20th Victim: (Women’s Murder Club 20) (Women's Murder Club) Read online

  Rosie is their youngest, their beloved change-of-life baby.

  Claire coughed into a napkin, then looked at me with water in her eyes. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’m a doctor, you know.”

  Bullshitting herself, lying to me, to Edmund, to people who loved her. That’s how scared she was.

  “Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

  I reached across the table and grabbed Claire’s wrists.

  We both burst into tears.

  CHAPTER 21

  BEFORE CLAIRE TEXTED me, I’d been thinking about how much I wanted to discuss the Baron murders with Joe.

  He has decades of experience in intelligence agencies and spent a number of those years as a profiler with the FBI.

  I had a new case: a successful record producer and his wife shot dead in their house by a very sophisticated marksman who knew their habits. Possibly knew about their drug business, which was still in a formative stage. The motive was unknown. Suspects, zero.

  Joe might see an angle on the case, but my thoughts about the Baron murders had become secondary.

  Now I wanted to hold Julie, spend time with her before she fell asleep, read to her first if I could steady my voice and not cry.

  I opened the door to our apartment and saw that Joe was across the room in his big leather chair. He lifted a hand in greeting, but I could tell he was deep in conversation.

  Martha waggled and shimmied into the foyer, yelping her joy that I was home. I ruffled her ears and called her pet names. Everything about this old doggy is precious to me. We’ve been together for so long. I talked to her as I put my gun in the safe that Dave Channing had given us, and she followed along as I went to find Julie.

  She was barefoot, still in the school clothes I’d dressed her in this morning, sitting on her bed with a book in her lap. She looked up and said, “Mommy. Martha peed on the floor.”

  “Oh. Did someone forget to walk her?”

  She shrugged, not willing to implicate her dad, too young to do the chore herself.

  “Wanna go for a walk?” I asked Martha.

  This is every dog’s favorite question, and ours responded with a loud, emphatic bark. Yes. Yes, she did want to go for a walk.

  We went out to the foyer, where I slipped a collar and leash onto Martha, zipped Julie into a coat, and tied her shoes. I got Joe’s attention, and he put his hand to the phone and said, “Just take a quick walk, okay?”

  I nodded and the three of us girls took the elevator down to Lake Street. Martha sniffed around the sidewalk, relieved herself for show, and then herded me and Julie together as border collies, even old ones, do.

  Back in Julie’s room, I found clean pj’s and asked her to tell me about her day. She was willing. I brushed the thick, dark curls she’d inherited from her dad, and I thought about Claire. My eyes watered. I heard Julie say, “Mommmmmy, are you listening? That was funny!”

  I hadn’t heard a word.

  “I’m sorry, Julie. Tell me again. Please.”

  “No,” she said.

  I asked her if she’d like me to read to her, and she said, “Not yet.” She wanted to tell me about a rabbit a classmate had brought to school, and kept talking until Joe came to the doorway and said, “How about a hug good night, Bugs?”

  She said, “Dad, Mommy is out to lunch.”

  “Then, I’ll make her some dinner.”

  We hugged and kissed our little girl, told her it was okay to sleep with Martha for a little while, and shut off her light.

  We were crossing the main room when Joe’s phone rang.

  He picked up and said, “I will, Dave. Of course. I’ll call you in the morning. You, too. Good night.”

  When he’d hung up the phone, we sat together on the sofa. He looked sad. In pain. I asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Ray. Dave’s father. He just died.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Dave thinks Ray was murdered.”

  “What?”

  “I have to go back to Napa Valley. I have to be there to help him.”

  CHAPTER 22

  JOE AND I sat together on the sofa, our arms around each other.

  Joe spoke haltingly about himself and Dave when they were roommates.

  And he told me that he wondered if Dave was in such a bad place that the only way he could accept his father’s death was to create a fantasy that Ray had been murdered.

  “It doesn’t make any sense otherwise,” Joe said. “Why would anyone kill Ray Channing inside a hospital?”

