15th Affair, Page 3

  “He didn’t knock,” I said. “His guest hasn’t arrived yet.”

  We fast-forwarded fourteenth-floor footage and watched people coming and going from their rooms, getting in and out of the elevators. No one raised suspicion. We paused the tape to check out the housekeeping cart; at 5 p.m., Maria Silva was still alive.

  At 5:52, a blond-haired woman exited the elevator.

  “Well, hello,” I said to the screen.

  I stopped the video. She was on her phone. Between her haircut, her glasses, and her holding the phone close to her mouth, I couldn’t see much of her face. Her overall appearance was stylish, and she seemed self-assured. I started up the video and we watched the woman walk down the hallway and knock on the door of room 1420. The door opened and she went inside.

  I kept the video rolling, looking for bad guys to appear, to put a gun to the housekeeper’s head, to go into the room next door and take out the PIs.

  Then, when the time code read 6:23—something happened. The screen went gray. The picture was just—gone.

  We ran the tape all the way to the end, hoping the video would resume, but there was nothing.

  Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  All we had were four dead people and no clue as to who had killed them, how they’d done it, or why.

  I didn’t like this.

  I didn’t like it at all.

  CHAPTER 7

  BY THE TIME I got home, it was three in the morning and I had a headache the size of a mushroom cloud.

  Martha, our border collie and best furry friend forever, greeted me at the door. She woke up Mrs. Rose, who was sleeping on the couch, but thankfully, Julie slept on. I hugged our lovely sitter, and after she’d gone home, I checked the caller ID log.

  Still no call from Joe.

  It wasn’t the first time I hadn’t heard from Joe over the course of a day. He had a consulting job with airport security. He could be in a series of meetings or lost in the details of keeping outbound planes secure.

  It was a great job and he loved it—but it was after three. He hadn’t texted me a single line since noon.

  Of course, I was worried. Was Joe OK?

  I checked on our little Sleeping Beauty and threw a sigh that relaxed my whole body. I watched her breathe. I rested my hand on her back. I made sure there was no draft, that she was dry and sleeping soundly. I pulled up her blanket, then softly closed her door.

  I took an Advil and followed it with the shower I’d been longing for. After putting on PJs and checking on Julie again, I got into bed and fell asleep, instantly.

  Maybe an hour later, my eyes flashed open.

  Joe still wasn’t home.

  I patted the bed and Martha jumped up, circled, and plopped down beside me. I hugged her and thought about the victims at the hotel. I reviewed each of the crime scenes in my mind’s eye and hoped that while I slept, answers would come to me.

  When I woke up, it was morning.

  I had not solved the crimes in my sleep, but Joe was in bed, snoring beside me.

  CHAPTER 8

  I KISSED MY husband.

  He opened his blue eyes and asked, “What day is it?”

  I told him and he fell back asleep.

  I woke him up.

  “What day is it?” he asked. Again.

  “Hey. It’s Tuesday, six forty-five a.m. Did you get any phone calls from me, like about six of them?”

  “Oh, geez. I’m sorry,” he said. “My phone was off.”

  “You’re in the doghouse, buddy.”

  I swung my legs over the bed. Joe’s arm snaked out and he grabbed me and pulled me down next to him.

  “Some people on the watch list came up on our passenger manifest,” he said. “And that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Fine.”

  I made another break for the side of the bed, but he didn’t let me get up.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “OK. But I worry when I don’t hear from you, Joe.”

  “I know. Same here.”

  We nuzzled and wrestled around and I relented a little. Then I relented a lot. I shut down the hideous pictures in my mind of dead people, and I even tried to keep from listening for Julie. Martha hung her muzzle on the edge of the bed, and Joe pushed her away without losing a beat.

  It was glorious lovemaking. Not fancy, but good wholesome friskiness when I hadn’t even thought kisses were in order.

  I collapsed with my arm over Joe’s chest and my head under his chin.

  “That was nice,” I said.

