15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(48)

“OK. Good. I’m still in the lobby,” said the voice of the man I’d loved for years, the man who’d promised to love me through sickness and health, the father of my baby. He said, “What’s going on?”

“They’re both in there. We’ve got action,” said Bud.

“Any talk about that plane from Beijing?” Joe asked.

The girl said, “Nothing yet. They’re all about each other, Chief.”

“OK. I’m coming up.”

“Copy,” said Bud.

And then, at 6:23 on the nose, Jad’s picture dissolved into static.

I was falling again, but my mind stayed in gear.

Sometime between the time the Internet feed went down and when Liam Dugan, the head of hotel security, showed us the dead housekeeper in the closet, a total of four people had been murdered.

Jad was saying to Cindy, “The two dead kids. Bud and Chrissy could be their real nicknames. If you run their pictures again with those names, maybe someone will come forward. You heard ‘Joe’ ask about an airplane from Beijing?

“Three days later, an airplane from China was blown to hell over Route 101. Maybe Bud and Chrissy were killed because they knew about the plane. I wish I didn’t, but I know it, too. And now so do you,” Jad said.

He said to Cindy, “Someone should put it out there that there was foreknowledge of that plane crash, don’t you think? But it can’t be me.

“And now say good-bye to the video.”

“Wait,” Cindy said. “Play the last minute again.”

Jad sighed, then reversed the footage and ran it forward. I heard Joe ask about an airplane from Beijing. Joe knew about that plane. Joe knew.

Jad closed down the video and dragged the file to an icon labeled DESTROY. Software flames consumed the files.

The videos might be permanently destroyed, but they were part of me now.

I couldn’t forget them if I tried.





CHAPTER 74


THE WIND HAD picked up during our fifteen-minute meeting in the parking lot, whipping the young trees standing in their concrete planters on the sidewalk as traffic illuminated the six-lane Embarcadero.

It looked like any normal summer evening in San Francisco, but nothing would ever be normal for me again.

Joe had prior knowledge of a plane crash that was shaping up to be one of the worst air disasters on record.

Cindy and I got out of the backseat of her car. Jad told Cindy that his phone number was now a nonworking number, and that no offense, he would stand there and watch us leave so that we couldn’t follow him.

We all shook hands, and Cindy wished Jad good luck. I wondered if Jad’s superiors actually believed his recording equipment had failed. Or if they were following him even now, watching Cindy and me as we climbed back into her car.

Cindy was practically bug-eyed as she drove us away from the parking lot.

“Check me on this,” she said to me. “The dead kids were taping Chan and Muller. They were told to hit the kill switch, and they did. During the blackout, someone came in and shot them and maybe killed Chan, too, right? That guy talking to them…?”

“That was Joe.”

“I know his name was Joe,” Cindy said. “Wait. Lindsay.” She turned to look at me. “You don’t mean that was your Joe?”

“Off the record. That was him.”

“Oh, no. Please don’t tell me that.”

“Cindy. Watch the road. Yes. That was Joe Molinari.”

“But what does Joe have to do with those people, Lindsay? I don’t get this at all.”

“I’m thinking,” I said.

My thoughts were scrambling for cover, but they couldn’t hide.

What role had he played in the lives and deaths of Bud, Chrissy, Chan, and Maria Silva? Had he killed them? Were he and Muller working this operation together? And I had to know—what had Joe known about flight WW 888? And what, if anything, had he done with that information?

I couldn’t share these thoughts with Cindy, not yet.

“Lindsay, are you thinking Joe is the killer?” Cindy was staring at me again, her eyes as big as headlights.

I said, “No—look, no. Joe’s a freelancer. It’s more like he was hired to monitor the action in Chan’s room. So what if, as Joe was going up to supervise those kids, someone heard him say he was going upstairs and sent a ‘go’ signal to the killer?”

I was winging it, but I was imagining it, too. I kept talking. “And so the kids were expecting Joe, but the killer knocked on the door and they let him in.”

Cindy said, “Yeah. Yeah. I’m following you. The killer shoots them, shoots Chan—and Joe got there after the shootings?”

“It’s a good theory,” I said, while wondering, Is it?

“What happened to Joe? And what happened to Ali Muller?”

“I wish I knew,” I said sincerely.

“According to my calculations,” Cindy said, “the plane went down about sixty-two hours later. Right?”

I nodded, remembering the run-up to that crash vividly.

I’d worked the hotel crime scene with Conklin, Clapper, and Claire, and that night, Joe had come home very early on Tuesday morning, two days before the crash. We’d made love and had breakfast together and I’d told him about the hits at the hotel. We talked about it.