20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20) - James Patterson Page 0,13

before the school bell. Eight thirty?”

I said, “That’s the same time the Barons were shot. To the minute.”

CHAPTER 20

CLAIRE TEXTED ME as I was driving home.

I stopped at the light on Turk Street and Webster Street and returned the text, asking Claire, Where are you? Are you ok?

I’m in my office. Call me.

I pulled over and phoned her. She picked right up.

“Where’d you go, Claire? I got no answer from the mysterious Dr. Dugan.”

There was a pause, then, “Where are you?”

“Turk and Webster.”

“Can you come back, Lindsay? I need to talk to you.”

I was about ten minutes out from the Hall. I said so, made a couple of left turns, a right, then a left on Bryant, and found my usual spot on Harriet Street waiting for me.

During those return ten minutes I tried on all kinds of reasons for why Claire needed to see me, and while some were ridiculous, the one that seemed most reasonable and possible was that she’d quit her job.

That crack house–turned–incinerator was a sick nightmare. Claire dealt with death every day, yet this case was singular. The victims were probable longtime addicts, so there was little chance that friends and family members were calling Missing Persons. And even if they did, Claire was at a dead end. No answers to what had happened, how or why, no fingerprints, no way to get those bodies home.

Maybe this fire had been Claire’s final straw.

I locked the car, buttoned my coat, and took the short walk to the medical examiner’s office. The lights shined through the glass. I saw that the receptionist had gone home, but there were a few people sitting in the waiting room. One of them was a cop I knew. I knocked on the glass and Diaz got up, reached behind the reception desk, and buzzed me in.

A moment later Claire opened the door to reception and leaned out, saying to me, “After I get outta of these bloody scrubs and wash up, want to go have a beer?”

I nodded. Good idea.

We went to MacBain’s, the bar and grill across Bryant and down the street, named for a valorous homicide captain who’d owned the place and whose portrait hangs over the bar. RIP. At six thirty MacBain’s was packed with Hall of Justice workers and one departing pair of lovebirds who’d left an empty table by the jukebox.

We grabbed it.

A sappy pop vocal was on loud, making my teeth vibrate, but at least we had a table. Syd MacBain, our waitress, stopped by and dropped off dinner menus.

Claire said, “Wait a sec,” handed back the menus.

“Two Anchor Steams and a bowl of chips,” I said.

Syd left, and I imagined a cone of silence dropping over our table so we wouldn’t be disturbed. In a way, it worked. The Cheers-like ambiance of the place faded. I asked Claire about the fire victims, a way in for her to say, “This damned job is just too damned much, Lindsay,” but she didn’t.

She said, “I’ve been coughing.”

I nodded. I knew that.

“I have lung cancer.”

I was sure I was hearing her wrong. I couldn’t believe what she had told me. I asked her to say it again, and she did. “I have lung cancer.”

I shook my head, No, no, no.

“Probably from the disinfectant or the X-rays or whatever fumes I breathe doing autopsies—or all of the above.”

“Claire. You know this for sure? You’ve had tests?”

Sydney brought the beer, the chips. We didn’t even acknowledge her when she said, “Will there be anything else?”

Claire said, “I had a biopsy. Today I saw my oncologist. It’s a carcinoma. It has to come out. I haven’t told Edmund. Jesus. I keep thinking about Rosie.”

Rosie is their youngest, their beloved change-of-life baby.

Claire coughed into a napkin, then looked at me with water in her eyes. “It’s nothing to worry about. I’m a doctor, you know.”

Bullshitting herself, lying to me, to Edmund, to people who loved her. That’s how scared she was.

“Don’t tell anyone,” she said.

I reached across the table and grabbed Claire’s wrists.

We both burst into tears.

CHAPTER 21

BEFORE CLAIRE TEXTED me, I’d been thinking about how much I wanted to discuss the Baron murders with Joe.

He has decades of experience in intelligence agencies and spent a number of those years as a profiler with the FBI.

I had a new case: a successful record producer and his wife shot dead in their house by a very sophisticated marksman who knew their habits. Possibly knew about their drug business, which was still in