Women's Murder Club [03] 3rd Degree Read online

  Michelle’s body relaxed. Inside, she was screaming. She wanted to punch Malcolm in the face. But she was too spent. Sweat was pouring through her T-shirt.

  Malcolm took the blasting cap and wheeled the chair back over to the device. “You think I was gonna set this beauty off?” He shook his head. “Fat chance, baby. She’s got important work to do. This bomb is going to blow the minds of everybody in San Francisco.”

  Chapter 31

  ABOUT SEVEN, I was back at my desk. My teams scattered all around the area, chasing the leads we had. Cindy had gotten me a copy of this book, Vampire Capitalism. She said it would give me an idea of the new radicalism that was starting to take hold.

  I flipped through the chapter headings: “The Failure of Capitalism.” “Economic Apartheid.” “Vampire Economics.” “The Armageddon of Greed.”

  I didn’t even notice Jill standing at my door. She knocked, making me jump. “If only John Ashcroft could see you. The linchpin of the city’s law-enforcement machine… Vampire Capitalism?”

  “Required reading,” I said, smiling, embarrassed, “for the serial killer with a bang.”

  She was dressed in a stylish red pantsuit and a Burberry summer raincoat, a pile of briefs squeezed into her leather satchel. “I figured you could use a drink.”

  “I could,” I said, tapping the book against the desk, “but I’m still on duty.” I offered her a bag of Szechuan soybeans instead.

  “What are you doing,” she snickered, “heading up the department’s new Subversive Authors wing?”

  “Very cute,” I said. “Here’s a fact I bet you didn’t know. Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Warren Buffett made more money last year than the thirty poorest countries, a quarter of the world’s population.”

  Jill smiled. “It’s good to see you developing a social consciousness, given your line of work.”

  “There’s something bothering me, Jill. The fake secondary device outside Lightower’s town house. The note on the company form balled up in Bengosian’s mouth. These people have made their motive clear. But they’re trying to taunt us. Why play the game?”

  She balanced a red shoe on the edge of my desk. “I don’t know. You’re the one who catches ’em, honey. I just put ’em away.”

  There was a bit of a pause. A stiff one. “You mind if I change the subject?”

  “Your soybeans,” she said with a shrug, popping one in her mouth.

  “I don’t know if this’ll sound silly. I was a little worried the other day. Sunday. After we ran. Those marks, Jill. On your arms. Something got me thinking.”

  “Thinking about what?” she asked.

  I looked into her eyes. “I know you didn’t get those marks from a shower door. I know what it’s like, Jill, when you have to admit you’re human, like the rest of us. I know how you wanted that baby. Then your dad died. I know you pretend that you can work everything out. But maybe you can’t sometimes. You won’t talk about it with anyone, even us. So the answer is, I don’t know about those marks. You tell me.”

  There was a stubbornness in her eyes that suddenly turned fragile, something about to give. I didn’t know if I had gone too far, but to hell with it, she was my friend. All I wanted was for her to be happy.

  “Maybe you’re right about one thing,” Jill finally said. “Maybe those marks didn’t come from a shower door.”

  Chapter 32

  THERE ARE CRIMES that are brutal and inexcusable. Sometimes they make me sick, but their motives are open. Now and then, I even understand. Then there are the hidden crimes. The ones you are never meant to see. The kind of cruelty that barely breaks the skin but crushes what’s inside, the little voice that is human in all of us.

  These are the ones that really make me wonder about what I do for a living.

  After Jill told me what had been going on between her and Steve, after I wiped her tears and cried with her like a little sister, I drove home in a daze. A pall had clung to her face, a whitewash of shame I will never forget. Jill, my Jill.

  My first instinct was to drive over there that night and slap a charge on Steve. All along, the slick, self-righteous prick had been bullying her, hitting her.

  All I could think of was Jill, the face I saw on her, that of a little girl. Not the Chief Assistant D.A., top of her class at Stanford, who seemed to breeze through life. Who put murderers away with that icy stare. My friend.

