“What did he think?”

“That the typical victim in a situation like this one would be a young streetwalker. You remember that case in Albuquerque?”

“Those young working girls who were buried in the desert?”

“That’s the one. I think there were about eighteen of them, late teens to midtwenties, buried without clothes, so they were just skeletons when they were found.

“There was no identification, no clues to their killer.

There was a cop in the missing-persons division who had collected DNA, though, so some of those girls were identified.”

“The killer wasn’t caught, as I remember.”

“No. Not yet. So, we have identified one of our Jane Does, Marilyn Varick. She wasn’t a known prostitute.”

“Maybe she was just never picked up for prostitution.”

“Agreed,” I said. “The stock profile for someone who preys on prostitutes is white male, thirty-five to fifty, has been in trouble with the law.”

Joe said, “Harry Chandler is about sixty, isn’t he?”

“Sixty-three. So, if he did it, he wants to be near his victims. And if that’s the case, I don’t see him as the one who dug them up. Someone else is leaving the message.”

“It’s a very frayed loose end,” said Joe.

“Isn’t it though?”

My mind went back to Jacobi. I saw him sitting across from me at LuLu’s, every bit my partner and friend of a dozen years.

I said, “Jacobi isn’t the shooter, Joe. He couldn’t be. I know him so well.”

“Do we ever really know anyone?” Joe said.

Chapter 63

Chapter 63

I SWUNG MY legs out of bed at six the next morning, left Joe snoozing as I got my running clothes from the hook behind the closet door.

Martha and I took a brisk and challenging run through the Presidio and when we got back, sunlight was splashing on the bedroom floor and Joe was still snoring, exactly as I’d left him.

I closed the bedroom door, showered, put on a pot of Blue Bottle roast, and booted up my laptop.

My mailbox was flooded with e-mail and spam. I mean flooded; I had mail in triple digits. It took me about fifteen minutes to clear my in-box and get to the day’s headlines. I clicked on the link to the Post and there was Jason Blayney’s front-page story about the Potrero Center shooting.

I skimmed the story quickly to see if Blayney, that rat, had come up with an angle I should be pursuing or denying, and son of a gun, his story linked to a piece about Joe Molinari.

When I clicked on the link, I expected to see a follow-up on the DEA task-force story, so I was nearly blown off my seat by the filthy piece of trash Blayney had run under the heading “Fed Takes the Night Off.”