Women's Murder Club [01] 1st to Die Read online

  “Sure. I’d feel safe in saying that they’re ‘ongoing.’”

  “Thanks.” She sighed. “Have you narrowed in on any suspects yet?”

  “This is what they tell you to ask at the Chronicle? You know I can’t divulge that.”

  “Off the record. No attribution. As a friend.”

  As I listened, I remembered when I was a recruit trying to elbow my way in. How the police world had been barred, closed off, until someone had opened up the tiniest crack to let me crawl through. “Like I said, Ms. Thomas,” my tone starting to soften, “no promises.”

  “Cindy,” the reporter said. “At least call me Cindy. For the next time you get cornered in the bathroom with your guard down.”

  “Okay, Cindy. I’ll be sure to keep you in mind.”

  Chapter 19

  I DIDN’T WANT TO GO HOME. And I knew I couldn’t stay at the Hall any longer.

  I grabbed my bag, rushed down to the underground garage, and started up my trusty-dusty Bronco without a clear sense of where I was headed.

  I just drove — Fourth, Third, onto Mission, past the Moscone Center — cafés, closed-up shops. All the way down toward the Embarcadero.

  I wrapped around Battery, heading away from the bay. I had nowhere to go, but my hands seemed to act on their own, leading me somewhere. Flashes of the murdered bride and groom flickered in my head. Echoes of Orenthaler. I had finally called Dr. Medved, the hematologist, for an appointment.

  I was approaching Sutter, and I turned. Suddenly, I knew where I was heading.

  I pulled into Union Square. Without even trying, I found myself in front of the brightly lit entrance of the Hyatt.

  I badged the manager and took the elevator up to the thirtieth floor.

  A single uniformed guard sat in front of the Mandarin Suite. I recognized him, David Hale out of Central. He stood up as he saw me approach. “Nowhere to go, Inspector?”

  A crisscrossing barrier of yellow tape blocked the entrance to the Mandarin Suite. Hale gave me the key. I peeled off a band or two of tape and slipped under the rest. I turned the lock and I was inside.

  If you’ve never wandered alone at the site of a freshly committed murder, you don’t really know the feeling of restless unease. I felt the dark ghosts of David and Melanie Brandt were still in the room.

  I was sure I had missed something. I was also sure it was here. What?

  The suite was pretty much as I had left it. The Oriental carpet in the living room had gone to Clapper’s lab. But body positions and blood sites were clearly marked out with blue chalk.

  I looked at the spot where David Brandt had died. In my mind, I retraced what had likely taken place.

  They are toasting each other. (I knew that from the half-filled champagne glasses on a table near the terrace.) Maybe he just gave her the earrings. (The open box was on the master bathroom counter.)

  There’s a knock. David Brandt goes to answer. It was as if secrets were buzzing in the thick air, alive with whispers.

  The killer comes in, carrying the champagne box. Maybe David knows him. Maybe he just left him an hour before at the reception. The knife comes out. Only one thrust. The groom is pinned against the door, apoplectic. It happens so fast that he cannot scream. “Poor man went in his pants,” Claire had said.

  The bride doesn’t scream? Maybe she’s in the bathroom. (The jewelry box.) Maybe she went in there to put on the earrings.

  The killer hunts through the suite. He intercepts the bride, coming out unsuspectingly.

  I envision Melanie Brandt — radiant, full of joy. He sees it, too. Was he someone she knew? Had she just left him? Did Melanie know her killer?

  There’s a Navajo saying, “Even the still wind has a voice.” In the quiet, confessing hotel room, I listen.

  Tell me, Melanie. I am here for you. I’m listening.

  My skin tingles with the chill of resurrecting each detail of the murder. She fights, tries to run away. (The bruises and small abrasions on her arms and neck.) The killer stabs her at the foot of the bed. He is horrified, yet wildly excited about what he has done. She doesn’t die immediately. He has to stab her again. And once more.

  When he is finished, he carries her to the bed. (Not drags. There is no sign of blood trailing behind.) This is important. He is gentle with her. It makes me think he knows her.

