“Meanwhile what?”
“Phone keeps ringing. The brass. The mayor. The press. Other bodies from other crimes. If you can break for lunch,” Claire said, “the girls want to get together at MacBain’s.”
By “the girls,” she meant herself and me, Cindy, and Yuki, the four of whom Cindy had collectively dubbed the Women’s Murder Club.
“I’ll try,” I said.
I left Claire and loped down the breezeway and through the back door of the Hall of Justice. I showed my badge to the guy at the metal detector, then took the stairs to the homicide squad on the fourth floor. The day shift was drifting in, but a lot of phones were ringing through to voice mail.
Brady was in his office, the ten-foot-square glass cubicle in the back corner of the room. He saw me coming, got up from behind his desk, and opened the door.
Brady is built like a wrestler, blond, taciturn, and as brave as they come. But he’s all business, all the time.
“Got anything?” he said.
“Just what I had last night, Lieu. Professional job from start to finish. One ID could blow it open,” I said. “We’re working on that now.”
Before he could say “Keep me in the loop,” all his phone lines rang at once.
CHAPTER 10
MACBAIN’S IS THE neighborhood hole-in-the-wall beer-and-burger joint frequented by cops, lawyers, and bail bondsmen who work along the 800 block of Bryant Street. Claire and I stood inside the open doorway and stared at the raucous scene. Customers had parked four deep at the bar, and the tables in front were all taken. Looked to me like a retirement party.
There was time to reverse course and pick another lunch spot, but Sydney, the front room waitress, pointed and mouthed, “They’re over here.”
Cindy Thomas stood up from behind a table near the jukebox and waved to get our attention. She was wearing her bloodhound clothes: a soft gray hoodie over a T-shirt and jeans. This was how Cindy dressed when she was working a story, and as a top crime reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, she wore bloodhound clothes most of the week.
Sometimes I felt bad for her.
Yes, she was adorable and well employed and happy in love, but her great buddy, me, and her fiancé, my partner, had to keep the red meat to ourselves. Cindy was the press. And historically, the press was not our friend.
Yuki Castellano, the legal arm of the Women’s Murder Club, sat wedged between Cindy and the wall with her back to the peanut barrel. She was wearing a knife-sharp black suit, her hair was twisted up, and she had chunky pearls at her neckline. She was dressed for court.
Claire and I waded into the crowd and I stuck close behind her, the pink sweater she’d thrown over her scrubs lighting the way. I wore my usual, rain or shine, at my desk or on the street: blue trousers, white shirt, blue blazer, hair in a ponytail, and my badge hanging from a ball chain around my neck.
I grabbed a seat across from Yuki, Claire sat next to me, and all of our hands shot up at the same time. When Syd arrived, Claire said, “We can order everything right now.”
Syd wrote down four burgers—one each of bloody, rare, medium-rare, and charred—with fries all around. Three of us asked for tea and fizzy water, but Yuki ordered rum and Coke, heavy on the rum.
“You’re drinking when you’re in court?” I asked her.
“Trial was canceled due to circumstances beyond my control,” she said.
At that, customers behind us broke into a rowdy drinking song. Folks applauded and stamped in time. So Yuki had to shout her bad story about her college girl client who’d been charged as an accessory to an armed robbery. As Yuki told it, Sandra had been waiting in her boyfriend’s car while he went into a store to buy a bottle of booze. Or so he told her. But he’d had a gun, and when the owner set off the alarm, the boyfriend fired his .22 into the owner’s chest.
Yuki’s eighteen-year-old client had been charged as an accessory and was looking at fifteen to twenty years if the liquor store owner lived. Her bail was set absurdly high and her family couldn’t raise a tenth of it.
“I saw Sandra yesterday,” Yuki said. “Once again, I told her that I was very connected in the DA’s office and that if she’d testify against her gutless boyfriend, I could probably get her sentence reduced—significantly.”
“She wouldn’t go for it,” Cindy guessed.
Yuki shook her head. “Just before court this morning, she ripped up her bedsheet and hanged herself on the bars. Why? Why did she do that? Why wouldn’t she listen to me? And even if she didn’t flip on that rat, there was hope for her. And what about her poor family? God. I am so sick about this.”