12th of Never (Women's Murder Club 12)

“Yeah,” said Yuki. “That’s what she says. So she set up the meeting for Keith with her new cop boyfriend, hoping Keith would be arrested for hiring a hit man. But Keith made the cop as a cop.”

“So he decided to take out Jennifer himself?” Claire said.

“Right. Divorce by homicide. According to Keith, he didn’t want his wife to end up with Lily. He’s a psycho, but he loves his little girl.”

I thought about Julie and looked at Claire. She had to be thinking about her little girl, Ruby Rose, too.

I sang a line from an old song: “Thank heaven for little girrrls.”

I raised my mug and clinked it against Claire’s.

Claire said solemnly, “And big girls, too. Getting bigger every day.”

Cindy cracked up and hoisted her beer. Yuki raised what remained of her second watermelon margarita and we touched glasses across the table.

Yuki said, “To us.”

We said it in unison and with feeling.

“To us.”

EPILOGUE

A BAD DAY FOR PRO FOOTBALL

Chapter 111

AT EIGHT THAT morning, I was working at my desk across from Conklin when Brenda called to me from the far side of the bull pen.

“Sarge, I’ve got incoming from a sheriff in Nevada. You want the call?”

Brady was out of the building, so I was in charge.

“Transfer it over,” I said.

The light on my phone console blinked. I picked up the receiver, tapped the button, and said my name and rank into the mouthpiece.

The man on the other end of the line said he was Sergeant Cosmo Rinker of the White Pine County, Nevada, sheriff ‘s department.

He said, “Sergeant, we’ve got two DBs out here, and you might be looking for them.”

“How’s that?” I said.

“Well,” Rinker said, “what happened was, this UFO group saw a bright light on the horizon a couple of weeks ago, thought it was a close encounter of the little green kind. But when they got to it, turns out to be a vehicle completely consumed by fire.”

I wondered what an incinerated vehicle had to do with us. But the sergeant had hooked me, and the man liked to tell the story his way.

“After the highway patrol called us, we got to see what was inside this burned-up Escalade. It was the cremains of two bodies in the rear cargo area, both of them female.”

We were missing two female bodie

s, which was an inexcusable tragedy, an embarrassment to San Francisco law enforcement, and a very bad blow to a very good friend of mine.

“I’m listening, Sergeant. Please go on.”

“Sure, sure; I’m getting there. One of the females had a bullet that went into her head and out the other side. The other female also had a gunshot to the head, but the bullet was fragmented and forensically worthless. But our lab did get a hit on the dental work of that first female and that’s why I called you.”

“What’s the victim’s name?”