11th hour wmc-11 Page 10

  “What about the identity of the Jane Doe whose picture ran in the Chronicle?”

  “We’re withholding her name until we have a positive ID. We expect to have that information for you shortly.”

  “What about Harry Chandler? Is he a suspect?”

  “Mr. Chandler is cooperating fully with the police and he is not charged with any crimes.”

  I felt like I was in a batting cage facing an automated pitching machine set on kill. Sweat beaded at my hairline. My voice caught in my throat as overlapping comments and questions came flying at me.

  “But the heads were buried in Chandler’s backyard.”

  “Where are the bodies?”

  “Is it true that you have witnesses?”

  “What happened to the bodies?”

  “How were the victims killed?”

  I avoided a few more inside fastballs, then Brady came to my rescue. He waved his hands and said, “Thank you, that’s all for today.”

  I left the room through the back door. I went along the hallway, took the stairs down, then exited into the astonishingly beautiful rotunda.

  I was glad to get into the sunshine, and the farther I got from room 200 the better. I was heading toward the garage when my phone buzzed. I looked to see — it was a text from Cindy.

  You did good.

  I smiled and put my phone back in my jacket pocket, then heard a man’s voice call my name.

  Naturally, Jason Blayney had followed me. I should have made a bet, because I would have won money on it.

  “No comment,” I said to Blayney. “I’m done commenting for the day.”

  “Have lunch with me,” he said. “Please.”

  Chapter 50

  I wanted to straighten Blayney out, on or off the record — and I wanted to know why he was on my case.

  He saw me hesitate and set the hook. “How about St. Francis Fountain? They have a fabulous breakfast menu.”

  He was talking about a classic old-timey eatery on the corner of Twenty-Fourth and York, built almost a hundred years ago.

  I said, “Okay, okay, okay.”

  I followed Blayney to the Fountain, parked my car where I’d be able to see it through the plate-glass window, and went inside.

  The diner had a soda fountain on one side of the room, straight-backed wooden booths on the other side, and tables and chairs in the window apse. Blayney called out to me from the window table and I slid into a chair across from him.

  The waitress came with the laminated menus listing your standard diner fare: burgers, club sandwiches, malts, and shakes.

  I ordered decaf and toast. Blayney went for the big man’s breakfast: pancakes, chorizo hash, fried potatoes, high-octane java.

  While we waited for the food, Blayney told me all about himself: his education, his job with the Times, his opportunity at the Post, and his determination to rule crime journalism.

  The food came, and he talked while he ate, kept talking until there was nothing on his plate but a smear of syrup.

  Then he placed his utensils on the upper right rim of the plate and told me that he believed in supporting the police department. And that he also believed that people have a right to know how the police department does its job.

  “It’s my duty to tell them the truth,” he said earnestly.

  “What were you doing when you told your readers that six hundred and thirteen people had been killed?”

  “Okay, that was my editor who did that,” Blayney said. “If I go a couple of days on a story without news, he’ll boost what I do have. So the number six thirteen becomes six hundred and thirteen victims. You can’t tell me otherwise, can you? Let me ask that another way — what does the number mean exactly?”

  “Jason, that number is exactly the kind of detail we don’t release, and if it wasn’t for your story, I would not have mentioned it today. When the nutjobs start confessing to crimes they didn’t commit, details, like handwritten index cards, are how we exclude them. Do you understand? So, by putting six hundred and thirteen out there, you made our job much harder. Maybe six hundred and thirteen times harder.”

  “Well, I’m sorry. I really am. I had to run with something. Give me something now. I can make you the heroine of this story,” Blayney said.

  “I’m not looking for that, Jason. I’m not a hero. I’m not superhuman. My partner and I, all of the SFPD, we’re doing our best, working as hard as humanly possible. Print that, will you?”

  I dug a five out of my pocket and put it down on the table.

  I left the diner thinking it had been a mistake to go there. I’d wanted him to give the good guys a break, but that wouldn’t give him the brazen headlines that sold papers.

  I could almost see his next story: a photo of my back as I went to my car and a quote, “Sergeant Boxer tells this reporter, ‘I’m doing the best I can.’”

  Chapter 51

  By the time I got back to my desk, Cindy’s featured story about the press conference was the front page of the Chronicle online.

  Cindy’s headline:

  ONE ELLSWORTH VICTIM IDENTIFIED; SFPD STILL SCRAMBLING.

  I scanned the article.

  Cindy’s lede was about Marilyn Varick, her background, her triumphs. The second paragraph detailed her more recent decline. There was a picture of Marilyn coming out of the ocean with her surfboard, and then Marilyn Varick was left behind as the article steamed ahead.

  Although Marilyn Varick has been identified, six victims remain unnamed. Sergeant Lindsay Boxer of Homicide admitted this morning that the SFPD still has no suspects and no leads to solving the crimes committed at the Ellsworth compound.

  I finished reading Cindy’s irritating story and wondered if I was paranoid.

  I said to Conklin, “I’m starting to pick up a bash-Boxer trend in the media. Do I look like a pinata to you?”

