4th of July (2005)

by JAMES PATTERSON (with Maxine Paetro)

  “You doing okay, Lieutenant?” asked one of the techs, a tall thirty-ish guy with big hazel eyes and a toothy smile.

  I looked around at the destruction, the glass and plaster dust over everything.

  “No. I’m not. This makes me sick,” I said. “I’ve got to sweep up, get the windows fixed, do something about this . . . this mess.”

  “I’m Artie, by the way,” the tech said, stretching out his hand.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said, shaking it.

  “My uncle Chris has a Disaster Master franchise. You want me to call him? He can get this place cleaned up, like, pronto. I mean, you’ll go to the head of the line, Lieutenant. You’re one of us.”

  I thanked Artie and took him up on his offer. Then I grabbed my handbag and took Martha out the back way. I fed Miss Piggy, then circled around to the patrol car in the driveway and ducked my head to window level.

  “Noonan, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Still on duty?”

  “Yes, ma’am. We’ll be here for a while. The whole squad is watching out for you, Lieutenant. The chief and all of us. This really stinks.”

  “I appreciate the concern.”

  And I did. Harsh daylight only made the shooting more real. Someone had driven down this sweet suburban street, raking Cat’s house with automatic gunfire.

  I was unnerved, and until I got my composure back, I had to get away from here. I jingled my car keys so that Martha flattened her ears and nearly wagged her tail off.

  “We need groceries,” I said to her. “What do you say we take the Bonneville on a shakedown cruise?”

  Chapter 114

  MARTHA JUMPED ONTO THE bench-style front seat of the “big gold boat.” I strapped in and turned the key. The engine caught on the second try, and I pointed the Bonneville’s aristocratic nose toward town.

  I was going to the gourmet grocer on Main Street, but as I made my way along the crosshatched streets of Cat’s neighborhood, I became gradually aware of a blue Taurus sedan in my rearview mirror. It seemed to be deliberately lagging behind me but keeping up all the same.

  That creepy feeling of being watched tickled my spine again.

  Was I being tailed?

  Or was I in such a state I just kept seeing myself as a pop-up figure in a shooting gallery?

  I took Magnolia across the highway and onto Main, where I whizzed past all the little shops: the Music Hut, the Moon News, the Feed and Fuel store. I wanted to convince myself that I was just being skittish, but damn—if I lost that Taurus for a block or two, it was behind me at the next turn.

  “Hang on tight. We’re going for a ride,” I said to Martha, who was smiling broadly into the wind.

  Toward the end of Main, I hooked a right onto Route 92, Half Moon Bay’s umbilical cord to the rest of California.

  Traffic was going fast on this winding two-laner, and I merged into a bumper-to-bumper chain of cars going fifty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone. The double yellow line went the distance—a full five miles of no-passing lane as 92 crossed the reservoir and linked up with the freeway.

  I drove on, dimly aware of the hillside of scrubby trees and chaparral on my left and the twenty-foot drop a few feet from the right side of my car. Three cars behind, the blue sedan kept me in sight.

  I wasn’t crazy. I had a tail.

  Was it a scare tactic?

  Or was the shooter inside that car, waiting for an opportunity for a clear hit?

  The end of 92 intersected with Skyline, and at the near right-hand corner was a rest stop with five picnic tables and a gravel parking lot.

  I didn’t signal for a turn, just hauled right on my steering wheel. I wanted to get off the road, let that Taurus pass me so that I could see his face, get his plate number. Get out of his sights.

  But instead of gripping the road as my Explorer would have done, the Bonneville fishtailed across the gravel, sending me back out onto 92, across the double yellow line and into the stream of oncoming traffic.

  The Taurus must have passed me, but I never saw it.

  I was hanging on to the wheel of my spinning car when the lights on the dashboard freaked out.

  My power steering and brakes were gone, the alternator was dead, the engine was heating up, and I was skidding around in the middle of the roadway.

  I pumped the brakes, and a black pickup truck swerved to avoid creaming me broadside. The driver leaned on his horn and yelled obscenities out his window, but I was so glad he’d missed me, I wanted to kiss him.

  By the time I skidded to a stop on the roadside, a cloud of dust billowed around me and I couldn’t see beyond the windshield.

  I got out of the Bonneville and leaned against it. My legs were rubbery and my hands shaking.

  For now, the chase was over.

  But I knew it wasn’t really over.

  Someone had me in his crosshairs, and I had no idea who it was or why.

  Chapter 115

  I PHONED THE MAN in the Moon Garage on my cell phone and got Keith’s answering machine.

  “Keith, I’m in a little jam. It’s Lindsay. Please pick up.”

  When Keith answered, I gave him my coordinates. Twenty minutes felt like an hour before he pulled up in his jouncing tow truck. He hooked up the Bonneville for her ignominious return home, and I climbed up into the passenger side of the cab.

