20th Victim: (Women’s Murder Club 20) (Women's Murder Club) Read online

  “I just heard. Charlie, I’m very sorry.”

  He said, “Thanks,” but his voice was all wrong.

  He sounded removed.

  “Charlie?”

  “Lindsay, got a minute? I’ll take this to my office.”

  I turned off the police radio, pressed my phone to my ear, and waited for Clapper. And then he was back on the line.

  “Boxer, what do you know about what happened?”

  I gave Clapper background on Moving Targets and said that Kennedy knew of an in-real-life location that was possibly Moving Targets’ HQ.

  I said, “Kennedy was going to check them out. Then he was shot a few blocks from their store. Houston PD found the store had been cleaned out.”

  “I hadn’t heard that part, Boxer. I’m starting to form a theory.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What if Kennedy knew these Moving Targets people? I should tell you, he was known to cross the line.”

  “Like how?”

  “Skim cash. Pocket drugs. Stash a gun. My just-formed theory is based on his character, Boxer, not on evidence. Maybe he told Moving Targets he wanted to make them an offer. They pay him off. He keeps the cops in the dark.”

  “And so they shot him.”

  “Evidence will tell, Boxer. Regards to Richie.”

  And then he hung up the phone.

  CHAPTER 69

  CINDY DRAFTED AN email to the mystery man who had given her the tip of a lifetime: the motive for nine killings and counting, a manifesto on a “new war on drugs,” followed by a lead to a new shooting in Chicago.

  The man wanted exposure. He had proven that he had inside knowledge. He wanted to get the word out that he and/or others were eliminating drug dealers, one piece of crap at a time.

  He’d obscured his identity, but he wasn’t being coy.

  His message to drug dealers was twofold: Do you want to live? Or do you want to “spin the wheel”?

  The final draft of her email to him was short and simple. “I am sympathetic to your cause and have an idea for spreading your message. Please write or call me again so we can discuss.”

  In fact, she abhorred frontier justice, but if she could be this man’s conduit to the worldwide press, he might give her the key to the whole shooting match. She would love to draw the killers out of their hidey-holes and into the hands of the SFPD.

  But she was impatient. She felt a breeze. It was the passage of time. The clock on her computer screen read a couple of minutes after noon. Where was the mystery man right now? Was he at his computer, reading the news, basking in the growing public praise for what he was calling the “new war on drugs”?

  Cindy sent her two-sentence email. Got the Message sent notification. And now she was on the hook, waiting for his reply.

  She turned her mind to other things. She spoke with Claire, who told her she’d never been so bored in her life. They laughed when Cindy added, “Better bored than dead.”

  She texted Richie to say, Can you tell me ANYTHING?

  Ah. No.

  Screw you, buster, she responded, forcing herself to add, Kidding! She got up, made a wide counterclockwise circle around the newsroom so that she could avoid not only McGowan but Tyler as well. The lunch wagon was in the outer corridor near the elevator. She bought an egg salad sandwich and a bag of pretzels, then took the long way back to her desk.

  She checked her email, hoping that the man of the spinning wheel had replied in the ten minutes since she’d invited him to be her confidential informant.

  Nope. He hadn’t. And he hadn’t called, either.

  So she opened her crime blog, skimmed the new comments on her original post, and found a thread she was least expecting. It was about the love of killing, the high of shooting, of slicing arteries, of stabbing and hacking off body parts, of taking trophies.

  Oh, my God. What door to hell had she opened?

  CHAPTER 70

  CINDY SKIMMED THE new comments on her blog, gobbled them down, then went back to the top of the page and read them again. The posts were about the love of violence and, to her mind, had been written by psychopaths.

  Like this one: “Daily life is gray. When you’re a soldier, you’re trained to kill, given direct orders from your CO, and compensated with the guilt-free experience that’s the greatest high in the world. Then you come home, and everything is gray again. If you’re like me, gray is not good enough.”

