21st Birthday (Women's Murder Club) Read online

  Brady and I got out of the car. He put an arm around Yuki, squeezed her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. Then he crossed the street to speak with Hallows. Yuki and I leaned against the Chevy while I phoned Conklin, who was at the top of the street, our outer perimeter.

  I watched him duck under the tape and hold it up for Inspector Sonia Alvarez. Conklin introduced Alvarez to Yuki, and from the way she walked, talked, and handled herself, I thought Alvarez seemed all right. A straight shooter.

  Brady joined us to say, “Hallows and Culver are ready for the walk-through. Any questions?” he asked Alvarez.

  “No, sir. I’ve done this before.”

  Brady sent Conklin and Alvarez to cover the rear door of the small two-story house. I peered through the front window and saw no sign that anyone was home. But to be on the safe side, Brady pulled his gun.

  He said, “Are we feeling lucky?”

  “Very.”

  I stepped forward, knocked on the dark blue front door, and announced. When no one answered, I did it again. This time, I heard footsteps and the sound of the chain lock coming off the door, its brass knocker shaped like a fist. The door swung open. And there he was in the doorway, Lucas Burke.

  “What do you want?”

  Brady said, “We have warrants to search your house, Mr. Burke. This could take a long time, probably overnight. Is there somewhere you can stay? Or I can have an officer drive you to a hotel.”

  “The hell you will. Do you understand? My baby girl is dead. I have to make arrangements. I’m in mourning. And look at this mob outside. Reporters, for God’s sake. My neighbors are seeing this. You’re ruining my life!”

  Brady said, “We’re very sorry, but we need to go through your house. For your sake as well as ours, you shouldn’t be here.”

  Burke slammed the door in our faces, but just before Brady kicked it in, it opened again without the chain. Burke brushed past us, strode angrily to his vehicle. He revved his engine, honked his horn at the press, and when he had an opening, he hit the gas and his car shot up the street like it was a lit fuse.

  CHAPTER 28

  BRADY HOLSTERED HIS GUN and deployed us from the entranceway; Conklin, Alvarez, and Hallows headed up the stairs while Brady, CSI Culver, and I clung to the ground-floor perimeter.

  The living room was small and tidy but not obsessively so, with an ExerSaucer visible in the center. A slate blue corduroy three-seater couch, with matching chairs, was angled toward the fireplace and the TV mounted above it and there were framed family photos on the mantel. To the left, Lorrie was pictured with a stuffed animal, with Lucas and Tara to the right in a traditional just-married pose.

  I turned away from the photos and looked for signs of violence, but saw none. No holes in the walls, no blood spatter on the ceiling, no bloody smears on the edge of the coffee table, no wet spots on the carpet. The fireplace tool caddy looked full. The bookshelves didn’t swing open to reveal a hidden room.

  I took notes. Culver documented the living room with his Nikon, then stood in the doorway to the den as Brady and I went inside.

  “This is depressing,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “I’m seeing phantoms, Boxer. Burke getting dressed for work. Tara making breakfast. Not speaking.”

  “And Lorrie?”

  “I just see her beached.”

  Me, too.

  We took opposite sides of the room, and did a search for weapons or incriminating messages, like a note from Burke’s girlfriend saying, “It’s now or never.” Or from Tara. “It’s over, you jerk. Drop dead.” Found zip. The desk drawers and file cabinets held graded classwork and warranties for household maintenance. Insurance policies. I took a look: Whole life, quarter of a million each on Tara and on Lucas Burke. No policy on the baby. If Tara was dead, Burke was in the chips unless he killed her. I confiscated the policies.

  “No laptop,” said Brady. “He stashed it somewhere. Work? In his car?”

  “I say it’s with Burke. Let’s see the kitchen,” I said. “Knives live there.”

  Along the way, I stopped to talk to Culver, who was crouched half in, half out of the hall closet.

  “Lookit this,” he said, smiling brightly. “We’ve got video.”

  “Show me.”

  I saw what looked like a DVR for an old security system.

