Authors: James Patterson
Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Suspense, #antique
The 5th Horseman (9 page)
She didn’t stop to say a word, or even to turn the light back on.
Feeling wobbly, Yuki negotiated the doorway, the hallway, the stairwell. And from there, she ran out to the street.
The air outside was heavy and damp, and suddenly she felt faint. Yuki sat down on the sidewalk under a large sycamore tree and stared at the people going to work as if it were a normal day.
She thought about the last time she’d seen her funny, feisty mom. Keiko had been eating ice cream in bed, dispensing her crazy old-world advice with the conviction of a judge.
And she remembered most how much they’d always laughed.
Now, all of that was over.
And it just shouldn’t be.
“Mom,” Yuki said now. “It wasn’t a dignified exit, I know, but I left that bastard sitting in the dark.”
She laughed to herself, thinking how much her mother would have enjoyed that scene.
Yuki-eh, why you never act like lady?
Then the pain swamped her.
Yuki drew her legs up and hugged them to her chest. With the solid old tree against her back, she put her head on her knees and wept for her mother. She sobbed like a child, one who would never be the same again.
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 36
IT WAS TOO EARLY for this kind of crap, just 7:00 in the morning when I pulled up to the curb in front of an old Tudor-style house on Chestnut Street. A large evergreen tree sent fingers of dark shade across the grass between the house and the garage. A handful of cops already dotted the front lawn.
I slammed the door shut on my three-year-old Explorer, buttoned my khaki blazer against the morning chill, and marched across the well-shorn grass.
Jacobi and Conklin were at the front doorstep interviewing a seventy-something couple wearing matching awning-striped bathrobes and slippers. With their stricken faces and spiky bed heads, the septuagenarians looked as shocked as if they’d just put their fingers into wall sockets.
The elderly gentleman screeched at Jacobi, “How do you know we don’t need police protection? You can see into the future?”
Jacobi turned his weary expression on me, and then introduced Mr. and Mrs. Robert Cronin.
“Hello,” I said, shaking their hands. “This is a terrible ordeal, I know. We’ll make it as easy on you as we possibly can.”
“CSU is on the way,” Conklin told me. “I’m okay here to do the interview, Lieutenant.” He was asking permission, but letting me know he was more than ready.
“It’s all yours, Inspector. Do your job.”
I excused myself and Jacobi; then we walked together toward the dark-blue Jaguar XK-E convertible parked with its top down in the driveway. A beautiful car, which only made things worse.
I’d known what to expect since getting Jacobi’s call twenty minutes ago. Still, when I looked into the victim’s face, my heart lurched.
Like Caddy Girl, this woman was white, probably eighteen to twenty-one, petite. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders in loose waves. The girl had lovely, lustrous hair.
She was “looking” out onto Chestnut Street with wide-open blue eyes. As with Caddy Girl, she’d been posed to look as though she were still alive.
“God, Jacobi,” I said. “Another one. Has to be. Jag Girl.”
“It was in the low fifties last night,” he told me. “She’s cold to the touch. And here we go again with the high-ticket clothes.”
“Head to toe.”
The victim was wearing a blue scarf-type blouse and a subtle blue-and-gray plaid tulip skirt. Her boots were Jimmy Choo, the kind that zip up the back. It was an outfit that would cost about three months’ of a cop’s salary.
One little discrepancy though. The dead girl’s jewelry struck me as wrong.
Her tennis bracelet and matching ear studs flashed with the prismatic light of fake diamonds. What was that all about?
I turned at the wail of sirens. I watched both the EMT and CSU vans roll up, park next to the lineup of squad cars.
Conklin crossed the lawn toward the EMTs. I heard him tell the driver, “She’s gone, buddy. Sorry you wasted the trip.”
As the ambulance shifted into reverse, Charlie Clapper stepped out of the scene-mobile with his kit and camera in hand. He walked over to where we were standing, said, “Another day, another body,” and asked us to kindly stand aside.
Jacobi and I stood a few yards from the Jaguar as Clapper shot his pictures.
