12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) Read online

  I dialed and Claire answered with a groggy “Dr. Wazjjjbrn.”

  “Claire. It’s too soon to go to the hospital, I know, but yow. I think I can feel the baby’s head down there. What should I do?”

  “Don’t push!” my best friend shouted at me. “I’m calling nine-one-one right now.”

  I shouted back at her, “Call a private ambulance service so I can go to the Women’s Hospital! Claire, do you read me?”

  Claire didn’t answer.

  My phone was dead.

  Three

  MY RAGING RIVER of hormones was sending a single, unambiguous message.

  Push.

  Claire had said, “Don’t push,” and that sounded both insane and impossible, but I got her drift. The baby was safe inside me until help arrived.

  It must have taken me ten minutes to ease my throbbing, hurting self into bed.

  I knew that Claire wouldn’t let me down, that she had probably thrown the weight of her office behind the 911 call. I put my birthing instincts in park and thought with my entire being, I’m in God’s hands now. All I can do is make the best of this and hope that the baby is safe. That’s all I can do.

  Martha got up on the bed and curled up next to me. I put my hand on her head and I resisted my contractions. I heard noises, someone calling “Helloooo”—sounds that were far outside my tunnel of pain. I put my hands up against blinding flashlight beams and then, like a force of nature, all the lights went on.

  The power was back.

  My bedroom was filled with strapping men standing shoulder to shoulder in a line that stretched from the door to the bed and ran along both sides of it. There had to be at least twelve of them, all with stricken, smoke-smudged faces, all in full turnout gear. I remember staring at the reflective tape on their jackets, wondering why a dozen fire-fighters were crowding in on me.

  I shouted, “Where’s the fire?”

  A large young man came toward me. He was at least six four, with a buzz cut, a still-bleeding gash on his cheek, and a look of deep concern in his eyes.

  He said, “I’m Deputy Chief Robert Wilson. I’m called Robbie. Take it easy. Everything is going to be okay.”

  Really? Then, I realized that a fire rig had been closer to the apartment than an ambulance and so firefighters had answered the 911 call.

  I said, “This is embarrassing. My place is a mess.”

  I was thinking about my clothes strewn all over the place, dog hair on the bed, somehow forgetting that I was completely naked with my legs spread apart.

  Robbie Wilson said, “How are you doing, Sergeant?”

  “I’m having a baby,” I said.

  “I know. You take it easy now.”

  He fitted an oxygen mask to my face, but I pushed it away.

  “I don’t need that.”

  “It’s for the baby,” he said. He turned to the gang of firemen and shouted, “I need boiling water. I need towels. A lot of them.”

  Did I have any clean towels? I didn’t even know. I pushed the mask away again and grunted at Robbie, “Have you ever delivered a baby?”

  He paused for a long moment. “A couple of times,” he lied.

  I liked him. I trusted him. But I didn’t believe him.

  He said, “You can push now, Sergeant. Go ahead and try.”

  I did it. I pushed and grunted and I lost track of the time. Had an hour passed?

  It felt as though the baby were grabbing my rib cage from the inside and holding on with both fists. The pain was agonizing and it seemed that I would never get Baby Molinari out of my body and into the world. Just when I thought I had spent my last breath, my baby slid out of my body into Robbie’s baseball-glove-size hands.

  I heard a little cry. It was a sweet sound that had the special effect of putting the pain behind me, hugging me around the heart.

  “Oh, wow. She’s perfect,” said Big Robbie.

  I peered into the light and said, “Give her to me.”

  I wiggled my fingers in the air as someone cut the cord and cleaned up her little face. And then my baby was in my arms.

  “Hello, sweet girl.”

  She opened her eyes to little slits and she looked right at me. Tears fell out of my eyes as I smiled into my daughter’s face. A bond was formed that could never be broken; it was a moment I would never, ever forget.

  My little girl was perfect and as beautiful as a sunrise over the ocean, as awesome as a double rainbow over swans in flight.

