breezed in with her coat buttoned and told Jacobi that Boxer called to say she couldn’t make the meeting.

  “You’ve got approximately two hundred e-mails, Chief, and too many calls to count. Mostly journalists and TV people. You’re gonna be famous. Here are the calls and e-mails I marked urgent.”

  She handed Jacobi a sheet of paper and asked if he needed anything else. “Speak now. Otherwise, I’m going home to my hubby.”

  When Toni had gone, Jacobi told Conklin and Brady about his day.

  “FBI section chief Gerson Oliver came here first thing. He’s got one objective. If Grant threatened to kill folks, it’s domestic terrorism and the case goes to the FBI.

  “If Grant blew up the big glass building all by himself—as he told Boxer—the case is ours.”

  Brady and Conklin nodded. Jacobi continued.

  “Oliver shared his info and it’s next to nothing. All the FBI could dig up on Grant is job history and some smalltown newspaper and internet stories, mainly about science programs he ran in high schools in three states since the time he graduated from the University of Miami in ’93.”

  “That’s all they’ve got?” Conklin said.

  “Wait. There’s more. After our talk Oliver and another agent asked Grant for a chat. He agreed, rather happily. They interviewed him for about four hours. They did all the talking, with Grant saying ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about’ and ‘I got nothing else to say.’

  “So the Feds wanted to take Grant to the bomb site, and I thought, Okay. We’ve got nothing to lose except maybe this giant headache gets handed off to the FBI. I tagged along, hoping the science teacher would show us something, say something.”

  “Fifty cents says he didn’t say a thing,” said Brady.

  Jacobi rocked in his chair. “You’re close. He stood in one place and looked around, saying, ‘Oh, wow. This is just amaaaazing.’ He said several versions of that. Like it was an outing and he was happy for the day off.”

  Jacobi shook his head in disgust. “Divers are going into the bay tomorrow. The bomb is still missing.”

  Conklin said, “Chief, Grant has a chemistry lab in his garage.”

  Jacobi stopped rocking. “No shit. Really?”

  Conklin summarized in a few words what had taken hours to analyze from Grant’s Bayview property, and then he homed in on the lab in the garage.

  Said Conklin, “It’s like what you might see in a high school classroom. One side of the garage has got a sink and shelves of chemicals and all the fixings: beakers, Bunsen burners and microscopes, some stainless steel equipment, I don’t know what to call it.

  “CSI cataloged everything and took samples.”

  Brady said to Conklin, “You were about to say something to me when the chief came in?”

  “Right. I found this inside his lab.”

  Conklin took out his phone and pulled up a photo of a notebook lying on a stainless steel table. He said, “This could be a book manuscript.”

  He read the title out loud: “‘How to Make a Bomb.’ Subtitle says, ‘For Twenty-Five Dollars in Twenty-Five Minutes,’ and here, lower right corner, ‘by Connor A. Grant.’”

  Conklin walked his phone over to Jacobi, who slapped his hands on his desk and said, “Thank you, Rich, and thank you, God.”

  He picked up his desk phone, punched out some numbers.

  “Len,” he said to DA Leonard Parisi. “We got something useful on the science teacher. Conklin is forwarding a photo to you now.”

  CHAPTER 17

  AFTER CONKLIN AND I said good night in the parking lot, I pulled the car out onto Bryant and made my way to Harrison, then took Tenth toward the hospital.

  Traffic was thick and maddeningly stop-and-go, but I resisted the urge to hit the siren. The normally ten-minute drive took twenty, during which time my mind was flooded with images of Connor Grant, the way he’d looked Thursday night in front of Pier 15. He’d been awestruck, and yet his expression when Brady and I interviewed him this morning had been mocking.

  Now we had a little more circumstantial evidence against him: his laboratory and his unfunny manuscript on how to build a bomb at home in your spare time for pocket change. It wasn’t proof, but it was enough to charge him. At least I thought so.

  Even if Joe couldn’t hear me or answer me, I wanted to tell him all about it, just
like I used to do.

  I turned into the hospital parking area and found an empty spot outside the ER. I took that to be a good sign. I threaded my way through the lobby, to the correct elevator bank, and reached the ICU without a hitch.

  I introduced myself to the nurse at the desk and asked how Joe was doing.

  “We’re weaning him off the medication to bring him out of the coma,” she said. “It’s not a sudden waking up, more like slow-w-w-ly coming back into consciousness. I think he’ll know you’re here even if he seems to be out of it.”

  She walked me to the glass-sided stall where Joe lay swaddled in bandages.

  “I’ll be back in a few,” she told me.

  There was no chair, so I stood right next to the bed and looked down at my battered husband. His head was wrapped, and tubes ran from somewhere inside his skull, looping under a flap of skin in his neck, and from there emptied into his abdomen. His face was bruised purple. His right forearm was in a cast and his right leg was in traction. He was breathing regularly. He was alive.

  In my mind I replayed images of the explosion and the immediate aftermath, the shocking remains of the museum, the body bags lined up on the sidewalk, and the families of the dead and injured both outside the tape and inside the ER waiting room. I was so grateful for Joe’s life.

  I covered his hand with mine.

  “Joe, it’s me. Lindsay. You are doing really well. Dr. Dalrymple is going to put you in a private room tomorrow. With a window. And a chair.”

  Joe’s eyes fluttered open.

  Oh, my God. He was awake. “Joe!”

  I squeezed his hand and his fingers moved. Tears ran out of my eyes and dropped onto the sheets.

  “What happened?” he asked me.

  I hurried to say, “You’re okay. Everything’s okay.”

  I cleared my throat and, striving for a calm tone, I told him about the explosion, that something had fallen on his head, that he’d had surgery.

  “Your doctor, Joe, she’s great. And you remember that guy who said he set the bomb? We might have evidence against him.”