15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(10)

I hit Pause after she had knocked and Chan had opened the door. He wasn’t on camera. We only saw the frozen profile of the striking blonde and the long shadow in the doorway.

Mrs. Chan asked, “Michael was in that room?”

“Yes. He was.”

“Did she shoot him?”

“We don’t know.”

“I want to see what she looked like when she left there.”

I said, “We don’t have anything else. Not long after she entered the suite, the video was corrupted. All we have is two hours of static. If she left through the lobby, she was disguised. We didn’t see her again.”

“She couldn’t just disappear,” said Mrs. Chan.

“The hotel is on floors five through twenty-one of a forty-story building. She may have left through the fire exit. Here’s something else. The room may have been under surveillance.”

I showed Mrs. Chan morgue shots of the two young probable snoops who might have recorded Michael Chan’s last moments. Mrs. Chan didn’t recognize them.

“They might have been students,” I said.

She shook her head, and I made a mental note to screen student ID photos from the university, all four thousand of them. I asked Mrs. Chan for names of her husband’s close friends both on and off campus, and when Richie went for coffee, I asked her personal questions about her marriage.

She got angry.

“I trust Michael. He was faithful to me. Just because that woman looks like that, it doesn’t mean they were having an affair.”

“We’re only concerned with the nature of their connection. We have to find her. For all we know, she’s also a victim.”

I had plenty of questions, and I laid them on Shirley Chan one at a time. Why would Michael use a fake ID? Why did he lie about his whereabouts? Had he lied to her before? Had she ever been suspicious of his movements?

She answered “I don’t know” and “No, no, no,” and then she put her head down on the scarred gray table and cried. By the time Conklin returned with the coffee, Shirley Chan was no longer talking to us. The interview was done.

I called the desk sergeant and arranged a ride home for Mrs. Chan with a uniformed officer, and Conklin walked her out to the street. I wanted to compare notes with my partner before we both went home. So I used this brief alone time to download the surveillance video our van had shot today on Waverley Street.

I pulled it up and watched images of me and my partner going up the walk to the Chan house, Mrs. Chan answering the door. And then I watched the light traffic running between the van and the Chans’ sweet old house.

At time stamp 5:24, the Chans’ next-door neighbor backed a silver sedan out of his driveway, interrupting the progress of a black Mercedes that had been coming up the street. The Mercedes was forced to wait for the sedan to maneuver, and for a long moment the Mercedes was stationary and parallel with our cameras.

Even though the Mercedes’ windows were tinted and it was dark outside, I almost recognized the shape of the driver’s head, the angle of the chin. My heart took off at a gallop before my mind knew what was scaring me.

I watched intently as the driver of the Mercedes turned to look at the minivan. I paused the action and refined the image of the driver, who was looking directly into the camera.

My mind reeled, did cartwheels, and nearly stroked out.

My God. It was Joe. Joe was driving that car.

He’d been caught on tape driving past the home of a dead man named Michael Chan, thirty miles from San Francisco.

Even though my heart and brain had left me for dead, my fingers moved and my eyes took everything in. As I stared at the image of my dear husband, my baby’s daddy, my closest friend and lover, who would never go behind my back, I fought hard to find a believable explanation.

Had Joe been looking for me? Had Brady told him where I was? If so, why, when the neighbor’s car took off up the street, had Joe kept going? Why hadn’t he called me?

There had to be a good reason. But I couldn’t come up with a thing.





CHAPTER 15


I’VE NEVER THOUGHT of myself as a coward, but I could not show this footage of my husband driving past the Chan house to my partner until I spoke to Joe.

I texted Richie, said I was going home now and that I would see him in the morning. I took the stairs down to the lobby. I left by the back door, fled along the breezeway out to Harriet Street, and found my car standing alone in the lot under the overpass.

I drove home on autopilot. The inside of my head felt like a pileup on a Minnesota highway at the height of a blizzard. I didn’t know which way was up or down, or when I would get slammed again.

At just before 11 p.m., I stood outside my front door with my key in hand.

If Joe was home, I would have to confront him. If he wasn’t home, that would only prolong the agony until he arrived. He had told me he was at the airport.

He told me that. And that was a lie.

I pushed the key into the lock. Martha woofed, and as I opened the door, she tore around the corner from the living room into the foyer and hurled herself at me, nailing me in the solar plexus.

I bent down, gave my doggy a pat and a kiss, and then went into the living room, expecting my lying son-of-a-bitch husband to get up from his chair.

But the chair was occupied by our sweet, gray-haired neighbor with the big heart.