Jacobi slipped out the door just before them, and went out into the inclement night. He started up his car, turned on the windshield wipers, and called in his location.

The black Mercedes pulled out of the parking lot on Taylor, and Jacobi followed, this time keeping close, confident that the doctor wouldn’t make him in this weather. Not with the pretty blond woman sitting almost on his lap, wrapping her arm around his neck, kissing him behind the ear.

The doctor turned onto Pacific for two blocks, taking a right onto Leavenworth, then four more blocks to Filbert.

Jacobi saw Garza nose the Mercedes into his driveway and open the automatic garage door, drive his car inside.

Jacobi drove past the pale-yellow house to the end of the block. He made a U-turn, coming back, parking on Garza’s side of the street where he could watch the house.

His hip was stiffening up, and his bladder was full again. He was thinking of getting out, taking a leak against his rear tire, when the downstairs lights in Garza’s house went out. A long fifteen minutes later, the upstairs lights winked out as well.

Jacobi called Lindsay on his Nextel. Told her he’d been tailing Garza since he left the hospital. Yeah, overtime. Free overtime.

“He didn’t even run a stoplight, Boxer. The man had dinner with a babe about forty, a willowy blonde. Held her hand at the table; then she climbed all over him on the drive home.

“As far as I can tell,” Jacobi said, “the doctor is guilty of having a girlfriend.”

Chapter 94

Chapter 94

I WAS FRETTING and stalking the corridors outside the ICU at Municipal when Jacobi called saying that Garza was tucked in for the night.

I dropped into a blue plastic chair in the hospital waiting room, thinking what an idiot I was for sending my buddy out into the foul night for nothing. Still, I couldn’t shake my prickling sense of wrongness about Garza.

Images flickered—Keiko’s mom, her knees buckling, dropping to the sidewalk, that feisty, funny lady who should still be alive.

I thought about brass buttons on her dead eyes and on the eyes of the thirty-one others who’d been marked that way.

Those freaking buttons. Markers.

Where was the killer’s fun if no one understood what he was doing or why?

I remembered the arrogance of the man who’d overseen the care of many of the deceased. The doctor who’d said, “Sometimes a bad wind blows.”

And I wondered for the hundredth time if Dennis Garza was one of those deranged and profligate killers, like Charles Cullen and Swango, that surgeon from Ohio, medical practitioners addicted to the power of snuffing out life.