16th Seduction: (Women’s Murder Club 16) (Women's Murder Club)

by James Patterson

  “When have I ever said no?”

  I thanked the number one best nanny in the world, threw on clean jeans and a cotton pullover, jammed shoes onto my aching feet. After Mrs. Rose crossed the hall to my place, I looked in on Julie and told her I’d be home before she knew it. She rolled over and turned her face to the wall.

  I told Mrs. Rose I’d call her. Then I booked.

  CHAPTER 54

  I TROTTED OVER to Twelfth Street, where I had parked my new secondhand Explorer, a newer model than my former beloved ride, which had been shot to pieces while I was behind the wheel.

  The new car had bells and whistles I didn’t need, but the same comfortable seat height, five-star crash rating, and curve control. Add that to its zippy pickup and quiet ride, and this was the perfect vehicle for me. Before pulling out, I called Conklin.

  “I’m about twenty-five minutes out,” I told him.

  I heard sirens through my phone.

  “I’m a block away,” he said. “Suggest you step on it.”

  I gunned the engine and headed to Jamestown Avenue, in Bayview, where Connor Grant lived.

  As it had been the first time I came to his place, the tidy wood-frame house, set back from the street and flanked by two concrete buildings, was hemmed in by a formation of squad cars. But now, in the dark, its plain, everyday exterior was animated by cherry lights whirling, flashing, and strobing the landscape.

  Conklin was standing on the front steps of the house talking to Grant. I badged the uniforms between me and the front door and joined my partner and the psycho who was officially innocent of all charges.

  If the shooter who had shot out his windows was watching, he could be on a rooftop or inside a parked car. To tell the truth, I didn’t much care if Grant got picked off while standing on his porch. But I did care about my partner’s safety and mine.

  I said, “We should go inside.”

  We followed Grant into his multipurpose living room. I felt creeped out just being in close proximity to him, but still, there was an opportunity here. Everything about Grant seemed to be some kind of act. From the first time I met him, all starry-eyed in the face of death and destruction, to the time he cross-examined me like a professional legal sharpshooter, Connor Grant didn’t compute.

  I might never get into this house again, but maybe there was something in plain sight that would give me a peephole into the enigma that was Connor Grant.

  I crossed the living room and walked through the open doorway to his office. There was an even bigger pile of mail than before stacked on the credenza, and next to his armchair were four plastic tubs of mail the post office had been holding for him.

  Grant interrupted my thoughts.

  He said, “Well, Sergeant, it took you long enough to get here.”

  I stifled a snappy comeback that he had rejected police protection and that I wasn’t his personal muscle. Instead I said, “Why don’t you tell us what happened?”

  Grant pointed up to the second floor.

  “I was upstairs watching a movie when the window shattered.”

  He pulled the collar of his shirt away to show us glass cuts on his cheek and neck. I nodded, but I had no sympathy for Grant. The little nicks in his skin only reminded me again of the shower of glass shards flying hundreds of feet in all directions. Lit by sundown for bonus points.

  Grant said, “I rolled off the bed onto the floor. When the shots stopped coming, I peeked out the window. I saw a car lurch and head north. I got three letters off the license plate.”

  I wrote down the letters.

  “What kind of car?”

  “I couldn’t tell. It was dark colored and had a boxy rear end.”

  “Like a van?”

  He nodded. “Could have been.”

  “How many shots were fired?” I asked.

  “Four or maybe five.”

  “Have you gotten any threatening phone calls?”

  “Only three or four an hour on my landline. ‘You’re lower than pond scum. You should die.’ I unplugged the phone.”

  I told Grant we’d try to get records of incoming calls from the phone company, and I jotted down his cell phone number for the record.

  While Grant took Conklin around the small house to do a security check on the doors and windows, I switched on the lamp near Grant’s easy chair and turned it so it lit up his library, which wrapped around two sides of the small room.

  I had only a couple of minutes, but I gave his bookshelves another look. Scanning the spines, I saw books on law, art history, archeology, astronomy, and notable people from A to Z. Grant also had a section on guns, about three feet of shelving dedicated to explosives, a section on aeronautics, as well as a top shelf with books on psychology and computer science.

