Women's Murder Club [02] 2nd Chance Read online

  At the end was a five-foot-high chain-link fence dividing the church grounds from the surrounding neighborhood. The fence wasn’t high. I planted my flats and hoisted myself over.

  I found myself facing penned-in backyards and tiny row houses. A few people had gathered, watching the show. To the right, the playgrounds of the Whitney Young projects.

  Jacobi finally caught up with me. “Take it easy, Loo,” he huffed. “There’s an audience. You’re making me look bad.”

  “This is how he must’ve made his way out, Warren.” We looked in both directions. One way led toward an alley, the other toward a row of homes.

  I shouted to a group of onlookers who had gathered on a back porch, “Anyone see anything?” No one responded.

  “Someone was shooting at the church,” I shouted. “A little girl’s been killed. Help us out. We need your help.”

  Everyone stood around with the unconfiding silence of people who don’t talk to the police.

  Then slowly a woman of about thirty came forward. She was nudging a young boy ahead of her. “Bernard saw something,” she said in a muffled voice.

  Bernard appeared to be about six, with cautious, round eyes, wearing a gold-and-purple Kobe Bryant sweatshirt.

  “It was a van,” Bernard blurted. “Like Uncle Reggie’s.” He pointed to the dirt road leading to the alley. “It was parked down there.”

  I knelt down, gently smiling into the scared boy’s eyes. “What color van, Bernard?”

  The kid replied, “White.”

  “My brother’s got a white Dodge minivan,” Bernard’s mother said.

  “Was it like your uncle’s, Bernard?” I asked.

  “Sorta. Not really, though.”

  “Did you see the man who was driving it?”

  He shook his head. “I was bringing out the garbage. I only saw it drive away.”

  “Do you think you would recognize it again if you saw it?” I asked.

  Bernard nodded.

  “Because it looked like your uncle’s?”

  He hesitated. “No, because it had a picture on the back.”

  “A picture? You mean like an insignia? Or some kind of advertising?”

  “Uh-uh.” He shook his head; his moonlike eyes were searching around. Then they lit up. “I mean like that.” He pointed toward a pickup truck in a neighbor’s driveway. There was a sticker of a Cal Golden Bear on the rear bumper.

  “You mean a decal?” I confirmed.

  “On the door.”

  I held the boy softly by the shoulders. “What did this decal look like, Bernard?”

  “Like Mufasa,” the boy said, “from The Lion King.”

  “A lion?” My mind raced through anything that seemed likely. Sports teams, college logos, corporations…

  “Yeah, like Mufasa,” Bernard repeated. “Except it had two heads.”

  Chapter 5

  LESS THAN AN HOUR LATER, I was pushing through a surging crowd that had built up on the steps of the Hall of Justice. I felt hollowed out and terribly sad, but knew I couldn’t show it here.

  The lobby of the tomblike granite building where I worked was packed with reporters and news crews, shoving their microphones at anyone who came in wearing a badge. Most of the crime reporters knew me, but I waved them off until I could get upstairs.

  Then a set of hands grasped my shoulders and a familiar voice chimed, “Linds, we need to talk….”

  I spun to face Cindy Thomas, one of my closest friends, though it also happened she was the lead crime reporter at the Chronicle. “I won’t bother you now,” she said above the din. “But it’s important. How about Susie’s, at ten?”

  It had been Cindy who, as a stringer buried on the paper’s Metro desk, had sneaked into the heart of the bride and groom case and helped blow it wide open. Cindy who, as much as any of us, was responsible for the gold on my shield today.

  I managed a smile. “I’ll see you there.”

  Upstairs on three, I strode into the cramped fluorescent-lit room that the twelve inspectors who managed Homicide for the city called home. Lorraine Stafford was waiting for me there. She had been my first appointment, after six successful years in Sex Crimes. And Cappy McNeil had come in, too.

  Lorraine asked, “What can I do?”

  “You can check with Sacramento for any stolen white vans. Any model. In-state plates. And put out an APB along with it for a bumper sticker of some sort of lion on the rear.” She nodded and started away.

  “Lorraine.” I stopped her. “Make that a two-headed lion.”

  Cappy walked with me while I made myself a cup of tea. He’d been in Homicide for fifteen years, and I knew he had supported me when Chief Mercer consulted him about offering me the lieutenant job. He looked sad, thoroughly depressed. “I know Aaron Winslow. I played ball with him in Oakland. He’s devoted his life to those kids. He really is one of the good guys, Lieutenant.”

  All of a sudden Frank Barnes from Auto Theft stuck his head into our office. “Heads up, Lieutenant. Weight’s on the floor.”

  Weight, in the lexicon of the SFPD, meant Chief of Police Earl Mercer.

  Chapter 6

  MERCER STRODE IN, all two hundred fifty pounds of him, trailed by Gabe Carr, a mean little weasel who was the department’s press liaison, and Fred Dix, who managed community relations.

