I was staking out a perp called J. Intel was he was linked to the terror group GAOAEBMIA – Global Attacks on Absolutely Anywhere But Mainly in America. The mission was to just keep track of him. But then I saw he had “bomb” written on the side of his car. And he was heading for San Francisco airport. Time to break the rules and intervene. J panicked and blew himself up. “Well done,” said my boss. “You’ve just stopped a major attack by GAOAEBMIA.”
Two months later, I was having dinner with my husband Joe. It was the first time we’d been together since he told me he was working for the CIA and had had to sleep with another woman in the service of his country. My trust levels were low, but I was working on them. Over dessert, we heard a giant explosion. Sci-Tron had just been blown up. We ran to the scene. I noticed a man standing around looking suspicious. “Hi,” he said. “My name is Connor Grant and I’ve just blown up the Sci-Tron centre killing 25 people.”
“Then I’m arresting you,” I replied. As I was speaking, Joe ran into the building to try to save someone but got badly injured in a secondary explosion. The medics took an age to pull him out. “Do you think he will be OK?” I asked when we reached the hospital in an ambulance. “It’s touch and go,” they said.
Joe pulled through. I could breathe a bit easier. Though not for long. After finding a babysitter for my daughter, whose name I had forgotten and was turning out to be getting in the way of the plot, I went to talk to my old friend Claire who worked in the medical examiner’s office.
“Hi Lindsay,” she said. “There’s something strange going on. I’ve just had my fourth person die of an apparent heart attack when the autopsy revealed their hearts were all completely normal.” “That can only mean...” “Yes. We have a serial killer lurking on the streets of San Francisco.”
Down at the Hyde Medical Center, a patient called Eddie Lamborghini – spelt like the car of the same name – grinned to himself. He was enjoying pretending to be mad and then spending his evenings going through the tunnels of San Francisco that only he knew about in order to murder random people by injecting them with a muscle relaxant.
It was time for Connor Grant’s trial. My close friend Yuki was prosecuting and another close friend Cindy was reporting for the Chronicle. I got to the court to find we were all in for a surprise. Grant had sacked his attorney and had chosen to defend himself. “I’m pleading not guilty,” Grant announced.
I knew I was in for a tough time in the witness box when Grant cross-examined me. “Why did you accuse me of being the GAOAEBMIA bomber?” he asked. “Because you admitted it,” I replied. “I was only having a laugh,” he said. “No more questions.”
It was a low point in my career when Grant was acquitted and I was put under investigation for trying to frame him. I felt like I needed some me time with my close friends Claire, Yuki and Cindy – who, along with me, were all members of the Women’s Murder Club.
“We’ve solved 15 other cases together,” said Cindy encouragingly. “So I’m sure we will solve this one.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “We haven’t even bothered to meet up till page 200. I just feel we’re all getting a bit lazy and are just going through the motions.”
“That’s just not fair,” Yuki cried. “This book has taken at least 10 days, 17 hours and 38 minutes to write. Which is a good hour and a half longer than the last one.”
Claire then remembered that a phial of a toxic muscle relaxant had been found close to one of the murders. “Maybe if we could find someone walking round with a syringe, we could catch the killer,” she said. Later that evening, I spotted Eddie Lamborghini with a syringe and my partner shot him dead. One crime solved, one to go.
Connor Grant felt it was time to change identities for a fourth time before blowing up something else and leaving San Francisco. Just one more thing to do before he left. Email Haight the mastermind behind GAOAEBMIA, who was nicknamed Haight because he lived in the Haight district.
That email was the breakthrough I needed and I raced across the city to catch Grant before he blew somewhere else up. But before I could get to him, I discovered someone else had already killed him so I went home to work on my trust issues with Joe.
Digested read, digested: Not so sweet sixteen.
