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  Chapter 55

  Potrero center was on Sixteenth and Bryant, a modern strip mall of wall-to-wall retail stores: Office Depot, Safeway, Jamba Juice, and more. A stone wall with a metal rail on top enclosed the vast parking lot that was nearly always packed.

  The sun was going down when we drove between the stone pillars on Sixteenth and identified ourselves to the uniformed cops at the entrance. I asked for the name of the first officer, then Conklin parked our car near the dozen or so squad cars right inside the gates.

  We headed toward the yellow tape at the perimeter, and as we worked our way through the shifting crowd, I saw fear and anger on the faces of shoppers. Clearly, they’d been told that no one could leave the lot without giving a statement, and the handful of officers on the scene were just starting a process that could go long into the night.

  The first officer was Mike Degano, a young guy who had been a block away when the call came over his radio. He wanted to help, had the look of a patrolman who aspired to work homicide.

  Degano pointed to a late-model black Mercedes XL, said to us, “That’s probably the DB’s car. He had a Mercedes key ring in his hand when he went down. Car is registered to Raoul Fernandez. I ran his name. He has a record for assault and for possession with intent. Spent a couple of years at Folsom, released in 2010. Wait’ll you see this.”

  Conklin and I walked with Degano to where the body of a heavily tattooed twenty-something man was splayed on the asphalt. His arms were flung out like wings, his legs were twisted. It looked to me as if he’d been walking toward the shopping center, had turned toward his killer, and had been blown off his feet by the four bullets he’d taken to his face.

  It took a steady hand and an automatic gun to throw four shots in such a tight pattern. I’m a good shot, and I couldn’t have done it.

  I took another look around the lot as lights came on. Shopping carts were adrift, like dinghies on a blacktop sea. Broken paper bags spilled groceries where they’d fallen. I saw surveillance cameras on light poles, but the shooting had taken place a good hundred yards from the closest camera.

  “Were there any witnesses?” I asked Degano.

  “Yes, ma’am, we have one sort of witness. Mr. Jonathan Nathan, over there. Old white dude. Red shirt. He heard the shots.”

  Chapter 56

  Jonathan Nathan was in his seventies, stooped, glasses balanced on the lower slope of his nose, red-and-white aloha shirt under a windbreaker, khaki pants. Flip-flops. His eyes switched between us and the parking lot, as though anything could happen, as though he didn’t feel safe.

  I said, “Can you tell us what you know?”

  “Sure. Happy to. I was putting my groceries into the trunk of my car when I heard the shots. I looked around, but I didn’t know where the shots came from,” Nathan told us. “My head was inside the trunk when the gun went off, you know? Plus a lot of cars were coming and going. It was crazy noisy.”

  “What happened then, Mr. Nathan?” I asked.

  “Then I saw the body,” Nathan said, spreading his fingers, framing his face with his hands. “I ran over to him, but the guy wasn’t breathing. He was absolutely dead. I didn’t touch him, okay? There was no point.”

  “Sure, I understand. Please go on.”

  “My phone was also dead, so I waved down this guy in an SUV and asked him to call the cops. He did it, and then he drove off.”

  Conklin and I had the same thought at the same moment. The so-called cop who had stopped the drug dealers on Schwerin had been driving an SUV.

  Conklin launched into his trademark rapid-fire interrogation with a smile.

  “The guy in the SUV,” Conklin said. “What did he look like?”

  “What did he look like? Jeez. I don’t know. Regular guy.”

  “Black? White? Hispanic?”

  “White.”

  “Young? Old? Fat? Skinny?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Hair color?”

  “I was on the far side of the car. He was in shadow.”

  “Okay, Mr. Nathan. What about the SUV?”

  “It was black, I think. No, it was definitely black.”

  “American make? Foreign?”

  “I have no idea. Look,” Nathan said, getting steamed. “There were bullets flying around. I’m supposed to notice what kind of car the guy with the phone was driving? Listen, I’ve gotta get home. My wife is sick with worry. Plus we got people coming over. I just ran out for some groceries.”