I was thinking that I knew what he was going to find: a ligature mark at the young woman’s throat, no handbag, no ID — and that the car would otherwise be clean as a whistle.
“Smell that?” said Jacobi.
It was faint at this distance, but I’d smelled it before: a musky fragrance that made me think of orchids.
“Caddy Girl’s eau de toilette,” I said to my former partner. “You know, the first one you think, maybe it’s personal. But again? Another girl? Similar physically. Another immaculate crime scene? They’re getting off on the killings, Jacobi. They’re doing it for fun.”
We watched Clapper’s team dust the car for prints in silence. I knew that Jacobi and I were cycling the same unspoken questions.
Who were these two girls? And who was the kinky tag team that had murdered them?
What had triggered the killings?
What was the meaning of the odd dress-up tableaux?
“The balls on these guys,” said Jacobi as the ME’s van arrived. “Putting the vics on display like this. They’re not just having fun, Boxer. They’re giving somebody the finger.”
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 37
I GRABBED THE PHONE in my office on the first ring when I saw that it was Claire.
“I’ve got some preliminary findings on Jag Girl,” she told me.
“Want me to come down?”
“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” she said. “I’m ready for a change of scene.”
The smell of oregano and pepperoni preceded Claire, who ambled into my office with a pizza box and a couple of cans of Diet Coke, saying, “Lunch is served, baby girl. Nature’s most perfect food. Pizza.”
I moved files from the side chair, cleared the stuff on my desk onto the window ledge, put out my finest paper napkins and the plastic cutlery.
“I took the stairs,” Claire said, dropping into the chair, beginning to carve up the pie.
“Well, give them back. We’re gonna need them later.”
“As I was saying before your awful joke,” she said, laughing at me, “I climbed the stairs. Three steep flights. That’s about a hundred calories, wouldn’t you think?”
“Uh-huh, I’d say. Probably cancels out a quarter of a slice of nature’s perfect food.”
“Never mind that.” She chuckled, flopping a steaming slice onto my paper plate. “I don’t believe in making war with food. Food is not the enemy.”
“A truce on pizza,” I said.
“To the truce,” Claire said, touching her cola can to mine.
“The whole truce,” said I. “And three kinds of cheese.”
I joined in with Claire’s long, rolling laugh, one of my favorite sounds in the world. Whenever work got particularly grisly, the two of us got giddy. Sometimes, it even helped. We polished off one of Pronto Pizza’s best in about ten minutes as Claire brought me up to date on our latest Jane Doe.
“Taking into account her exposure to the low temperature last night, I’m calling Jag Girl’s time of death somewhere ’round midnight,” she said, lobbing her empty can into the trash basket.
“The clothes were gorgeous,” she said, “but a bad fit. Too small on top, too big across the hips, but this time her shoes fit.”
“And she never walked in them, right?”
“Clean soles. And just like with Caddy Girl, that funky perfume was only on her labia.”
“When are you starting the post?”
“Soon’s I get back downstairs.”
“Want some company?”
I phoned Tracchio’s office and blew off the staff meeting. Was I rebelling against authority? Yep. Then I went out to the squad room and invited Jacobi. I filled him in as we jogged down the stairs to the morgue.
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 38
I ALWAYS FOUND the stark reality of the morgue, Claire’s place, a shock to the nervous system — the unforgiving white light on the dead, the sheets hiding that their insides were out. The empty faces. The harsh scent of antiseptics.
Somehow, the circumstances didn’t completely dim Jag Girl’s material beauty. If anything, she looked younger, and more vulnerable, than she had dressed up in designer clothes.
The purple bruise circling her neck and the dusting of bluish bruising on her upper arms seemed like an insult to her flawless skin. After several hours in the morgue, she was starting to have a bad hair day, too.
I watched as my friend slipped into her gear — cap, gown, plastic apron, and gloves. “It looks like another soft kill,” Claire said. “No knives, no guns.”
Claire positioned her scalpel to make the deep, Y-shaped incision that would run from shoulder to shoulder, meeting at Jag Girl’s breastbone and extending down to her pubis.
