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

  Suddenly a new speaker climbed on top of the SUV. My eyes bulged. It was Lemouz. Imagine that.

  The professor took the microphone and began shouting. “What comprises the World Bank? It is a group of sixteen member institutions from all parts of the world. One of them is the Bank of America. Who loaned the money to Morton Lightower? Who were the underwriters who handled his company’s IPO? The good old B of A, my friends!”

  Suddenly the mood of the crowd changed. “These bastards should be blown up!” a woman shouted. A student tried to start a chant: “B of A. B of A. How many girls have you killed today?”

  I saw pockets of violence begin to break out. A kid hurled a bottle at the window of the bank. At first I thought it was a Molotov, but there was no explosion.

  “See what we have to deal with over here,” Santos said. “Problem is, they’re not all wrong.”

  “Fuck they’re not,” contributed Jacobi.

  Two police officers invaded the ranks and tried to corral the bottle thrower, but the crowd banded together, impeding their way. I saw the kid take off down the street. Then there was screaming, people on the ground. I couldn’t even tell where it all had started.

  “Oh fuck.” Santos put down his camera. “This could be getting out of hand.”

  One of the cops swung his stick and a long-haired kid sank to his knees. More people began to throw things. Bottles, rocks. Two of the agitators started wrestling with the police, who dragged them down, pinning them with their sticks.

  Lemouz was still barking into the microphone. “See what the state must resort to—cracking heads of mothers and children.”

  I had taken about as much as I could sit back and watch. “These guys need help,” I said, and went to open the door.

  Martelli held me back. “We go in, we get made.”

  “I’m already made,” I said, unstrapping the gun from my leg. Then I ran across the street with Martelli a few strides behind.

  Cops were being shoved and pelted with debris. “Pigs! Nazis!”

  I pushed my way into the throng. A woman held a cloth to her bleeding head. Another carried a baby, crying, out of harm’s way. Thank God somebody had a little common sense.

  Professor Lemouz’s gaze fixed on me. “Look how the police treat the innocent voice of protest! They come with drawn guns!

  “Ah, Madam Lieutenant,” he said, grinning down from his makeshift podium, “still trying to get yourself educated, I see. Tell me, what did you learn today?”

  “You planned this,” I said, wanting to run him in for disorderly conduct. “It was a peaceful demonstration. You stirred them up.”

  “A shame, isn’t it? Peaceful demonstrations never seem to make the news. But look…” He pointed toward a news van pulling up down the street. A reporter jumped out, and a cameraman was filming as he ran.

  “I’m watching you, Lemouz.”

  “You flatter me, Lieutenant. I’m just a humble professor of an arcane subject not in vogue these days. Really, we should have a drink together. I’d like that. But if you’ll excuse me, there’s a case of police brutality waiting for me now.”

  He bowed, produced a supercilious grin that made my skin crawl, then started to wave his arms over his head, stirring up the crowd, chanting, “B of A. B of A. How many girls have you enslaved today?”

  Chapter 41

  CHARLES DANKO STEPPED INTO the depressingly drab lobby of the large municipal building. There was a security station to his left, two desultory guards inspecting bags and packages. His fingers tightened around the handle of the leather case.

  Of course, Danko wasn’t his name right now. It was Jeffrey Stanzer. Before that, it had been Michael O’Hara. And Daniel Browne. He had gone through so many names over the years, changing them, moving on whenever he felt people getting too close. Names were fungible, anyway—as easy to change as making a new driver’s license. What had remained constant was a belief that burned deeply inside his soul. That he was doing something here that was very important. That he owed it to people close to his heart, people who had died for a cause.

  But the scary thing—none of that was true.

  Because Charles Danko believed in nothing but the hate burning inside of him.

  He made a check of the security officers going about their work, but it was nothing new. He had seen it many times before. He stepped up to the platform and started to empty his pockets. He’d done this so many times over the past few weeks that he might as well actually work in this building. Case over there: he mouthed the words before they were spoken.

