I reached Joanna’s apartment on the third floor. My heart was pounding. Careful, Lindsay, a voice inside me said, then came a cautioning chill. Could Nicholas Jenks be here?
I had certainly entered enough hostile environments during my police career. None worse than this. I inserted the key, turned, and when the lock caught, pushed the door with my foot.
It swung open…revealing the bright, stylishly decorated apartment of Joanna Wade.
“Anyone here?” I shouted.
No one answered.
There was no one in the living room. Same for the dining room, kitchen. A coffee mug in the sink. The Chronicle out and folded to the Datebook section.
No sign that I was in the home of a psycho. That bothered me.
I moved on. Magazines — Food and Wine, San Francisco — on the coffee table. A few yoga posture books.
In the bedroom, the bed, unmade. The entire place had a relaxed, unforbidding feel.
Joanna Wade lived like any ordinary woman. She read, had coffee in her kitchen, taught exercise, paid her bills. Killers were preoccupied with their victims. This didn’t make sense.
I turned into the master bath. “Oh, damn it!” The case had made a last, irrevocable turn.
On the floor, in her workout tights, was Joanna Wade.
She was leaned against the tub looking at me, but not really — actually, she was still looking at her killer. Her eyes were wide and terrified.
He had used a knife. Jenks? If not him, then who?
“Oh, Christ,” I gasped. My head was spinning and it hurt.
I hurried over to her, but there was nothing I could do. Everything had twisted again. I knelt over the dead woman as a final, shuddering thought filled my mind:
If it wasn’t Joanna, who was Chris following?
Chapter 122
WITHIN MINUTES, two blue-and-whites screeched to a stop outside. I directed the patrol officers upstairs to the grisly body of Joanna, but my thoughts had turned to Chris. And whoever he was following.
I had been up in the apartment for ten, maybe twelve minutes, without a word from him. I was worried. He was following a murderer, and a murderer who had just killed Joanna Wade.
I ran downstairs to an open patrol car. I called in what had happened to Command Central. A riot of doubts was crashing in my mind.
Could it somehow have been Jenks after all? Could Jill have been right? Was he manipulating us, right from the start? Had he set everything up, even the sighting in Pacific Heights?
But if it was him, why? Why, after I had told him I believed him? Why would he kill her now? Was Joanna’s death something I could have prevented? What in hell was going on? Where was Chris, damn it?
My cell phone finally beeped. To my relief it was Chris.
“Where are you? You had me scared to death. Don’t do that to me.”
“Down by the marina. The suspect’s in a blue Saab.”
“Chris, be careful. It’s not Joanna. Joanna’s dead. She was stabbed a bunch of times in her apartment.”
“Dead?” he repeated. I could feel the frantic question slowly sinking into his mind. “Then who the hell is driving the Saab up ahead of me?”
“Tell me where you are exactly.”
“Chestnut and Scott. The suspect just pulled up to the curb. The suspect is getting out of the car.”
Somehow, this sounded familiar. Chestnut and Scott? What was down there? In the tumult of blue-and-whites screeching up in front of Joanna’s building and reporting in, I raked my mind for a connection.
“He’s heading away from the car, Lindsay. He’s starting to run.”
Then it hit me. The photo I had picked up at Jenks’s house. The beautiful and unmistakable moonlit dome. The Palace of Fine Arts.
It was where he had been married.
“I think I know where he’s going!” I shouted. “The Palace of Fine Arts.”
Chapter 123
I TOOK OFF IN THE RADIO CAR with the siren blaring all the way to the Presidio.
It took me no more than seven minutes, with traffic wildly shifting out of my way, to speed down Lombard over to Richardson to the south tip of the Presidio. Up ahead, the golden rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts loomed powerfully above a calm, gleaming pond.
I saw Chris’s blue Taurus pulled up diagonally across from the tip of the park and jackknifed the patrol car to a halt next to it. I didn’t see a sign of any other cops.
