2nd Chance (Women's Murder Club 2)

I looked at her. “Jill, he saved my life. I can’t just turn him in.”

“But you’re taking a huge risk. For what? His gun is properly licensed. He was your father, and he was following you. He saved you. There’s no crime in that.”

“Truth is”—I swallowed—“I’m not sure he was following me.”

Jill shot me a hard look. She wheeled her chair closer. “You want to run that by me again?”

“I’m not sure he was following me,” I said.

“Then why the hell was he there?” Cindy shook her head.

All their eyes fell on me.

Piece by piece, I laid out the exchange with my father in the car after the shooting. How after I confronted him, my father had admitted to being a material witness twenty years ago in Bay View. “He was there with Coombs.”

“Oh, shit,” Jill said with blank eyes. “Oh Jesus, Lindsay.”

“That’s why he came back,” I said. “All those uplifting conversations about reconnecting with his little girl. His little Buttercup. Coombs was threatening him. He came back to face him down.”

“That may be,” said Claire, reaching out for my hand, “but he was threatening him with you. He came back to protect you, too.”

Jill leaned forward, her eyes narrowed. “Lindsay, this may not be about protecting your dad from getting involved. He may have known Coombs was killing people and not come forward.”

I met her eyes. “These past weeks, having him back in my life, it was like, all of a sudden I could put aside the things he had done, the hurt he caused, and he was just a person, who made some mistakes but who was funny and needing, and who seemed happy to be with me. When I was little, I dreamed of something like this happening, my dad coming back.”

“Don’t give up on him yet,” Claire said.

Cindy asked, “So if you don’t think your father came back for you, Lindsay, what is he protecting?”

“I don’t know.” I looked around the room, my eyes stopping at every face. “That’s the big question.”

Jill got up, went over to the credenza behind her desk, and hoisted up a large cardboard box file. On the front was marked, “Case File 237654A. State of California vs. Francis C. Coombs.”

“I don’t know either,” she said, patting it. “But I’ll bet the answer’s somewhere in here.”

Chapter 94

AS SOON AS SHE GOT TO WORK the next morning, Jill opened the case file and waded in. She told her secretary to hold all calls and canceled what only yesterday had seemed an urgent meeting on another murder case she’d been working on.

With a mug of coffee on her desk and her DKNY suit jacket slung over her chair, Jill lifted out the first heavy folder. The massive trial record—pages and pages of testimony, motions, and judicial rulings. In the end, it would be better that she didn’t find anything. That Marty Boxer ended up being a father who had come back to protect his kid. But the prosecutor in her wasn’t convinced.

She groaned and started reading the file.

The trial had taken nine days. It took the rest of the morning for her to go through it. She sifted through the pretrial hearings, jury selection, the opening statements. Coombs’s previous record was brought out. Numerous citations for mishandling situations on the street where blacks were involved. Coombs was known for off-color jokes and pejorative remarks. Then came a painstaking re-creation of the night in question. Coombs and his partner, Stan Dragula, on patrol in Bay View. They encounter a schoolyard basketball game. Coombs spots Gerald Sikes. Sikes is basically a good kid, the prosecution conveys. Stays in school, is in the band; one blemish when he had been rounded up two months before in a sweep of the projects looking for pushers.

Jill read on.

As Coombs busts up the game, he starts taunting Sikes. The scene gets ugly. Two more patrol cars arrive. Sikes shouts something at Coombs, then he takes off. Coombs follows. Jill studied several hand-drawn diagrams illustrating the scene. After the crowd is subdued, two other cops give chase. Patrol Officer Tom Fallone is the first to arrive. Gerald Sikes is already dead.

The trial and notes ran over three hundred pages… thirty-seven witnesses. A real mess. It made Jill wish she’d been the prosecuting attorney. But nowhere was there anything implicating Marty Boxer.

If he was there that night, he was never called.

By noon, Jill had made her way through the depositions of witnesses. The murder of Sikes had taken place in a service alley between Buildings A and B in the projects. Residents claimed to have heard the scuffle and the boy’s cries for help. Just reading the depositions turned Jill’s stomach. Coombs was Chimera; he had to be.

She was tired and discouraged. She’d spent half a day plowing through the file. She had almost gotten to the end when she found something odd.

A man who claimed he’d witnessed the murder from a fourth-story window. Kenneth Charles.