  I tossed and turned the whole night. The following morning, it took all I had to focus on the case. Overnight the lab tests confirmed Claire’s findings. It was ricin that had been ingested by George Bengosian.

  I had never seen the Hall as tense as it was that morning, bustling with dark-suited Feds and media managers. I felt as if I was sneaking past security just to call Cindy and Claire.

  “I need to see you guys,” I told them. “It’s important. I’ll meet you at Susie’s at noon.”

  By the time I arrived at the quiet counter café down Bryant, Cindy and Claire were squeezed into a corner booth. Both wore anxious looks.

  “Where’s Jill?” asked Cindy. “We figured she was coming with you.”

  “I didn’t ask her,” I said. I sat in the seat across from them. “This is about Jill.”

  “Okay…” Claire nodded, confused.

  Piece by piece, I took them through my first suspicions about the marks I had seen on Jill while we were jogging. How I didn’t like the looks of them and how maybe, in the aftermath of losing the baby, she had done them to herself.

  “That’s ancient history,” Cindy shot in. “Isn’t it?”

  “You asked her?” asked Claire. Her gaze was deadly serious.

  I nodded, my gaze fixed on hers.

  “And…?”

  “She said, ‘What if I didn’t make those marks myself?’”

  I watched Claire studying me, trying to read my face. Cindy blinking, beginning to understand.

  “Oh, Jesus,” muttered Claire. “For God’s sake, you don’t mean Steve…”

  I nodded, swallowed.

  A deep, sickening silence fell over the table. The waitress came. We ordered numbly. When the waitress left, I met their eyes.

  “That son of a bitch.” Cindy shook her head. “I’d like to cut off his balls.”

  “Join the club,” I shot back, “that’s all I thought about last night.”

  “How long?” asked Claire. “How long has this been going on?”

  “I don’t really know. She keeps saying it was the baby. When she lost it, Mr. Sensitivity there laid the blame on her. ‘You couldn’t do it, could you? The big hotshot. You couldn’t even do what every other woman can. Have a child.’”

  “We have to help her,” Cindy said.

  I sighed. “Any ideas how?”

  “Get her the hell out,” Claire said. “She can stay with one of us. Does she want out?”

  I didn’t know. “I’m not sure she’s gotten there yet. I think what she’s dealing with now is just shame. Like she’s letting people down. Us. Maybe him. Strange as it sounds, I think there’s a side of her that wants to prove she can be the wife, and mother, he wants her to be.”

  Claire nodded. “So we talk to her, right? When?”

  “Tonight,” I answered.

  I looked at Claire. “Tonight,” she agreed.

  Our food came and we picked at it without much appetite. No one had even asked about the case. Suddenly Claire shook her head. “Like you didn’t have enough going on.”

  “Speaking of which”—Cindy pulled up her bag—“I have something for you.” She brought out a spiral notebook and ripped off a page.

  Roger Lemouz. Dwinelle Hall. 555-0124.

  “This guy’s at Berkeley. In the Linguistics Department. Globalization expert. Be prepared: his view of life, let’s just say, may not exactly coincide with yours.”

  “Thanks. Where’d you get this?” I folded the paper in my purse.

  “I told you,” Cindy said, “a million miles away.”

  Chapter 33
<
br />   I PUSHED THE SITUATION with Jill to the back of my mind as best I could; I phoned and managed to catch Roger Lemouz in his office. We spoke briefly and he agreed to see me.

  Just getting out of the Hall was a breath of fresh air. These days, I rarely went over to this part of the bay. I parked my Explorer near the stadium off of Telegraph Avenue and headed past the street rats hawking pot and bumper stickers. The sun was beating onto Sproul Plaza, students in backpacks and sandals sitting around, reading on the steps.

  Lemouz’s office was in Dwinelle Hall, an official-looking concrete structure just off the main quad. “Please, it’s open,” a strong, Mediterranean accent answered my knock. A hint of something more formal, educated. British?