  I didn’t want to break into Joe’s thoughts, but I was also grieving. Moments with Claire were flashing through my mind, starting with the look on her face as she told me about the cancer diagnosis, then back to her smiling at me when she painted my toenails the day Joe and I got married. She was Julie’s godmother and I was Rosie’s. Each of us was the go-to person for the other whenever we needed advice, love, support, and the truth.

  I couldn’t imagine my life without Claire. And I didn’t want her to go.

  Joe was holding me, and my body started shaking and I just couldn’t stop it. He turned me so that I was looking into his face, gripped my shoulders, and asked me, “Lindsay. What’s going on?”

  I blurted out, “I said … I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  My voice cracked. He was alarmed and he tightened his grip on me.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “Claire has cancer.”

  I cried. Joe consoled me until he cried, too. Second time I ever saw Joe cry. I was so grateful that Julie was in bed, but Martha felt the sadness, came out of Julie’s room, and put her nose on the couch between us.

  “Keep talking,” Joe said.

  “She said it’s nothing to worry about, but she was lying.”

  Joe held me tight. I thought about what Claire must be going through.

  “She hasn’t told Edmund.”

  “She will.”

  “I can’t bear this, Joe.”

  “You can. You will. You’ll be strong for Claire.”

  We went into the bedroom and got in bed, under the blankets, and held hands.

  The last time I looked at the clock, it was 3:40 in the morning. The big paw that had once caught footballs enclosed my hand, and when Joe squeezed my fingers, it was gentle. A hug.

  I slept hard after that, and when I woke up a short time later, Joe was dressed.

  He leaned over and kissed me.

  “I made coffee and walked Martha. Julie’s still sleeping. Mrs. Rose will take her to the pre-K bus, and she’ll pick her up, make her dinner. I’ll call you after I see Dave.”

  I sat up and kissed him again.

  He said, “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

  When the phone rang, I thought it was Joe, but it was Cindy.

  CHAPTER 23

  CINDY WAS AT her desk at the San Francisco Chronicle at 6 a.m.

  It was nine o’clock in New York, and news had been breaking across the country all morning. Her scanner was on, transmitting police, paramedic, and fire department radio calls while she booted up her laptop.

  First thing, she looked in on the updated SFPD 911 log for calls related to the Baron case. No arrest, no statement, nothing. Next web stop was the Examiner, the local competition. Nothing to worry about there. She checked out the major news outlets for any new reporting, found none, and then went back to the updated SFPD 911 log.

  There was no hot news at all, so she moved on. Checked her inbox—it was full—and looked to see how much coffee was left in her mug. It was empty.

  She watched through the glass walls of her office as reporters, writers, and staff ambled into the city room, navigated the maze of partitioned cubicles to their stations. They stowed their bags, got coffee, then went to work.

  It was six fifteen when McGowan came in.

  He went to his desk with its clear view of her office. He dropped off his computer bag and waved at her. After opening his laptop, he headed across the city room to suck
up to the publisher, who was doing his morning walk-through.

  McGowan was the worst kind of phony. A toady. Blech.

  Cindy shook off the creeps, turned back to her computer, and opened her crime blog. A lot of people had posted questions about the Baron killings. Sometimes posters had questions for her. But she didn’t have anything to tell them, not today, not yet. She blogged that information on the case was pending and she would report to her readers as soon as she could.

  Damn it. If Lindsay hadn’t blocked her, she could take the action that she and all journalists worked for—breaking the news.

  The coffee station, the urn and fixings, were just down the hallway. Cindy brought her mug, and when she returned to her desk, there was an interesting bulletin in the chyron crawling across the bottom of her screen.

  A drug dealer had been shot in Chicago yesterday morning. The cops had identified the victim as Albert Roccio but had kept the story quiet for twenty-four hours until the autopsy was completed.

  Now the police were asking the public for information on Roccio’s death.

