20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20) - James Patterson Page 0,3
told me the same.”
Brady thought about when Boxer had been very sick. Took off a couple of months and came back. Said she felt perfect. So now what was she saying?
“You think she’s all right?” said Brady.
Conklin said, “She’s fine. Doctor told her she shouldn’t run herself into the ground like she does. So her sister has the wild child, and Lindsay and Joe took off to parts unknown for the weekend, maybe another day or two. You know, Brady. Most people take weekends off.”
“Oh, really? I don’t know many.”
Brady gathered up loose pens and pencils and put them into a ceramic mug.
Conklin said, “What worries me is how you look.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
Brady had been working two jobs since Chief Warren Jacobi had been retired out. Filling Jacobi’s old chair on the fifth floor as well as running the Homicide squad room felt like having his head slammed in a car door.
The mayor was pressuring him; choose one job or the other, but decide.
Brady had talked it over with Yuki, who’d offered measured wifely advice, not pushing or pulling, just laying it out as a lawyer would.
“I can make a case for taking on more responsibility while working fewer hours per day. I can also give you reasons why Homicide is where your strengths lie. And you love it. But you have to make a decision PDQ, or the mayor is going to make it for you.”
Conklin was saying, “I can work with Chi and McNeil until Boxer is back.”
“Yeah. Do that.”
Brady left Conklin and the bullpen, took the fire stairs one flight up to five. When he got to his office, his assistant said, “Lieu, I was just about to look for you. Check this out.”
He took a seat behind the desk. Katie leaned over his shoulder and brought up the Chronicle online, paused on the front page, and read the headline, “‘Roger Jennings Shot at Taco King,’” then added the takeaway, “He’s in critical condition.”
Jennings was a baseball player, a catcher nearing the end of his professional career.
Why would anyone want to kill him?
CHAPTER 6
I’D CALLED JOE as soon as I left my doctor’s office and told him what Doc Arpino had said: “Lindsay. Live a little. Get out of town for a few days. Go to a spa.”
My dear husband had said, “Leave this to me.”
I’d left word with Brady and Conklin: “I’m off duty.”
Words to that effect.
Now, with our phones locked inside the trunk, Joe and I were heading north, breezing across the Golden Gate Bridge, sailboats flying below us across the sparkling bay.
Joe was at the wheel and I was sitting beside him, saying, “I did not.”
“You did, too. You came to the airport. You said, ‘I want you. And I want the jet.’”
I laughed out loud. “You’re crazy.”
“You remember the company plane?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“Louder, dear.”
“Oh, YES.”
We both laughed.
Joe and I had met on the job, heads of a cop and DHS joint task force charged with shutting down a terrorist who was armed with a deadly poison and a plan to take down members of the G8 meeting in San Francisco. He killed a lot of people, including one very close to me, before we nailed the bastard and took him down.
I blocked thoughts about all of that and said, “You remember when we broke away from the G8 case for the investigation in Portland?”
“Do I ever,” said Joe. “Inside that conference room with a dozen people working a national-security murder and you saying, ‘If you keep looking at me like that, Deputy Director Molinari, I can’t work.’”
I laughed and said, “I told you that afterward. I didn’t say that out loud.”
I was sure I was right, but it was also true that working with Joe under so much adrenalized fear and pressure had unleashed some pretty amazing magic between us. And before we’d left Portland for San Francisco, we’d fallen in love. Hard.
Was it perfect from then on?
Hell no. We lived on opposite sides of the country, and so we rode the long-distance relationship roller coaster for a while, cured loneliness and longing with adventures for a few days a month until Joe gave up his job and moved to the City by the Bay.
About a year after our wedding, I gave birth to Julie Anne Molinari while home alone on a dark and stormy night with electric lines down across the city. While I panted and pushed and screamed, surrounded by firemen, Joe was thirty-five thousand feet overhead, unaware.