  The chief was still dressed in his trademark dark gray suit, blue shirt, and shiny gold cuff links. I’d watched Mercer manage a number of tense scenes—transit bombings, Internal Affairs stings, serial killers—but I’d never seen his face so tight. He motioned me into my office and, with barely a word, pulled the door shut. Fred Dix and Gabe Carr were already inside.

  “I just got off the phone with Winston Gray and Vernon Jones”—two of the city’s most outspoken leaders. “They’ve assured me they’ll plead for restraint, give us some time to find out just what the fuck is going on. Just so I’m clear: By restraint, what they mean is, deliver the person or group who’s responsible for this or they’ll have two thousand outraged citizens at City Hall.”

  He barely relaxed his face when he stared at me. “So I’m hoping, Lieutenant, you got something you want to share…?”

  I took him through what I had found at the church, along with Bernard Smith’s sighting of the white getaway van.

  “Van or not,” the mayor’s man, Fred Dix, cut in, “you know where you have to start on this. Mayor Fernandez is going to come down hard on anyone operating in the area espousing a racist or antidiversity message. We need some heat to fall their way.”

  “You seem pretty sure that’s what we’re looking at,” I said with a noncommittal glance. “Your garden-variety hate crime?”

  “Shooting up a church, murdering an eleven-year-old child? Where would you start, Lieutenant?”

  “That girl’s face is going to be on every news report in the country,” Carr, the press liaison, pitched in. “The effort in the Bay View neighborhood is one of the mayor’s proudest accomplishments.”

  I nodded. “Does the mayor mind if I finish my eyewitness interviews first?”

  “Don’t worry yourself with the mayor,” Mercer cut in. “Right now, all you have to be concerned with is me. I grew up on these streets. My folks still live in West Portal. I don’t need a TV sound bite to see that kid’s face in my mind. You run the investigation wherever it leads. Just run it fast. And Lindsay… nothing gets in the way, you understand?”

  He was about to get up. “And most importantly, I want total containment on this. I don’t want to see this investigation being run on the front page.”

  Everyone nodded, and Mercer, followed by Dix and Carr, stood up. He let out a deep blast of air. “Right now, we have one hell of a press conference to muck our way through.”

  The others filed out of the room, but Mercer stayed behind. He leaned his thick hands on the edge of my desk, his hulking shape towering over me.

  “Lindsay, I know you left a lot on the table after that last case. But all that’s d
one. It’s history now. I need everything you have on this case. One of the things you left behind when you took that shield was the freedom to let personal pain interfere with the job.”

  “You don’t have to worry about me.” I gave him a solid stare. I’d had my differences with the man over the years, but now I was ready to give him everything I had. I had seen the dead little girl. I had seen the church torn up. My blood was on fire. I hadn’t felt this way since I left the job.

  Chief Mercer flashed me a smile of understanding. “It’s good to have you back, Lieutenant.”

  Chapter 7

  AFTER A HIGHLY CHARGED news conference conducted on the steps of the Hall, I met Cindy at Susie’s as we had arranged. After the frenzied scene at the Hall, the relaxed, laid-back atmosphere at our favorite meeting place was a relief. She was already sipping a Corona as I arrived.

  A lot had happened here—at this very table. Cindy; Jill Bernhardt, the assistant district attorney; and Claire Washburn, the chief medical examiner, my closest friend. We had started to meet last summer, when it seemed that fate had pulled us together with links to the bride and groom case. In the process, we had evolved into the closest of friends.

  I signaled our waitress, Loretta, for a beer, then planted myself across from Cindy with a worn-out smile. “Hey…”

  “Hey, yourself.” She smiled back. “Good to see you.”

  “Good to be seen.”

  A TV blared above the bar, a broadcast of Chief Mercer’s news conference. “We believe it was a single gunman,” Mercer announced to a flash of photographers’ bulbs.

  “You stay for that?” I asked Cindy, taking a welcome swig of my ice-cold beer.

  “I was there,” she replied. “Stone and Fitzpatrick were there, too. They filed the report.”

  I gave her a startled look. Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick were her competition on the crime desk. “You losing your touch? Six months ago, I would’ve found you coming out of the church as soon as we arrived.”

  “I’m going at it from another angle.” She shrugged.

  A handful of people crowded around the bar, trying to catch the breaking news. I took another chug of beer. “You should’ve seen this poor little girl, Cindy. All of eleven years old. She sang in the choir. There was this rainbow-colored knapsack with all her books on the ground nearby.”

  “You know this stuff, Lindsay.” She gave me a bolstering smile. “You know how it is. It sucks.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “But just once, it’d be nice to pick one of them up… you know, brush them off, send them home. Just once, I’d like to hand one back their book bag.”

  Cindy tapped her fist affectionately on the back of my hand. Then she brightened. “I saw Jill today. She’s got some news for us. She’s excited. Maybe Bennett’s retiring and she’s getting the big chair. We should get together and see what’s up with her.”

