“You’re nuts,” she grumbled. Then she looked over at me. My grin set hers off.
“You kill me, Lindsay. You really do. But it’s your ass, baby.”
Ten minutes later, we followed Stark’s car off the highway into Moss Beach.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 70
THE MORGUE WAS IN the basement of the Seton Medical Center. It was a white-tiled room smelling as pristine and fresh as the frozen-food section in a supermarket. A cooler hummed gently in the background.
I nodded at two evidence techies who were grousing about some bureaucratic scheduling screwup as they folded the victims’ garments into brown paper bags.
I was drawn to the autopsy tables in the middle of the room, where the ME’s young assistant was running a sponge and hose over the Sarduccis’ bodies. He turned off the water and stepped aside as I approached.
Joseph and Annemarie lay naked and exposed under the bright lights. Their glistening bodies were unmarked except for ugly slash wounds across their necks, their faces as unlined in death as those of children.
Claire called my name, breaking my silent communion with the dead.
I turned and she introduced me to a man in blue scrubs and a plastic apron, with a net over his gray hair. He had a slight, stooped build and a lopsided smile, as if he had Bell’s palsy or had suffered a stroke.
“Lindsay, this is Dr. Bill Ramos, forensic pathologist. Bill, this is Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer, Homicide, from SFPD. There may be a link between these murders and a cold case of hers.”
I was shaking Ramos’s hand when Chief Stark came over.
“Doc, tell her what you told me on the phone.”
Ramos said, “Why don’t I show you?”
He spoke to his assistant: “Hey, Samir, I want to take a look at the female’s back, so give me a half turn. Let’s put her on the side.”
Samir crossed Annemarie’s ankles left over right, and the doctor reached over and took her left wrist. Then the two of them pulled the corpse so that it rested on one side.
I peered at seven yellowish marks crossing over one another on the dead woman’s buttocks, each about three-quarters of an inch in width, approximately three inches long.
“Tremendous force in these blows,” said Ramos. “Still, you can barely make them out. Samir, let’s turn Mr. Sarducci now.”
The doctor and his assistant pulled the male onto his side, his head lolling back pathetically as they did so.
“Now, see,” the doctor said, “here it is again. Multiple faint rectangular patterns, pressure-type abrasions. They aren’t the red brown color you’d see if the section had been struck while he was still alive, and they’re not the yellow parchmentlike abrasions you’d get if the blows were administered postmortem.”
The doctor looked up to make sure I understood.
“Punch me in the face, then shoot me twice in the chest. There won’t be enough blood pressure for me to get a rip-roaring bruise on my face, but there’ll be something there if my heart pumps for a moment.”
The doctor took a scalpel to one of the marks on the male’s back, cutting through unmarked tissue and the pale strap mark. “You can see this light brownish color under the abrasions, what’s called a ‘well-circumscribed focal accumulation of blood.’
“In plain English,” Ramos continued, “and wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Washburn? The deep slash across the carotid artery and the vagus nerves stopped the heart almost instantly, but not instantaneously. This man had one last heartbeat when he was whipped.
“These blows were administered cum-mortem—just before or at the time of death. In the mind of the killer, the victim could still feel the lash.”
“Looks like it was personal,” said Stark.
“Oh, yes. I’d say the killers hated their victims.”
There was a hush in the room as the doctor’s words sank in.
“The marks on Joe are narrower than the marks on Annemarie,” Claire noted.
“Yes,” Ramos agreed again. “Different implements.”
“Like a belt,” I said. “Could these whippings have been made by two different belts?”
“I can’t say positively, but it’s certainly consistent,” said Ramos.
Claire looked not only focused but sad. “What are you thinking?” I asked her.
“I hate to say it, Lindsay, but this really brings me back. The marks look like what I remember seeing on your John Doe.”
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 71
IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT when the Watcher headed inland from the beach. He climbed the sandy cliff, then stuck to the quarter mile of path that cut through the thistles and thick dune grasses and ran east from the cliffs. The Watcher could finally make out the serpentine bay-side road.
He was honing in on one particular house when he stumbled over a log in the path. He reached out to break his fall and went down hard, splaying on his belly, hands scraping packed sand and saw grass.
The Watcher got quickly to his knees, slapping his breast jacket pocket—his camera had flown.
“Fuck fuck fuck!” he yelled in frustration.
He crawled on all fours, patting the sand, feeling the sweat on his upper lip dry in the cool air.
Desperation clutched at him as the minutes leached away. At last, he found his precious camera, so small—lens-down in the sand.
He blew on the camera to dislodge the grit, pointed it at the houses, and peered into the viewfinder. He saw through a haze of fine scratches across the plastic lens.
This was bad.
Cursing under his breath, the Watcher checked the time—12:14 a.m.—and set out toward the house where Lindsay was staying.
Now that his zoom lens was useless, he would have to get closer, and on foot.
The Watcher stepped over the guardrail at the end of the field and stood square on the sidewalk with a streetlight blazing down on his head.
Two houses in from the end of the road, Cat Boxer’s house glowed with lamplight.
He ducked into shadows and approached the house obliquely by cutting through side yards, crouching at last in the lee of the privet hedge bordering the Boxer living room.
With heart pounding, he stood and peered through the picture window.
The gang was all there: Lindsay in her SFPD T-shirt and tights; Claire, the black ME from the city, in a gold caftan; and Cindy, her blond hair bunched on top of her head, a chenille robe covering all but the legs of her pink pajamas and her feet.
The women were talking intensely, sometimes laughing loudly, then getting serious again. If only he could make out what the hell they were saying.
The Watcher ran through the facts, recent events, the circumstances. The chair in the kid’s room. It didn’t connect any of them to anything, but it was a mistake that he’d made.
Was it safe to go forward?
There was so much more to do.
The Watcher felt the accumulating effects of stress on his body. His hands were shaking, and his chest burned with acid. He couldn’t stay here any longer, he just could not.
He looked around, making sure no one was walking a dog or taking out the garbage, then he stepped from behind the hedge and briefly into the streetlight. He jumped the guardrail and started along the darkened path to the beach.
A decision had to be made about Lindsay Boxer.
A tough one.
The woman was a cop.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 72
I WOKE EARLY IN the morning with a thought that surfaced in my mind like a porpoise breaking from beneath the waves.
I let Martha out back, put coffee on to perk, and booted up my laptop.
I remembered that Bob Hinton had said that two other people had been killed in Half Moon Bay two years before: Ray and Molly Whittaker. They were summer people, Hinton had said. Ray was a photographer, Molly a bit player, an extra, in Hollywood.