3rd Degree (5 page)

“Can't, Momma,” the child replied.

“Can't? Who's got time for this, young lady? Just drop your stockings and pee.”

“I can't, Momma. You gotta come see.”

Lucille sighed. Whoever said time is on your side sure never had twins. She took a quick glance in the mirror, sigh-ing again, not ever a single second for herself. She helped Marcus to the floor, then went to open Cherisse's stall.

She said impatiently, “So what you crying about, child?”

The little girl was staring at the toilet.

“My God.” Lucille took a breath.

On the toilet seat, wrapped in a blanket in a bassinet, was an infant.

ONCE IN A WHILE there are moments in this job when everything works out for you. Finding the Lightower baby at McDonald's was one of those times. The entire Hall seemed to breathe a deep, grateful sigh of relief.

I got Cindy on the line and asked a favor. She said she'd be delighted to put a little pressure on X/L.

I hung up with Cindy, and Charlie Clapper was knocking on my door. “Nice bust, Boxer.”

“That's a little sexist, even from you,” I said with a smile.

Clapper laughed. His Crime Scene team had spent the better part of the past day and a half picking through the bomb site. Charlie looked exhausted.

“FYEF, darlin',” he said, motioning with his head for me to follow. “For your eyes first. They're a whole lot cuter than Tracchio's.”

“Knew I earned this gold shield for something.”

Charlie took me to his office down the hall. Niko was in there, from the Bomb Squad, leaning back in Charlie's old hardwood recliner and picking something out of a Chinese food container.

“Okay, we've pieced together an idea of the explosive device.” Charlie threw out a chair for me. On a poster board, someone had drawn a floor plan of the Lightowers' town house. “Traces of C-4 were all over the place. Half a pound's enough to blow a jet from the sky, so from the size of the blast, I figure this was about five times that. Whoever did it put it inside something like this” - he took out a black Nike sport bag - “and placed it in one of the rooms.”

“How do we know that?” I asked.

“Easy.” Clapper grinned. He pulled out a fragment of black nylon with a Nike swoosh on it. “We found this plas-tered against the wall.”

“Any luck you could scrape a few prints off the bag?” I asked hopefully.

“Sorry, honey,” Clapper snickered, “this is the bag.”

“It was triggered by a fairly sophisticated device,” Niko explained. “Remote detonation. Blasting cap was hooked up to a cell phone.”

“There's a market for C-4, Lindsay. We could look into any construction-site thefts, missing military inventory,” said Charlie Clapper.

“How are you with babies, Charlie?”

“If they're eighteen or over,” the CSU man said, grinning. “Why? You finally getting the itch?”

If Clapper were a foot taller, fifty pounds lighter, and hadn't been married for thirty years, I just might take him up on his little flirtations one day. “Sorry, this one's a little younger.”

“You mean the Lightower baby?” Charlie scrunched his face.

I nodded. “I want her dusted, Charlie. The kid, blanket, bassinet, anything you can find.”

“Been thirty years since I changed a diaper.” Clapper let out a breath, looking a little squeamish. “Hey, I almost for-got....” He pulled out a coded evidence bag from under-neath a pile of papers on the desk. “There was a room down the hall from the nursery. Someone spent the night there. Someone who isn't accounted for now.”

The au pair, I was thinking.

“Don't get excited,” Charlie said, shrugging. “Everything was cinders. But we picked up this by the bed.”

He tossed me the plastic bag. Inside was a small, twisted canister about three inches long.

I held it up. Didn't have the slightest idea what it was.

“Everything must've melted.” Clapper shrugged. He fumbled behind him through his jacket draped over the chair. He came out with something that looked similar.

“Proventil, Lindsay.” He took the cap off his own device and fit it neatly onto the one from the evidence bag. He pressed the mouthpiece twice. Two puffs shot out into the air.

“Whoever slept in that bed had asthma.”

JILL BERNHARDT SAT in her darkened office long after everyone else had left.

A law brief was open in front of her, and she suddenly realized she'd been staring at the same page for ten minutes now. On nights when Steve wasn't traveling or working late, she had taken to staying at the office. Doing anything she could to avoid him. Even when she wasn't preparing for trial.