  Culver said, “Just the one camera over the front door. Low-tech, motion activated, and it was running.”

  “Good catch.”

  Culver reversed the recording so I could see what he’d already watched.

  He narrated.

  “So here’s Burke on Monday morning. He leaves the house alone at seven forty a.m. The camera is not positioned to show me Burke’s expression, but he’s in a hurry, carrying a computer bag. Car keys in his hand.”

  As Culver talked, I watched Burke come out of the house alone, not locking the door, carrying only a laptop bag. He got into his silver Audi and zoomed out of the frame.

  Culver said, “And here comes Tara.”

  He forwarded the video. The time stamp read 8:12. Tara was wearing a denim dress, low heels, bouncing the baby against her right hip, her handbag in her left hand. As Tara’s friend Johanna had said, the young mother was pretty. Her car, a red Volvo, was in the short driveway.

  Tara put her bag down on the asphalt, strapped the baby into a rear-facing car seat, then returned to the house and came out again carrying a diaper bag and an overnight case, which she put in the trunk.

  Tara got into the driver’s seat. I could see her checking on the baby, then carefully backing out and making a reverse K-turn on Dublin Street. She headed downhill in the opposite direction her husband had taken.

  As with Lucas, the camera angle was all wrong for seeing faces, but her actions and body language were clear.

  She was not distressed or in a panic. And the carry-on showed Tara Burke had planned to be gone for some period of time.

  Maybe not forever, but surely overnight.

  CHAPTER 29

  CONKLIN SHOUTED DOWN to us from the top of the stairs.

  “I need you to see something!”

  I followed Brady up the staircase and found Conklin at the closet across from the bathroom. It was filled with linens and cleaning supplies. Conklin pointed to a crumpled-up blanket on the closet floor. It was crib-sized, pink, and patterned with bunnies.

  Conklin said, “That blanket must have been there since Tara and Lorrie left the house on Monday. I want to see inside of it.”

  Culver took a few shots of the blanket and then Rich carefully unfolded it with his gloved hands. A little pile of feces was in the center of the folds, like the fortune inside the cookie.

  Kathleen Wyatt had told me that Tara and Lorrie had been abused, that Lorrie was sometimes locked in the closet for crying. The soiled blanket was suspicious — but by itself proved nothing.

  “She could have taken it out of the baby’s crib and thrown it into the closet,” I said, but I made note of it in my book.

  This dollhouse of a home had no basement, no attic, the eaves were enclosed with sheetrock. So, after checking out the upstairs rooms and finding no bodies or signs of any, we cops left the house to CSU, stood near our cars, and brainstormed, theorized, hypothesized.

  Where had Tara gone? Had she left Burke? How had she gotten separated from Lorrie? Had she and Lucas been in touch since Monday morning?

  That was an interesting thought but took me nowhere.

  The trees in the park were alive with the light rustling of leaves and the sweet sounds of birdsong. It was the kind of day that made you think that nothing bad could ever happen here.

  And then Brady’s phone buzzed.

  He answered, “What’s up?”

  His face went rigid. He said, “I got it. I got it. Wait, let me get the coordinates again.” He slapped his shirt pocket, got back into the car, opened the console, and was reaching for the glove box when I handed him a pen and my notepad. Brady scribbl
ed and said, “Thanks. See you later.”

  He clicked off and went into deep thought.

  I said, “Brady? What happened?”

  “That was Teller.”

  “Teller?”

  “A CSI. A body was found on the eastern side of the park. Female.”

  “Is it Tara?”

  “Don’t know. Lady walking her dog found a girl’s body in a shallow grave. Throat cut. I’ve called for backup.”

  What the hell was this?

  Had Burke killed Tara and buried her in the park? And now that bastard was loose? My mind was ranging, trying to take in this new information and make sense of it.

  I needed to see the victim.

  I stuck with Brady as we all followed Hallows along a trail into the lush greensward. We’d walked for no more than five or six minutes when we reached a half dozen CSIs who’d roped off the area around the body.

