“That we already knew,” I said.
He kept looking at me, as if I had somehow insulted him with the obvious. Then he lifted a bottle out of the open case.
“Check the numbers, Lindsay. Each bottle’s registered with a number. Look here, four-two-three-five-five-nine. Must make it go down all the more smoothly.” He took out a folded-up green copy of a “Police Property” voucher from his chest pocket. “The one from the Hyatt. Same lot. Same number.” Charlie smiled.
The bottles were the same. It was solid evidence that tied Jenks to where David and Melanie Brandt were killed. It wasn’t a weapon, but it was damning, no longer circumstantial. A rush of excitement shot through me. I high-fived the pale, heavy-set CSU man.
“Anyway,” Charlie said, almost apologetically, “I wouldn’t have brought you all the way out here for just that.”
Clapper led me through the finely furnished interior of the house to the master bedroom. It had a vast picture window looking out on the Golden Gate Bridge. He took me into a spacious closet. Jenks’s.
“You remember the bloody jacket we found at the hotel?” In the rear of the closet, Charlie squatted over a large shoe rack. “Well, now it’s a set.”
Clapper reached behind the shoe rack and pulled out a crumpled Nordstrom’s shopping bag. “I wanted you to see how we found it.”
Out of the bag, he pulled balled-up black tuxedo trousers.
“I already checked. It’s the other half of the jacket at the Hyatt. Same maker. Look inside; same style number.”
I might as well have been staring at a million dollars in cash, or a ton of stolen cocaine. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pants, imagining how Nicholas Jenks would squirm now. Claire had been right. She’d been right from the start. The jacket hadn’t come off the victim. It had always belonged to Jenks.
“So whaddaya think, Inspector?” Charlie Clapper grinned. “Can you close your case or what? Oh, yeah,” the CSU man exclaimed, almost absentmindedly. “Where’d I put it?”
He patted his pockets, searched around in his jacket. He finally found a small plastic bag.
“Straight out of the sucker’s electric razor,” Charlie announced.
In the bag were several short red hairs.
Chapter 91
CLAIRE SAID, “I’ve been expecting you, honey.” She took my arm and led me back into the lab to a small room lined with chemicals. Two microscopes were set up side by side on a granite-block counter.
“Charlie told me what he came up with,” she said. “The champagne. Matching pantalones. You got him, Lindsay.”
“Match these”— I held out the plastic bag —“we put him in the gas chamber.”
“Okay, let’s see,” she said, smiling. She opened a yellow envelope marked “Priority, Evidence,” and took out a petri dish identical to the one I had seen after the second murders. It had Subject: Rebecca DeGeorge, #62340 written on the front in bold marker.
With a tweezer, she placed the single hair that had come from the second bride onto a clear slide. Then she inserted it under the scope. She leaned over it, adjusting the focus, then caught me by surprise, asking, “So how’re you feeling, woman?”
“You mean Negli’s?”
“What else would I mean?” she said, peering into the scope.
In the rush of apprehending Jenks, it was the first time in the past few days that I had really thought about it. “I saw Medved late last week. My blood count’s still down.”
Claire finally looked up. “I’m sorry, Lindsay.”
Trying to sound upbeat, I walked her through my regimen. The increased dosage. The higher frequency. I mentioned the possibility of a bone marrow transplant.
She flashed me a big smile. “We’re gonna have to find a way to get those red cells of yours shaken up.”
Even in the laboratory, I must’ve started to blush.
“What?” asked Claire. “What’re you hiding? Trying unsuccessfully to hide?”
“Nothing.”