  “It’s a luxury car, Lindsay,” Keith chastised me. “You’re not supposed to do loop-de-loops with this thing. It’s more than twenty years old, for God’s sake.”

  “I know, I know.”

  Long silence.

  “Nice blouse.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, really,” he said, making me laugh. “You should wear more stuff like that.”

  Back at the garage, Keith flipped open the Bonneville’s hood.

  “Ha. Your fan belt snapped,” he said.

  “Ha. I know that.”

  “Did you know that in a pinch you could fix this with a length of panty hose?”

  “Yes, I did. But, strange as it may seem, I didn’t have any tights in my roadside emergency kit.”

  “I have an idea. Why don’t I buy this car back from you? Give you a hundred bucks more than you paid me.”

  “I’ll think about it. No.”

  Keith laughed and said he’d drive me home and I had to accept his offer. Since he was going to find out anyway, I told Keith what I hadn’t told my girlfriends, hadn’t even told Joe yet.

  I told him about the gunfire the night before.

  “And now you think someone’s following you? Why don’t you go home, Lindsay? Seriously.”

  “Because I can’t turn this murder case loose. Not now. Especially since someone threw a dozen rounds at my sister’s house.”

  Keith gave me a sorry look, tugged on the bill of his Giants cap, handily negotiated the turns in the road.

  “Anyone ever call you stubborn?”

  “Sure. It’s considered a good trait in a cop.”

  I understood what he was getting at. I no longer knew whether I was being intrepid or stupid.

  But I wasn’t yet ready to make the call.

  Chapter 116

  WHEN KEITH AND I pulled up in front of Cat’s house, the driveway was full: the Explorer, a patrol car, a glazer’s truck bearing the legend “We Do Windows,” and a big metallic-blue van with Disaster Master decals on the doors.

  I thanked Keith for the lift and, with Martha trotting behind me, I went inside the house, where I found a big man with a little mustache and a horseshoe of dark hair around his head, vacuuming the sofa. He turned off his power vac and “Uncle Chris” and I exchanged introductions.

  “Buncha snoopy reporters showed up,” he said. “I told them you moved out until the house was put back together. Okay?”

  “Perfect. Brilliant.”

  “And Chief Stark was here a few minutes ago. Said to call him when you could.”

  I ignored the forty-seven messages blinki
ng on the answering machine and called the station from the kitchen phone. I got the duty officer.

  “The chief’s in an interview,” she said. “Can he call you back?”

  “I really wish he would.”

  “I’ll see to it, Lieutenant.”

  I hung up and walked down the hall to my nieces’ room.

  The blankets were still on the floor. A window was shattered, and one of those sweet potato vines was drying up on the floor. I’d dented the dresser really good when I bashed the chair against it, and the whole room full of stuffed animals seemed to rebuke me.

  What if the kids had been here?

  What then, Lindsay?

  I dragged the unbroken chair over to the corkboard, sat down, and stared at my notations on the murders. My eyes went right to the thing that disturbed me most.

  Sometimes the most telling facts hide in plain sight until you’re ready to see them.

  I had tunnel vision now—on the peepholes in the O’Malleys’ closet.

  I changed my clothes and put Martha outside with Penelope. “You two play nice.” Then I carefully angled the Explorer around the glazer’s truck and out to the street.

  I drove back into town.

  Chapter 117

  THE WATCHER TOOK THE blue Taurus north on 280, sticking to the freeway through Hillsborough. His thoughts were varied, but most of them centered on Lindsay Boxer.

  Thinking about Lindsay gave the Watcher a complex set of feelings. He was kind of weirdly proud of her, the way she kept surviving, kept snapping back. The way she refused to back off, stand down, go back to where she came from.

  But it was bad news that she insisted on being their problem. Bad news for her.

  When it came right down to it, they didn’t want to kill her. Killing a cop, especially this particular cop, would mean an all-out manhunt. The whole SFPD would spill out of the city and work her murder. Maybe the FBI, too.

  The Watcher slowed at the exit sign for Trousdale Drive, then his sturdy little car glided down the off-ramp. A mile and a half later, he turned right at the huge Peninsula Hospital, and right again onto El Camino Real, heading south.

  He found an Exxon station two blocks down the road and went inside the attached minimart. He wandered around for a couple of minutes, picking up a few small things: a bottle of springwater, a Clif bar, a newspaper.

  He paid the busty teenage girl at the cash register $4.20 for his purchases and another $20 for gas. As he left the store, he unfolded the morning paper and saw the story on page one.

  GUNSHOTS RIP THROUGH INSPECTOR’S HOUSE

  There was a picture of Lindsay in uniform over the story, and in the right-hand column was a follow-up about the Cabot case. Sam Cabot had been charged with a double homicide, “Continued on page 2.”

