“Probably…we’re cops.” He touched me again, and suddenly I was tingling all over, and we melted into each other’s arms. “What the heck, we’re Homicide, anyway.”
We kissed, and once again we were locked into a single, intertwined shape. I started to laugh. The list, I was thinking. The skybox. Now an earthquake. This sucker’s starting to get pretty long.
My beeper went off. I cursed, rolled over, glanced at the screen.
It was the office.
“Code one eleven,” I told Chris.
Emergency Alert.
“Shit,” I muttered, “it’s just an earthquake.”
I sat up, pulled the sheet over me, called in on the phone next to the bed.
It was Roth buzzing me. Roth never buzzed me. What was going on? Immediately, I transferred to his line.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Dusting off some debris,” I said, and smiled toward Chris.
“Get in here. Get in here fast,” he barked.
“What’s going on, Sam? This about the quake?”
“Uh-uh,” he replied. “Worse. Nicholas Jenks has escaped.”
Chapter 111
AS HE SAT SHACKLED TO THE SEAT of the police van on the way back from Napa, Nicholas Jenks watched the impassive eyes of the patrolman across from him. He plotted, schemed. He wondered how much it would take to buy his freedom.
One million? Two million? After all, what did the fool take home? Forty grand a year?
He figured the steely-eyed officer was someone above reproach, whose commitment to his duty was unquestioned. If he were writing it, that’s who he would have put in the car with him.
Five million, then. He smirked.
If he were writing it. That notion possessed a cold, punishing irony for him. He had written it.
Jenks shifted in his restraints — wrists cuffed, torso strapped to the seat. Only minutes earlier, he had stood in the redbrick courthouse in Santa Rosa while the prosecutor in her little Liz Claiborne suit pointed her finger at him. Over and over, she accused him of things only a mind as cultivated as his would think up and do.
All he could do was stare coldly while she accused him of being this monster. Sometime, he’d like to lock her in the law library and show her what he was really capable of.
Jenks caught a glimpse of the sky and the sun-browned hills through the narrow window in the rear door and tried to get a fix on their bearings. Novato. Just hitting Marin.
He pressed his face to the steel restraining wall. He had to get out. If he were writing it, there would always be a way out.
He looked at the guard. So what was the story, Joe Friday? What happened next?
“You married?” he asked.
The policeman stared through him at first, then he nodded.
“Kids?”
“Two.” He nodded again, even breaking a slight smile.
No matter how hard they tried to resist, they were always fascinated to talk with the monster. The guy who killed the honeymooners. They could tell their wives and friends, justify the miserable six hundred a week they brought home. He was a celebrity.