“Yeah,” I said. Then I must’ve gotten quiet for a minute or so.
“Whatcha thinking, honey?”
“That I’ve got another John Doe on my hands.”
I was remembering another teenage John Doe, a homeless kid who’d been murdered in a place like this when I was just getting started in homicide. It was one of my worst cases ever, and ten years later the death still gnawed at me.
“I’ll know more when I get this young man on my table,” Claire was saying when Jacobi stuck his head through the doorway again.
“The informant says that partial plate number was taken off a Mercedes,” he said. “A black one.”
A black Mercedes had been seen at the other electrocution murder. I grinned as I felt a surge of hope. Yes, I was making it personal. I was going to find the bastard who had killed these kids and I was going to put him away before he could do it again.
Womans Murder Club 4 - 4th of July
Chapter 3
A WEEK HAD GONE by since the nightmare at the Lorenzo Hotel. The crime lab was still sifting through the abundant detritus of room 21, and our informant’s three-digit partial license plate number was either half wrong or a wild guess. As for me, I woke up every morning feeling pissed off and sad because this ugly case was going nowhere.
The dead kids haunted me as I drove to Susie’s for a get-together with the girls that evening. Susie’s is a neighborhood café, a bright hot spot with walls sponge-painted in tropical colors, serving spicy but tasty Caribbean food.
Jill, Claire, Cindy, and I had adopted this place as our sanctuary as well as our clubhouse. Our straight-shooting girl talk, unhampered by rank or department lines, had often cut through weeks of bureaucratic BS. Together, we’d broken cases wide open in this very spot.