The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club 17)

A freaking lead. O-kay.

“If it belonged to the shooter, he just ditched it so he wouldn’t be recognized. This coat wouldn’t have been in the trash for long.”

Headlights swept the parking area. I looked up to see a van coming around the one-cruiser barricade to the crime scene at the side of the antique-mechanical-game museum.

It was CSI’s mobile forensic lab.

Thank you, God. The cavalry had arrived.

CHAPTER 26

THE CRIME SCENE investigation van was parked outside the barrier tape, which enclosed a sixty-square-foot area of asphalt, a dead woman, and a double handful of cops and vagrants.

CSIs and techs poured out of the van and began setting up lights and an evidence tent. Moments later an SUV rolled up to the outer perimeter across the parking area on the Embarcadero side and stopped.

I heard shouting and saw Casey and Baskin try to block a gray-haired man and a teenage girl who had emerged from the vehicle. But they broke past the cops and ran toward the body on the ground. And now every gory detail was illuminated by professional-grade halogen lights.

A third person got out of the SUV. I recognized her from a hundred yards, and she saw me. From her gestures and body language I gathered that Millie Cushing was telling the cops at the barrier that she knew me.

I called out, “She’s okay.”

The tape was lifted. Cushing skirted the inner perimeter, sticking close to the museum’s stucco wall, and crossed the parking area quickly. When she reached me, she said, “I phoned Laura’s husband. I had to let him know.”

The teenage girl screamed, “Oh, my Goooood, oh, my Goooood. Mommy, noooo. Get up, Mommy, get up. Oh, my God, Mommy. Pleeease.”

The shrieks and cries coming from Laura Russell’s daughter pierced the ambient sound of police radios, traffic on the Embarcadero, crowd noise coming from beyond our crime scene out on the pier.

The man I took to be the young woman’s father grabbed her into a tight hug as a CSI forced them away from the body of someone they loved.

I was shaken. What had happened here? Why was a former schoolteacher with a family living on the street? Why was she murdered? Was this killing personal or circumstantial?

Was Millie Cushing right that someone with a beef against the homeless was picking them off one by one?

My phone rang in my pocket. I looked at the screen. It was Brady.

He said, “Boxer, Sergeant Stevens and his partner, Moran, are on the way.”

“The family of the victim is here, Brady. They should be brought in for questioning.”

“Step back, Boxer. You hear me?”

I heard him. Central Homicide’s turf.

I stood with Conklin and Millie Cushing outside the tape at the boundary of the crime scene. I leaned against a patrol car and watched as the CSIs took photos of the murder victim and began to process the corrupted crime scene.

At long last an unmarked car came through the barrier at the Embarcadero end of the parking area and slowed to a stop near the CSI van. Two men in sports jackets got out.

Stevens and Moran had arrived.

CHAPTER 27

CONKLIN AND I watched Stevens and Moran, the two detectives from Central Station, approach Gene Hallows, a senior CSI on the graveyard shift.

My partner said, “Let’s give them what we’ve got.”

He held up the crime scene tape and we ducked under it, then crossed the parking area to join the cluster of CSIs and the pair of detectives. Thanks to the bug Millie Cushing had stuck in my ear and my own eyewitness account, I’d already indicted our colleagues for lateness and a lack-adaisical attitude, until proven otherwise.

I would try to be diplomatic.