Kill or Be Killed Read online

  Chapter 5

  Conklin and I joined the patrol cops who were talking to the Vault’s freaked-out customers, now milling nervously in the taped-off section of the street.

  We wanted an eyewitness description of the shooter or shooters in the act of killing two women in the bar.

  That’s not what we got.

  One by one and in pairs, they answered our questions about what they had seen. It all came down to statements like I was under the table. I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I couldn’t see the bar. I didn’t look up until I heard screaming, and then I ran to the back.

  We noted the sparse statements, took names and contact info, and asked each person to call if something occurred to him or her later. I was handing out my card when a patrolman came over, saying, “Sergeant, this is Ryan Kelly. He tends bar here. Mr. Kelly says he watched a conversation escalate into the shooting.”

  Thank God.

  Ryan Kelly was about twenty-five, with dark, spiky hair. His skin was pale with shock.

  Conklin said, “Mr. Kelly, what can you tell us?”

  Kelly didn’t hesitate.

  “Two women were at the bar, both knockouts, and they were into each other. Touching knees, hands, the like. The blonde was in her twenties, tight black dress, drinking wine coolers. The other was brunette, in her thirties but in great shape, drinking a Scotch on the rocks, in a white dress, or maybe it was beige.

  “Three guys, looked Mexican, came over. They were dressed right, between forty and fifty, I’d say. The brunette saw their reflections in the backbar mirror and she jumped. Like, Oh, my God. Then she introduced the blonde as ‘my friend Cameron.’”

  The bartender was on a roll and needed no encouragement to keep talking. He said there had been some back-and-forth among the five people, that the brunette had been nervous but the short man with the combed-back hair had been super calm and played with her.

  “Like he was glad to meet her friend,” said Kelly. “He asked me to mix him a drink called a Pastinaca. Has five ingredients that have to be poured in layers, and I had no open elderflower. There was a new bottle under the bar. So I ducked down to find it among a shitload of other bottles.

  “Then I heard someone say in a really strong voice, ‘No one screws with the King.’ Something like that. There’s a shot, and another right after it. Loud pop, pop. And then a bunch more. I had, like, a heart attack and flattened out on the floor behind the bar. There was screaming like crazy. I stayed down until our manager found me and said, ‘Come on. Get outta here.’”

  I asked, “You didn’t see who did the shooting?”

  Kelly said, “No. Okay for me to go now? I’ve told this to about three of you. My wife is going nuts waiting for me at home.”

  We took Kelly’s contact information, and when Covington signaled us that the Vault was clear, Conklin and I gloved up, stepped around the dead men, their spilled blood, guns, and spent shells in the doorway, and went inside.

  Chapter 6

  I knew the Vault’s layout: the ground floor of the former bank had been converted into a high-end haberdashery. Access to the nightclub upstairs was by the elevators at the rear of the store.

  Conklin and I took in the scene. Bloody shoe prints tracked across the marble floors. Toppled clothing racks and mannequins lay across the aisles, but nothing moved.

  We crossed the floor with care and took an elevator to the second-floor club, the scene of the shooting and a forensics investigation disaster.

  Tables and chairs had been overturned in the customers’ rush toward the fire exit. There were no surveillance cameras, and the floor was tacky with spilled booze and blood.

  We picked our way around abandoned personal property and over to the long, polished bar, where two women in expensive clothing lay dead. One, blond, had collapsed across the bar top, and the other, dark-haired, had fallen dead at her feet.

  The lighting was soft and unfocused, but still, I could see that the blond woman had been shot between the eyes and had taken slugs in her chest and arms. The woman on the floor had a bullet hole through the draped white silk across her chest, and there was another in her neck.

  “Both shot at close range,” Richie said.

  He plucked a beaded bag off the floor and opened it, and I did the same with the second bag, a metallic leather clutch.

  According to their driver’s licenses, the brunette was Lucille Alison Stone and the blonde was Cameron Whittaker. I took pictures, and then Conklin and I carefully cat-walked out of the bar the way we had come.

