The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club #17)(40)

CHAPTER 57


MICHAEL FELT THAT his gun was an extension of his arm.

He squeezed the trigger.

The gun cracked, the bullet thudded into her chest, and his arm thrummed with the shock. He was electrified with a thrill that was monumentally more satisfying than what he’d felt the other times he’d fired his gun.

He watched all of it, committed every minute move to memory. She screamed, dropped the sandwich, and clapped her chest with her hand. She sucked in her breath and stared into his eyes. He read her expression.

Disappointment.

That was good. It was how he’d felt his whole life.

“Have some more,” he said.

He fired again and she dropped, falling sideways, disillusionment frozen on her face. She was the picture of eternal sadness. But she was still alive.

She wheezed and looked up at him.

She tried to speak, but nothing could be more irrelevant to him than her words. She’d told him so many times, It’s not what you say that counts. It’s what you do.

He pumped three more rounds into her, watching her jerk and twitch with each shot until he put the final bullet in her head. At last she lay still on the sidewalk. She was dead. DEAD.

He wanted to take a moment to do a war dance, to scream out his relief and pleasure, to revel in the pure ecstasy of the best moment of his life.

But he’d promised himself that night while he was standing in the rain on Geary, as the police cars screamed up to the body, that he would make no more mistakes.

He knew what to do. He scooped up the shell casings, chasing one into the gutter, then clutching them in his fist, he walked quickly two blocks southwest to the intersection at Beale. There a small paved plaza filled a niche between two office buildings. It was an arty little space, organized with a grid of small trees standing in concrete planters.

Two people were in the plaza. A man sat on the edge of a planter, his head bent as he spoke into his phone. A woman leaned against a building wall, smoking a cigarette, maybe waiting for someone or just deep in thought.

Michael spotted the trash can between two planters and walked nonchalantly toward it. It took only seconds to stuff the coat and gloves into the black plastic bag lining the can, and to transfer the gun and spent shells to the pocket of the black jacket that he wore under the coat.

He left the plaza, disappearing into the fog and shadow on Mission.

What a wonderful night.

What a wonderful fucking night.

If he missed her at all, it was because now he had to find another target. And he had an idea who that would be.

That bitch who’d taken his picture on Geary.

Sergeant Lindsay Boxer. He remembered.

She was like his mother. Shaming him for drinking milk from the carton. For taking a few bills from her purse. For his magazines. Shaming him, in front of his sister, their neighbors, his own friends.

And Sergeant Boxer had done the same with the flash of her camera. Exposing him, nailing him there on the street.

She would have to pay for that.





CHAPTER 58


WHILE THE DISHWASHER hummed and sloshed, Joe and I folded laundry at the kitchen table.

I was on autopilot. My hands turned the jumble of shirts and towels into warm cotton packets, but I was thinking of other things. Among them was my mother’s Limoges vase, which Julie had pulled off a table, smashing it into ungluable shards. I also kept rerunning my cringeworthy meeting with IAD’s Hon, and the cherry on top was that I was weak and headachy, a little bit queasy. It was an overall sick feeling that was becoming harder to ignore.

Joe said, “That’s it? No woo-hoo?”

“Aw, geez, Joe, sorry. Say it again. Please?”

He said, “I got a call from the new head of antiterrorism at the Port of San Francisco.”

“Wow. About a job?”

Joe said, “Yep. There’s a new guy, Benjamin Rollins. Ex-marine. He’s looking for a hands-on risk assessment pro, freelance or on staff, to be decided. He’s known to be kind of a dick, but I think I’d like him.”

I said, “He’s ‘kind of a dick’ but otherwise fantastic?”

“Correct,” said Joe. “This isn’t about love. It’s about money.”

“Three cheers for money.”

Joe cheered. I laughed and we went back to folding.

Actually, this breaking news was fantastic. A few months back Joe had been badly injured in a bomb blast, but he was healing well. It wouldn’t be long before Julie would be going to preschool, and Joe needed a job. Even though my thoughts were scattered, I could focus on that.

I said, “So, what’s the next step?”

Joe was telling me about the interview with Security Director Rollins next week when, of course, the phone rang.

It was a weeknight, and to me that meant I was still on duty. I took the phone out of my jeans pocket and glanced at the caller ID. Joe watched me and shook his head no.

“Brady,” I said into the phone. “What’s wrong?”

He jumped right into it.

“A homeless woman was shot dead on Mission near Spear. Same MO as the others. Point-blank range. No witnesses. But here’s something a little different. She was shot on our street.”

“Say that again?”

“She was shot on the south side of Mission. Our beat. Take it away, Lindsay. You’re lead investigator. Call Conklin. And you might want to compare notes with Stevens.”