3rd Degree (16 page)

“The victim's dumped on the second floor. Single shot to the back of the head.”

Part of me winced, part of me relaxed. At least it was only one.

We headed up steep metal stairs, Claire and Cindy follow-ing behind. An Oakland cop tried to stop us. I pushed my badge at him and moved past. A body was on the floor, par-tially wrapped in a bloody tarp. “Goddammit,” I said. “Those bastards.” Two cops and an EMS team were leaning over the victim.

There was a note fastened by a metal twist to the tarp. A bill of lading.

“ `You were warned,' ” I read it out loud. “`The criminal state is not exempt from its own crimes. Members of the G-8, come to your senses. Renounce the colonizing policies. You have three more days. We can strike anywhere, anytime. August Spies.' ”

At the bottom of the page I saw the words in bold print,

RETURN THIS TO THE HALL OF JUSTICE.

My body stopped dead. A wave of panic tore at me. For a second I couldn't move. I looked at Claire. Her face crumpled with shock.

I pushed an EMT out of the way. I went down on my knees. The first thing I came upon was the victim's wrist - the aquamarine David Yurman bracelet I knew so well.

“Oh no,” I gasped. “No, no, no...”

I peeled back the tarp.

It was Jill.

THINKING BACK, I remember only flashes of what hap-pened next. I know I stood there, unable to comprehend what I was seeing: Jill's beautiful face, lifeless now. Her eyes staring forward, clear, almost serene. “Oh no, no...,” I repeated over and over.

I know my legs gave out, and someone held me. Claire's voice, cracking: “Oh my God, Lindsay...”

I couldn't take my eyes off Jill's face. A trickle of blood seeped from the corner of her mouth. I reached out and touched her hand. She still had her wedding ring on.

I heard Cindy start to cry, and saw Claire holding her. I kept repeating over and over, This can't be Jill. What does she have to do with August Spies?

Then things fell into a daze. I kept reminding myself, It's a crime scene, Lindsay, a homicide scene. I wanted to be strong for Claire and Cindy, for all the cops around. I asked, “Did anyone see how she got here?” I looked around. “I want the area canvassed. Someone could've seen a vehicle.”

Molinari tried to pull me away, but I shook him off. I had to look around, find something. There was always some-thing, some mistake they had made. You assholes, August Spies... You scum.

Suddenly Jacobi was there. And Cappy. Even Tracchio. My homicide team. “Let us handle it,” Cappy said. Finally, I just let them take charge.

I was beginning to understand that this was real. These emergency lights, they weren't in my head. Jill was dead. She'd been killed, not by Steve but by August Spies.

I watched them take her away. My friend. Jill...I watched Claire help place her into the morgue van and send it off, sirens blaring. Joe Molinari comforted me as best he could, but then he had to return to the Hall.

Then as the crime scene quieted down, Claire, Cindy, and I sat on the steps of an adjoining building in the light rain. Not a word passed between us. My brain echoed with ques-tions I couldn't answer: Why? How does this fit? It's a different case! How can Jill be connected?

How long we sat on those steps I don't know. The haze of urgent voices, flashing lights. Cindy weeping, Claire holding her. Me too stunned to even speak, my fists clenched, turn-ing the question over and over. Why?

A thought kept creeping into my head. If only I had gone to Jill's that night. None of this might have been....

Suddenly a ringing broke the silence. Cindy's cell. She answered, her voice tremulous. “Yes?” Cindy drew a breath. “I'm at the scene.”

It was her Metro desk.

In a halting voice, she gave details of what had taken place. “Yes, it looks like it is part of the terror campaign. The third victim...” She described the location, the e-mail she had received at the paper, the time.

Then Cindy stopped. I could see tears glazing her eyes. She bit her lip, as if she was afraid to let the words out. “Yes, the victim's been identified. Her name is Bernhardt... Jill.” She spelled it letter by letter.

She tried to say something else, but the words caught in her throat. Claire reached for her. Cindy sucked in a breath, wiped her eyes. “Yes,” she said, nodding. “Ms. Bernhardt was Chief Assistant District Attorney of the City of San Fran-cisco....”

Then, in a whisper, “She was also my friend.”