  “Case over there,” the security guard said, clearing a spot on the screening table. He flipped open the top.

  “Raining yet?” he asked Danko as he passed it through the X-ray scan.

  Danko shook his head, his heart barely skipping a beat. Mal had built a masterpiece this time, the contents molded right into the lining. Besides, these drones wouldn’t know how to find the bomb even if they knew what to look for.

  Danko walked through the metal detector and a beeper went off. He patted his jacket up and down and seemed surprised when he took the bulging device out from one of his pockets.

  “Cell phone,” he said, smiling apologetically. “Don’t even know it’s on me until it rings.”

  “Mine only rings when it’s for the kids,” the genial guard said with a grin.

  How easy it was. How asleep these people were. Even with all the warnings around them. Another guard pushed his case to the end of the platform. He was in. The so-called Hall of Justice.

  He was going to blow it to bits! He’d kill everyone in here. Without regrets or remorse.

  For a moment Danko just stood there, gazing at the oh-so-busy people rushing back and forth, reminded of his years of staying low, the quiet, trivial life that he was leaving behind. His palms began to sweat. In a few minutes they would know he could strike anywhere. At the epicenter of their power, the very heart of the investigation.

  We will find you, no matter how large your house or powerful your lawyers….

  What he was carrying was enough to blow out an entire floor.

  He stepped inside a crowded elevator and pushed the button for the third floor. It filled with people coming back from lunch. Cops, investigators from the D.A.’s office, pawns of the state. With their families and pets, watching the Giants on the tube, they probably felt they weren’t responsible. But they were. Even the man who swept the floors. They were all responsible, and if they weren’t, who cared?

  “Excuse me,” Danko said on three, squeezing himself out with two or three other people. Two uniformed cops passed him in the hallway. He didn’t flinch. He even smiled at them. How easy it was. The home of the D.A., the chief of police, the investigation.

  They had let him walk right in! Morons!

  They wanted to show they had this whole G-8 thing under control. He would show them that they didn’t have a clue.

  Danko took a breath and came to a stop in front of Room 350. HOMICIDE, it said.

  He stood there for a moment, looking as if he belonged. But then he turned and walked back to the elevator.

  Dry run, he thought as he took the next car down.

  Practice makes perfect. Then…

  Boom! Yours truly, August Spies.

  Part Three

  Chapter 42

  IT WAS FOUR by the time I left Berkeley and made it back to the office. My secretary, Brenda, happened to catch me in the hallway. “You’ve got two messages from A.D.A. Bernhardt, but don’t get comfortable. The boss is asking for you upstairs.”

  As I knocked on Tracchio’s door, a meeting of the Emergency Task Force was already under way. I wasn’t surprised to see Tom Roach, from the local FBI. They’d been all over things since Cindy got the e-mail that morning. Plus Gabe Carr, the deputy mayor in charge of police affairs, and Steve Fiori, the press liaison.

  And someone with his back to me whom I didn’t recognize: dark, with thick brown hair, solidly built. The guy had advan
ce team for the G-8 meeting stamped all over him. Here we go, antacid lovers.

  I nodded to the guys I had worked with, a quick glance toward the suit I didn’t know. “You want to bring everyone up to date, Lieutenant?” the Chief said.

  “Sure,” I said, nodding. My stomach churned. I hadn’t exactly prepped for a presentation. I had the feeling I was being set up, Tracchio-style.

  “A lot of things are pointing toward Berkeley,” I explained. I ran off the key angles we were working. Wendy Raymore, the demonstration today, Lemouz.

  “You think this guy’s involved?” Tracchio asked. “He’s a professor, right?”

  “I ran his name and it came back with nothing deeper than a couple of unlawful demonstrations and resisting arrests,” I said. “Both dropped. He’s harmless. Or he’s very, very smart.”

  “Any trace on the taggants in the C-4?” Tracchio asked. It felt as if he was trying to make points with the Fed in the tan suit. Who the heck was he anyway?

