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

  “The defense will tell you that the people’s case is all based on circumstantial evidence. We have nothing to hide. We cannot put a gun in Mr. Herman’s hand. But circumstantial evidence is real evidence.

  “If you go to bed one night and in the morning you see snow in your front yard and there are footprints in that snow, that is circumstantial evidence that snow fell during the night and that someone walked across your yard. You don’t have to actually see the snow falling to conclude that there was snowfall.

  “So why are we all here today, ladies and gentlemen?

  “We submit to you that Keith Herman did brutally kill Jennifer and Lily Herman so that he could, for once and for all, be free to pursue his life as a wealthy widower and come to the party with no baggage and no financial overhead.

  “We cannot let him get away with it. At the conclusion of this trial, you will have evidentiary proof that the defendant did callously commit two premeditated murders.”

  The words were just out of Yuki’s mouth when John Kinsela laughed noisily again and once more drew the eyes of the jury to himself.

  Yuki sharply objected.

  Judge Nussbaum sustained her objection and Kinsela apologized for the interruption. But he had stolen her moment, broken the mood. And he had the jury’s rapt attention as he stood to make his opening statement.

  Chapter 5

  JOHN KINSELA BUTTONED his jacket and ran his hand across the lower half of his face. He achieved a look of contrition, as though he was sorry for the interruption.

  It was all theatrics.

  Yuki hoped the jury could read him as the drama whore he was.

  “Folks, again, I’m sorry to have made light of the state’s opening statement. It was rude, but unintentional. The prosecutor is doing her job, a very difficult one, I assure you, because there is no evidence linking my client to any crime.”

  Kinsela put his hands into his pockets, sauntered out into the well, and continued his conversation with the jury.

  “As the prosecutor said, there is no blood, no DNA, no gun in Mr. Herman’s hand. There is no direct evidence against Mr. Herman, because my client didn’t kill anyone, and the circumstantial evidence, such as it is, does not tie him to the death of his wife.

  “Mr. Herman is one of the victims here. He loved his family and is devastated by their loss. And yet, as Ms. Castellano told you, he was having an affair with Ms. Lagrande.

  “For a married man to have an affair may be bad behavior, but it’s not a crime. If it were a crime, about sixty-five percent of married men in the United States would be in the slammer.”

  There was a riffle of laughter in the courtroom, which Judge Nussbaum banged into silence with his gavel. He admonished the audience, and told them that he could have individuals removed or the entire courtroom emptied.

  “You are here at my discretion,” Nussbaum warned. “Go on, Mr. Kinsela.”

  And Kinsela did.

  “Ms. Lagrande has a little cottage in the woods a few hours up the coast. She and Mr. Herman drove up there in her car on the afternoon of February twenty-eighth. My client was spending the night with Ms. Lagrande when the crimes presumably took place. They didn’t see anyone and no one saw them. That is often the nature of a clandestine affair.

  “Now, Ms. Lagrande is going to tell you that she was not with Mr. Herman the day that Jennifer Herman’s body was found, the day Lily Herman tragically disappeared. She’ll say Mr. Herman is making that up to give himself an alibi.

  “Why is she going to betray Mr. Herman? Because they fought that weekend and Mr. Herman ended the affair.

  “Ms. Lagrande is a woman scorned, and she’s not just my client’s alibi, she is the prosecution’s entire case.

  “The neighbor misidentified Mr. Herman and a car that is the same model as the one Mr. Herman owns. Lily Herman did have bruises, but she had them because she had a temper tantrum. Her father wouldn’t buy her a dress she wanted and she flailed and kicked at Mr. Herman and he tried to restrain her. There was no beating, no call to the police, nothing like that.

  “If he could, he would buy her a million dresses now.

  “Mr. Herman did not report that his wife and daughter were missing on March first because he didn’t know it. He was occupied with Ms. Lagrande at the time of this tragedy, which has unquestionably destroyed his life.

  “That’s it, folks. That is our case. Mr. Herman didn’t kill anyone. This trial is about whether or not you believe Ms. Lagrande beyond a reasonable doubt.”