  It’s too bad the word miracle has been overused, because I swear it’s the only word that fit the feeling of holding my daughter in my arms. My heart swelled to the size of the world. I only wished Joe had been here.

  I counted my baby’s fingers and toes, talking nonsense to her the whole time.

  “I’m your mommy. You know that, baby girl? Look what we’ve done.”

  But was she really okay? Was her little heart beating at the right pace? Were her lungs filling with enough air?

  The big dude said, “You should both have a thorough checkup. Ready to go to the hospital, Sergeant?”

  “We’re going in the fire rig?”

  “I’ll make room in the front seat.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “And please, amp up the sirens.”

  BOOK I

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  Chapter 1

  YUKI CASTELLANO PARKED her car on Brannan Street, a block or so away from the Hall of Justice. She was lucky to have gotten this parking spot, and she took it as a good sign. Today she was glad for any good sign.

  She got out of her car, then reached into the backseat for her briefcase and jacket. Then she set off toward the gray granite building on Bryant Street, where she worked as an assistant district attorney and where, in about an hour, she would prosecute a piece-of-crap wife and child killer named Keith Herman.

  Keith Herman was a disbarred attorney who had made his living by defending the most heinous of slime-bucket clients and had often won his cases by letting prosecution witnesses know that if they testified, they would be killed.

  Accordingly, witnesses sometimes fled California rather than appear against Herman’s clients.

  He’d been charged with witness tampering, but never convicted. That’s how scary he was. He was also a registered sex offender, so that made two juicy bits of information Yuki couldn’t tell the jury because the law said that she couldn’t prejudice the jury by citing his prior misdeeds.

  So Yuki had been building the case against Herman based on evidence that he’d killed his wife, dismembered her body, and somehow made his young daughter disappear, arguably a harder charge to prove because the girl’s body had not been found.

  Yuki had been doing nothing but work on the Herman case for the last five months and now, as the first day of the trial arrived, she was stoked and nervous at the same time. Her case was solid, but she’d been surprised by verdicts that had gone against her in cases as airtight as this one.

  As she turned the corner onto Bryant, Yuki located the cause of her worry. It was Keith Herman’s defense attorney, John Kinsela, who, right after Keith Herman, was probably the sleaziest lawyer in the country. He had defended legendary high-profile killers and had rarely lost a case.

  And he usually destroyed the reputations of opposing counsel with innuendo and rumors, which he leaked as truth to the press.

  Yuki had never gone up against Kinsela before, but Kinsela had shredded her boss, Leonard “Red Dog” Parisi, in a murder trial about two years ago. Parisi still hadn’t gotten over it. He was pulling for Yuki, giving her his full support, but it wasn’t lost on Yuki that he wasn’t trying the case himself.

  Red Dog had a bad heart.

  Yuki was young, fit, and up for the challenge of her life.

  Yuki walked quickly toward the Hall, head bent as she mentally rehearsed her opener. She was startled out of her thoughts by someone calling her name. She looked up, saw the good-looking young guy with the blond cowlick and the start of a mustache.

/>   Nicky Gaines was her associate and second chair in this trial. He was carrying a paper bag.

  “Damn, you look good, Yuki.”

  Gaines was five years younger than she was, and Yuki didn’t care whether he really did have a crush on her or if he was just flattering her. She was in love. And not with Nicky Gaines.

  “You have coffee in there?” Yuki asked.

  “Hot, with cream, one sugar. And then I’ve got the double espresso for you.”

  “Let’s go straight to the courtroom,” Yuki said.

  “How are you feeling about this?” Gaines said, walking up the steps along with her.

  “Like if I don’t get a double-barreled conviction, I may kill Keith Herman myself.”

  Chapter 2

  WHEN JENNIFER HERMAN’S dismembered body turned up in eight separate garbage bags, and when seven-year-old Lily Herman hadn’t been found despite the exhaustive police search conducted over a six-month period, Keith Herman was tried in the press and found guilty of murdering them both.

