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  “Sequestered in this hospital, I tend to be a little out of touch. Especially when people don’t visit you.”

  “I was here last week,” Vail said.

  “I don’t consider you ‘people,’” Manette said. “I mean real flesh-and-blood humans.”

  “Sounds like you’re doing well,” Robby said. “Getting back to your old self.” He gestured toward her with a raise of his chin. “How’s your hip coming along?”

  “I got me a brand new one, titanium or some shit like that. Bionic space-age technology. I’m going to be faster, stronger than before.”

  “Yeah,” Vail said. “And she’ll be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

  “I got a doc who’s got a bedside manner just like yours,” Manette said. “I slapped him upside the head. He’s much nicer to me now.” She shifted her weight and grabbed the parallel bars. “If he wasn’t such a hunk, I’da fired his ass the first day.”

  Vail’s phone rang. Her hand sprung to the holster and silenced it, then pulled it free. Glanced at the display and said to Robby, “It’s your father.”

  Robby rolled his eyes. “Will you stop saying that every time your boss calls you?”

  Vail feigned innocence.

  “What’s that?” Manette asked. “Vail’s ASAC’s your father?” She looked back and forth at both of them. “Man, Kari. You don’t tell me nothin’. Sounds like I missed some juicy shit wasting away in this here hospital.”

  “Juicy shit, indeed.” Vail turned and answered the call.

  “Karen,” Thomas Gifford said. “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday. But something’s come up.”

  “I think this is the part where I make believe there’s static on the line and then press the END button.”

  “I’m serious, Karen. I’ve got something here.”

  “And you’ve got at least eleven other profilers you can call.”

  “The one I really need has retired. And he’s out of the country so I can’t even give him a shout. So you’re it.”

  “Robby and I have plans with Jonathan for a movie later.”

  “Take a rain check. A detective just called the unit with a fresh eighty-two-year-old female, sexually assaulted and murdered.”

  “So you want Mark Safarik. He’s the world expert on the sexual homicide of elderly females—”

  “Yes, yes,” Gifford said. “But like I said, he’s unreachable. And I know you worked with him before he retired and coauthored his last paper.”

  Vail sighed. “So I’m the pinch hitter.”

  “For lack of a better term, yeah.”

  Vail looked at Robby and gave him a thumbs down sign. “Where and when?”

  “We’ve got you booked on a flight to San Francisco leaving out of Reagan in two hours.”

  “San Francisco? Wait, I get it. This is a joke, right? I had the nightmare of my life in Napa, so you’re sending me back there a few months after I got out of that godforsaken place. Good one, sir.” She pressed END and disconnected the call.

  “Problem?” Robby asked.

  Her BlackBerry rang again seconds later. Vail looked at the phone, then at Robby. Brought the handset to her ear. “You weren’t kidding, were you.”

  “No, Karen, I wasn’t. I’m emailing you the flight information. Pack whatever you need and get over to Reagan ASAP.”

  “Fine.”

  “And—please, promise me one thing.”

  “Only one thing, sir?”

  “Only one thing,” Gifford repeated. “But it’s a big one. Stay out of trouble. This one time. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

  6

  Karen Vail arrived at San Francisco International Airport at 11 PM. Her connecting flight in Atlanta was delayed due to weather somewhere over the country, so she’d picked up a copy of Nelson DeMille’s latest novel at an airport bookstore and devoured half of it by the time she touched down at SFO.

  Robby had turned her on to DeMille. He’d said DeMille’s main character, John Corey, was a lot like her—a sarcastic, wise-cracking former detective. She told Robby he had his head up his ass. But now that she’d read DeMille’s novels, she realized that maybe she did share a few similar characteristics with John Corey—but she wouldn’t give Robby the satisfaction.

  “First of all, I’m not a wiseass,” she started. He merely squinted at her. Fine, that wasn’t too convincing an argument. I wouldn’t believe that one, either. “Second, I’m a lot better cop than Corey.”

  That was when Robby tilted his head and said, “You’re comparing your skill set to a fictional character?” And then he delivered his zinger, designed to put her in her place: “Besides. Come to think of it, I think maybe Corey’s a little smarter than you are.”

  At that point, Vail fell back on the only card she had left to play. “Who would you rather sleep with. Fictitious John Corey, or me?”

  Robby didn’t have a comeback for that—or he chose to keep it to himself. Wise choice.

  Vail took a cab to the Hyatt Regency in the city, left a message for Inspector Lance Burden that she had arrived later than she had anticipated, and told him she would meet him at 8 AM at the Hall of Justice’s Homicide Detail on Bryant Street. Then she sent an email to her friend, Roxxann Dixon, an investigator with the Napa County District Attorney’s office, who served with her on the Crush Killer task force a few months back. Vail didn’t know if they would be able to coordinate a dinner together, but she wanted her to know that she was working a serial killer case in the city in case they had a chance to see one another.