  I took Nathan’s contact information, gave him my card.

  My partner and I went back to view the body, stood off to the side as the CSU van rolled up and techs piled out onto the parking lot.

  I said to Conklin, “Look at how close the shooter gets to the vics. Chaz Smith. Those guys in the BMW the other night. Now Mr. Fernandez, dope dealer to Potrero Hill. This shooter knows these guys. He’s organized. He’s a perfectionist.”

  “And most of all, he’s insane,” said Conklin. “He’s taken out five people this week, for a total of eight, Lindsay.

  “And Brady thinks Warren Jacobi is capable of this?”

  “Here comes Brady now.”

  Chapter 57

  Brady’s car braked with a squeal only yards from the barrier tape. Lieutenants Brady and Meile boiled out of the vehicle, both of them agitated and demanding to be briefed.

  Brady said, “What have we got?”

  “Raoul Fernandez,” I said, pointing to the deceased. “Meth dealer, former convict. He was dead before he hit the ground.”

  “Witnesses?”

  “One so far. He maybe saw our shooter, a generic white male driving a black SUV. Our witness asked the driver to call nine-one-one, and he apparently did it. Dispatch is pulling the tape now.”

  I went on to say that uniforms were taking down the name and number of everyone who’d been in the lot when the police showed up. Other uniforms were canvassing the shops.

  “Plate readers have been down the rows,” I said, “and it was a decent sweep. Two stolen cars, two other drivers with outstanding warrants, but none stand out as our shooter.

  “I asked the ME to give us an hour with the scene. Meanwhile, we’ve got surveillance tapes on the way from the security chief.”

  “Let’s hope we got that black SUV on tape…”

  Brady let his words trail off but I knew where he was going. Digital forensics was getting so refined that even a partial shot of the vehicle’s fender could yield enough information to identify the make and type of car.

  I stood with Brady and Conklin and watched the light trucks come in. CSU was working fast and well, photographing scrapes on car doors, marking blood spatter, bagging found objects on the asphalt.

  Soon the ME would remove the body, and CSU would take the car back to the lab on a flatbed truck. By tomorrow morning, the shopping center would be open again, like the shooting had never even happened.

  But it had happened.

  A spree killer was running the table.

  I told Conklin I’d be back in a couple of minutes. I ducked under the tape, turned my back to the crime scene, and called Jacobi.

  His voice sounded so real to me that I actually said, “Jacobi, it’s me, Lindsay.”

  The voice kept talking, said, “Leave me a message.”

  I told my old partner’s voicemail that I missed him, wanted to get together with him, asked him to call me.

  I really did miss him.

  I wanted to tell him about this spree killer, hear what he had to say. Maybe he had an idea we hadn’t thought of and maybe in the course of the conversation, he’d tell me something that would establish his innocence. I was sure that Brady was delusional. My old friend wasn’t the killer.

  It just couldn’t be Jacobi.

  Chapter 58

  Cindy wasn’t the only person working after close of business, not even close. A dozen offices in her line of sight had the lights on; loud laughter came in bursts from the corner office; and
down the hall, the copy machine in the hallway chugged out copies.

  These days, no one left work early.

  Everyone wanted to be sure of a chair if the music stopped.

  Cindy turned on her desk lamp and read Richie’s text message again. Caught a homicide. Cya later. XXX. She texted back: Copy that. Ttys.

  She put her phone down and asked herself why she’d let Richie’s message go unanswered for so many minutes, why she’d withheld returning the XXXs, wondered again if she was becoming like her parents.

  Her mom was a shrink, her dad was a math teacher, and when she was a kid, she had called them Robo-Mom and Robo-Pop because they both overanalyzed absolutely everything. Every. Little. Thing.

  This was what she was doing with her relationship with Richie: Yes, no, maybe. Repeat.

  She was also obsessed with her story, treating the numbers found with the Ellsworth heads as if they were the da Vinci code.