  Maybe he once loved Melanie? He folds her arms on her waist in a restful pose. A princess sleeping. Maybe he pretends that what has taken place is only a bad dream.

  Nowhere in the room do I feel the clinical pattern of professionals or hired killers. Or even someone who has killed before.

  I’m listening.

  A ferocious anger rises up in his blood. He realizes he will never see her again. His princess…

  He’s so angry. He wants to lie down with her this one time. Feel her.

  But he cannot. That would defile her. But he must have her. So he lifts her dress. Uses his fist.

  It is all screaming at me. I’m sure there is one last thing I am not seeing. Unrevealed. What am I missing? What has everyone missed so far?

  I step over to the bed. I envision Melanie, her horrifying stab wounds, but her face is calm, unaccusing. He leaves her like that. He doesn’t take the earrings. He doesn’t take the huge diamond ring.

  Then it hit me with the power of a train exploding from a dark tunnel. What was missing. What I hadn’t seen. Jesus Christ, Lindsay.

  Rings!

  I ran my mind over the image of her lying there. Her delicate, blood-smeared hands. The diamond was still there, but…Jesus! Is it possible?

  I ran back to the foyer and brought to mind the crumpled body of the groom.

  They had been married just a few hours before. They had just completed their vows. But they weren’t wearing gold bands.

  Wedding rings.

  The killer doesn’t take the earrings, I realized.

  He takes the rings.

  Chapter 20

  NINE THE NEXT MORNING, I was in the office of Dr. Victor Medved, a pleasant, smallish man with a narrow, chiseled face, who, with a trace of an Eastern European accent, scared the hell out of me.

  “Negli’s is a killer,” he stated evenly. “It robs the body of its ability to transport oxygen.

  “In the beginning, the symptoms are listlessness, a weakening of the immune system, and some light-headedness. Ultimately, you may experience similar brain dysfunction to a stroke and begin to lose mental capacity as well.”

  He got up, walked over to me, cradled my face in his gentle hands. He stared at me through thick glasses. “You’re already peaked,” he said, pressing my cheeks with his thumbs.

  “Always takes me a while for the blood to get hopping in the mornings,” I said with a smile, trying to mask the fear in my heart.

  “Well, in three months,” Dr. Medved said, “unless we reverse it, you will look like a ghost. A pretty ghost, but a ghost all the same.”

  He went back to his desk and picked up my chart. “I see you are a police detective.”

  “Homicide,” I told him.

  “Then there should be no reason to go forward under any delusions. I don’t mean to upset you. Aplastic anemia can be reversed. Up to thirty percent of patients respond to a regimen of biweekly transfusions of packed red blood cells. Of those who do not respond, a similar percentage can be ultimately treated through a bone marrow transplant. But this involves a painful process of chemotherapy first in order to boost up the white cells.”

  I stiffened. Orenthaler’s nightmarish predictions were coming true. “Is there any way to know who responds to the treatment?”

  Medved clasped his palms together and shook his head. “The only way is to begin. Then we see.”

  “I’m on an important case. Dr. Orenthaler said I could continue to work.”

  Medved pursed his lips skeptically. “You may continue as long as you feel the strength.”

  I meted out a slow, painful breath. How long could I hide this? Who coul
d I tell? “If it works, how long before we see improvement?” I asked with some hope.

  He frowned. “This is not like popping aspirin for a headache. I’m afraid we’re in this for the long haul.”

  The long haul. I thought of Roth’s likely response. My chances at lieutenant.

  This is it, Lindsay. This is the greatest challenge of your life.

  “And if it doesn’t work, how long…before things start to…”

  “Start to get worse? Let us attack this with optimism and hope. We’ll discuss that as we go along.”

  Everything was thrown open now. The case, my career, all the goals of my life. The stakes had changed. I was walking around with a time bomb ticking in my chest, tightly wound, incendiary. And the slow, disappearing fuse was all that I thought I might be.

  I asked quietly, “When do we start?”

  He scribbled out the location of an office in the same building. Third floor. Moffett Outpatient Services. There was no date.

  “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to start right now.”

