I did just that. Then I shifted the black Max Mara suit jacket hastily thrown over a cushion and sank back in the leather couch. We tilted our bottles, and both of us blurted in the same breath, “So… how’s your case?”
“You first.” Jill laughed.
I spread my thumb and index finger barely a half inch apart to indicate basically zip. I took her through the maze of dead ends: the van, the chimera sketch, the surveillance photo of the Templars, that CSU had come up with nothing on the Davidson ambush.
Jill came over and sat beside me on the couch. “You want to talk, Linds? Like you said, you didn’t come up here to make sure I was behaving myself.”
I smiled guiltily, then placed my beer on the coffee table. “I need to shift the investigation, Jill.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’m listening…. This is just between us.”
Piece by piece, I laid out my theory that the killer was not some reckless, hate-mongering maniac but a bold, plotting pattern killer acting out a vendetta.
“Maybe you’re overreaching,” Jill replied. “What you do have is three terror crimes aimed at African Americans.”
“So why these victims, Jill? An eleven-year-old girl? A decorated cop? Estelle Chipman, whose husband has been dead for five years?”
“I don’t know, honey. I just nail ’em to the wall when you turn them over.”
I smiled. Then I leaned forward. “Jill, I need you to help me. I need to find some connection between these victims. I know it’s there. I need to check out past cases in which a white plaintiff was victimized by a black police officer. That’s where my gut leads me. It’s where I think these killings might start. It has something to do with revenge.”
“What happens when the next victim never had anything to do with a police officer? What are you gonna do then?”
I looked at her imploringly. “Are you going to help me?”
“Of course I’m going to help you.” She shook her head at me. “Duh… Anything you can give me that will help me narrow it down?”
I nodded. “Male, white. Maybe a tattoo or three.”
“That oughtta do it.” She rolled her eyes.
I reached out and squeezed her hand. I knew I could count on her. I looked at my watch. Seven-thirty. “I better let you finish up while you’re still in your first trimester.”
“Don’t go, Lindsay.” Jill held my arm. “Stick around.”
I could see something on her face. That clear, professional intensity suddenly weakened into a thousand-yard stare.
“Something wrong, Jill? Did the doctor tell you something?”
In her sleeveless vest, with her dark hair curled around her ears, she looked every bit the power lawyer, number two in the city’s legal department. But there was a tremor in her breath. “I’m fine. Really, physically, I’m fine. I should be happy, right? I’m gonna have a baby. I should be riding the air.”
“You should be feeling whatever you’re feeling, Jill.” I took her hand.
She nodded glassily. Then she curled her knees up to her chest. “When I was a kid, I would sometimes wake up in the night. I always had this little terror, this feeling that the whole world was asleep, that around this whole, huge planet, I was the only one left awake in the world. Sometimes my father would come in and try to rock me to sleep. He’d be downstairs in his study, preparing his cases, and he’d always check on me before he turned in. He called me his second chair. But even with him there, I still felt so alone.”
She shook her head at me, tears glistening in her eyes. “Look at me. Steve’s away for two nights and I turn into a fucking idiot,” she said.
“I don’t think you’re an idiot,” I said, stroking her pretty face.
“I can’t lose this baby, Lindsay. I know it seems stupid. I’m carrying a life. It’s here, always in me, right next to me. How is it I feel so alone?”
I held her tightly by the shoulders. My father had never been there to rock me to sleep. Even before he left us, he worked the third shift and would always head to Mc-Goey’s for a beer afterward. Sometimes I felt like the heartbeat that was closest to me was the pulse of the bastards I had to track down.
“I know what you mean,” I heard myself whisper. I held Jill. “Sometimes I feel that way, too.”
Chapter 41
ON THE CORNER of Ocean and Victoria, a man in a green fatigue windbreaker hunched chewing a burrito as the black Lincoln slowly made its way down the block. He had waited here dozens of nights, stalked his next prey for weeks.