Women's Murder Club [05] The 5th Horseman, Page 3

  “See all this here, sugar? Was this young lady intubated?” Claire asked me.

  “Nope. The EMTs never touched her. We waited for you.”

  “So this is trauma artifact. Look at her tongue. Appears to be a laceration.”

  Claire flicked her light over the furrow at the girl’s neckline.

  “Unusual ligature mark,” she told me.

  “I thought so, too. Don’t see any petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes,” I said, talking the talk. “Odd, isn’t it? If she was strangled?”

  “All of it’s odd, girlfriend,” said Claire. “Her clothes are immaculate. Don’t see that too much with a body dump. If ever.”

  “Cause of death? Time of death?”

  “I’d say she went down somewhere around midnight. She’s just going into rigor. Other than that, all I know is that this girl is dead. I’ll have more for you after I examine young Jane under some decent light back at the shop.”

  Claire stood and spoke to her assistant.

  “Okay, Bobby. Let’s get this poor girl out of the car. Gently, please.”

  I walked to the edge of the fourth floor and looked out over the tops of buildings and the creeping traffic down on Golden Gate Avenue. When I felt a little collected, I called Jacobi on my cell.

  “I turned Guttman loose,” he told me. “He’d just gotten off a flight from New York, had left his car at the garage while he was out of town.”

  “Alibi?”

  “His alibi checks out. Someone else parked that girl in his Caddy. How’s it going over there?”

  I turned, saw Claire and Bobby wrapping the victim tamale-style in the second of two sheets before inserting her into a body bag. The chalk-on-board sound of that six-foot-long zipper closing, the finality of encasing the victim in an airproof sack, feels like a gut-punch no matter how many times you’ve witnessed it.

  My voice sounded sad to my own ears as I said to Jacobi, “We’re wrapping things up now.”

  Chapter 12

  IT WAS ALMOST 6:00 that night, ten hours after we’d found Caddy Girl’s body.

  The sheaf of paper in the center of my desk was a list of the 762 cars that had gone through the Opera Plaza Garage last night.

  Since morning, we’d run the plates and registrations of those cars through the database, and no red flags had popped up, nothing even remotely promising.

  We’d also struck out on Caddy Girl’s prints.

  She’d never been arrested, or taught school, or joined the military, or worked for any government agency.

  A half hour ago, we’d gotten a digital picture of her likeness out to the press, and depending on what else was happening in the world, she’d be in all the newspapers tomorrow.

  I pulled the rubber band out of my hair, shook out my ponytail, threw a breathy sigh that riffled the papers in front of me.

  Then I called Claire, who was still downstairs in the morgue.

  I asked her if she was hungry.

  “Meet me downstairs in ten,” she said.

  I greeted Claire at her private parking spot on McAllister. She unlocked the car, and I opened the passenger-side door of her Pathfinder. Claire’s scene kit was on the seat, along with a pair of hip waders, a hard hat, a map of California, and her ancient 35mm Minolta.

  I transferred the tools of her trade from the front into the back and wearily slid onto the passenger seat. Claire gave me an appraising look, then burst out laughing.

  “What’s the joke, Butterfly?”

  “You’ve got that third-degree look on your puss,” she told me. “And you don’t have to work me over, baby girl. I’ve got what you want right here.”

  Claire waved some papers at me, then shoved them into her cowhide handbag.

  Some people think Claire’s nickname is Butterfly because, like Muhammad Ali, she “floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.”

  Not so.

  Claire Washburn has a bright golden Monarch butterfly tattooed on her left hip. Now I pinned her with my eyes.

  “I’m sooooo ready to hear your verdict,” I said.

  Claire gave it up at last.

  “It’s a homicide, definitely,” she told me. “Lividity was inconsistent with a sitting position, so she was moved. And I found faint bruising across the tops of her arms, chest, and on her rib cage.”

  “So the manner and cause of death?”

  “I’m gonna say she was burked,” Claire told me.

  I was familiar with the term.

