The 19th Christmas (Women's Murder Club #19)(8)

“I’m good,” he said.

“You’re great. A human shield,” I said to my partner, who might have saved my life.

“Pure reflex. Let’s get you up.”

He reached down and I grabbed his hand. He pulled me to my feet.

My ears were ringing and I was on adrenaline overload as I stared along the narrow hallway. Most of the ceiling lights had been shot out. Five feet away, an FBI agent with what looked like a fatal head wound sat propped against a wall. The other agent had taken a bullet to his shoulder. Blood spurted as he tried to coax his partner back to life.

I called for backup and an ambulance, stat. I wasn’t sure how the shit had hit the fan, but I gathered what I could from the chaotic scene and tried to piece together what had just happened. I’d been standing to the side of room 6R, waiting for SWAT to kick in the door, when the hallway had exploded in gunfire—the first shots coming from behind us—and Conklin had thrown himself on top of me.

We’d been told by the desk clerk that Chris Dietz, the professional hitter, was in 6R, rear. But apparently he’d been in 6F, front.

Had Dietz been so paranoid that he’d kept two rooms? Had he heard us running up the stairs and taken defensive action by busting into someone else’s space? Or—the simplest explanation—had the terrified desk clerk given us the wrong room number?

The door to 6F had nearly been shot off its hinges. The dead man inside, cut down by our return, and more intense, gunfire, blocked the threshold. Even in the dim light I could see his blood pooling on the tiles. Me, Conklin, Commander Covington, and two of his people went to 6F and the body.

A SWAT officer kicked the dead man’s gun aside, and he and Conklin rolled him. I pulled a wallet from his back pocket. His driver license told me he was Christopher Dietz, Caucasian male, no corrected vision. Height, five ten; eyes, hazel; born in 1985. An address in Boise. If there had been a place for occupation, I suppose it would have said freelance hitter.

I was glad he was dead but very, very sorry I wouldn’t get a chance to interrogate him.

Covington shouted through 6F’s open doorway for any people inside to show themselves, put their hands above their heads. When no one answered, he and his team stormed the small room, clearing it to the corners.

Conklin and I stepped around the dead man and peered into 6F, which was lit by the sporadic flashing of red neon coming from the liquor store next door.

Covington hit the light switch and the room lit up.

I saw a coffee table made of two milk crates and a plank, and a bare mattress in the corner. A rag of a shirt hung in the open closet. There were empty beer and liquor bottles everywhere, and the smell of excrement permeated the air.

We touched nothing, corrupted nothing, just looked for something that would reveal what Chris Dietz had been doing before he decided to commit suicide-by-cop in grand style.

If a clue was there, I didn’t see it.

I heard sirens screaming up Sixth Street, ambulances and cruisers. Conklin and I backed out of the doorway and returned to the rear of the building, and I told the wounded FBI agent to hang on, EMTs were on the way.

Covington rammed in the door to 6R, rushed in, and, a moment later, pronounced it clear.

Paramedics jogged up the stairs with a stretcher. Uniformed cops followed. Conklin told them to cordon off the rooms at both ends of the hall and start checking for wounded residents behind the other doors.

I called Brady, briefed him, and gave him the bad news: “Our best and only lead to the Christmas Day heist has expired.”





CHAPTER 11





YUKI AND BRADY were at home that evening, dressing for a pre-Christmas dinner with DA Len Parisi and a handful of coworkers. They had promised each other that they would pick out a tree together. There was still time.

Yuki fastened the clasp of her jet necklace, and it curled neatly above the rounded neckline of her little black dress. She brushed her hair and then sat on the edge of the bed, watching Brady get ready.

He said, “I’m looking forward to getting out, talking to people. Wonderin’ if I still have any charm left after all these years.”

“You’ve still got it, sweetie. Charm to spare.”

In Yuki’s opinion, he underplayed his appeal and it was a pleasure to see him dressing for a night out. She liked his pink shirt, a sweet complement to his buffed body and white-blond hair. He held up three ties for her review, and she selected one with a pattern of jumping dolphins.

“This place is going to be jammed,” said Brady as he knotted his tie in front of the mirror.

The restaurant they were going to was the new hip successor to LuLu’s, also specializing in local seafood, suckling pig, and gourmet pizza cooked in wood-fired brick ovens. Yuki thought about her first dinner at LuLu’s with Len Parisi.

Yuki and her new boss had been discussing a case in which a ferry passenger had pulled a gun and unloaded on the other passengers, killing six innocent people. The Brinkley case was Yuki’s first prosecution of a mass murderer, and it was personal: the killer had shot her friend Claire Washburn and her teenage son, both of whom, thank God, had survived.

She and Len had been deep in conversation over wine and pizza when he suddenly clutched his chest and toppled backward onto the restaurant floor.

To this day, Len credited her with saving his life. She had only made a phone call, but he insisted that it was because of her clearheaded actions—waving off the fellow diner who had volunteered to drive him to the hospital, calling 911, staying with him, riding with him in the ambulance—that he was alive today.