2nd Chance

The second novel in the Women's Murder Club series opens with a drive-by shooting at the La Salle Heights Church in San Francisco's Bay View neighborhood. As 48 children from a choir exit after rehearsal, gunfire erupts from a nearby thicket. Reverend Aaron Winslow, a Desert Storm veteran serving as the church's minister, shields two girls with his body. When the shooting stops, 11-year-old Tasha Catchings lies dead in a flowerbed, her white blouse soaked with blood.

Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) Homicide Detail takes the case, her first since the death of her partner, Inspector Chris Raleigh. Working with her former partner, Inspector Warren Jacobi, Lindsay finds spent rifle casings at the scene; the shooter's position suggests a direct hit on Tasha was nearly impossible. A young witness reports a white van fleeing with a decal resembling a two-headed lion on its door.

Lindsay's friend Cindy Thomas, a crime reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle, reveals a possible connection: Three days earlier, an elderly Black woman named Estelle Chipman was found hanged in an Oakland basement, reclassified as a homicide after skin was found under her fingernails. Claire Washburn, the city's chief medical examiner and Lindsay's closest friend, examines Tasha and determines that two bullets struck her at clean, frontal angles, meaning she was deliberately targeted. At the Oakland crime scene, Lindsay discovers a crude wall drawing of a two-headed figure with a lion's head, a goat's head, and a serpent's tail, matching the van decal and confirming the murders are linked.

A crucial pattern emerges: Chipman's late husband was a retired San Francisco cop, and Tasha's uncle is also a city officer. Lindsay suspects these are not random hate crimes but targeted killings aimed at people connected to Black police officers. She shares this theory with the Women's Murder Club: herself, Claire, Cindy, and Jill Bernhardt, an assistant district attorney who has just learned she is eight weeks pregnant. Claire, reexamining the Chipman case, determines the skin under the victim's nails contains tattoo ink rather than natural pigmentation, proving the killer is white.

The killer strikes twice more. He lures Black Patrol Sergeant Art Davidson into an ambush at an abandoned hotel, killing him with a single rifle shot, and gives his name as "Billy Reffon" on the 911 recording. He then assassinates Chief of Police Earl Mercer on a residential street, shooting him three times at close range. A dog-eared copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology is found in Mercer's jacket; the page describing the chimera, a creature from Greek myth combining a lion, a goat, and a serpent, bears a handwritten note: "More to come . . . justice will be served" (157). Lindsay realizes "Billy Reffon" is a corruption of Bellerophon, the mythological hero who slew the chimera.

The violence spreads to Lindsay's inner circle. The killer phones Claire at home, identifies himself as Chimera, and fires through her window, grazing her neck. Jill suffers a miscarriage at work, devastating the group. Meanwhile, Lindsay's estranged father, Marty Boxer, a former SFPD cop who abandoned the family when Lindsay was 13, reappears and claims he wants to reconnect. Lindsay tentatively lets him stay in her guest room.

Cindy traces the chimera symbol to a white supremacist prison gang at Pelican Bay State Prison. Lindsay interviews the gang's incarcerated leader, Weiscz, who cryptically calls the killings "an inside job" (197). This leads Lindsay to discover that Frank Coombs, a former SFPD street cop, choked a Black teenager named Gerald Sikes to death in the Bay View projects 20 years earlier. Coombs served 20 years for manslaughter and joined the Chimera gang in prison. The connections are damning: The Sikes killing occurred in the same neighborhood where Tasha was shot. Edward Chipman was a spokesman for the Officers for Justice (OFJ), the Black officers' group that pushed for Coombs's prosecution. Mercer was Coombs's field lieutenant. Coombs blamed Black officers for destroying his career.

Confronted by Lindsay, Marty admits he was present the night Coombs killed Sikes, witnessed the choking, and failed to intervene or report it. His concealed complicity was the true reason he abandoned his family. Jill independently corroborates this through the original case file. Devastated, Lindsay orders her father to leave.

Lindsay locates Coombs at a Tenderloin hotel but lacks the physical evidence needed for an arrest. When Coombs slips surveillance, Lindsay, whose cell phone is dead, follows him alone to a Chimera meeting in South San Francisco, where she is captured. Marty, still watching over her, opens fire from the shadows, wounding Coombs and freeing Lindsay. A search of Coombs's hotel room yields clippings connecting each victim to the Sikes case and a photo of Lindsay with her face circled in red.

Days later, Coombs, disguised in a police uniform obtained from a retired cop friend, opens fire on Lindsay on the steps of the Hall of Justice. She is grazed; Jacobi, Detective Cappy McNeil, and other officers kill Coombs. As he dies, he whispers, "One last surprise" (322). Lindsay notices his body bears no tattoo, contradicting the forensic evidence. Claire's autopsy reveals Coombs had advanced Parkinson's disease, making the precision marksmanship in the earlier killings physically impossible. Coombs orchestrated the campaign but was not the shooter.

This is confirmed when the real killer fires through Cindy's apartment window during a dinner with Aaron Winslow, with whom Cindy has begun a relationship. Aaron spots a reflection and shields Cindy, saving her life. Reexamining evidence, Lindsay notices a marksmanship trophy from Coombs's hotel room inscribed "Frank L. Coombs," not "Frank C." The initials belong to Coombs's son, Rusty, a Stanford football player. The white van originated near Palo Alto, Rusty's sealed juvenile records reveal animal cruelty, anti-Semitic vandalism, and race-based violence, and the white chalk at crime scenes matches chalk used by weight lifters.

When police converge on Stanford, Rusty takes a sniper rifle to the observation deck of the 250-foot Hoover Tower and fires on students below. Lindsay enters the tower alone, climbing 13 flights to the deck. Rusty shoots the Glock from her hand, but the tower's carillon bells begin tolling, disorienting him. Lindsay draws a backup Beretta from her ankle holster and kills him. On his chest, she finds the chimera tattoo, pierced by one of her bullets.

Ballistic analysis reveals that one bullet recovered from Frank Coombs does not match any police weapon. It is a .40 caliber round matching those from the house where Marty fired to rescue Lindsay, meaning her father was at the Hall of Justice, protecting her one final time. Lindsay tells Acting Chief Anthony Tracchio the bullet makes no sense to her, and Tracchio files the report without further inquiry.

Months later, the La Salle Heights Church unveils a new stained-glass window depicting a woman reaching toward a young Black girl who resembles Tasha. Lindsay, Claire, Jill, and Cindy stand together in the back of the church, moved to tears. Two weeks later, Lindsay receives a letter from Marty, postmarked Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. He writes that he has stopped running and encloses a Polaroid of a fishing boat he has purchased. The name on the hull is Buttercup, his childhood nickname for Lindsay.