Then Jacobi and I headed up the ramp.

I’d had way too little sleep, but a thin, steady flow of adrenaline was entering my bloodstream. I was imagining the scene before I saw it, thinking about how a young white female came to be strangled inside a parking garage.

Footsteps echoed overhead. Lots and lots of them. My people.

I counted a dozen members of the SFPD strung around the upward-coiling concrete-ribbon parking area. Officers were going through the trash, taking down plate numbers, looking for anything that would help us before the crime scene was returned to the public domain.

Jacobi and I rounded the bend that took us to the fourth floor and saw the Caddy in question, a black late-model Seville, sleek, unscratched. Its nose was pointing over the railing toward the Civic Center Garage on McAllister.

“Zero to sixty in under five seconds,” Warren muttered, then did a fair imitation of the Cadillac musical sting from their TV commercials.

“Down, boy,” I said.

Charlie Clapper, head of CSU, was wearing his usual non-smile and a gray herringbone jacket that casually matched his salt-and-pepper hair.

He put his camera down on the hood of an adjacent Subaru Outback and said, “Mornin’, Lou, Jacobi. Meet Jane Doe.”

I tugged on latex gloves and followed him around the car. The trunk was closed because the victim wasn’t in there.

She was sitting in the passenger seat, hands folded in her lap, her pale, wide-open eyes staring out through the windshield expectantly.

As if she were waiting for someone to come.

“Aw, shit,” Jacobi said with disgust. “Beautiful young girl like this. All dressed up and no place to go. Forever.”

Chapter 9

“I DON’T SEE a handbag anywhere,” Clapper was telling me. “I left her clothing intact for the ME. Nice duds,” he said. “Looks like a rich girl. You think?”