12th of Never Page 11

But nothing was as scary or as emotionally devastating as my tiny daughter having a fever of 103.

  The second I got home and read the thermometer, I called Julie’s pediatrician and insisted that she be paged, because I wasn’t getting off the phone until I spoke with her.

  Dr. Gordon was very patient. She said that Julie’s fever meant that she was fighting an infection—that she could have an earache, for instance—and to give her a lukewarm bath followed by liquid Tylenol every four hours.

  I made an appointment to bring Julie in to see the doctor in the morning. Then I sat in the bathtub with my baby in my lap. I desperately wanted to bathe away her fever without letting her know that I was scared out of my freaking mind.

  Joe sat on the toilet seat, singing “Oh! Susanna” in the soft, slow way James Taylor recorded it. His singing was like a lullaby, but it didn’t soothe the baby.

  She cried. She was limp. I wanted to take her to the hospital right then, but Joe said no.

  “It’s too risky. She could pick up a worse infection in the hospital,” he said. “Let’s do what Dr. Gordon said.”

  I sponged Julie down with the tepid water and when we were both wrinkled, Joe helped us out of the bath and we took her with us into bed.

  Her temperature had dropped to 102. It was a change in the right direction, but still outside my comfort zone. I called Dr. Gordon again and she phoned back at just before ten that night.

  “It’s probably nothing. Try not to worry,” she said.

  “Right,” I said into the phone.

  “If her temperature goes to a hundred and four, take her straight to the emergency room.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning. Try to get some sleep.”

  “Thanks, Doctor,” I said.

  No one slept at our house except Martha, and we were at the doctor’s office as soon as the doors opened.

  Dr. Gordon weighed Julie, examined her, made notes on her chart. The doctor’s expression was so neutral I couldn’t read it, not even between the lines.

  “I wish she’d put on a little more weight,” she said.

  “She’s been fussy from the beginning,” I said.

  “I’m going to draw some blood. Standard procedure,” said the doctor. “Just to get a baseline.”

  Joe held Julie as the stick pricked my daughter’s tiny pink heel. Julie howled, of course, and I just hid my face until it was over.

  I asked the doctor to tell us everything. “Don’t hold anything back.”

  Finally, Dr. Gordon cracked a smile.

  “She’s got a fever, but it’s not abnormal. I’ll call you when I get back her blood work. Meanwhile, you should all get some sleep.”

  As soon as I hit the sheets, my cell phone rang. I read the caller ID and then told Brady, “Whatever it is has got to wait. I need four hours of sleep. Just four.”

  Brady ignored me.

  “Boxer, that streetcar driver on the F line?”

  “What? Who?”

  “Your professor said a streetcar driver was going to be shot, remember?”

  “Oh. No. Don’t tell me.”

  “We’ve got a female streetcar driver who took a bullet about an hour ago. Right between the eyes. Just like the professor said.”

  Chapter 49

  BY THE TIME I dragged myself to the Ferry Building, at the Embarcadero and Market Street, the perimeter was in place and the building was the backdrop for a messy crime scene made worse by the stationary streetcar and the throttled morning rush.

  Of the three lanes of traffic running in each direction, four were stopped cold and the other two were stalled. There is a wide median strip adjacent to the streetcar tracks, a strip of plaza between the northbound and southbound lanes. On any other day, this strip would have been busy with buskers, mimes, cyclists, and skateboarders. Now, in place of all the activity, there were black-and-white cruisers, ambulances, the crime scene mobile unit, and traffic cops.

  I parked the Explorer at the edge of the pack of law enforcement vehicles and headed toward the evidence tent that had been set up on the median. I picked out Conklin and Morales, who were talking to Clapper and a stocky guy I didn’t know. He had an authoritative air and tiny little eyes.

  He had to be our temporary medical examiner.

  Conklin introduced me to Dr. Morse, and I said, “Pleased to meet you.” Then I asked Conklin to give me the details.

  “That’s the primary crime scene,” he said, pointing to the 1940s-style green-and-cream-colored trolley.

