1st to Die (Women's Murder Club 1)

“You contramanded a direct order from the chief of police. If that doesn’t leave you in a hole, it sure digs one for me.”

“So you’d rather be digging out of a story in the Chronicle about a serial killer?”

He backed against the wall. “That’s Mercer’s call.”

A policeman I knew skipped up the stairs past us, grunting hello. I barely nodded back.

“Okay,” I said, “so how do you want to play it? You want me to go in and spill my guts to Sam Roth? I will.”

He hesitated. I could see he was torn, clicking through the consequences. After what seemed like a minute, he shook his head. “What’s the point? Now.”

I felt a wave of relief. I touched his arm and smiled at him for a couple of long beats. “Thanks.”

“Lindsay,” he added, “I checked with the state highway patrol. No record of any limos reported stolen in the past week.”

That news, the dead end that it represented, discouraged me.

A voice shouted out from the squad room. “Boxer out there?”

“I’m here,” I hollered back.

It was Paul Chin, one of the bright, efficient junior grades assigned to our team. “There’s a Lieutenant Frank Hartwig on the line. Says you know him.”

I ran back in, grabbed the phone on our civilian clerk’s desk. “This is Lindsay Boxer.”

“We found them, Inspector,” Hartwig said.

Chapter 36

“CARETAKER DISCOVERED THEM,” Hartwig muttered with a grim shake of his head. We were walking up a dirt path leading to a small Napa winery. “I hope you’re ready for this. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen. They were killed making love.”

Raleigh and I had rushed up to St. Helena, turning east off 29, “the wine road,” onto Hawk Crest Road until it wound high into the mountains, no longer paved. We had finally come upon an obscure wooden sign: Sparrow Ridge.

“Caretaker comes up here twice a week. Found them at seven this morning. The place’s no longer in regular use,” Hartwig continued. I could tell he was nervous, shook up.

The winery was barely more than a large corrugated shed filled with shiny, state-of-the-art equipment: crushers, fermenting tanks, staggered rows of stacked, aging barrels.

“You’re probably used to this sort of homicide,” Hartwig said as we walked in. The sharp, rancid smell hit our nostrils. My stomach rolled. You never get used to homicide scenes.

They were killed making love.

S

everal members of the local SCU team were huddled over the open bay of a large, stainless grape presser. They were inspecting two splattered mounds. The mounds were the bodies of Michael and Becky De-George.

“Awhh, shit, Lindsay,” Raleigh muttered.

The husband, in a blazer and khakis, stared up at us. A dime-sized penetration cut the center of his forehead. His wife, whose black dress was pushed up to her neck, was on top of him. White-eyed fear was frozen on her face. Her bra was pulled down to her waist, and I could see blood-spattered breasts. Her panties were down to her knees.

It was an ugly, nauseating sight. “You have an approximate time?” I asked Hartwig. He looked close to being sick.

“From the degeneration of the wounds, the M.E. thinks they’ve been dead twenty-four to thirty-six hours. They were killed the same night they disappeared. Jesus, they were just kids.”

I stared at the sad, bloodied body of the wife, and my eyes fell to her hands.

Nothing there. No wedding band.

“You said they were killed in the act?” I asked. “You’re sure about that?”