“So, Sampson was chained up for what, the last hour? Maybe two?”
I nodded, overtly lying, but still trying to convince myself.
Sampson wouldn’t do this, I reasoned. He promised me . . .
And he spent a whole year pretending he was dead. The realization hit me like a fist to the gut and I felt my lips part, felt the words pressing against my teeth.
But Alex was ignoring me, cell phone pressed to his ear.
I studied the explosion of police officers unrolling crime scene tape and trying to hold back curious onlookers. Squad cars were parked up on sidewalks, giving us a still-narrow street to maneuver down once the office on patrol waved us through.
“We got to the crime scene just over an hour ago.”
I raised my eyebrows, feeling a sense of relief for the first time in weeks. “See?”
“I see that this massacre happened at least ten to twelve hours ago. Were you with Pete Sampson ten to twelve hours ago?”
I opened my mouth, my brain racking through the last several hours of my life: prowling through the UDA, prowling through Alex’s office, running out of the police station wearing fifty percent of a pair of handcuffs . . . knocking on Will’s door, Pete Sampson coming out of the shower.
Just a shower, I told myself.
“You don’t seem to be jumping in with a defense,” Alex noted.
“Why are you so hell-bent on crucifying Sampson?” I roared.
“Why are you so hell-bent on keeping your head in the sand?”
I had never seen that kind of rage from Alex before. It should have frightened me, but it only made me throw my shoulders back, narrowing my eyes in a hard challenge. I had to believe in Sampson—I just had to.
“Get out,” Alex spat. “I want you to see something.”
The sea of police officers parted as Alex flashed his badge and I hurried behind him. It was still unnaturally hot for San Francisco, but now there was something else hanging in the air—something that clawed at my chest and made it hard to breathe. I looked around cautiously, wondering if anyone else felt it, too. No one seemed to; all eyes were saucer-wide and glued to the taped-off door of the Du delicatessen, Chinese America Food Wi-Fi Bathroom for Customers Only.
The silence should have alerted me. At no time in my entire adult life had I known my city to be as eerily quiet as it was now. No one spoke. No birds chirped. No cars backfired, no church bells chimed, no planes whooshed overhead. There was nothing but an impenetrable, unholy silence.
Alex paused in front of a table set up along the sidewalk, blocking the entrance to the delicatessen. A police pop-up tent shaded it, and the table was heaped with all manner of crime scene preservation material. The man behind the table nodded solemnly when Alex showed him his badge, and pushed forward to stacks of hospital-looking garb.
“Put these on.” Alex didn’t look at me when he spoke to me, and I picked up my own stack of disposable crime scene cover-ups.
“These, too?” I asked, referring to the tie-back paper hats left on the table.
Alex nodded, the tension stiffening his body palatable.
“Yeah, it’s that bad,” the guy behind the table filled in, handing me a hat. I saw his eyes go to my cuffed wrist. “It’s couture,” I said hastily.
I tucked my mass of red curls up and nodded to Alex. “I’m ready.”
He grabbed my elbow and steered me to the door. I sucked in a preparatory breath and steeled myself, stepping into the dim delicatessen.
“Holy shit.” It was out of my mouth before I had a chance to think about it, and had I thought about it, I would have screamed. The stark white tiles and Formica tables that I had grown accustomed to in the store were still there, only now they were stained a heinous red. The little anime dolls wielding swords and arrows and daggers were drowning in sticky pools of it, and all around me bodies were scattered in various positions of desperate escape: a small woman’s fingers still curled, clawing the floor as she’d tried to pull herself toward the door; a young boy I recognized from a recent visit was only partially visible as he must have attempted to sprint out the back, and Xian, her bubble-gum-pink baby-doll dress in angry shreds, each tear to the fabric puckered and blood soaked, as if her attacker had had claws—claws that recently drew enormous amounts of human blood.