  Conklin said, “The victim is still in there. Her name is Janet Rice, thirty-four, African American, married with two children. She’s been working as a driver for sixteen years.”

  “She’s black?”

  “She was on her usual route,” Conklin said. “There was a shot fired. She was killed instantly.”

  “Tell me we’ve got some witnesses,” I said.

  “Someone pulled the door lever and everyone who could get out did. A bystander called nine-one-one. Units are canvassing now.”

  I heard my name and turned to see Paul Chi and his partner, Cappy McNeil, coming toward me.

  Chi had been bodyguarding a blond streetcar driver and McNeil had been shadowing Professor Judd.

  Chi said, “Sergeant, the driver we identified with the blond hair is Tara Moffett. Always works the F line. I’ve been her constant companion for the last week, and Lemke took the second shifts. Ms. Moffett is a hundred percent fine. I’d say she wasn’t the target.”

  The sun was beating down. There were sailboats out on the bay. This should have been a beautiful sight, but there were also helicopters overhead, news choppers. If there was anything worse than a shooting, it was a shooting that affected the city’s tourist business.

  The video guys in the helicopters were getting phenomenal photos that would play brilliantly on national television. The San Francisco Bay. The bridges. The sailboats on the sun-flecked waves. The streetcar in front of the monumental Ferry Building and the buglike cruisers around the evidence tent.

  McNeil said, “I watched the professor night and day. Samuels watched him when I was off duty. Professor Judd couldn’t have taken a shit without our knowing it.”

  To my left, Brady was lifting the barrier tape for the mayor, then both of them came toward us.

  “Brief the lieutenant, will you?” I said to Conklin. “I’ve got to call home.”

  Chapter 50

  THE INSIDE OF the streetcar was crawling with crime techs in bunny suits and booties, shooting pictures, capturing prints, trying not to fall over one another or step in potential evidence.

  I stood on the street, looking through the open folding doors at the front part of the streetcar, especially at the driver’s seat, where Janet Rice had been sitting before she stopped at Market to take on passengers.

  A dozen feet away from me, Conklin and Morales were at the doors in the middle of the car, Conklin explaining crime scene procedure even as Claire’s stand-in, Dr. Morse, stood impatiently behind him.

  Janet Rice’s body was lying across from Conklin, her head and shoulders wedged between two seats, legs in the aisle, blood pooling under her head and running under the seat behind her.

  As Judd described his dream, he had been about to hand his ticket to the driver when she took a shot between the eyes. So if the dream matched reality, the shooter would have been standing behind the professor and would have fired the gun from over his shoulder.

  If that was true, Rice’s killer had likely waited for the streetcar to stop. He had climbed aboard, or maybe just stood on the top step. From there, he had a fleeting clear shot at the driver and had taken it. Then, as all eyes went to the victim, he’d stepped back down onto the street and blended into the crowd.

  As the ME’s techs struggled to remove the victim, I heard Morales say to Conklin, “I’m going to do my dissertation on this psychic angle. Whether the professor is clairvoyant or not, this case has all the elements of a classic ser
ial killing.”

  Conklin nodded and said, “Oh, absolutely.”

  I noticed something of a frisky nature in their body language. They were standing hip to hip. Making lots of eye contact. What was going on between those two, exactly? Was this your typical workplace flirtation? Or was it something more?

  I didn’t have a chance to chase down this train of thought because to my left, coming from the direction of the Ferry Building, a female voice shouted out, “No, no, nooo.”

  I picked her out of the crowd.

  A teenage girl in a Catholic school uniform was making a run for the streetcar. Cops grabbed her by the arms before she breached the tape, but they were having a hard time restraining her. She was determined and desperate and she was breaking my heart.

  “Mom-ma,” she screamed. “Mom-maaaa.”

  Chapter 51

  ONCE AGAIN, CONKLIN and I were closeted in an interview room with the little professor and his gigantic ego. Professor Judd had predicted a second murder and he could not be happier with himself.

