Women's Murder Club [10] 10th Anniversary

by James Patterson

  “Okay, so moving past Ellen Lafferty, what about Caitlin?” I asked Yuki. “Did she take her father’s gun and shoot him?”

  “I’m talking to her court-appointed shrink in, uh, five hours. I’ll let you know what he says.”

  I said to Cindy, “I don’t need to say, ‘Sit on this until we say go,’ do I?”

  “I haven’t got a story yet anyhow.”

  “You sure don’t.” I grinned, slapping her a high five.

  Yuki leaned forward and started the engine. Cindy and I reached for our door handles.

  Yuki said, “Linds. I’ve been so sure Candace killed Dennis. If Caitlin hadn’t confessed in open court to shooting her father, I think I would have gotten the doctor convicted. It scares me. What if I’ve been wrong?”

  Chapter 115

  OVERRIDING THE PROTEST from the director of security at Metropolitan Hospital, Conklin and I took the two empty seats at the back of an amphitheater above an operating room.

  The room was packed with interns and specialists. Two monitors showed close-ups of the operating table fifteen feet below, and cameras exported streaming video to medical people all over the country who wanted to see Candace Martin perform heart surgery on Leon Antin, a legendary seventy-five-year-old violinist with the San Francisco Symphony.

  The patient was draped in blue, his rib cage separated and his heart open to the bright lights. Candace Martin was accompanied by other doctors, nurses, and an anesthesiologist operating the cardiac-bypass machine.

  A young intern sat to my right, Dr. Ryan Pitt, according to the ID tag pinned to his pocket, and he was currently bringing me up to speed.

  According to Pitt, this was a complex operation under any circumstances, but even more so because of the patient’s age.

  Pitt said, “The surgery is not going to improve his longevity by much—he’s an ASA class four. That’s high-risk. But the patient wanted his chance now that Dr. Martin was available. He just wanted his friend to do the surgery. Only her.”

  Pitt explained that in the previous three hours, two of Antin’s veins had been harvested from his thighs and three of four grafts had been implanted into the coronary arteries. Dr. Martin was stitching in the last implant now.

  I was staring at the screen above my head when I saw the medical personnel suddenly become highly agitated. Green lines jumped on the monitors below, and Candace Martin began shouting at the anesthesiologist while massaging Antin’s heart with her hands.

  I said to the intern, “What is this? What’s going on?”

  Pitt spoke pure medicalese, but I got the drift. The patient’s heart was beat-up and worn out, and it refused to work anymore. Dr. Martin was spraying curses all around the operating room, but she wasn’t giving up.

  Needles went into IVs. Paddles were applied to Antin’s exposed heart, and then, once again, Candace Martin massaged the heart with her hands, begging her friend to stay with her. Demanding it.

  After it was clear, even to me, that the patient wasn’t coming back, a nurse pulled Candace away, and a doctor pronounced the time of the patient’s death.

  Candace ripped off her mask and made a rapid and direct line for the door. The video cameras blinked off.

  I heard my name, turned toward the exit, and saw the security director beckoning to Conklin and me.

  Security said, “Can I see that warrant again, please?”

  Conklin took it out of his inside jacket pocket. The security chief read it and said, “Dr. Martin is in the locker room. Please follow me.”

  We found Candace Martin still in her bloody scrubs, sitting on a bench, staring at a wall of lockers. I asked her to stand up, and she looked at me as though she didn’t recognize me. Conklin showed her the warrant and told her we were taking her into custody for the murder of her husband.

  All the fight seemed to have gone out of her.

  Chapter 116

  YUKI AND I sat across a small metal table from Candace Martin and Phil Hoffman. Hoffman looked as he always did: contained, dressed for a press conference at a moment’s notice. Candace Martin looked like she’d been dragged by her hair through hell.

  I was angry, feeling the calm before an emotional storm, pissed off at myself for the first time since Hoffman buffaloed me into getting involved in this case. But I’d done it, believed Candace Martin’s lies, and if I didn’t want to be patrolling the Mission in a squad car for the next year, I had to make this mess turn out right.

