Women's Murder Club [07] 7th Heaven

by James Patterson

  “Actually, we brought you this,” Pidge said, handing over the bottle of Cointreau. Connor thanked the boy, slid down the foil bag, and looked at the label.

  “Thanks for this. I’ll open this for you if you like, or maybe you’d like something else. I’m having scotch.”

  “We’re good, sir,” said Pidge.

  Campion put the bottle next to Michael’s picture on the ornately carved mantelpiece, then bent to open the bowed glass doors of the vitrine he used as a liquor cabinet. He took out a bottle of Chivas and a glass. When he turned, he saw the gun in Hawk’s hand.

  Campion’s muscles clenched as he stared at the revolver; then he looked up at the smirk on Pidge’s face.

  “Are you crazy? You’re holding me up?”

  Behind Pidge, Hawk’s eyes were bright, smiling with anticipation, as he took a reel of fishing line out of his back pocket. Horror came over Campion as suspicion bloomed in his mind. He turned his back to the boys, said neutrally, “I guess I won’t be having this.” He made a show of putting the Chivas back inside the cabinet, while feeling around the shelf with the flat of his hand.

  “We have to tie you up, sir, make it look like a robbery. It’s for our own protection,” Pidge said.

  “And you need to get Mrs. Campion down here,” Hawk added firmly. “She’ll want to hear what we have to say.”

  Campion whipped around, pointed his SIG at Hawk’s chest, and squeezed the trigger. Bang.

  Hawk’s face registered surprise as he looked down at his pink shirt, saw the blood.

  “Hey,” said Hawk.

  Didn’t these punks know that a man like him would have guns stashed everywhere? Campion fired at Hawk again, and the boy dropped to his knees. He stared up at the older man and returned fire, his shot shattering the mirror over the fireplace. Then Hawk collapsed onto the rug facedown.

  Pidge had frozen at the sound of the shooting. Now he screamed, “You shit! You crazy old shit! Look what you did!”

  Pidge backed out of the room, and when he cleared the library’s doorway, he turned and raced for the front door. Campion walked over to Hawk, kicked the gun out of his outstretched hand, lost his footing, and fell, hitting his chin against the edge of the desk. He pulled himself up using the desk leg, then stumbled out to the vestibule and pressed the intercom that connected to the caretaker’s cottage.

  “Glen,” he yelled. “Call 911. I shot someone!”

  By the time Campion reached the front walk, Pidge was gone. The caretaker came running across the yard with a rifle, and Valentina stood in the front doorway, her eyes huge, asking him what in God’s name had happened.

  Lights winked on in neighboring houses, and the wolfhound next door barked.

  But there was no sign of Pidge.

  Campion clamped his fist around the grip of his gun and shouted into the dark, “You killed my son, you son of a bitch, didn’t you? You killed my son!”

  Chapter 102

  I ARRIVED AT the Campions’ home within fifteen minutes of getting Jacobi’s call. A herd of patrol cars blocked the street, and paramedics bumped down the stone steps with their loaded gurney, heading out to the ambulance.

  I went to the gurney, observed as much of the victim as I could. An oxygen mask half covered his face, and a sheet was pulled up to his chin. I judged that the young man was in his late teens or early twenties, white, with well-cut, dirty-blond hair, maybe five ten.

  Most important, he was alive.

  “Is he going to make it?” I asked one of the paramedics.

  She shrugged, said, “He’s got two slugs in him, Sergeant. Lost a lot of blood.”

  Inside the house, Jacobi and Conklin were debriefing the former governor and Valentina Campion, who sat together on a sofa, shoulder to shoulder, their hands entwined. Conklin shot me a look: something he wanted me to understand. It took me a few minutes to get it.

  Jacobi filled me in on what had transpired, told me that there was no ID on the kid Campion had shot. Then he said to the former governor, “You say you can identify the second boy, sir? Help our sketch artist?”

  Campion nodded. “Absolutely. I’ll never forget that kid’s face.”

  Campion looked to be in terrible pain. He’d shot someone only minutes before, and when he asked me to sit down in the chair near the sofa, I thought he wanted to tell me about that. But I was wrong.