  The post had been signed with a screen name, and the writer hadn’t confessed to a specific killing. Interestingly, he’d gotten dozens of likes.

  Other writers had expressed similar thoughts, sending her anecdotes about blood lust that only war could satisfy. Some veterans of foreign wars had detailed the taking of trophies—ears and hands and fingers—spelling out in loving specificity the pleasure of taking body parts, as well as taking photos of piles of the dead. The language used to describe these atrocities was too graphic for the Chronicle to print.

  More to the point, the posts were about killings in war.

  Nowhere in this avalanche of gory imagery was there a connection to the snipers and the victims in American cities. Cindy kept reading, and finally, at the bottom of the fourth screen, she found a post with a completely different feel, a declaration.

  Her vision narrowed. She knew who he was. She read fast, then again more slowly:

  There are killers who torture, who revel in taking life, sometimes in rage, sometimes for pleasure. This is not my style. When I kill a drug dealer, I am in control. My fellow travelers and I know our targets long before we fire a gun. They are guilty of ruining lives and of taking them by the tens of thousands as a byproduct of their sales jobs.

  I’m proud of the recent work we’ve done. We’ve saved countless lives while only taking a few. I feel no pleasure in the shootings. I feel proud of the results. I’m doing good work. And I stand by it.

  The post was signed Kill Shot, and Cindy knew from the cadence and structure of his post that this was the man who’d declared the “new war on drugs.”

  She grabbed the phone to call Tyler but stopped because McGowan had appeared in her doorway. She put down the receiver.

  “What is it, Jeb? What do you need?”

  CHAPTER 71

  CINDY STARED UP at the creep Tyler had forced her to take under her wing, wishing that she could make him disappear just by looking at him.

  “See how you feel about this,” said McGowan. “I roughed out the profile of the first victim.”

  Cindy knew a lot about Roger Jennings, the ballplayer who’d been killed at the Taco King. She and Jeb had seen the car, the pregnant wife who’d been spared, and the hole punched in the windshield by a bullet before it killed the Giants catcher. Thanks to Richie’s friend Sawyer, she had a photo of the word Rehearsal written in the dust of the Porsche’s rear window.

  It had been verified that the veteran ballplayer had sold recreational drugs to his teammates. That wasn’t even news. She’d assigned Jeb to writing victim profiles, so now he was saying he’d done it.

  It was put-up-or-shut-up time for McGowan.

  “Let’s see it,” Cindy said.

  McGowan placed a sheet of paper on her desk and stood watching her.

  “It’s a first draft,” he said, “but I want your early read on the tone.”

  “Be quiet and let me read,” she said.

  Jennings’s name was at the top of the sheet.

  The text read:

  There’s more than one kind of head shot.

  Some head shots are close-up photos that can get you a part. Another can drop you to the mat in the eighth round. Others you catch and throw back to the pitcher. Those are known as high, hard ones.

  Roger Jennings was versed in high, hard ones. He knew they were coming because he would call them. He didn’t do it often—it wasn’t his style—just when he needed to ruffle a hitter.

  As a batter himself, he was quick to react. He could duck or fall flat to the ground. He was seldom tag
ged as the target of pitches, let alone those thrown at his head.

  But the head shot that killed him wasn’t a baseball. It was a bullet, and he never saw it coming.

  Cindy looked up at Jeb, who’d been nervously watching her read.

  He said, “And then his bio, thirty-eight years old, survived by his wife, Maria, twenty-nine, blah, blah, blah—”

  “It’s good, Jeb. It’s very good. Poetic. Evocative. Compelling. And yes, I like the tone.”

  “Really? Thanks, Cindy.”

  “You’re welcome. Keep going. Make sure you mention that witnesses report that Jennings was selling drugs. Maybe that’s the kicker at the end of the piece. Maybe it’s a refrain or a summary. Try it a few ways.”

  “Can do.”

  “Good. We’re looking for eight more profiles and counting.”

  “Right,” Jeb said. “I’ll have those for you before we close for the day.”

  “Go get ’em,” said Cindy.

