Willing to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

Bianca would have to get used to it. Despite her jerk-wad of a father, or her mean mom, or the fact that she didn’t have the grades or money to live the California dream. At least not yet.

She’d survive.

That thought stopped her short as she realized how closely Bianca had come to death barely six months earlier. Maybe Pescoli should cut her some slack. Some more slack. Then again, maybe not. Bianca had to learn to be tough, no matter how hard the lessons.

“Hell’s bells,” she said under her breath as Tucker let out a sharp little cry for attention. Sometimes being a parent was a real pain in the butt.

* * *

Tanaka was getting nowhere fast.

Though it was still early in the investigation of the Latham double-homicide, she sensed things starting to stall.

In her studio apartment, with Mr. Claus doing figure eights between her bare feet, Tanaka stretched her arms high over her head, bending her knees slightly, grasping high in the chair pose. Closing her eyes for a second, she felt her muscles lengthen. “Let go,” she told herself, her mantra. “Let go.” She was standing in front of the television, playing a recording of a yoga instructor and following the routine.

She’d spent the last forty-eight hours running down leads, going over notes, statements, and trace evidence, rereading the autopsies, checking phone records, bank statements, insurance inventories, and the damned will. As far as they could reconstruct the last hours of the victims’ lives, it seemed that the housekeeper, or possibly Ivy Wilde, was the last to have seen Brindel Latham alive. Paul was at his clinic until the afternoon, then played squash at his athletic club, and the man who’d been his opponent said he’d left around six thirty. Camera footage had confirmed.

“So who killed you?” Tanaka said aloud, thinking about both victims.

Brindel Latham’s will left everything to her husband, and then in the case that he died before her, to her daughter and Paul’s sons equally. In trust. Paul’s will was different, leaving only a portion of his estate to his wife and her child from a previous marriage, the bulk going, again in trust, to his sons, the snarly Macon and more reticent Seth.

Taking in a deep breath, Tanaka tried to clear her mind. She forced herself to mimic the flexible instructor on the tube. Stretching and bending her body, she attempted to lose herself in the stretches and breathing.

But she was too focused on the case to get into it. Who, who, who? she wondered, then turned her thoughts back to why. If she knew why, the who would follow. She’d thought the ex-spouses might have been holding a deep and murderous grudge, but so far that theory hadn’t panned out. Both Brindel’s ex, Victor Wilde, and the previous Mrs. Latham had solid alibis that Tanaka hadn’t been able to break. So far.

Of the two sons, Seth had been cleared . . . well, mostly. Tanaka wasn’t completely convinced. And Macon was too much of a smart-ass for his own good.

“Doesn’t make him a killer,” she told the cat as his long tail tickled her calf. “But it doesn’t mean he’s not, either.”

She rotated her neck slowly, breathing out as she did, trying to count the seconds away.

Ronny Stillwell had seen Troy Boxer the night of the murder, though the hours of the actual killing were up for debate. If Boxer had stayed in, he would no longer be a suspect, but if not . . . the jury was still out on that one.

George Aimes, the owner of the rooming house where Boxer and Stillwell resided, had insisted Boxer’s car had never left the parking area that night, but there wasn’t a security camera on the property to back him up. Tanaka was checking other traffic cams and security footage from businesses in the area. And also with the other tenants of the rooming house other than Ronny Stillwell.

The alibi bothered her somehow. Didn’t seem as solid as it should have been. Probably because Stillwell had done time for burglary three years earlier. He’d been eighteen at the time and clean ever since, but Tanaka wasn’t convinced that Stillwell’s larcenous instincts had been totally rehabilitated or quelled by his light, slap on the wrist sentence of three months in jail and a year of probation.

Maybe that was prejudice talking.

Or perhaps it was gut instinct.

Or even just plain reasonable.

“I’ll find out,” she informed the cat. Neither Ronny Stillwell nor Troy Boxer had come off as a Rhodes scholar.

Downward-facing dog was the next position.

Tanaka bent from the hips, lowering her head toward the yoga mat. “Your favorite,” she told Mr. Claus, who lifted his nose so that it met the tip of Tanaka’s. “Silly, silly boy.”

He meowed and she actually smiled, felt the tension in her body release and told herself, she could do this. She could solve this case. She probably didn’t even need Paterno, but he had one foot out of the department already, and as for that Montana detective, she wouldn’t be around long.

Nope, the Latham double-homicide was her baby.

She intended to solve it.

“By hook or by crook,” she told the cat, and wondered, for a second, just how far her ambition would take her. How far would she go?

“Doesn’t matter. All that matters is that the case is solved and yours truly gets the credit she deserves.”