Unlucky 13(74)

CHAPTER 101


DONNA TIMKO SHUFFLED into the small meeting room. She was dressed in orange, wore no makeup, and had stringy hair. She looked sallow and yet cheerful. Why? She should be hitting the bottom about now, I figured.

With shackles clanking, she edged onto the plastic chair across the table from me and was compliant as Officer Waters linked her cuffs with a chain through the hole in the table to the chain around her waist.

“I’ll be baaack,” said Officer Waters.

The door closed and Timko and I were alone.

“I’m getting that déjà vu feeling,” she said. “Only this time, no coffee, no Baby Cakes.”

Okay, good, she wasn’t giving me the silent treatment. I said, “Donna. How’re you doing?”

“Not bad. First vacation I’ve had in years. Nice of you to ask. Why are you here?”

“Well, maybe you could help me out with something.”

“I refuse to answer any questions that you’ll try to use against me, so, let’s talk about what I want to talk about.”

“Go ahead.”

I sat back in my wobbly seat as Donna teed up whatever she had on her twisted mind. She wanted ballgame scores and headlines on “Dancing with the Stars,” and she wanted to know if I knew how Walter was doing.

I told her about the 49ers’ crushing win over the Packers, said that I didn’t watch the other thing, and told her that as far as I knew, Walter was making friends in jail. “I’ll get word to him that you were asking after him. I promise.

“My turn,” I said after that.

“I’ll listen,” she said, “but I told you, Sergeant.”

Then she motioned zipping her lip.

Donna Timko was looking playful, almost cute.

But Bubbleen Waters hadn’t exaggerated when she said of Timko, “She’s a nasty piece of work.”

My mind filled with pictures dominated by the color red. The red Jeep on the bridge, followed a few days later by the bloodied interior of a car in a Chuck’s parking lot in LA.

And the latest, Corporal Andy Licht, twenty-three years old, rented tuxedo hanging from a hook in the backseat, St. Christopher hanging from the rearview mirror. This returning soldier was two days from marrying the young woman who’d been waiting for him and praying for his safety. Now Licht was dead, his blood sprayed all over the white tile on the restaurant floor.

Jacobi had said, “Get them to brag. That’s what we want.”

I looked at Timko and said, “Something just happened. I’d like your thoughts on it, Donna.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the magic word?” she said, cocking her head like a predatory bird.





CHAPTER 102


I DON’T THINK it’s a secret in our squad that when we’re doing an interrogation, I’m the bad ass and Conklin is the good cop that women can’t resist. Well, I had Conklin’s role now, and I asked myself, what would Conklin do?

No doubt he would play along with the mean girl in cuffs and tangerine-colored jumpsuit, being attentive and sympathetic and almost for real.

I decided my version of Conklin’s style was “Just us girls.”

I said, “Between us, I’ve got a disaster on my hands and I don’t know what the hell to do next.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Definitely, yeah,” I said. “A belly bomb went off inside a Chuck’s restaurant in Alameda. Same effect as your bombs, but with a shorter time between ingestion and explosion. So, it’s a better bomb.”

Timko’s face crumpled. “Better? How could it be better?”

“That’s what I want to know. You’ve got advanced degrees in chemistry. So how did this copycat improve on your formula? Could someone you know be advancing your work? Give me your thoughts. Please. There. I said the magic word.”

Tears came into Timko’s eyes, beaded up on her lower lid, and spilled over.

What the hell?

“Someone else died because of Chuck’s?” she asked me. “How is that better, Sergeant? What kind of person are you, anyway?”

I guess my face registered surprise, even shock.

This made no sense. Last time I’d seen Timko, she was threatening to run me through a meat grinder.

And then Timko’s face lit up. She was beaming at me.

Man, oh, man. She was like a shape-shifter.

And I remembered that the first time I saw Timko, she was on a monitor attending a Chuck’s senior staff meeting virtually. And she’d been crying.

Crocodile tears.

Timko said, “I kind of love this, Sergeant. Do you know what it’s like to be treated like you’re nothing? Like you don’t even exist? No. That’s my life. Well, I don’t feel like nothing right now. I think I could bend steel bars with my bare hands.”