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“Why not follow through and see Alec tomorrow night? Before you decide about Garrick’s offer.” Polly sidestepped a soccer ball that bounced in her path. A group of kids were kicking it around before school, some poorly. “Didn’t you say you wanted to try out the horse before you ride it this time? What’s the harm?”
Maren and Polly were midway through an early morning walk on the newly renovated track that circled the Sacramento High football field. It was a beautiful setting, tall eucalyptus trees framing the stadium under cover of a light morning fog.
“Maybe. But I’ve given it more thought. Dating Alec Joben would be complicated,” Maren replied.
Despite their relatively slow pace, Polly was in full workout regalia. Form-fitting Lycra leggings and jacket, matching wristbands. She smelled like peaches from a new body wash marketed as age defying, which, according to Polly, all the celebrities were “going on about.” Maren had never understood why a woman would want to smell like a fruit. She was in sweats and the T-shirt she’d slept in, nursing a cooling herbal tea.
“And marrying Garrick Chauncey wouldn’t be?”
“Garrick’s not asking for marriage yet, it’s—”
Another soccer ball—Maren kicked this one back, pleased with herself when it landed in the vicinity of the kids.
“I know. Friendship, then living together, then marriage,” Polly said, repeating what Maren had told her. “But it all involves Garrick, a fatal flaw.”
Maren was conscious that she worked Alec’s name into conversations, finding excuses to talk about him. So she really couldn’t blame Polly for thinking he was Maren’s path out of spinsterhood—a distant future Maren didn’t ponder one way or the other, but that seemed to weigh heavily on
Polly on her behalf.
“Mom, I took four dollars from your purse for lunch.” Maren looked up to see Jenna, Polly’s daughter, calling through the mesh fencing that separated the path to school from the track.
Jenns was weighed down by a huge backpack, a gym bag, and her saxophone case, straps overlapping. She looked like a sherpa about to scale Mount Everest. Danny Paxton, Jenna’s best friend since preschool, caught up with Jenna. Danny was carrying a similar load, although he got off easier with a clarinet rather than a sax.
“No problem,” Polly called back. “See you tonight.”
“Isn’t it early for them?” Maren asked.
“Jazz band practice before school. Why not give this new bloke Alex a chance?”
Knowing there was no avoiding Polly’s desire to jump-start her stalled love life, Maren replied, “Alec. It’s Alec, not Alex. Alec Joben. He’s a state senator from Yolo County, just south of here. There was a special election after the former Yolo senator died.”
“Alec, then. Alec from Yolo. What would be the harm? Don’t you have three months or some such nonsense while you and Garrick are just friends?”
Polly had increased the pace. Maren tried to keep up without spilling her tea.
“Just for fun, tell me Mr. Joben’s best qualities.”
Maren had given considerable thought to Alec’s attributes. “Intelligent, compassionate.” She paused. “Honest and not manipulative. Which in the capitol is really saying something,” she added.
“OK, so he’s a Boy Scout,” Polly said. “How about his vitals? Obviously the man can look himself in the mirror in the morning without flinching, but do you find him attractive?”
Maren laughed. “Yes. He’s tall, with that build, the dark hair . . .”
“So we have an upstart challenger, Alec Joben, a smashing personality, gorgeous, who can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Versus the defeated champ, Garrick Chauncey, who in the last bout for your heart was disqualified for dirty, low-down cheating.”
Polly was smiling as she pumped her arms with each step, but Maren knew her friend was serious.
“It’s not that simple,” Maren said. “For one thing, Alec Joben is a senator, an elected official, and I’m a lobbyist. There are ethics rules. A legislator must declare any gift over ten dollars in value a lobbyist gives them, which has been interpreted to include non-monetary gifts.”
“You mean there’s a form he would need to fill out if you had sex?”
Now they were both smiling.
“It depends.”
“On whether shagging you is worth more than ten dollars?”
“No, on whether my ‘shagging’ him, as you put it, is intended to influence his voting record.”
“What if he stays clear of any bills you’re working on?”
