Unlucky 13 (Women's Murder Club 13)

CINDY TOOK HER mug of Earl Grey into her home office, facing Mission Street, and got settled in her hydraulic chair with the memory foam seat. She checked her e-mail and returned all work-related messages.

Then she opened her original files on the Mackenzie Morales/Randolph Fish story.

She reacquainted herself with Morales: She was born in Chicago, and although unmarried, she had had a child with the infamous convicted serial killer Randy Fish, a boy named Ben, now age four.

Cindy read up on the three murder charges against Morales, and she reread her own interview with Lindsay, who had witnessed Fish’s last mortal moments and death.

And there was the quote she’d gotten from the SFPD press liaison: “Mackenzie Morales had confessed to three homicides and was in police custody at Metropolitan Hospital when she escaped. She is an extr

emely intelligent individual and may be armed and dangerous.

“If you see Mackenzie Morales, don’t approach her. Contact the SFPD.”

Duly noted.

She went out to the Web and typed “Mackenzie Morales” into her browser. A second and a half later, a list of Morales-related stories filled her screen.

She opened the most recent articles first and saw pictures of Morales being wheeled into the ambulance bay four months ago. The familiar figure walking alongside the gurney was Richie. Rich had been in some kind of hell.

She stared for a moment, then clicked through.

After reading all the publicly available information on Morales and Fish, she signed on to LexisNexis, the by-subscription electronic database for legal files and public records.

The legal files on Fish were extensive. The FBI had linked him to the bodies of eight young women who had been brutally murdered. Fish was a sexual sadist, a type of killer that got off on torturing his victims. The pathology had been documented and studied for hundreds of years.

Fish had never given a press interview, but as Cindy paged through court transcripts, she found one bit of information that had gotten little, if any, attention. Randy Fish’s father had owned a small house on Lake Michigan in a town called Cleveland, Wisconsin.

When Cindy went through the tax records, she found that the property was still in William Fish’s name. It was not in arrears and it had never been sold.

This was significant. Morales had been seen within thirty miles of William Fish’s lake house.

Cindy grabbed her mug and held it in both hands. She was getting a rush from linking two facts that had never been linked before.

She imagined interviewing Morales. She could see the small gray room, gray table, Morales in orange with handcuffs and chains. She would sympathize with the woman, get her to open up about Randy Fish. Cindy would write a double exposé of Fish and Morales that could very well become a crime classic, like the interviews of Bundy, Gacy, BTK, and Dahmer.

Fish and Morales put Bonnie and Clyde in the shade.

First, she had to get a go-ahead from her boss, Chronicle publisher Henry Tyler. Tyler liked her, but this story would take her out of state and away from her regular assignments.

She would have to be damned convincing.

Cindy put her laptop into sleep mode, then went to bed. She hugged the king-size body pillow that used to be Richie’s.

She lay awake for more than an hour, organizing her pitch, refining it. When she woke up in the morning, she was invigorated—fired up and ready to go.

CHAPTER 10

CINDY WAS READY for her 8:15 a.m. meeting with Henry Tyler when she entered the old Gothic Revival–style Chronicle Building at the intersection of Mission and 5th. She went directly to her office and put down her bags, then took the elevator to the executive floor.

When the doors opened, she said “Hey” to the receptionist, who buzzed her in through the double glass doors.

She walked down the carpeted corridor to Tyler’s office. She was five minutes early. Which was perfect.

Tyler was behind his enormous glass desk in his many-windowed corner space, furnished in pewter-colored leather with enormous abstract canvases on three walls.

He was a handsome man in his fifties, a Harvard graduate and former reporter for the New York Times, former war correspondent for Reuters, and now corporate honcho.

Tyler put down the phone and beckoned to Cindy to come in, saying, “I haven’t seen you in a while. Is everything okay?”