  Campion said, “Michael wanted to be like his friends. Go out. Have fun. So I was always on his case, you know? When I caught him sneaking out at night, I reprimanded him, took away privileges, and he hated me for it.”

  “No he didn’t,” Valentina Campion said sharply. “You did what I didn’t have the courage to do, Connor.”

  “Sir?” I said, wondering where he was going with this.

  Campion’s face sagged with exhaustion.

  “He was being irresponsible,” Campion continued, “and I was trying to keep him safe. I was looking ahead to the future — a new medical procedure, a pharmaceutical breakthrough. Something.

  “I told him, straight up, ‘When you decide to act like an adult, let me know.’ I wasn’t angry, I was afraid,” Campion said, his voice cracking. “So I lost him before I lost him.”

  His wife tried to calm him, but Connor Campion wouldn’t be soothed. “I was a tyrant,” Campion said. “Mikey and I didn’t speak for the whole last month of his life. If I’d known he had a month to live . . . Michael told me, ‘Quality of life, Dad. That’s what’s important.’ ”

  Campion fixed me with his bloodshot eyes.

  “You seem to be a caring person, Sergeant. I’m telling you this so you understand. I let those hooligans into my house because they said they had information about Michael — and I had to know what it was.

  “Now I think they killed him, don’t you? And tonight they were going to rob us. But why? Why?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  I told Campion that as soon as we knew anything, we’d let him know. That was all I had for him. But I got it now, why Conklin had given me that look when I’d walked in the door. My mind was running with it.

  I signaled to my partner and we went outside.

  Chapter 103

  CONKLIN AND I leaned against the side of my car, facing the Campion house, staring at the lights glowing softly through a million little windowpanes. Campion and his wife didn’t know what kind of death Hawk and Pidge had planned for them tonight, but we knew — and thinking about that near miss was giving me the horrors.

  If Connor Campion hadn’t fired his gun, Hawk and Pidge would have roasted him and his wife alive.

  Rich pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one — and this time I took him up on it.

  “Might be some prints on that foil around the bottle of booze,” he said.

  I nodded, thinking we’d be lucky if those kids had records, if their prints were in AFIS, but I wasn’t counting on it.

  “Hawk. Pidge. Crazy names,” Conklin said.

  “I got a pretty good look at Hawk,” I said. “He matches Molly Chu’s description of the so-called angel who carried her out of the fire.”

  Conklin exhaled a long stream of smoke into the night. He said, “And the governor’s description of Pidge sounds like the kid who pawned Patty Malone’s necklace.”

  “And of course there’s the fishing line. So . . . what are we thinking?” I said to Conklin. “That Hawk and Pidge also killed Michael Campion? Because I don’t see two guys killing a kid when their MO is to tie up rich couples, leave a few words in Latin inside a book, and then burn the house down.”

  Conklin said, “Nope. That doesn’t work for me, either. So why do you think these birds targeted the Campions?”

  “Because the Campions are in the news. Big house. Big fire. Big headlines. Big score.”

  Conklin smiled, said, “Only they screwed up.”

  I smiled back, said, “Yeah.”

  We were both starting to feel it, the kind of incomparable exhilaration that comes when after
nothing but dead ends, A leads to B leads to C. I was sure that Hawk and Pidge were the sadists who did the arson killings, but not only couldn’t we prove that, we didn’t know who Hawk and Pidge were.

  I stamped out my cigarette on the street, said to Conklin, “That Hawk bastard had better live.”

  “At least long enough to talk,” said my partner.

  Chapter 104

  HAWK’S SURGEON, Dr. Dave Hammond, was a compact man with rusty hair and the tight manner of a perfectionist who’d spent the night stitching his patient’s guts back together. Conklin and I had spent the same eight hours in a small, dull waiting room at St. Francis Hospital, waiting for Hammond’s report.

  When the doctor entered the waiting room at 6:15 a.m., I shot to my feet, asked, “Is he awake?”

  Hammond said, “Right now, the patient’s condition defines touch-and-go. He was bleeding like a son of a bitch when he came in. One slug punctured his lung and nicked his aorta. The other damn near pulverized his liver.”

