15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(18)

“How are you holding up?”

“OK, considering that this is the most exhausting night of my life. Most of these victims don’t have ID. I’ve got a three-year-old with no name. Hope I can tag him tonight.”

Dr. Germaniuk, the seasoned on-call pathologist and Claire’s backup doc, was sliding a body into a drawer and three sweaty techs were cleaning up, setting up a body for her next autopsy.

Claire called out, “Dr. G. I’m gonna take a fifteen-minute break, OK?”

“Take twenty,” he said.

I followed Claire along the hallway to her office and she shut the door behind us. She took her desk chair and I dropped down hard into the seat across from her. Claire had made this room as homey as possible, meaning only passably.

A gardenia floated in a bowl of water on her desk, a few finger paintings were under the glass desktop, and framed photos hung on the wall behind Claire: her friends in the Women’s Murder Club and snapshots of her family. Her husband, Edmund. Her two grown-up sons. Her little girl, Rosie.

My eyes got stuck on the baby.

Claire’s eyes were on me. “Talk to me,” she said.

“Richie and I were tasked with escorting kids off school buses today,” I said. “The buses came up to a side entrance to Mills-Peninsula Medical. The parents were behind police lines and crazy with fear. They couldn’t do what they wanted to do, you know? They wanted to rush the buses.

“We had to get those tiny terrified, traumatized kids into the building, make sure they didn’t need emergency care. We got their names. Gave them water. Then we tried to match the kids’ names to the list of parents storming the barricades.

“When we had a match, Highway Patrol would call out the name over a megaphone. Rich and I would escort these five-year-olds outside into this freakin’ mob scene of moms and dads screaming at the child, ‘Do you know my daughter? Did you see my little boy?’

“We had all of the one-at-a-time parent-and-child reunions. Oh, my God, Claire. Each and every time a scraped-up little kid with ripped clothes broke away from me and started running toward loving arms, I thought my heart was going to blow through my chest.”

I had to stop speaking. Claire reached across her desk and grabbed my hand.

I said, “I kept thinking about Julie. How can I protect my own daughter when the world is like this?”

There was a long silence as we pondered the imponderable. Then Claire asked me, “Any word from Joe?”

I shook my head.

“What the f*ck has happened to him? How could he not call me? He has to have a good reason, right, Claire? I have to trust that he would call me if he could. But what if he’s hurt? Or dead? No one is going to look for my missing husband in the thick of all this.”

Claire murmured comforting words. “He’s OK. He has a reason, sure. He’ll call soon.”

I looked up at my friend through the tears in my eyes. “I have to get home,” I said. “You haven’t said why you called.”

Claire said, “Right.” She opened a file drawer, took out a small sheaf of paper, and put it down on the desk facing me.

“This is the passenger manifest,” she said. “I’m looking, you know, to see if I can find the name of that little boy and maybe three people I’ve got here who still had wallets in their pockets. And I see this name, Michael Chan. I’m thinking, there’s probably a lot of people named Michael Chan.”

I stared at Claire, and I really didn’t understand what she was saying. Michael Chan had been chilling in this morgue since he was murdered in the Four Seasons Hotel three days ago.

But Claire was saying something different. She was tapping the passenger list where a name had been highlighted in yellow.

“Look at this, Linds,” she said. “Chan. Michael. Professorville, Palo Alto. This is your victim from the hotel shooting, am I right? He couldn’t have been on that plane. He’s here—in a drawer with his name and number on a toe tag. I double-and triple-checked. It’s him.”

My mouth was open. I tried to clear the smoke from my head and absorb the highlighted name on the passenger list. Who was this Michael Chan? Our dead man had been identified by his widow. Even with two shots in his face, he was a match for his DMV picture.

Claire’s incredulity mirrored mine.

“Where is this Michael Chan right now?” I asked, stabbing the highlighted name.

“Metropolitan Hospital,” she said. “He was sent to Metro’s morgue.”





CHAPTER 29


METROPOLITAN HOSPITAL IS a huge general hospital with a lab and morgue that occupies the entire basement level.

At 6:30 p.m., Metropolitan’s parking lot was nearly impassable. Claire carefully maneuvered her car up and down the aisles of hastily parked vehicles. There were no open spots, not for cops or doctors or patients. Meanwhile, Metro’s overextended director of pathology was waiting for us inside.

Claire said, “I’ll call Dr. Marshall, let her know what’s happened to us.”

She took out her phone and I used the moment to call Mrs. Rose—only to find that my phone battery was dead and that I’d left my charger in the squad car.

Claire was saying, “Fine. We’ll park on Valencia. Blue Chevy Tahoe.”

We left the hospital lot, parked on Valencia in the no parking zone in front of an auto repair shop. We didn’t have to wait long. A fantastically fit glossy-haired woman wearing a green leather coat over bloody blue scrubs knocked on Claire’s window.