  Besides my personal experience with Grant acting as his own attorney, Yuki had told me how he’d distinguished himself throughout the trial. Question: How had he managed to educate himself with law books and retain enough practical knowledge to put on a such a skillful defense against Len Parisi?

  I pulled out an intriguingly titled book, Satan’s Advice to Young Lawyer. I opened it and saw a bookplate: “This book belongs to” and the inscription “Sam Marx.” A random sampling of three more law books had the same bookplate and inscribed name, Sam Marx.

  Maybe Grant had bought the collection at a tag sale or from a secondhand bookstore. But why?

  I heard footsteps on the stairs. Grant was telling Conklin, “I was falsely arrested and tried. My reputation has been trashed. Now I could be assassinated. I was stupid to turn down police protection, but now I demand it.”

  I left the living room and met Grant and Conklin in the foyer. “We’ll get you round-the-clock surveillance for a while,” I told him, “but if I were you, I’d move.”

  “You really have a hate-on for me, don’t you, Sergeant?” Grant said. “Do I remind you of someone? Do you have a problem with intelligent men? Do you just like to throw your weight around? You should get over your superiority complex. You’re not that superior.”

  I handed him my card, saying, “We’ll check on that partial plate as well as incoming phone calls. Any more shooting incidents, call 911, then call me.”

  “You mean, if I’m not dead.”

  Conklin said, “Consider taking Sergeant Boxer’s advice about moving. She’s usually right.”

  CHAPTER 55

  FIVE MINUTES LATER Conklin and I were sitting in his car in front of the mass murderer’s sweet little blue-and-white house.

  “I can’t possibly say how much I hate that guy,” I said.

  “You’ve got good reason,” he said. “Linds, just do what you’re doing. Stay cool. We do our jobs and maybe some superhero will take him the fuck out.”

  “If only.”

  He laughed. My partner, the good cop.

  Conklin fed the three letters Grant had given us into the mobile data terminal, while I watched the street. Five squad cars pulled out into the night, leaving two cruisers behind to protect the not-guilty mother of all dirtbags.

  Conklin whistled through his teeth as the software ran all the plate combinations with the letters WXL in San Francisco.

  “Got a Land Rover with a WYL,” he said.

  “Registered to?”

  “Cary Woodhouse, of all people. Could be his plate or just pretty damn close to it.”

  We knew that Woodhouse had lost his wife in the Sci-Tron explosion and had threatened Connor Grant inside a packed courtroom.

  “If Woodhouse did the drive-by, he wasted no time,” I said. “What can we find out about him?”

  Conklin tapped the keys and said, “He’s a career soldier. Christ, the guy’s an actual hero. Desert Storm.”

  While I stared up at Grant’s shot-out bedroom window, Conklin phoned Brady and told him, “Grant got three letters off the probable shooter’s plate. Two of them match Woodhouse’s vehicle. I’m thinking this was harassment or a warning. If the shooter had seriously wanted to kill Grant, he
could have come through the front door. Cheap locks, no cameras.”

  Brady’s voice came over the speaker, telling Conklin he’d put out an APB on the vehicle in question and that he wanted us to drive to the Woodhouse residence.

  “Report back,” said Brady.

  A CSI van rolled up to Grant’s house and parked. I got out of Conklin’s car, walked over to the van, and spoke to George Campbell, a former science teacher himself and now a CSI on the graveyard shift. We talked about the shots fired, and I asked him to call me when he’d gotten back the ballistics on the slugs.

  “Put a hot rush on it,” I said. “And Campbell, while you’re hunting for slugs, if anything strikes you as weird or out of place, call me.”

  “I sure will.”

  I walked back to Conklin’s car, thinking that even if Campbell found a notebook with actual hand-lettered instructions on how to blow up Sci-Tron, Grant would still be not guilty. Double jeopardy applied.

  Still. I needed to know if he had done it.

  Conklin buzzed down his window and said, “Ready?”

  “I’ll follow you.”

  I got into my car, switched on the engine, gave it some gas, and was two car lengths behind Conklin as we headed out.

