The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

“We were swimming together, naked, under a waterfall. Water. That’s sex, right?”

He released my hand. The mattress shifted. He shook out the blanket and covered my body.

I heard the shower running as I lay in the dark, feeling pent-up and tearful and unresolved. I dozed, waking to Joe’s hand touching my hair.

“I’m going now, Lindsay.”

I reached up and put my arms around his neck, and we kissed in the dark.

I said, “Have a good trip. Don’t forget to write.”

“I’ll call.”

It was all the wrong tone to let Joe leave on this cool note. The front door closed. The locks clicked into place.

I bolted out of bed.

I dressed in jeans and one of Joe’s sweaters, ran barefoot out into the hallway. I pressed the down button at the elevator station, one long push until the car made the climb back up to the eleventh floor and jumped open.

I despaired as the elevator dropped me slowly down. In my mind’s eye, Joe’s bags were in the trunk, the car moving now along Lake Street, picking up speed as it headed toward the airport.

But when the elevator finally released me into the lobby, I saw Joe through the glass front doors, standing beside a Lincoln sedan. I blew past the doorman and ran out into the street, calling Joe’s name.

He looked up and opened his arms, and I fell against him, pressed my face to his jacket, felt the tears slip out of my eyes.

“I love you so much, Joe.”

“I love you, too, Blondie.”

“Joe, when we were in that waterfall, was I wearing my ring?”

“Yeah. Big old sparkler. Could see it from the Moon.”

I laughed into his shoulder. We kissed and hugged, did it again, until the driver joked, “Save a little for later, okay?”

“I’d better go,” Joe said.

I stepped back reluctantly, and Joe got into the car.

I waved and Joe waved back as the black Lincoln took my lover away.

Chapter 12

YUKI WAS IN HER OFFICE, one of the dozens of windowless, grubby warrens for assistant district attorneys in the Hall of Justice. She was prepped, primed, and in full court dress: a gray Anne Klein suit, ice-pink silk shirt, three-hundred-dollar shoes she’d gotten half off at Neiman.

It was half past six in the morning.

In about three hours she would be making her closing argument in the bloody awful and complex murder trial of Stacey Glenn, a twenty-five-year-old former pageant queen who’d managed to be both a beauty and a beast.

What Stacey Glenn had done to her parents was revolting, unprovoked, and unforgivable, and Yuki was determined to nail that psycho-bitch and send her away for good. But for all of Yuki’s determination and gifts for bringing the strongest argument to life, she was becoming famous around the DA’s office — famous for losing. And that was killing her.

So this was it.

If Stacey Glenn got off, as much as she’d hate to do it, Yuki would go back to civil law, handle rich people’s divorces and contract negotiations. That’s if she wasn’t fired before she could quit.

Yuki hunched forward in her creaky chair and shuffled a packet of index cards, each one highlighting a point she would make in summing up the People’s case.

Item: Stacey Glenn had left her apartment in Potrero Hill at two in the morning and driven her distinctive candy-apple-red Subaru Forester to her parents’ house forty miles away in Marin, crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.