  “It’s with ATF,” I said.

  “And these people keep communicating on these public e-mail ports to threaten us,” he said.

  “What do you want us to do, stake out every public-access computer in the Bay Area?” I asked. “You know how many we’re talking, Chief?”

  “Two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine,” the Fed in the suit suddenly chimed in. He flipped a sheet of paper. “Two thousand one hundred and seventy-nine public-access Internet access portals in the Bay Area, depending on how they’re defined. Colleges, libraries, cafés, airports. That includes two in army recruiting centers in San Jose, but I don’t think they’ll try there, if that narrows it down at all.”

  “Yeah,” I said as our eyes finally met, “that starts to narrow it down.”

  “Sorry.” The man rubbed his temples and relaxed into a tired smile. “I just got off a plane from Madrid twenty minutes ago, expecting to check through some security details for the G-8 next week. Now I’m wondering if I suddenly find myself in the middle of the Third World War.”

  “Lindsay Boxer,” I said.

  “I know who you are,” the Fed replied. “You worked that La Salle Heights church bombing last year. People in Justice took note. Any chance we can contain these people in the next week?”

  “Contain?” The word had a Clancy-esque sound to it.

  “Let’s not play games, Lieutenant. We have a meeting of the heads of finance of the Free World coming here. Plus a threat to the public safety, and like the Chief said, we don’t have much time.”

  There was a directness about this guy I liked. Not the usual Washington type.

  “So everything’s still on?” Gabe Carr, the mayor’s deputy, asked.

  “On?” The Washington man looked around the room. “The locations are secure, right? We have adequate manpower, don’t we, Chief?”

  “Every uniformed man on the force at your disposal next week.” Tracchio’s eyes lit up.

  I cleared my throat. “What about the e-mail we received? What do we do with it?”

  “What do you want to do with it, Inspector?” the Washington guy asked.

  My throat was dry. “I want to answer it,” I said. “I want to start a dialogue. Map out the contact points they respond from. See if they divulge something. The more we talk, the more they might reveal….”

  There was one of those sticky, protracted silences, and I was hoping I wasn’t about to be shoved off this case.

  “Right answer.” The federal agent winked at me. “No need for all the melodrama, I just wanted to see who I was working with. Joe Molinari,” he said, smiling, and pushed across his card.

  As I read it, as hard as I tried not to change my expression, my heart picked up a beat, maybe a couple of beats.

  DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, the card read. JOSEPH P. MOLINARI. DEPUTY DIRECTOR.

  Shit, this guy was all the way up!

  “Let’s start a dialogue with these bastards,” said the deputy director.

  Chapter 43

  MY HEAD WAS STILL BUZZING from my meeting with Molinari as I headed back to my office. On the way, I stopped at Jill’s.

  A worker was vacuuming the corridor, but her lights were still on.

  An Eva Cassidy CD was playing lightly in the background. I heard Jill dictating into a recording device.

  “Hey.” I knocked on the door. A look as apologetic as I could muster. “I know you left some messages. It probably won’t help if I tell you about my day.”

  “Well, I know how it began,” Jill said. Icicles.

  Deserved.

  “Look, I can’t blame you for being mad.” I stepped in, placing my hands on the top of a high-backed chair.

  “You could say I was a little mad,” Jill said, “earlier in the day.”

  “And now?”

  “Now… I guess you could call it very fucking mad, Lindsay.”

  There wasn’t a hint of humor in her face. When you needed someone to seriously bust some balls—to use the wrong metaphor—Jill was your gal.

  “You’re torturing me,” I said, and sat in the chair. “I realize what I did was way out of bounds.”

  Jill laughed derisively. “I would say the part about sending a hit man after my husband seemed a bit wide of the lines—even for you, Lindsay.”

