4th of July (28 page)

She peeled cellophane and foil from the mouth of the packet, tapped out a cigarette. A match sparked, and the smell of sulfur rose into the air.

“Keith was only twelve when he came to my school. Same age as my son, Bob,” she said. “Lovely boys, both of them. Tons of promise.”

I listened intently as Carolee described the appearance of Brian Miller, an older boy, a runaway who gained her confidence and eventually become a counselor at the school.

“Brian raped them repeatedly, both Bob and Keith, and he raped their minds, too. He had a Special Forces knife. Said he’d turn them into girls if they ever told anyone what he’d done.”

Tears slipped from Carolee’s eyes. She waved at the smoke as if that was what had made her tear up. Her hand shook as she sipped at her container of coffee.

The only sound in the room was the soft sibilance of the magnetic tape spooling between the reels of the Sony.

When Carolee began speaking again, her voice was softer. I leaned toward her so that I wouldn’t miss a word.

“When Brian was finished using the boys, he disappeared, taking their innocence, their dignity, their self-worth.”

“Why didn’t you call the police?”

“Look, I reported it, but by the time Bobby told me what had happened, time had passed. And the police weren’t so interested in my school for runaways. It took years to get Keith to smile again,” Carolee went on. “Bob was even more fragile. When he slashed his wrists, I had to do something.”

Carolee fooled around with her watchband, a dainty, feminine gesture, but fury contorted her features, an anger that seemed as fresh now as it had been a decade ago.

“Go on,” I said. “I’m listening to you, Carolee.”

“I found Brian living in a transient hotel in the Tenderloin,” she told me. “He was selling his body. I took him out for a good meal with lots of wine. I let myself remember how much I’d once really liked Brian, and he bought it. He believed that I was still his friend.

“I asked him nicely for an explanation. The way he told it, what he had with the boys was ‘romantic love.’ Can you believe it?”

Carolee laughed and tapped ashes into an aluminum foil tray.

“I went back to his place with him,” Carolee continued. “I’d brought his things with me: a T-shirt, a book, some other stuff.

“When he turned his back, I grabbed him. I slashed his throat with his own knife. He couldn’t believe what I’d done. He tried to scream, but I’d cut through his vocal cords, you see. Then I whipped him with my belt as he lay dying. It was good, Lindsay. The last face Brian saw was mine.

“The last voice he heard was mine.”

An image of John Doe #24 came to me, animated now into a living person by Carolee’s story. Even if he was everything she said he was, he’d still been a victim, condemned and executed without a trial.

The final coincidence, and it was a killer, was that Carolee had scrawled “Nobody Cares” on the hotel wall. It was in all the newspaper stories. Ten years later, the clippings were found in Sara Cabot’s bizarre collection of true crime stories. She and her brother had ripped off the catchphrase.

I flipped a notepad across to Carolee’s side of the desk and handed her a pen. Her hand was shaking as she started to write. She cocked her pretty head. “I’m going to put down that I did it for the children. That I did it all for them.”

“Okay, Carolee. That’s fine. It’s your story.”

“But do you understand, Lindsay? Someone had to save them. I’m the one. I’m a good mother.”

Smoke curled around us as she held my gaze.

“I can understand hating people who have done terrible things to innocent children,” I said. “But murder, no. I’ll never understand that. And I’ll never understand how you could have done this to Allison.”

I WALKED ALONG THE dreary alley called Gold Street until I reached the neon sign, Bix, in huge blue letters. I entered through the brick-lined doorway and the blue-note chords of a baby grand thrilled me.

The high ceilings, the cigarette smoke hanging above the long sweep of mahogany bar, and the art deco fixtures and trappings reminded me of a Hollywood version of a 1920s speakeasy.

I stepped up to the maître d’, who told me that I was the first to arrive.

I followed him up the stairs to the second floor and took a seat in one of the richly upholstered horseshoe-shaped booths overlooking the jumping bar scene below.

I ordered a Dark & Stormy—Gosling’s Black Seal rum and ginger beer—and was sipping it when my best bud in the world came toward me.

“I know you,” Claire said, sliding into the booth, wrapping me in a huge hug. “You’re the gal who went and solved a whole buncha murders without any help from her homegirls.”

“And lived to tell the tale,” I said.

“Just barely, the way I heard it.”

“Wait,” said Cindy, scooting into the booth on my other side. “I want to hear. For the record, if you don’t mind, Lindsay. I think a little profile of our homicide ace is in order.”

I bussed her on the cheek. “You’ll have to clear it with PR,” I told her.

“You’re such a pain,” she said, kissing me, too.

Claire and Cindy each ordered one of the exotic drinks the bar was famous for as Yuki arrived, straight from the office. She was still in her prim lawyer’s suit, but she had a new sassy red streak in her glossy black hair.