  Cindy opened her link to the Chicago PD website and read up on the victim. Albert Roccio was fifty-four, a Chicago native. Owned a smoke shop on North Broadway where he sold papers, smokes, candy, soft drinks. He had an undetermined number of employees, who Cindy guessed were stock boys doubling as drug runners.

  Roccio was divorced, no children. He had been exiting his apartment house on his way to work, car keys in hand, when he was shot, one bullet to the forehead.

  Roccio’s girlfriend, Tonya Patton, forty-eight, and her boy, Vanya, eight, had been walking right behind Albert down the front steps. One bullet had been fired. One only. The woman and child had been spared.

  Patton hadn’t seen the shooter, was questioned and released. Apart from Patton and Vanya, there had been no witnesses to the shooting, no suspects. Police found a half kilo of heroin taped under the dashboard of Roccio’s Subaru Forester.

  The news crawl resumed, and this time Cindy read it from the beginning.

  Chicago drug dealer shot in execution-style murder at 10:30 a.m. on Monday.

  Cindy sat still for a moment and let the connection sink in. Roccio was shot on the same day and at the same time that the Barons had been shot.

  She called her boyfriend, Rich Conklin, who she knew was still sleeping.

  “Sorry, Richie, but I’ve got something to tell you. It’s hot. Yeah, I’d call it very damned important,” Cindy said.

  CHAPTER 24

  ON DIRECT ORDERS from the man she loved, Cindy waited two excruciating hours, so as not to wake Lindsay, and then she called her.

  “Lindsay. It’s Cindy.”

  “Everything okay? I’m trying to get out of here. I still need to press a shirt and dry my hair—”

  “What time is it, Linds?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m asking you. What time is it?”

  “Uh. Eight thirty.”

  “That’s right, Lindsay. At this time yesterday the Barons were killed, and at this same time yesterday Albert Roccio, smoke shop owner in Chicago, was shot between the eyes. Cops found a hefty bag of heroin taped to the underside of his dash.”

  Silence on the phone.

  “Lindsay? Linds, you there?”

  “I hear you.”

  “Good. Richie told me that I had to tell you that I want to run with this drug dealer–time of death connection, which, as you know, Lindsay, is what the Chronicle pays me to do. Chicago dude and Barons, all holding significant drugs for distribution, all shot at the same time, each struck by a single kill shot.”

  “I gave you information about the Barons in your car and off the record. Do you remember?”

  Lindsay’s voice was thrumming with badass. She’d seen Cindy make headlines from invisible ink before.

  Cindy loved Lindsay and wouldn’t betray her, but frankly, she’d just made a connection that spelled more than a coincidence; it was some kind of collusion. TBD. Which was the difference between writing “What to do this weekend in San Francisco” and investigative journalism. She was onto a gangbuster front-page story.

  Cindy said, “I know. I know you told me off the record. Otherwise I wouldn’t be asking for your permission.”

  “Calm down, Cindy.”

  “You, too, Lindsay.”

  Henry Tyler, the publisher and editor in chief of the Chronicle and her “rabbi,” knocked on her glass door, then came into her office and sat in the side chair. He held up his hand, mouthed, “I can wait.”

  Lindsay was saying, “I understand this is some kind of sacrifice, but I’m going to give you another off-the-record tip as compensation. Hear me?”

  Cindy scoffed. “Yes. What is it?”

  “Here’s another dot to connect. There was a shooting in LA yesterday, 8:30 a.m. But as of now, nothing about drugs.”

  Cindy nodded to Tyler, held up a finger, Just a minute, and said to Lindsay, “Can you officially confirm that?”

  “No. It’s an anonymous tip. Find out some other way. You can’t quote me or say sources close to the police or anything like that, and do not link that up with the Baron murders—”

  “Or what? Roger Jennings was my story, by the way.”

  “Don’t do it, Cindy. I’ll give you the go-ahead with a quote soon, but I need to see if there really is a connection before you take it public and warn off the shooters.”

  “Okay. So no problem with the LA piece?”

  “Just don’t mention the time of the shooting.”

  Cindy exhaled her exasperation, said, “Okay. Talk to you later.”

