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Glasses clinked and dinner arrived. The bass was perfectly seasoned and prepared and went down fast. We were summoning our waitress to ask about dessert when my phone vibrated in my pocket.
I ignored it, of course. No phones at Women’s Murder Club meetings. My husband, Joe, was home with our little girl, Julie, and this wasn’t his ringtone. Still, my phone buzzed again. Then Yuki’s phone also went off. Simple math told me that Jackson Brady, Yuki’s husband and my CO, was calling. He was probably steamed that I hadn’t picked up.
Yuki and I both looked at our phones. She answered hers a split second before I did.
“She’s right here, hon,” she said into her phone. “Linds. Brady wants to talk to you.”
“Brady?” I said. “Who died?”
Rich’s phone rang. He stabbed a button and joined Brady’s conference call.
“We’re all here, Lieu. Give that to us again.”
Rich raised his hand for the check and Yuki said to Cindy, “I’ll drive you home. Don’t think twice about it.”
Yuki gave her credit card to the waitress, and I said, “Yuki, let me know what I owe you.”
I grabbed a hunk of bread, slugged down the last inch ofmy beer. I kissed cheeks, hugged Cindy again and tousled her hair. “Love you.”
“Me, too. I’m glad you were there,” she said.
I was sorry to leave my friends and wouldn’t do it but for a phone call that could only mean that someone had been murdered.
CHAPTER 6
RICH AND I left the restaurant, both of us feeling bad to leave Cindy on this of all evenings.
Rich said, “I’ll make it up to her.” He unlocked the Bronco. As we mounted up, he said, “And if this turns out to be an all-nighter, I’m going to challenge Brady to a friendly fight, and then I’m going to break his nose.”
I cracked up. Conklin is ten years younger than Brady, but Brady has massive guns. He stretches out his shirtsleeves just bending an elbow.
“I don’t want you to die, Richie.”
“You gotta believe in me, Lindsay. I’ve got quick hands. And I can dance.”
I cracked up again. I love Richie and after many years of sitting across from him at our facing desks, working innumerable homicides together, having the other’s back, always—Rich playing good cop to my badass, my preferred role—we were a good team. More than that, he’s the brother I never had. And a friend for life.
Brady is, too. When he and Yuki got married, he became part of the family. Tall, with white-blond hair and pale blue eyes, he and Yuki make a striking pair. She’s a size two, daughter of a Japanese mother and Italian-American soldier father, wears slim, smart suits and a navy-blue colored streak in her hair.
After I caught my breath and Rich had stopped punching the air with one fist, I told him that I hadn’t heard everything Brady had told us.
“His voice was breaking up,” I said. “I only got the gist.”
“Man’s been found dead in his car …”
“That, I heard.”
“… a ten-minute drive from Book Passage.”
Sausalito is over the bridge from San Francisco, not our beat. Yet, we’d been drafted because of the victim’s proximity to the bookstore? That didn’t compute, but between the radio and our siren, no further conversation was possible. Still, I was looking for a reason. All I came up with was that Rich and I had worked the Burke case together when “Quicksilver” or the “Ghost of Catalina” as he’d been called, lived on Mount Tamalpais, about an hour from here. Marin PD had joined us when we were working on their turf. I guessed Brady was returning the favor by sending us.
Rich knew the way. He drove north parallel to Route 101. We took a sharp left at Tamal Vista Boulevard, a mixed-use area that ran past the Corte Madera lagoon waterfront. After a series of quick turns, we took Doherty to our destination. The classic American shopping center was approaching closing time.
Rich slowed to a crawl as we entered a transient scene;people leaving stores, going to their cars, cars leaving, potential witnesses evaporating never to be seen again.
I surveilled the area from the passenger seat, doing a rough count of the shops. About twenty one- and two-story stucco buildings; a bank, a bakery, three fast-food restaurants, a shoe-repair shop, and innumerable boutiques, all forming a ragged semicircle around a parking lot.
As was standard for large suburban parking lots, this one was divided by treed median strips and hundreds of parking spots, nearly all of them filled with cars. At the far end of the lot, flashing police-car lights grabbed my attention.