Jill Meyer Bernhardt. Super lawyer. Everybody's alpha dog.

She was afraid to go home.

Slowly, she massaged the bruise on her backbone. The newest bruise. How could this be happening? She was used to representing women who felt like this, not hiding a secret in the dark herself.

A tear wound its way down her cheek. It was when I lost the baby, she thought. That's when it all started.

But, no, the trouble with Steve had started long before that, she knew. When she was just out of law school and he was finishing up his MBA. It started with what she would wear. Outfits that weren't his taste or showed her scars. Dinner parties where his opinion - politics, her job, any-thing - seemed so much stronger, more important than hers. Pretending it was his earnings that had paid for the down payment on the town house, the Beemer.

You can't do it, Jill. She had heard that since she met him. Jesus Christ, she dabbed her eyes with the heel of her hands. She was the top assistant D.A. in the city. What else did she have to prove?

The phone rang. The sudden ring made her jump. Was it Steve? Just the sound of his voice made her sick. That creepy, oh-so-concerned, oh-so-solicitous tone: “Hey, honey, watchya doin'? Come on home. Let's take a run.”

To her relief, the caller ID said it was an assistant D.A. from Sacramento. He was calling back on getting a witness cleared out of a state pen. She let it go to her voice mail.

She closed the heavy brief. This was the last time, she vowed. She would start by telling Lindsay. It hurt her not to be honest with her. Lindsay thought Steve was a prick any-way. She was no fool.

As she was stuffing her briefcase, the phone rang again. This time it had that special ring, cutting right through her.

Don't answer, Jill. She was already halfway out the door. But something made her look at the digital screen. The familiar number lit up. Jill felt her mouth go dry. Slowly, she picked up the receiver. “Bernhardt,” she whispered, closing her eyes.

“Working late again, hon?” Steve's voice cut through her. “If I didn't know better,” he said, sounding almost hurt, “I'd think you were afraid to come home.”

THAT NIGHT, George Bengosian got lucky.

Short and balding, with a large flattened nose, Bengosian had realized early in his residency that he had no flair for urology and found his true calling stringing together failing regional insurers into giant HMOs. He also realized he wasn't the type who could charm a beautiful woman with his profit projections and silly industry jokes - certainly not this sexy analyst at the Bank of America Health Care Conference.

It was as if he were living someone else's dream. Mimi was mesmerized by him, and now they were on the way to his suite. “The penthouse, wait until you see the view,” he teased.

George giddily traced the outline of her bra as he opened the door to his suite at the Clift; he was imagining her perky tits jiggling in front of him, and those mooning eyes staring into his. This was what having your picture in the annual report was all about.

“Give me just a second,” Mimi said, pinching his arm and heading into the powder room.

“Not too long,” George said with a pout.

In clumsy haste, he ripped the wrapping off a bottle of Roederer that had come complimentary with the suite and poured out two glasses. His fifty-four-year-old cock flopped around in his pants like a cod in a catch basket. In the morn-ing he had to be back in the jet, off to a meeting of the Illinois Senate Health Care Committee, which he already knew had been swayed into looking the other way while he dropped the poorest individual accounts and highest risks from his enrollment. One hundred forty thousand families out of the plan, and all of it accretive to the bottom line!

Mimi came back from the powder room, and she looked better than ever. George handed her a glass.

“To you,” he said. “Well, to both of us. To tonight.”

“To Hopewell.” Mimi flashed a smile and clinked glasses.

“Hey, want to try something?” She put her hand on his wrist. “This is guaranteed to make your projections rock-solid firm.” She produced a vial from her purse. “Just stick out your tongue.”

George did as he was told, and she dribbled out two drops.

Bitter. The taste was so sharp, it almost made him jump. “Can't they make these things in cherry flavor?”

“One more.” Her smile was dazzling. “Just to make sure you're ready for me. For us.”

George stuck out his tongue again. His heart was beating out of control.

Mimi dribbled out another drop. Then her smile changed. Colder. She squeezed him by the cheeks, turned the entire vial upside down.

George's mouth filled with the liquid. He tried to spit it out, but she threw his head back and he swallowed. His eyes popped. “What the hell?”