  “It wasn’t a hit man,” I corrected her. “It was a knee-cracker. But who’s being technical. What can I say? You’re married to a total SOB.” I pulled the chair up to the side of her desk. “Look, Jill, I know it was wrong. I didn’t go there to threaten him. I went for you. But the guy was such a tight-assed creep.”

  “Maybe what the guy didn’t appreciate was our business being laid out like a laundry list in his face. What I told you was in confidence, Lindsay.”

  “You’re right.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

  Gradually, the little lines of anger in her brow began to soften. She pushed back her chair from the desk and rolled it to face me, almost knee to knee.

  “Look, Lindsay, I’m a big girl. Let me fight my own battles. You’re my friend in this case, not the police.”

  “So everybody’s telling me.”

  “Then hear it, honey, because I need you to be my friend. Not the 101st Airborne.” She took my hands and squeezed them. “Usually a friend hears another out, invites her to lunch, maybe sets her up with a cute coworker…. Barging into her husband’s office and threatening to have his knees capped… that sort of stuff… we call them enemies, Lindsay.”

  I laughed. For the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile crack through Jill’s ice. A glimmer.

  “Okay, so as a friend, how are you and the SOB since he punched you?” I sniffed back a false smile.

  Jill laughed, shrugged. “I guess we’re okay…. We talked about counseling.”

  “The only counseling Steve needs is from a lawyer, during an arraignment.”

  “Be my friend, Lindsay, remember…. Anyway, there are more important matters to discuss. What’s going on in this city?”

  I told her about the message Cindy had received that morning, and how it ratcheted up the case. “You ever hear of an antiterrorism guy named Joe Molinari?”

  Jill thought. “I remember a Joe Molinari who was a prosecutor back in New York. Top-notch investigator. Worked on the World Trade Center bombing. Not hard to look at, either. I think he went down to Washington in some capacity.”

  “‘Some capacity’ means the Department of Homeland Security and my new point man on the case.”

  “You could do worse,” Jill said. “Did I mention he wasn’t hard to look at?”

  “Cut it out.” I blushed.

  Jill cocked her head. “Normally you don’t go for the federal types.”

  “’Cause most of them are just career guys looking to score a promotion on our sources and leads. But this Molinari seems like the real deal. Maybe you could do some groundwork for me….”

  “You mean like what kind of litigator he is?” Jill smiled, cat-eyed. “Or whether he’s marrie
d? I think Lindsay’s a little taken with the special agent.”

  “Deputy director.” I wrinkled my nose.

  “Oh… the man’s done well.” Jill nodded approvingly. “I did say he was handsome, didn’t I?” She grinned again. We both laughed.

  After a while, I took Jill’s hand. “I’m sorry I did what I did, Jill. It would kill me if I added to what you’re going through. I can’t promise to stay out, at least not completely. You’re our friend, Jill, and we’re worried sick for you. But I’ll give you my word… I won’t put a hit out on him. Not without running it by you first.”

  “Deal.” Jill nodded. She squeezed my hand. “I know you’re worried for me, Lindsay. And, really, I love you for it. Just let me see it through my way. And leave the cuffs at home next time.”

  “Deal.” I smiled.

  Chapter 44

  FOR A SWISS, Gerd Propp had acquired a lot of American tastes and habits. One of them was going after salmon. In his room at the Governor Hotel in Portland, Gerd excitedly laid out on the double bed the new Ex Officio fishing vest he had just acquired, along with some hi-tech lures and a gaff hook.

  His job, as an economist with the OECD out of Geneva, might be thought by some as stiff and tedious work, but it did bring him to the States several times a year and had introduced him to men who shared the same passion for coho and chinook.

  And that was where Gerd was headed tomorrow, under the guise of finalizing his speech before the G-8 gathering in San Francisco next week.

  He put his arms through the brand-new fishing vest and regarded himself in the mirror. I actually look like a professional! As he adjusted his hat and puffed out his chest in his fancy vest, Gerd felt as energized and manly as a leading man in a Hollywood film.