7th Heaven

“I found a book in my apartment,” I shouted into the phone. “It’s clean. It didn’t burn. There could be prints. I want it bagged and tagged, and I don’t want to do it myself in case there’s any question down the road.”

“I’m five minutes away,” Jacobi said.

I stood in the hallway with Joe and Martha, Joe telling me that Martha and I were moving in with him. I held tightly to his hand, but my mind was running a slide show of all the fire-razed houses I’d walked through in the last month, and I was feeling the searing shame of having been so professional and so removed. I’d seen the bodies. I’d seen the destruction. But I hadn’t felt the terrible power of fire until now.

I heard Jacobi’s voice and that of the building manager downstairs, then Jacobi’s ponderous footsteps as he huffed and wheezed up the stairs. I’d ridden thousands of miles in a squad car with Jacobi. I’d been shot with him, and our blood had pooled together in an alley in the Tenderloin. I knew him better than anyone in the world, and he knew me that way, too. That’s why when he arrived at the top landing, all I had to do was point to the book.

Jacobi stretched latex gloves over his large hands, gingerly opened the red cover. I was panting with fear, sure that I’d see an inscription inside, another mocking Latin saying. But there was only a name printed inside the front page.

The name was Chuck Hanni.

Chapter 70

IT WAS 1:03 A.M. and sixty-eight degrees outside.

I was lying next to Joe tucked inside the cool, white envelope of his six-hundred-thread-count sheets, wearing one of his T-shirts, staring up at the time and temperature projected onto his ceiling by a clock made for insomniacs and former G-men who needed to have this critical info the second they opened their eyes.

Joe’s hand covered mine. He had listened to my fears and my ranting for hours, but as he drifted off, his grip loosened, and now he was snoring softly. Martha, too, was in the land of nod, her fluttery breaths and dream-yips providing a stereophonic accompaniment to Joe’s steady snores.

As for me, sleep was on the far side of the moon.

I couldn’t stop thinking how the fire skipped the first two floors but had torched my apartment out to the walls. It was undeniable. I was the target of a vicious, premeditated killer who’d already deliberately burned eight people to death.

Had he thought I was home? Or had he watched me leave with Martha and sent me a warning? How could Chuck Hanni be that person?

I’d had meals with Chuck, worked crime scenes with him, confided in him. Now I was reconfiguring him in my mind as a killer who knew everything there was to know about setting fires. And everything there was to know about getting away with murder.

But why would a man who was this smart leave his damned calling card in my apartment?

The signature of a killer was actually his signature?

It made no sense.

The pounding in my temples was building up to a five-alarm headache. If there’d been anything in my stomach, I would have heaved it up. When the phone rang at 1:14, I read the caller ID and grabbed the receiver on the first ring. Joe stirred beside me. I whispered, “It’s Conklin,” and Joe mumbled, “Okay,” and dropped back down into sleep.

“You got something?” I asked my partner.

“Yeah. You’re not going to like this.”

“Just tell me. Tell me what you’ve got,” I half whispered, half shouted. I got out of bed, stepped over Martha, and walked out into Joe’s living room with its night view of Presidio Park, its tall eucalyptus trees swaying eerily in the moonlight. Martha’s nails clacked on hardwood as she followed me, slurped water from a bowl in the kitchen.

“About the book…” Rich said.

“You found Latin written inside?”

“No. It’s Chuck’s book, all right -”

“Man oh man.”

“Let me finish, Linds. He didn’t leave it in your apartment. I did.”

Chapter 71

MY MIND SCRAMBLED as I tried to understand what Conklin was telling me. “Say that again,” I demanded. When he answered, his voice was contrite.

“I left the book at your place.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

He had to be. I couldn’t imagine any circumstances under which Conklin would leave a fire and explosion manual in my fire-ravaged apartment.

“What happened is, I got together with Chuck, like you said to do,” Rich told me in measured tones. “We had a no-hard-feelings dinner and I picked up the tab. And I told him I’d like to learn more about fire investigation from him. I mean, he’s the pro.”

Rich paused for breath and I shouted at him, “Go on!”

“We went out to his car, Lindsay, he practically lives in that thing. Pop-Tarts wrappers all over the seats, his computer, clothes hanging from the -”

“Rich, for God’s sake!”

“So, just as he finds the fire investigations manual to lend me, Jacobi calls and tells me your apartment went up. I told Hanni, and he said, ‘I’ll drive,’ and I was still holding that book when we entered your place.”

“You put it down on the telephone table.”

“Didn’t think about it again until Jacobi called me,” Rich said miserably.

“Has Jacobi already spoken to Hanni?”

“No. He wanted to talk to me first. Hanni knows nothing about this.”

It took long seconds for me to sort it all out, put Chuck Hanni back into his role as friend, and realize that the essential truth hadn’t changed. I was shivering, and I wasn’t cold.

“Linds?” I heard Rich say.

“We still don’t know who set fire to my place or to any of the others,” I said. “We still don’t know anything.”

Chapter 72

THERE HAD BEEN a whole blessed week’s break while Judge Bendinger returned to physical rehab for his replaced knee. But the break was over. Bendinger was back. And Yuki now felt the tsunami effect of the whole freakin’ Junie Moon circus starting all over again, the out-of-control press, the pressure to win.

At nine o’clock sharp, court was called into session.

And the defense began to put on its case.

L. Diana Davis didn’t look up as her first witness came through the gate, passing so close she must have felt a breeze as his herringbone jacket nearly grazed her arm. Yuki saw Davis lean in and speak behind her hand to her client, all the while panning the gallery with her eyes. The TV cameras were running, and the reporters were