14th Deadly Sin (Women's Murder Club 14)

“I have a job offer with a not-for-profit. The Defense League. Impeccable credentials. I’ll get the same salary, don’t worry. But I’ll be defending people with inadequate representation. They already have a case for me.”

“Can we talk about this later?” Brady said. He unhooked his phone from its charger and put it in his pocket.

“Sure. We can talk about it,” she said. “But I’ve got to give the Defense League an answer.”

“Today?”

“Yes. And I’ve got to tell Parisi before I accept, and he’s on his way out of town at the end of the day.”

Brady took his wallet off the dresser and put it in his back pocket. He was moving in a pretty herky-jerky fashion. Yuki read his body language. He was processing something he really didn’t like. She knew her timing sucked.

“Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

“It was sudden. I just met with the director yesterday, and I wanted to think about the offer overnight.”

“Thanks for your faith in me.”

Yuki trusted Brady with her life. This wasn’t about faith in Brady.

“OK,” he said after five or six silent seconds had elapsed. “I guess you should do what you want. I hope it works out for you.”

“Brady? Please don’t be like this.”

“People are waiting for me, hon. I’ll see you later.”

She listened to him leave the apartment, closing the door hard; she heard the door lock. And she heard her dead mother’s voice inside her head.

You hurt your husband’s pride, Yuki-eh. Why didn’t you ask him if he approved of this move?

She didn’t have to answer her mother. She felt defiant, knowing that truly, Brady would have pressured her out of the job. And he would have had valid reasons. He would have said it was good for her to work in the Hall, to be near him.

As a lifetime cop, he would have told her patiently that it was good for her to be part of the city government, where her job was secure, where she was moving up, making a reputation, and locking in a pension plan. He would have said that her hours might be long, but they were predictable. And he would have said that he wouldn’t be able to stop worrying if she was working in bad neighborhoods.

And he would have been right on all those points.

But he would also have been wrong.

Safe was good. But she had another idea about what she should be doing with her life and her abilities. She wanted to do work that would make her feel good about herself.

Yuki looked at the clock, then slipped a sleep mask over her eyes.

She tried to fall back to sleep, but there was no way.

As bad as it was fighting with her husband, she couldn’t stand thinking about what Red Dog was going to say to her. It wasn’t going to be good.

But she had to get it over with.

CHAPTER 15

YUKI SAW THAT Leonard Parisi’s office door was open and that he was at his desk, with its wide, uninspiring view of traffic and the handful of gritty low-rent businesses on Bryant Street.

Parisi’s assistant was away from her post, so Yuki rapped on her boss’s door frame. He smiled at her and waved her in, pointing to the phone at his ear.

She came inside and closed his door behind her. Then she took the chair across from him at his leather-topped desk and stared past his shoulder to the wall hanging behind him that showed the caricature of a big red dog gripping a bone in its teeth.

Yuki had thought about what she was going to say to Len; she knew that in some ways, it was as critical as an opening statement to a jury. Len was that important a person in her life. But she knew that once she’d made her speech, the meeting could go very wrong, depending on what Len said to her.

Parisi was talking to a witness for an upcoming trial. The man had just had an emergency quintuple bypass. Yuki let her mind float until Parisi hung up the phone.