Unlucky 13(15)

I asked him, “Do you know of anyone who wanted to hurt your mom? Did she have a boyfriend? Did you or your mom bring home hamburgers? Or any takeout food?”

He answered: No, no, no, and no.

When the Crime Lab van pulled up, I asked Officer Adler to take Wes out to his cruiser and keep him company for a while.

Crime scene analysts streamed into the small house. Conklin and I stood off to the side as they took photos of the body and everything that surrounded it. I asked them to open the kitchen trash bin. I saw no hamburger wrappers. No fast-food packaging of any kind.

The ME arrived and the body was turned and lifted onto a sheet.

That’s when one of Clapper’s techs found the Glock under Ms. Beadle’s body.

I said to the tech, “Do an instant GSR, will you?”

As the tech swabbed the back of Ms. Beadle’s hand, Dr. Massimo opened the woman’s robe.

He said, “Don’t hold me to it, but at first look, death was caused by a bullet to the heart at close range.”

If the wound was self-inflicted, as it appeared to be, Belinda Beadle wanted to have an open-casket funeral. And maybe she thought her teenage son wasn’t home when she took her life.

“Her right hand is positive for GSR,” said the tech, showing me the test vial.

Conklin and I took Wes Beadle down to the Hall and gave him a clean SFPD sweatshirt. Then we interviewed him with tape rolling. He told us, yes, his mom had a gun. Yes, that was her gun. Yes, she’d been sad lately. But he didn’t know she was so sad. And, no, he didn’t always come home on Friday nights.

Wes was crying, blaming himself for being a bad kid, and I just had to do it. I got up and opened my arms to him, and he fell into me, hugged me hard.

Child Protective Services came about then. Wes had an Uncle Robert who lived up the coast, and I promised I would keep calling him until I reached him.

I was speaking with Robert Beadle and had just told him about the morning’s events, when my phone alarm beeped an alert I had programmed into my phone. What was it?

I could hardly believe it. The wedding was starting in forty-five minutes—and Conklin and I were both in work clothes.

Speaking for myself, I could not miss Yuki’s wedding.

I just couldn’t let that happen.





CHAPTER 16


I GAVE CONKLIN the keys to my car and called my husband. “This is an emergency, Joe. SOS.”

It took Joe almost a half hour to get to the Hall. He was wearing a two-thousand-dollar suit that he hardly got to wear anymore, and my hot designer dress was hanging from the hook in the backseat of his Mercedes.

He’d even remembered to bring my shoes.

And my makeup kit.

I love my husband. Love him.

I got into the backseat, and Joe took the famous roller-coaster streets of San Francisco at pretty close to the speed of sound.

I struggled in back with undergarments, snaps, and fasteners as the car climbed and swooped. It was almost a riot. The makeup, well, that was an actual riot. I viewed my face in a two-inch-square mirror and did my best to color within the lines. I sprayed myself with fragrance and got a little on Joe.

“Hey,” he said. “Watch out, Blondie.”

We arrived at City Hall and parked in the underground lot with two or three seconds to spare. It was so perfect that Yuki was getting married in City Hall, a stunning building, so familiar to all of us in law enforcement, who passed through constantly.

And she was getting married in the Ceremonial Rotunda.

Joe grabbed my hand and we ran upstairs to the beautiful round hall laid entirely in Tennessee pink marble. About fifty people were clustered at the foot of the staircase waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin.

I saw Brady, taller than almost everyone there, his pale blond hair hanging loose to his shoulders. He was wearing a slate-blue suit that made him look like a movie star.

Brady turned toward me, and I saw Yuki, outrageously beautiful in a white satin sheath, her hair swept up and held with pearl combs. Her bouquet was a great bunch of creamy peonies with trailing pink ribbons. Oh, my.

Together, Brady and Yuki looked like they should be in the Style section of the Chronicle as the most beautiful couple of the year.

Yuki called out, “Okay, we can start now. Lindsay is here.” And then her laughter echoed in the round, and Yuki did a little dance of her own devising. Brady doesn’t laugh out loud too much. In fact, this might have been the first time I’d ever heard his hearty “Ahahaha.”

Judge James Devine wore a black suit and a yellow bow tie. He cleared his throat, and as the wedding guests grouped at the foot of the stairs, Yuki and Brady climbed them in tandem. They stood opposite the judge under the grand 24-karat gold dome like figures on the top tier of an extraordinary pink wedding cake.