Conklin looked exasperated, and I felt the same way. So many pairs of eyes, and one of the only two witnesses had seen practically nothing.
My partner went on.
“After the attack, the doer kept going and disappeared into the crowd. Mr. Gosselin saw none of this. He went to his wife when she started screaming. The rest was chaos. A stampede.”
An unmarked car pulled up and two guys from our squad got out: Fred Michaels and Alex Wang, both new hires by Brady.
Conklin and I greeted them and brought them up to date on the details of the crime as we knew it. I told them I’d send them a typed version of my notes and the photos as soon as I got back to the Hall. And then, as sorry as I was to do it, I turned the case over to the new guys.
Conklin and I had our own horrible murder waiting for us at our desks. We got back into our separate cars and were headed back to the Hall when, as I turned onto Bryant Street, something came to me. It was a realization that just about reached out and hit me like a slap across the face.
Claire had been right.
There had been murders on each of her birthdays for the previous two years. And I was almost positive that those cases hadn’t been solved.
CHAPTER 9
WHEN THE WRETCHED day finally ended and I came through the front door of our apartment, Martha wiggled her butt, barked, and sang me an excited welcome-home song. I hugged her, held her front paws, and danced a few steps with her. Then I called out to Joe.
He called back.
“I’m giving Julie a bath.”
OK, then.
I hung up my jacket, kicked off my shoes, and put my gun in the cabinet, locking it up. I walked with Martha to the open kitchen of our airy apartment on Lake Street, where I’d come to live with Joe as his bride. A year later, this was where I gave birth to Julie during a blacked-out and very stormy night while Joe was out of town.
That was at the top of the list of the most memorable nights of my life.
I topped up Martha’s dinner bowl and poured two chilled glasses of Chardonnay. With Martha trailing behind me, I went to the master bathroom.
I knocked, opened the door, and saw the two people I love the most. My smile stretched out to my ears.
“Awwww,” I cooed. “Look how cute and clean she is.”
I leaned down and kissed Joe, who was kneeling beside the tub. Julie grinned her adorable face half off, lifted her arms, and squealed. I put the wineglasses on the vanity. Then I kissed Julie’s hand, making funny noises in her palm. I handed Joe the pink towel that was appliquéd with OUR BABY GIRL.
I understand that first-time parents are a little goofy, but this towel had been a gift.
“I need a bath myself,” I said as Joe lifted the damp baby into his arms.
“You go ahead,” said my handsome and most wonderful husband. “You OK with Pizza Pronto? I’ll call in an order.”
“Brilliant,” I said. “Sausage, mushrooms, onions, OK?”
“You forgot the jalapeños.”
“Those, too.”
The pizza arrived, pronto.
Over our down-and-dirty dinner, I told Joe about the Windbreaker cops. When the pizza box was in the trash, the baby was asleep, and Joe was working in his home office, a.k.a. the spare bedroom, I brought my laptop to the living room and took over the big leather sofa.
I’d worked the Windbreaker cops case at both ends of my day, but I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Tina Strichler, the shrink who’d been gutted in the street.
Now that I had a full belly and some free time, I felt compelled to check out the homicides that had happened on Claire’s birthday the two previous years.
I was almost positive that these cases had somehow slipped through the cracks.
CHAPTER 10
MY HUSBAND STOOD behind me, his hands working on the clenched muscles in my neck.
“Oooh, I think I like working at home,” I said.
“Yes, well, I’m the legendary man with the slow hands.”
I laughed. “Yes, you are.”
“More wine?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“OK, then,” he said, giving my shoulders a squeeze. “Martha and I are going for a run.”
“I’ll wait up.”
As soon as Joe and Martha had left the apartment, I checked on our sleeping little one, and then I went back to work.
I typed in my password and opened the SFPD case log to kick off my search. The index to the files was little more than a list of the victims; each case was dated and marked either active, closed, or pending. The name of the lead inspector on each case was listed under the victim’s name.
Since I was searching for murders on specific dates, it didn’t take long to find the two women who’d been killed on Claire’s birthday. I stared at the names, and I remembered the occasions.
Just the way it had happened today, I’d been called from the table to go to the crime scene because I was a ranking officer, on duty, and near the location when the body had been discovered.
I clicked open the older of the two unsolved cases.
Two years ago a woman named Catherine Hayes had been killed outside her father’s coffee shop on Nob Hill. Hayes, who worked for her father during the day, went to night school for accounting and finance. On that twelfth day of May, she’d been having a smoke outside while talking to a friend on the phone when she’d been stabbed in the back. Then her throat had been slit.
There were no witnesses, and the friend who had been on the phone with Hayes had heard only the victim’s screams. Hayes hadn’t been robbed. The killer took his knife and left nothing behind; no note, no DNA, no skin cells under the victim’s nails. The leads were thin to nonexistent, and nothing panned out. Catherine Hayes left devastated friends and family, and her open file was still chilling.
So was the file of Yolanda Pirro, a poet who’d been seen competing in last year’s 12k Bay to Breakers Race, a huge attraction that had been run annually for over a hundred years. Many of the runners wore costumes; some even ran nude, or dressed like fish and ran backward, as if they were swimming upstream. Go figure.
Pirro’s body was found the day after the race in a thicket of shrubs at the end of the course. She’d been wearing runners’ gear, nothing that would make her stand out.
Pirro had multiple stab wounds, any one of which could have been fatal. Her devastated husband and close circle of friends said she had no enemies. She was a poet who worked as a volunteer at a community garden and liked to run.
She hadn’t known Catherine Hayes, and the two women had no common friends, family, or acquaintances. The Northern District had caught the case and had no suspects and no witnesses—and at the same time, tens of thousands of suspects who’d participated in the race or watched from the sidelines. And so, without a clue, Yolanda Pirro’s case went cold.
The Pirro case reminded me a lot of Strichler.
Lots of people in a crowd, but no witnesses.
Including Tina Strichler, all three victims who were killed on Claire’s birthday were attractive white females between the ages of thirty-four and fifty-two, living within three densely populated miles of one another.
Did anything connect them?
Well, yes. They’d all been knifed.
I was staring over my laptop, searching my mind for anything else that would link these three women’s deaths, when someone kissed my temple.
I put my arms up the way Julie does, and Joe gave me a big crinkly smile and another kiss. He came around the sofa and sat down next to me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Prowling around in some old case files.”
“Oh, yeah? Why?”
I told him all about it.