10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

Brady nodded, his hands clasped together on the table. “By the time IAB was done with me, I wanted to leave Miami. I wanted you to know that. I’m here to stay.”

The waiter came over and said, “Your table is ready.”

Yuki followed the waiter upstairs to the mezzanine, with its view of the lights on the bridge, the promenade below, and Cupid’s Span, a huge piece of public art, an arrow piercing the ground.

She was aware of Brady walking behind her and liked the feeling of having him at her back.

But, she was also worried. Not because Brady had killed a man, but because she was going to have to tell Lindsay that she was going out with her boss.

Chapter 40

CINDY LOOKED THROUGH the window facing Kirkham Street and saw a smart-looking black Town Car coming up the block. It pulled up to the modest three-story apartment building where she lived with Richie.

There were no celebrities or wealthy people living in this building, so she made a mental note that this might turn out to be an interesting development. The driver got out of the car and headed up the front steps.

The buzzer rang in her foyer.

Cindy thought, Wrong number, and walked to the intercom.

“Hello?”

“Ms. Thomas. Your car is here.”

“My car?”

“Are you Cindy Thomas?”

“I’ll be right down,” she said.

Cindy threw on her best coat, a black cashmere blend with antique buttons. She locked up, ran down the three flights and the front steps to the sidewalk. Richie was standing next to the car, a big bunch of pink sweetheart roses in his hand.

He was wearing a suit.

It was a blue one, Rich’s only color, and he also wore a starched white shirt and a striped silver-and-blue tie. It took Cindy a second to fully get that yes, this was Richard Conklin wearing a suit, and he had a look of triumph in his eyes.

It wasn’t her birthday. It wasn’t his either. Who on earth was this someone he’d said he wanted her to meet?

“God, you’re gorgeous,” Rich said when Cindy was close enough to see the shaving nick on his jaw.

“You stole my line,” she said.

She flung herself into his arms and they kissed a few times before Rich broke away, laughing, and said, “May I show you to our private room?”

“Where are we going?” she asked once they were settled into the back of the car, her legs across his lap. “Who’s the mystery person? Tell me right now.”

“I’m not saying.”

Cindy gave him a soft sock to the arm as the car traveled from Golden Gate Park to Oak Street, along the panhandle, a wide tree-covered median, and then from Van Ness past City Hall to California. “Every now and then I like to try to keep something from you,” Rich said.

Cindy laughed and said, “Well, you got me, Inspector. I am clueless.” And she was still clueless when the car pulled up in front of Grace Cathedral and stopped.

Grace Cathedral was a stupendous Gothic structure with a long history going back to before the earthquake and fire of 1906 and through its reconstruction to the present day.

The cathedral was such a short distance from where she and Richie lived that she’d passed by it many times, always gripped by the awesome sight of the exaggerated arches and spires and the Ghiberti Doors of Paradise, Old Testament–inspired replicas of the gilded originals in Florence.

You saw this cathedral and you had to think of God.

Cindy didn’t even know for sure where she came out on the God question, but a cathedral was meaningful, even for the nonreligious. Not only was it a place of worship, but it embodied the history of the times and the course of generations, the birth through death of entire families.