My best girls Claire, Cindy, and Jill our crazy club. I can even see myself, the way I used to be, anyway. Nobody ever, ever thought that I looked like an inspector, the only woman homicide inspector in the entire SFPD. My friends always said I was more like Helen Hunt married to Paul Reiser in Mad About You. I was married once. I was no Helen Hunt; he sure was no Paul Reiser. This is so hard, so bad, so wrong. It's so unlike me. I keep seeing David and Melanie Brandt, the first couple who were killed, in the Mandarin Suite of the Grand Hyatt. I see that horrifying hotel room, where they died senselessly and needlessly. That was the beginning. Book One


DAVID AND MELANIE


Chapter 1


BEAUTIFUL LONG-STEMMED RED ROSES filled the hotel suite- the perfect gifts, really. Everything was perfect. There might be a luckier man somewhere on the planet, David Brandt thought as he wrapped his arms around Melanie, his new bride. Somewhere in Yemen, maybe- some Allah praising farmer with a second goat. But certainly not in all of San Francisco. The couple looked out from the living room of the Grand Hyatt's Mandarin Suite. They could see the lights of Berkeley off in the distance, Alcatraz, the graceful outline of the lit-up Golden Gate Bridge. "It's incredible." Melanie beamed. "I wouldn't change a single thing about today." "Me either," he whispered. "Well, maybe I wouldn't have invited my parents." They both laughed. Only moments before, they had bid farewell to the last of the three hundred guests in the hotel's ballroom. The wedding was finally over. The toasts, the dancing, the schmoozing, the photographed kisses over the cake. Now it was just the two of them. They were twenty-nine years old and had the rest of their lives ahead of them. David reached for a pair of filled champagne glasses he had set on a lacquered table.



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