The 5th Horseman Read online

  “That doesn’t mean that the hospital is perfect. Human beings sometimes commit human error. But mistakes are one thing. Malpractice is something else entirely.”

  Kramer paused to let his words sink in and used the long moment to look each juror in the eye again. He was talking to them, one at a time, making this personal.

  “I’m afraid that this is going to be an emotional trial because people have died. But the judge will tell you that you can’t let the plaintiffs’ attorney obscure the facts by playing on your emotions.

  “Weigh the facts as presented—that’s the job you’ve accepted and it’s your charge. The facts, ladies and gentlemen. The facts will convince you that my client is not negligent, and that my client performs an incredibly valuable service for our city of San Francisco.”

  Cindy’s mind leaped ahead as Kramer thanked the jury and took his seat.

  She saw the front-page headline in her mind—SAN FRANCISCO MUNICIPAL SUED FOR MALPRACTICE, the block of twenty victims’ photos and the rest of her story carried over to page three.

  This trial was the stuff of books and movies.

  Twenty people had died.

  And whether or not the hospital was guilty, the evidence would shock people.

  They would take it personally. And patients who were admitted to Municipal would be scared for their lives.

  Hell, she was scared just listening at this trial.

  Chapter 23

  IT WAS MIDMORNING, four long days since we’d found Caddy Girl dead in the Opera Plaza Garage. I’d just come back from a meeting with Chief Tracchio, who told me that he was rotating some staff, moving some of my people out of Homicide to plug openings in other departments. Tracchio wasn’t asking for my input, just informing me.

  I hung my jacket behind the door, still seeing the chief in my mind, ticking off the reasons on his chubby fingers—Budget cuts. Too much overtime. Gotta backfill here and there. It’s just temporary, Boxer.

  It was infuriating, crippling, bureaucratic bs.

  And now I had a pounding headache behind my right eye.

  “Tell me something good,” I said to Jacobi as he walked into my office, parked his large butt on my credenza. Conklin followed him in, moving with the grace of a lynx, crossing his arms as he leaned against my doorway. Hard not to stare.

  “Keep your expectations low,” Jacobi growled.

  “Okay, Warren. They’re subterranean. Give it to me.”

  “We sent a text message over the NCIC system to all regional law enforcement agencies with everything we had on Caddy Girl.” Jacobi interrupted himself with a bout of coughing, a lingering symptom of the still-healing gunshot wound he’d taken to his right lung.

  “Height, weight, approximate age, manner of dress, color of her hair, eyes, the works,” he continued at last.

  “Checked all the possibles that came out of that,” said Conklin, optimism lighting his eyes.

  “And?” I asked.

  “We got a few approximate matches, but in the end they didn’t check out. One piece of good news. The lab found a print on one of her shoes.”

  I perked up.

  “It’s a partial,” Jacobi said, “but it’s something. If we ever get anything or anyone to match it to. That’s the problem so far. No links.”

  “So, what’s your next step?”

  “Lou, I was thinking that’s a trendy haircut on Caddy Girl,” Conklin said. “The cut and the color probably cost around three hundred dollars.”

  I nodded, said, “Sounds about right.” How did he know about three-hundred-dollar haircuts?

  “We’re going to canvass the fancy beauty salons. Someone might recognize her. Is that okay with you?”

  “Let me see the picture,” I said, sticking out my hand.

  Conklin reached out and handed me the dead woman’s photo. I stared at her angelic face, her tousled blond hair lying soft against the stainless-steel slab. A sheet was pulled up to her clavicle.

  My God. Who was she? And why hadn’t anyone reported her missing? And why, four days after the girl’s death, were we absolutely clueless?

  The two inspectors left my glass-walled cube, and I called out to Brenda, who settled into the side chair and flapped a notepad open on her lap.

  I began to dictate a memo-to-staff about my meeting with Tracchio, but I found it hard to focus.

  I wanted to do something today, something that mattered. I wanted to be out on the street with Conklin and Jacobi, showing Caddy Girl’s picture around “fancy beauty salons” and prospecting good neighborhoods for clues.