“He could. But if a bill of mine is good for his district and he stays off it or votes no, he won’t be serving his voters. And if he votes yes on it, as he would have done if it weren’t my bill, it will look as though I bought his vote with my . . . my . . . behavior.”
Polly conceded the point. But she wasn’t giving up. “Still, there must be couples who meet that way.”
“I suppose,” Maren said. Although silently she was backtracking from both Alec and Garrick, wondering why she ever thought agreeing to see two men would be simpler than the trouble she usually got into with one.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, MAREN was dressed for work and was halfway to the capitol on foot. She was intent on the research she was doing via the web on her phone when she narrowly missed colliding with a stocky woman in a black suit and too much gold jewelry. Maren thought she recognized Liza Booth-Henry’s handiwork in the small burnished metal figures hanging from the woman’s bracelet.
In forward motion again, she returned to scrolling down the phone’s screen.
Maren remained convinced that a person or persons unknown had killed Tamara Barnes, and that it was politically or financially motivated rather than love gone wrong. Even if it was a passion play, Maren would bet her beloved car that it had to do with her ex, Governor Ray Fernandez, not Sean.
She reflected on the image of Sean in Rorie Rickman’s office kneeling before Tamara, listening attentively, not an ounce of jealous stalker in his posture. She contrasted that with Ray’s wandering eyes (and hands). Tamara’s beauty and youth would have been a daily temptation as she worked alongside him in the governor’s suite. Plus, Maren had experience with Sean when he was under stress and disappointed—employment in California’s capital was not for the faint of heart. True, she hadn’t picked up on Sean’s depression. In fact, she was coming to realize she knew little that was concrete about his personal life. But unless he had multiple personalities, she didn’t see how Sean’s downtime behavior could be radically different from his calm and happy work repertoire—at least not to the point where it could include the capacity for murder.
So it didn’t fit with what she knew—and more than that, it infuriated her—that the DA and the police were locked in on Sean as their man. She felt she needed a hook, something to point them in a new direction. Tamara’s mention of Ray Fernandez the day of her murder, that they had together done something awful, hadn’t done it.
Maren returned again to consider the death of researcher Marjorie Hopkins. It still bothered Maren that like Tamara Barnes, Hopkins was a young professional woman, stabbed, with no sign of sexual assault, also involved in legislative work, albeit a step removed through her research.
Why couldn’t there be a link, and it be one killer for both women?
Clay Zimbardo in marketing at Ecobabe had put the interns to work on his big-box-store marketing project. The Ecobabe Board considered that a priority, so transcribing Simone Booth’s tapes was on hold. But Maren figured she could do some research on the Hopkins homicide on her own.
There are so many murders in our charming town . . .
That was what Polly had said the night they hung out with Noel in Maren’s backyard.
Maren decided to start by checking whether Polly was right, whether the sheer numbers worked against Maren’s theory of a serial killer who, admittedly, worked slowly or simply had modest goals—two murders a year. Plugging “Sacramento homicides” into her browser’s search function, Maren discovered there had been thirty murders in the city in the past year. Horrible for each and every victim and their loved ones, but with a population of five hundred thousand, that didn’t strike her as so many. One article reported the number was down from over a hundred killings five years prior. Credit was given to Chief Sam Watson, who shared it with his officers.
In an attempt to determine how many of those thirty deaths were from knife attacks—to find out if Tamara’s and Marjorie’s deaths were part of a smaller subset in that respect, making a connection more likely—Maren quickly reviewed reports on everything from armed robberies to gang-related drive-by shootings. She found only lurid case-by-case descriptions, no statistics that might help. So she focused in on “Marjorie Hopkins,” then “Broads and Bards,” where the Hopkins murder had occurred.
Broadening, narrowing and seeking new angles felt familiar—she was adept at on-the-fly research. When a question was raised by a legislator, a prompt answer could translate into the vote needed for success.
In the end, it was a brief local news piece on a cable station targeting suburbs north of Sacramento that had what Maren was looking for.