  And when he was gone, she dialed Tyler’s extension.

  He picked up his phone.

  “It’s Cindy,” she said. “Hold a spot on the front page for this: ‘Anonymous Shooter Confesses.’ Sending you a draft in five.”

  CHAPTER 72

  JOE WAS WORKING in his home office, outlining a security analysis proposal for the TSA.

  It was pleasant work. He’d written the book on the Transportation Security Administration when he was in Homeland Security, and figuring out the new TSA specs gave him a chance to use comfortable tools that were right at hand.

  Julie had left her stuffed cow, Mrs. Mooey Milkington, on his desk to keep him company. Martha was snoozing next to his feet. Bill Evans’s soothing “Peace Piece” was coming through his earbuds, and in about an hour Joe was going to break for the meat loaf sandwich that was chilling in the fridge.

  It was while Joe was in this fine-tuned contemplative mood that his phone rang, breaking it all into shards.

  Joe glanced at his caller ID, which read, NAPA COUNTY JAIL.

  He let the phone ring a few more times as he decided whether or not to pick up, but by the third ring he really had no choice.

  “Molinari.”

  “Joe. Thank God you’re there.”

  “Dave. Please don’t tell me you’re in lockup and that this is your one phone call.”

  “You want me to start lying to you now?” Dave said. It was a joke but not a good one.

  “What happened? Give me the condensed version so you don’t use up your quarter.”

  “Okay. This morning, after I drank my breakfast, I went to Murray’s office and called him out. His nasty nurse—”

  “Atkins?”

  “Yeah. Her. She barred the door. So I made a general announcement in the waiting room that Murray had killed my father, and I was shown the door. I saw Murray’s Beemer in the parking lot, so I rolled past it and keyed the side of his car. Next thing, cops came, lifted me out of my chair, and carried me into the squad car.”

  “What are the charges, Dave?”

  “It was vandalism with a side order of defamation.”

  “How bad was the scratch?”

  “Headlight to taillight. I don’t need a lawyer to tell me it was more than four hundred dollars in damages. I could go to jail for, like, three years.”

  A muffled sound coming over the phone was Dave crying, and Joe had to strain to hear the guard tell him, “Say good-bye. Time’s up.” Dave argued with the guard, said that he was talking to his lawyer and that he needed to get bailed out.

  “Thirty seconds,” said the guard. “Make it count.”

  Joe said, “Dave, what’s the bond?”

  “It’s 10K. Look, Joe, I know I have a goddamn lot of nerve, but can you come back and pay the bail? I can repay you as soon as we get to my place. Also, I have a few more documents you’re going to want to read. And, Joe, I gotta be honest. It kills me that you don’t believe me about Murray.”

  Joe thought about all of the sleeping pills Dave had saved up in his medicine cabinet. If he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life blaming himself for Dave’s suicide, he had to see him, try to get him into therapy. At the very least, throw out all the pills he could get his hands on.

  “Your bed is all made up,” Dave was saying. “And I have a couple of New York steaks and a bottle of Private Reserve Cab that Ray had been aging for ten years.”

  Joe said he had to make arrangements, but he’d try to be at the bail bondsman by 4:00 p.m.

  “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Take it easy,” he said, but the call had been disconnected and there was a dial tone in his ear.

  Over the next couple of hours Joe spoke to Lindsay, made an arrangement with Mrs. Rose, squared away his notes, and wrote a couple of emails. He went to the bank, and then he was on the road, heading north to Napa Valley.

  As he picked up speed, Joe was starting to look forward to what would come next. He wanted to see the new documents Dave had mentioned, and more than that, he wanted to have an honest conversation with Dave.

  There was a question he’d never asked him, and he wanted to watch Dave’s face when he finally did.

  CHAPTER 73

  DAVE WAS USING a disreputable wheelchair that had been ridden hard in the Napa County Jail for a couple of decades.

  Dave’s own chair had been lost and there was no finding it.

