Unlucky 13(14)

“No fair,” Joe said.

“I’ll make it up to you, Joe. I swear I will.”

“I think I’ve heard that before. A few thousand times.”

I laughed. I got dressed, strapped on my shoulder holster, and put on a jacket. My blue one. One of my three almost identical blue blazers.

Then, I took the dress I was going to wear to the wedding out of the closet—a gorgeous deep blue, almost-black dress with a swishy taffeta skirt, a cinched-in waist, and a pleated matte jersey bodice. My sapphire pendant on a chain would look good with this. Oh, my.

I hung my dress on the back of the door, then rooted around the closet shelf and found the box with my barely-ever-worn black Stuart Weitzman shoes. I put the box on the floor under the dress. I just couldn’t wait to put on some glam.

I said to my husband, “I’ll check out the scene, and with luck, I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“Right,” said Joe. “I’m not feeling lucky.”

“Will you make sure Maria Teresa is on to babysit for Julie?”

“You bet.”

“Are you mad?” I asked.

“Hell, no,” Joe said. “What makes you happy, makes me, uh, happy enough.”

I told Joe that I loved him “this much” and spread my arms.

He laughed, and I kissed him, then looked in on the baby and blew her a kiss so that I didn’t wake her. Martha followed me out to the door and yipped. She also gave me the big, pleading eyes.

I nipped back into the kitchen and filled her bowl.

“Okay, Boo?”

Christ.

I was still at home and the crime scene was waiting.





CHAPTER 15


CONKLIN GOT INTO my car, combed back his brown forelock with his fingers, and said, “Brady said it’s a belly bomb?”

“That’s what it sounds like.”

We drove to Scott Street near O’Farrell and parked in front of a brown-shingled, two-story house, one of a dozen just like it that squatted under a tangle of overhead lines on a tree-lined street in the Western Addition.

Officer Shelly Adler, one of the cops at the door, ran the scene for us, saying that the victim was a white female, dead on the kitchen floor in a world of blood. There were no signs of a break-in or any kind of altercation between the single mom and the son who lived with her.

“As for belly bombs, Sergeant,” Adler said, “I’ve got no idea. She’s still warm, so she hasn’t been dead long. Her name is Belinda Beadle. Her son, Wesley, is upstairs in his room with my partner. The kid is sixteen.”

Conklin and I signed the log and had just walked through the door, when a brown-haired teenage boy burst down the stairs and came toward us. Adler’s partner called from the top floor, too late.

“Wes. You can’t go down there.”

The boy looked bad: pale, wide-eyed, maybe in shock. There was blood on his hands and smeared on his cheeks, and his T-shirt was soaked with it.

He grabbed my arm. Hard.

“It’s my mom,” he said. “She exploded. Like those people on the bridge.”

“Tell me what happened, Wes,” I said.

His chest heaved, and he put his hands to his eyes and cried. After a minute, he used the hem of his T-shirt to wipe his eyes and said, “I came home late last night or this morning, and was sleeping in my room. I heard a sound, like boom. And so I got up and ran down and found my mom on the floor with blood pouring out of her, from here.”

Wes Beadle grabbed his stomach with hands.

“I tried to get her to speak to me. I tried to wake her up, but she was dead. She was dead.”

He looked horrified. Devastated. And it hurt me to think that he would never be able to forget what he’d seen this morning. That he’d relive the sight of his dead mother for the rest of his life.

Conklin and I left Wes with Officer Adler and, after clearing the barrier tape between the front room and the rest of the house, found Belinda Beadle on the kitchen floor near the sink, lying in an odd position. She was sitting on her left side but leaning about thirty degrees toward the floor. Her light brown hair had been brushed. She was barefoot and wearing makeup and a navy-blue bathrobe.

As Adler had said, there was a lot of blood. It had soaked through the front of her robe and made a wide pool on the floor. The blood appeared to have come from her midsection, but the way her body was leaning, I couldn’t see where she’d been wounded. But I did see that her robe was intact. Unlike like the clothing of the belly bomb victims in the Jeep, the garment hadn’t been shredded.

I conferred with Conklin and then called Clapper and the weekend ME, Dr. Massimo. I reported in to Brady, and my partner and I returned to the front room.

I had more questions for Wesley, who was sitting in a chair flanked by two uniformed police officers.