  As we were leaving, we passed Charlie Clapper, our CSI director, coming in with his crew.

  Clapper was a former homicide cop and always looked like he’d stepped out of a Grecian Formula commercial. Neat. Composed. With comb marks in his hair. Always thorough, never a grandstander, he was one of the SFPD’s MVPs.

  “What’s your take?” he asked us.

  “It was overkill,” I said. “Two women were shot to death at point-blank range and then shot some more. Three men were reportedly seen talking to them before the shooting. Two of them are in your capable hands until Claire takes them. We have one alive, being booked now.”

  “The news is out. You think he’s Kingfisher.”

  “Could be. I hope so. I really hope this is our lucky day.”

  Chapter 7

  Before the medical examiner had retrieved the women’s bodies, while CSI was beginning the staggering work involved in processing a bar full of fingerprints and spent brass and the guns, Conklin and I went back to the Hall of Justice and met with our lieutenant, Jackson Brady.

  Brady was platinum blond, hard bodied, and chill, a former narcotics detective from Miami. He had proven his smarts and his astonishing bravery with the SFPD over the last couple of years and had been promoted quickly to run our homicide squad.

  His corner office had once been mine, but being head of paperwork and manpower deployment didn’t suit my temperament. I liked working crime on the street. I hadn’t wanted to like Brady when he took the lieutenant job, but I couldn’t help myself. He was tough but fair, and now he was married to my dear friend Yuki Castellano. Today I was very glad that Brady had a history in narcotics, homicide, and organized crime.

  Conklin and I sat with him in his glass-walled office and told him what we knew. It would be days before autopsies were done and guns and bullets were matched up with dead bodies. But I was pretty sure that the guns would not be registered, there would be no prints on file, and law enforcement might never know who owned the weapons that killed those women.

  I said, “Their car was found on Washington—stolen, of course. The two dead men had both Los Toros and Mala Sangre tats. We’re waiting for ID from Mexican authorities. One of the dead women knew Kingfisher. Lucille Alison Stone. She lived on Balboa, the thirty-two hundred block. Has a record. Shoplifting twice and possession of marijuana, under twenty grams. She comes up as a known associate of Jorge Sierra. That’s it for her.”

  “And the other woman? Whittaker?”

  “According to the bartender, who read their body language, Whittaker might be the girlfriend’s girlfriend. She’s a schoolteacher. Has no record.”

  Brady said, “Barry Schein, ADA. You know him?”

  “Yes,” Conklin and I said in unison.

  “He’s on his way up here. We’ve got thirty-six hours to put together a case for the grand jury while they’re still convened. If we don’t indict our suspect pronto, the FBI is going to grab him away from us. Ready to take a crack at the man who would be King?”

  “Be right back,” I said.

  The ladies’ room was outside the squad room and down the hall. I went in, washed my face, rinsed out my mouth, reset my ponytail. Then I walked back out into the hallway where I could get a signal and called Mrs. Rose.

  “Not a problem, Lindsay,” said the sweet granny who lived across the hall and babysat Julie Anne. “We’re watching the Travel Channel. The Hebrides. Scotland. There ar
e ponies.”

  “Thanks a million,” I told her.

  I rejoined my colleagues.

  “Ready,” I said to Brady, Conklin, and Barry Schein, the new rising star of the DA’s office. “No better time than now.”

  Chapter 8

  When Kingfisher began his campaign against me, I read everything I could find on him.

  From the sparse reports and sightings I knew that the five-foot-six Mexican man who was now sitting in Interrogation 1 with his hands cuffed and chained to a hook on the table had been running drugs since before he was ten and had picked up the nickname Martin Pescador. That was Spanish for kingfisher, a small, bright-colored fishing bird with a prominent beak.

  By the time Sierra was twenty, he was an officer in the Los Toros cartel, a savage paramilitary operation that specialized in drug sales up and down the West Coast and points east. Ten years later Kingfisher led a group of his followers in a coup, resulting in a bloody rout that left headless bodies from both sides decomposing in the desert.

