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

Then it hit me. The photo I had picked up at Jenks’s house. The beautiful and unmistakable moonlit dome. The Palace of Fine Arts.

It was where he had been married.

“I think I know where he’s going!” I shouted. “The Palace of Fine Arts.”

Chapter 123

I TOOK OFF IN THE RADIO CAR with the siren blaring all the way to the Presidio.

It took me no more than seven minutes, with traffic wildly shifting out of my way, to speed down Lombard over to Richardson to the south tip of the Presidio. Up ahead, the golden rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts loomed powerfully above a calm, gleaming pond.

I saw Chris’s blue Taurus pulled up diagonally across from the tip of the park and jackknifed the patrol car to a halt next to it. I didn’t see a sign of any other cops.

Why hadn’t any backup arrived? What the hell was going on now?

I clicked my gun off safety and made my way into the park underneath the giant rotunda. No way I was waiting.

I was startled by people running toward me, away from the rotunda grounds.

“Someone’s shooting,” one of them screamed.

Suddenly, my legs were flying. “Everyone out! I’m San Francisco police!” I screamed as I bumped through the people rushing by.

“Maniac with a gun,” one of them yelled.

I ran around the pond alongside a massive marble colonnade. There was no sound up ahead. No more shots.

Leading with my gun, I rounded corners until I was in sight of the main rotunda. Huge Corinthian columns soared above me, capped with ornate heroic carvings.

I could hear voices in the distance: a woman’s mocking tone: “It’s just you and me, Nick. Imagine that. Isn’t it romantic?”

And a man’s voice, Jenks’s: “Look at you, you’re pathetic. As always.”

The voices echoed out of the huge dome of the main rotunda.

Where was Chris? And where was our backup?

Cops should have been here by now. I held my breath, straining to hear the first police siren.

Every step I took, I heard my own footsteps echoing to the roof.

“What do you want?” I heard Jenks’s cry reverberating off the stone. Then the woman shouting back, “I want you to remember them. All the women you fucked.”

Still no sign of Chris. I was tight with worry.

I decided to go around the side of a row of low arches that ran down to where the voices were coming from. I ducked around the corner of the colonnade.

Then I saw Chris.

He was sitting there, propped against a pillar, watching everything unfold.

My first reaction was to say something like, Chris, get down, someone will see you. It was one of those slowmotion perceptions where my eyes were faster than my mind.

Then I was seized with horrible fright, nausea, and sadness.

Chris wasn’t watching, and he wasn’t hiding.

The front of his shirt was covered with blood.