  Professor Lemouz leaned back behind a chaotic desk in the small office cluttered with books and papers. He was large-shouldered and swarthy, with curly black hair falling over his forehead, a shadowy growth on his face.

  “Ah, Police Inspector Boxer,” he said. “Please sit, be my guest. Sorry the surroundings are not so plush.” The room was musty and smelled of books and smoke. An ashtray and a pack of unfiltered Rothmans were on the desk.

  I lowered myself into a seat across from him and pulled out my pad. I handed him a card.

  “Homicide,” Lemouz read, bunching his lips, seemingly impressed. “So I suspect it’s not some rogue etymological nuance that brings you here?”

  “Perhaps another interest of yours,” I said. “You’re aware, of course, of the events going on across the bay?”

  He sighed. “Yes. Even a man with his nose in his books most of the time brings it out now and then. Tragic. Totally counterproductive. Fanon said, ‘Violence is its own judge and jury.’Yet, one cannot find it completely surprising.”

  Lemouz’s phony sympathy appealed to me about as much as a dentist’s drill. “You mind telling me just what you mean by that, Mr. Lemouz?”

  “Of course, Madam Inspector, if you would be so kind as to tell me just why you are here.”

  “It’s Lieutenant,” I corrected him. “I head up the Homicide detail. And I was given your name as someone who might have some firsthand knowledge of what’s going on here. The ideological scene. People who might find blowing up three sleeping people and almost killing two innocent children as well as virtually imploding someone’s vascular system an acceptable form of protest.”

  “By ‘over here,’ I assume you mean the peaceful, academic groves of Berkeley,” Lemouz said.

  “By ‘over here,’ I mean wherever someone would want to do these awful things, Mr. Lemouz.”

  “Professor,” he replied. “The Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages”—I saw the glimmer of a smile—“as long as we’re spouting credentials.”

  “You said you didn’t find these murders surprising.”

  “Why should they be?” Lemouz shrugged. “Should the patient be surprised he is ill when his body is covered in lesions? Our society is infected, Lieutenant, and the very people who transmit the disease look around and go, ‘Who, me?’

  “Do you know,” he said, raising his eyes, “that the powerful multinational corporations now have an output larger than the GNP of ninety percent of the countries around the globe? They have supplanted governments as the system of social responsibility in our world.

  “Why is it,” he laughed cynically, “we are so quick to rail against the moral outrage of apartheid when it threatens our racial sensibilities, but are so asleep to recognize it when it is economic. It is because we do not see it through the eyes of the subjugated. We see it through the culture of the powerful. The corporation. On TV.”

  “Excuse me,” I interrupted, “but I’m here about four gruesome murders. People are dying.”

  “Yes they are, Lieutenant. That’s exactly my point.”

  There was a part of me that would like to have grabbed Lemouz by the lapels and shaken him. Instead, I pulled out the photo of the au pair on Wendy Raymore’s ID and a police artist’s sketch of the woman videotaped walking into the Clift Hotel with George Bengosian. “Do you know either of these women, Professor?”

  Lemouz almost started to laugh. “Why would I want to help you? It’s the state who is the architect of this injustice, not these two women. Please tell me, who has committed the larger injustice? The two women suspects”—he threw the front page of the Chronicle across the desk at me—“or these sparkling examples of our system?”

  I was staring at photos of Lightower and Bengosian.

  “If these people are signaling the start of a war,” Lemouz laughed, “I say, let it unfold. What is the new phrase, Lieutenant?” He smiled. “The one Americans have embraced with all their moral imperative? Let’s roll.”

  I picked up the pictures, closed my pad, and placed it back in my bag. I stood up, feeling tired and soiled. I walked out on the Lance Hart Professor of Romance Languages before I blew him up.

  Chapter 34

  I WAS STEAMING all the way back to the Hall thanks to Lemouz’s sanctimonious rantings, plus my frustration that we weren’t getting anywhere on these murders. I was still hot when I got to the office after six. I called Cindy and made a date to meet at Susie’s. Maybe we could get something accomplished over lobster quesadillas. I needed the girls on this.