  Right then, he was drawing a diagram on a pad of paper.

  “Clairvoyance means ‘clear seeing,’” Judd said. “There are several forms of clairvoyance—for instance, telepathy. With telepathy, a person reads another person’s thoughts. Remote viewing is when you can see what someone else sees, as they are seeing it.”

  Judd drew circles and arrows to illustrate what he knew about extrasensory perception. If he really was clairvoyant, I had to say it was an impressive talent. Still, he didn’t seem to care that another person had died. And that his “talent” was useless unless it led to catching a killer.

  “I have precognition,” Judd said. “I see events before they happen. Frankly, I don’t yet understand how I suddenly came to have this gift.”

  The professor was musing. He’d gone into his head—a scary, mysterious, and also tedious place to be.

  A good interrogator befriends the subject, flatters him, encourages him to talk, hoping he’ll trap himself in a lie or make a confession.

  But patience was my partner’s forte, not mine.

  I was overtired and in a bad mood. Also, I couldn’t stand this guy.

  I slapped Janet Rice’s photo ID down on the table and said, “Do you know this woman?”

  “Is this the driver who was shot?”

  “Yes. This is our victim. Janet Rice. Married. Two children. Churchgoer. Taxpayer. Home owner. Employee of the city of San Francisco. Friend to many, enemy to none. Do you recognize her?”

  “She’s not the person I envisioned. So … what could this mean?”

  “Have you seen her before?” I asked for the third time.

  “No. Never.”

  “Where were you this morning between eleven and twelve noon?”

  “I told you, Sergeant Boxer. I was in class with thirty students,” Judd said. “We’re reading Anna Karenina.”

  Conklin said, “Why do you suppose you saw a blond driver in your dream? I mean, this woman isn’t blond and she has never been blond. You think she was a victim of circumstance? She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “I am wondering the same thing, Inspector. But I have absolutely no idea.”

  His sappy voice made my last nerve snap like an old guitar string.

  “What happened inside that streetcar?” I said to the professor. I grabbed the pad and pencil away from him and drew an arrow off the word clairvoyance, encircled a bunch of question marks.

  “Give us an educated guess. Maybe you have an idea that doesn’t involve extrasensory malarkey.”

  Judd looked shocked. Then he got pissed.

  “Don’t talk to me that way, Sergeant. I came here at your request and of my own volition. I’ve told you everything I know. Where’s the thanks I deserve?”

  “You know about lucid dreaming?” I asked him.

  “Well, yes. Lucid dreaming occurs when a person is conscious that he is having a dream. He’s lucid. According to the literature, if the dreamer is aware that he’s dreaming, he can change the direction, even the outcome of the dream.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Try lucid dreaming, would you, Professor Judd? Next time you’re in a dream, get your head on straight. Grab the gun. And then remember who the killer is and tell us. Thank you for coming in. Always a pleasure seeing you. Please don’t leave town.”

  I flipped the pencil into the middle of the table, said to Conklin, “My baby is sick. I’m going home.”

  Chapter 52

  YUKI AND HER associate, Nicky Gaines, returned from the lunch recess a few minutes before court reconvened and took their seats.

  Yuki had rested her case, and now it was the defense’s turn to present theirs. She hoped like mad that her case was strong enough to hold up no matter what Kinsela said to convince the jury that Keith Herman, a subhuman piece of garbage, was not guilty.

  Yuki thought about Patricia Reeves, a woman who was tried for the murder of her two-year-old daughter. Reeves’s lawyer had stated that his client had been sexually abused by her father and that the father had been complicit in covering up the child’s accidental death.

  In Yuki’s opinion, the defendant had lied, the lawyer had lied, too, and Patricia Reeves had gotten away with murder.

  Like Reeves’s attorney, Kinsela was a master of the ad hominem attack. He’d assaulted Lynnette Lagrande’s character to discredit her. And he would certainly come up with a load of random bullcrap in his client’s defense.

  Thinking over Kinsela’s case, looking for holes in her own, Yuki didn’t see any quicksand.

