“You know this for a fact?” Joe said.
“I do. I can feel it.”
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 78
I AWOKE TO THE jarring sound of the bedside phone. I grabbed it on the second ring, noticing that Joe was gone and that there was a note on the chair where his clothes had been.
“Joe?”
“It’s Yuki, Lindsay. Did I wake you?”
“No, I’m up,” I lied.
We talked for five minutes at Yuki’s trademark warp speed, and after we hung up, there was no falling back to sleep. I read Joe’s sweet good-bye note, then I pulled on some sweats, put a leash on Martha, and together we jogged to the beach.
A cleansing breeze whipped in off the bay as Martha and I headed north. We hadn’t gotten very far when I heard someone calling my name. A small figure up ahead came running toward me.
“Lindseee, Lindseee!”
“Allison! Hey, girl.”
The dark-eyed little girl hugged me hard around the waist, then dropped to the sand to embrace Martha.
“Ali, you’re not here alone?”
“We’re having an outing,” she said, pointing to a clump of people and umbrellas a ways up the beach. As we got closer, I heard kids singing “Yolee-yolee-yolee,” the theme song from Survivor, and I saw Carolee coming toward me.
We exchanged hugs, and then Carolee introduced me to “her” kids.
“What kind of mutt is that?” an eleven- or twelve-year-old with a sandy mop of Rasta hair asked me.
“She’s no mutt. Sweet Martha is a border collie.”
“She doesn’t look like Lassie,” said a little girl with strawberry curls and a healing black eye.
“Nope. Border collies are a different breed. They come from England and Scotland, and they have a very serious job,” I said. “They herd sheep and cattle.”
I had their attention now, and Martha looked up at me as if she knew that I was talking about her.
“Border collies have to learn commands from their owners, of course, but they’re very smart dogs who not only love to work, they feel that the animals in the herd are theirs—and that they are responsible for them.”
“Do the commands! Show how she does it, Lindsay,” Ali begged me. I grinned at her.
“Who wants to be a sheep?” I asked.
A lot of the kids snickered, but four of them, including Ali, volunteered. I told the “sheep” to scatter and run down the beach and then I unleashed Martha.
“Martha. Walk up,” I called to her, and she ran toward the little group of five. They squealed and tried to evade her, but they couldn’t outdo Martha. She was fast and agile, and with her head down, eyes focused on them, she barked at their heels, and the kids kept together and streamed forward in pretty tight formation.
“Come-bye,” I shouted, and Martha herded the kids clockwise toward the bay. “Away,” I called out, and Martha looped them back around toward the cliff, the children giggling gleefully.
“That’ll do,” I called out, and my little black-and-white doggy kept the kids in a clump by running circles around their legs, shepherding them, breathless and giddy, back to the blankets.
“Stand, Martha,” I said. “Good job. Excellent, sweetie.”
Martha barked in self-congratulation beside me. The kids clapped and whistled, and Carolee handed out cups of orange juice and toasted us. When the attention had gone off me and Martha, I huddled with Carolee and told her about my conversation with Yuki.
“I need a favor,” I said.
“Anything,” said Carolee Brown. And then she felt compelled to say, “Lindsay, you would be a great mom.”
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 79
MINUTES AFTER SAYING GOOD-BYE to Carolee and the kids, Martha and I climbed the cliff and crossed the grassy field toward Miramontes Street. My feet had just touched the sidewalk when I saw a man maybe a hundred yards away pointing a smallish camera in my direction.
He was so far away, all I could see was the glint of the lens, his orange sweatshirt, and a baseball cap pulled down low over his eyes. And he didn’t let me get any closer. Once he saw that I had noticed him, he turned and walked quickly away.
Maybe the guy was just taking pictures of the view, or maybe the tabloid press had found me at last, or maybe that pinging in my chest was just paranoia, but I felt kind of uneasy as I headed home.
Someone was watching me.
Someone who didn’t want me to see him.
Back at Cat’s, I stripped my bed and packed my things. Then I fed Penelope and changed her water.
“Good news, Penny,” I told the wonder pig. “Carolee and Allison promised that they’ll come over later. I see apples in your future, babe.”
I put Joe’s sweet good-bye-for-now note into my handbag and, after a thorough look around, made for the front door.
“Home we go,” I said to Martha.
We scrambled up into the Explorer and headed back to San Francisco.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 80
AT SEVEN THAT NIGHT, I opened the door to Indigo, a brand-new restaurant on McAllister, two blocks from the courthouse, which ought to have taken my appetite away. I passed through the wood-paneled bar into the high-ceilinged restaurant proper. There, the maître d’ checked me off his list and escorted me to a blue velvet banquette where Yuki was leafing through a sheaf of papers.
Yuki stood to hug me, and as I hugged her back, I realized how very glad I was to see my lawyer.
“How’s it going, Lindsay?”
“Just fabulous, except for the part when I remember that my trial starts Monday.”
“We’re going to win,” she said. “So you can stop worrying about that.”
“Silly me for fretting,” I said.
I cracked a smile, but I was more shaken than I wanted her to know. Mickey Sherman had convinced the powers that be that we would all be best served if I was represented by a woman attorney and that Yuki Castellano was “a great gal for the job.”
I wished I felt as sure.
Although I was catching her at the end of a long workday, Yuki looked fresh and upbeat. But most of all, she looked young. I reflexively clutched my Kokopelli as my twenty-eight-year-old attorney and I ordered dinner.
“So, what have I missed since I skipped town?” I asked Yuki. I pushed chef Larry Piaskowy’s pan-seared sea bass with a parsnip purée to the far side of my plate and nibbled at the fennel salad with pine nuts and a carrot-tarragon vinaigrette.
“I’m glad that you were outta here, Lindsay, because the sharks have been in a feeding frenzy,” Yuki said. I noticed that her eyes made direct contact with mine, but her hands never stopped moving.
“Editorials and TV coverage of the outraged parents have been running twenty-four/seven. . . . Did you catch Saturday Night Live?”
“Never watch it.”
“Well, just so you know, there was a skit. You’ve been dubbed Dirty Harriet.”
“That must’ve been a riot,” I said, pulling a face. “I guess someone made my day.”
“It’s going to get worse,” said Yuki, tugging at a lock of her shoulder-length hair. “Judge Achacoso okayed live TV coverage in the courtroom. And I just got the plaintiff’s witness list. Sam Cabot’s going to testify.”
“Well, that’s okay, isn’t it? Sam confessed to doing those electrocution murders. We can use that!”
“’Fraid not, Lindsay. His lawyers filed a motion to suppress because his parents weren’t there when he blurted out his confession to that ER nurse.
“Look,” Yuki said, grabbing my hands, no doubt responding to the way my face had frozen in shock. “We don’t know what Sam’s going to say—I’ll take him apart; you can count on that. But we can’t impeach him with his confession. It’s your word against his—and he’s thirteen and you’re a drunken cop.”