4th of July (Women's Murder Club 4)

He jerked his head up and his arm flew out, knocking over his coffee and spilling it across his newspaper. I saw the picture on the front page just before it became a coffee-sodden mess. It was a close-up of a fair-haired boy in a wheelchair.

Sam Cabot. My own little nightmare.

“Sorry, Bob, I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”

“You have nothing to be s-s-sorry for,” Bob said. He adjusted his pink-framed glasses and pulled some paper napkins out of his desk drawer to blot the spill. “Have a seat. Please.”

“Thank you. I will.”

Bob asked me how I was getting along in Half Moon Bay, and I told him I was managing to keep busy.

“I was just reading about you, Lieutenant,” he said, mopping the front page of the paper with a wad of napkins.

“There are no secrets in a nanosecond world,” I said with a smile. Then I told Bob that I’d become interested in the homicides that were going on a few miles from my door and wondered what he could tell me.

“I knew Lorelei O’Malley,” he said. “Represented her on a case. Got her off with a wrist slap,” he said with a self-deprecating shrug. “I know Ben only slightly. People are saying he must have had something to do with Lorelei’s death, but I can’t see him killing Caitlin’s stepmother. The child was so traumatized by her real mother’s suicide.”

“Cops always look at the spouse first.”

“Sure. I know. I’ve got friends on the force. I grew up in Half Moon Bay,” he explained, “and I started practicing here right after law school. I like being a small fish in a small pond.”

“You’re too modest, Bob.” I waved my hand, indicating the photos hanging on the walls of Bob shaking hands with the governor and other dignitaries. There were also some neatly framed parchment awards.

“Oh, those,” Bob said, shrugging again. “Well, I do some pro bono work as a guardian ad litem for abused or neglected kids. You know, representing them in court, making sure that their rights are protected.”

“Very commendable,” I said. I was starting to warm up to this very likable guy, and I noticed that he was getting more comfortable with me. He hadn’t stuttered since the coffee incident.

Bob leaned back in his chair and pointed to a photo of an award ceremony in the town hall. Bob shaking hands with someone who was handing him a plaque.

“See this guy?” he asked, indicating a dapper man sitting with a line of others on the stage. “Ray Whittaker. He and his wife, Molly, lived in LA, but they summered here. Murdered in their beds a couple of years ago. Lindsay, do you know that all these people were whipped and slashed to death?”

“I’d heard,” I said. I zoned out for a minute as my brain grappled with the fact of yet another set of murders a couple years ago. What did the whippings mean? How long had the killer been working?

When I tuned back in, Bob was still talking about the Whittakers.

“. . . folksy, real nice people. He was a photographer and she was a bit player in Hollywood. It makes no sense. These were all good people, and it’s tragic that the kids end up in foster homes or with relatives they hardly know. I worry about the kids.” He shook his head and sighed. “I try to leave this kind of stuff at the office at the end of the day, but it never really works.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “If you’ve got a few minutes, I’ll tell you a story that I’ve been bringing home from the office for the past ten years.”

Chapter 55

BOB GOT UP AND walked over to a Mr. Coffee sitting on a filing cabinet. He poured us each a cup of coffee.

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he said. “I don’t like Starbucks prices.” He smiled over at me. “Or that whole yuppie-on-the-go scene.”

Over tepid coffee with powdered milk, I told Bob about my first homicide case.

“We found him in a squalid hotel in the Mission District. I’d seen corpses before, but I was unprepared for this, Bob. He was young—somewhere between seventeen and twenty-one—and when I walked into the room I found him lying spread-eagled on his back, decomposing in a congealed pool of his own blood. Flies were all over him. A shimmering blanket of flies.”

My throat closed up as the image came flooding back; it was as clear as if I were standing in that hotel room right now, thinking, Oh, God, get me out of here. I sipped at the terrible coffee until I could speak again.

“He was wearing only two items of clothing: an ordinary Hanes tube sock, which was identical to hundreds of thousands that were sold all across the country that year, and a T-shirt from the Distillery. You know the place?”

Bob nodded. “I’ll bet every tourist passing through Half Moon Bay since 1930 has eaten there.”

“Yeah. Hell of a clue.”

“How did he die?”