She pulled up her mask, lowered her face shield, spoke into the mike as she made a layer-wise dissection of the strap musculature of Jag Girl’s neck.
She peeled back a flap of skin with her forceps. Showed me and Jacobi the brownish stain in the shape of a thumbprint.
“This young lady was asphyxiated by two complete nutjob assailants,” Claire said.
“Just like with Caddy Girl, there’s no petechial hemorrhaging. So someone held her down and burked her. Pressed her neck right here with his thumb. This boy is strong.
“Someone else applied a ligature. Sort of crinkly-like. Looks like a patterned impression, consistent with the rolled edge of a plastic bag. Probably put his paw over her nose and mouth to seal the deal.”
I couldn’t help staring at the victim and imagining the freaking outrageous homicide.
“It’s making me think that this is some kind of porn fantasy come to life,” I said. “No peep-show booth, no magazine or computer screen. What fun. Real girls without any barriers. The perps can drug them, rape them, dress them up, do whatever the hell they want.”
“There’s no sign this young lady fought back,” said Claire. “So until I get the tox screen, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say she was probably drugged, too.”
Jacobi seethed. “Fucking cowards.”
“Keep the faith, you guys,” said Claire. “I’ll call in a favor at the lab. See if I can put a rush on the DNA.”
I stepped closer to the table and looked into the victim’s lifeless face again. Finally, I reached over and closed her clouded blue eyes.
“We will get these bastards,” I told her.
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 39
CLAIRE SAW LINDSAY and Jacobi to the door, saying that she wished that she had given them more to work with, hoping for all of them that this poor dead girl would have a name unrelated to luxury cars very soon.
She made her call to DNA and got the usual — “Of course, Dr. Washburn, we’ll get right on it,” an assurance that came with an unspoken disclaimer, namely, “Do you understand how long this procedure takes? Do you know how many cases are ahead of yours?”
“I mean it,” she said to the lab supervisor. “This is urgent, rush, high priority.”
“Yes, ma’am. I got it.”
Claire was sliding Jag Girl into a drawer, when her cell phone rang. Yuki’s number flashed on the caller ID.
“Yuki! Darlin’, how are you holding up?” she asked. “Do you want me to pick you up or can you drive over by yourself? Edmund’s really looking forward to meeting you, and he’s cooking mushroom risotto tonight.”
“Claire, I’m sorry. I just can’t — I can’t be with people right now.”
Claire gave it a respectful beat; then she said, “Of course, honey. I understand.”
“But I have to ask a favor,” Yuki said, then sighed loudly.
“Whatever you need.”
“I want you to do an autopsy on my mom.”
Claire listened intently as Yuki described her meeting with Garza, and explained that she was completely unsatisfied with his explanation for her mother’s death.
Claire wanted to sigh out loud, too, but she held it in. She didn’t want to show any disrespect to Yuki.
“You’re sure you want me to do this, baby? Can you handle whatever I find?”
“I swear I can. I have to know if her death was avoidable. I absolutely have to know what happened to my mom.”
“I understand. I’ll arrange to have her brought here in the morning.”
“You’re the best,” Yuki said, her voice cracking from the pressure of tears.
“Don’t you worry, honey. She’s family. Just leave your mom to me.”
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 40
THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, Yuki was in her mother’s kitchen, standing over the sink. She stuffed a bite of toast into her mouth, hardly chewing. Everything about this still seemed so unreal.
She’d been up the whole night — phoning her mother’s friends, going through albums and scrapbooks, losing herself in memories. Now she wrenched herself back to the present, wondering when Claire would call and what Claire would say.
When the phone finally rang, Yuki lunged for it.
Claire asked, “How are you doing, honey?”
“I’m okay,” Yuki said, but that was a lie. She felt light-headed, her guts twisting as she waited for Claire to tell her about the end of her mother’s life. Finally, she couldn’t stand it another second.
“Did you find out anything?”
“I did, honey. For one thing, Garza was right when he told you that your mom had an embolism around her brain. What he didn’t tell you was it had to have been more than three hours before someone noticed that she was in trouble.
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