3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)

There was one of those sticky, protracted silences, and I was hoping I wasn’t about to be shoved off this case.

“Right answer.” The federal agent winked at me. “No need for all the melodrama, I just wanted to see who I was working with. Joe Molinari,” he said, smiling, and pushed across his card.

As I read it, as hard as I tried not to change my expression, my heart picked up a beat, maybe a couple of beats.

DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY, the card read. JOSEPH P. MOLINARI. DEPUTY DIRECTOR.

Shit, this guy was all the way up!

“Let’s start a dialogue with these bastards,” said the deputy director.

Chapter 43

MY HEAD WAS STILL BUZZING from my meeting with Molinari as I headed back to my office. On the way, I stopped at Jill’s.

A worker was vacuuming the corridor, but her lights were still on.

An Eva Cassidy CD was playing lightly in the background. I heard Jill dictating into a recording device.

“Hey.” I knocked on the door. A look as apologetic as I could muster. “I know you left some messages. It probably won’t help if I tell you about my day.”

“Well, I know how it began,” Jill said. Icicles.

Deserved.

“Look, I can’t blame you for being mad.” I stepped in, placing my hands on the top of a high-backed chair.

“You could say I was a little mad,” Jill said, “earlier in the day.”

“And now?”

“Now… I guess you could call it very fucking mad, Lindsay.”

There wasn’t a hint of humor in her face. When you needed someone to seriously bust some balls—to use the wrong metaphor—Jill was your gal.

“You’re torturing me,” I said, and sat in the chair. “I realize what I did was way out of bounds.”

Jill laughed derisively. “I would say the part about sending a hit man after my husband seemed a bit wide of the lines—even for you, Lindsay.”

“It wasn’t a hit man,” I corrected her. “It was a knee-cracker. But who’s being technical. What can I say? You’re married to a total SOB.” I pulled the chair up to the side of her desk. “Look, Jill, I know it was wrong. I didn’t go there to threaten him. I went for you. But the guy was such a tight-assed creep.”

“Maybe what the guy didn’t appreciate was our business being laid out like a laundry list in his face. What I told you was in confidence, Lindsay.”

“You’re right.” I swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

Gradually, the little lines of anger in her brow began to soften. She pushed back her chair from the desk and rolled it to face me, almost knee to knee.

“Look, Lindsay, I’m a big girl. Let me fight my own battles. You’re my friend in this case, not the police.”

“So everybody’s telling me.”

“Then hear it, honey, because I need you to be my friend. Not the 101st Airborne.” She took my hands and squeezed them. “Usually a friend hears another out, invites her to lunch, maybe sets her up with a cute coworker…. Barging into her husband’s office and threatening to have his knees capped… that sort of stuff… we call them enemies, Lindsay.”

I laughed. For the first time I saw a glimmer of a smile crack through Jill’s ice. A glimmer.

“Okay, so as a friend, how are you and the SOB since he punched you?” I sniffed back a false smile.

Jill laughed, shrugged. “I guess we’re okay…. We talked about counseling.”