10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

“After all these years, you still think you can get away with lying to me?”

“No. No, I don’t.”

“So, what is it?”

I told my best bud, “Once a month I get body-slammed by the loss of another opportunity, you know? Getting married makes me want a baby more than ever. It’s come over me like a freakin’ baby-love tsunami,” I said.

“You and Joe have been trying?”

I nodded.

“For how long?”

“A little while. Three or four months.”

“That’s nothing,’” Claire said.

By then we were on Interstate 5 about one hundred miles north of San Francisco. Knee-high thickets of scrub flanked both sides of the freeway, and wire fences separated the road from the plains of parched grass that stretched to the horizon.

The word “barren” came to mind.

“You having PMS right now?” Claire asked me.

“Yuh-huh,” I said.

Claire reached over and gave my shoulder a shake. “You’re getting a chocolate bar at the next gas station,” she said.

I croaked, “What is that? Doctor’s orders?”

Claire laughed. “Yes, it is, smarty-pants,” she said. “It most definitely is.”

Chapter 74

ANY COP WOULD SAY that emotional attachment messes with your objectivity. You just have to accept that innocent people get hurt, raped, scammed, kidnapped, and murdered every day.

But if you’re a cop and you don’t bring everything you’ve got to nailing the bad guys, what the hell is the point? For the same time and money, you might as well be punching tickets on a train.

We gassed up the Explorer outside Williams, then had lunch at Granzella’s, a restaurant that looked like a feed store on the outside and a hunting lodge inside. Claire and I sat at a table under the mounted heads of deer and bear as well as zebras, water buffalo, and long-horned goats.

Along with the exotic taxidermy, Granzella’s specialized in a very nice linguine with a spicy red sauce. While we ate, I groused about Avis.

“She’s wasted more than a week of our time, Claire. And she’s such a liar, even this could be a flyin’ goose chase.”

Claire clucked sympathetically as I ranted, then raised the heat by reminding me about the last big case we’d worked together. Pete Gordon, a bona fide psycho killer, had murdered four young moms and five little kids a few months ago in a murder spree that had torn me and Claire to pieces.

I went to the bathroom, sat on the rust-stained throne, and got some major weeping out of my system. Then I washed my face, came out, and said to Claire, “I’ve got the check. Let’s go, butterfly.”

We were back on the road again by a quarter past two. About two hundred miles north of San Francisco, the freeway crossed a section of Shasta Lake.

For the first time in a week, I stopped thinking of babies. The sight of pink-and-yellow sandstone banks rising from the impossibly vivid bands of sea-green and peacock-blue water simply blew everything else out of my mind.

And then sightseeing was over. Surely we would find Avis’s baby boy. Surely we would.

We pulled into Taylor Creek at 5 p.m.

It’s a one-traffic-light town, a typical small town in the great northwest. Main Street was a row of western facades from the late 1800s. Brick buildings that were once banks or warehouses now housed boutiques and small storefront businesses.

Cars crawled along the main drag. Streetlights and headlights came on as the sunlight faded to a streak of pink.