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

I nodded, but after Noble Blue’s hour-long virtual tour of the Baileys’ lifestyle, I was exhausted by so much information that had yielded so little.

At the same time, Noble Blue had managed to hook me. I found that I cared about these two people who’d seemed lucky and blessed until their lives were canceled — as if someone had thrown a switch and simply shut them down.

I thanked Blue, unfolded my cramped legs, and stepped down from the tiki hut in the center of the Tenderloin.

“I know less now than when Jacobi lobbed this hot potato to us,” I said to Conklin as we walked out to Eddy Street.

“You,” Conklin said, unlocking the car.

“Me, what?”

He gave me his lady-killer grin, the one that could make me forget my own name. “You,” my partner said again. “Jacobi lobbed this hot potato to you.”

Chapter 31

THE COPS on the Bailey investigation were loosely arranged around the grungy twenty- by-thirty-foot squad room we often think of as home.

Jacobi sat behind my desk, saying into the phone, “They just got here. Okay. As soon as you can.”

He hung up, told us, “Clapper says there were no suspicious prints in the bedroom or bath. There was nothing interesting in the glasses or the pills or the bottle of champagne.

“Claire’s on her way. Paul, why don’t you start?”

Paul Chi is lithe, upbeat, resourceful, and a first-class interrogator. He and Jacobi had interviewed the Baileys’ live-in staff, and Chi gave his report from his seat.

“First up, the gardener. Pedro Vasquez, forty-year-old Hispanic. Seemed twitchy. He volunteered that he had some porn on his laptop,” Chi said. “But it turned out to be legal-age porn. I spent an hour with him, don’t see a motive, not yet, anyway. His prints were not found in the Baileys’ bedroom. Vasquez told me he’d never been above the ground floor, and at this point, we’ve got no reason to think that’s a lie.

“Two: Iraida Hernandez,” Chi said, flipping the page in his notebook. “Hernandez is a nice lady.”

“Your professional opinion, Chi?” Lemke asked mildly.

“Yes,” said Chi, “it is. Hernandez is a naturalized citizen, Mexican, fifty-eight, employed for more than thirty years by Isa Booth’s family and by the Baileys. As expected, her prints are all over the Baileys’ bedroom.

“She’s got no record, but as for motive? It’s a maybe.”

“Really?” I said.

Chi nodded. “She says she’s probably in the Baileys’ will, so you never know, but my Grift-O-Meter didn’t go off. Iraida Hernandez does things by the book. She’s loyal. She didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone, so as I said, ‘Nice lady.’ ”

“What about the cook?” Cappy McNeil called out. Cappy’s a big guy, two hundred fifty, and if the doughnuts and the stairs don’t get him, he could get promoted out of here to a good lieutenant’s job in a small town down the line. That’s what he’s shooting for. Calls it “going coastal.”

“As I was about to say,” Chi said to his partner, “number three: the cook is Miller, Marilyn, white, forty-seven years old. Moved here from somewhere in flyover country.” Chi looked at his notes. “Ohio. Only been working for the Baileys for a year. Has a clean record. No prints upstairs. All I got off her was ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’ I see no motive. What’s she got to gain? But like the rest of the staff, access to the Baileys was a given. And if we’re thinking poison…”

Chi shrugged as if to say, She’s the cook.

Jacobi said, “I told Miller not to leave the city, and I got two teams from the Special Investigation Division. They’ll be on her at all times.”

Chi was finishing up his report on the remaining two of the Baileys’ live-in staff, a second housekeeper and the mechanic, both as clean as cat whiskers, when Claire stomped into the squad room in her sneakers and scrubs.

She looked around and said, “Are you all thinking, Now that Claire’s here, the party can begin? Think again.”

Chapter 32

CHI WHEELED A CHAIR over for Claire. She sat down, propped her feet up on a desk, said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Baileys’ bodies were so pristine, I expected them to start breathing. No pills in their stomachs, no abrasions, contusions, or lacerations. Negative for carbon monoxide. And since I never let skin stand between me and my diagnosis, I did a layerwise dissection on both necks, and the backs of their necks as well.

“In sum, I looked at everything but their dreams. The autopsies were completely negative.”

Everyone groaned. Even me.