  She justified her obsession like this: If she didn’t decode those numbers, someone else would. Jason Blayney would. And so, partially because of him, partially because she would have done it anyway, Cindy had been flipping the flipping numbers every which way, forward, backward, inside out.

  First she’d tried to connect the numbers to Harry Chandler. He’d notched his bedpost innumerable times during his long life as a star. He’d been named People magazine’s sexiest man in the world three times and had been the tabloids’ favorite cover boy for decades because of the many famous girlfriends he had squired to black-tie events.

  Had Harry Chandler had 613 lovers? Was that what the number meant? If so, how did the 104 figure in? Not his address, not his birth date, not his license-plate number.

  So Cindy had abandoned that line of inquiry and moved on. She had plugged the numbers into her search engine and found that if she put a colon between the 6 and the 13, Google kicked out an interesting passage from the Bible.

  Romans 6:13: “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin as an instrument of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death.”

  It was interesting and, in the context of the buried heads, very creepy. “Do not offer any part of yourself to sin…”

  Was the person who dug up the heads at the Ellsworth compound saying the dead had been guilty of sin? Adding the colon to the other number didn’t help — biblically speaking, 1:04 meant nothing.

  Moving on, there was 1:04; 6:13. Time of day, time of death, day of the year?

  Cindy reviewed the lists she’d cut and pasted from Wikipedia into her research file, the tens of dozens of names of people who had been born on January 4 and died on June 13, and absolutely none of them rang bells when it came to the skulls at the house of heads.

  Cindy grabbed her phone and texted Lindsay: Any IDs yet on skulls?

  Still waiting, Lindsay texted back.

  Thx.

  Crap. Cindy got up from her desk, walked down the hall, and found three people who would share a pizza with her. She ordered out, and while she waited, she ran the numbers again.

  Chapter 59

  It was Groundhog Day all over again.

  I came home at 11:00 p.m. with swollen feet and a growling stomach; was greeted at the door by my manic border collie and her tranquil nanny. I walked Karen out to the street, watched the taillights of her old Volvo disappear into the distance. Then I returned to an apartment that was devoid of Joe.

  I had spoken to Joe twice a day since he’d left town, but swapping conversational tidbits by phone was way short of being in my husband’s real live presence.

  I nuked a he-man-style TV dinner of Salisbury steak and green beans and brought it into the living room. I got into Joe’s big chair, put my feet up on a footstool, and rested my tray on my bambino’s rump.

  “You don’t mind, do you, darling?” I asked him or her.

  Not a problem, Mom.

  The national news was wrapping up as I tucked into my fancy steak burger, and then the local headlines came on. First up was the report on the 6:15 shooting at the Potrero Center.

  The on-site reporter described the latest drug-dealer execution in fairly accurate and gruesome detail, saying that this victim was the fifth dealer to be murdered in the past five days.

  The reporter said, “In an interview with KTVU earlier today, crime analyst Ben Markey said that these killings probably are not gang related but are an indictment of the SFPD. Quoting Mr. Markey, ‘The cops can’t put the bite on drug crime, so a vigilante has stepped in to do the job.’

  “Channel Two has learned this evening that the DEA has assembled a task force to investigate this rash of killings. Joseph Molinari, formerly a senior agent with the FBI and more recently deputy to the director of Homeland Security, has been hired to consult. Molinari is now based in San Francisco.

  “And so, Tracey, back to you.”

  I stared at the TV for quite a long moment, trying to absorb what I’d just heard, especially the part where my husband was on a DEA task force and I didn’t know a thing about it.

  I gathered up my tray and myself, got out of the chair, and found my phone. I called Joe, who answered three time zones away at two thirty in the morning.

  I scared him half to death.

  “What’s wrong, Lindsay?”

  “I’m fine. We’re fine,” I said. “I just heard about this task force from Channel Two News.”

  “You didn’t get my message?”

  “No. No.”

