Women's Murder Club [03] 3rd Degree

by James Patterson

  He ordered an FBI team on a copter down to Redwood City. The toxicology expert was hooked right into our speakers. “If it’s ricin,” he said, “we’re going to see immediate convulsions, massive broncho-constriction, with intense, influenza-like symptoms.”

  Claire had gotten patched through to the school nurse. She identified herself and said, “I need you to carefully describe the symptoms the children are showing.”

  “I didn’t know what it was,” a frantic voice came back. “The kids were suddenly weak, showing signs of severe nausea. Temperatures were almost a hundred and four. Abdominal pain, throwing up.”

  One of the emergency copters had already gotten to the school and was circling, relaying film from above. Children were rushing out of the exits, guided by teachers. Frantic parents were arriving on the scene.

  All of a sudden, a second report crackled over the airwaves. A worker had collapsed at a construction site in San Leandro. That was on the other side of the bay. They didn’t know if it was a heart attack, or something ingested.

  As we tried to follow up, a news flash broadcast came over one of the monitors: “Breaking news… In Redwood City, the local elementary school has been evacuated after children were rushed to a nearby hospital, having collapsed, showing signs of violent sickness, possibly related to a toxic substance. This, on top of broadcast alerts of possible terrorist activity today…”

  “Any more reports of illness from the school?” Molinari spoke into the phone.

  “None yet,” the principal replied. The school was completely evacuated. The helicopter was still circling.

  Suddenly a doctor from the ER gave us an update. “Their temperatures are one oh three point five to one oh four,” the doctor reported. “Acute nausea and dyspnea. I don’t know what’s causing it. I’ve never had experience with this sort of thing before.”

  “You need to take immediate mouth and nasal swabs to determine if they were exposed,” the toxins expert was instructing. “And chest X-rays. Look for any kind of bilateral infiltrates.”

  Claire cut in. “How are the pulmonary functions? Breathing? Lung activity?”

  Everyone waited anxiously. “They seem to be functioning,” the doctor reported.

  Claire grabbed Molinari’s arm. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I don’t think this is ricin,” she said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  Claire had the floor. “Ricin attacks through a necrosis of the vascular cells. I saw the results. The lungs would already be starting to degrade. Also, ricin has a four-to-eight-hour incubation period, does it not, Dr. Taub?” she asked the toxicology expert on the line.

  The expert begrudgingly agreed.

  “That means they would’ve had to have been exposed during the night. If the lungs are symptom-free, I don’t think it has anything to do with that water. I don’t know if this is some kind of staph attack, or strychnine…. I don’t think it’s ricin.”

  The minutes passed slowly as the doctors in Redwood City ran through the first series of diagnostic tests.

  An EMS team was already on the scene in San Leandro. They reported that the construction worker there was having a heart attack and had been stabilized. “A heart attack,” they repeated.

  Minutes later, Redwood City reported back. A chest X-ray showed no deterioration of the lungs in any of the children. “The bloodwork showed traces of staphylococcal enterotoxin B.”

  I watched Claire’s expression.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mayor Fiske demanded.

  “It means they’ve got a severe staph infection,” she said, exhaling. “It’s serious, and it’s contagious, but it’s not ricin.”

  Chapter 80

  THE RINCON CENTER was full at noon. Hundreds of people chatting over lunch, scanning the sports pages, rushing around with bags from the Gap or Office Max. Just relaxing under the enormous plane of water that fell from the glittering roof.

  The pianist was playing. Mariah Carey. “A hero comes along…” But no one seemed to notice the music or the player. Hell, he was awful.

  Robert sat reading the paper, his heart beating wildly. No more room for talk or argument, he kept thinking. No more waiting for change. Today he’d make his own. God knows, he was one of the disenfranchised. In and out of VA hospitals. Made crazy by his combat experience, then abandoned. That was what had made him a radical.