  “Nice? At my age? With no sleep? I’m wondering how I pulled that off at all.”

  He got me laughing. I said, “It was the best ever, Joe. God. You’re amazing.”

  “Want to go another round?”

  “Save something for tonight,” I said, laughing again.

  I dressed, took Martha for a run along Lake Street, stretched my legs, and watched sunrise and early-morning traffic and other people out for a run with their dogs.

  When doggy and I returned, Julie was in her high chair and I smelled pancakes. I went to my sweet girl and kissed and squeezed her a little bit.

  “You’re sooo cute,” I told her. “Did you tell Daddy thank you for the pancakes?”

  “Nooooo,” she said, slapping her hands on the tray.

  “Oh, you like that word too much,” I said. So she said it again, laughing and burbling at the same time.

  “OK, I’ll tell him,” I said.

  I put my arms around my husband’s waist and hugged him tight. “I love you so much,” I said. “And thank you for making breakfast.”

  “Uh-huh. Please, sit yourself down.”

  I pulled up a seat at the table, which was positioned to get a nice bright beam of morning light. Joe dished up the pancakes and crispy bacon, and between bites, I fed cereal to Julie.

  It was idyllic. Picture-perfect and framed in gold. We didn’t have breakfast table perfection when I was growing up, so I cherished every bit of this. Gloried in it.

  Joe said, “I checked my phone and you were phoning me at three this morning.”

  “I’d just gotten home after working some terrible business at the Four Seasons. The fourteenth floor was like an abattoir.”

  I told Joe the details, availing myself of his excellent crime-solving mind.

  “Among the many mysteries was this woman we saw going into the dead man’s room,” Lindsay said. I described her in full. “She may have been his lover, or lover-by-the-hour, or even his wife. Or I don’t know, Joe. All we know is that she’s the only living person who can answer our questions.”

  “The bangs down to her glasses,” Joe said. “Not a bad disguise. Even talking on the phone distorts the shape of the mouth. All of that will outwit facial recognition. More coffee?”

  “No thanks, honey. I’m going to hit the shower.”

  I stood under the water and thought about the blond woman with the wraparound shades and how finding her could kick the doors down on all of it.

  But in lieu of that, the dead man in 1420 was the beginning of the story.

  CHAPTER 9

  I FOUND CLAIRE hard at work in her autopsy suite, gowned and gloved up and halfway through the internal exam of the unknown male killed in room 1420. His face had been reflected down over his chin and a Y incision had opened his body down to the pubic bone.

  “How’s it going?” I asked.

  “You know how long I’ve been ME?” Claire asked me.

  “Since I was this tall,” I said, putting my hand on top of my head. Actually, we’d been rookies together, back about a dozen years ago.

  “And you know how many autopsies I do a year?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” I said.

  She put a bloody liver on a scale. Bunny Ellis, one of Claire’s morgue techs, waggled her fingers hello at me and took Claire’s notes.

  “One thousand, two hundred bodies more or less pass through these doors annually,” Claire said.

  “I hear
you.”

  Claire was grumpy. Rare for her.

  “What I hate the most—”

  “Dead kids. I know.”

  “And what I hate the second most? Healthy murder victims who could have had full and productive lives. Like Mr. Doe or Wang or whatever his real name is. He was perfect. All his organs are A-plus. He has bones and joints of steel. I don’t think this man even got heartburn,” she said.

  “Tell me more,” I said, since this was why I had stopped by this morning.

  Claire continued to cut and slice as she talked.

  “He has a scar on his knee, probably from falling off a bike when he was six, and that’s it.”

  “What about his stomach contents?”

  “BLT on rye with mayo. Green tea.”

  “You ran his blood?”

  “It’s waiting to go out. With these.”

  She showed me a stainless steel bowl with three slugs rattling inside.

  “Medium-caliber, like nine-millimeter. Based on that squeaky-clean crime scene, keep your expectations in check,” said Claire. “I’ll bet you a burger and fries there won’t be a record of the murder weapon.”

