"Can't." Closing her eyes, "Going to be sick."
Her body began to spasm. Hunt turned her head and held her as she lost her last couple of drinks and most of her meal.
"Okay," he said, "it's okay. Just let it go. You'll be all right."
When she seemed to have finished, he pulled off his tie and cleaned her face with it, leaving it in the gutter. Getting her to her feet, he backed her away from the curb. Her purse had flown away from her on her fall and was now in the middle of the street. He set her down against the nearest building while he went to get it. When he came back, her eyes were closed, her breathing ragged. Going into a squat, he touched her cheek.
"Andrea, can you hear me?"
She barely moved.
"Do you think we can get you home?"
No response.
He opened her purse, found a wallet, opened it up for her address. She lived someplace on Larkin Street, which ran way the hell up to the north end of the city. Hunt looked at his watch-nearly midnight. For all of its congestion during the workday, this time of night Montgomery was deserted. No cars had passed the whole time he'd been here.
Now he saw a cab on its way toward them. He got to the side of the road, put his hand out. The cab pulled up and stopped, and Hunt went to the driver's window. "My girlfriend's had too much to drink," he said, pointing over to Parisi. "If you can just give me a minute."
The cabbie was a middle-aged black man in a Giants cap and jacket. "You need some help?" he asked.
In a minute, they had her in the backseat, passed out.
"You want to take her to emergency?"
Hunt almost said yes, then decided that it might cause her more trouble. She was breathing. She'd had way too much to drink, but she wasn't going to die. And the emergency room meant complications with her job and her TV work. He didn't want to cause her any further problems. He just wanted to get her through this.
"I don't think so. Just home." He gave his address.
The cabbie turned the corner and stepped on the gas.
8
The morning interviews with Jeannette Palmer and the briefing sessions with both the FBI and Homeland Security blew Juhle and Shiu through lunchtime. After hitching a ride back downtown with Assistant Coroner Janey Parks, they picked up their normal car and headed back out to Clay Street to start talking to neighbors and look over anything else CSI turned up.
Which was not much.
A slug in the book that Juhle had noticed verified the murder weapon caliber as.22. Mostly based on the accuracy of the shots and gunshot residue on the desk, the forensics folks had determined that the shooter was probably standing very close to if not at the very front of the desk. Although further tests would seek to amplify the initial data, which was sketchy at best, this in turn led Shiu to surmise-based on the blood splatter and trajectory angle through the book-that the shooter was either a short man or a woman.
Juhle flinched. He knew that there were too many variables in the relative positions of the gun and the targets to draw conclusions. How could one possibly distinguish, for example, a tall man who shot from the hip from a short man holding the gun at shoulder height? He couldn't stop himself. "So, a man or a woman. Imagine that. As opposed to, say, a chimpanzee, which was my first choice."
The neighborhood was a bust as well, with one perhaps important exception. Shari Levin, who lived directly across the street from the Palmers and who had gone out to her bridge party at about seven thirty, had noticed what she thought was Mrs. Palmer's car parked out in the street. She noticed because she wondered why she hadn't parked as usual in her own circular driveway. At least it was the same basic type of car-"one of those sports convertibles you see everywhere nowadays."
She knew Mrs. Palmer drove the same BMW Z4 that was parked in the driveway now, and she thought it had been that car, although it had been near dusk and the car was dark, too. Juhle and Shiu filed the information, knowing full well that if it hadn't been Mrs. Palmer's, the car in question might well turn out to be an Audi, a Porsche, or a Mercedes. Even a Honda. In more rigorous questioning, all Ms. Levin had finally given them was that she'd barely glanced and hardly noticed, but there had definitely been a car on the street, parked up flush to the driveway, and she thought at the time that it had been Mrs. Palmer's. Whose else would it have been?
So they hadn't exactly broken the case wide open in the first few hours. Not that they expected to, but public forbearance over slow progress would be short-lived. Chief Batiste made that crystal clear in his afternoon press conference when he said that the murder of a federal judge struck at the very heart of our free society and that the apprehension of the guilty party for this atrocity would be the top priority of his police department until the case was solved. The "my police department" was ominous. He would take the credit for success and the blame for failure. He promised results-and fast.
Juhle hated when they did that. Batiste had no idea what they had, what they were working with; he hadn't the vaguest notion of the complexity of the crime. In fact, no one did yet. But Batiste was promising quick results. Stupid and counterproductive, and now all on the heads of Juhle and Shiu.
Thanks, chief. And you wonder why morale's in the toilet?
At the press conference, amping it up another notch, Batiste also announced that he and Mayor West had assigned an Event Number to the case, meaning that they were freeing up nearly unlimited funds from the city's general fund, outside of the police budget, for the investigation.
No mistake about it: If Juhle and Shiu hadn't felt the pressure from the beginning, and they had, they were in a cooker now. And they still hadn't even identified the female victim. All the usual inquiries failed. No criminal history, no military record, no applications where she'd submitted fingerprints to any agency. Fingerprints sent to DMV came back negative.
She didn't even have a driver's license?
Now, Shiu driving and closing in on one in the morning, the two inspectors parked in the cops' lot behind the Hall of Justice. Groggy and silent, they walked up the dimly lit outdoor corridor that led them to the morgue, just across the way from the jail.
It was a clear night, cold and quiet.
Shiu rang the coroner's night bell-Juhle hadn't taken any pain medication since the morning, and his hand was throbbing. After a moment the silhouette of Janey Parks appeared back in the darkened recesses of the outer office. She was the efficient yet generally friendly bureaucrat with whom they'd hitched a ride downtown twelve hours before.
When she opened the door, leading them back through the desks the way she'd come, she started right in: "The witness is Mary Mahoney. She's a waitress at MoMo's. Twenty-seven. Came down by herself. No question on the ID. Positive."
This last wasn't much of a surprise, since the young woman's face hadn't been touched by the bullet, a mystery which Ms. Parks had solved earlier in the day at Palmer's house by opening the victim's mouth with her rubber-gloved hands and looking inside with her flashlight, thereby discovering the entry wound at the back of her throat. The girl had had her mouth open when the shot was fired. All the teeth were intact. The slug didn't have enough punch to penetrate the skull, so there was no exit wound, either. "But, man, it did some damage inside," Janey was saying. "Ricocheted up and kicked around in there like a pinball. The brain was scrambled eggs."
"Hey, great. Good detail. Thanks, Janey." This was the kind of image that tended to stick with Juhle and wake him up with the sweats. But he shook it off-it would come back to haunt him, anyway, get him on the ricochet, as it were.
They got to the office of John Strout, the medical examiner who was now in his mid-seventies and had long since ceased caring about the formal appearance of professionalism. The place was a museum of the bizarre, the outright macabre, and the dangerous. Three hand grenades, reputedly live, served as paperweights on his desk. By the entrance to the morgue's cold room, a skeleton with a pipe in its teeth and a silken rope around its neck relaxed on an authentic antique Spanish garrote. On the bookshelf counter, Strout kept his collection of knives, brass knuckles, sharp and deadly ninja paraphernalia. Several rifles and shotguns leaned against the walls. In an immense terrarium in the center of the office-and completely illegally as a technical matter-he kept his favorite murder weapons from actual cases he'd worked, many complete with bloodstains: an ice pick, a beaker full of empty syringes, a baseball bat, various pokers and blunt objects, a couple more knives of particularly creative design.