The 20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(14)

I sat up and kissed him again.

He said, “Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

When the phone rang, I thought it was Joe, but it was Cindy.





CHAPTER 23





CINDY WAS AT her desk at the San Francisco Chronicle at 6 a.m.

It was nine o’clock in New York, and news had been breaking across the country all morning. Her scanner was on, transmitting police, paramedic, and fire department radio calls while she booted up her laptop.

First thing, she looked in on the updated SFPD 911 log for calls related to the Baron case. No arrest, no statement, nothing. Next web stop was the Examiner, the local competition. Nothing to worry about there. She checked out the major news outlets for any new reporting, found none, and then went back to the updated SFPD 911 log.

There was no hot news at all, so she moved on. Checked her inbox—it was full—and looked to see how much coffee was left in her mug. It was empty.

She watched through the glass walls of her office as reporters, writers, and staff ambled into the city room, navigated the maze of partitioned cubicles to their stations. They stowed their bags, got coffee, then went to work.

It was six fifteen when McGowan came in.

He went to his desk with its clear view of her office. He dropped off his computer bag and waved at her. After opening his laptop, he headed across the city room to suck up to the publisher, who was doing his morning walk-through.

McGowan was the worst kind of phony. A toady. Blech.

Cindy shook off the creeps, turned back to her computer, and opened her crime blog. A lot of people had posted questions about the Baron killings. Sometimes posters had questions for her. But she didn’t have anything to tell them, not today, not yet. She blogged that information on the case was pending and she would report to her readers as soon as she could.

Damn it. If Lindsay hadn’t blocked her, she could take the action that she and all journalists worked for—breaking the news.

The coffee station, the urn and fixings, were just down the hallway. Cindy brought her mug, and when she returned to her desk, there was an interesting bulletin in the chyron crawling across the bottom of her screen.

A drug dealer had been shot in Chicago yesterday morning. The cops had identified the victim as Albert Roccio but had kept the story quiet for twenty-four hours until the autopsy was completed.

Now the police were asking the public for information on Roccio’s death.

Cindy opened her link to the Chicago PD website and read up on the victim. Albert Roccio was fifty-four, a Chicago native. Owned a smoke shop on North Broadway where he sold papers, smokes, candy, soft drinks. He had an undetermined number of employees, who Cindy guessed were stock boys doubling as drug runners.

Roccio was divorced, no children. He had been exiting his apartment house on his way to work, car keys in hand, when he was shot, one bullet to the forehead.

Roccio’s girlfriend, Tonya Patton, forty-eight, and her boy, Vanya, eight, had been walking right behind Albert down the front steps. One bullet had been fired. One only. The woman and child had been spared.

Patton hadn’t seen the shooter, was questioned and released. Apart from Patton and Vanya, there had been no witnesses to the shooting, no suspects. Police found a half kilo of heroin taped under the dashboard of Roccio’s Subaru Forester.

The news crawl resumed, and this time Cindy read it from the beginning.

Chicago drug dealer shot in execution-style murder at 10:30 a.m. on Monday.

Cindy sat still for a moment and let the connection sink in. Roccio was shot on the same day and at the same time that the Barons had been shot.

She called her boyfriend, Rich Conklin, who she knew was still sleeping.

“Sorry, Richie, but I’ve got something to tell you. It’s hot. Yeah, I’d call it very damned important,” Cindy said.





CHAPTER 24





ON DIRECT ORDERS from the man she loved, Cindy waited two excruciating hours, so as not to wake Lindsay, and then she called her.

“Lindsay. It’s Cindy.”

“Everything okay? I’m trying to get out of here. I still need to press a shirt and dry my hair—”

“What time is it, Linds?”

“You don’t know?”

“I’m asking you. What time is it?”

“Uh. Eight thirty.”

“That’s right, Lindsay. At this time yesterday the Barons were killed, and at this same time yesterday Albert Roccio, smoke shop owner in Chicago, was shot between the eyes. Cops found a hefty bag of heroin taped to the underside of his dash.”

Silence on the phone.

“Lindsay? Linds, you there?”

“I hear you.”

“Good. Richie told me that I had to tell you that I want to run with this drug dealer–time of death connection, which, as you know, Lindsay, is what the Chronicle pays me to do. Chicago dude and Barons, all holding significant drugs for distribution, all shot at the same time, each struck by a single kill shot.”

“I gave you information about the Barons in your car and off the record. Do you remember?”

Lindsay’s voice was thrumming with badass. She’d seen Cindy make headlines from invisible ink before.

Cindy loved Lindsay and wouldn’t betray her, but frankly, she’d just made a connection that spelled more than a coincidence; it was some kind of collusion. TBD. Which was the difference between writing “What to do this weekend in San Francisco” and investigative journalism. She was onto a gangbuster front-page story.