  I wanted to wear out my shoes on this case.

  I wanted to work in a way that made me feel as if I was doing my job instead of dictating useless, worthless memos.

  Chapter 24

  AT ABOUT 7:30 that evening, Claire called, saying, “Lindsay, come on down. I have something to show you.”

  I tossed the Chronicle with Cindy’s front-page story about the Municipal trial into the file basket. Then I locked up for the night. I jogged downstairs to the morgue hoping for a breakthrough.

  Hoping for something!

  One of Claire’s assistants, a smart cookie named Everlina Ferguson, was closing a drawer on a gunshot victim when I got there. Ug-ly.

  Claire was washing up. “Give me half a minute,” she said.

  “Take the full minute,” I replied.

  I poked around the place until I found Caddy Girl’s photos tacked to the wall. God, this case was bugging the hell out of me.

  “What did you make of that perfume she was wearing?” I called out to Claire.

  “Funny thing about that. It was only evident on her genitalia,” Claire called back. She turned off the faucets, dried her hands, then extracted two bottles of Perrier from the little fridge under her desk.

  She opened them and handed one to me.

  “Lots of girls these days like to perfume their gardens,” she went on. “So normally I wouldn’t even mention it in my report. But this girl, she didn’t dab it anywhere else. Not on her cleavage or wrists or behind the ears.”

  We clinked bottles, each took a long drink.

  “Struck me as unusual, so I sent a swab of the perfume to the lab. They kicked it back,” Claire said a moment later. “They can’t ID it. Don’t have the right equipment. Don’t have the time.”

  “No time to solve the crime,” I groused.

  “It’s always a three-legged sack race around here,” Claire said, pushing papers around on her desk.

  “But I got back the labs on the sexual-assault kit. Hang on. It’s right here.”

  Eyes glinting, she seized a brown envelope, pulled out the sheet of paper, and pinned it to her desk with a forefinger, saying, “The stain on her skirt was, in fact, semen, and it matched one of the two semen samples that showed up inside Caddy Girl.”

  I followed Claire’s finger down the results of the toxicology screen. She stabbed the letters ETOH with her index finger. “This is what I wanted to show you. Her blood was positive for alcohol. Point one three.”

  “So she was wasted,” I said.

  “Uh-huh, but that’s not all. Look here. She was also positive for benzodiazepine. It’s unusual to have booze and Valium in your system, so I had tox run her bloods again, this time looking for zebras. They narrowed it down to Rohypnol.”

  “Aw. No. The date-rape drug.”

  “Yeah, she didn’t know where she was, who she was, what was happening, even if it was happening.”

  The ugly pieces were there, but I still couldn’t make sense of the whole picture. Caddy Girl had been doped up, assaulted, and murdered with mind-boggling care and precision.

  Claire turned to the wall of photos. “It’s no wonder she didn’t have vaginal bruising and defensive wounds, Lindsay. Caddy Girl couldn’t fight back if she wanted to. Poor child never had a chance.”

  Chapter 25

  I DROVE MY EXPLORER home in the dark, feeling female, not female cop. I had to see the world through Ca
ddy Girl’s eyes if I wanted to understand what had happened to her. But it was horrific to imagine being that vulnerable to the will of violent men. Two of them, two animals.

  I grabbed my Nextel out of its clip on my belt and called Jacobi before more time passed. He answered on the first ring, and I filled him in on what Claire had told me.

  “So I’m guessing she found herself in a room with a couple of guys who had sex on their mind,” I said, braking for a light at the next street corner. “They got pushy—and Caddy Girl resists, rebuffs them. So one of the guys puts roofies into her Chardonnay.”

  “Yeah,” Jacobi agreed. “Now she’s so stoned she can’t move. Maybe she even blacks out. They take her clothes off, spray her with perfume, take turns having sex on her.”