  He glanced up, said, “A little bit. Your bangs, maybe. Why do you ask?”

  He laughed. I stuck out my tongue and said, “Well then, I’m going to be the best pinata I can be.”

  Just then, Brady’s door opened. He stood there and stared across the bullpen, then called the two of us into his office.

  Brady looked like he’d been sleeping facedown on his desk. His skin was ashen and he had swollen bags under his eyes. Whatever was on his mind, I could tell it was bad.

  Brady said, “I just got a heads-up that Chaz Smith’s society wife is going public. Big-time. Prime time. Her interview with Katie Couric is going to air tonight.”

  I grabbed the one side chair and Conklin leaned his tail-bone against the credenza. He asked, “What’s the gist of the story?”

  “Mrs. Smith says that her husband was an undercover cop. That the SFPD screwed up, of course. Narcotics is going to take the heat for Smith, but his murder is going to get connected to the ones last night in the hood, and therefore, Homicide will also take a beating.”

  I looked at the stacks of personnel folders on his desk. Brady saw me looking and went on. “I asked for a rundown of all police personnel who have been suspended or canned. Or who have had some sort of major meltdown due to either a one-off incident or the cumulative wear and tear of being a cop.

  “I went over every cop’s file in every department.”

  He dragged his chair out from behind his desk and dropped into it. He sighed, then looked at me and Conklin. “It makes me sick to have to say it, but the person on the top of my list is your old partner, Boxer. Yours too, Conklin. Warren Jacobi.”

  I almost had a meltdown myself.

  Spots blinked on and off in front of my eyes and I thought for a minute that I was going to faint.

  Jacobi was on medical leave. He hadn’t punched a time clock in months. He was tough, but he was not a vigilante. I refused to believe otherwise.

  I finally managed to say, “Boss, that’s not possible. With all due respect, you don’t know Warren Jacobi. At all.”

  Chapter 52

  My relationship with Jacobi went back ten
years. He was my partner for most of that time, and we were nothing short of great together. We averaged fourteen hours a day sitting side by side in a car or face-to-face across our desks.

  I laughed at his crude jokes and he told me I was brilliant, since I thought he was funny. We solved some terrible crimes together and became the closest of friends. It got so that we moved as though we were operating with the same brain.

  Then something happened that brought us even closer together. In fact, it bonded us with blood.

  We’d been watching a late-model Mercedes parked in a bad neighborhood. When it took off at seventy miles an hour, we followed. It was a chase that ended when the top-of-the-line luxury sedan crashed and flipped in a dark and desolate alley.

  Two kids were in the car, both sky-high on meth. The older was a fifteen-year-old girl with a pixie haircut, a pink sweater, and I think some kind of sparkly makeup on her cheeks. Her brother was two years younger and he was injured.

  Both of them were crying and bloody and afraid we would tell their father that they had taken his car. Jacobi and I put one and one together, got two scared teens, called for medics, and put our weapons down.

  It was a mutual lapse of judgment and could have been the biggest mistake of our lives.

  The girl went for her learner’s permit and pulled out a gun. She got off five shots, hitting me twice, and her brother put three rounds into Jacobi before I managed to take them down. Then we lay on the deserted street and almost bled to death before the ambulance came.

  Jacobi’s injuries that night had slowed him down. He couldn’t run. He put on weight. He was in constant pain, and about ten months ago, Jacobi had been promoted to chief.

  The pain got to him though, and recently, Jacobi had taken medical leave to have his damaged hip replaced.

  “He’s been out for three months,” Brady said to me now. “Jacobi was either off duty or on leave when the first three shootings occurred. He was off the radar when Chaz Smith was taken out and when those three shits were wasted on Schwerin.”

  Brady talked over my objections. Told me to hear him out.

  “Jacobi can use his radio two ways: to gather intel and to create a distraction. He has street sources. He could go into the property room at any time. He’s chief of police, Boxer. Who’s gonna suspect him? He can hide in plain sight the way only a fifty-five-year-old white guy with a limp can.”

  “He’s not a killer.”

  “Let’s say you’re wrong,” Brady said.

  “He’s like family to me,” I said.

  “I don’t buy it either,” Conklin said. “He’s a great cop. He just wouldn’t go off the deep end and become a vigilante.”

  Brady waved our comments away.

  “I need you both to work closely with me. We’re not going to say anything to Jacobi or to anyone else. We’re just going to watch him.”

  My mind drifted.

  I hadn’t been in touch with Jacobi in months. I’d gone to the hospital after his operation. I’d brought flowers, but I’d called him only a couple of times after that. It was embarrassing to think about it. I wondered now how was he doing.

  Was he depressed?

  Was he angry?

  Did getting shot on Larkin Street by a drug user constitute motive to go on a killing spree?

  According to Brady, it did.

  “Are you listening to me, Boxer?”

  “I’m sorry. No. What did you say?”

  “I said, if anyone can talk him in, it’s the two of you. I’ll tell you where to be and when. That’s all.”

  Chapter 53

  At just after 6:00 p.m. Revenge was standing at the counter at Peet’s waiting for take-out coffee for his drive home.