  My heart was pounding, but Brady was a brick. He had a quiet word with the CSIs that boiled down to “We’ll take it from here.”

  I edged close enough to the deceased to see that she was partially covered with soil and leaves. But she was exposed enough that I could see that she was naked. Her throat had been cut on an angle and her breasts had been sliced, in no discernable pattern. From where I was standing, only her profile was visible.

  I stared up as a news chopper hovered overhead. Then Clapper drove up in his car, lights flashing.

  Ready or not, this gruesome murder was about to go public.

  CHAPTER 30

  CLAPPER LOOKED OVER the partially exposed and mutilated body and made a general announcement.

  “Listen up, everyone. You know the rules. Play dumb. Do not speak to the media or anyone else. I’ll make an announcement after the vic has been identified and next of kin notified.”

  I decided to get out ahead of the ID I knew was coming. I said, “I can notify her mother. I know her.”

  This would be a horrible job. Kathleen would go insane, but I thought it better for me to deliver the news than a stranger. Just then, a CSI appeared at Clapper’s elbow saying, “Sir, we found something.”

  “Go ahead. What is it?”

  “A pile of women’s clothes. All folded neatly. I looked in the handbag. Here’s her license.”

  Clapper took the license by the edges from the CSI’s gloved hand. As he looked at it, a muscle twitched in his cheek.

  “This license belongs to a Wendy Franks,” said Clapper. “She resembles Tara Burke. But, her nose. The width of her forehead …” Clapper stooped down and held the driver’s license, containing the requisite California state seals and holographs, near the dead woman’s face.

  “Unless her prints say otherwise, the victim is Wendy Franks.”

  Things went a little crazy about then, everyone talking at once, firing off opinions, comparing the DMV photo to the victim’s face. I looked at the license in Clapper’s hand and said, “Wendy Franks had brown eyes and was five nine. From her description, Tara Burke has blue eyes. She’s five six.”

  Alvarez said, “So, is Franks’s death a mistaken-identity situation? Or was her death totally unrelated?”

  The CSI said, “I took a shot of the clothes.”

  I peered at his image on his phone, saw a folded green striped dress, sandals, a brown shoulder bag. Not the clothes Tara was wearing on the video from Monday morning.

  More confirmation.

  The dead woman wasn’t Tara. Period.

  Claire and several of her techs joined us graveside. She greeted those of us she knew and began shooting pictures of the deceased in situ, while Hallows’s team did the same.

  I paced away from the body, looked at my watch every five minutes. Conklin and Alvarez were talking together under a tree. Brady stood with Clapper and Culver, and so forty-five minutes passed.

  When the scene had been photographed from every angle, Claire and a tech carefully lifted the dead woman from her shallow grave and placed her onto a sheet.

  I stooped next to Claire as she wrapped the body.

  “Can you estimate time of death if I don’t hold you to it?”

  “Swear it’s between you and me, Lindsay. Because I’m not ready to retire.”

  “Promise,” I said.

  “The young lady is out of rigor. I’d say she died twenty-four hours ago and you don’t need me to tell you cause or manner of death. Once I’ve got her on my table, I’ll do a preliminary workup.”

  Brady joined us.

  Claire said, “You’re gonna want a cheek swab from Burke. Maybe she scratched the bastard as he was killing her. Maybe he left trace behind. Or maybe he didn’t do it.”

  Leaving Brady at the scene, I hitched a ride back to the Hall with Conklin and Alvarez. I slumped against the back seat, just thinking. Lucas Burke had been released more than twenty-four hours ago. He’d had time to kill her, barely. Maybe.

  But had he done it?

  And if so, why?

  Had Franks witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to see?

  CHAPTER 31

  CINDY WAS AT HER DESK, laser-focused on her work, when a static storm crackled over her police scanner.

  The signal faded, came back strong, and she could make out a few words. Piecing sentence fragments together, she gathered that a deceased female had turned up in McLaren Park. She listened, hoping for more information. A voice over the radio sputtered the name “Tara Burke.”

  Cindy fell back in her chair.

