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

“That means there’s an old one out there who might be willing to talk.”

He had a satisfied expression on his face. “So, can I buy you a meal, Lindsay?”

A hot bead of sweat burned a slow path down my neck. I didn’t know whether to get out or stay in. I thought, If I got out… “Chris, I already ate. Had a commitment.”

“Jacobi.” He grinned. He could always get me with that smile of his.

“Sort of a women’s thing, a group of us. We meet once a month. Go over our lives. You know, nanny problems, personal trainers, country homes. Affairs, things like that.”

“Anyone I know?” Raleigh raised his eyebrows.

“Maybe one day I’ll introduce you.”

We sort of hung there, my blood slowly throbbing in my chest. The hair on Raleigh’s forearm gently grazed against mine. This was driving me insane. I had to say something. “Why’d you call me out here, Chris?”

“Jenks,” he replied. “I didn’t tell you everything. We ran a firearms check on him with Sacramento.” He looked at me with a glint in his eye. “He’s got several registered. A Browning twenty-two-caliber hunting rifle, a Renfield thirty-thirty. A Remington forty-point-five.”

He was leading me on. I knew he had struck pay dirt.

“There’s also a Glock Special, Lindsay. Nineteen-ninety issue. Nine millimeter.”

A rush of validation shot through my veins.

Chris frowned. “He has the weapon of choice, Lindsay. We’ve got to find that gun.”

I made a fist and brought it down against Raleigh’s in triumph. My mind was racing. Sparrow Ridge, the phone calls, now a Glock Special. It was all still circumstantial, but it was falling into place.

“What’re you doing tomorrow, Raleigh?” I asked with a smile.

“Wide open. Why?”

“I think it’s time we talked to this guy face-to-face.”

Chapter 75

HIGH ON THE CLIFFS above the Golden Gate Bridge, 20 El Camino del Mar was a stucco, Spanish-style home with an iron gate guarding the terra-cotta driveway.

Red Beard lived here — Nicholas Jenks.

Jenks’s home was low, stately, surrounded by decoratively trimmed hedges and bright, blossoming azaleas. In the driveway’s circle, there was a large iron sculpture, Botero’s Madonna and Child.

“Fiction must be good.” Raleigh let out a whistle, as we stepped up to the front door. We had made an appointment through Jenks’s personal assistant to meet him at noon. I had been warned by Sam Roth not to come on too hard.

A pleasant housekeeper greeted us at the door and took us back to a spacious sunroom, informing us that Mr. Jenks would be down in a short while. The lavish room seemed straight out of some designer magazine — with rich jacquard wallpaper, Oriental chairs, a mahogany coffee table, shelves of mementos and photographs. It opened onto a fieldstone patio overlooking the Pacific.

I had lived in San Francisco all my life but never knew you could come home every night to this kind of spectacular view.

While we waited, I examined photos arranged on a side table. Jenks with a series of well-known faces: Michael Douglas, the top guy from Disney, Bill Walsh from the 49ers. Others were with an attractive woman I took to be his new wife — sunny, smiling, strawberry-blond hair — in various exotic locations: beaches, skiing, a Mediterranean isle.

In a silver frame, there was a four-by-six of the two of them in the center of an enormous lit-up rotunda. The dome of the Palace of Fine Arts. It was a wedding photo.

It was then that Nicholas Jenks walked in. I recognized him immediately from his photographs.

He was slighter than I had imagined. Trim, well-built, no more than five-ten, wearing an open white dress shirt over well-worn jeans. My eyes were drawn immediately to the reddish, gray-flecked beard.

Red Beard, it’s good to meet you, finally.

“Sorry to put you off, inspectors,” he said with an easy smile, “but I’m afraid I get cranky if I can’t get my morning pages in.” He held out his hand, noticing the photograph I was still holding. “A bit like the set of Marriage of Figaro, wasn’t it? Myself, I would’ve gone for a small civil ceremony, but Chessy said if she could snare me in a tux, she’d never, ever doubt my commitment to her.”