  In the 1820s, a couple of sweethearts named Burke and Hare were in the cadaver procurement business. For a while, they dug up bodies for sale to Edinburgh’s medical schools—until they realized how easy it was to produce fresh corpses by grabbing live victims and sitting on their chests until they died.

  Burking was still in good standing today. Postpartum mommies do it to their kids more often than you’d ever want to know. Slip the child between the mattress and box spring, sit on the bed.

  If you can’t expand your chest, you can’t breathe.

  And the victim’s body shows little or no sign of trauma.

  I buckled up as Claire backed the car out and headed to Susie’s.

  “It was a horror show for this girl, Lindsay,” Claire told me. “What I’m thinking is, while one perp sat on her chest, another freak slipped a plastic bag over her head and smothered her. Rolled up the edge of the bag good and tight. That’s where the ligature mark came from. Maybe he pressed his hand to her nose and mouth at the same time.”

  “She had two killers?”

  “If you ask me, Lindsay, that’s the only way it could have been done.”

  Chapter 13

  SAN FRANCISCO’S BUSINESS DISTRICT slipped by as Claire piloted the Pathfinder through evening rush-hour traffic. We were silent for a few minutes, the eeriness of that young woman’s death filling the space around us.

  Images shifted in my mind as I tried to put it together one grisly piece at a time.

  “Two killers,” I finally said to Claire. “Working as a team. Posing the victim inside a car after the fact. What’s the point of that? What’s the message?”

  “It’s cold, for one thing,” Claire said.

  “And sick, for another. The rape kit?”

  “Is at the lab,” said Claire, “along with that pricey outfit Caddy Girl was wearing. By the way, the lab found a semen stain on the hem of her skirt.”

  “Was she raped?”

  “I didn’t see the kind of vaginal tearing or bruising you’d expect from a rape,” Claire mused. “We’ll have to wait to decide about that.”

  Claire braked the car at the Muni rail crossing, and together we watched the train rattle by. Night was closing in over the city of San Francisco, and the commuters were all going home.

  Questions were still flooding my little mind. Lots of them. About who Caddy Girl was. Who had killed her. How she and her killers might have crossed paths.

  Had the killing been personal?

  Or was Caddy Girl a victim of opportunity?

  If it was the latter, we could be looking for a ritualistic killer, someone who liked to kill and was equally excited by patterns.

  Someone who might like to do it again.

  Claire made a left across a break in the oncoming traffic. A moment later, she executed a careful parallel-park maneuver between two cars on Bryant, right outside Susie’s.

  She turned off the engine, turned to face me. “There’s more,” she said.

  “Don’t make me beg, Butterfly.”

  Claire laughed at me, meaning it took even longer for her to get it together and tell me what I was dying to know.

  “The shoes,” she said. “They’re a size eight.”

  “Couldn’t be. That little girl?”

  “Could be and are. But you’re right that it’s crazy, Linds. Caddy Girl probably wore a size five. Those shoes weren’t hers. And the soles have never touched pavement.”

  “Huh,” I said. “If they’re not her shoes, maybe those
aren’t her clothes, either.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking, Lindsay. I don’t know what it means, but those clothes are brand-new. No sweat stains, no body soil of any kind. Somebody carefully, I want to say artfully, dressed that poor girl after she was dead.”

  Chapter 14

  IT WAS STILL EARLY in the evening when Claire and I crossed the threshold to Susie’s, the boisterous, sometimes rowdy Caribbean-style eatery where a group of my friends meet for dinner every week or so.

  The reggae band hadn’t yet arrived—which was fine, because when Cindy waved to us from “our” booth, I could see from her expression that she had something big on her mind.

  And words were her thing.

  Cindy is the hot-shit crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle these days. We met four years ago while I was working a particularly grisly case involving honeymoon murders, and she talked her way right into my crime scene. Her audacity and tenacity ticked me off enormously, but I came to respect those same qualities when her reporting helped me nail a vicious killer and send him to death row.

  By the time Cindy crashed my next crime scene, we’d bonded and become trusting friends. I’d do anything for her now. Well, almost anything—she is a reporter after all.

