Crush

his nose, which led him here.” Friedberg grabbed the irregular bottom of the iron door with both hands and lifted it. The metal hinge squealed.

“Body dump,” Vail said.

“Body dump. Take a look.”

Dixon and Vail stepped forward and peered in. “Goes down quite a bit.”

“Wasn’t any fun getting the body out, I can tell you that much.”

“How’d you catch the case?” Dixon asked. “This isn’t SFPD jurisdiction.”

Friedberg chuckled. “Jurisdiction around here is a freaking nightmare. Need a scorecard and map to keep it straight. A hundred feet in any direction, jurisdiction could change. Basically, it goes by who owned the land before it became a national park. So where we’re standing is U.S. Park Police. They assigned a Criminal Investigative Branch detective, who ran the investigation and coordinated with the Marin County sheriff’s office. That’s where I came in. This was a couple years before I hooked up with SFPD.” He shook his head. “Let’s just say I regretted working the case from day one. But I kept a copy of the file. I always hoped one day I’d solve it.”

Vail stepped back and Friedberg lowered the cover. “ID on the vic?”

“Betsy Ivers. Bank teller, thirty-three, single.”

“Any connection to the wine country?” Dixon asked.

“None I remember. But it’s been a while since I reviewed the file.”

“Did Agent Rooney go over the unusual things our killer does to the body?”

Friedberg clapped his hands to shake off the dirt. “I went to that FBI Profiling seminar in ’06 that your colleague did, Agent Safarik. I know what to look for. He was really good. Great freaking class. How is he?”

“Doing well,” Vail said. “He retired, but he’s got his own company, still doing profiling, expert testimony, the whole shebang.”

“Well, that’s how I knew to fill out the VICAP form. Every cop in the country should take that course.”

Friedberg led the way back toward the bridge, up the stairs and down the incline to the wood post and cable fence that prevented one from taking a header down the cliff, into the Pacific. The sun was setting and the temperature had dropped another few degrees. Head-lighted cars streamed from the city across the bridge into Marin.

Vail took a deep breath. Cold, damp, sea breeze. Smell of salt riding on the air. “Any suspects?”

“Couple people we were looking at. One was a guy who was working for a local pest control company. I liked him, but he blew out of town after we questioned him. Turns out he used a fake ID, name, address. His whole employment app was bullshit. Couldn’t find him—he vanished like water droplets in the freaking San Francisco fog. But just when we were about to start a goddamn manhunt, this other guy came on our radar. Billy Todd Lundy. Some psycho who’d been in and out of mental health institutions as a kid, went off his meds, and had all sorts of run-ins with SFPD.”

Friedberg had Vail’s attention. Mental health issues. That could fit with the severed breasts. “And what happened with Billy Todd Lundy?”

“We questioned him, there were holes in his story. He was seen around Battery Spencer a couple days before the murder, which fit with the estimated TOD. And he also lived down the block from Ivers’s apartment.”

“Violent tendencies?”

“When he was off his meds, yeah.” Friedberg pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and tapped it. Removed one, lit it. “But that’s where things got screwed up. We didn’t have enough to hold him, so we kicked him loose.” He leaned on the fence’s wood post. Took a long drag of his smoke. Nodded at the Golden Gate. “Did I tell you before about the bridge?”

Vail and Dixon shared a look. “Yeah, we went through all that. Your buddy the painter.”

“No, no,” Friedberg said, shaking his head urgently. “Its less glamorous side.”

Dixon faced him. “I don’t follow you.”

“It’s the most prevalent place in the country to commit suicide. Over twelve hundred a year. And those are just the ones we know about. Because of the dense fog we get here, and, well, times when no one’d see a jumper, like at night, some cops think the number’s much higher.” He pointed at the bridge. “Someone supposedly hooked up motion-detecting cameras that recorded the jumpers. Confirmed the theory that the rate was worse than we thought. Kind of morbid, don’t you think?”

“Inspector,” Dixon said. “The point?”

“Two days after we kicked Lundy, he jumped. Right there, by the north tower.”

“Any chance he survived?” Vail asked.

“Who knows? I think a couple people have lived to talk about it over the years. But let’s say the odds are against it. It’s a two hundred-fifty-foot drop. He’d be going eighty-five miles an hour when he hit the water.” Friedberg took another long puff, then held up his cigarette and examined it. “At least this kills me slowly.”

Vail thought about that a moment, then said, “Yeah, I guess that’s something.”

THIRTY-NINE

John Wayne Mayfield finished “work” early—when Dixon and Vail headed out of town, he felt the risk of following them was too high. If one of them had taken note of his vehicle behind theirs in Napa, and the same vehicle happened to still be following theirs on the highway, thirty or more miles later, the chances of them dismissing it as a coincidence plummeted to unreasonable levels.

So when Dixon and Vail headed out of Napa, entered Vallejo and then Highway 37, Mayfield turned around and headed home. Now, as he settled down in front of his computer, a glass of fine ’02 Cakebread Cellars Cabernet by his side, he had thinking to do—and tasks to complete before he planned his most high profile murders. There was considerable risk involved and there would be no turning back. He could still stop right here and come away clean. With what?

No, as he thought about it, there really was no turning back . . . even if he never killed again—which was just not going to happen.

He sat in front of the keyboard, staring at the screen. Took a sip of wine and let it linger on his tongue, savoring the complex Cabernet borne from Rutherford’s exceptional soil and climate. He swallowed, then woke from his reverie. His task called to him, and though fraught with risk, it required his attention.

Everything had been leading up to this. He had no choice. He had to do it. He wanted to do it.

But wait.

As he sat there, an idea began to form. Perhaps there was another way. He’d give it one more shot, put forth one last effort, before he chose what he considered the “nuclear option.” He thought it through, examining it from all angles, role-playing how it would go down once he contacted the cops.

This might just work—at considerably less risk. He’d take precautions, give them what they wanted . . . so long as he got what he wanted. It was a trade. Equitable. Fair. Just a reasonable business offer.

If he was going to do this, he had to do it right. He made a phone call to gather the particulars, then checked the wall clock. He had barely an hour before this copy was due. Not much time. And he didn’t want to screw up, not this late in the game. Even if this was the path of lesser risk, if he wasn’t careful it could end in disaster. He took a deep breath to calm his thoughts.

Then he opened a new document and started typing.

FORTY

Dixon and Vail had left Robert Friedberg with a copy of his file in hand. They were headed back to

Napa and their appointment with Ian Wirth. At the time prompt from Dixon, Vail had called and given the man the promised thirty-minutes’ notice.

As they pulled into the circular drive of Wirth’s three-story brown brick and stone-faced home, Vail tucked Victoria Cameron’s file beneath the seat and pulled down the sun visor mirror to straighten her hair. The wind at Battery Spencer had done a job on it.

“Why didn’t you tell me my hair looked like I just came out of a wind tunnel?”

Dixon shoved the car into park and turned to Vail. “I was driving. It’s dark. I didn’t notice.” She pulled down her own visor and combed her hair into place. “How come you didn’t tell me mine was a