  Someone had left the Post behind and he read the front-page story about the shooting outside the projects. Despite the overheated writing about the deaths of the three dirtbag drug dealers, it was clear that the cops had nothing on the shooter except the gun he’d tossed into the car, the gun that had been used to take out Chaz Smith.

  There were no prints on that gun, and there was no way to link it or anything else to him.

  The primary on the case was Lindsay Boxer. He had met Boxer a couple of times back in the day. She was a hands-on homicide cop, maybe gifted, and certainly tenacious. But smart and dogged could only help you so much when you didn’t have a clue.

  Martina, the girl behind the counter, took cash from an old man with a limp, said, “Thank you. Come back soon.”

  She closed the cash drawer, dropped the small change into a cup, and exhaled a long sigh.

  Revenge knew that Martina was depressed about her pending divorce. Although she laughed it off, called it “losing a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” Martina was obviously heartsick.

  She put on a brave face for him and said of the front-page story, “That’s something, isn’t it?”

  She poured hot coffee into a cardboard coffee cup, leaving two inches at the top for milk, the way he liked it. “Some kind of vigilante is killing drug dealers. Have you heard about him? He’s called Revenge.”

  “Just reading about it now,” he said. “I don’t read the paper all that often.”

  “But you do watch TV, right? One of the guys Revenge killed was a big-deal undercover cop, and his wife is going to be on TV tonight. With Katie Couric.”

  “No kidding. Well, maybe I’ll watch it then.”

  He smiled at the waitress, poured milk into the cup, and capped it. He left four dollars on the counter, told Martina to take care, and went out into the strip mall.

  He got into his vehicle and called his wife, told her he’d be home in half an hour; did she need him to pick up anything?

  “No, thanks. We’re good, sweetie,” she said.

  Revenge hung up and had just started the engine when he saw something that almost snapped his head back. It was Raoul Fernandez, a scumbag drug dealer who was moving up in his world from small-timer selling teenths in the hood to distributor with young kids doing the dealing for him.

  While Revenge was with the DEA task force, he’d looked for evidence against this ugly piece of work. Fernandez was cagey and elusive, and after serving two years for dealing, he had been released.

  That should never have happened. Now Revenge watched Fernandez lock up his sporty little Mercedes and head across the parking lot toward the Safeway.

  The strip mall was busy. Revenge had just been seen by Martina and everyone who’d been in Peet’s. He knew he ought to let Fernandez go. He should drive home to his family, just drive away.

  But fuck it. He might not get this chance again.

  Revenge got his gun out of the glove box and stepped out of his car. He walked past the Mercedes and followed a dozen yards behind the drug dealer, his gun pressed against his leg.

  Fernandez might have heard something, or maybe he just had a sixth sense; the dealer turned toward Revenge, and he had a gun in his hand.

  Revenge felt his heart rate spike.

  The voice inside his head was saying, This was a mistake. This is where I go down. I guess I want it to happen. Today.

  Chapter 54

  Conklin and I stood with Charlie Clapper on the bricks behind the Ellsworth compound watching CSU pack up their gear. The garden was pocked with holes and heaped with mounds of dirt; it looked as if a hundred woodchucks on crack had run amok there.

  Still, no additional heads or any other body parts had been found. There was no new evidence of any kind.

  I was struck again by how twisted this case was, how unusual in every way.

  Ninety-nine percent of the time, a homicide investigation revolves around a body and a scene where the crime actually took place.

  You’ve got an assortment of material to work with: clothing, blood, fingerprints, hard evidence that can tell you who the victim was, what caused his death, and possibly when the victim died. You can even compare a photograph of the victim with the DMV’s database and most of the time can come up with a name.
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  Or you start with a missing-person report and you work the case from the other side. You start with dental records, maybe DNA, a list of friends, coworkers, phone numbers, the time the missing person was last seen.

  All we had were holes, piles of dirt, unidentified remains, and a list of suspects that barely made the needle jump.

  We couldn’t even say for sure that the seven victims had died from homicidal violence. Maybe they had all died of natural causes and their heads were brought to the site for burial.

  All we knew for certain was that whoever buried those heads had access to the garden behind the Ellsworth compound over a period of perhaps ten years or more.

  As we waited for the forensic anthropologist to complete her measurements and run the data through software that could put virtual features on bare skulls, we could do nothing but hope for a lucky break or — please, God — a confession.

  Now Clapper unzipped his coveralls, stripped off his gloves, and sighed.

  “We’ve sifted every square foot of this place. We’ve got everything there is to get. Those artifacts we pulled out of the graves were clean. No prints. No DNA. Just doodads.”

  “If we identify the victims, the doodads may mean something to the families,” I said.

  Clapper said, “Okay, then. I gotta get out of here. My wife is expecting me home for dinner, first time this week.”

  I felt deflated and frustrated. I was about to suggest to Conklin that we go to the firing range and put a lot of holes in some paper targets when Brady’s phone reached out and connected with mine.

  “Boxer, there’s been a shooting. Looks like another one of these freaking Revenge killings. That son of a bitch. Is Conklin with you? Good. You two go to Potrero Center. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”