  The intense media attention had whipped up a lot of hatred toward Keith Herman. It made it nearly impossible to find a jury who hadn’t watched the network specials, hadn’t seen the rewards offered for information about the missing child, and hadn’t formed an opinion as to the guilt of the accused.

  And so jury selection had taken almost three weeks.

  Now the press filled half the gallery in courtroom 202, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco. The other half of the room was filled with citizens who had lined up early enough that morning to have scored one of the precious seats.

  At 8:23 a.m. Yuki was at the prosecution table in the blond-wood-paneled courtroom. Her laptop was open and as she went through a long e-mail from Red Dog, she hoped all her witnesses would show up to testify—that they hadn’t been silenced or intimidated (or worse) by the opposition.

  Across the aisle, at the defense table, sat two ordinary-looking men who were actually two of the scariest people Yuki had ever met. Keith Herman was paunchy, bald, and had black eyes that looked like bullet holes in his unlined, babyish face. Not all psychopaths look homicidal, but Keith Herman did. Herman had never shown any remorse, not while identifying the sections of meat that had once been his wife, not while discussing his missing daughter.

  Herman’s attorney, John Kinsela, was tall with thinning gray hair and a bloodless complexion that made him look as though he climbed out of a coffin at night. Unlike his client, Kinsela was smooth. He expressed sadness and regret. He listened thoughtfully and spoke well and persuasively on camera. He passed as a reasonable facsimile of a person. A little digging into his past had turned up five divorces and the ownership of a Glock semiautomatic, which he carried at all times.

  Yuki had been with these ghouls through countless hours of depositions and felt that she knew them too well.

  She had dressed this morning in a bright red suit because she had a slight build, could look younger than her years, and because of the fact that red made her look and feel more powerful.

  You couldn’t hang back in red. You couldn’t hesitate. You really had to live up to red.

  She also wore a gold star on a chain around her neck, a graduation-from-law-school gift from her mother, who had been murdered several years earlier.

  Wearing the star kept Keiko Castellano present in Yuki’s mind and might even help her to win.

  She had to win.

  This was a tremendous opportunity to get justice for the victims, to become a hero to female victims everywhere. It was also an opportunity to be humiliated by a savage attorney and his perverted, murdering client.

  It was her job to make sure that Keith Herman didn’t get out of jail—ever.

  The buzz in the gallery intensified, then cut off suddenly as the door leading from the judge’s chambers opened behind the bench and Judge Arthur R. Nussbaum entered the courtroom.

  Chapter 3

  YUKI HALF LISTENED as Judge Nussbaum instructed the handpicked jury of six men, six women, and four alternates, who were as diverse a group as could be imagined: black, white, brown, white-collar, and blue-collar.

  Nussbaum had been a clever trial lawyer, but the judge was new at his job and Yuki was sure he would play this one by the book.

  When he asked her if she was ready to begin, she said she was. Gaines whispered, “Go get ’em,” and Yuki stood, greeted the jury, and walked confidently to the lectern in the well of the courtroom. Then, without warning, she blanked. She couldn’t remember the first sentence in her opener, the key that would unlock her carefully wrought statement.

  Yuki looked over at Gaines. He smiled, nodded, and her mind unfroze.

  She said, “The defendant, Keith Herman, is a killer, and the evidence in this case will show you that the people who depended on Mr. Herman, the ones who looked to him for protection and love, are the people who should have feared him the most.”

  Yuki paused to let her words sink in, looked at every member of the jury, and began to lay out her case.

  “On March first, a day like any other, Keith Herman tucked his daughter’s lifeless body into the backseat of his Lexus, and she was never seen again. Jennifer Herman, Keith Herman’s wife, never reported her daughter missing, because as her husband was driving off with their daughter, Jennifer Herman was already dead by her husband’s hand.