  Los Toros was the bigger loser, and the new cartel, led by Kingfisher, was called Mala Sangre, a.k.a. Bad Blood.

  Along with routine beheadings and assassinations, Mala Sangre regularly stopped busloads of people traveling along a stretch of highway. The elderly and children were killed immediately. Young women were raped before execution, and the men were forced to fight each other to the death, gladiator style.

  Kingfisher’s publicity campaign worked. He owned the drug trade from the foot of Mexico to the head of Northern California. He became immensely rich and topped all of law enforcement’s “Most Wanted” lists, but he rarely showed himself. He changed homes frequently and ran his business from a laptop and by burner phones, and the Mexican police were notoriously bought and paid for by his cartel.

  It was said that he had conjugal visits with his wife, Elena, but she had eluded attempts to tail her to her husband’s location.

  I was thinking about that as I stood with Brady, Conklin, and Schein behind the mirrored glass of the interrogation room. We were quickly joined by chief of police Warren Jacobi and a half dozen interested narcotics and robbery inspectors who had reasonably given up hope of ever seeing Kingfisher in custody.

  Now we had him but didn’t own him.

  Could we put together an indictable case in a day and a half? Or would the Feds walk all over us?

  Normally, my partner was the good cop and I was the hard-ass. I liked when Richie took the lead and set a trusting tone, but Kingfisher and I had history. He’d threatened my life.

  Rich opened the door to the interrogation room, and we took the chairs across from the probable mass killer.

  No one was more primed to do this interrogation than me.

  Chapter 9

  The King looked as common as dirt in his orange jumpsuit and chrome-plated bracelets. But he wasn’t ordinary at all. I thought through my opening approach. I could play up to him, try to get on his side and beguile him with sympathy, a well-tested and successful interview technique. Or I could go badass.

  In the end I pitched right down the center.

  I looked him in the eyes and said, “Hello again, Mr. Sierra. The ID in your wallet says that you’re Geraldo Rivera.”

  He smirked.

  “That’s cute. What’s your real name?”

  He smirked again.

  “Okay if I call you Jorge Sierra? Facial recognition software says that’s who you are.”

  “It’s your party, Officer.”

  “That’s Sergeant. Since it’s my party, Mr. Sierra it is. How about we do this the easiest and best way. You answer some questions for me so we can all call it a night. You’re tired. I’m tired. But the internet is crackling. FBI wants you, and so do the Mexican authorities, who are already working on extradition papers. They are salivating.”

  “Everyone loves me.”

  I put the driver’s licenses of Lucille Stone and Cameron Whittaker on the table.

  “What were your relationships to these two women?”

  “They both look good to me, but I never saw either one of them before.”

  “Before tonight, you mean? We have a witness who saw you kill these women.”

  “Don’t know them, never saw them.”

  I opened a folder and took out the 8½ x 11 photo of Lucille Stone lying across the bar. “She took four slugs to the chest, three more to the face.”

  “How do you say? Tragic.”

  “She was your lady friend, right?”

  “I have a wife. I don’t have lady friends.”

  “Elena Sierra. I hear she lives here in San Francisco with your two children.”

  No answer.

  “And this woman,” I said, taking out the print of the photo I’d taken of the blond-haired woman lying on the bar floor.

  “Cameron Whittaker. I counted three or four bullet holes in her, but could be more.”

  His face was expressionless. “A complete stranger to me.”

  “Uh-huh. Our witness tells us that these two, your girlfriend and Ms. Whittaker, were very into each other. Kissing and the like.”

  Kingfisher scoffed. He truly looked amused. “I’m sorry I didn’t see them. I might have enjoyed to watch. Anyway, they have nothing to do with me.”

  I pulled out CSI’s photos of the two dead shooters. “These men. Could you identify them for us? They both have two sets of gang tats but have fake IDs on them. We’d like to notify their families.”

  No answer, but if Kingfisher gave a flip about them, you couldn’t tell. I doubted a lie detector could tell.