  Chapter 21

  THE STORY ABOUT GERALD BRANDT’S business deal with the Russians had broken. It was on every newsstand: bold headline reading, “GROOM’S FATHER MAY HAVE TRIGGERED RUSSIAN WRATH.”

  The Chronicle reported that the FBI was seriously looking into the matter. Great.

  Two half-liter bags of hemoglobin-enriched blood were pumping through me as I finally reached my desk at about ten-thirty. It took everything I had to push from my mind the image of the thick, crimson blood slowly dripping into my vein.

  Roth called my name — the usual disgruntled glower was all over his face. “Chronicle says it’s the Russians. The FBI seems to agree,” he said as he leaned over my desk. He pushed a copy of the morning’s paper at me.

  “I saw it. Don’t let the FBI in on this,” I said. “This is our case.”

  I told him about last night, my going back to the crime scene. How I was pretty sure the sexual assault on the corpse, the bloody jacket, the missing rings, added up to a single, obsessed killer.

  “It’s not some Russian professional. He put his fist inside her,” I reminded him. “He did this on her wedding night.”

  “You want me to tell the Feds to back off,” Roth said, “because you have strong feelings about the case?”

  “This is a murder case. A kinky, very nasty sex crime, not some international conspiracy.”

  “Maybe the Russian killer needed proof. Or maybe he was a sex maniac.”

  “Proof of what? Every paper and TV station in the country carried the story. Anyway, don’t the Russki hitters usually cut off a finger, too?”

  Roth rattled a frustrated sigh. His face showed more than its usual tic of agitation.

  “I’ve got to run,” I said. I shot my fist in the air and hoped that Roth got the joke.

  Gerald Brandt was still at the Hyatt, waiting for his son’s body to be released. I went to his suite and found him there alone.

  “You see the papers?” I asked him as we sat at the umbrellaed table on the terrace.

  “The papers, Bloomberg, some woman reporter from the Chronicle calling all night. What they’re suggesting is total madness,” he said.

  “Your son’s death was an act of madness, Mr. Brandt. You want me to be straight with you when it comes to the investigation?”

  “What do you mean, Detective?”

  “You were asked the other day if you knew anyone who might want to cause you harm —”

  “And I told your detective, not in this way.”

  “You don’t think certain factions in Russia might be a little angry at you for pulling out of their deal?”

  “We don’t deal with factions, Ms. Boxer. Kolya’s shareholders include some of the most powerful men in this country. Anyway, you make me seem like I’m a suspect. It was business. Negotiations. In what we do, we deal with this sort of thing every week. David’s death has nothing to do with Kolya.”

  “Mr. Brandt, how can you be so sure? Your son and his wife are dead.”

  “Because negotiations never broke off, Detective. That was a ruse we used for the media. We closed on the deal last night.”

  He stood up, and I knew my interview was over.

  My next call was to Claire. I ached to talk to her anyway. I craved my daily Claire fix. I also needed help on the case.

  Her secretary said she was in the middle of a conference call when my call came in. She told me to hold on.

  “Forensic specialists,” Claire grumbled as she came on the line. “Listen to this…. Some guy’s driving sixty in a thirty-five zone, rams into an elderly man in his Lexus, double-parked, waiting for his wife. DOA. Now the driver’s tying up the guy’s estate with a suit that the victim was illegally parked. All each side wants is to grab a piece of the estate, experts included. Righetti’s pushing me in ’cause the case’s being written up in an AAFS journal. Some of these bastards, you give them a penny for their thoughts, you know what you get?”

  “Change,” I answered with a smile. Claire was funny.

  “You got it. I’ve got about thirty-one seconds. How you doing?” she inquired. “I love you, sweetheart. I miss you. What do you want, Lindsay?”

  I hesitated, part of me wishing I could let the whole thing burst out, but all I asked was if the Brandts were wearing any wedding bands when they were brought in.

  “To my knowledge, no,” she replied. “We inventoried earrings and a diamond as large as an eyeball. But no wedding bands. I noticed that myself. In fact, that’s why I was calling you last night.”

  “Great minds think alike,” I said.