  “Maybe they’re afraid she might remember the assault,” I said, my thoughts neatly in sync with those of my former partner. “They’re not totally stupid. Maybe they’re very smart, actually. They want to kill her without leaving a lot of evidence. One guy burks her; the other makes sure she’s dead by suffocating her with a plastic bag. A nice clean kill.”

  “Yup, sounds right, Boxer. Maybe after she’s dead, they reload and do her again,” Jacobi said. “Figure a little necrophilia never hurt anyone. Then what? They dress her in five thousand bucks’ worth of clothes and take her for a ride? Drop her off in Guttman’s Seville?”

  “That’s the craziest part of it all,” I said. “I don’t get it about the clothes. The clothes thing throws everything off for me.”

  “Claire didn’t have the results on the DNA?”

  “Not yet. You know, if Caddy Girl was the mayor’s wife, we’d know something by now. But since nobody’s even reported her missing . . .”

  “Good-looking girl like that,” said Jacobi. I could hear a tinge of sadness in his voice. Some small revelation of loneliness. “Someone should be missing her.”

  Chapter 26

  I OPENED THE FRONT DOOR to my apartment and exchanged sloppy hellos with Martha.

  “Hey, Boo. Howzmygirl?”

  I hugged her squirming body as she yapped her enthusiastic approval of my return from the wars.

  As exhausted as I was, jogging with my girl was the greatest encouragement I had to keep fit.

  I leashed her, and soon after, we were running across Missouri in the dark, around the rec center, down and back up the hill, endorphins lifting my mood and giving me a slightly more positive outlook on Caddy Girl’s murder investigation.

  The perp’s DNA was cooking in the lab right at this moment.

  Cops were canvassing with her picture in hand.

  There was hope after all.

  Someone had to be missing her by now and would make a call soon. Or a witness would step forward who’d seen her likeness in the Chronicle or on our Web site.

  Once we had a name, we’d have a chance to solve her murder. We could all stop thinking of her as Caddy Girl.

  A half hour later I was back at home. I slugged down a cold beer and ate a Swiss and Hellmann’s on sourdough in front of the TV while catching up on the news of the world on CNN, CNBC, and FOX. Then I stripped down, turned on the shower, and waggled my hand in the water to test the temperature.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  Figures. Now what—another murder? Better yet, a break in the case?

  The caller ID flashed his name.

  “Hey,” I said, feigning nonchalance, heart going boom, da-boom, da-boom.

  “God, you’re gorgeous.”

  “I don’t have a picture phone, Joe.”

  “I know what you look like, Lindsay.”

  I laughed.

  “That’s a very naked laugh,” said my fella. He wasn’t clairvoyant. He could hear the shower running. I turned off the water, put my robe on.

  “You’re amazingly perceptive,” I said. By now, I was picturing him naked, too.

  “Listen, naked lady, rumor has it I’m going to be in your town this weekend. The whole weekend.”

  “Good, ’cause I miss you,” I said, my voice dropping down a few notches, getting a little throaty. “We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  We flirted until my skin was damp and my breath was short. When we hung up a few minutes later, we had a plan for our upcoming good time.

  I dropped my robe, stepped into the shower, and, as the hot spray beat on my skin, began to belt out a pretty good rendition of “My Guy,” loving the vibrato in my voice coming back at me in my little tiled sound studio.

  Whooo! Let’s hear it for Lindsay Boxer, pop star.

  For the first time in a whole lot of days, I put the job out of my mind.

  I felt great, at least for the moment.

  I felt gorgeous.

  And very soon, I was going to be with my love.

  Chapter 27

  CHIEF TRACCHIO WAS obviously surprised to see me when I knocked on the partially open door to his office. There was a lot of dark wood paneling in there and a big photo mural of the Golden Gate Bridge that took up the whole wall facing his desk.

  “Boxer,” the chief said now. Then he actually smiled. “Come in.”

  I’d thought about my speech all night, rehearsed it in my mind all morning, had the first line all teed up and ready to go.

  “Chief, I have a problem.”

  “Drag up a chair, Boxer. Let’s hear it.”

