4th of July (Women's Murder Club 4)

“Do you see any sheep around here?”

“You’re silly.”

“Yes, I am. But you know what I love most about Martha? She keeps me company and she warns me about bad guys or even about things that go bump in the night.”

“And you have a gun, right?” Ali asked with an almost cagey look on her sweet face.

“Yup. I have a gun.”

“Wow. A gun and a dog. You rock, Lindsay. You might be the coolest person I know.”

I finally threw back my head and laughed. Ali was such a cute and imaginative child. I was shocked at how much I liked her and how fast. I’d come to Half Moon Bay to rethink my whole life. Now I was being visited by a vivid fantasy of me, Joe, a home, a little girl.

I was turning this shocking thought around in my mind when Carolee came into the backyard with a lopsided Novocain smile. I couldn’t believe two hours had gone by and I was so, so sorry to see Ali go.

“Come back soon,” I said, hugging her good-bye. “Ali, come back any time.”

Chapter 53

I STOOD ON THE street waving until Carolee’s minivan disappeared around the loop in Sea View Avenue. But when it was gone, a thought that had been circling the periphery of my consciousness parked in my forebrain.

I took my laptop to the living room, settled into a puffy chair, and booted up the NCIC database. Within minutes I learned that Dr. Ben O’Malley, age forty-eight, had been cited for speeding a few times and arrested on a DWI five years before. He had been married and widowed twice.

Wife number one was Sandra, the mother of their daughter, Caitlin. She’d died inside their two-car garage in 1994, hanged herself. The second Mrs. O’Malley, Lorelei née Breen, murdered yesterday at age thirty-nine, had been arrested for shoplifting in ’98. Fined and released.

I did the same drill on Alice and Jake Daltry, and reams of information scrolled onto my screen. Jake and Alice had been married for eight years and had left twin boys, age six, when they were slaughtered in their yellow house in Crescent Heights. I pictured that cute place with its sliver of bay view, the abandoned basketball, and the child’s sneaker.

Then I focused back on the screen.

Jake had been a bad boy before he married Alice. I clicked down through his rap sheet: soliciting a prostitute and forging his father’s signature on his Social Security checks, for which he served six months, but he’d been clean for the last eight years and had a full-time job working in a pizzeria in town.

Wife Alice, thirty-two, had no record. She’d never even run a light or backed into a car at the supermarket.

Still, she was dead.

So what did this add up to?

I phoned Claire, and she picked up on the first ring. We got right into it.

“Claire, can you dig around for me? I’m looking for some kind of link between the O’Malley murder and those of Alice and Jake Daltry.”

“Sure, Lindsay. I’ll reach out to a few of my colleagues around the state. See what I can find.”

“And also could you look into Sandra O’Malley? Died in 1994, hanged herself.”

We talked for a few more minutes, about Claire’s husband, Edmund, and a sapphire ring he’d given her for their anniversary. And we talked about a little girl named Ali who could channel pigs.

When I hung up the phone, I felt as if I were breathing air of a richer kind. I was about to close down my computer when something caught my eye. When Lorelei O’Malley went to trial for boosting a twenty-dollar pair of earrings, a local lawyer by the name of Robert Hinton had represented her.

I knew Bob Hinton.

His card was still in the pocket of my shorts from the morning he had mowed me down with his ten-speed.

And as I remembered it, the guy owed me a favor.

Chapter 54

BOB HINTON’S OFFICE WAS a shoe box of space on Main Street, nestled between Starbucks and a bank. Taking the chance that he might be in on a Saturday, I pushed open the glass door and saw Bob sitting behind a large wooden desk, his balding scalp bent over the San Francisco Examiner.