  As for me, my heart was still racing. I was aware of the men behind the glass, and I knew that if I screwed up this interrogation, I would let us all down.

  I looked at Richie. He moved his chair a couple of inches back from the table, signaling me that he didn’t want to insert himself into the conversation.

  I tried a Richie-like tack.

  “See it through my eyes, Mr. Sierra. You have blood spatter on your shirt. Spray, actually. The kind a person would expel onto you if she took a shot to the lung and you were standing right next to her. Your hands tested positive for gunpowder. There were a hundred witnesses. We’ve got three guns and a large number of slugs at our forensics lab, and they’re all going to tell the same story. Any ADA drawn at random could get an indictment in less time than it takes for the judge to say ‘No bail.’”

  The little bird with the long beak smiled. I smiled back, then I said, “If you help us, Mr. Sierra, we’ll tell the DA you’ve been cooperative. Maybe we can work it so you spend your time in the supermax prison of your choice. Currently, although it could change in the near future, capital punishment is illegal in California. You can’t be extradited to Mexico until you’ve served your sentence here. Good chance that will never happen, you understand? But you will get to live.”

  “I need to use the phone,” Kingfisher said.

  I saw the brick wall directly up ahead. I ignored the request for a phone and kept talking.

  “Or we don’t fight the extradition warrant. You take the prison shuttle down to Mexico City and let the federales talk to you about many mass murders. Though, frankly, I don’t see you surviving long enough in Mexico to even get to trial.”

  “You didn’t hear me?” our prisoner asked. “I want to call my lawyer.”

  Richie and I stood up and opened the door for the two jail guards, who came in and took him back to his cell.

  Back in the viewing room Conklin said, “You did everything possible, Linds.”

  The other men uttered versions of “Too bad” and left me alone with Conklin, Jacobi, Brady, and young Mr. Schein.

  I said, “He’s not going to confess. We’ve got nothing. To state the obvious, people are afraid of him, so we have no witnesses. We don’t know if he’s the killer, or even if he is the King.”

  “Find out,” said Brady. He had a slight southern drawl, so it came out “Fahnd out.”

  We all got the messag
e.

  Meeting over.

  Chapter 10

  It was just after 8:00 p.m. when I walked into the apartment where Julie and I live. It’s on Lake Street, not too far from the park.

  Mrs. Rose, Julie’s nanny, was snoozing on the big leather sofa, and our HDTV was on mute. Martha, my border collie and dear old friend, jumped to her feet and charged at me, woofing and leaping, overcome with joy.

  Mrs. Rose swung her feet to the floor, and Julie let out a wail from her little room.

  There was no place like home.

  I spent a good hour cuddling with my little girl, chowing down on Gloria Rose’s famous three-protein meat loaf, downing a couple of glasses of Pinot Noir, and giving Martha a back rub.

  Once the place was tidy, the baby was asleep, and Mrs. Rose had left for the night, I opened my computer and e-mail.

  First up, Charlie Clapper’s ballistics report.

  “Three guns recovered, all snubbies,” he wrote, meaning short-barreled .38 Saturday night specials. “Bullets used were soft lead. Squashed to putty, every one of them, no striations. Fingerprints on the guns and shells match the two dead men and the man you booked, identity uncertain. Tats on the dead men are the usual prison-ink variety, with death heads and so forth, and they have both the Los Toros bull insignia and lettering saying Mala Sangre. Photos on file.”

  Charlie’s report went on.

  “Blood on the clothing of the dead men and your suspect is a match to the blood of the victims positively identified as Cameron Whittaker, white, twenty-five, grade-school substitute teacher, and Lucille Stone, white, twenty-eight. ID says she was VP of marketing at Solar Juice, a software firm in the city of Sunnyvale.

  “That’s all I’ve got, Lindsay. Sorry I don’t have better news. Chas.”

  I phoned Richie, and Cindy picked up.

  My reporter friend was a cross between an adorable, girly journalist and a pit bull, so she said, “I want to work on this Kingfisher story, Linds. Tell Rich it’s okay for him to share with me.”