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

Raleigh ran into me, carrying coffee and a paper. “Hey.” He smiled. “Nice vest.”

“Chin’s got a live one in four,” I said, grabbing his arm. “Claims to have a physical sighting. You want to come along?”

In my haste, I was already by him, not even giving him a second of recognition. He put down his paper on our civilian clerk’s desk and caught up on the stairs.

In the cramped interrogation room sat a nicely dressed, attractive woman of about fifty. Chin introduced her to me as Laurie Birnbaum. She seemed tight, nervous.

Chin sat down next to her. “Ms. Birnbaum, why don’t you tell Inspector Boxer what you just told me.”

She was frightened. “It was the beard that made me remember. I didn’t even think of it until now. It was so horrible.”

“You were at the Brandts’ wedding?” I asked her.

“Yes, as guests of the bride’s family,” she replied. “My husband works with Chancellor Weil at the university.” She took a nervous sip from a cup of coffee. “It was just a brief thing. But he gave me the chills.”

Chin pushed down the record button of a portable recorder.

“Please, go ahead,” I told her soothingly. Once again, I felt close to him — the bastard with the red beard.

“I stood next to him. He had this graying red beard. Like a goatee. The kind they wear in Los Angeles. He looked older, maybe forty-five, fifty, but there was something about him. I’m not saying this right, am I?”

“You spoke to him?” I asked, trying to communicate that even though she didn’t do this every day, I did. Even the male detectives admitted that I was the best at Q and A on the floor. They joked that it was “a girl thing.”

“I had just come in from the dance floor,” she said. “I looked up, and there he was. I said something like, ‘Nice affair…bride or groom?’ For a moment, I thought he looked kind of appealing. Then he just sort of glared at me. I took him for one of those arrogant investment-banker types from the Brandt side.”

“What did he say to you?” I said.

She massaged her brow, straining to recall. “He said, in the weirdest way, that they were lucky.”

“Who was lucky?”

“Melanie and David. I may have said, ‘Aren’t they lucky?’ Meaning the two of them. They were so stunning. And he replied, ‘Oh, they’re lucky.’”

She looked up with a confused expression on her face. “He called them something else… chosen.”

“Chosen?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Oh, they’re lucky…. You could even say they were chosen.’”

“You say he had a goatee?”

“That’s what was so strange. The beard made him seem older, but the rest of him was young.”

“The rest of him? What do you mean?”

“His face. His voice. I know this must sound strange, but it was only for a moment, as I came off the dance floor.”

We got as much as we could from her. Height, hair color. What he was wearing. Everything confirmed the sparse details that we already had. The killer was a man with a short, reddish beard. He had been wearing a tux — the tux jacket he had left behind in the Mandarin Suite.

A fire was building inside me. I felt sure that Laurie Birnbaum was credible. The beard. The tux. We were piecing together his appearance. “Is there anything more, anything at all that stands out to you? Some physical characteristic? A mannerism?”

She shook her head. “It happened so quickly. It was only when I saw the drawing of him in the Chronicle…”

I looked at Chin, conveying that it was time to call down an artist to firm up the details. I thanked her, made my way back to my desk. We’d get a sketch from her to use along with the one from Maryanne Perkins at Saks.

The murder investigation had entered a new phase. It was very hot. We had a stakeout operational outside the Bridal Boutique at Saks. One by one, we were contacting the names on the store’s list, anyone who had ordered a wedding dress in the past several months.

My heart was pounding. The face I had imagined, my dream of the red-bearded man, was starting to fill in. I felt we had him contained.