  John Kinsela thanked the jury and sat down. For a second, Yuki couldn’t quite believe that Kinsela had singled out her star witness, shot a cannonball at her, then took a bow.

  Yuki had hoped he would do exactly that. It was now in Kinsela’s best interest to strip Lynnette Lagrande’s testimony bare, break her, and throw her bones under the bus. He could only do that if she testified.

  Her witness would appear.

  Lynnette Lagrande, a woman with an exotic dancer’s name, was in fact a grade-school teacher, twenty years younger than the defendant, and possessed of a spotless reputation. She’d never gotten so much as a parking ticket in her life.

  Gaines showed Yuki the cartoon he had doodled on his iPad. It was a Yuki character dunking a basketball into a net. Yuki never liked to say that a case was a slam dunk.

  But the battle was shaping up and Yuki liked the look of the field.

  “We’re good,” she whispered to Gaines as the judge called the court into recess. “We’re looking good.”

  Chapter 6

  JULIE HAD BEEN wailing since we left the hospital, hardly stopping before revving her engine and howling again. It had been going on for weeks and I was mystified and a little alarmed.

  What was wrong? What was she trying to tell us?

  It was just about 8:00 p.m. when Joe settled me into the big rocker in Julie’s room. I reached up and Joe handed me our screaming little bundle of distress. I tried to nurse her again, but as usual, she refused me.

  What was I doing wrong?

  I said, “Please don’t cry, baby girl. Everything is okay. Actually, everything is perfect.”

  She took in another breath and cried even harder. As much as her first cry felt like a hug around my heart, now her cries felt like my heart was being squeezed in a vise.

  “What is it, darling? Are you hot, cold, wet?”

  She was dry.

  “Joe, she’s hungry. Okay, she might nurse a little bit if we wait her out. But listen, she clearly prefers the bottle.”

  “Be back in a sec,” Joe said.

  I rocked my daughter. Even with her fists waving and her little face as pink as a rose, she was a spectacular, fully formed human being made from love. I was in awe of her perfection. And more than anything, I wanted her to feel good.

  I jounced her in my arms and sang a nonsense song that I made up as I went along. “Ju-lee, you’re breaking my heart. What can I do for my bay-bee?”

  I fished an old Irish lullaby from the vault of long-buried memories, and then hauled out a couple of nursery rhymes. Mice ran up a clock, cradles rocked, but nothing worked.

  Joe appeared, like a genie, with a warm bottle of formula. I tested a drop on the back of my hand, and then I tried the bottle on Julie. And—thank you, God—she began to suck.

  I was elated. Euphoric. Ecstatic. Julie was eating. Joe and I watched our daughter pulling at the bottle with intense attention, and when a few ounces had gone down and she turned away from the bottle, Joe said, “I’ll take her, Blondie. You go to bed.”

  He put Julie over his shoulder and burped her like a pro.

  “I love you, Julie Anne Molinari,” Joe said to our baby.

  “You’ve told her twenty eleven times today. She knows it,” I said, standing up and kissing my husband.

  “She can’t hear it too much. This is the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “I believe that. But I think something is bothering you,” I said.

 
; “God. I can’t sneak anything past you, Blondie. Even when you’re dog-tired. Even when you shouldn’t notice anything but Julie’s fingers and toes.”

  I felt the first frisson of alarm.

  “Is something going on? Tell me now.”

  Joe sighed. “How can I put this delicately? I got fired.”

  “What? Come on. Don’t kid with me about this.”

  I was searching his eyes, looking for the joke.

  “Really,” Joe said. He looked embarrassed. Honest to God. I’d never seen this look on his face before.

  “I got axed. It’s being chalked up to cutbacks due to the financial deficit. Naturally, freelancers are the first to go. Don’t worry, Linds. I know things about homeland security very few people know. As soon as the word gets out, I’ll get calls.”

  My mouth was dry. My heart was thudding almost audibly.