  He tapped the leather briefcase with his shoes, just to make sure it was still there. He was reminded of something he had seen on TV, in a dramatization of the Civil War. A runaway slave had been freed and then conscripted to fight for the North. He fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. After one, he happened to spot his old master, shell-shocked and wounded among the Confederate prisoners. “Hello, massa,” the slave went up to him and said, “looks like bottom rail’s on top now.”

  And that’s what Robert was thinking as he panned the unsuspecting lawyers and bankers slopping down their lunch. Bottom rail’s on top now….

  Across the crowd, the man Robert was waiting for stepped into the concourse—the man with the salt-and-pepper hair. His blood came alive. He stood, wrapping his fingers around the case handle, keeping his eyes fixed on the man—his target for today.

  This was the moment, he told himself, when all the fancy speeches and vows and homilies turn into deed. He tossed down his newspaper. The area around the fountain was jam-packed. He headed toward the piano.

  Are you afraid to act? Are you afraid to set the wheel in motion?

  No, Robert said, I’m ready. I’ve been ready for years. He stopped and waited at the piano. The pianist started up a new tune, the Beatles: “Something.” More of the white man’s garbage.

  Robert smiled at the young red-headed dude behind the keyboard. He took a bill out of his wallet and stuffed it in the bowl.

  Thanks, man, the pianist nodded.

  Robert nodded back, almost laughed at the false camaraderie, and rested his briefcase against a leg of the piano. He checked the progress of his target—thirty feet away—and casually kicked the briefcase underneath the piano. Take that, you sons of bitches!

  Robert started to drift slowly toward the north entrance. This is it, baby. This is what he’d been waiting for. He fumbled through his pocket for the stolen cell phone. The target was only about fifteen feet away. Robert turned at the exit doors and took it all in.

  The man with the salt-and-pepper hair stopped at the piano, just as the Professor said he would. He took a dollar bill out of his wallet. Behind him, the eighty-foot column of water splashed down from the ceiling.

  Robert pushed through the doors, walked away from the building, and depressed two preassigned keys on the cell phone—G-8.

  Then the whole world seemed to burst into smoke and flame, and Robert felt the most incredible satisfaction of his entire life. This was a war he wanted to fight in.

  He never saw the flash, only the building wrenching in a rumble of concrete and glass, doors blowing out behind him.

  Start the revolution, baby…. Robert smiled to himself. Bottom rail’s on top now….

  Chapter 81

  THERE WAS A LOUD SHOUT in the Emergency Command Center. One of the guys manning the police frequency yanked off his headset. “A bomb just went off at the Rincon Center!”

  I turned to Claire and felt the life deflate out of me. The Rincon Center was one of the city’s most spectacular settings, in the heart of the Financial District, home to government agencies, business offices, and hundreds of apartments. This time of day, it would be jammed. How many people had just died?

  I wasn’t waiting around for police reports to call in the damage or casualties. I ran out of the Emergency Command Center with Claire a step behind. We hopped in her medical examiner’s van. It took about fifteen minutes for us to race downtown and fight our way through the maze of traffic, fire vehicles, and bystanders crowded around the stricken area. Reports coming over the radio said the bomb had gone off in the atr
ium, where it would be busiest at noon.

  We ditched the van at the corner of Beale and Folsom and started to run. We could see smoke rising from the Rincon a couple of blocks away. We had to go to the Steuart Street entrance, running past the Red Herring, Harbor Court Hotel, the Y.

  “Lindsay, this is so bad, so bad,” Claire moaned.

  The first thing that hit me was the blunt cordite smell. The outside glass doors were completely blown away. People sat on the sidewalk, coughing, bleeding, slashed by exploding glass, expelling smoke out of their lungs. Survivors were still being evacuated left and right. That meant the worst was inside.

  I took a deep breath. “Let’s go. Be careful, Claire.”

  Everything was covered with hot black soot. Smoke stabbed at my lungs. The police were trying to clear some space. Fire crews were dousing sporadic blazes.

