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“I can be bitter and happy at the same time, however, for the sake of our friendship and my nerves, I’ll change the subject.” She nodded forward. “Palmer’s visitor has great hands. If you don’t know, in some cultures, hands like his mean a man’s probably really well…”
She broke off as Vanessa was bumped by a passing detective.
“Captain wants to see you,” the man grunted.
At his curled lip, Vanessa laughed. “Your great-hands guy must be a Fed, Geri. FBI or CIA?”
“Don’t know, don’t care. It’s you Palmer wants, not me.”
Always a sobering thought. From Geri’s perspective, however, the spin was more positive.
“Great hands, great hair, great face, great body.” She pushed on her stomach. “Is there a way to lose twenty pounds in five minutes?”
“Yeah, drop your briefcase. Oh, damn. Palmer’s coming out.” Vanessa started to turn, but checked herself. “Wait a minute. I’m off duty. I can walk.”
“Good luck with that in those heels.” Geri drew up to her full height of five feet four inches. “Good evening, Captain Palmer.”
“Ms. Kruger. I don’t care if you are off duty, Connor, we’re going to talk. You, me and Agent Maguire here.”
Of course he’d have a guy name. Geri’s lips curved into a knowing smile. Vanessa braced and turned. “Agent Maguire,” she acknowledged, and was surprised by the quick surge of—she wasn’t sure what—that jolted through her. Could have been lust. Or appreciation. Whatever it was, it mingled swiftly with suspicion. “Why do I need to talk to a federal agent?”
Palmer glared. “Courtroom time make you dense, Connor? I know you know about Mara Chan. That makes three of your old college roommates dead inside ninety days.”
“We weren’t roommates.” But it was a technicality, and Vanessa was dragging her feet, something she rarely did. “I don’t want a leave of absence, Captain, and I don’t need a federal agent breathing down my neck.” She flashed Agent Maguire a quick smile. “No offense.”
“I’m used to it.”
Geri chuckled. “Great voice,” she mouthed to Vanessa, before holding out her hand. “I’ll take that as my cue to exit. Nice to have almost met you, Mr. Maguire.”
His answering smile was friendlier than expected. “You, too, Ms. Kruger.”
Geri gave Vanessa a discreet nudge. “Stay safe,” she whispered, and headed for the door.
“No objections, Connor,” her captain warned. “We’ve got three dead Berkeley women on our hands.”
In actual fact “we,” meaning the San Francisco Police Department, didn’t have any dead Berkeley women on their hands since none of the victims had lived or died anywhere near the Bay Area. But Vanessa kept her mouth shut and waited for him to drop his bomb. He always did. It was the reason homicide detectives liked him. Or didn’t, depending on their dispositions.
“I want you to listen to Agent Maguire. Moreover, I want you to cooperate with him.”
As bombs went, it was far from unanticipated. Still…” I don’t need a babysitter, Captain.”
“You need what I say you need. Agent Maguire will talk, and you’ll listen. But not here.” He dismissed the still-bustling room. “Some place where you can actually hear what he’s saying.”
As if to emphasize his point, a detective and a uniformed officer ushered a young man in handcuffs through the door. The man had blood on his shirt, had lost several teeth and was shouting every four-letter word in the English language, along with a few Vanessa recognized as Dutch.
Palmer stuck his face in hers. “Go,” he said softly. “Pick a restaurant. Dinner’s on the department. And don’t tell me you’ve already eaten, because I know your routine.”
Vanessa wondered if either man understood Dutch, but she held her tongue and forced a smile. “Do you like Armenian food, Mr. Maguire?”
“Rick,” he replied with a quirk of his lips. “I’m good with anything.”
Especially women, she imagined. But that was an unfair thought that he’d done nothing to deserve. Yet.
“Right. Well.” She considered clipping her hair back, then saw no less than three detectives firing visual bullets at Rick Maguire’s back and reasoned that a fast escape might be prudent.
“I won’t go into hiding.” She shot the warning over her shoulder as they worked their way through the room.
“That’s between you and your captain, Detective.”
She relented. “Vanessa’s fine. But you can eighty-six the charm. I’m not easily wooed.”
“You’d rather be treated like one of the guys?”
“I’m okay with it.”
“How often does it happen?”
She glanced back. “Do all Feds ask sexist questions?”
“Only when challenged by beautiful women.”
“I’m a cop.”