  Conklin said, “So, Doctor, when can we talk to him?”

  “Inspector, you understand what I just said? We had to inflate the kid’s lungs, transfuse him, and remove a chunk of his liver. This is what we like to call major surgery.”

  Conklin smiled winningly. “Okay. I hear you. Is he awake?”

  “He just opened his eyes.” Hammond sighed with disgust. “I’ll give you one minute to get in and get out.”

  One minute was all we’d need, enough time to wring two words from that bastard — his first name and his last. I pushed open the door marked RECOVERY and approached Hawk’s bed. It was a shocking sight.

  Hawk’s body was lashed down in four-point restraints so that he couldn’t flail and undo the work his surgeons had just done. Even his head was restrained. IV bags dripped fluids into his body, a chest tube drained ooze out of his lungs, a catheter carried waste into a canister under the bed, and he was breathing oxygen through a cannula clipped to his nose.

  Hawk looked bad, but he was alive.

  Now I had to get him to talk.

  I touched his hand and said, “Hi there. My name is Lindsay.”

  Hawk’s eyes flickered open.

  “Where . . . am I?” he asked me.

  I told him that he’d been shot, that he was in a hospital, and that he was doing fine.

  “Why can’t . . . I move?”

  I told him about the restraints and why he was tied down, and I asked for his help. “I need to call your family, but I don’t know your name.”

  Hawk scanned my face, then dropped his gaze to the badge on my lapel, the bulge of my gun under my jacket. He murmured something I had to strain to hear.

  “My work here is finished,” Hawk said.

  “No,” I shouted, gripping the kid’s hand with both of mine. “You are not going to die. You’ve got a great doctor. We all want to help you, but I have to know your name. Please, Hawk, tell me your name.”

  Hawk pursed his lips, starting to form a word — and then, as though an electric current had taken over his body, his back bowed and he went rigid against his restraints. Simultaneously, the rapid, high-pitched beeping of an alarm filled the room. I wanted to scream.

  I held on to Hawk’s hand as his eyes rolled back and a noise came from his throat like soda water pouring into a glass. The monitor tracking his vital signs showed Hawk’s heart rate spike to 170, drop to 60, and rocket again even as his blood pressure dropped through the floor.

  “What’s happening?” Conklin asked me.

  “He’s crashing,” Hammond shouted, stiff-arming the door. The rapid beeping turned into one long squeal as the green lines on the monitor went flat.

  Hammond yelled, “Where’s the goddamned cart!”

  As the medics rolled it in, Conklin and I were pushed away from the bed. A nurse closed the curtain, blocking our view. I heard the frenzy of doctors working to shock Hawk’s heart back into rhythm.

  “Come on, come on,” I heard Dr. Hammond say. Then, “Crap. Time of death, 6:34 a.m.”

  “Damn it,” I said to Conklin. “Damn it to hell.”

  Chapter 105

  AT 7:45 THAT MORNING, I took off my jacket, hung it over the back of my chair, opened my coffee container, and sat down at my desk across from Conklin.

  “He died on purpose, that monster,” I said to my partner.

  “He’s dead, but this is not a dead end,” Conklin muttered.

  “Is that a promise?”

  “Yeah. Boy Scout’s honor.”

  I opened my desk drawer, took out two cello-wrapped pastries, not more than a week old. I lobbed one to Rich, who caught it on the fly.

  “Oooh. I love a woman who bakes.”

  I laughed, said, “Be glad for that coffee cake, mister. Who knows when we’ll see food again.”

  We were waiting for phone calls. A blurry photo of Hawk being wheeled out of the Campion house was running in the morning Chronicle. It was unlikely someone could ID him from that, but not impossible. At just after eight, my desk phone warbled. I grabbed the receiver and heard Charlie Clapper’s voice.

  “Lindsay,” he said, “there were a dozen prints on that bottle and the foil it was wrapped in.”

  “Tell me something good.”

  “I’d love to, my friend,” Clapper said. “But all we’ve got for sure is a match to Hawk’s prints, and he’s not in AFIS.”