  Yuki said, “Dr. Martin, it’s over. We’ve spoken with Caitlin’s shrink. She has recanted her testimony. She said she didn’t kill her father. She said that her father forced himself on her, yes. But she said you did the shooting.

  “The People are ready to proceed with your trial, or you can tell us what really happened.”

  Hoffman said, “I need to consult with my client. And she needs a little time to get her wits together. She’s suffering a grave personal loss.”

  I was almost lit up with fury, the fighting-mad kind that you can control but just don’t want to. I said, “Phil, you have lied to me, your client has lied to me, and she tried to get us to look at an innocent person for murder.

  “Ask me how much I care about her personal loss. Not. At. All. This woman killed her husband. She’s cooked, and this is her only chance to make a deal.”

  Candace was shaking her head, her face contorted in pain. “You don’t understand.”

  I was unmoved.

  Yuki said, “Phil. The judge gave us sixty days to determine whether or not the People wish to try your client. This is day fifty-seven. On Monday, we either tell Judge LaVan that the defendant pleads guilty or we go back to trial.

  “The children will not be in court, but Caitlin’s shrink will be standing by, and if you so much as hint that Caitlin killed her father, Dr. Rosenblatt will play the tape of Caitlin’s recantation for the jury.

  “So, Dr. Martin,” Yuki said, “it’s us or the jury. Take your pick. Honestly, I think your odds are better with us.”

  “Candace,” Hoffman said, “it’s your decision.”

  “I’m tired, Phil,” she said. And then she was sobbing.

  Phil nodded and handed her a tissue.

  Candace dabbed at her eyes, blew her nose, and said, “Phil, I’m sorry I lied to you. I did it to protect my children. They don’t have anyone but me.”

  “Let’s hear it,” Yuki said.

  Chapter 117

  CANDACE MARTIN SAID, “You want me to say I shot Dennis? I did. After years of torture, that bastard finally pushed me over the edge.”

  “What edge is that?” I asked her.

  The doctor’s eyes were flaming red. Her fingers shook and her voice wavered. The composed surgeon I’d met in this room back in October had been swapped out for a woman who still looked like her but was emotionally broken and ready to tell the truth.

  “On the night in question, I was in my home office,” she said. “Ellen had left for the evening and a little while later, I heard a muffled shout. It could only be Caitlin. I got up from my desk and ran down the hallway in time to see Dennis coming out of her bedroom.

  “He didn’t look right,” Candace said. “He jumped when he noticed me. Then he screamed at me, ‘Don’t sneak up on me like that.’ ”

  “I didn’t even have a chance to answer before Caitlin ran out of her bedroom and into my arms. She was naked. She was flushed and crying and the insides of her thighs were wet. She cried, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,’ the most savagely sad cries I’ve ever heard.

  “She’d been raped,” Candace said, her face radiating horror. “My husband had done this to my little girl.”

  Neither Yuki nor I moved or said a word, and then Candace continued.

  “I held her and told her that I loved her and always would. I told her to shower and get dressed, that I’d be right back. And then I ran back down the hallway to the bedroom I shared with Dennis—and he was there, stuffing cash into his wallet, and he said, ‘Don’t believe what she tells you
. Caitlin lies.’

  “Dennis picked up his car keys and left the bedroom,” Candace said. “He had cheated on me for years, but whenever I tried to leave him, he said he would take the children and prove that I was an unfit mother. I knew that he would try. Even though he was never home, even though he was a horrible parent. I knew he would find a way to take them, just to make sure I didn’t get them.

  “He must not have heard me come home that evening. He was raping her while I was actually in the house. How could he have done that?

  “I hated myself for missing the signs. But I hated Dennis more. I couldn’t let him get away with what he’d done. I ran back to my office and grabbed my gun.”

  Candace’s voice ran out and she just sat there, hands propping up her head, staring hard at the table, silent.