The oysters and firecracker shrimp came, and the hand-cut steak tartare was dressed by a waiter at tableside. As the food and libations were served, I told the girls about the takedown at the stucco house on the hill.

“It was so freaking weird that I thought of her as a buddy,” I said of Carolee, “and I didn’t know her at all.”

“Makes you doubt your intuition,” said Cindy.

“Really. And she fooled my sister, too.”

“You think she was just keeping tabs on you because you investigated this Brian Miller’s murder?” said Claire.

“Yeah. Keeping her ‘friend’ close and her enemy closer.”

“To John Doe Number Twenty-four. His case is closed,” said Yuki, lifting her glass.

“Case closed,” we repeated, clinking our glasses to hers.

We ordered monkfish, skate with asparagus, Maine lobster spaghetti, and New York Black Angus steak, and somehow, between chowing down on the sensational food and all of us trying to speak at once, everyone got her story in.

Cindy was writing a story about a bank robber who’d gotten caught because he wrote his “stick ’em up” note on the back of his own deposit slip.

“He left the deposit slip and took off with the dough,” Cindy said. “Cops were waiting for him when he got home. This one goes to the head of my ‘Dumb Crooks’ column.”

“I’ve got one for you!” Yuki jumped in. “My client—to remain nameless—is a stepson of one of the partners, and I had to defend him,” she said, twirling the red streak in her hair. “A coupla cops bang on his door looking for a robbery suspect. My guy says, ‘Come on in,’ because he doesn’t know anything about a robbery. Then he says, ‘Look anywhere you like—except the attic.’”

“Go on, go on,” we urged her. Yuki sipped her Germain-Robin Sidecar and looked around the table.

“Judge grants a search warrant, and the cops find my client’s setup in the attic. Hydroponic marijuana under grow lights. Sentencing is next week,” she said over our laughter.

As the conversation swirled around the table, I felt lucky to be with this gang again. We all felt so comfortable together and had shared so much—even with our newest friend, Yuki, who’d been unanimously admitted to the group for saving my butt and my life as I knew it.

We were about to order dessert when I saw a familiar white-haired man with a slight limp coming toward us.

“Boxer,” Jacobi said, without even acknowledging the others, “I need you now. The car’s running outside.”

I put my hand over my now-empty glass reflexively. My heart rate shot into high gear, and a mental slide show of a car chase and a shoot-up flashed before my eyes.

“What’s going on?” I asked him.

He bent his head toward mine, but instead of whispering, he kissed me on the cheek.

“There’s nothing going on,” he said. “I was going to pop out of a cake, but your girls here dissuaded me.”

“Thanks, Jacobi,” I said, cracking up. I put my hand on his arm. “Come and join us for dessert.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Jacobi slid into the booth, and we all shoved over one seat to make room for him. The waiter brought chilled Dom Perignon—thanks, Jacobi—and when our flutes were full, my friends new and old toasted my return.

“To Lindsay. Welcome home!”

THE FIRST WEEK BACK on the job blew around me like a Category 5 hurricane.

The phone rang nonstop, and cops were at my door every few minutes bringing me up to speed on several dozen active cases. Everything was a red alert.

But the overarching problem was clearer to me than ever before. The department’s average of solved cases hovered around 50 percent, which put us very close to the bottom of large-city homicide squads.

It wasn’t that we weren’t good; we were simply undermanned and overwhelmed, and the squad was burning out. In fact, people had been calling in sick all week.

When Jacobi knocked on the glass door that Friday morning, I told him to come in.

“Lieutenant, shots were fired in Ocean Beach, two men down. One car is on the scene, one on the way, and the officers are still requesting backup. The witnesses are panicky and starting to scatter.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Taking lost time.”

I could see everyone in the squad through the glass walls of my office. The only cop without a stack of active cases on his or her desk was me. I grabbed my jacket from the back of my chair.

“I guess we’re catching,” I said to my former partner. “Tell me what you know.”

“Two gangs from Daly City and Oakland had it out in the parking lot near the beach,” Jacobi told me.

We hustled down the stairs, and once we were outside on McAllister, Jacobi unlocked the car and took the wheel.

“It started with knives, then a gun came out. Two vics dead at the scene, one wounded. Two perps are in custody. One of the perps waded out into the surf and buried the gun in the sand.”

I was already imagining the scene of the crime, looking ahead to putting the puzzle pieces together. “We’ll need divers,” I said, gripping the dash as we took the corner at Polk.

Jacobi gave me a rare grin.

“What’s that for, Jacobi?”

“Pardon me, Lieutenant,” he said over the sound of the siren. “I was thinking.”

“Yes?”

“I still like working with you, Boxer. It’s good to have you back in the saddle again.”