I KNEW I WOULDN'T be able to sleep that night. I didn't want to go home.

So I stayed at the crime scene until the lab teams had come and gone; then for about an hour I crisscrossed the deserted streets of the port searching for anyone, a night worker, a vagrant, who might've seen who dumped Jill off. I drove around, afraid to go to the office, afraid to go home, reliving the awful sight over and over again, tears streaming down my face. Turning over that tarp - seeing Jill!

I drove until my car seemed to know the place I was headed. Where else did I have to go? Three o'clock in the morning. I found myself at the morgue.

I knew Claire would be there. No matter what time it was. Doing her job because it was the one thing that could hold her together. In her blue scrubs, in the operating room.

Jill was laid out on the gurney. Under those same harsh lights where I'd seen so many victims before.

Jill...My sweet darling girl.

I stared through the glass, tears wending down my cheeks. I was thinking I'd failed her in some way.

Finally I pushed through the glass doors. Claire was in the middle of the autopsy. She was doing what I was doing. Her job.

“You don't want to be in here, Lindsay,” she said when she saw me. She drew a sheet over Jill's exposed wound.

“Yeah, I do, Claire.” I just stood there. I wasn't going to leave. I needed to see this.

Claire stared at my swollen, tear-stained face. She nodded, the tiny outline of a smile. “At least make yourself useful and hand me that probe on the tray over there.”

I handed Claire her instrument and traced the back of my hand against Jill's cold, hard cheek. How could this not be some dream?

“Widespread damage to the right occipital lobe,” Claire spoke into the microphone on her lapel, “consistent with a single, rear-entry gunshot trauma. No exit wound; the bullet is still lodged in the left lateral ventricle. Minimal blood loss to the affected area. Strange...,” she muttered.

I was barely listening. My eyes still fixed on Jill.

“Light powder burns around the hair and neck indicate a small-caliber weapon fired at close range,” Claire continued.

She shifted the body. The opened rear of Jill's skull appeared on the monitor.

I couldn't watch that. I looked away.

“I'm now removing what looks like a small-caliber bullet fragment from the left ventricle,” Claire went on. “Signs of severe rupture, symptomatic of this type of trauma, but... very little swelling...” I watched Claire as she probed around and removed a flattened bullet. She dropped it into a dish.

A jolt of rage tensed me. It looked like a flattened.22. Caked with specks of Jill's blood.

“Something doesn't fit,” Claire said, puzzled. She looked up at me. “This area ought to be covered in spinal fluid. No swelling of the brain tissue, very little blood.”

Suddenly Claire the professional clicked in. “I'm going to open up the chest cavity,” she spoke into the mike. “Lindsay, look away.”

“What's wrong, Claire? What's going on?”

“Something's not right.” Claire rolled the body over, took out a scalpel. Then she slipped the blade down a straight line from the top of Jill's chest.

I did avert my eyes. I didn't want to see Jill like that.

“I'm doing a standard sternotomy,” Claire dictated into the mike. “Opening up the pneumo chest area. Lung mem-brane is soft, tissue... degraded, soupy... I'm exposing the pericardium now....” I heard Claire take a deep breath. “Shit.”

My heart started racing. I was fixed on the screen now. “Claire, what's going on? What do you see?”

“Stay there.” She put up a hand. She had seen something horrible. What was it?

“Oh, Lindsay,” she whispered, and finally looked at me. “Jill didn't die from a gunshot.”

“What!”

“The lack of swelling, blood seepage.” She shook her

head. “The gunshot was delivered after she was dead.” “What are you saying, Claire?” “I'm not sure” - she looked up - "but if I had to

guess... I'd say ricin."

THERE WAS ALWAYS something intimidating about meeting Charles Danko in person. Even at a fancy place like the Hunt-ington Hotel in San Francisco. Danko fit in anywhere. He was wearing a tweed jacket, pinstriped shirt, and a rep tie.

There was a girl with him, pretty, with a tangle of bright red hair. He always liked to keep you off guard. Who is she?

Mal had been told to wear a suit jacket and even a tie, if he could dig one up. He had, and he found it kind of funny - bright red with tiny bugles in the design.