Why hadn’t any backup arrived? What the hell was going on now?
I clicked my gun off safety and made my way into the park underneath the giant rotunda. No way I was waiting.
I was startled by people running toward me, away from the rotunda grounds.
“Someone’s shooting,” one of them screamed.
Suddenly, my legs were flying. “Everyone out! I’m San Francisco police!” I screamed as I bumped through the people rushing by.
“Maniac with a gun,” one of them yelled.
I ran around the pond alongside a massive marble colonnade. There was no sound up ahead. No more shots.
Leading with my gun, I rounded corners until I was in sight of the main rotunda. Huge Corinthian columns soared above me, capped with ornate heroic carvings.
I could hear voices in the distance: a woman’s mocking tone: “It’s just you and me, Nick. Imagine that. Isn’t it romantic?”
And a man’s voice, Jenks’s: “Look at you, you’re pathetic. As always.”
The voices echoed out of the huge dome of the main rotunda.
Where was Chris? And where was our backup?
Cops should have been here by now. I held my breath, straining to hear the first police siren.
Every step I took, I heard my own footsteps echoing to the roof.
“What do you want?” I heard Jenks’s cry reverberating off the stone. Then the woman shouting back, “I want you to remember them. All the women you fucked.”
Still no sign of Chris. I was tight with worry.
I decided to go around the side of a row of low arches that ran down to where the voices were coming from. I ducked around the corner of the colonnade.
Then I saw Chris.
He was sitting there, propped against a pillar, watching everything unfold.
My first reaction was to say something like, Chris, get down, someone will see you. It was one of those slowmotion perceptions where my eyes were faster than my mind.
Then I was seized with horrible fright, nausea, and sadness.
Chris wasn’t watching, and he wasn’t hiding.
The front of his shirt was covered with blood.
All my police training nearly gave way. I wanted to scream, to cry out. It took everything I had to hold it in.
Two dark bloodstains were soaking through Chris’s shirt. My legs were paralyzed. Somehow I forced myself over to him. I knelt down. My heart was pounding.
Chris’s eyes were remote, his face as gray as stone. I checked for a pulse and felt the slightest rhythm of a heartbeat.
“Oh, Chris, no.” I stifled a sob.
When I spoke, he looked up, eyes glimmering as he saw my face. His lips parted into a weak smile. His breath wheezed, heavy and labored.
My eyes filled with tears. I applied pressure to the holes in his chest, trying to push back the blood. “Oh, Chris, hang in there. Hang in there. I’ll get help.”
He reached for my arm. He tried to speak, but it was only a weak, guttural whisper.
“Don’t talk. Please.”
I raced back to the patrol car and fumbled with the transmitter until I heard Dispatch. “Officer down, officer down,” I shouted. “Four-oh-six. I repeat, four-oh-six!” The statewide call for alarm. “Officer shot, rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts. Need immediate EMS and SWAT backup. Possible Nicholas Jenks sighting. Second officer on the scene inside. Repeat, four-oh-six, emergency.”
As soon as the dispatcher repeated the location back to me with a “Copy,” I threw down the transmitter and headed back inside.
Voices rang out ahead in the rotunda. I couldn’t make them out, but it was the same man and woman. Then there was a gunshot.
“Go,” Chris whispered. “I’m holding on.”
Our hands touched.
“I’ve got rear,” he muttered with a smile. Then he pushed me away.
I scurried ahead, my gun drawn, glancing back twice. Chris was watching — watching my back.
I ran in a low crouch all the way down the length of the row of columns closest in, clear up to the side of the main rotunda. The voices echoed, intensified. My eyes were riveted.
They were straight across the basilica. Jenks, in a plain white shirt. He was holding one arm, bleeding. He’d been shot.
And across from him, holding a gun and dressed in a man’s clothes, Chessy Jenks.