  Claire and I wriggled into the booth opposite Cindy, who looked both boyish and girly with her fluffy blond hair, man-tailored black suit jacket over a mauve sweater, and jeans. Her front two teeth overlap minutely, which only makes her face look even prettier. Her smile, when it comes, lights you up inside.

  I flagged down Loretta, ordered a pitcher of margaritas, turned off my cell phone, then said to Cindy, “You look like you’re hatching something.”

  “You’re good. And you’re right,” she said with a grin. She licked salt off her upper lip and set down her glass.

  “I’ve got a lead on a story that’s going to be a bombshell,” Cindy said. “And I think I’ve got it to myself—at least for a while.”

  “Do tell,” said Claire. “You’ve got the talking stick, girlfriend.”

  Cindy laughed and launched into her story.

  “I overheard a couple of lawyers talking in an elevator. They arrr-oused my interest,” Cindy said with a funny, leonine growl, “and I followed up.”

  “Don’t you just love blabbermouths?” I said, pouring margaritas for Claire and myself, then topping off Cindy’s glass.

  “Some of my favorite people,” Cindy said, leaning in toward the center of the table.

  “So here’s the prepublication scoop. There’s a malpractice suit starting against a huge hospital right here in Metropolis,” she told us. “Last couple of years, a number of patients who were admitted through the emergency room fully recovered. Then, a few days later, according to what I overheard between the lobby and the fourth floor of the Civic Center Courthouse, those patients died. Because they got the wrong medication.”

  I eyed Cindy over the rim of my glass. A feeling was starting to grow in the center of my chest, a feeling I hoped would disappear as she continued her story.

  “This hotshot lawyer named Maureen O’Mara is going after the hospital, representing a bunch of the patients’ families,” Cindy was saying.

  “Which hospital?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

  “Well, sure, Linds. San Francisco Municipal.”

  I heard Claire say, “Oh, no,” as the feeling in my gut mushroomed.

  “I just spent the night at Municipal holding Yuki’s hand,” I said. “We brought her mom into the emergency room yesterday afternoon.”

  “Let’s not go crazy, here,” Cindy said quietly. “It’s a humongous hospital. There’s one doctor in particular in the crosshairs, a guy named Garza. Apparently, most of the deceased in question were admitted on his watch.”

  “Oh my God,” I said, my blood pressure spiking so I felt heat through the top of my head. “He’s the one. I met him. That’s the doctor who admitted Yuki’s mother!”

  Just then, the air moved at the back of my neck, and silky hair brushed the side of my face as someone bent down to kiss my cheek.

  “Did you just mention my name?” Yuki asked. She slipped into the empty seat beside Cindy. “What’d I miss?”

  “Cindy is working on a story.”

  “It’s something I think you should know,” said Claire.

  Chapter 15

  YUKI’S EYES WERE BEAMING question marks, but suddenly Cindy seemed reluctant to talk.

  “You can trust me,” Yuki said earnestly. “I understand what ‘off the record’ means.”

  “It’s nothing like that,” Cindy said.

  Loretta came by, greeted Yuki, and unloaded a tray of jerk chicken and spareribs dripping sauce. After a few halting starts and a few sips of her margarita, Cindy repeated to Yuki what she’d just told us about Maureen O’Mara’s pending case against Municipal Hospital.

  “Actually, I know a lot about this,” Yuki said when Cindy was finished. “O’Mara’s been putting this case together for about a year.”

  “Really? Come onnnn,” Cindy said. “How do you know?”

  “I have a friend, an associate at Friedman, Bannion and O’Mara,” Yuki said. “She told me ’cause she’s thrown a ton of man-hours into this case. Tremendous amount of research involved. A lot of medical technicalities to plow through. It should be a hell of a trial,” Yuki continued. “O’Mara never loses. But this time, she’s shooting the moon.”

  “Everyone loses sometimes,” Claire offered.

  “I know, but Maureen O’Mara carefully picks cases she knows she can win,” Yuki said.

