The 6th Target (Women's Murder Club 6)

I stooped down for a kiss, lifted Martha’s silky ears, looked into her big brown eyes.

“You want to run on the beach, Boo?”

I picked up the phone and dialed Karen’s number.

“Excellent,” she said. “I’ll pick her up in the morning.”

Chapter 47

IT WAS MONDAY MORNING, half past dawn.

Conklin and I were at the construction site below Fort Point, the huge brick fort that had been built on the edge of the San Francisco peninsula during the Civil War and now stood in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge.

A damp breeze kicked up whitecaps on the bay, making the fifty-degree temperature feel more like thirty-five.

I was shaking, either because of the windchill factor or from my sickening sense of what we were about to find.

I zipped up my fleece-lined jacket, put my hands inside my pockets as the whipping wind brought moisture to my eyes.

A welder who was working on the bridge retrofit came toward us with containers of coffee from the “garbage truck,” a food wagon outside the chain-link fence that separated the construction site from the public area.

The welder’s name was Wayne Murray, and he told me and Conklin how when he’d come to work that morning, he’d seen something weird hung up on the rocks below the fort.

“I thought at first it was a seal,” he said mournfully. “When I got closer, I saw an arm in the water. I never saw a dead body before.”

Car doors slammed, men coming through the chain-link gate, talking and laughing — construction workers, EMS, and a couple of Park Service cops.

I asked them to rope off the area.

I turned my eyes back to the dark lump down on the rocks below the seawall, a white hand and foot trailing in the foam-flecked water that streamed toward the ocean.

“She wasn’t dumped here,” Conklin said. “Too much chance of being seen.”

I squinted up at the silhouette of the bridge security officer patrolling the structure with his AR-15 semiautomatic rifle.

“Yeah. Depending on the time and the tides, she could have been dropped off one of the piers. The perps must’ve thought she’d float out to sea.”

“Here comes Dr. G.,” Conklin said.

The ME was chipper this morning, his damp white hair still showing comb marks, his waders pulled up to midchest, his nose pink under the bridge of his glasses.

He and one of his assistants took the lead, and we joined them, walking awkwardly across the jagged rocks that sloped at a forty-five-degree angle, fifteen feet down to the lip of the bay.

“Hang on, there. Be careful,” Dr. Germaniuk said as we approached the body. “Don’t want anyone to fall and touch something.”

We stood our ground as Dr. G. scrambled down the boulders, approached the body, put his scene kit down. Using his flashlight, he began his preliminary in situ assessment.

I could see the body pretty well in his beam. The victim’s face was darkened and swollen.

“Got some skin slippage here,” Dr. G. called up to me. “She’s been in the water a couple of days. Long enough to have become a floater.”

“Does she have a gunshot wound to the head?”

“Can’t tell. Looks like she’s been banged up on the rocks. I’ll give her a head-to-toe X-ray when we get her back to home base.”

Dr. G. photographed the body twice from each angle, his flash popping every second or two.

I took note of the girl’s clothing — the dark coat, the turtle-neck sweater, her short hair, similar to the distinctive bowl cut I’d seen in her driver’s license picture when I’d gone through her wallet two days before.