Chapter 124
SHE LOOKED like a bizarre disfigurement of the beautiful woman she was. Her hair was matted and dyed gray and red. Her face still carried the marks of her disguise, a man’s sideburns and flecks of a red beard.
She was holding a gun tightly, pointing it directly at him. “I have a present for you, Nick.”
“A present?” Jenks said in desperation. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“That’s why we’re here. I want to renew our vows.”
Chessy took a small pouch out of her jacket and tossed it at his feet. “Go ahead. Open it.”
Nicholas Jenks knelt stiffly and picked up the pouch. He opened it, the contents spilling into his palm. His eyes bulged in horror.
The six missing rings.
“Chessy, Christ,” he said. “You’re out of your mind. What do you want me to do with these?” He held out a ring. “These will put you in the gas chamber.”
“No, Nick,” Chessy said, shaking her head. “I want you to swallow them. Get rid of the evidence for me.”
Jenks’s face twitched in apprehension. “You want me to what?”
“Swallow them. Each one is someone you’ve destroyed. Someone whose beauty you’ve killed. They were innocent. Like me. Little girls on our wedding days. You killed us all, Nick — me, Kathy, Joanna. So now give us something back. With this ring, I do pledge.”
Jenks glared and shouted at her. “That’s enough, Chessy!”
“I’ll say when it’s enough. You love games, so play the game. Play my game this time. Swallow them!” She pointed the gun. “No sense pretending I won’t shoot, is there, dear?”
Jenks took one of the rings, raised it to his lips. His hand was shaking badly.
“That was Melanie, Nicky. You would’ve liked her. Athletic…a skier…a diver. Your type, huh? She fought me to the end. But you don’t like us to fight, do you? You like to be in total control.”
She cocked the gun and leveled it at Jenks’s head.
Jenks put the ring in his mouth. With a sickened expression, he forced it down his throat.
Chessy was losing it. She was sobbing, trembling. I didn’t think I could wait any longer.
“Police,” I yelled. I stepped forward, two hands on my .38, leveling it at her.
She spun at me, not even showing surprise, then back to Jenks. “He has to be punished!”
“It’s over,” I said, carefully advancing toward her. “Please, Chessy, no more killing.”
As if she suddenly realized what she had become, the sickening things she’d done, she looked at me. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry for everything that happened — except this!”
She fired, at Jenks.
I fired, too, at her.
Chessy’s slender body flew backward, hitting the wall hard and crumpling against it. Her beautiful eyes widened, and her mouth sagged open.
I looked and saw that she’d missed Jenks. He was staring at her in disbelief. He didn’t think she could do it, didn’t think she hated him that much. He still believed he controlled Chessy, and probably that she loved him.
I hurried to her, but it was too late. Her eyes were already glazed, and the blood was streaming from her chest. I held her head and thought that she was so beautiful — like Melanie, Rebecca, Kathy — and now she was dead, too.
Nicholas Jenks turned toward me with a gasp of relief. “I told you…I told you I was innocent.”
I looked at him in disgust. Eight people were dead. The brides and grooms, Joanna, now his own wife. I told you I was innocent? Is that what he thought?
I swung, my fist catching him square in the teeth. I felt something shatter as Jenks dropped to his knees. “So much for innocence, Jenks!”
Chapter 125
I WAS RUNNING AND I REALIZED that I no longer knew exactly what I was doing, where I was. Somehow my instincts brought me back to where Chris had been shot.
He was still up against the pillar in the same position. He looked as if he’d been waiting for me to return.
I rushed up to him, knelt down as close as I could get. I could see police and the EMS medical crew finally arriving. What took them so long?
“What happened?” Chris whispered. I could barely hear him.
“I got her, Chris. Chessy Jenks was the killer.”
He managed to nod his head. “That’s my girl,” he whispered.
Then Chris smiled faintly and he died on me.
I never would have imagined, or dreamed, that Chris would be the first to die. That was the most terrible and dreadful shock. I was the sick one, the one whom death had brushed against.