Cherrie Glazier, a former waitress at Broads and Bards, was featured in a human interest piece. The camera zoomed in on Cherie and her husband, Mark, as they stood in front of a modest storefront where workers were hanging an awning and putting finishing touches on the paint.
“What made you choose Roseville to locate your new restaurant?” asked a petite brunette reporter, her demeanor serious, leaning in with the microphone so as not to miss a word.
Cherrie turned to her husband, then back to the camera. The Glaziers were both in their forties, with short curly brown hair and broad smiles. In fact, she and Mark Glazier looked like they could have been twins, except that Cherrie’s curves were in decidedly womanly places and his might have resulted from too much of her cooking.
“I couldn’t consider downtown Sacramento anymore,” Cherrie said. “I mean, not after that awful murder right where I worked.”
The cameraman cut to the reporter. Maren thought her eyes seemed artificially wide, emphasizing—in case the audience might have missed it—that they were now talking about murder.
Mark Glazier added, “A young woman was killed right in the parking lot of Cherrie’s old place. Of course, it scared Cherie. Well, me too. We didn’t want to overreact, so we read everything we could about it. And we found out the police never caught the scum who did it. Stabbed that poor girl right through the heart, he did. Tragic.”
Another shot of the reporter, nodding sympathetically, encouraging Mark Glazier to continue—as if to say to the viewers, Pay attention, this is good stuff, not your run-of-the-mill human interest piece.
“After that, the big bar and restaurant in downtown just didn’t feel safe to us anymore,” Mark said, putting his arm around his wife and puffing out his chest. “I’m sure many patrons feel the same way. I knew with Cherrie’s cooking and my management skills, we could make a successful local spot on our own, something away from crime and the big city. So here we are.”
* * *
DEPUTY PUBLIC DEFENDER Lana Decateau’s daily grind consisted largely of battling obstacles and discrimination so that her guilty, impoverished clients might receive no harsher punishment than guilty, rich defendants who could afford private lawyers. Still, there were times when her task was vindicating those who had been falsely or incorrectly charged. And she believed that Maren Kane’s discovery of similarities in the Hopkins and Barnes murders—both women killed by a single stab wound to the heart—might be enough to shift Sean to the “presumed innocent” category from his current berth in the “he did it, the trial is a formality” class.
“Sifuentes here.”
“Carlos, it’s Lana. I’m calling about the Verston case.”
“Lana, how are you? Verston, yes, Sean. How is he doing?”
“Not well. The food is bad.”
Their inside joke—Carlos always asked how Lana’s clients were faring in jail, and Lana referenced only the prison food, even though both knew the nightmares of incarceration were so much worse.
“I should bring him my mama’s special pupusas.”
“I’m sure he would like that,” Lana said. “But Mr. Verston doesn’t belong in prison. I’ve filed to force his release based on the wholly circumstantial nature of the evidence—no weapon, no witnesses, no confession. His explanation of why he was at the scene is strongly consistent with the facts. Still, you know Judge Campbell. It’s going to be up to DA Sharpton to acknowledge he has the wrong man and drop the charges.”
Carlos lowered his voice. “I’m not sure I agree with your characterization of the evidence—the accused’s fingerprints on the shoes of the deceased, and a video placing him at the scene matters. Regardless, DA Sharpton will never say he has the wrong man. Only, perhaps, that he arrested the right man at the time and new information came to light so that man must now go free.”
“Yes,” Lana said, accepting the spin. “But my message, did you get it? Tamara Barnes died from a single fatal strike with a knife through the heart. So did Marjorie Hopkins. One murder might occur like that by luck—bad luck for the victim. But two separate incidents, surgically placed strikes killing young women in Sacramento? That’s a modus operandi signaling one person responsible for the two crimes. And Sean was in DC that week with Senator Rorie Rickman, so he couldn’t have killed Hopkins.”