“And a beautiful woman.” Reaching around her, he pulled the door open. “You want to get to the point, am I right?”
“It’d be nice.”
“Okay, we’ll start with your dead friends. Then, we’ll move on to your former Berkeley College connection. Finally—” his dark eyes met hers “—we’ll deal with the fact that someone broke into your home last week and went through your bedroom closet.”
RICK LET HER DIRECT HIM to Grant Avenue, to the Dragon’s Gate. Not that he needed a human GPS. He’d spent a good portion of his youth in San Francisco, sharing houses with friends as aimless as he’d been back then, soaking up the atmosphere of a lost era, and hoping for the smallest scrap of inspiration as to where his life should go.
“Is this your car?” Vanessa inquired from the passenger seat.
He watched her run a finger over the soft leather armrest and grinned. “About a third of it. I’ll be making payments for a few more years.”
“Quite a few, I imagine. I have an aunt in Bodega Bay. Her husband had a Porsche. He ran it into a northbound train one night, died on impact.”
“There’s an uplifting story.”
“He was dying anyway. A crash was the better way for him. It was a freight train. No casualties except my uncle, his Porsche and a whole lot of sugar.” She motioned forward. “Park anywhere. We can talk while we walk.”
“To the Chinese-slash-Armenian restaurant?”
It was her turn to grin. “Armenian food’s great, but you absolutely have to eat Chinese when you come to San Francisco.”
He couldn’t argue with that. Nor could he keep his eyes from straying to her legs when he opened the door for her. The fact that he knew she knew he was looking and didn’t bother to tug her skirt down intrigued him. Coy, Detective Connor wasn’t. Inherently seductive, he suspected she was.
Temperatures in and around San Francisco had been uncommonly high for several days, or so Rick had heard. The thermometer still hovered in the mideighties, and it was almost 9:00 p.m. But Rick was accustomed to DC summers. Nothing on the west coast could touch the cloying heat and humidity of the east.
“Wo Tan’s has good duck.” Vanessa folded her jacket over one arm. “There’s also Kwon Lee’s, but that’s a Korean restaurant.”
“Snuck in on the fringe, huh?”
“Married in. Okay, so what does my bedroom closet have to do with three murders? Obviously, you feel it’s relevant.”
He went with the simple answer, though he’d had to dig through several layers to uncover the link. “Your friends’ bedroom closets were all trashed prior to their deaths.”
Vanessa tipped her head. “Says lunatic with a big chip and a lot of emotional problems to me.”
The white sleeveless top she wore clung like a second skin. She was, as he’d noticed earlier, a remarkably beautiful woman. He’d been half hoping she would also be unpleasant. From the information he’d gathered on the dead women, the first two certainly had been.
“Lunatic, maybe.” He made what appeared to be an idle sweep of the brightly lit, extremely busy street. “And I’m sure we’ll find a chip on at least one of his shoulders. Emotional problems—well, hey, we all have those, right? But this killer calculates and executes, cleverly and cleanly. He doesn’t leave DNA, he doesn’t give his victims time to raise an alarm and he doesn’t hang around to gloat. Gloating is not uncommon,” he added, bringing his gaze back to hers.
Amused, Vanessa tapped his forehead with her index finger. “Homicide cop, Rick. I’ve bumped into one or two gloaters myself. Some people say Jack the Ripper was guilty of that. Don’t know why he springs to mind, but there you go. He left plenty of clues at the scenes of his maniacal murders, yet to this day no one really knows who he was. And don’t even get me started on Norman Bates.”
Rick chuckled. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a movie buff.”
“I loved to be scared as a kid. I gave my aunt, Cinnamon—the one in Bodega Bay—a mynah bird for Christmas last year and named it Lydia Brenner, after the character in The Birds.”
“You should have called it Mrs. Bundy—the know-it-all ornithologist who said birds couldn’t and wouldn’t mass together.”
Appreciation softened her expression. “You’re okay for a Fed. Now talk to me about the closets.”
Drawing her out of the traffic flow in front of a Chinese emporium, Rick once again scanned the passing stream of late night humanity. He could have scanned Vanessa and enjoyed himself a great deal more, but with her long, red-brown hair, slitted pencil skirt, incredible legs and eyes the color of liquid honey, he knew better than to tempt fate.