I put my head down close to his chest. There was no movement, no breath, just a terrifying stillness. Everything seemed so unreal.
Then the medics were working on Chris, doing heroic, useless things, and I just sat there holding his hand.
I felt hollowed out and empty and incredibly sad. I was sobbing, but I had something to say to him; I had to tell Chris one last thing.
“Medved told me, Chris. I’m going to be okay.”
Chapter 126
I COULDN’T GO NEAR MY OFFICE at the Hall. I was given a one-week leave. I figured I’d take another of my own time on top of that. I sat around, watched some videos of old movies, went for my treatments, took a jog or two down by the marina.
I even cooked and sat out on the terrace overlooking the bay, just as I had with Chris that first night. On one of those nights, I got really drunk and started playing with my gun. It was Sweet Martha who talked me off the ledge. That, and the fact that if I killed myself, I would be betraying Chris’s memory. I couldn’t do that. Also, the girls would never have forgiven me, right?
I felt a hole tear at my heart, larger and more painful than anything I had ever felt, even with Negli’s. I felt a void of connection, of commitment. Claire called me three times a day, but I just couldn’t speak for very long, not even to her.
“It wasn’t you, Lindsay. There was nothing you could’ve done,” she consoled.
“I kind of know that,” I replied. But I just couldn’t convince myself it was true.
Mostly, I tried to persuade myself I still felt a sense of purpose. The bride and groom murders were solved. Nicholas Jenks was shamelessly milking his celebrity status on Dateline and 20/20. My Negli’s seemed to be in remission. Chris was gone. I tried to think of what I would do next. Nothing very appealing came to mind.
Then I remembered what I had told Claire when my fears of Negli’s were the strongest. Nailing this guy was the one clear thing that gave me the strength to go on.
It wasn’t just about right or wrong. It wasn’t about guilt or innocence. It was about what I was good at, and what I loved to do.
Four days after the shooting, I went to Chris’s funeral. It was in a Catholic church out in Hayward, where he was from.
I took my place in the ranks with Roth and Jacobi. With Chief Mercer, who was dressed in blues.
But my heart was aching so bad. I wanted to be up near Chris. I wanted to be next to
him.
I watched his ex-wife and his two boys struggling to keep it together. I was thinking about how very close I had come to their lives. And they didn’t know it.
Hero cop, they were eulogizing him.
He was a marketing guy, I thought, smiling. And then I started to cry.
Of all people, I felt Jacobi grasp my hand. And of all the improbable things, I found myself holding his back. Go ahead, he seemed to be saying. Go ahead and weep.
Afterward, at the graveside, I went up to Chris’s ex-wife, Marion. “I wanted to meet you,” I said. “I was with him when he died.”
She looked at me with the fragile courage only another woman could understand.
“I know who you are,” she said with a compassionate smile. “You are pretty. Chris told me you were pretty. And smart.”
I smiled and took her hand. We both squeezed hard.
“He also said you were very brave.”
I felt my eyes well up. Then she took my arm and said the one thing I wanted most to hear.
“Why don’t you stand with us, Lindsay.”
The department gave Chris a hero’s burial. Sad, mournful bagpipers opened the ceremony. Row after row of cops in dress blues. A twenty-one-gun salute.
When it was over, I found myself walking back to the car, wondering what in God’s name I was going to do next.
At the cemetery gates I spotted Cindy and Jill and Claire. They were waiting there for me.
I didn’t move. I stood there, my legs trembling badly. They could see that if they didn’t make the first move, I could break down.
“Why don’t you ride back with us?” Claire said.
My voice cracked. I could barely utter the words. “It was supposed to be me, not him,” I said to them. Then one by one they all hugged me.
I put my arms around all of them and melted into their embrace as deeply as I could. All four of us were crying. “Don’t ever leave me, guys.”
“Leave?” Jill said with wide eyes.
“None of us,” promised Cindy. “We’re a team, remember? We will always be together.”
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