Split Second - Catherine Coulter [27]
He hadn’t visited San Francisco in four, five years, but he remembered the air, how it usually felt crisp and fresh, didn’t matter if it was foggy or rainy or sunny. He breathed in deep, and the air was as he remembered it—fresh and a little exotic, with a touch of the ocean in it.
Both he and Lucy had brought single carry-ons, and both had their SIGs on belt clips after the usual involved paperwork with Dulles security.
The traffic was heavy on 101 into the city. Every once in a while, Coop leaned out the taxi window to look up at the bit of moon posing brighter in the sky with every minute as the sun was setting. Just beautiful. He and Lucy had plenty of time to discuss their plan of attack on the flight over, and were ready and anxious to get moving.
Coop dialed Inspector Vincent Delion’s cell as Lucy tried to understand some of the Russian the taxi driver was speaking on his cell to his wife. Or girlfriend. She’d taken Russian in school, but it sure hadn’t stuck.
“Yo, Delion here. That you, Agent McKnight?”
“That would be me,” Coop said.
“You got an Agent Carlyle with you?”
“Indeed I do.”
Delion said, “I sure hope you guys are hungry. I’ve gotten no calls from the media, which means no leaks yet, and believe me, that’s a real pleasant surprise.”
Thirty minutes later, Lucy and Coop walked into La Barca, a Mexican restaurant on Lombard Street, Delion’s favorite Mexican restaurant in the city, he’d told Coop.
Coop recognized Inspector Vincent Delion immediately. He looked exactly how Savich had described him. “Hey,” he said, “very fine mustache. I’ll bet Hercule Poirot sends you hate mail.”
Delion laughed and gave a loving little twist to the ends of his glistening black handlebar mustache. He knew it was magnificent, a work of art. It was polished to a high gloss, nearly as shiny as his bald head.
“Too bad Poirot’s fiction, and Dame Agatha is dead, or I’ll bet he would,” Delion said with a good deal of satisfaction.
They all shook hands and sized one another up. Both Coop and Lucy recognized the cop in his eyes, eyes that looked ancient, filled with memories of stuff you really didn’t want to know about, eyes that had seen too much over too many years.
And both of them wondered if their eyes held that same knowledge. No, not yet. Delion had twenty years on them.
Once they were seated, a young Latino set a basket of warm tortilla chips in front of them. All hands reached out at the same time, and everyone laughed, including the young guy, Carlos, who was pouring water into their glasses.
Delion said, “These are the best tortilla chips in town. Eat up, kids, the proud city of San Francisco is picking up the tab. When I told our lieutenant, Linda Bridges, you guys had info on the serial killer, and who you believed she was, she said to take you to my favorite place, on us. Then she told everyone to keep their fricking mouths shut, under pain of dismemberment, which never works but scares the rookies for maybe five minutes.”
While they stuffed themselves on chips, salsa, and a bowl of guacamole, Delion talked about the case he’d worked with Dane Carver, and moved on to the continuing sorry saga of the 49ers. As he spoke, Lucy found herself thinking about her grandmother’s attic, a massive open room that ran the full length of the house. She’d be busy for a week going through everything up there. Maybe she would start with the attic when she got back home. It beat searching through any more books.
When she heard Delion and Coop discussing the fate of football since Brett Favre had left the game, Lucy said, “Like Coop, I bow my head and weep when the Redskins lose, Inspector, but I can’t stand it—tell us you’ve found Kirsten Bolger’s mom.”
Delion toasted her with a tortilla chip. “Yes, I found her. It’s a good news, bad news sort of deal, though.”
“What do you mean?”
Delion didn’t answer her until their waitress, Cindy Lou, the archetypical California girl—blond, tanned, and gorgeous—had served their enchiladas