10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

“What do you mean, she’s ‘acting weird’?”

“She must’ve been drugged. And I think something happened to her while she was out. For eight hours. Woke up in the shrubbery near her front door. That’s what I mean by acting weird. I love this girl, Cindy. Will you come here while I’ve got her? I think together we can get her to talk.”

“Right now?” Cindy asked. She looked at her Swatch. Only six hours until her drop-dead deadline at four o’clock. Eight empty column inches that she’d told Lisa Greening she could fill. It was a crevasse of empty space.

“She’s like a sister to me, Cindy,” Joyce said, her voice breaking with emotion.

Cindy sighed.

She forwarded her calls to the front desk and left the building. She took BART to 24th, walked four blocks to Metropolitan Hospital at Valencia and 26th, and met Joyce just outside the ambulance bay. The friends hugged, and then Joyce led Cindy into the crush and swarm of the ER.

Chapter 11

LAURA RIZZO sat at the edge of a hospital bed in the ER. She was about Cindy’s age, around thirty-five, raven-haired with an athl

etic build, and she was wearing jeans and a dark blue Boston U sweatshirt. Her movements were jerky and her eyes were open so wide, you could see a margin of white completely surrounding her irises. She looked like she’d been plugged into an electric outlet.

“Laura,” Joyce said. “You remember Cindy Thomas?”

“Yeah.… Hi. Why — why are you here?”

Joyce said, “Cindy is smart about things like this. I want you to tell her what happened to you.”

“Look. It’s nice of you to come, I guess, but what is this, Joyce? I didn’t tell you so that you’d bring in reinforcements. I’m fine. I just need something for sleep.”

“Listen, Laura. Get real, would you, please? You called me because you’re freaked out, and you should be freaked out. Something happened to you. Something bad.”

Laura glared at Joyce, then turned and said to Cindy, “I have to say, my mind’s a blank. I was coming home from work last night. I remember thinking about getting pizza for dinner and a bottle of wine. I woke up lying in the hydrangeas outside my apartment building at around 2 a.m. No pizza. No wine. And I don’t know how I got there.”

“Good lord,” Joyce said, shaking her head. “So you just got up and went inside?”

“What else could I do? My bag was right there. Everything was in it, so I hadn’t been robbed. I went upstairs and took a shower. I noticed then that I felt sore —”

“Sore where? Like you’d been in a fight?” Cindy asked.

“Here,” Laura said, pointing to the crotch of her jeans.

“You were assaulted?”

“Yeah. Like that. And as I’m standing there in the shower, I have like this vague memory of a man’s voice. Something about winning a lot of money, but I sure don’t feel like I won anything.”

“Did you go somewhere after work? A bar or a party?”

“I’m not a party girl, Cindy. I’m like a nun. I was going home. Somehow, I — I don’t know,” Laura said. “Joyce, even if I let a doctor examine me, I don’t want to tell the cops. “I know cops. My uncle was a cop. If I tell them that I don’t know anything about what happened to me, they’re going to think I’m a wacko.”

Chapter 12

PHIL HOFFMAN PACED in front of the reception desk at the seventh-floor jail in the Hall of Justice. He was waiting for his client Dr. Candace Martin, who was changing out of her prison uniform in preparation for her first day of trial.

Candace was holding up well.

She was determined. She was focused. And while she was uncomfortable in her present circumstances, she had borne up well under the confinement — the close contact with the other inmates, the rules — because that was what it took to get to this day.

Now it was up to him.

If Phil won an acquittal, Candace would go back to her job as head of cardiac surgery at Mercy Hospital. The stain on her name would be eradicated. She would be able to pick up the parenting of her two children, who were, even now, waiting for them outside the courtroom.

Phil had talked to both of the kids, and in his judgment they could handle the pressure. But he did expect a challenge from opposing counsel.