JACOBI PULLED UP behind the blue Ford on the corner of Taylor and Washington. He climbed out into the freaking rain again, walked over and exchanged a few words with Chi and Lemke.
As their Ford took off, Jacobi crossed Washington, ducked under the black awning with gold letters spelling “Venticello Ristorante.”
He labored up the stairs of the cream-colored two-story building, warm air and the smell of garlic and oregano greeting him as he entered the foyer, making his stomach growl.
To his right, the hatcheck girl asked for his coat, an offer he declined.
He stood for a moment, dripping wet, taking in the L-shaped bar in the entryway, the down staircase to his left, the only public stairway to the main floor of the restaurant.
Jacobi took a barstool, ordered a Buckler’s, put his coat on the stool next to him. Then he told the bartender he wanted to use the washroom.
He took the dozen carpeted steps down to the small rectangular dining room, ten occupied tables overlooking the streets through tall corner windows, a blue-tiled fireplace dominating the space.
The doctor’s table was near the fire, his back to Jacobi, an attractive woman smiling into his face. Red wine glowed in the glasses in front of them.
Jacobi walked past the table, bumping the doctor’s chair, enjoying the way Garza whipped his head around, his face an outraged scowl.
Jacobi apologized as if he meant it. “Hey, I’m sorry. Sorry. Excuse me.” Then he walked across the floor, used the washroom, and returned upstairs to the bar.
He drank his near-beer and nursed another, settling the bill after each round. He dropped another five on the bar as the dark-haired doctor and his date passed him on their way to the cloakroom.
Jacobi slipped out the door just before them, and went out into the inclement night. He started up his car, turned on the windshield wipers, and called in his location.
The black Mercedes pulled out of the parking lot on Taylor, and Jacobi followed, this time keeping close, confident that the doctor wouldn’t make him in this weather. Not with the pretty blond woman sitting almost on his lap, wrapping her arm around his neck, kissing him behind the ear.
The doctor turned onto Pacific for two blocks, taking a right onto Leavenworth, then four more blocks to Filbert.
Jacobi saw Garza nose the Mercedes into his driveway and open the automatic garage door, drive his car inside.
Jacobi drove past the pale-yellow house to the end of the block. He made a U-turn, coming back, parking on Garza’s side of the street where he could watch the house.
His hip was stiffening up, and his bladder was full again. He was thinking of getting out, taking a leak against his rear tire, when the downstairs lights in Garza’s house went out. A long fifteen minutes later, the upstairs lights winked out as well.
Jacobi called Lindsay on his Nextel. Told her he’d been tailing Garza since he left the hospital. Yeah, overtime. Free overtime.
“He didn’t even run a stoplight, Boxer. The man had dinner with a babe about forty, a willowy blonde. Held her hand at the table; then she climbed all over him on the drive home.
“As far as I can tell,” Jacobi said, “the doctor is guilty of having a girlfriend.”
Chapter 94
I WAS FRETTING and stalking the corridors outside the ICU at Municipal when Jacobi called saying that Garza was tucked in for the night.
I dropped into a blue plastic chair in the hospital waiting room, thinking what an idiot I was for sending my buddy out into the foul night for nothing. Still, I couldn’t shake my prickling sense of wrongness about Garza.
Images flickered—Keiko’s mom, her knees buckling, dropping to the sidewalk, that feisty, funny lady who should still be alive.
I thought about brass buttons on her dead eyes and on the eyes of the thirty-one others who’d been marked that way.
Those freaking buttons. Markers.
Where was the killer’s fun if no one understood what he was doing or why?
I remembered the arrogance of the man who’d overseen the care of many of the deceased. The doctor who’d said, “Sometimes a bad wind blows.”
And I wondered for the hundredth time if Dennis Garza was one of those deranged and profligate killers, like Charles Cullen and Swango, that surgeon from Ohio, medical practitioners addicted to the power of snuffing out life.
I shifted in my chair, knocked over a half-full coffee container on the floor, watched the lazy brown pool seep around my Nikes. “Jeez, Lindsay. You expect to catch a killer.” Can’t even drink coffee.