  I make a cop’s salary. It isn’t bad money, but it wouldn’t support our airy three-bedroom apartment on Lake Street, which Joe had rented when he was working for the government as deputy director of Homeland Security.

  When he was making a ton.

  “How much money do we have?”

  “We’ll be fine for quite a few months. I’ll find a job before we run dry. We’ll be fine, Lindsay,” he said. “I’m not going to disappoint my two fabulous girls.”

  “We love you, Joe,” I said.

  Our little daughter started to cry.

  Chapter 7

  YUKI WAS NAKED, lying flat on her back on the bedroom carpet, panting, her pulse slowing after her heart’s wild gallop over the hills during the morning’s romp.

  She turned her head and looked at her gorgeous and in every way fantastic lover.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I tried, but I was distracted. Thinking about other things.”

  Brady laughed.

  He rolled toward her, put his arm across her body, and pulled her to him. “You’re too much fun. I’m crazy about you, you know that?”

  She knew. She was crazy about him. Was this just the best sex she’d ever had? Or were she and Brady traveling in lockstep toward the real deal?

  She touched Brady’s mouth and he kissed her palm. She swept his damp blond hair back from his eyes and kissed the side of his mouth.

  He took her face in one hand and kissed her lips and she felt him start to get hard again. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her gently, saying, “I hate to do it, but I’ve got to leave.”

  Brady was Lieutenant Jackson Brady, head of the homicide squad, SFPD, Southern District. Yuki reached down and ran her fingers up his leg, stopping at the round pink scar on his thigh, where he took a bullet that nicked his femoral artery. It was sheer good fortune that he had gotten to the hospital in time.

  She said, “Me, too. I’ve got court in an hour.”

  Yuki got up, pulled her robe from the bedpost, and started for the kitchen of the condo her mother had left her. In a way, Keiko Castellano still lived here. She often talked to Yuki, although not out loud. It was as though Keiko’s voice, her opinions, her experiences were so embedded in Yuki’s mind that Keiko was just always there.

  Now her mother said, “You good girl, Yuki-eh, but foolish. Brady still married. Look what you doing.”

  “You shouldn’t be watching,” Yuki muttered as she picked pillows off the floor and threw them onto the bed.

  “I can’t help myself,” Brady said. He zipped up his fly and reached for his shirt. “You’re so very cute.”

  Yuki grinned, slapped his butt. He yelled, “Hey,” grabbed her, lifted her into his arms, kissed her.

  Then Brady said, “I wanted to tell you about this case.”

  “Start talking.”

  As Yuki made coffee, she mentally rebutted her mother’s commentary, telling Keiko that, as she well knew, Brady was separated, and his soon-to-be-ex-wife lived in Miami, as far across the country as possible.

  Brady was saying, “You’ve heard of Jeff Kennedy?”

  Yuki poured coffee into Brady’s mug.

  “Basketball player.”

  “He’s a 49er, sweetie. His girlfriend turned up dead in her car, couple miles from his house.”

  “Homicide? And you think this Niner is the doer?”

  Brady laughed, shook his head. “You’re a tough talker.”

  Yuki put her hands on her hips and grinned at him. “It’s been said more than once that I’m one tough cookie.”

  Brady took a sip of coffee, put the mug in the sink, put his arms around Yuki, and said, “Kill ‘em in court today, Cookie. I’ll call you later.”

  He kissed the center part in her hair and went for the door.

  Chapter 8

  AT NINE THAT morning, Dr. Perry Judd walked through the swinging half door at the entrance to the homicide squad room and demanded the attention of a detective, saying, “I want to report a murder.”

  Rich Conklin had walked Dr. Judd back to Interview 2 and had been trying to get a straight story ever since.

  Dr. Judd said that he taught English literature at UC Berkeley. He was fifty, had brown hair, a goatee, and small eyeglasses with round frames the size of quarters. His jacket and button-down shirt were blue, and he wore a pair of khakis with a pleated front.

  He had seemed to be a solid citizen.

  “I was going into Whole Foods on Fourth Street last night,” Judd said. “There was a woman right in front of me and it just happened that I followed her into the store. She said hello to one of the cashiers. I got the feeling she was a regular there.”