  She righted her chair, spun around to where the radio sat on the windowsill, and fiddled with the channel dial in search of clear signal but didn’t get it. She ran out to the newsroom, found Jonathan Samuels at his desk and told him what she’d heard. He opened a file drawer, grabbed his camera, and said, “All set.”

  The two had picked up the portable scanner, left the Chronicle building, and gone directly to the underground parking garage across the street. By the time they were strapped in and heading toward the park, the name Tara Burke had been withdrawn.

  “Correction … vic … unidentified.”

  Cindy said, “That’s messed up. How’d they get that so wrong?”

  “Overexcitement,” Samuels said, “and bias confirmation. Slow down, will you?”

  Cindy eased up on the gas. Her urgency had cooled, but who, what, where, when, and why was still news. According to the scanner chatter, this was likely just another homicide who’d been buried in the greens and brambles of McLaren Park.

  Traffic flowed and soon the car was closing in on the Burkes’ gabled house.

  Samuels said, “Up ahead.”

  She said, “Good catch,” and turned down the radio. Two blocks away, police vehicles were pulling away from the curb near the park, streaming toward them, then, passing them.

  “There’s our story,” she said. “We just have to get it.”

  Cindy parked the car on the street opposite three marked CSI vehicles, a K9 transport vehicle, and some cruisers.

  Samuels hung his press pass on a cord around his neck, Cindy pinned hers to her jacket, and together they crossed the street toward the law-enforcement vehicles. Cindy picked out the youngest of the uniformed officers who was standing alone, thumbing his phone.

  “Hi there,” she said. “I’m Cindy Thomas with the San Francisco Chronicle.”

  He said, “How can I help you?”

  “I’m covering this crime. What you can tell me about what happened here?”

  “I’m not authorized to do that.”

  “Okay, but, if I don’t know your name …?”

  “Hah-hah. No. Sorry.”

  “Okay then. Mind if we just take a walk in the park?”

  “Not in the crime scene, uh, Cindy. Off-limits until CSU is done here.”

  That’s when Cindy noticed a woman sitting on her porch across the street, watching all of it.

  Cindy said, “Thanks anyway,” and she and Samuels crossed to the wood frame house with a small porch and front garden.

  Calling
up to the woman in the rocking chair, Cindy said, “Hi there. We’re from the Chronicle. May we talk with you for a minute?”

  The woman answered, “Come on up. See the gate latch? There you go. I’m in no rush.”

  Introductions were made. It seemed Ms. Melissa Goeden, retired social worker, knew of Cindy, read her column, and was, in fact, a fan.

  “I’m the one who found her,” said Ms. Goeden. “Well, Sparky did.” She petted the head of her cocker spaniel lying at her feet. “That poor girl.”

  Ms. Goeden used her finger to mimic a blade slashing across a neck.

  Samuels said, “That’s awful. You didn’t by chance learn her name?”

  “I was there when they found her driver’s license. She’s some-body Franks. Candy. No, no. Wendy. Wendy Franks. After that, it was ‘Thanks for being a good citizen, ma’am. Now get out of our crime scene.’”

  Cindy said, “We’re familiar. But thank you from us. You helped us a lot and maybe we can help find Wendy’s killer.”

  “You be careful, Cindy. Be very careful,” said Ms. Goeden.

  CHAPTER 32

  I WAS WORKING at a desk outside of Brady’s office.

  We faced each other through his wall and he could still close his door for privacy. At the opposite end of the squad room, Alvarez sat at my desk and Conklin was at his. They were engaged in animated conversation.

  Looking hard for the bright side, at least I still had my own computer.

  I put two photos up on my computer desktop; one of Tara Burke next to the morgue close-up of Wendy Franks’s face. I compared them, scrutinized them, confirming what I already knew. They didn’t match. So who was Wendy Franks? I was restless. She was haunting me. Why had she been murdered? Why hastily buried in McLaren Park? The park had a history as a dumping ground for inconvenient corpses, but the coincidence of a fresh body in close proximity to the Burke house bothered the hell out of me.