“There’s not a lot to tell. Anywhere from a week to ten days before they died, each victim’s home was broken into and her bedroom closet trashed. None of them filed a report, so it took me more time than it should have to make the connection. Fortunately, while they didn’t lodge official complaints, they did talk to friends and family members.”
“Who eventually talked to you.” She lifted a shrewd brow. “What’s your technique, Maguire? Charm, straight up questioning, or does it vary depending on the questionee?”
“Whatever works.” He returned his eyes to her face, kept them deliberately neutral. “Your captain expects you to cooperate with me, Vanessa. I’ve worked a lot of serial murders. I can keep you alive.”
“Thanks, but I’ve put murderers behind bars before and will again. Whoever killed Deirdre, Sandy and Mara had an advantage over them. They didn’t realize he or she was out there. I do. I’m also a cop, fully trained. Scale tips slightly in my favor.”
Rick had run into similar resistance too many times in the past to be put off. “So that would be a no to cooperation, then.” When she merely stared at him, he offered her a vague smile. “Palmer’ll be pissed.”
“He’s my captain, not my father.”
He was a little more than that, however, Rick let it slide and instead offered a sage, “Would you have listened to your father?”
He spied the glimmer of sadness in her eyes before she looked away. “My father was a cop. Homicide. He died in the line of duty. He’d have understood how I feel, how any officer would feel. I’ll deal with Palmer and with anyone who comes after me. I can make connections, too, Rick.” She pointed through the Emporium window. “Do you see that pretty lady there?”
He followed her outstretched finger to a carved white figure. His lips twitched. “Are you going to tell me she’s fragile and you’re not?”
“She’s porcelain, like my—well, like many people, I suppose. I’m more elastic.”
Not from where Rick stood. She wasn’t flexing one bit on this matter.
He started to point that out, but the words never emerged. As she bent to inspect another figure, the window over Vanessa’s head exploded.
Chapter Two
Fragments of tempered glass flew everywhere. Inward, sideways, some of the larger ones actually ricocheted back onto the street. The white porcelain figure shattered. So did dozens of other ornaments.
Already low to the ground, Vanessa snatched her gun from her purse and swung around in a crouch. Rick had his Glock out and angled skyward.
The people closest to them gave a collective gasp, then began to scream. The store owner rushed out, shouting in Chinese.
“Get down,” Rick told him and anyone else who could hear.
“There.” Vanessa used her gun to indicate a gray Volvo with blacked out windows and a dent in the passenger side.
Rick assisted a woman who’d twisted her knee, but his eyes were on the Volvo. “Call for backup,” he said and took off before Vanessa could reply.
The store owner grabbed her arm, impeding her. She knew what he wanted—more or less—but couldn’t do anything except pry his fingers free and tell him to go back inside.
Spotting a patrol car, she ran toward it. The Volvo had vanished. So had Rick.
“What happened?” the sergeant at the wheel called out.
“Shot fired into the store. Look for a Volvo, late eighties, large dent in the passenger door. Driver’s heading north on Grant. No plates. The side windows are painted flat black.”
“You okay?”
“No problem.” Only hampered by her shoes and tight skirt. Not to mention the store owner’s fingers that were once again grinding into her forearm.
Even a police siren couldn’t drown out the pandemonium around her. Resigned, Vanessa located her badge and endeavored to calm the situation down before anyone got seriously hurt.
Thirty minutes passed. Two backup patrols arrived and took over crowd control. Vanessa was talking to her desk sergeant when Rick returned, winded and alone.
“I lost him on Jackson.”
She flipped her phone closed. “New Porsche lost aging Volvo? That’s gotta be a first.”
“New Porsche almost got sideswiped by a hippie mobile with bad brakes. I cut over to Stockton on foot, but the Volvo disappeared in the confusion. Did you get the plates?”
“There weren’t any. A patrol car took up the pursuit. They might get lucky. Mr. Sing?” She gestured to the distraught store owner who was holding his head while he surveyed the ruin that had once been his display window.
“Bad, very bad,” he moaned as he emerged. “Guns are very dangerous.”
Vanessa eased him forward. “Mr. Sing, this is Rick Maguire. He’s with the FBI. Tell him what you told me.”
“It was a man.” Sing used his hands to illustrate. “He moved like a snake, in and out of the crowd. I saw him through the door of my shop.”
“Can you describe him?” Rick asked.
“He was like the Steve in an old movie.”
“McQueen,” Vanessa supplemented.