Danko stood rather formally and shook Mal's hand, just another of his odd off-putting gestures. He waved a hand around the dining room. “Could there be a safer place for us to meet? My Gawd, the Huntington!”

He looked at the girl and they both laughed, but he didn't introduce her.

“Ricin,” Malcolm said, “it's brilliant. What a great day - we got Bengosian! We can do so much damage here. Hell, we could wipe out this capitalist den in about a minute flat. Go over to the Mark and take out another hundred rich blood-suckers. Take the trolley and spring death on anybody we passed.”

“Yes, especially because I figured how to make it as a concentrate.”

Malcolm nodded, but he looked nervous. “I thought this was about G-8?”

Danko looked at the girl again. They shared condescend-ing smiles. Who the hell is she? What does she know?

“Your focus is too narrow, Mal. We've talked about that before. More than anything else, this is about terrifying people. And we're going to scare them, believe me. Ricin will do the trick. Makes anthrax look like something only farm animals should fret about.”

He stared hard at Malcolm now. “You have a delivery sys-tem for me? For the ricin?”

Malcolm had stopped making eye contact. “Yeah.”

“And more of your explosives?”

“We could blow the Huntington right off the map. The Mark, too.” Malcolm finally allowed himself a sheepish smile. “All right, who is she?”

Danko threw back his head and laughed. “She's someone brilliant, just like you. She's a secret weapon. Let's leave it at that. Just another soldier,” he said, then looked into the girl's eyes. “There's always another soldier, Malcolm. That's what should be scaring the hell out of everybody right now.”

MICHELLE HEARD VOICES in the other room. Mal was back from his meeting. Julia was whooping it up as if she'd won the lottery. But Michelle felt awful.

She knew they had done terrible things. The latest killing didn't sit well with her. That pretty, innocent D.A. She had put aside the image of Charlotte Lightower and the house-keeper who'd been killed in the blast, and found some relief that at least the children had been saved. Lightower, Ben-gosian - they were greedy, guilty scum.

But this one. What had she done to be on the list? Because she worked for the state? What had Mal said? This one is just for the thrill of it, just to show we can. Except Michelle didn't really believe that. There was always a hidden agenda with Mal.

The poor D.A. knew she was going to die from the minute they forced her into the truck. But she never gave in. Not once. She seemed brave to Michelle. The real crime was that she never even knew why she was dying! They wouldn't even give her that.

The door creaked open and Mal eased into the room. The look of triumph on his face gave Michelle the creeps. He lay down next to her, smelling of tobacco and alcohol. “What happened to my party girl?”

“Not tonight,” Michelle said. A wheeze kicked up in her chest.

“Not tonight?” Mal grinned.

Michelle sat up. “I just don't understand. Why her? What did she do to anybody?”

“I mean, what did any of them really do?” Mal stroked her hair. “Wrong employer, honeybun. She represented the big bad state that's sanctioning the criminal pillaging of the world. That's what she did, Michelle. She's tanks in Iraq. She's Grumman and Dow Chemical and the WTO all rolled into one. Don't be fooled because she was pretty.”

“They said on the news that she put away murderers. She even prosecuted some of these CEOs in business scandals.”

“And I told you not to pay attention to the news, Michelle. Sometimes people who do good things die. Hold that thought.”

She shot a horrified look at him. The cough in her chest grew tighter. She fumbled around the bed for her new inhaler, but Mal blocked her hand. “What did you think, Michelle? We were in this just to knock off a couple of fat-cat billionaires? Our fight's with the state. The state is very pow-erful. It won't roll over and die.”

Michelle forced a breath. She realized in that moment that she was different from Mal. From them all. He called her a little girl. But he was wrong. A little girl didn't do the terrible things she had done. She wheezed again. “I need my inhaler, Mal. Please.”

“And I need to know if I can trust you, honeybun.” He picked up the inhaler and twirled it in his fingers like a toy.

Her breathing was starting to get heavy now, ragged. And Mal was making it worse, scaring her like this. She didn't know what he was capable of. “You can trust me, Mal. You know that,” she whispered.

“I do know that, Michelle, but it's not me I'm worried about. I mean, we work for someone, don't we, hon? Charles Danko isn't forgiving, the way I am. Danko is tough enough to beat them at their own game. He's a genius.”