The 9th Judgment (Women's Murder Club 9)

My attention was drawn to a Land Rover stopping in the opposite lane, somehow making it through the perimeter before the bridge was closed off. A bearded man jumped out of the driver’s seat holding a camera with a long SLR lens. He started snapping pictures of me wearing a look of horror on my face, the Chronicle plastered to my chest, pink panties and all.

To my left, a yell: “HEY!”

A man burst from the back of a police cruiser, a big hunka guy, built like a football player. He crossed the roadway to the man with the camera and shouted, “Give me that!”

The big hunka guy was Joe.

The camera guy refused to give it up, so Joe grabbed him by the throat, extracted the camera from his hand, and threw it over the rail. He left the dude on the hood of the Land Rover and shouted out over his shoulder, “Sue me.”

Then the man I love ran toward me with a look of anguish on his face. He held out his arms, and I fell against him and began to cry. “We got him,” I said.

“Did that bastard hurt you?”

“No. We got him, Joe.”

“You sure did, honey. It’s all over now.”

Joe put his big jacket around me and folded me into his arms again. Conklin and Jacobi got out of a gray unmarked car and came over to where I stood with Joe, asking in unison, “Are you okay, Lindsay?”

“Never better,” I chirped, my cheeks wet with tears.

“Go home,” Jacobi said. “Clean up. Have a meal, then come back to the Hall. We’ll take our time booking that freak. Should take us about three hours to print him and do the paperwork. He’s all yours, Boxer. No one will talk to him before you do.

“Good job.”

Chapter 68

MY HAIR WAS still wet from my shower when I arrived back at the Hall, geared up and ready to confront the guy who’d humiliated me, terrified me, and killed six innocent people.

I walked to Jacobi’s office and said, “What have we got?”

“His ID says he’s Roger Bosco, former Park Service employee, currently a maintenance man at the San Francisco Yacht Club. No military background, no sheet of any kind. He hasn’t asked for counsel.”

“Let’s do it,” I said.

The observation room behind the glass was packed with cops, brass, and folks from the DA’s office. The cameras were rolling. We were good to go.

The suspect looked up from his seat at the table when Jacobi and I walked into the interrogation room, and I was surprised at his appearance and demeanor.

Roger Bosco seemed older and smaller than the man we’d seen on the parking-garage tapes, and he looked confused. He turned his watery blue eyes on me and said, “I was afraid of the helicopter. That’s why I tried to get away.”

“Let’s start at the beginning, Roger. Okay if I call you Roger?”

“Sure.”

“Why did you do it?”

“For the money.”

“Your plan all along was to collect the ransom?”

“What do you mean, ‘ransom’?”

I pulled out a chair and sat down next to Bosco, trying to look behind the “little guy” act for a cocky, murdering psycho. Jacobi walked slowly behind us, turned, and walked back the other way.

“I understand that two million is a lot of money,” I said, keeping my temper in check, showing that I could be trusted, that the hours-long mystery tour from hell was forgiven.

“Two million? I was offered five hundred. I only got the first two fifty.”