  “You will hear testimony that before she disappeared, Jennifer Herman told a friend on several occasions that she was afraid of her husband and that if anything ever happened to her, the friend should go to the police. Which this friend did. Had Lesley Rohan not called the police, they wouldn’t have looked for Jennifer Herman and her body would have been buried under several tons of garbage in a landfill.

  “You will hear testimony from another witness, an under-cover police officer, who will tell you that he was offered one hundred thousand dollars by the defendant to kill Jennifer Herman.”

  Yuki’s mind unclenched. She knew that she had gotten into the rhythm and the beat of her perfectly choreographed and well-rehearsed presentation. She was in a great groove.

  She told the jury about the witnesses she would introduce—the sanitation worker who found the body of Jennifer Herman in eight separate garbage bags and the forensic pathologist who would talk about Jennifer Herman’s cause of death.

  She walked to the counsel table and picked up an 8 × 10-inch color photo of a young child with dark wavy hair and a captivating smile. Carrying the picture in both hands, Yuki showed it to the jury as she walked along the length of the railing.

  “This beautiful child is the defendant’s daughter, Lily, who has been missing for over a year. You will hear from a neighbor’s housekeeper, Maria Ortega, that a month before Lily disappeared, she became moody and withdrawn and that there were bruises on her arms and legs. Ms. Ortega will testify that she reported her suspicions to the police.

  “The state,” Yuki said, keeping eye contact with the jury, “does not have to prove motive, but if I were sitting in the jury box, I’d be asking, ‘Why would the defendant, a man with wealth and means, decide to put his entire life in the toilet? Why would he kill the beautiful woman who was his wife, and the wonderful little girl who was his daughter?’

  “Did Mr. Herman abuse his little girl, and did his wife catch him at it and try to protect their daughter?”

  Kinsela shot to his feet. “Your Honor, this is argument.”

  “Overruled.”

  Yuki didn’t hesitate.

  She stepped on the gas.

  She said to the jury, “Did Mr. Herman physically abuse his little girl? Did Mr. Herman kill his wife when she tried to protect their daughter? What was his motive for murdering his loved ones?

  “That question is going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  Chapter 4

  WHEN SHE STOOD behind the lectern, Yuki felt like a little kid peering up over the edge of a table. So she stayed close to the jury box and spoke loudly enough for everyone in t
he courtroom to hear.

  “We can’t know what was in the defendant’s mind when he took the lives of his wife and daughter, and the victims can’t tell us,” she said.

  “We don’t have to know or prove motive, but we do have a witness, Ms. Lynnette Lagrande, who will testify that the defendant wanted to ditch his family. She will testify that she was in love with Keith Herman, that Mr. Herman said that he loved her and wanted to marry her. And so Ms. Lynnette Lagrande, a model citizen, patiently waited for Mr. Herman to make good on that promise for the last three years.”

  There had been no coughing in the gallery, no shuffling in the jury box, and even when the defense team attempted to distract the jurors and the audience, Yuki had kept all the attention on herself.

  But when she said that Lynnette Lagrande would give evidence proving that the defendant wanted to leave his family, John Kinsela snorted—what passed for laughter in his corner of the underworld. Yuki’s cheeks burned, but she didn’t even flick her eyes in opposing counsel’s direction. She had to bring her opening home.

  She moved her glossy black hair away from her face, hooked it around her ears, and said to the jury, “The defense will tell you that there is no evidence connecting the death of Jennifer Herman to Keith Herman. They will say that Keith Herman’s fingerprints and DNA were not on the garbage bags—that in fact, Mr. Herman never saw his wife or daughter the day our witness saw him leave his house and put his daughter into his car.

  “The defense will impugn the character and the veracity of Mr. Herman’s lover.

  “They will tell you that the defendant was misidentified by his neighbor and will maintain that since the body of Lily Herman has never been recovered, there is no evidence that she is even dead.

  “So I ask you and I ask them,” Yuki said, pivoting so that she was staring the defendant and his counsel down. “Where is Lily Herman? Where is that little girl?