  “Busy minds, at least,” she countered. “How’s your grisly, godawful case coming?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. Next thing we have to do is go through three hundred guests to see if any might’ve been carrying any special grudges. You saw how this is being played up in the press. Russian revenge. The FBI’s creeping around, and Chief Mercer’s barking in Roth’s ear to put a real detective on it. Speaking of which, I have Jacobi out trying to trace down the jacket. Other than that, the case is moving along smoothly.”

  Claire laughed. “Stick with it, sweetie. If anyone can solve these murders, it’s you.”

  “I wish it were only that….” I let my voice drop.

  “Is everything all right?” Claire came back. “You don’t sound your usual chatty, irreverent self.”

  “Actually, I need to talk with you. Maybe we can get together Saturday?”

  “Sure,” Claire said. “Oh, damn…we’ve got Reggie’s graduation party. Can it keep a day? I could drive in for brunch on Sunday.”

  “Of course it can hold,” I said, swallowing my disappointment. “Sunday would be great. I’d like that.”

  I hung up with a smile. For a moment, I actually felt better about things. Just making the date with Claire made it seem as if weights had been lifted off my shoulders. Sunday would give me some time to prepare. About how I was going to deal with the treatment, and my job.

  Raleigh wandered up. “You want to grab a coffee?”

  I thought he was needling me about what time I’d come in. He must have sensed my resentment.

  He wagged a legal-size manila envelope in my face and shrugged. “It’s the Brandts’ wedding guest list. I thought you’d want to see who made the cut.”

  Chapter 22

  WE WENT DOWN TO ROMA’S, one of those stucco-on-stucco, high-ceilinged, Euro-style coffee joints, across the street from the Hall. I prefer Peet’s, but Roma’s is closer.

  I ordered a tea, and Raleigh came back with some fancy mocha latte and a slice of fresh pumpkin bread that he put in front of me.

  “You ever wonder how these places make any money?” he asked.

  “What?” I looked at him. “There’s one on every corner. They all serve the same thing, and their average sale’s gotta be, what …two dollars and thirty-five cents?”

  “This isn’t a date, Raleigh,” I snapped. �
��Let’s go through the list.”

  “Maybe closer to three or three-fifty. Lucky if the places gross four hundred thousand.”

  “Raleigh, please,” I said, losing patience.

  He pushed the envelope toward me.

  I opened it and fanned out eight or nine pages of names and addresses bearing Gerald Brandt’s office crest. I recognized some of the guests on the groom’s side immediately. Bert Rosen, former secretary of the treasury of the United States. Sumner Smith, some billionaire who had made his money in the eighties through big-time LBOs. Chip Stein, of E-flix, Spielberg’s buddy; Maggie Sontero, the hot SoHo designer from New York. Lots of big names and big trouble.

  On the bride’s side, there were several prominent names from the San Francisco area. Mayor Fernandez for me. Arthur Abrams, the prominent local attorney. I had gone up against his firm once or twice in the witness box, testifying in homicide cases. Willie Upton, superintendent of public schools.

  Raleigh pulled his seat over to me. Side by side we scanned the rest of the list. Columns of impressive-sounding couples with Doctor or Honorable in front of their names.

  It was a long, unrevealing, seemingly impenetrable list.

  I don’t know what I expected — just something to jump out at me. Some flashing name resonating with a culpability even the families didn’t recognize.

  Raleigh let out a worried breath. “This list is scary. You take fifty, I’ll take fifty, and we’ll give the balance to Jacobi. We’ll all meet back here in two weeks and see what we’ve got.”

  The prospect of hammering away at these people — each one horrified and indignant at the prospect of why we were looking into them — didn’t fill me with joy or high hopes.

  “You think Mayor Fernandez might be a sex killer?” I muttered. “I do.”

  What came out of me next was a complete surprise. “So you said you were married?”

  If we were going to be thrown together, we might as well get it out. And the truth was, I was curious.

  Raleigh nodded after a short pause. I thought I saw pain in his eyes. “Actually, I still am. Our divorce is coming up next month. Seventeen years.”