1st to Die - James Patterson [6]
I avoided his eyes as I skirted past him out of the suite.
“What the hell’s wrong with Boxer?” Charlie Clapper asked.
“You know women,” I heard Jacobi reply. “They always cry at weddings.”
Chapter 7
PHILLIP CAMPBELL was walking along Powell Street toward Union Square and the Hyatt. The police had actually blockaded the street, and the crowd outside the hotel was growing quickly. The howling screams of police and emergency vehicles filled the air. This was so unlike civilized and respectable San Francisco. He loved it!
Campbell almost couldn’t believe he was headed back to the crime scene. He just couldn’t help himself. Being here again helped him to relive the night before. As he walked closer and closer on Powell, his adrenaline surged, his heart pounded, almost out of control.
He edged through the mob that populated the final block outside the Hyatt. He heard the rumors swirling through the crowd, mostly well-dressed businesspeople, their faces creased with anguish and pain. There were rumors of a fire at the hotel, a jumper, a homicide, a suicide, but nothing came close to the horror of the actual event.
Finally, he got close enough so that he could watch the San Francisco police at work. A couple of them were surveying the crowd, looking for him. He wasn’t worried about being discovered, not at all. It just wasn’t going to happen. He was too unlikely, probably in the bottom 5 percent of the people the police might suspect. That comforted him, thrilled him, actually.
God, he had done it—caused all of this to happen, and he was only just beginning. He had never experienced anything like this feeling, and neither had the city of San Francisco.
A businessman was coming out of the Hyatt, and reporters and other people were asking him questions as if he were a major celebrity. The man was in his early thirties and he smirked knowingly. He had what they all wanted and he knew it. He was lording it over everyone, enjoying his pitiful moment of fame.
“It was a couple—murdered in the penthouse.” He could overhear the man. “They were on their honeymoon. Sad, huh?”
The crowd around Phillip Campbell gasped, and his heart soared.
Chapter 8
WHAT A SCENE! Cindy Thomas pushed her way through the murmuring crowd, the looky-loos surrounding the Grand Hyatt. Then she groaned at the sight of the line of cops blocking the way.
There must’ve been a hundred onlookers tightly pressed around the entrance: tourists carrying cameras, businesspeople on their way to work; others were flashing press credentials and shouting, trying to talk their way in. Across the street, a television news van was already setting up with the backdrop of the hotel’s facade.
After two years spent covering local interest on the Metro desk of the Chronicle, Cindy could feel a story that might jump-start her career. This one made the hairs on her neck stand up.
“Homicide down at the Grand Hyatt,” her city editor, Sid Glass, had informed her after a staffer picked up the police transmission. Suzie Fitzpatrick and Tom Stone, the Chronicle’s usual crime reporters, were both on assignment. “Get right down there,” her boss barked, to her amazement. He didn’t have to say it twice.
But now, outside the Hyatt, Cindy felt her brief run of luck had come to an end.
The street was barricaded. More news crews were pulling up by the second. If she didn’t come up with something now, Fitzpatrick or Stone would soon be handed the story. What she needed was inside. And here she was, out on the curb.
She spotted a line of limos and went up to the first one—a big beige stretch. She rapped on the window.
The driver looked up over his paper, the Chronicle, of course, and lowered the window as she caught his eye.
“You waiting for Steadman?” Cindy asked.
“Uh-uh,” the driver replied. “Eddleson.”
“Sorry, sorry.” She waved. But inside she was beaming. This was her way in.
She lingered in the crowd a few seconds longer, then elbowed her way to the front. A young patrolman