Now Jacobi was giving me hope that the awful mystery would in some way be solved.
“Michael’s body has been found?” I asked him.
“Naw, but we’ve got a credible lead. Finally.”
I pressed the phone hard against my ear, ghost stories and the first annual getaway of the Women’s Murder Club forgotten.
Jacobi was saying, “If you want in on this, Boxer, meet me at the Hall -”
“I can be there in an hour.”
Chapter 3
I MADE THE ONE-HOUR DRIVE back to the Hall of Justice in forty-five minutes, took the stairs from the lobby to the third floor, and strode into the squad room looking for Jacobi.
The forty-by-forty-foot open space was lit with flickering overhead fluorescent tubing, making the night crew hunched over their desks look like they’d just crawled out of their graves. A few old guys lifted their eyes, said, “Howsit goin’, Sarge?” as I made my way to Jacobi’s glassed-in corner office, with its view of the on-ramp to the 280 freeway.
My partner, Richard Conklin, was already there; thirty years old, six feet two inches of all-American hunk, one of his long legs resting on the edge of Jacobi’s junkyard of a desk.
I pulled out the other chair, bashed my knee, swore loudly and emphatically as Jacobi sniggered, “Nice talk, Boxer.” I sat down, thinking how this had been a functional workspace when Jacobi’s office had been mine. I took off my baseball cap and shook out my hair, hoping to hell that the guys wouldn’t smell tequila on my breath.
“What kind of lead?” I asked without preamble.
“It’s a tip kind of lead,” Jacobi said. “Anonymous caller using a prepaid cell phone – untraceable, naturally. Caller said he’d seen the Campion kid entering a house on Russian Hill the night he disappeared. The house is home to a prostitute.”