  I said, “Who’s up next?”

  “I only have two hands, Lindsay. Two. I’m not finished with Mr. Wang.”

  “I’ll get out of your way, Butterfly,” I said, calling her by her nickname.

  As if she hadn’t barked at me, she said, “I’ll do young Ms. Doe next. That is a clean-looking girl, Lindsay. Skin like milk. She could just barely drive and vote. I’ll need backup to get this work done today. Meanwhile…”

  “Meanwhile what?”

  “Phone keeps ringing. The brass. The mayor. The press. Other bodies from other crimes. If you can break for lunch,” Claire said, “the girls want to get together at MacBain’s.”

  By “the girls,” she meant herself and me, Cindy, and Yuki, the four of whom Cindy had collectively dubbed the Women’s Murder Club.

  “I’ll try,” I said.

  I left Claire and loped down the breezeway and through the back door of the Hall of Justice. I showed my badge to the guy at the metal detector, then took the stairs to the homicide squad on the fourth floor. The day shift was drifting in, but a lot of phones were ringing through to voice mail.

  Brady was in his office, the ten-foot-square glass cubicle in the back corner of the room. He saw me coming, got up from behind his desk, and opened the door.

  Brady is built like a wrestler, blond, taciturn, and as brave as they come. But he’s all business, all the time.

  “Got anything?” he said.

  “Just what I had last night, Lieu. Professional job from start to finish. One ID could blow it open,” I said. “We’re working on that now.”

  Before he could say “Keep me in the loop,” all his phone lines rang at once.

  CHAPTER 10

  MACBAIN’S IS THE neighborhood hole-in-the-wall beer-and-burger joint frequented by cops, lawyers, and bail bondsmen who work along the 800 block of Bryant Street. Claire and I stood inside the open doorway and stared at the raucous scene. Customers had parked four deep at the bar, and the tables in front were all taken. Looked to me like a retirement party.

  There was time to reverse course and pick another lunch spot, but Sydney, the front room waitress, pointed and mouthed, “They’re over here.”

  Cindy Thomas stood up from behind a table near the jukebox and waved to get our attention. She was wearing her bloodhound clothes: a soft gray hoodie over a T-shirt and jeans. This was how Cindy dressed when she was working a story, and as a top crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she wore bloodhound clothes most of the week.

  Sometimes I felt bad for her.

  Yes, she was adorable and well employed and happy in love, but her great buddy, me, and her fiancé, my partner, had to keep the red meat to ourselves. Cindy was the press. And historically, the press was not our friend.

  Yuki Castellano, the legal arm of the Women’s Murder Club, sat wedged between Cindy and the wall with her back to the peanut barrel. She was wearing a knife-sharp black suit, her hair was twisted up, and she had chunky pearls at her neckline. She was dressed for court.

  Claire and I waded into the crowd and I stuck close behind her, the pink sweater she’d thrown over her scrubs lighting the way. I wore my usual, rain or shine, at my desk or on the street: blue trousers, white shirt, blue blazer, hair in a ponytail, and my badge hanging from a ball chain around my neck.

  I grabbed a seat across from Yuki, Claire sat next to me, and all of our hands shot up at the same time. When Syd arrived, Claire said, “We can order everything right now.”

  Syd wrote down four burgers—one each of bloody, rare, medium-rare, and charred—with fries all around. Three of us asked for tea and fizzy water, but Yuki ordered rum and Coke, heavy on the rum.

  “You’re drinking when you’re in court?” I asked her.

  “Trial was canceled due to circumstances beyond my control,” she said.

  At that, customers behind us broke into a rowdy drinking song. Folks applauded and stamped in time. So Yuki had to shout her bad story about her college girl client who’d been charged as an accessory to an armed robbery. As Yuki told it, Sandra had been waiting in her boyfriend’s car while he went into a store to buy a bottle of booze. Or so he told her. But he’d had a gun, and when the owner set off the alarm, the boyfriend fired his .22 into the owner’s chest.