  “There’s a shock. So he’s still a John Doe and, I take it, so is Pidge.”

  “Sorry, kiddo. The only other match I got was to Connor Campion.”

  I sighed, said, “Thanks anyway, Charlie,” and stabbed the blinking button of my second line.

  Chuck Hanni’s voice sounded wound-up, excited.

  “Glad I got you,” Hanni said. “There’s been a fire.”

  I pressed the speaker button so Conklin could hear.

  “It just happened a few hours ago in Santa Rosa,” Chuck said. “Two fatalities. I’m on the way out there now.”

  “It’s arson? You think it’s related to our case?”

  “The sheriff told me that one of the vics was found with a book in his lap.”

  I stared at Conklin, knowing he was thinking the same thing: that SOB Pidge hadn’t wasted any time.

  “We’ll meet you there,” I said to Hanni.

  I wrote down the address and hung up the phone.

  Chapter 106

  THE HOUSE WAS TUDOR-STYLE, surrounded by tall firs and located in a development of million-dollar-and-up homes bordering on a golf course in Santa Rosa. We edged our car into the pack of sheriff’s cruisers and fire rigs, all of which had been on the scene for hours. The firefighters were wrapping up as the ME and arson investigators came and went, ducking under the barrier tape that had been looped around the premises.

  I was furious that Pidge had killed again, and once again, he’d taken his hellacious arson spree to a county where Rich, Chuck, and I had no official standing.

  Chuck called out to us, and we walked toward the house.

  “The fire was contained in the garage,” he said, massaging the old burn scar on his hand.

  Hanni held the garage door open, and Conklin and I stepped inside. It was a three-car garage, tools and lawn equipment against the walls, and in the center of the floor was a late-model minivan that had been seared by flames, the exterior scorched black, blue, and a powdery gray. Hanni introduced us around to Sheriff Paul Arcario, to the ME, Dr. Cecilia Roach, and to the arson investigator, Matt Hartnett, who said he was a friend of Chuck’s.

  “The homeowner is a Mr. Alan Beam,” Hartnett told us. “He’s still inside his vehicle. And there’s a second victim, a female. She was found on the floor next to the van. She’s in a body bag for safekeeping. Otherwise, everything is just as we found it.”

  Hanni shined his light into the carcass of the van so that Conklin and I could get a better look at the victim’s incinerated body in the driver’s seat. The seat was tilted back. A heavy chain lay across the victim’s legs, and
a small book rested on his lap, right above the pink and protruding coils of his large intestine.

  I went weak at the knees.

  The smells of burned flesh and gasoline were overpowering. I could almost hear the screaming, the pleading, the soft whick of a match, and the boom of the consuming fire. Rich asked me if I was okay, and I said that I was. But what I was thinking was that what had happened here in the small hours of the morning had been the ultimate in terror and agony.

  That it had been nothing less than the horror of hell.

  Chapter 107

  DR. ROACH ZIPPED the body bag closed and asked her assistants to carry the female victim out to the van. Roach was petite, in her forties, wore her thick graying hair in a ponytail and her glasses on a beaded chain.

  “There was no ID on her,” Dr. Roach told me. “All I can say is that she looks to be a juvenile, maybe a teenager.”

  “Not Beam’s wife?”

  “The ex–Mrs. Beam lives in Oakland,” said the sheriff, closing his cell phone. “She’ll be here in a few.”

  Hanni began a run-through of the fire for our benefit.

  “The fire started inside the passenger compartment,” he said. “Paper and wood were piled up in the backseat directly behind the driver. And this is a tow chain,” he said of the heavy links lying across the victim’s lap.

  He pointed to a metal bar down in the driver-side foot well, explained that it was a steering wheel lock, like The Club, and that it had been passed through the chain and locked around the steering column. Hanni theorized that first the chains and The Club were locked, then the newspapers and wood were doused with gasoline.

  “Then, probably, the gas was poured over the victims and the can was wedged behind the seats —”

  “Sorry, folks, but I’ve got to start processing this scene,” Hartnett said, opening his kit. “I’m getting shit from the chief.”