  Phil went to the door of the interview room and opened it. I heard him ask someone to bring water.

  As we waited, I went back over the pictures Candace had painted in my mind. I could see everything as if I’d been there myself and witnessed the horror.

  It all rang true, but I still had questions.

  Chapter 118

  PHIL BROUGHT BOTTLES of water into the room and set them down on the table. Candace’s hand shook violently as she drank down half of one of the bottles. After that, she told Phil that she was all right and wanted to go on. She continued her story of betrayal in the first degree.

  “Dennis was heading toward the front door and I was right behind him, screaming at him to stop, calling him names, but he just lowered his head and kept going.

  “I had no plan to kill him. You have to believe that. I only wanted to stop him. All I could think about was that he had raped my child, his own daughter. And I didn’t want him to ever do it again.”

  “What happened next, Candace?” I asked.

  Candace had fallen down a tunnel of memory. I repeated my question and she returned to her story.

  “I was charging after Dennis, but as I passed Caitlin’s room, she ran out to me and grabbed me by the waist again.

  “I comforted her, but Dennis kept taunting me. He turned to me in the foyer and said that Caitlin was lying, that her hysteria was make-believe. I knew what he’d done. I knew full well what he had done to my little girl.

  “He saw the gun in my hand, and I remembered that I was holding it. I said, ‘Stay where you are. I’m calling the police.’

  “He laughed at me. I lifted the muzzle and aimed the gun at him, and for the first time since I’d met Dennis, I saw fear in his face—but only for a second. I shot him twice, once while he was standing, once when he was down.

  “Caitlin was holding on to me, screaming and crying, and then Duncan was there, too. He saw his father lying dead on the floor. I put Caitlin aside and swept Duncan up, carried him to the foot of the stairs, and told him to run up to Cyndi’s room and stay there.”

  Candace came back to the present and she spoke directly to me.

  “Sergeant, it had all become quite clear to me—I had to protect those children. If not me, then who?

  “I went to the foyer and picked up the gun. After that, I called nine one one. When the police came, I said that an intruder had broken into the house and had killed my husband. They tested my hands for gunpowder. I told them I had opened the front door and fired after him. They brought me here. You know the rest.

  “I’m sorry that it happened this way, but in that moment, I acted on pure instinct. I couldn’t let Dennis live in the same world with Caitlin.”

  Chapter 119

  YUKI AND I walked Candace back to the beginning of her story, and she filled in the sickening gaps. She said that Dennis Martin was a degenerate womanizer and a stalker with a well-honed gift for emotional abuse but that he had a good reputation in the community and was well spoken. Candace said she was convinced that in a divorce trial she wouldn’t have gotten custody of the kids.

  Dr. Martin said, “Had I known that he was abusing Caitlin before that moment, I would have taken her and Duncan and called the police. I would not have let my children see him die.”

  After Candace was locked up and Phil was on his way home to Oakland, Yuki and I gathered our notes and collected the videotapes. And then we were alone.

  I said, “That was the worst.”

  “Awful. If the jury had heard it, even if they thought she was guilty, they might have let her off so she could be there for her kids.”

  “Caitlin told her shrink that Dennis had been raping her?”

  “Yes. I didn’t see any point in telling Candace that it had been going on for quite a while.”

  “What are you going to recommend?”

  “Damned if I know,” Yuki said.

  She hurried upstairs to confer with Red Dog and I went down four flights to see Jacobi, my former partner, my longtime friend, and now the chief of police.

  Jacobi cracked open a couple of Coke cans, and after I brought him up to the minute on Candace Martin, he said, “What’s Yuki thinking?”

  “She and Parisi are chewing it over right now. Brady is going to bust me back to the beat,” I said. “I couldn’t let this case go.”

  “You want me to talk to him?”

  “Yeah. Would you?”

  Jacobi nodded his head and began tapping on the desk. He kept it up until under my prompting to just spit out whatever he was thinking, he said, “Lindsay, a message was forwarded to me this morning. It’s not good news.”