  Come to think of it, she also didn’t see the defense.

  Yuki poked Gaines with her elbow and angled her chin toward the defense table. No one was there; not the lawyers, not Keith Herman. Where were they?

  Just then, Judge Arthur R. Nussbaum came through his private door and the bailiff called the court to order. Nussbaum saw the void at the defense table, called the bailiff over to the bench, leaned down, and whispered loud enough for Yuki to hear, “Have the clerk call Kinsela. Find out where the hell he is.”

  Worst-case scenarios were now rising in Yuki’s mind. Had Keith Herman escaped from jail? Had he hanged himself? Had her wish that John Kinsela would eat shit and die actually come true?

  The judge apologized to the jury for the delay, saying, “If the defense and the defendant aren’t here in five minutes, I’m going to adjourn court for the day.” Then he muttered, “And there will be hell to pay.”

  Five minutes passed. Very. Very. Slowly.

  The bailiff returned to the bench and had another whispered conversation with the judge, which was interrupted by a young lawyer in a severe charcoal-gray suit and high heels coming up the aisle in a great clacking hurry.

  “Your Honor, I’m Linda Gregory from Mr. Kinsela’s office.”

  “What’s going on, Ms. Gregory?”

  “May I approach?”

  As the attorney came toward the judge, the doors at the end of the aisle opened again. Nicky said to Yuki, “Lookit this, will you?”

  Yuki turned and saw Keith Herman, handcuffed and flanked by two armed guards, walking toward the bar. He was smiling as if he’d just gotten a free pass to the good seats in heaven.

  A woman in the gallery said loudly, “Oh, my God.”

  Two more people had come through the double doors; John Kinsela was holding the hand of a cute little girl with honey-blond hair. The child was about eight, wearing jeans, a floral print shirt, and a pink hoodie. She looked neat and clean.

  Yuki’s heartbeat sped over the legal limit. She recognized that little girl. From the rustle and gasps in the gallery, everyone did. This child’s picture had been on the news and had circumnavigated the Internet a million times since she’d gone missing.

  Kinsela stopped in the aisle beside his table and said to the judge, “I apologize for being late, Your Honor, but I received an urgent call just an hour ago. Then I needed my
client to confirm this little girl’s identity.”

  “Explain yourself, Mr. Kinsela.”

  “Judge, I’d like to introduce you to my client’s daughter, Lily Herman. She was found alive and well, sitting on the front steps of her former home.

  “We respectfully request that you dismiss the charges against Mr. Herman.”

  Chapter 53

  YUKI THOUGHT SOMETHING was very wrong with Lily Herman. The child seemed distracted, as if she were seeing things from a distance or through a filter. She had to have been traumatized, or maybe she was drugged. Where had she been for the last year? What had happened to her?

  The judge sat behind the desk in his chambers, opened his drawer, and said, “Lily, I’m a bit of a chocolate nut. How about you? Do you like M&M’s?”

  “I like Jell-O,” Lily said. “The purple kind.”

  Nussbaum said, “I’m sorry, Lily. I’m out of Jell-O. We’ll be able to get you some after we talk. Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  Lily kicked her feet under the judge’s side chair, looked around, blinked at Yuki, then slid her gaze over Kinsela, who was sitting in a chair against the wall. Kinsela smiled, but the child turned away and brought her attention back to the judge. He asked her if she knew the difference between a lie and the truth.

  “Yeppers. I know the difference.”

  “It’s very important, so important that you have to swear to God to tell the truth.”

  “No problem,” said the eight-year-old. “I swear to God.”

  “What’s your full name, dear?” Nussbaum asked.

  “Lily Baines Herman.”

  “And how old are you, Lily?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you know what month this is?”

  “Is it summer yet?”

  “Not yet, but soon,” said the judge. “You’ve been missing for a long time. Everyone has been worried. Where have you been?”

  “In a room. In a house,” she said. “I had a TV and a little tiny tabby kitten. Pokey.”