  CHAPTER 56

  CARY WOODHOUSE LIVED in Parkside on Twenty-Fourth Avenue. The house was of the tiled-roof Mediterranean style that had been popular in the 1930s, and along with the similar homes on this street, it looked fresh and well tended.

  Conklin pulled into Woodhouse’s driveway behind a boxy, dark-colored Land Rover. I double-parked on the street, and Conklin and I put on our Kevlar vests and our SFPD Windbreakers over them. We approached the front door together.

  I rang the bell, and in a minute the door opened.

  The guy in the doorway was barrel chested, wearing a blue plaid flannel shirt and baggy cords, standing six feet tall in his bedroom slippers. He had a Bud in his hand.

  I introduced myself and Conklin, asked if he was Mr. Cary Woodhouse.

  “Yes. What’s this about?”

  Conklin said, “We’d like to ask you a couple of questions, sir. Better if we come inside.”

  Woodhouse flung the door wide open and said, “Come right in. I’m on a streak, so I hope this won’t take too long. Some of the boys have to get home to their wives.”

  I checked out the house as we walked in. Stucco walls, overstuffed furniture, framed photo of Mrs. Woodhouse draped in black hanging over the fireplace. An arched passthrough connected the living room to the dining room, where five men in their forties to midsixties sat around the snack- and beer-bottle-laden dining room table. They were holding cards.

  Conklin said to Woodhouse, “We can talk in the kitchen.”

  “No, just come in and ask what you want. I don’t have secrets from my friends and family.”

  Woodhouse took his seat at the head, named the men at the table, including his father, Micah, and his brother, Jeff. After turning down an offer to “pull up a chair,” Conklin asked Woodhouse, “Have you driven your car this evening?”

  “Of course. Went out for food and beer. What’s this about?”

  Conklin said, “About this shopping trip. Were you in Bayview?”

  “Bayview? No, I went to the Lucky on Sloat. You didn’t answer me, son, and I’m asking you for the third and final time before I kick you the hell out. What’s this about?”

  “Shots were fired through Connor Grant’s windows this evening at around eight. A car was spotted leaving the area that matches the description of your Land Rover.”

  “Oh, I see. This is because I shouted at that scum sucker. Was he killed, I hope?”

  One of the men at the table said, “Eight o’clock? Cary was right here at eight, wasn’t he, boys?”

  The men around the table agreed: “Yeah,” “Uh-huh,” “Right here,” and “I can vouch for that.”

  Woodhouse smiled, put down his beer bottle.

  “I’ve got, count ’em, five alibis. Any other questions?”

  I said, “What kind of guns do you own, Mr. Woodhouse?”

  Woodhouse said, “Oh, come on. I have a lot of weapons, and some of them are recently fired. I used them at the gun club range this morning. If you want to check them out, I guess you’re going to need a warrant.”

  I said, “Mr. Woodhouse, if anything should happen to Connor Grant, you’re suspect number one.”

  “Duly noted,” he said, giving me a look that could stop a tank in its tracks. He went on to say, “I can’t believe that you, of all people, are trying to protect that maniac. Please. Show yourselves out.”

  Woodhouse placed a deck of cards in front of the older man to his right.

  “Dad, you’re up. Dealer’s choice.”

  Out again on the street, Rich and I said our good-nights. With luck, I’d be back in my favorite pj’s in a half hour. As for dreamland, I wasn’t sure I still had a ticket.

  CHAPTER 57

  NEDDIE LAMBO WAS pacing in Ward Six of the North Tower just after lights-out. He walked from window to window, to the bathroom, and back to the bunk room, restless as a man could be.

  He thought about Mr. Homes, the broker he’d put down, and the story on The Six O’Clock News Hour about Salesman of the Month Bobby Riccardo’s heart attack. That he was so young and so well regarded and how much he’d be missed—and it just pissed Neddie off. Big-time.

  Yes, indeed, it was a good thing that Bobby Riccardo had gotten all the attention, but it was maddening not to get any himself. People had thought he was a true moron since he was a little kid, and he’d learned how to work that angle to perfection. But sometimes, like right now, he wished a woman, or even a shrink, would see that someone was home inside of Neddie Lambo. That he was someone very special and very smart.