  Yuki’s eighteen-year-old client had been charged as an accessory and was looking at fifteen to twenty years if the liquor store owner lived. Her bail was set absurdly high and her family couldn’t raise a tenth of it.

  “I saw Sandra yesterday,” Yuki said. “Once again, I told her that I was very connected in the DA’s office and that if she’d testify against her gutless boyfriend, I could probably get her sentence reduced—significantly.”

  “She wouldn’t go for it,” Cindy guessed.

  Yuki shook her head. “Just before court this morning, she ripped up her bedsheet and hanged herself on the bars. Why? Why did she do that? Why wouldn’t she listen to me? And even if she didn’t flip on that rat, there was hope for her. And what about her poor family? God. I am so sick about this.”

  She covered her eyes with her hands, and we tried to console her. When her drink came, she downed half of it in one gulp. Yuki overestimates her ability to hold her liquor, and I was pretty sure she’d be staggering after lunch.

  About then, Claire, already in an uproar, vented about the fresh young bodies piling up in her morgue—without mentioning names and details. Cindy pricked up her ears like a dog who’s been asked, “Want to go for a ride in the car?”

  “Tell me something,” she said to Claire. “I heard there was a shooting at the Four Seasons. Just give me something I can own and work into a story.”

  I was thinking maybe Cindy could help us. If we couldn’t identify the Four Seasons victims, Cindy could run their pictures in the Chron. But I wasn’t there yet.

  I looked around the table and thought how my three girlfriends were all seething with a tension that was only intensified by their having to shout over the retirement festivities around us.

  So much was going on, I didn’t have to speak.

  I was glad. If asked, I would have to say that my life was pretty damned good right now. My little family was healthy, Joe and I were both working, money was coming in, and even staring at a computer screen for the last four hours hadn’t stolen the afterglow from my morning romp with my husband.

  It didn’t occur to me to think how fast things can change.

  Just like that.

  CHAPTER 11

  I RETURNED FROM lunch to find Conklin dumping the remains of his Chinese take-out into the wastebasket.

  He said, “The security chief sent over lobby footage from before and after the set we’ve already screened. Maybe those dead kids in fourteen-eighteen came in around lunchtime.”

  I asked Inspectors Lemke and Samuels to view the eight-
thirty-p.m.-to-midnight footage and gave them printouts of the mystery blonde. Then I reset my ponytail, cracked my knuckles, and sat down next to my partner.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  The video flashed onto my screen.

  At time stamp 12:30 p.m., the elegant lobby was humming with guests as well as local businesspeople heading for the entrance to MKT, the hotel’s restaurant. Conklin and I sat shoulder-to-shoulder for the next three hours, looking for dead people walking, occasionally shaking out our legs, using the facilities.

  By the time the day shift started punching out, my eyes were gritty and my temples were pounding. But I was still watching the video when the time stamp read 3:27 p.m. I hit Pause.

  There was a girl hanging around the front desk in jeans and a quilted jacket, a mile of bulky scarf around her neck. Was she one of the private investigator kids who’d been shot in room 1418? I was about to say “Look at her,” when she turned toward the elevator and I saw her face. Damn it. She was not the girl in 1418. Not by a mile.

  At that precise moment, Conklin was pointing at a different part of the screen.

  “I think I saw this guy on the later footage,” he said.

  He circled the cursor around a big man who was facing away from the camera, wearing a bulky coat and a knit cap. His body and features were almost entirely obscured—yet he was somehow familiar.

  “He reminds me of Dugan,” I said, referring to the security chief.

  Conklin said, “That’s not Dugan. Dugan stoops.”

  We watched the big man walk away from the cameras, slipping seamlessly between groups of people so that we never had more than a second’s glimpse of him.

  We reversed the footage, paused, zoomed in, but there was not even a partial view of his face.

  “He knows where the cameras are,” said Conklin.

  “Like he’s some kind of pro,” I said. “Let’s look for him on the later tape.”