Page 11 of The 24th Hour

She passed her phone to Mary Elena, and leaving heroffice, Yuki went back to the empty cubicle. Gaines peered over the top of the partition, and said, “Hey.”

Yuki looked up and said, “She’s talking to Dr. Aronson. She doesn’t remember you, so probably best if you …”

“Got it.”

Gaines was back in his office when Mary Elena appeared and said to Yuki, “Dr. Aronson didn’t have time to talk with you, but he says he sent you something by email. A video. I told him it was okay.”

After Yuki had walked Mary Elena to the elevator, she stopped off at Gaines’s office, saying, “I need you, Nicky. We’ve got work to do.”

Yuki woke her computer and clicked on the email from Dr. Aronson.

“It’s a therapy session,” Yuki said as Gaines pulled up a chair. “Dated a month ago.”

“Aronson sent this to you?”

“With Mary Elena’s permission.”

Yuki opened the attachment and a video began playing. Dr. Stuart Aronson sat in an easy chair. Mary Elena was in a chair across from him, talking.

Yuki and Gaines watched as the session streamed.

CHAPTER 8

CONKLIN’S FOOT WAS heavy on the gas as we sped to the scene of a fatality on Pacific Avenue. The victim had been identified as James Fricke III: well-known billionaire, middleweight philanthropist, sole owner of a Belgian soccer team, and a narcissistic SOB. The man in his early sixties was now a deceased SOB, shot in the street a block away from where his wife, former Olympic gymnast Holly Bergen Fricke, had been killed six months before.

We still had no leads in Holly Fricke’s murder investigation, and I was willing to bet that soon we’d be looking at another no-clue homicide—the kind of crime that would go unsolved for years, then become a cold case that haunted good cops and turned them into humorless drunks.

Conklin’s mood mirrored mine, but he was expressing his frustration out loud, ranting that Jamie Fricke, the most likely suspect in his wife’s death, had gotten himself killed “on purpose.” Richie’s uncharacteristic outburst shifted into overdrivewhen traffic suddenly stopped, boxing us in at the intersection of Franklin Street and Geary Boulevard.

My partner swore, got out of the car, and took off at a run toward the bottleneck. I stayed in place with the radio and thought about Holly Fricke. I’d been a fan. I’d cheered her on when I was in high school and she was in the Summer Olympics, picking up the gold medal in gymnastics for Team USA.

I’d followed her when she foundedSpike,a women’s sports magazine, and became a familiar face on late-night talk shows. Then Holly married Jamie Fricke. He was a large man, square-faced, dark-eyed. He exuded power the way Holly radiated goodness. They’d looked happy together. And although they hadn’t had any children, babies were named after Holly and deserving high schoolers went to college on her dime.

But now we still didn’t knowwhyHolly Fricke had been killed or bywhom,though Medical Examiner Claire Washburn had told ushow. Holly’s cause of death was an onslaught of .40-caliber rounds from an unregistered handgun, every shot fatally precise. Neither her new Bentley nor the jewelry she’d been wearing, estimated to be worth a low seven figures, had been recovered.

Unofficially, we’d chalked up Holly Fricke’s murder to armed robbery, but privately none of us really bought that. It was excessive. Holly had been shot in broad daylight. No witnesses. Nothing from her husband or friends. Now that Jamie had been killed the same way, I knew we’d missed all of it: means, motive, opportunity—and suspect.

On day one, Holly’s case had been assigned to senior Homicide team sergeants Cappy McNeil and Paul Chi.

Cappy is a wise old hand, a walking chronicle of murders in San Francisco over the last twenty years. His partner, Paul Chi, is as thorough and obsessively detailed an investigator as is humanly possible. It’s said he can find a hair in a haystack. Yet a thousand cop-hours spent working her homicide had yielded zip, not even a theory. If Cappy still had hair, by now he’d have torn it all out. Chi had gone dark and quiet, as though in some fathomless funk.

Conklin and I had been brought in to back up this first-class team, but all we’d been able to surmise was that Holly’s killer knew her movements, had a strategic mind, titanium nerves, and perhaps, a cloak of invisibility.

When questioned, Jamie Fricke had told us as little as possible. He didn’t like cops, which he made clear with his clipped answers and negative attitude. He’d previously been accused of sports crimes, but had skirted the law with handshake deals and payoffs. He brought in his squadron of high-priced lawyers and threatened to hire private investigators.

Somehow, Cappy and Chi had kept the PI threat at bay. But Fricke had offered a quarter of a million dollars as a reward for evidence leading to the arrest and conviction of Holly’s killer, which opened our hotline to an unending plague of useless tips.

My thoughts were derailed as horns blew behind the squad car. Conklin came back to the car and got behind the wheel, released the brake, and I called dispatch to say we would be at the crime scene in ten minutes.

I hit the switch that loosed the lights and siren.

CHAPTER 9

CONKLIN PULLED OUR car over on Steiner Street, at the intersection of Steiner Street and Pacific Avenue. The smart, well-kept homes and small businesses in this upscale neighborhood were now penned in by cruisers with flashing lights, the ME’s stolid van, and the CSU mobile with its panel doors wide-open.

“Ready?” Conklin asked me.

Ready or not, I opened my door.

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