7th Heaven (Women's Murder Club 7)

Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.

“There’s no weapon here.”

“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”

We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.

Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner — your choice, Lindsay —”

I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.

“I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”

“I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”

Chapter 11

JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.

This time we had a search warrant.

The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.

“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”

“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”

“And I’d like to see Venice before it sinks into the sea. And as long as we’re wishing on stars here, I’m still pining for a Rolls Silver Cloud.”

There was a leaden sound as the CSI working behind and under the tub dismantled the trap. As the tech bagged the plumbing, Conklin and I went back to Junie’s bedroom.

It wasn’t the pigpen Ricky Malcolm slept in, but Junie wasn’t a tidy homemaker either. There were dust balls under the furniture, the mirrored walls were smudged, and the dense gray carpet had the oily look of a floor mat in a single dad’s minivan.

A CSI asked if we were ready, then closed the curtains and shut off the overhead light. She waved the wand end of the Omnichrome 1000 in a side-to-side pattern across the bedspread, carpet, and walls, each pass of her wand showing up pale blue splotches indicating semen stains everywhere. She shot me a look and said, “If the johns saw this, they’d never take off their clothes in this girl’s house, guaranteed.”

Conklin and I walked downstairs toward the sound of the vacuum cleaner, watched the CSIs work, Conklin shouting to me over the vacuum’s motor, “Three months after the fact, what do we expect? A sign saying, ‘Michael Campion died here’?”

That’s when we heard the clank of metal against the vacuum cleaner nozzle. The CSI turned off the motor, stooped, pulled a steak knife from under the skirt of a velvet-covered sofa — just where Conklin and I had been sitting last night.

The investigator held out the steak knife with his gloved hand so that I could see the rust-colored stain on the sharp, serrated blade.

Chapter 12

I WAS STILL SAVORING the discovery of the knife when my cell phone rang. It was Chief Anthony Tracchio, and his voice was unusually loud.

“What is it, Tony?”

“I need the two of you in my office, pronto.”

After a short volley of useless quibble, he hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin and I walked into Tracchio’s wood-paneled corner suite and saw two well-known people seated in the leather armchairs. Former governor Connor Hume Campion’s face looked swollen with rage, and his much younger wife, Valentina, appeared heavily sedated.

The front page of the Sunday Chronicle was on Tracchio’s desk. I could read the headline upside down and from ten feet away: SUSPECT QUESTIONED IN CAMPION DISAPPEARANCE.

Cindy hadn’t waited for my quote, damn it.

What the hell had she written?