“It's toxic,” Mimi said, tossing the empty vial back into her purse. “Very special poison for a very special guy. The first drop would be enough to kill you in a few hours. You just swallowed enough to waste San Francisco.”

George's champagne glass dropped and shattered on the floor. He tried to spit the ingested liquid back out. This bitch must be insane. She must be screwing with him. But then a violent pain shook his abdomen.

“This is from all those people you've spent your life fuck-ing, Mr. Bengosian. No one you've ever met, just families who had no choice in life but to count on you. On Hopewell. Felicia Brown? She died of treatable melanoma. Thomas Ortiz? Name ring a bell? It would to your risk-management team. He shot himself trying to pay off his son's brain tumor. We call it `cleaning the coffers.' Isn't that what you say, Mr. B?”

Suddenly his stomach began to wrench. A viscous froth built up in his mouth. He spit it out, all over his shirt, but it was as if sharp, clawing angers were tearing at the lining of his gut. He knew what was taking place. Pulmonary edema. Instant organ failure. Yell for help, he told himself. Get to the door. But his legs gave out, crumbling beneath him.

Mimi was standing there, watching him with a mocking grin. He reached out in her direction. He wanted to hit her, squeeze her throat, crush the life out of her. But he couldn't move.

“Please...” This was no joke.

She knelt over him. “How does it feel to have your coffers cleaned, Mr. Bengosian? Now be a dear and open your mouth one more time. Open wide!”

With all his might George tried to suck air into his lungs, but there was nothing. His jaw fell open. His tongue had swelled to a monstrous size. Mimi held a blue piece of paper in front of his face. At least he thought it was blue - but his eyes were refractive and glassy and weren't registering colors very well. In the blurry outline he saw Hopewell's logo.

She crumpled the paper into a ball and shoved it in his mouth. “Thanks for thinking of Hopewell, but as the form says, coverage is denied!”

MY CELL PHONE was beeping.

It was the middle of the night. I shot up and blinked at the clock. Shit, 4 A.M.

Groggily, I fumbled for the phone, trying to read the num-ber on the screen. It was Paul Chin's. “Hey, Paul, what's going on?” I mumbled.

“Sorry, LT, I'm at the Clift Hotel. I'm thinking you better come on down.”

“You find something?” A four-in-the-morning question? Four-in-the-morning calls meant only one thing.

“Yeah. I think the Lightower bombing just got a bit more complicated.”

Eight minutes later - jeans and a tank thrown on, and a few purposeful brushes through my hair - I was in the Explorer, bounding down Vermont on the way to Seventh, top hat flashing through the quiet night.

Three black-and-whites along with a morgue van were crowded around the hotel's bright new entrance. The Clift was one of the city's great old hotels and had just undergone a fancy renovation. I badged my way past the cops at the front, gawking at the lavish ostrich-hide couch and bulls' horns on the wall, a few stunned hotel employees standing around, wondering what to do. I took the elevator up to the top floor, where Chin was waiting.

“The vic's name is George Bengosian. Health-care bigwig,” Paul Chin explained as he led me into the penthouse suite. “Prepare yourself. I'm not kidding.”

I looked at the body, propped upright against the leg of a conference table in the lavishly appointed room.

The color of Bengosian's skin had turned a hypoxic green-yellow, the consistency of jelly. His eyes were wrenched open like mangled gear sockets. Mucus, or some sort of viscous orange fluid, ran out of his nose and had caked grotesquely on his chin.

“What the hell did he do,” I muttered to the med tech leaning over him, “get into a life-sucking contest with an alien?”

The tech looked totally mystified. “I don't have the slight-est idea.”

“You're sure this is a homicide?” I turned to Chin.

“Front desk got a call, two forty-five A.M.,” he said with a shrug, “from outside the hotel. Said there was some garbage that needed to be picked up in the penthouse.”

“Works for me.” I sniffled.

“That, and this,” Chin said, producing a balled-up piece of paper that he picked up with latex gloves. “Found it in his mouth.”

It looked like some kind of crumpled business form.

A white embossed logo: Hopewell Health Care.

It was a statement of benefits. Some text filled in. As I started to read, my blood ran cold.