The 8th Confession

“Really?” I said.

Chi nodded. “She says she’s probably in the Baileys’ will, so you never know, but my Grift-O-Meter didn’t go off. Iraida Hernandez does things by the book. She’s loyal. She didn’t have a bad thing to say about anyone, so as I said, ‘Nice lady.’ ”

“What about the cook?” Cappy McNeil called out. Cappy’s a big guy, two hundred fifty, and if the doughnuts and the stairs don’t get him, he could get promoted out of here to a good lieutenant’s job in a small town down the line. That’s what he’s shooting for. Calls it “going coastal.”

“As I was about to say,” Chi said to his partner, “number three: the cook is Miller, Marilyn, white, forty-seven years old. Moved here from somewhere in flyover country.” Chi looked at his notes. “ Ohio. Only been working for the Baileys for a year. Has a clean record. No prints upstairs. All I got off her was ‘What’s going to happen to me now?’ I see no motive. What’s she got to gain? But like the rest of the staff, access to the Baileys was a given. And if we’re thinking poison…”

Chi shrugged as if to say, She’s the cook.

Jacobi said, “I told Miller not to leave the city, and I got two teams from the Special Investigation Division. They’ll be on her at all times.”

Chi was finishing up his report on the remaining two of the Baileys’ live-in staff, a second housekeeper and the mechanic, both as clean as cat whiskers, when Claire stomped into the squad room in her sneakers and scrubs.

She looked around and said, “Are you all thinking, Now that Claire’s here, the party can begin? Think again.”

Chapter 32

CHI WHEELED A CHAIR over for Claire. She sat down, propped her feet up on a desk, said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the Baileys’ bodies were so pristine, I expected them to start breathing. No pills in their stomachs, no abrasions, contusions, or lacerations. Negative for carbon monoxide. And since I never let skin stand between me and my diagnosis, I did a layerwise dissection on both necks, and the backs of their necks as well.

“In sum, I looked at everything but their dreams. The autopsies were completely negative.”

Everyone groaned. Even me.

“I spoke with Ethan Bailey’s physician,” Claire continued. “I spoke with Isa’s gynecologist. Both doctors had complete and recent medical histories of their patients, and the Baileys passed their physicals with five stars each, ten stars total. Those kids knew how to take care of their bodies.

“So as I hung up the phone after talking to you ten minutes ago,” she said to Jacobi, “the rushed toxicology report walked in the door.

“I was ready to opine that if there was poison involved, one of the Baileys whacked the other and then took poison him- or herself, so we’d have homicide-suicide or double suicide. But I got surprised – and not in a good way.”

Claire had us by the eyeballs.

No one spoke. Maybe no one breathed.

Claire waved a computer printout, said, “Toxicology was negative. No poison, no opiates, no narcotics, no nothing. Cause of death? No idea. Ma

“Oh, man,” I muttered. “So much for ‘The tox screens will give us a clue.’ ”

“Okay, okay, I was wrong about that, Lindsay. Since there’s no such thing as ‘sudden adult death syndrome,’ we’re thinking homicide. Until we’ve got something to go on, I’m giving Ethan and Isa Bailey Chinese death certificates.”

Chi spoke up, said, “Claire, my darling, that’s a new one for me. What’s a Chinese death certificate?”

“Pen Ding,” she cracked. “Case open. Any other questions?”

“Yep,” said Jacobi. “What now?”

Claire took her feet off the desk, stood up, and said, “I’m going home. Going to kiss my baby. Then I’m going to eat an entire turkey potpie followed by a bowl of chocolate pudding with whipped cream, and no one better try to stop me.”

She gazed around the room at our faces, slack from the long day and gray from the overhead fluorescent lights. I was pretty sure we looked like the living dead.

Jacobi in particular looked awful. He would be the one telling the family and the press and the chief and the mayor that at the end of the day, we were clueless.

“I know you’re just getting started, and so am I,” said Claire, her smile beaming a small ray of hope into our collective gloom. “I sent the samples back to the lab. Let the night crew take a crack at this,” she said. “I’m asking them to run the tests again, this time instructing them to look for the weird, the strange, and the bizarre.”

Chapter 33

CONKLIN AND I spent seven full hours interviewing Isa and Ethan Bailey’s friends, family, and the short list of their non-live-in personal employees: Isa’s secretary; the dog walker, who was also a gal Friday; and the children’s tutor.

Nothing popped. We filled our notebooks and moved on.

While the rest of my team went back to the neighborhood canvass, Conklin and I went to see Yancey and Rita Booth, Isa’s indescribably wealthy parents, who tearfully invited us into their magnificent Nob Hill home.

We spent hours with the Booths, mostly listening and taking notes. The Booths were in their sixties, devastated by Isa’s death, and needed to talk their way through the shock by telling us about the Booth and Bailey family histories.

According to Yancey Booth, there was a hundred-year-old dispute between the Booths and the Baileys, ongoing to this day, that had started with a plot of land with ambiguous boundary lines.

We learned that Ethan Bailey had three brothers, none of them successful, and that little fact opened a door to a new branch of the investigation.

We looked at the Booth family photos going back to the gold-rush days, and we met the grandkids, or rather they met us, demanding to be let in to see the police.

At five in the afternoon we turned down an offer to stay for di

As we walked down the front steps, I grumbled to Conklin, “We’re going to be working this case until we retire.”

We got into the car and sat there, talking over what we knew about the lives of Isa and Ethan, wondering if this case would ever come together.

I said to Conklin, “Her parents are never going to get over this.”

“They sure loved her,” he said.

“When Mrs. Booth broke down -”

“Heartbreaking. I mean, I think she could really die of this.”

“And those little boys.”

“Just old enough to understand. When the smaller one, Peter, said, ‘Please tell me why anyone would do this to Mommy and Daddy…’ ” Conklin sighed. “See? Isa and Ethan couldn’t have done it. I don’t see one killing the other. Not with kids like that.”

“I know.”

I told Conklin about my sister’s kids, Brigid and Meredith, who are about the same age as the Bailey boys. “I’m going to call my sister tonight. I just want to hear the little girls’ happy voices.”

“Good idea,” Conklin said.

“We were supposed to visit them. Me and Joe. He had to go on a business trip.”

“That’s too bad. But you can see Cat when he gets back.”

“That’s what he said.”

“You like kids, Lindsay,” Conklin said after a moment. “You should have some.”

I turned away, looked out the window as all those forbidden thoughts tumbled over one another, how close Rich and I had become, the taboo words and deeds, the smell of his hair, what it had felt like to kiss him, the part of me that regretted saying no because now I would never know how we would have fit together.