  He said, “Don’t worry, Joe. I have a spare at home.”

  A guard helped Joe transfer Dave from the chair into his passenger seat, and Joe got behind the wheel. He checked to see that Dave was buckled in, then drove away from the jail and took the first right turn onto the highway. Dave thanked Joe effusively for all he’d done and then sagged against the car door.

  When they’d cleared the town limits, Joe asked, “Tired?”

  “Yeah. Tired and beat. That was fucking brutal. Real jail. Real bad guys. No joke. I was afraid to sleep.”

  Joe winced. He said, “You fix the damage, make some promises and keep them, get a good lawyer …”

  “Do you know anyone?”

  “I’ll ask around.”

  It got quiet again and Joe turned on the car radio, fiddled with the dial until a classical station came in strong. He tried to relax. He was fine with Beethoven and an open road. But it was seven thirty. He was hungry and he needed to think. He wondered, not for the first time, what the hell he was doing here.

  Nearly an hour after leaving the jail, Joe pulled onto the dirt road leading up the side of the hill to the winery. A minute or two later he’d parked in front of Dave’s cottage and, following his directions, located the key under a stone rabbit and entered the dark house. He located the lights and the spare wheelchair folded up in the hall closet.

  Returning to the car, he found Dave sitting with the door open, his legs outside the car and a look of mortification on his face.

  “Dave? What’s wrong?”

  He waved his hands in the general direction of his lap until Joe got it. Dave had peed his pants.

  Joe felt heartsick for Dave and positively ashamed of his own selfish feelings.

  If he took Dave at his word, his friend had suffered an incalculable loss. His father was dead. He was facing one to three for the childish vandalism, and a good lawyer might or might not keep him out of jail. It was becoming clear to Joe that even if Dave was acquitted, he couldn’t run the winery by himself.

  This was an awful and desperate situation.

  Joe helped Dave into the chair and pushed it to the foot of the ramp. Dave was saying, “I’ve got to clean up.”

  “Do you need help?”

  “No, no, I can do it. And I need to go online for a couple of minutes. Make sure no one is suicidal. I never go twenty-four hours without checking into my website.”

  Joe knew he was speaking of his support group for paralytics.

  “I’m good to go now, Joe. Just hold the door.”

  “Sure.”

  “There should be a bottle of wine around s
omewhere.”

  Joe cracked a smile.

  “We’re fifteen or twenty minutes from a steak on the fire.”

  “Take your time,” Joe said. “I’m fine.”

  As Dave rolled his chair to his quarters at the back of the house, the thought Joe had had so many times before came back to him. What had happened to Ray? Had he simply died? Had Murray killed him, as Dave insisted?

  Or was Dave behind it all, doing a head fake, playing the victim, and in so doing, covering up his real crime?

  CHAPTER 74

  JOE SAT AT Dave’s big plank dining table and called Lindsay.

  “I have to stay overnight,” he told her. “Dave’s a wreck.”

  “Call me after lights-out,” she said. “I want to hear about Dave, and I have a few things to talk about.”

  “He’s in the shower. Tell me now.”

  Lindsay filled him in quickly on the Houston cop, Carl Kennedy, who had been part of her task force. Her voice was strained when she told him that Kennedy had been killed, shot from behind, and that Moving Targets might be involved.

  “They had an office,” she said. “By the time the cops got there, it had been cleaned out to the walls. And of course no one witnessed the shooting.”

  “So who do you think shot him?” Joe asked.

  “Hang on a sec,” Lindsay said. “There’s more. Clapper just spoke with Houston’s forensics lab. Kennedy was armed when he was shot. One bullet had been fired from his gun, and he had a shell casing in his pocket.”

  “I’m not getting it.”

  “Here’s the thing, Joe. A drug dealer who was killed in Houston yesterday was found with crack hidden in her bra, and when the slug was removed from her neck, it matched—”

  “It was a match to Kennedy’s gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “So who shot Kennedy? What are you thinking, Linds? I’m not my sharpest tonight.”