  Claire knelt next to a woman whose face was burned and who was shouting that she couldn’t see. I pushed past them, farther in. A couple of bodies were crumpled in the center of the atrium near the Rain Column, which continued to pour water into a pond built into the floor. What have these people done? Is this their idea of war?

  Experienced cops were barking into handheld radios, but I saw younger ones just standing around, blinking back tears.

  In the center of the atrium, my eye fell on a mangle of twisted wood and melted wire—the remains of what looked like a piano. I spotted Niko Magitakos from the Bomb Squad crouched next to it. He had a look on his face that I will never forget. Something terrible like this, you pray it will never come.

  I pushed my way over to Niko.

  “The blast site,” he said, tossing a piece of charred wood in the piano pile. “Those bastards, those bastards, Lindsay. People were just having lunch here.”

  I was no bomb expert, but I could see a ring of devastation—benches, trees, burn smears—the location of the casualties blasted out from the center of the atrium.

  “Two witnesses say they saw a well-dressed black male. He left a briefcase under the piano and then split. My guess, it’s the same work as the Marina case. C-4, detonated electronically. Maybe by phone.”

  A woman in a Bomb Squad jacket came running up, holding what looked like a fragment from a blown-apart leather case.

  “Mark it,” Niko instructed her. “If we can find the handle, maybe there’ll even be a print.”

  “Wait,” I said as she started to walk away. What she had found was a wide leather strap, the piece that closed over the top of a briefcase and buckled into the clasp. Two gold letters were monogrammed into the strap. AS.

  A sickening feeling rose up inside me. They were fucking with us. They were mocking us. I knew what the letters stood for, of course.

  A.S. August Spies.

  My cell phone went off and I grabbed it. Cindy was on the line.

  “Are you there, Lindsay?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m here. What’s up?”

  “They took credit for the bombing,” she told me. “Somebody called it in to the paper. The caller said he was August Spies. He said, ‘Three more days, then watch out!’ He said this was just practice.”

  Chapter 82

  BY LATE AFTERNOON it finally caught up with me that I hadn’t gotten even an hour’s sleep for the second night in three days.

  I also started to feel that I was missing something important about the case. I was sure of it.

  I called Cindy and Claire together. I’d been so focused on finding Hardaway, I’d missed something else.

  Claire had spent the day in the morgue with the grim task of trying to identify the victims of the Rincon Center blast. There were sixteen dead so far, and more to come, unfortunately. She agreed to meet for a few minutes across the street at Susie’s, our familiar corner table.

  The minute I hit the street on the way to Susie’s, I could feel the anxiety, see it on faces. Claire and Cindy were waiting for me inside.

  “The note about Jill is the key.” I told them my latest theory as we sipped our tea.

  “The note said she was part of the state,” Claire said, looking puzzled.

  “Not that one. Cindy’s e-mail. It said, ‘This one wasn’t like the others….’”

  “This one was personal,” Cindy finished it off.

  “You’re thinking Jill had some personal contact with this guy?” Claire blinked. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what I’m thinking. Just that each of these victims was chosen precisely. None of the killings have been random. So what led them to Jill? They tracked her. They cased her home and picked her up. Lightower, Bengosian… Something tied Jill to the two of them.”

  “Maybe one of her cases?” Cindy shrugged. Claire seemed unconvinced.

  There was a lull in the conversation. We looked around. The silence brought us all to the same place. The empty seat at the table.

  “It’s so strange to be here,” Claire said, letting out a breath, “to be doing this, without Jill. To be talking about her.”

  “Jill’s gonna help us,” I whispered.

  I looked at both of them. A renewed sparkle was in their eyes.

  “Okay,” Claire said, nodding, “how?”

  “We’re going to look over her old cases,” I said. “I’ll try and get someone on Sinclair’s staff to pitch in.”

  “And we’re looking for what exactly?” Cindy narrowed her eyes.