  The wind coming off the Bay struck her as she got out of the cab on California Street. Vail walked past the cable car, loading passengers in front of the Hyatt, and strode up to the hotel’s entrance, where the escalators carried her up to the third floor. As the moving stairs lifted her toward the lobby, the grandness of the central atrium left her jaw slack. Ahead, a massive sculpture—it looked like a swirling copper sphere—sat atop a black marble base with water cascading down its sides. To her left, thousands of tiny lights, suspended from above, stretched what must’ve been a hundred feet in length by a hundred feet in width.

  “Wow,” she said under her breath.

  After so many sleepless nights on this coast, Vail was relieved to enjoy a restful evening, in a comfortable bed and no middle-of-the-night pages, texts, or calls. She dreamt of Robby and was disappointed when she awoke early to find that he wasn’t beside her. Despite the momentary letdown, she felt refreshed and ready to go to work.

  She showered. Then, while wrapped in a bath sheet, pulled open the curtains and peered out the window for the first time. Her view was the finest she had ever seen: the room was on the fourteenth floor and overlooked the Embarcadero and Port of San Francisco. Maybe this trip won’t be so bad after all.

  To her right stood the steel blue Bay Bridge, stretching from an island on the left all the way to the furthest reaches of her window’s field of vision on the right. A cargo ship marked Hanjin in enormous white letters set against a dark body ferried blue and red containers on its back. An escort tug tailed it a safe distance astern as both vessels passed beneath the farthest span of the bridge.

  The sky was a thick gray, remnants of fog hanging low in the distance. While pondering the weather and what to wear, her wakeup call came, the automated voice welcoming her and informing her that the high temperature was expected to be a nippy 52 degrees. Actually, the recording omitted the adjective.

  In her haste to pack—Gifford hadn’t left her much time—she’d neglected to check the weather. She pulled out the pair of form-fitting jeans that she had worn on the plane and snuggled into a tight-knit black sweater. She stepped into the cylindrical, windowed elevator and again marveled at the curtain of hanging lights as the car descended to the lobby. Curbside, she was about to hail a taxi when a text message from Inspector Burden hit her BlackBerry. He wanted to meet instead at the crime scene, in an area he called the Marina District.

  Vail supplied th
e cab driver the address and asked how long till they arrived. It was only a few miles—a ten-minute ride, traffic permitting.

  She arrived as promised, in front of a well-appointed line of charming row houses, decked out in muted colors of butterscotch and sapphire, each sporting their own variation of wrought iron-wrapped balconies.

  Standing out front of a creamy avocado building marked with a brass “114” was a tall, thin man chomping on a slice of gum. Vail paid the taxi driver, then walked up to the house. “Karen Vail. Are you Burden?”

  The inspector extended a hand. “With a lot of things, yeah.”

  Vail took it. His grip was soft and quick. “A sense of humor. A bad one, but a sense of humor. That’s good.”

  “My kids give me shit too.”

  “About the weak handshake or your bad jokes?”

  Burden drew back. “Man, you’re a fiery one. Give me a few minutes to adjust to that, okay?”

  “Only a few minutes? You’re in danger of impressing me, Inspector.”

  He eyed her cautiously. “Maybe a few days.”

  Vail broke a smile. “That’s more like it. But if it helps, I’m told I grow on you once you get to know me.”

  “I wanted Mark Safarik.”

  Vail nodded. Hey, if it was me, I’d want Safarik, too. But she kept that to herself. “He’s not available. You get me.”

  Burden pulled his leather jacket tighter as the wind whipping off the Bay blew through his thin shirt.

  Vail shivered. “What’s up with your weather? It’s July. If I’d known it was gonna be this goddamn cold, I’d have packed a jacket and gloves.”

  Burden pulled a key from his pocket and unlocked the door to the house. “Don’t you know the famous quote?”

  Vail frowned. “I know a lot of famous quotes, Inspector. You have a particular one in mind?”

  “‘The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent in San Francisco.’ Mark Twain. Well, some think Twain said it.”

  “Nope. Never heard it.”

  Burden moved inside the house. “The city’s weather is kind of like Australia, all messed up calendar-wise.”

  Vail eyed him. “Okay. Right. San Francisco is Australia. Got it.” She followed him in through the door and up the stairs.

  “Any security other than locks on the doors?”

  “Nope.” Burden led her inside, to the mouth of the living room. “That bedroom there,” he said, gesturing down the hall with a nod of his chin. “That’s where the body was found.”

  Read the rest of Inmate 1577, which was named to The Strand magazine’s Top 10 Best Books of the Year list.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Alan Jacobson

  ISBN: 978-1-4976-5597-3

  This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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