15th Affair (Women's Murder Club #15)(7)

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.