3rd Degree

Then I heard Otis barking. The brown lab ran from inside the kitchen.

“Hey, boy.” I patted his back. He seemed happy to see a familiar face. “Where’s Mommy?” I asked. I knew one thing. Jill would never leave him. Steve maybe, but not Otis.

“Jill … Steve?” I called around the house. “It’s Lindsay. And Claire.”

Jill had just re-done the place in the past year. Patterned couches, melon-colored walls, a tufted leather ottoman for a coffee table. The house was dark and silent. We checked around the familiar rooms. No reply. No Jill.

Claire exhaled and said, “This is really starting to give me the creeps.”

I nodded and squeezed her shoulder. “Me too.

“C’mon,” I said to Claire, “I’m going up to check upstairs. We’re going to check.”

Climbing the stairs, I couldn’t put aside the thought of a crazed Steve charging out of some room like in some teenage horror movie. “Jill …Steve?” I called out again. I tugged at my gun just in case.

Still no answer. The master bedroom lights were off. The big four-poster bed was made. Jill’s toiletries and makeup in the bathroom.

When I last spoke with her she was going to bed. I was about to go back into the hallway when I saw it.

Jill’s briefcase.

Jill didn’t go anywhere without her “traveling office.” It was a ru

I took a cloth and held it by the strap, loosely. I met Claire back in the hallway. She’d checked the other rooms. “Nothing …”

“I don’t like this, Claire. Her car’s in the driveway.” My eyes drifted to her case. “This …She slept here, Claire. But she never left for work.”

Chapter 63

I had no idea how to get in touch with Steve.

It was late—who the hell knew where he was staying. And Jill had only been missing for the day. She could show up and be pissed over all the attention. There was nothing to do but wait and worry ourselves sick and, in my case, feel guilty.

I called Cindy and she was there in fifteen minutes. Claire called Edmund and said she was going to stay for a while, maybe the night.

We sat in Jill’s den, curled up on couches. There was always the chance she’d had a change of mind and gone to visit Steve, somewhere.

Around eleven my cell phone rang. But it was only Jacobi, checking in, telling me no one in the Berkeley bars they’d checked admitted to recognizing Hardaway. Then we all sat around without speaking. I don’t even remember what time we dozed off.

I woke a few times in the night, thought I heard something. “Jill?” But it wasn’t her.

First thing in the morning, I went home. Joe had made the bed and left the apartment looking tidy. I showered and called in to the office to say I’d be late.

An hour later I was down at Steve’s office in the Financial Center. I left the Explorer right there on the street. By the time I pushed through the office doors, I could barely control the panic I was feeling.

Steve was right there, in reception. He was practically draped over the receptionist, sipping a coffee, his leg perched casually on a chair.

“Where is she?” I said. I must’ve startled him because coffee splattered all over his pink Lacoste shirt.

“What the hell, Lindsay …” Steve held up his hands.

“Your office,” I said, glaring at him hard.

“Mr. Bernhardt?” the receptionist said.

“It’s okay, Stacy,” Steve said. “She’s a friend.” Yeah, right.

As soon as we were down in his corner office I slammed the door. “Are you nuts, Lindsay?” Steve said.

I pushed him into a chair. “I want to know now where she is, Steve.”

“Jill?” He turned up his palms and actually seemed confused.

“Cut the shit, you son of a bitch. Jill’s missing. She didn’t show up for work. I want to know where she is.”

“I don’t have the slightest idea,” Steve said. “What do you mean, ‘missing’?”

“She had a trial yesterday, Steve,” I said, losing control, “and she didn’t show up for it. Does that sound like Jill? She didn’t come home last night, either. Her car’s there. And her briefcase. Someone got inside the house.”

“I think you’ve got your facts a little twisted, Lieutenant,” Steve said with a derisive laugh. “Jill tossed me out the other night. She changed the locks on Fortress Bernhardt.”

“Don’t mess with me, Steve. I want to know what you’ve done. When was the last time you saw her?”

“How about eleven o’clock the other night, through my own living-room window, as I was banging on the fucking door, trying to get back into my own house?”

“She told me you were coming by yesterday morning to pick up your things.”

Anger flashed in his eyes. “What the hell is this, an interrogation?”

“I want to know where you spent Friday night”—I stared at him hard—“and everything you did Saturday morning before you came to work.”

“What’s going on? Do I need a lawyer, Lindsay?”

I didn’t answer his question, just turned away and walked out of there. I hoped to God Steve didn’t need a lawyer.

Chapter 64

Anger was no longer the word for what was tearing at me as I headed back to the Hall. It was deeper than anger. Every time I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of my own eyes, I kept thinking, I’ve seen those eyes before.

On the job. On the faces of parents and wives when someone close to them is missing. The wordless panic when something horrible has taken place but just hasn’t played out yet. Stay calm, we tell them. Anything can happen. It’s still early.

And that’s what I was telling myself as I drove back to the office. Stay calm, Lindsay. Jill could turn up anytime.…

But looking at myself in the rearview mirror, I couldn’t stop thinking, Same eyes.

Back at the Hall, I put in a call to Ingrid Barros, who was Jill’s housekeeper, but she was at a meeting at her kid’s school. I sent Lorraine and Chin up and down Jill’s street on Buena Vista Park to see if anyone had noticed anything suspicious. I even ordered a trace on Jill’s cell phone calls.

Someone must have called her. Someone must have seen her. It didn’t make sense that she had completely disappeared. Jill wasn’t the disappearing type.

I did my best to focus on the picture we were getting on Stephen Hardaway as it started to drift in throughout the day. The FBI had been looking for Hardaway for a couple of years, and though he wasn’t on the Most Wanted, he was close enough to raise suspicions now.

He’d been raised in Lansing, Michigan. After high school, he came west and went to Reed College in Portland. That’s when he began turning up in the system. Oregon records showed an arrest for aggravated assault at an anti-WTO demonstration at the University of Oregon. He was a suspect in bank robberies in Eugene and Seattle. Then in ’99, he was caught in Arizona trying to buy blasting caps from a gang member who turned out to be local ATF. And that was when Stephen Hardaway disappeared. He’d jumped bail. He was rumored to be involved in a string of armed robberies in Washington and Oregon. So we knew he was armed, dangerous, and had a desire to blow things up.

Not a word on him for the past two years.

About five, Claire knocked at my office. “I’m going crazy, Lindsay. C’mon, get a cup of coffee with me.”

“I’m going crazy, too,” I said, and grabbed my purse. “Maybe we should call Cindy over,” I said.

“Don’t bother,” she said, and pointed down the hall. “She’s already here.”

The three of us went down to a cafeteria on the second floor. At first we just sat around stirring our drinks, the silence as thick as June fog.

Finally I just sucked in a breath. “I think we all agree, Jill’s not out there, pining away on some rock. Something’s happened. The sooner we admit that, the sooner we can find out what it is.”

“I keep thinking there has to be some explanation,” Claire said. “I mean, I know Steve. We all do. He wouldn’t be my ideal partner, but I can’t believe he’s capable of anything like this.”