  As I hung up with Cindy, Warren Jacobi stepped into my office. “Yank Sing,” he said.

  “Yank Sing?”

  “It’s a better bet than quesadillas. Dim sum. Women always open up with Chinese. You should know that, LT. While you’re there, they say the chicken in salt and ginger caused the downfall of the Qin dynasty.

  “Where you been?” He sat down. He had something for me. I knew that sly grin of his.

  “Out wasting my time, in the People’s Republic. You got something, other than the restaurant review?”

  “We got a hit on the Wendy Raymore APB,” he said, grinning.

  That got my juices flowing.

  “A Safeway across the bay called in. Night clerk thought he recognized the face. There’s a video on the way. He said she has red hair now and was wearing sunglasses. But she took them off for a second to count the cash, and he swears it’s her.”

  “Where across the bay, Warren?”

  “Harmon Avenue in Oakland.” I drew a little mental map, and we both came to the same realization. “Near the McDonald’s where little Caitlin was found.”

  Geographically, it was starting to fit into place. “Get that photo to every storefront in the neighborhood.”

  “Already done, LT.” Jacobi’s eyes had that little sparkle they got when he was holding something back.

  “There been a lot of calls,” I said, cocking my head at Warren. “What makes you think this one’s real?”

  He winked. “She was buying an asthma puffer.”

  Chapter 35

  CINDY, CLAIRE, AND I had finished most of our Coronas and a plate of wings by the time Jill arrived. She hung her coat and came up warily to the booth, the nerves easy to read in her thin smile.

  “So,” she said, dumping her briefcase, and tossed herself next to Claire, “who wants to be first to prod?”

  “No dissection,” I said. “Wings… and here…” I tilted what was left of a beer into her glass.

  We all raised our glasses, Jill a little hesitantly. We had this moment of quiet, everybody trying to figure out just what was right to say. How many times had we met together before? At first, four women with tough jobs who had come together just to pool our resources, solve a crime.

  “To friends,” Claire said. “Ones who will be there for one another. That means for anything, Jill.”

  “I’d better drink this,” Jill said, her eyes starting to grow moist, “before I run my nose in it.”

  Jill drained about a third of the glass in a deep swallow. She drew a breath. “Okay, no reason to beat around the bush, right? You all know?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Telephone, telegraph, tele-Boxer.” Jill threw a wink my way.

  “If y
ou’re in pain, we’re all in pain,” Claire said. “It would be the same for you if the roles were reversed.”

  “I know it would.” Jill nodded. “So I guess what happens next is that you guys tell me I don’t exactly fit the profile of the typical battered spouse.”

  “I think the only thing that’s next,” I said, wetting my lips, “is for you to tell us how you feel.”

  “Yeah.” She drew a tight breath. “First, I’m not battered. We fight. Steve’s a bully. He’s never hit me with a fist. He’s never struck my face.”

  Cindy moved to object, but Claire held her back.

  “I know that doesn’t exonerate him, or justify anything. I just wanted you to know.” She bit her bottom lip. “I guess I can’t describe how I feel. I’ve tried enough of these cases to know the range of emotions. Mostly, I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed to admit that this is me.”

  “How long has it been going on?” Claire asked.

  Jill leaned back and smiled. “You want the truthful answer to that question, or the one I’ve been telling myself the past few months? The truthful one is, from before we were married.”

  I felt myself clench my teeth.

  “It was always something. What I would wear, something I would buy for the house that didn’t fit his style. Steve’s very big on telling me I’m stupid.”

  “Stupid?” Claire gasped. “You run intellectual rings around him.”

  “Steve’s not dumb,” Jill said. “He just doesn’t see a lot of possibilities. At first, he would just squeeze me, like here, in the shoulders. Always pretend that it was inadvertent. Once or twice he threw things when he had a fit. My purse. Once, I remember”—she started to laugh—“it was this slab of Asiago cheese.”

  “Why?” Cindy shook her head, incredulous. “Why would he do these things to you?”