  “Well, I left one for you.”

  I glanced at the phone, saw the blinking message light; it must’ve come in while I was taking witness statements at the strip mall.

  “I’m sorry, Joe. I missed it.”

  “I’m coming back tomorrow night. I’m investigating Chaz Smith’s death for the DEA.”

  “But why?”

  “Because Chaz Smith wasn’t just a narc. He was a federal agent.”

  Book Three

  FRIENDS AND LOVERS

  Chapter 60

  It was 7:00 P.M., forty degrees outside the gray Crown Vic where Conklin and I sat parked across the street from Restaurant LuLu, Warren Jacobi’s favorite eatery. LuLu’s was a homey place with a wood-fire oven, a sunken dining room, a five-star wine list, and a memorable menu of Provencal dishes.

  The last time we all ate at LuLu’s, Jacobi picked up the tab because Conklin and I had brought down a long-sought psycho killer — except I was sure we had nailed the wrong man.

  Now Conklin gave me a poke in the ribs and said, “What are you thinking?”

  “About that time Jacobi took us here.”

  “You were wearing a dress, as I remember. One of the few times in your life.”

  “That’s what you remember?”

  “I had the roasted mussels. Oh. And Jacobi told you to lighten up. Give yourself a break for an hour, something like that.”

  We both grinned at the memory, but tonight we weren’t celebrating. In fact, we were on a surveillance detail; we had followed Jacobi from his house on Ivy Street in Hayes Valley to LuLu’s, where my old friend was dining alone. He did that a lot. Even at the best of times, Jacobi’s life seemed almost unbearably lonely and sad, which made my neglecting our friendship all the more inexcusable.

  I said, “I might as well get this over with.”

  I took my phone out of my pocket, punched in Jacobi’s number. He picked up.

  “It’s Lindsay,” I said.

  “Hey. How are things going, Boxer?”

  “Not so great. I’m working a couple of cases that are driving me crazy.”

  “I’ve been following your exploits in my morning e-mail. Seen a couple of hot stories on the news too.”

  “Yeah. Well then, you know. I’ve got twisted, bloody murders on the one hand, mysterious decapitated heads on the other. I’d love to kick this stuff around with you.”

  “What are you doing now?” he asked me.

  “Just sitting around,” I said. It was true. More or less.
r />   “I’m at LuLu’s,” Jacobi said. “Just got here. You hungry?”

  I told Jacobi I could be there in about ten minutes. Then I hung up, said to Conklin, “I’d say I feel like a dog but most dogs are pretty straightforward.”

  “Lindsay, you want to exclude him as a suspect, right?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So talk to him. If you don’t like what he tells you, if you get suspicious, we’ll figure out how to handle it.”

  “Okay, Richie.”

  “I’m going to stay out here until you leave the restaurant.”

  “Aw, jeez. That’s not necessary. But thanks.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  We sat together in the dark for eight minutes, then I got out of the car and went into LuLu’s.

  Chapter 61

  I opened the front door to our apartment on Lake Street and heard La Traviata, saw a leather jacket hanging on the coatrack in the hall. Joe called out to me, and Martha did her amazingly fast twenty-yard dash from the living room to the foyer, concluding with a four-point leap against my body. And then there was Joe, big, adorable, his arms open.

  Tears jumped into my eyes.

  I was so glad to see my husband that I was mad — you could say irrationally pissed off — that he had been away for so long when I wanted him at home.

  Joe put his arms around me. I gave him a peck and struggled to get out of his embrace, but he wouldn’t let me escape.

  “Hey, hey, it’s me, Linds. I’m here.”

  “Damn it. My hormones are mad at you. And they’re mad at me too.”

  “I know, I know.”

  I gave in and hugged him so hard, Joe gasped dramatically, then laughed at me, said, “Air. I need air.”

  He put an arm around my shoulder and walked me to the couch, sat down beside me, untied my shoes. He pulled my feet into his lap and began giving me a foot massage from heaven.