14th Deadly Sin (Women's Murder Club 14)

Now that I had a full belly and some free time, I felt compelled to check out the homicides that had happened on Claire’s birthday the two previous years.

I was almost positive that these cases had somehow slipped through the cracks.

CHAPTER 10

MY HUSBAND STOOD behind me, his hands working on the clenched muscles in my neck.

“Oooh, I think I like working at home,” I said.

“Yes, well, I’m the legendary man with the slow hands.”

I laughed. “Yes, you are.”

“More wine?”

“No, thanks. I’m good.”

“OK, then,” he said, giving my shoulders a squeeze. “Martha and I are going for a run.”

“I’ll wait up.”

As soon as Joe and Martha had left the apartment, I checked on our sleeping little one, and then I went back to work.

I typed in my password and opened the SFPD case log to kick off my search. The index to the files was little more than a list of the victims; each case was dated and marked either active, closed, or pending. The name of the lead inspector on each case was listed under the victim’s name.

Since I was searching for murders on specific dates, it didn’t take long to find the two women who’d been killed on Claire’s birthday. I stared at the names, and I remembered the occasions.

Just the way it had happened today, I’d been called from the table to go to the crime scene because I was a ranking officer, on duty, and near the location when the body had been discovered.

I clicked open the older of the two unsolved cases.

Two years ago a woman named Catherine Hayes had been killed outside her father’s coffee shop on Nob Hill. Hayes, who worked for her father during the day, went to night school for accounting and finance. On that twelfth day of May, she’d been having a smoke outside while talking to a friend on the phone when she’d been stabbed in the back. Then her throat had been slit.

There were no witnesses, and the friend who had been on the phone with Hayes had heard only the victim’s screams. Hayes hadn’t been robbed. The killer took his knife and left nothing behind; no note, no DNA, no skin cells under the victim’s nails. The leads were thin to nonexistent, and nothing panned out. Catherine Hayes left devastated friends and family, and her open file was still chilling.

So was the file of Yolanda Pirro, a poet who’d been seen competing in last year’s 12k Bay to Breakers Race, a huge attraction that had been run annually for over a hundred years. Many of the runners wore costumes; some even ran nude, or dressed like fish and ran backward, as if they were swimming upstream. Go figure.

Pirro’s body was found the day after the race in a thicket of shrubs at the end of the course. She’d been wearing runners’ gear, nothing that would make her stand out.

Pirro had multiple stab wounds, any one of which could have been fatal. Her devastated husband and close circle of friends said she had no enemies. She was a poet who worked as a volunteer at a community garden and liked to run.

She hadn’t known Catherine Hayes, and the two women had no common friends, family, or acquaintances. The Northern District had caught the case and had no suspects and no witnesses—and at the same time, tens of thousands of suspects who’d participated in the race or watched from the sidelines. And so, without a clue, Yolanda Pirro’s case went cold.

The Pirro case reminded me a lot of Strichler.

Lots of people in a crowd, but no witnesses.

Including Tina Strichler, all three victims who were killed on Claire’s birthday were attractive white females between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-two, living within three densely populated miles of one another.

Did anything connect them?

Well, yes. They’d all been knifed.

I was staring over my laptop, searching my mind for anything else that would link these three women’s deaths, when someone kissed my temple.

I put my arms up the way Julie does, and Joe gave me a big crinkly smile and another kiss. He came around the sofa and sat down next to me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.