“You could be right,” Carlos said, “but it’s speculation only, Lana, you know that. The Hopkins case is closed. Dead, está muerto. It’s in the cold case file, an unsolved murder chalked up to a robbery gone bad. If DA Sharpton brings it back up, he reminds the voters that he could not solve that crime then. And if Mr. Verston is released, it shows the public that DA Sharpton also has not solved this crime now. He is not going to do that unless you have something much more than an idea. Something conclusive.” Lana could hear another man’s voice in the background. Carlos paused, covered the phone, then returned. “I have to go. Please let me know when you are ready to go dancing. There’s a new club by the river, the Water Wall. You need to get your gorgeous self out of that office.”
When he hung up, Sifuentes lifted his jacket from the back of his desk chair and slipped it on, heading to the file room to see if Winston Chen, the clerk responsible for archived files, was around.
The Hopkins murder was less than a year old so the summary and index, if not sitting in backlogs due to state budget cuts in data entry, should be accessible to Carlos online. But given Lana Decateau’s concerns, the young detective wanted to see the original handwritten notes—everything that was there—to determine for himself if anything had been overlooked. He knew Decateau to be a solid attorney, one with ethics. When she was brokering a deal with the DA’s office her client’s guilt might not matter, but when sending a police officer out to substantiate a theory of innocence—for that he knew she must believe.
“Officer Sifuentes, what brings you down here?”
The old man, gray stubble as present on his chin and jowls as on the crown of his head, sat on a stool behind the counter in the basement office that bordered the evidence bays and file rooms. He removed the pipe he kept, unlit, clenched in his teeth, and tucked it into a drawer. There was a strict no-smoking policy in government buildings, but Winston didn’t smoke anymore. He just liked to remember it.
Carlos pushed a paper across the counter, on which he had jotted down the essentials on the Marjorie Hopkins case. Winston reviewed it without a word before disappearing through a back door. Carlos regretted not having brought his computer tablet with him as he waited for close to ten minutes. But at least Winston eventually emerged with the file—it hadn’t been lost or checked out by someone else.
Back in his office, Carlos seated himself and took a sip of now-cold coffee—there wasn’t much that tasted worse in this life that he could think of. Opening the folder and sorting its contents, he was careful to note the order so he could put things back properly.
There were notes from the scene, including a statement that the victim’s purse was missing. A few interviews with employees at the restaurant Broads and Bards. Nobody had seen anything. Although there was mention of a bartender who was on duty that night, but had gone home early the next day for a family funeral, taking a red-eye to Milwaukee. It didn’t look like anyone had ever gotten around to talking with him. Finally, the coroner’s report, documenting a single knife strike to the heart as the cause of death. No signs of a struggle, no other wounds or bruises. The investigating officer, Tommy Noonan, concluded Marjorie Hopkins was a woman in the wrong place at the wrong time. Victim of a random parking lot robbery that for some reason turned into murder—perhaps someone was coming or the perp was strung out on drugs so that the line between sparing a life and causing a death was inconsequential to him.
No arrest was ever made.
Sifuentes compared the Hopkins information with what he had in the Tamara Barnes case.
As Lana had indicated, both women were killed by one upward knife thrust through the heart. Lana had suggested that the single strike, where accuracy mattered, meant a hit by someone trained in lethal combat—an ex-marine or navy SEAL, special ops of some kind. But he thought that was most likely just Lana’s way of looking at it. The way she should look at it as a defense attorney. That didn’t mean it was so—why couldn’t the similarity be by chance? An attack in close quarters on a helpless woman where you didn’t want her to scream. Why not aim for the heart? It could make sense to two different murderers—it would make sense to a smart kid like Verston.
Sifuentes kept reading.
Neither weapon was recovered. Based on entry wounds, the weapon used in the Hopkins attack was thick and serrated. Likely a kitchen knife of sorts. In contrast, the blade that killed Tamara Barnes was small, flat, and thin. It was surprising, he thought, that the smaller one did the job.
Sifuentes read both files twice before deciding there wasn’t enough to reopen the Hopkins case, especially not with the way the DA was feeling these days. Three months out from his election, everything had to be clean, crisp, and packaged for the press.