  The professor then described the woman in extraordinary detail.

  “She was blond, about two inches of black roots showing. She was about forty, a ‘squishy’ size ten, wore a white blouse with a ruffled neckline and a necklace. Green beads, glass ones.”

  Judd had gone on to say that the woman had been wearing sandals, her toenails painted baby blue.

  Then the professor had gone completely off-road. He began quoting from obscure books, and although Conklin seriously tried to get the connection, the guy sounded psycho.

  Conklin liked to let a witness lay out the whole story in one piece. That way he could shape and sharpen his followup questions and determine from the answers if the witness was telling the truth or talking crap.

  Dr. Judd had stopped talking altogether and was staring into the one-way glass behind Conklin’s back.

  Conklin said, “Dr. Judd. Please go on.”

  The professor snapped back to the present, then said to Conklin, “I was thinking about The Stranger. You know, by Camus. You’ve read it, of course.”

  Conklin had read The Stranger when he was in high school; as he remembered it, the story was about a murderer who had separated from his feelings. Not like a psychopath who didn’t feel—this killer had feelings, but was detached from them. He watched himself commit senseless murders.

  What could this 1940s novel by Camus possibly have to do with a woman shopper at Whole Foods?

  “Dr. Judd,” Conklin said. “You said there was a murder?”

  “This woman I described went to the frozen-foods section, and I was going there myself to get a spinach soufflé. She reached into the case and pulled out a pint of chocolate chip ice cream. She was turning back when three muffled shots rang out. She was hit in the back first, then she whipped around and was hit twice more in the chest. She was dead by the time she hit the floor.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “No. I didn’t think to do it until now.”

  “Did you see the shooter?”

  “I did not.”

  “Were there any other witnesses?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Judd said.

  Conklin was a patient guy, but there were eleven open case files on his desk, all of them pressing, and Perry Judd was a waste of time.

  Conklin said to the professor, “You said you teach writing. You’re also a creative writer, right?”

  “I write poetry.”

 
“Okay. So I have to ask you—no offense—but did this murder actually happen? Because we have had no reports of any kind of homicide at any supermarket last night.”

  “I thought I had said I dreamed it last night. It hasn’t happened yet,” said Perry Judd. “But it will happen. Have you read Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre?”

  Conklin tossed his pen onto the table, pushed back his chair, and stood up.

  He said, “Thanks for your time, Professor. We’ll call you if we need to talk with you again.”

  There was a knock on the mirrored glass.

  Conklin got up, stepped outside the room.

  MacKenzie Morales, the squad’s extremely attractive summer intern, looked up at him and said, “Rich, could I talk to Dr. Judd for a minute? I think I can get to the bottom of this.”

  Chapter 9

  MACKENZIE MORALES, A.K.A. Mackie, was twenty-six, the single mother of a three-year-old boy. More to the point, she was smart, going for her PhD in psychology. She was working in the homicide squad for no pay, but she was getting credit and doing research for her dissertation on criminal psychopathy.

  Conklin was finished with Perry Judd, but what the hell. If Morales wanted a shot at making sense out of crap, okay—even though it was still a waste of time.

  Morales took a chair next to Dr. Judd and introduced herself as Homicide’s special assistant without saying she was answering phones and making Xerox copies. She shook Judd’s hand.

  “Do I know you?” Professor Judd asked Morales.

  “Very doubtful. I was going through the hallway,” she said, pointing to the glass, “and I heard you mention Sartre’s novel—”

  “Nausea.”

  “Oh, my God, I love that book,” Morales said. “I’m a psych major, and the protagonist in Nausea is the very embodiment of depersonalization disorder, not that they called it that back then.”

  “Depersonalization. Exactly,” said the professor. He seemed delighted. “Separation from self. That’s what this dream was like. If it was a dream. The imagery was so vivid, it was as if I were having an out-of-body experience. I watched a woman die. I had no feelings about it. No horror. No fear. And yet I know that this dream is prescient, that the murder will happen.”