  The Watcher put the paper neatly down on the passenger seat and filled up his tank. Then he started the car and headed toward home. He would talk to the Truth later. Maybe they wouldn’t kill Lindsay the way they had the others. Maybe they would just make her disappear.

  Chapter 118

  THE LATE DR. O’MALLEY’S office was inside a two-story brick house on Kelly Street, his name etched on a brass plaque to the right of the doorway.

  I felt a little rush as I rang the bell. I knew the chief would kick my butt for going around him, but I had to do something. Better to beg forgiveness later than to ask permission and be refused.

  The buzzer sounded, and I pushed open the door. I found the waiting room to my left: small and square, with gray upholstered furniture and yards of condolence cards strung up around the walls.

  Behind the reception desk, framed in the open window, was a middle-aged woman with graying hair in a sixties flip.

  “I’m Lieutenant Boxer, SFPD,” I said, showing my badge. I told her that I was working on a cold homicide case that had some similarities to Dr. O’Malley’s unfortunate death.

  “We’ve already spoken to the police,” she said, scrutinizing my badge and the winning smile I’d put on just for her. “Hours and hours of questions.”

  “I’ll only need a couple of minutes.”

  She slid her frosted-glass window closed and a moment later appeared in the doorway to the inner office.

  “I’m Rebecca Falcone,” she said. “Come in.”

  Two other middle-aged women were in the office behind the connecting door.

  “That’s Mindy Heller, RN,” she said, indicating a streaked blonde wearing nurse’s whites and gobs of eye makeup, dumping platters of plastic-wrapped cookies into the trash can. “And this is Harriet Schwartz, our office manager,” Rebecca said of a wide woman in red sweats sitting behind an old computer. “We’ve all been with Dr. Ben since before the flood.”

  I shook hands, and repeated my name and why I was there. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I said. Then I told the women that I needed their help. “Anything you can do to shed some light.”

  “You want the truth?” said Harriet Schwartz. She turned away from the computer, leaned back in her chair, and warmed to her memories. “He was like a Picasso drawing. A bunch of lines, and from looking at those, you deduce a person. In between the lines, blank space —”

  Mindy Heller jumped in: “He was a decent doctor, but he was chintzy, withholding, a know-it-all. And he could be mean to his galley slaves.” She shot a look at her coworkers. “But I don’t believe he was killed because he was a dickhead, and that’s the worst he was.”

  “Uh-huh. So you think the O’Malleys were just victims of opportunity.”

  “Exactly. Picked at random. I’ve been saying that all along.”

  I asked if any of the other murder victims had been patients of Dr. O’Malley’s and I was shut right down.

  “You know we have to protect patient confidentiality,” said Ms. Heller, “but I’m sure Chief Stark can tell you what you want to know.”

  Okay, then.

  I jotted down my cell phone number and left it on Harriet Schwartz’s desk. I thanked everyone for their time, but I felt deflated. Dr. O’Malley may have been all his staff said he was, but in fact, I’d hit another dead end.

  I’d just opened the door to the street when someone gripped my arm. It was Rebecca Falcone, a look of urgency drawing her features into a line down the center of her face.

  “I have to speak to you,” she said, “in private.”

  “Can you meet me somewhere?” I asked.

  “The Half Moon Bay Coffee Company. Do you know the place?”

  “In that little strip mall at the top of Main?”

  She nodded once. “I get off at twelve-thirty.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Chapter 119

  OUR KNEES ALMOST TOUCHED under the small table at the back of the restaurant near the restrooms. We had salads and coffee in front of us, but Rebecca wasn’t eating. And she wasn’t yet ready to talk.

  She pulled on the little gold cross hanging from a chain around her neck, sliding it back and forth.

  I thought I understood her conflict. She wanted to be the one to tell the real information, but at the same time, she didn’t want to blow the whistle where her friends could hear it.

  “I don’t know anything, understand?” Rebecca said at last. “And I certainly don’t know anything about the murders. But Ben was under some kind of shadow lately.”

  “Can you elaborate, Rebecca?”

  “Well, he was unusually moody. Snapped at a couple of his patients, which, let me tell you, was rare. When I asked him what was going on, he denied that he was having problems.”

  “You knew Lorelei?”

  “Sure. They met at church, and frankly I was surprised Ben married her. I think he was lonely and she looked up to him.” Rebecca sighed. “Lorelei was pretty simple. She was a childlike woman who liked to shop. No one hated her.”

  “Interesting observation,” I said. And that was all the encouragement Rebecca needed to say what she’d wanted to say all along.

  She looked as though she we
re standing on the edge of a diving board and the pool was far, far below.

  She took a breath and dove.