  She clicked off and said hi to Henry Tyler, her publisher and editor, a kind man who’d backed her wild notions and promoted her to senior reporter on the crime desk.

  He said, “Sorry to interrupt. Look. Do me a favor, Cindy. Take McGowan under your wing, will you? He’s a good writer, but he’s new to us. He could use some help getting into the swing of things around here.”

  “Sure, Henry,” she said.

  Tyler thanked her and left her office. He had just left when McGowan stepped in, without knocking, and sat down in the chair.

  “So, Cindy. What’s the inside scoop on the Baron killings? Tyler wants us to work together on the story.”

  CHAPTER 25

  I ARRIVED IN the squad room an hour and a half late that morning.

  I was still rattled from the fit Julie had thrown because Joe couldn’t take her to the pre-K school bus, and was sick with worry about Claire’s heartbreaking news. Cindy’s phone call had scrambled whatever cognition I had left after my sleepless night, and a traffic detour on Bryant had made me frustrated and bad tempered.

  All I said to Richie was, “Life kneecapped me this morning.”

  He gave me a long look, pointed at my jacket.

  I looked down at the dribble of white down my jacket lapel. Even the toothpaste was out to get me. I shrugged off my jacket, hung it on the back of my chair. I noticed that someone had messed with my desk.

  “What happened here?”

  “Brady happened,” Conklin said. “You were still floating on the wine country afterglow. He’s a little compulsive.”

  “Ya think?”

  I sat down, wheeled the chair up to my desk, and started returning articles to where they belonged. Lamp, notepad, picture of Julie and Joe. I stared at my mug, now full of pens, and said, “Any progress on the Barons?”

  He said, “Clapper called. The bullets were recovered, but they’re soft points. One was deformed by the inside of Paul’s skull. The other went through Ramona, smashed into a wall.”

  “So much for ballistics,” I said.

  Richie went on. “I spoke to Sergeant Noble, LAPD. They have nothing yet on the Peavey shooting, but they want to work with us. And here’s the name of the primary lead detective on the Chicago shooting. I left a message. No call back.”

  Conklin passed me a sticky note over the narrow gulch separating our desks. It r
ead, “Det. Stanley Richards. Victim, Albert Roccio, smoke shop dude.”

  It was 11:50 in Chicago. I made the call, was passed around the police department until Detective Richards picked up his phone.

  I introduced myself, said that my partner was also on the line, and told the detective that I’d read about Albert Roccio. I said, “We’ve had a couple of similar shootings here.”

  Richards said, “What can I do for you?”

  I couldn’t keep the stress out of my voice as I gave the detective what we had: the “rehearsal” at the Taco King and the Baron shootings. I also told him about Fred Peavey, the LA dealer who’d dropped his kid off at school and taken one through the forehead. Richards was aware of only the Barons, who’d made the national news.

  I said, “The Barons and Peavey happened at the same time, 8:30 a.m. Monday morning Pacific Standard Time.”

  Richards grunted, said, “That’s a match. Roccio was offed at ten thirty here.” He sounded bored. “Boxer, right? Good luck with your DBs.”

  He was hanging up.

  “Richards.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You got anything on Roccio? A motive? A suspect?”

  “Sorry. I can’t help you.”

  Richards was keeping the case to himself, and frankly, I wasn’t into pulling teeth from another cop.

  I said, “Do I have this right? You’re the primary on Roccio, I’ve got a case that could be its twin, and you’re jerking me around? Maybe your captain can give us an assist. I’ll give him a call.”

  Richards said, “Hang on, Boxer. Happy to tell you about our big file of nothing.”

  Reluctantly he told us much of what we already knew: that Roccio’s girlfriend claimed not to have seen the shooter and knew nothing about his drug business. As of now, Chicago PD didn’t know if Roccio had enemies.

  “Roccio’s body is still warm,” Richards said, giving me notice that he was done.

  We signed off. Richie muttered that Richards was a jerk, and I agreed with him as I typed a note for the file.