  “You got the e-mail. Something personal,” I said. “Just like this case is for us. Look at the faces in here, and out on the street. Somebody has to stop these bastards, these murderers.”

  Chapter 83

  BENNETT SINCLAIR hooked me up with Wendy Hong, a young prosecutor in his department, and with April, Jill’s assistant. We requisitioned Jill’s casework over the past eight years. All of it!

  It was a mountain of paperwork, wheeled up from the law morgue in large laundry-style pushcarts and stacked in Jill’s office in columns of thick, bound files.

  So we started in.

  By day, I still ran the investigation, trying to close in on Hardaway. But at night, and every other available moment I could find, I went downstairs and plowed through the files. Claire pitched in. So did Cindy. Deep into the night, it seemed Jill’s light was the only one left on in the Hall.

  This one was personal. The phrase rang in our ears.

  But we didn’t find anything. A lot of people’s time wasted. If there was a connection to August Spies in Jill’s life, it wasn’t in her files. Where was it? It had to be there somewhere.

  Finally, we loaded the last of the files to go back to the morgue.

  “Go home,” Claire said to me, exhausted herself. “Get some sleep.” She struggled up and pulled on her raincoat. She placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “We’ll find another way, Lindsay. We will.”

  Claire was right. I needed a good night’s sleep more than anything in the world, other than a warm bath. I had staked so much on this.

  I checked in with the office one more time, then, for the first time I could remember, packed up to head home for some sleep. I got in the Explorer and started heading down Brannan for Potrero. I stopped at a light. I was feeling totally empty.

  The light changed. I sat there. I knew inside that I wasn’t going home.

  I jerked a right when the light changed, and headed out on Sixteenth toward Buena Vista Park. It wasn’t as if any brilliant idea flashed into my brain…. More like a lack of anything else to do.

  Something connected them. I was sure of that much. I just hadn’t found it.

  There was a single patrol guy guarding Jill’s town house when I pulled up. Crime scene tape blocked the stairs to the landing.

  I ID’d myself to the young officer at the door, who was probably happy for the diversion at this time of night. I stepped inside Jill’s house.

  Chapter 84

  A REALLY CREEPY FEELING came over me that this might not be something I should be doing. Walking around the home I had been to so many times,
knowing Jill was dead. Seeing her things: a Burberry umbrella, Otis’s food bowl, a stack of recent newspapers. I was overcome with a sense of loneliness, missing her more than ever.

  I went into the kitchen. I leafed through some loose things on an old pine desk. Everything was just as she’d left it. A note to Ingrid, her housekeeper. A few bills. Jill’s familiar handwriting. It was almost as if she were still there.

  I went upstairs. I walked down the hall to Jill’s study. This was where she did her work, spent a lot of her time. Jill’s space.

  I sat down at her desk. I smelled her scent. Jill had an old brass lamp. I flicked it on. Some letters scattered on the desk. One from her sister, Beth. Some photos: her and Steve and Otis at Moab.

  What are you doing in here, Lindsay? I asked myself again. What are you hoping to find? Something signed by August Spies? Don’t be a fool.

  I opened one of the desk drawers. Files. Household things. Trips, airline mileage statements.

  I got up and stepped over to the bookshelf. The Voyage of the Narwhal, The Corrections, stories by Eudora Welty. Jill always had good taste in books. Never knew when she found the time to read these things. But somehow she did.

  I bent down and opened a cupboard under the shelf. I came upon boxes of old pictures. Trips taken, her sister’s wedding. Some went back as far as her college graduation.

  Look at Jill: frizzy hair, thin as a rail, but strong. They made me smile. I sat on the hardwood floor and leafed through them. God, I miss you.

  I saw this old accordion-style folder, wrapped tightly by an elastic cord. I opened it. Lots of old things. What it contained surprised me. Letters, photos, newspaper clippings. Some report cards from when Jill was in high school. Her parents’ wedding invitation.

  And a file stuffed with newspaper clippings. I leafed through them. They were mostly about her father.