  I did as he said, but as I looked into his face, I forgot the careful phrasing, the curlicues and fripperies, and blurted out the whole deal at once.

  “I don’t like being a boss, boss. I want to go back to investigation full time.”

  His smile was gone, long gone. “What are you saying, Lieutenant? I don’t get you.”

  “I wake up in the morning feeling wrong, Chief. I don’t like supervising a lot of other people. I don’t like being Lieutenant Inside,” I explained. “I like being on the street, and you know that’s where my abilities lie, Tony. You know I’m right.”

  For a second or two I wasn’t sure Tracchio had even heard me—his face was that stony. Was he thinking of all the killers I’d helped put away? I sure hoped so. Then he slapped the desk with such force, I inadvertently pushed my chair back a couple of inches.

  He exploded verbally, spit actually flying in my direction.

  “I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, Boxer, but you’ve got the job. You—no! Don’t say anything! You know how many men got bumped when you were promoted? You know how many guys in the squad still resent you? You were promoted because you’re a leader, Boxer. You’re squad commander. Do your job. End of conversation.”

  “Chief —”

  “What? Make it quick. I’m busy.”

  “I’m better on the ground. I close cases, and my record bears that out. I’m spinning my wheels in my office, and those guys who want to be lieutenant, well, you should promote one of them, Chief. You need someone in my job who wants it.”

  “Okay, now that you’ve started this, I’ve got a couple of other things to say to you,” Tracchio said.

  He opened a desk drawer, pulled out a cigar, chopped off the tip of it with a pocket guillotine gizmo, and puffed blue smoke into the air as he lit his stogie.

  I waited breathlessly.

  “You’ve got room to grow in this job, Boxer. When it comes to crime solution, the SFPD is dead last across the board. In the whole country! You need to learn to supervise better. Help other cops with your experience. You need to put out a positive image of the SFPD. Be a beacon of good. You gotta help us recruit and train. You’re nowhere when it comes to that stuff, Boxer, and—I’m not finished!

  “Not long ago you got shot and almost died. We almost lost you for good. You weren’t even on duty that night, and you showed no self-control at all. Jacobi invites you on a stakeout, you say, ‘Let me at it.’”

  Tracchio stood, whirled around, put his hands on the back of his chair. His reddened face radiated exasperation. “You know, I don’t even understand what the hell you’re beefing about.
You’ve got it easy. How would you like my job?”

  I stared at him dully as he began ticking off departments on his sausage fingers: “I’ve got Homicide, Robbery, Narcotics, Anticrime, and Special Victims. I got the mayor and I got the governor, and if you think that’s like getting the red-carpet treatment on Oscar night —”

  “I think you’re making my point for me, Chief.”

  “Look, why don’t you do yourself and everyone else a big favor and suck it up, Lieutenant. Request denied. Now we’re done.”

  I felt like a little kid as I picked myself up and left Tracchio’s office. I was humiliated and mad enough to quit—but I was too smart to do it. Everything the man had said was right. But I was right, too.

  Recruit and train?

  Learn to supervise?

  None of that had anything to do with why I’d become a cop.

  I wanted to be back on the streets of San Francisco.

  Chapter 28

  CINDY THOMAS SAT on the back bench of courtroom 4A of the Civic Center Courthouse, squeezed between a reporter from the Modesto Bee and a stringer for the LA Times. She felt keyed-up, focused, and very, very possessive. This was her town, her story.

  Her laptop was warm on her knees, and Cindy tapped at the keyboard, making notes as Maureen O’Mara’s first witness was sworn in.

  “Good morning, Mr. Friedlander,” O’Mara said. The lawyer’s long auburn hair glowed against the flat blue wool of her suit. She wore a white blouse with a plain collar and a simple gold watch on the wrist of her ring-free left hand.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but how old are you?” O’Mara asked her witness.

  “I’m forty-four.”

  Cindy was surprised. With his creased face and graying hair, she would have put Stephen Friedlander’s age at closer to sixty.