The 8th Confession

“You’re scaring me, John. Spit it out.”

“A few days ago when you said that you hadn’t had sex in a couple of years -”

“That was stupid of me. It’s true, but I was nervous. My brain… just overflowed.”

Doc fixed his slate-blue eyes on her. “I haven’t had sex in a couple of years either.”

“You? Come on. I don’t believe you.”

Yuki’s brain was on rewind, thinking how she’d gone to the hospital to see Doc after the car accident. She’d agreed to show him the city. After their first soft kiss, she’d dived in for a longer, sexier one – like she’d done just now.

She’d been driving the whole fantasy.

He’d been following her lead.

Yuki was mortified. Why hadn’t she listened to her mother?

“Be like swan, Yuki- eh. Hold head high. Swim strong and silent.” She had no patience. Instead she’d taken after her father. The tank driver.

“Please, just say it,” Yuki said.

And then he did tell her, his voice halting, the story coming out in bits and pieces on a jagged time line. And although Yuki could hardly grasp what he was saying, her vision narrowed. There was a loud humming in her head.

And then everything went black.

Chapter 91

I SAT IN a wobbly chair across from Yuki and Cindy at Casa Loco, a Mexican joint near Cindy’s apartment specializing in two- star chicken fajitas. It was dark outside, and the windows reflected our colorless images, making us look like ghosts.

Especially Yuki.

Cindy was both propping Yuki up and pumping her for more information when Claire arrived, dropped down in the chair next to me.

“You were right not to go away with him,” Cindy was saying to Yuki. “You can’t make decisions when your head’s been through a blender.”

The teenage waitress removed our plates, and Claire ordered coffee all around. Yuki said, “I keep thinking maybe I should have toughed it out. Just gotten into the car -”

“And if you hadn’t felt better?” Cindy asked her. “What a bloody awful weekend this would’ve been if you’d been stranded in Napa with someone who might have repulsed you.”

“I hate it when you sugarcoat things, Cindy.”

“Well, I’m not wrong, am I?”

“So let me get this straight,” Claire said, bringing herself up to date since talking to Yuki on the phone. “Doc was born with ambiguous genitalia? The doctors didn’t know for sure if he was a boy or a girl?”

Yuki nodded, used a forefinger to wick the tears out from under her eyes.

“They told his parents that if they conditioned him as a girl, he’d never know.”

“They got that wrong,” I said.

Claire said, “It’s a damned tragedy, Yuki. I’m sure the parents were under a lot of pressure to tell people the baby’s sex. Anyway, it was a theory based on practicality. Even if the chromosomes read XY, if the parts looked messed up, they did the surgery. ‘Easier to make a hole than a pole,’ they used to say. Then, they’d advise, treat the kid like a girl. Give her estrogen at adolescence, and by God, she’ll be a girl.”

“They named him Flora Jean,” Yuki sputtered. “Like you said, Claire, they took a baby boy and made him a girl! But he never felt like one, ever – because he wasn’t a girl. Oh my God. It’s so sick!”

“So he reversed the process when he was how old?” Claire asked.

“Started when he was twenty-six. After that, he went through about four or five years of hell.”

“Oh man. That poor guy,” I said.

Yuki lifted her teary eyes to mine. “I’m crazy about Doc, Lindsay. He’s sweet. He’s fu

“Aw, Yuki. Where did you leave things with him?”

“He said he’d call me over the weekend. That we’d go out to di

“Doc cares about you,” I said. “He’s showing you how much he cares by telling you what happened. Giving you time.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Yuki choked out.

Cindy held Yuki and let her cry until Claire reached across the table and took Yuki’s hand.

“Sugar, take it easy on yourself. It seems complicated, but maybe it’s not. And nothing has to be decided right now.”

Yuki nodded, and then she started to cry again.

Chapter 92

I GOT TO the squad room before eight on Monday morning and found a thick padded envelope on my desk. The routing slip showed that St. Jude had messengered it over from the Cold Case Division and had stamped the envelope URGENT, URGENT, URGENT.

I remembered now – McCorkle had called me, and I hadn’t called him back. I ripped open the envelope, dumped out a tattered detective’s notebook, found a note from McCorkle clipped to the front cover.

“ Boxer – check this out. This subject knew the last of the nineteen eighty-two snake victims and a few of the new ones. She’s expecting your call.”

I hoped “she” was a hot lead that hadn’t gone cold over the weekend, because right now, all we had on the “snake killer” was ugly press coverage and five dead bodies twiddling their thumbs in their graves.

Conklin wasn’t in, so I killed a few minutes in the coffee room, putting milk and sugar in the last inch of coffee sludge left over from the night shift.

When I returned to my desk, my partner was still absent, and I couldn’t wait for him any longer.

I opened the notebook to where a neon-green Post-it Note stuck between the pages pointed to a twenty-three-year-old interview with a socialite, Gi

I knew a few things about Gi

She was once married to a deputy mayor in the ’80s, now deceased, and was currently married to a top cardiologist. She was a patron of the arts and a gifted painter in her own right.

I sca

Friedman answered on the third ring and surprised me by saying, “I’m free if you come over now.”

I left a note on Conklin’s chair, then took my Explorer for a spin out to Friedman’s address in Pacific Heights.

Gi

I walked up the steps and pressed the bell, and a lovely-looking gray-haired woman in her early seventies opened the door.

“Come in, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you. What can I get you? Coffee or tea?”

Chapter 93

MRS. FRIEDMAN AND I settled into a pair of wicker chairs on her back porch, and she began to tell me about the snake killings that had terrorized San Francisco ’s high society in 1982.

Friedman stirred her coffee, said, “There’s got to be a co

“We think so, too.”

“I hope I can help you,” Friedman said. “I told Lieutenant McCorkle that it was stinking horrible when those prominent people kept dying in eighty-two. Scary as hell. Keep in mind, we didn’t know why they died until Christopher Ross was found with that snake coiled up in his armpit.”

“And you knew Christopher Ross?”

“Very well. My first husband and I went out with him and his wife often. He was a very handsome guy. A thrill-seeker with an outgoing personality, and he was wealthy, of course. His gobs of money had gobs of money. Chris Ross had it all. And then he died.

“Some said it was poetic justice,” Friedman told me. “That he was a snake who was killed with one – but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

“Take your time,” I said. “I want to hear it all.”

Friedman nodded, said, “In nineteen eighty-two, I was teaching fifth-grade girls at the Katherine Delmar Burke School in Sea Cliff. You know it, I’m sure.”