  Maybe Yuki was missing the point, so I had to say it. “Yuki, doesn’t it worry you that your mom is at Municipal?”

  “Nah. Just because Maureen O’Mara is taking on the case doesn’t mean the hospital is guilty. Lawyer’s credo: anyone can sue anyone for anything.

  “Really, you guys,” Yuki said, her words going her usual rat-a-tat, sixty-five miles an hour. “I had my appendix taken out there a couple of years ago. Had an excellent doctor. And first-class care until I left the hospital.”

  “So how is your mom?” Claire asked.

  “She’s in fine form,” said Yuki. Then she laughed. “You know how I know? She tried to fix me up with her cardiologist. Bald guy in his forties with tiny hands and dog breath.”

  We all laughed as Yuki’s animated reenactment lit up the table. She did her mom so well, I could see Keiko as if she were right there.

  “I said, ‘Mom, he’s not for me.’ So she said, ‘Yuki-eh. Looks mean nothing. Dr. Pierce honest man. He good man. Looks for mag-azines.’ I said, ‘Mom, Daddy looked like Frank Sinatra. What are you talking about?’”

  “So are you going out with him?” Cindy asked, sending us into new rounds of laughter.

  Yuki shook her head. “You mean, if he asks me? You mean, if my mom grabs his cell phone and dials my number for him?”

  We were having so much fun the band had to dial up the music a notch to be heard over our good time. Twenty minutes later, Yuki left the table before the coffee and chocolate mud pie, saying she wanted to see Keiko again before visiting hours were over.

  Despite her rapid-fire talk, and our good-time chatter, there were worry lines between Yuki’s beautiful brown eyes when she told us all good night.

  Chapter 16

  MAUREEN O’MARA FELT HER PULSE beating in her temples. Was that possible? Well, that’s how pumped she was. She pulled open one of the massive steel-and-glass doors to the Civic Center Courthouse and entered the cool gray interior.

  Goddamn.

  Today was the day. She owned this place.

  She handed her briefcase to the security guard, who put it on the X-ray machine and checked it as she cleared the metal detectors. He nodded good morning and returned her seven-hundred-dollar “lucky” Louis Vuitton case with a smile.

  “Best a’ luck today, Miss O’Mara.”

  “Thanks, Kevin.”

  O’Mara showed the guard her crossed fingers; the
n she cut through the milling crowd in the lobby and headed toward the elevator bank.

  She was thinking as she walked—about how her stuffy, know-it-all partners had told her that she was insane to take on the huge, well-defended hospital, to try to weave twenty individual claims into one gigantic malpractice case.

  But she couldn’t have turned it down. This one was too good.

  The first patients had found her—then she’d seen the pattern. The momentum had built rapidly, then snowballed, and soon she’d become the go-to lawyer for patients with serious grievances against Municipal.

  Putting this case together had been like corralling wild horses while standing on the seat of a motorbike and juggling bowling balls. But she’d done it.

  Over the last fourteen months, she’d slogged through the discovery process, the endless depositions, lined up her seventy-six witnesses—medical experts, past and present employees of the hospital, and her clients, the families of the twenty deceased who were all finally in accord.

  She had a personal reason for her total, unwavering commitment, but no one needed to know why this case was a labor of love.

  She definitely felt her clients’ pain—that was reason enough.

  Now she had to convince a jury of their peers.

  If she could do that, the hospital would feel the pain, too, in the only way it could—by kicking out a gigantic payout, the many, many millions her clients richly deserved.

  Chapter 17

  MAUREEN O’MARA MADE A RUSH for one of the courthouse elevators, stepping in then starting as a man in a charcoal-gray suit joined her just as the doors were closing.

  Lawrence Kramer gave her a brilliant smile, leaned forward, and pressed number four.

  “Morning, Counselor,” he said. “How are ya doing so far today?”

  “Never better,” she chirped. “And you?”

  “Perfecto. I had about three pounds of raw meat with my eggs this morning,” Kramer said. “Breakfast of Champions.”