The 5th Horseman (Women's Murder Club 5)

I thanked Conklin and asked him to collect the parking-garage tickets and the surveillance tapes.

Then Jacobi and I headed up the ramp.

I’d had way too little sleep, but a thin, steady flow of adrenaline was entering my bloodstream. I was imagining the scene before I saw it, thinking about how a young white female came to be strangled inside a parking garage.

Footsteps echoed overhead. Lots and lots of them. My people.

I counted a dozen members of the SFPD strung around the upward-coiling concrete-ribbon parking area. Officers were going through the trash, taking down plate numbers, looking for anything that would help us before the crime scene was returned to the public domain.

Jacobi and I rounded the bend that took us to the fourth floor and saw the Caddy in question, a black late-model Seville, sleek, unscratched. Its nose was pointing over the railing toward the Civic Center Garage on McAllister.

“Zero to sixty in under five seconds,” Warren muttered, then did a fair imitation of the Cadillac musical sting from their TV commercials.

“Down, boy,” I said.

Charlie Clapper, head of CSU, was wearing his usual non-smile and a gray herringbone jacket that casually matched his salt-and-pepper hair.

He put his camera down on the hood of an adjacent Subaru Outback and said, “Mornin’, Lou, Jacobi. Meet Jane Doe.”

I tugged on latex gloves and followed him around the car. The trunk was closed because the victim wasn’t in there.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her pale, wide-open eyes staring out through the windshield expectantly.

As if she were waiting for someone to come.

“Aw, shit,” Jacobi said with disgust. “Beautiful young girl like this. All dressed up and no place to go. Forever.”

Chapter 9

“I DON’T SEE a handbag anywhere,” Clapper was telling me. “I left her clothing intact for the ME. Nice duds,” he said. “Looks like a rich girl. You think?”

I felt a shock of sadness and anger as I looked into the victim’s dreamy face.

She was fair-skinned, a light dusting of powder across her face, a hint of blush on the apples of her cheeks. Her hair was cut in a Meg Ryan-style mop of tousled blond lights, and her nails had been recently manicured.

Everything about this woman spoke of privilege and opportunity, and money. It was as if she’d been just about to step down the runway of life when some psycho had ripped it all away from her.

I pressed the victim’s cheek with the back of my hand. Her skin was tepid to the touch, telling me that she’d been alive last night.

“Larry, Moe, and Curly didn’t whack this little lady,” Jacobi commented.

I nodded my agreement.

When I first got into Homicide, I learned that crime scenes generally come in two types. The kind where the evidence is disorganized: blood spatter, broken objects, shell casings scattered around, bodies sprawled where they fell.

And then there were the scenes like this one.

Organized. Planned out.

Plenty of malice aforethought.

The victim’s clothes were neat, no bunching, no buttonholes missed. She was even wearing a seat belt, which was drawn snug across her lap and shoulder.

Had the killer cared about her?

Or was this tidy scene some kind of message for whoever found her?

“The passenger-side door was opened with a slim jim,” Clapper told us. “The surfaces have all been wiped clean. No prints to be found inside or out. And look over here.”