Chris shrugged. “Must be frustrating. If your boss isn’t getting anywhere, maybe the paper should just put the story aside. It sounds like you’ve got enough to do every week without having to play detectives.”
“You know, sweetie, I think he would do that if it wasn’t for Alma Samuels and her Ladies of Liberty breathing down his neck.”
“Oh,” Chris frowned, deep in thought, as he munched on a few French fries. “I hear she’s got a lot of clout around town. I know Chief Petersen hates it when she calls.”
“Believe me; Alma deserves to be whacked over the head with a shovel.”
“Wow, you’ve got a lethal side to you! I better watch myself.”
Holly squeezed Chris’s leg as she teasingly fed him one of her fries. She leaned in and whispered, “Oh, you don’t know the half of it, baby! I can be a dangerous lady when I want.”
“I’m starting to find that out,” he nodded toward the door. “I think it’s time we get back to my place.”
Holly signaled the waiter for a check. Minutes later they were driving back to their love nest.
Rob woke before sunrise. He did some warm-up stretches while waiting for Eddie to appear. Before long, the two of them were back, following the same circuitous route they had taken just six days before.
Jogging down the final half mile along Prospect, Rob realized that in thirty minutes they had not passed a single car, hiker, jogger, or dog walker.
“At six on a Sunday morning, this town is really dead,” he exclaimed. “Seems like we’re the only ones dumb enough to be up at this hour.”
“Don’t you love it? I think we might want to start doing this a few days a week,” Eddie suggested.
“Fine with me, as long as it’s not on a day when I can sleep in,” Rob muttered.
“Sorry about the early start with the kids being gone and all, but I’m hoping we’ll strike gold a second time.”
Rob chuckled. “May the Gods of law and order be with us.”
Eddie winked. “We’re on a roll, buddy. And I’m feeling lucky today.”
Once inside, they again donned their surgical booties and nitrile gloves.
“Okay, Sherlock, what are you looking for this time?” Rob asked.
“When we were last here, I’d hoped to find something substantial, so I rushed through a lot of other stuff. I know I can bullshit my way around why we’re here if we get caught, but I would prefer not to be in that position.”
“And?”
“During our last visit I quickly flipped through that big binder over there on the kitchen counter next to the Cuisinart. It’s filled with recipes, alongside which Bradley scribbled a lot of little notes in the margins. It mostly looked like names and dates, or additions and deletions of different ingredients. It would have been too much to cover in too little time, so I put the book aside and went looking at more likely hiding places, thinking that Bradley wasn’t going to place anything from his past in there. Yesterday, while flying back to Oakland, I tried to remember what it was that Chris Harding told us about Bradley during the reception after the memorial service. Suddenly it came to me: it was how much he enjoyed that caramel chicken. Remember? Warren made it the day of the last luncheon he served down at the Sausalito PD.”
“You’re right, Eddie. He did mention that chicken.”
“If he managed to get himself invited for dinner, perhaps that’s what Bradley cooked. I want to see if he scribbled anything in the margin alongside that particular recipe.”
“Wow! You’re smarter than I realized.”
“Thank you, kind sir. Now, go over to the door and keep an eye out for any of the neighborhood snoops while I spend a little time in the late chef’s kitchen.”
“I’m on it,” Rob said, as he positioned himself to the side of the ancient French door.
Eddie said a little prayer as he opened the old binder with frayed corners. He turned the pages carefully, many of which had yellowed over time and stiffened with the grease that inevitably was absorbed when paper sits so close to a kitchen range.
The sections all started with a tab but were not themselves arranged alphabetically. Through the C’s, Eddie went page by page, past the Clams Oreganata, and the Clam Chowder, the Couscous with Garbanzo Beans, and then a half dozen chicken recipes from the making of chicken sausage to Chicken Parmesan. Nearly every page had a date on it. Many of them had several. Eddie hoped that the book doubled as a kind of diary, reminding Warren how many times he’d made a particular recipe and for whom. Some notes said things like, “Alma’s favorite,” or “Women’s League Holiday Luncheon.”
When he came to the page that held the recipe for Caramel Chicken, the last note was “Sausalito PD,” and the date of that final lunch, but there was no date after that.
“Damn it, there’s nothing here,” Eddie pounded his fist down on the counter.
“Maybe he never got the chance to write it down,” Rob replied.
“Yeah, that could be. Still, it would have been sweet to have had one last nail in Harding’s coffin.”
“Wait a minute,” Rob said suddenly, “Harding also mentioned pasta with veal, sausage, and porcini ragu.”
“How the hell did you remember that?”
“Because I thought it sounded great. I suggested to Karin that we should try making it one night.”
“What the hell, it’s worth a try,” Eddie said as he reopened the book.
For several more minutes he methodically turned over each page in the binder and then:
“BINGO,” Eddie exclaimed too loudly, he quickly realized.
Alongside his pasta recipe, there was one last entry: Chris Harding.
Underneath the name, Warren wrote the date. It was the night he died.
“Something tells me you got it,” Rob said.
Eddie pulled his phone out of his nylon running jacket and snapped a photo of the page.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Eddie said. “It’s