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “It’s about your father.”

  “My father?”

  “He died back in August. The pension people just got the word. I’m sorry, Linds.”

  I said, “No,” and stood up, surprised that I felt light-headed, that my legs didn’t want to hold me up. I grabbed the back of the chair for support. I thought about how Marty Boxer was hardly a father. In fact, I wasn’t sure that he had even loved me. Had I loved him?

  The next thing I knew, Jacobi had come around his desk and put his arms around me, and I was getting tears on his jacket.

  “I wanted to be the one to tell you. He didn’t ditch you at your wedding, my friend. He had a heart attack. He was already gone.”

  Chapter 120

  CLAIRE’S HOME in Mill Valley is a dream of a house: wood-paneled inside with trusses and beams in the cathedral ceiling, stone floors throughout the open space, and a two-story fireplace. The bedrooms all have mountain vistas, and the patio has a multimillion-dollar view of a great, green, tree-studded lawn.

  Edmund Washburn, a big teddy bear of a man, had fired up the barbecue, and Joe, Brady, and Conklin were horsing around with a football on the grass.

  Yuki, Cindy, Claire, and I reclined on teak lounge chairs under woolly blankets, and baby Ruby slept in her rocking seat at Claire’s elbow.

  A Mozart symphony was pouring out of the Bose, and Yuki was staring at the guys on the field, at Brady in particular, and she finally said, “I’m a goner. I just thought you ladies would like to know. I’m a very moony lady. Over my head for Jackson Brady.”

  We laughed out loud—couldn’t help ourselves. Yuki wanted to be in a relationship and it looked like she was in one with my lieutenant.

  Brady saw her watching him, tossed the football aside, and ran toward us. He grabbed Yuki out of the chair, hoisted her over his shoulder, and made a run for the space between the two saplings that marked the goal line.

  Yuki shrieked and kicked melodramatically as Brady did the happy dance around the trees, then put Yuki on her feet and kissed her. With their arms around each other, they came back to the patio, laughing.

  Man. They were disgustingly happy.

  But I didn’t begrudge Yuki a bit of it. Between Yuki and Jacobi, Brady had let my end run fade without so much as a wrist slap.

  Damn. It was good to have friends.

  Joe called my name. He had the ball, so I stood, ran out, and waved my hands in the air until he tossed it to me. Cindy threw off her blanket and went
for a pass, doing some little moves with her hips that had never before been seen in football.

  I threw the ball to her, a surprisingly tight spiral, if I do say so, and she whooped and yelled as she caught it. Conklin came off the sidelines and chased and tackled her, and then, even though I didn’t have the ball, Joe tackled me. He tucked me under his body and rolled with me so that I landed on top of him, never even touching the ground.

  We were all acting like a bunch of kids. And you know what? We needed to be kids. It was wonderful to just laugh our heads off. That’s what I was thinking when a minute later Brady came over to me at the barbecue and pulled me aside. He leaned toward me, close enough to whisper in my ear.

  He said, “For insubordination, Boxer, you’re on night shift for the next six weeks.”

  It sucked, but I knew he was right. I had broken the rules.

  What could I say? “Okay, Lieutenant, I understand.”

  Chapter 121

  WE ATE like we never expected to eat again.

  When Joe’s secret-sauced ribs had been picked clean, the salad had been reduced to a film of olive oil in the bowl, and all that remained of the baked potatoes was a pile of foil in the recycle bin, we went inside the house.

  Claire busted out the cake while Edmund popped the top on the Krug. It was one of the best champagnes, at least a hundred bucks a bottle.

  “Introducing my original white-chocolate cheesecake with cream cheese and orange slices between the layers,” Claire said, putting it down on the dining room table. “Baked sour cream frosting, and Grand Marnier in a graham cracker crust. Voilà! I hope you like it.”

  The applause was spontaneous and rousing, and I was pushed forward so that I could be next to my best friend. There were ten candles on the cake, standing for the tenth anniversary of the first time Claire and I met.