The Trial (Women's Murder Club 15.50)

The King was in our jail and he was ours to convict.

Chapter 14

Joe and I were dancing together close and slow. He had his hand at the small of my back, and the hem of my low-cut slinky red gown swished around my ankles. I couldn’t even feel my feet because I was dancing on cotton candy clouds. I felt so good in Joe’s arms—loved, protected, and excited, too. I didn’t want this dance to ever end.

“I miss you so much,” he said into my ear.

I pulled back so I could look into his handsome face, his blue eyes. “I miss you—”

I never got out the last word.

My phone was singing with Brady’s ring tone, a bugle call.

I grabbed for the phone, but it slipped out of my hand. Still half under the covers, I reached for it again, and by that time Martha was snuffling my face.

God!

“Boxer,” I croaked.

Brady’s voice was taut.

“A juror was found dead in the street. Gunned down.”

I said, “No.”

He said, “’Fraid so.”

He told me to get on it, and I called Richie.

It was Saturday. Mrs. Rose was off, but I called her anyway. She sounded both half asleep and resigned but said, “I’ll be right there.”

She crossed the hall in her robe and slippers and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking Martha out before I took off.

After a three-minute successful dog walk I guzzled coffee, put down a PowerBar, and drove to Chestnut Street, the main drag through the Marina District. This area was densely lined with restaurants and boutiques, normally swarming with young professionals, parents with strollers, and twentysomethings in yoga pants.

All that free-spirited weekend-morning traffic had come to a dead halt. A crowd of onlookers had formed a deep circle at the barrier tape enclosing a section of street and the victim’s body.

I held up my badge and elbowed my way through to where Conklin was talking to the first officer, Sam Rocco.

Rocco said, “Sergeant, I was telling Conklin, a 911 caller reported that one of the grand jurors in the Sierra jury had been ‘put down like a dog.’

“The operator said the caller sounded threatening. She got the street and cross street before the caller hung up,” Rocco continued. “Feldman and I were here inside of five minutes. I opened the victim’s wallet and got her particulars. Sarah Brenner. Lives two blocks over on Greenwich Street. From the coffee container in the gutter, looks like she was just coming back from Peet’s on Chestnut.”

“Anyone see the shooting?” I asked.

“None that will admit to it,” said Officer Rocco.

“Cash and cards in the wallet?”

“Yep, and she’s wearing a gold necklace and a watch.”

Not a robbery. I thanked Rocco and edged around the dead body of a young woman who was lying facedown between two parked cars. She wore jeans and a green down jacket with down puffing out of its bullet holes, and nearby lay the slip-on mules that had been blown off her socked feet by the impact or the fall. Shell casings were scattered on the asphalt around the body, and some glinted from underneath the parked cars.

I lifted a strand of Sarah Brenner’s long brown hair away from her face so that I could see her features. She looked sweet. And too young. I touched her neck to be sure she was really gone. Goddamnit.

Putting Sarah Brenner “down like a dog” was a crude term for a professional hit meant to scare everyone connected with Sierra’s trial. Inciting fear. Payback. Revenge.

It was just Kingfisher’s style.