  Neddie paced some more. He looked at his sleeping bunkies, Fred Mouse and Quarter to Ten. He blew on Oscar’s face until the old dude flipped onto his stomach. He hid Goose Thomson’s shoe in Randy Rockefeller’s trunk because Goose would go full-bore insane when he couldn’t find his shoe.

  But Neddie was getting nowhere fast. Or slow, either.

  He had a lot of anger right now, thinking about that damned real estate salesman, and he had to blow it off. He had been at the Loony Bin for thirty-six years and had amassed many privileges. The best of them was not the bunk by the window, the seat at the head of the table, or the title of Dorm Dad.

  It was that he could leave the Bin on his own.

  Normally, he spaced out these trips abroad. He’d put down the broker only a week ago, but tonight, since the TV coverage of the big funeral for Bob-Bob-Bobby Riccardo, he felt an urgent need to fly.

  But where to go?

  Neddie knew the vast network of underground spaces beneath San Francisco as if he’d designed those secret places himself.

  For one thing, there were the former speakeasies that had been the major entertainment during Prohibition. Along with the speakeasies there had been brothels galore, many of them underground and connected by secret passageways.

  Many or even most of the older buildings from that time had storage rooms that went out under the sidewalks and sometimes under the streets, too.

  Even ships were buried downtown, and Neddie had seen them, walked through and over them. It was just fantastic. He’d even been to a place under a saloon where sailors had been shanghaied, sold to merchant ships. And then there was the entire Embarcadero, with its wide sidewalk built over a beach and a bay.

  It was all true.

  Neddie knew where these secret rooms connected and where the tunnels surfaced. He had his own private runways and escape hatches under the buildings and pavement. He had done the cartography in his mind. He’d done it himself.

  He was not as dumb and crazy and brain damaged as he appeared to be in the files and folders about him, in the books that the shrinks wrote about their patients, labeled with numbers instead of names, in his reflection in the glassy eyes of the nurses who hardly thought of him at
all.

  He tickled the feet of the man sleeping in the bunk next to his.

  “Mike-Mike-Mike.”

  “What, Neddie? What do you want now?”

  “I can’t keep you safe from Meanies tonight, Mikey. I have to fly.”

  “Go, Neddie. I’m strong. Loud Mike can take care of himself.”

  Yesssss.

  Neddie Lambo, Space-Time Traveler, King of the Underground.

  Where should he go tonight?

  CHAPTER 58

  IT WAS AFTER 9:00 p.m. when Neddie took the stairs down from Ward Six to the basement-level tunnel, which was the corridor to many service rooms, including the kitchen and the laundry. It also ran between the Loony Bin and Saint Vartan’s Medical Center.

  Neddie wore a black hoodie under a hip-length denim jacket. His weapon of choice was in his pocket, and his most serious running shoes peeked out from the legs of his jeans.

  Dodging the few orderlies and maintenance workers using the underground tunnel at that hour, Neddie stuck to the shadows, then exited through the medical waste room under Saint Vartan’s and walked a block and a half overland to Jones Street.

  Jones had once been a hive of speakeasies with escape hatches into underground hidey rooms, and Neddie knew the whole subterranean network better than anyone.

  There, in front of the Wainscot, was one of Neddie’s best portals. He sat on the curb and had to wait only a minute for a burst of traffic to pass before removing the storm drain cover at his feet and climbing inside. He smoothly replaced the cover and began his descent down the metal ladder, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dark.

  Once he reached the bottom of the ladder, it was an easy sprint along the old speakeasy connector to the manhole at Sixth and Stevenson. Neddie was not only swift, he was nimble. He made the short hand-over-hand climb, listened for a break in traffic, then shouldered open the heavy lid capping the entrance to the tunnel.

  Aboveground again, Neddie walked in darkness, making turns along well-traveled streets into narrow alleys, passing strollers and dog walkers in ones and twos in Sue Bierman Park. He kept his hood up, his hands in his pockets, his eyes down, finally taking a pathway at the end of Drumm to the Embarcadero.