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unlikely.
"This one a psychic or a police buff?" I asked with a skeptical
smile.
"I think this one's the genuine article," said Chin. "She was at the
first wedding."
I almost leaped out of my chair after him. At the front of the squad
room, I spotted Raleigh coming in. Chris.
For a moment, a tingle of pleasure rushed through me.
He'd left about eleven, after we ended up polishing off both bottles
of wine. We ate, chewed over our separate stints on the force, and the
ups and downs of being married or single.
It had been a sweet evening. Took the heat off from the case. It even
got my mind off Negli's.
What scared me a little was the tremor inside that it could be
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something more. I had caught myself staring at him Friday night, while
he helped out with the dishes, thinking, If times were different...
Raleigh ran into me, carrying coffee and a paper. "Hey." He smiled.
"Nice vest."
"Chin's got a live one in four," I said, grabbing his arm. "Claims to
have a physical sighting. You want to come along?"
In my haste, I was already by him, not even giving him a second of
recognition. He put down his paper on our civilian clerk's desk and
caught up on the stairs.
In the cramped interrogation room sat a nicely dressed, attractive
woman of about fifty. Chin introduced her to me as Laurie Birnbaum.
She seemed tight, nervous.
Chin sat down next to her. "Ms. Birnbaum, why don't you tell
Inspector Boxer what you just told me."
She was frightened. "It was the beard that made me remember. I didn't
even think of it until now. It was so horrible."
"You were at the Brandts' wedding?" I asked her.
"Yes, as guests of the bride's family," she replied. "My husband works
with Chancellor Weil at the university." She took a nervous sip from a
cup of coffee. "It was just a brief thing. But he gave me the
chills."
Chin pushed down the record button of a portable recorder.
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"Please, go ahead," I told her soothingly. Once again, I felt close
to him- the bastard with the red beard.
"I stood next to him. He had this graying red beard. Like a goatee.
The kind they wear in Los Angeles. He looked older, maybe forty-five,
fifty, but there was something about him. I'm not saying this right,
am I?"
"You spoke to him?" I asked, trying to communicate that even though
she didn't do this every day, I did. Even the male detectives admitted
that I was the best at Q and A on the floor. They joked that it was "a
girl thing."
"I had just come in from the dance floor," she said. "I looked up, and
there he was. I said something like, "Nice affair . bride or groom?"
For a moment, I thought he looked kind of appealing. Then he just sort
of glared at me. I took him for one of those arrogant
investment-banker types from the Brandt side."
"What did he say to you?" I said.
She massaged her brow, straining to recall. "He said, in the weirdest
way, that they were lucky."
"Who was lucky?"
"Melanie and David. I may have said, "Aren't they lucky?" Meaning the
two of them. They were so stunning. And he replied, "Oh, they're
lucky."
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She looked up with a confused expression on her face. "He called them
something else ... chosen."
"Chosen?"
"Yes. He said, "Oh, they're lucky.... You could even say they were
chosen.""
"You say he had a goatee?"
"That's what was so strange. The beard made him seem older, but the
rest of him was young."
"The rest of him? What do you mean?"
"His face. His voice. I know this must sound strange, but it was
only for a moment, as I came off the dance floor."
We got as much as we could from her. Height, hair color. What he was
wearing. Everything confirmed the sparse details that we already had.
The killer was a man with a short, reddish beard. He had been wearing
a tux- the tux jacket he had left behind in the Mandarin Suite.
A fire was building inside me. I felt sure that Laurie Birnbaum was
credible. The beard. The tux. We were piecing together his
appearance. "Is there anything more, anything at all that stands out
to you? Some physical characteristic? A mannerism?"
She shook her head. "It happened so quickly. It was only when I saw
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the drawing of him in the Chronicle ..."
I looked at Chin, conveying that it was time to call down an artist to
firm up the details. I thanked her, made my way back to my desk. We'd
get a sketch from her to use along with the one from Maryanne Perkins
at Saks.
The murder investigation had entered a new phase. It was very hot. We
had a stakeout operational outside the Bridal Boutique at Saks. One by
one, we were contacting the names on the store's list, anyone who had
ordered a wedding dress in the past several months.
My heart was pounding. The face I had imagined, my dream of the
red-bearded man, was starting to fill in. I felt we had him
contained.
My phone rang. "Boxer," I answered, still shuffling through the names
in the Saks wedding folder.
"My name's McBride," a deep, urgent voice said. "I'm a homicide
detective. In Cleveland."
ChapterSS
"I GOT A HOMICIDE HERE that fits the pattern of what you've been
dealing with," McBride explained.
"GSWs," McBride continued, "both of them. Gunshot wounds right between
the eyes." He described the quick but grotesque deaths of Kathy and
James Voskuhl, killed at their wedding at the Rock and Roll Hall of
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Fame. This time the killer hadn't even waited for the wedding to
end.
"What kind of weapon your guy use in Napa?" McBride asked.
"Nine millimeter," I told him.
"Same."
I was reeling a little bit. Cleveland?
A voice pounded inside me. What the hell was Red Beard doing in Ohio?
We had just made the breakthrough, found out where he was casing his
victims. Did he know that? If so- how?
Cleveland was either a copycat killing, which was entirely
possible, or this case had just broken wide open and could lead
anywhere.
"You have crime-scene photos there, McBride?" I asked.
McBride grunted, "Yeah. Got them right in front of me. Nasty.
Sexually explicit."
"Can you get me a close-up of their hands?"
"Okay, but why the hands?
"What were they wearing, McBride?"
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I heard him shuffling through photos. "You mean rings?"
"Good guess, Detective. Yeah."
I was praying that it wasn't our guy. Cleveland ... it would shatter
everything that made me feel we were close to him. Was Red Beard
taking his killing act across the country?
A minute later, McBride confirmed exactly the thing I didn't want to
hear. "There are no wedding bands."
The bastard was on the move. We had a stakeout going where we thought
he might show up, and he was two thousand miles away. He'd just
murdered a couple at their reception in Ohio. Shit, shit, shit.
"You said the bodies were found in a sexually explicit position?" I
asked McBride with dismay.
The Cleveland cop hesitated. He finally said, "The groom was shot
sitting on the John. We found him there. Sitting up, legs open. The
bride was shot in the stall, too, as she was coming in. There was
enough of her brains on the inside of the door to confirm it. But when
we found her, she was facedown. Uh, her face was stuffed between his
legs." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]