The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club #17)(26)

His heartbeat was in overdrive. This was it.

He walked toward her, and when he was close enough to read the name Peking Bazaar on one of her shopping bags, he called out to her.

“Hey, hey. Imagine meeting you here.”

The woman looked up.

She gave him a gappy smile and the dizzy look of a person who couldn’t quite see straight.

She said, “Hi, good-looking. Got some change? I haven’t eaten today.”

His disappointment was fierce and sudden. The loopy female leaning against the wall of the historic office building wasn’t HER, wasn’t even close. Michael cried out, “Oh, shit.”

The woman’s ditzy look changed to concern.

She said, “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” he snapped.

He stood in that glistening clearing of sidewalk that would soon close around him.

“I’m just fine,” he said. “I do have something for you.”

Holding his umbrella with his left hand, he pulled his gun with his right. He was standing so close to the woman in the many-layered clothing under the shiny plastic wrapper he could almost count the beads of water on her eye-lashes.

He fired into her chest.

She gasped, “What?”

“I fucking hate you,” he said.

He fired the second round, and as she sagged against the wall, he scooped up the casings and started walking.

He didn’t look back.

That dirty old lump of dump. No one would even know she was dead until morning. Michael crossed Geary, his umbrella obscuring his face, but he saw a man running through the rain, coming toward the dead woman with a phone to his ear.

He was shouting into the phone, “Send an ambulance to Geary and Grant. Hurry.”





CHAPTER 37


MICHAEL STOOD OUTSIDE the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, a gray man within a gray crowd under a heavy night sky, the flashing red and blue lights from the squad cars beaming and slashing through the mist.

He thought of himself as a cool, professional-grade assassin, but he couldn’t quell the heart palpitations and sweat beading up at his hairline, running out from under his cap and mixing with the rain streaming down his face.

He rarely had this feeling. This was fear. Extreme fear bordering on panic.

He knew that he had screwed up. But he didn’t know how badly. Had the woman lived? Could she identify him? What about the man with the phone?

After firing on the woman, he’d crossed the street, skirted traffic, passed through alleys, and circumnavigated Union Square. He walked among other pedestrians, returning to the wide avenue, and stopped on the sidewalk to put his hands on his knees and take calming breaths.

Then Michael resumed walking. He made a wide loop around the scene of the shooting, taking a route from one end of Post Street to Kearny, then to Market and back up Grant, finally drawn back to Geary Street and what he’d done there.

He had a grip on himself now.

A crowd of curiosity seekers had assembled across the street from the office building behind the police tape that held them back from the scene of the shooting.

Michael merged into the dull gray crowd, taking a place at the end of a row three people deep. He asked the man in front of him, “What happened over there?”

“Don’t know. Someone must have died.”

Michael hoped.

His view of the dead woman was blocked by two squad cars parked up to the curb. He saw cops talking to one another, heard radios squawking and finally a shrill, whooping siren of an ambulance screaming up the street, braking hard only yards from where Michael stood.

Ambulance doors flew open. Paramedics jumped down from the back with a stretcher and moved quickly toward where Michael had last seen that woman.

Did the presence of an ambulance mean that she was still showing signs of life?

Even in the crowd and under his umbrella he felt exposed and transparent. He wanted to slip away. Go home. Go online. Look for news. He should do that, but instead he stood. More people had joined the crowd, and some of the cops had broken away from their cars to hold back the swelling mob.

“Go on home, everyone. This isn’t the circus.”

Michael looked beyond the cop and saw another car pull up, a gray Chevy sedan. Two people got out. The driver was a tall woman with a blond ponytail who was wearing a vest marked SFPD over her jacket. The man with her was the same height and was wearing a matching vest.

He’d seen cops at the scenes of his other crimes, but he’d never seen these two before.

The woman cop seemed to be in charge. She walked past the line of cruisers, and for a split second a sight line opened up. Michael saw paramedics standing near the body, not lifting it onto a stretcher, not doing anything.

Because the lump of dump was dead.

Relief flooded through his body, lifting his heart like a lifeboat on a swelling sea.

He watched the female cop pull her phone from her pocket. He thought that she was going to take pictures of the body before it was taken away.

But no, the cop crossed the street toward the people standing, jammed together, behind the yellow tape. She turned the phone so that it was facing his end of the crowd, and fanning it from left to right, she snapped off several flash shots with her phone.

Michael felt as though she had actually shot him. His lifeboat of a heart deflated and sank. The cop held up her badge and said to the gathering of bystanders, “I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer of the SFPD. Did anyone see what happened?”