  “For sure.” I nodded. “That what you wanted to tell me tonight, Cindy…?”

  She shook her head. In the background, all hell was breaking loose in the news conference on the screen—Mercer promising a swift and effective response. “You’ve got a problem, Linds….”

  I shook my head. “I can’t give you anything, Cindy. Mercer’s handling everything. I’ve never seen him so worked up. I’m sorry.”

  “I didn’t ask you here to get something, Lindsay….”

  “Cindy, if you know something, tell me.”

  “I know that boss of yours better be careful what he’s committing to.”

  I glanced at the screen. “Mercer…?”

  In the background, I heard his voice asserting that the shooting was an isolated incident, that we already had tangible leads, that every available cop would be on the case until we tracked the killer down.

  “He’s telling the world you’re gonna nail this guy before it happens again…?”

  “So…?”

  Our eyes met solidly. “I think it already has.”

  Chapter 8

  THE KILLER WAS PLAYING Desert Command and he was a master.

  Phffft, phffft, phffft… phffft, phffft.

  Impassively, he squinted through the illuminated infrared sight as hooded figures darted into view. As if by an extension of his finger, the darkened, mazelike chambers of the terrorist bunker exploded in balls of orange flame. Shadowy figures burst into narrow halls, phffft, phffft, phffft.

  He was a champion at this. Great hand-eye coordination. No one could touch him.

  His finger twitched on the trigger. Ghouls, sand mites, towel-heads. Come at me, baby…. Phffft, phffft… Up through the dark corridors… He smashed through an iron door, came upon a whole nest of them, sucking on tabbouleh, playing cards. His weapon spit a steady orange death. Blessed are the peacemakers. He smirked.

  He squinted one more time through the sight, replaying the scene at the church in his mind, imagining her face. That little Jemima, with her braided hair, the rainbow-colored knapsack on her back.

  Phfft, phfft. An onscreen figure’s chest exploded. This next kill was for the record. Got it! His eye flashed toward the score. Two hundred seventy-six enemy dead.

  He took a tug on his Corona and grinned. A new personal record. This score was worth keeping. He punched in his initials: F.C.

  He stood at the machine in the Playtime arcade in West Oakland, flicking the trigger long after the game had ended. He was the only white guy in the room. The only one. In fact, that was why he chose to be here.

  Suddenly, the four large television sets overhead were blaring the same face. It sent a chill down his back and made him furious.

  It was Mercer, the pompous ass who ran the San Francisco cops. He was acting like he had everything figured out.

  “We believe this was the act of a single gunman…,” he was saying. “An isolated crime…”

  If you only knew. He laughed.

  Wait until tomorrow…. You’ll see. Just you wait, Chief Asshole.

  “What I want to stress,” the chief of police declared, “is that under no circumstance will we permit this city to be terrorized by racial attack….”

  This city. He spat. What do you know about this city? You don’t belong here.

  He clutched at a C-1 grenade in his jacket pocket. If he wanted to, he could blow everything open right here. Right now.

  But there was work to do.

  Tomorrow.

  He was going for another personal record.

  Chapter 9

  THE NEXT MORNING Jacobi and I were back examining the grounds of the La Salle Heights Church.

  All night long, I had fretted over what Cindy had told me about a case that had come across her desk. It involved an elderly black woman who lived alone in the Gustave White projects in West Oakland. Three days ago, the Oakland police had found her hanging from a pipe in the basement laundry room, an electrical cord tightly wound around her neck.

  At first, the police assumed it was a suicide. No abrasions or defensive wounds were found on her body. But the next day, during the autopsy, a flaky residue was found packed under her nails. It turned out to be human skin with microscopic specks of dried blood. The poor woman had been desperately digging in to someone.

  She hadn’t hung herself after all, Cindy said.

  The woman had been lynched.

  As I went back over the crime scene at the church, I felt uneasy. Cindy could be right. This might not be the first, but the second in an onset of racially driven murders.

  Jacobi walked up. He was holding a curled-up Chronicle. “You see this, boss?”

  The front page rocked with the blaring headline, “POLICE STUMPED AS GIRL, 11, IS KILLED IN CHURCH ASSAULT.”

  The article was written by Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick, whose careers had been nudged aside by Cindy’s work on the bride and groom case. With the newspapers stoking the fire, and the activists Gray and Jones railing on the air, soon the public would be accusing us of sitting on our hands while the terror suspect was running free.

&nbs
p; “Your buddies…” Jacobi huffed. “They always make it about us.”

  “Uh-uh, Warren.” I shook my head. “My buddies don’t take cheap shots.”

  Behind us in the woods, Charlie Clapper’s Crime Scene Unit team was going over the ground around the sniper’s position. They’d turned up a couple of foot imprints, but nothing identifiable. They would fingerprint the shell casings, grid-search the ground, pick up every piece of lint or dust where the supposed getaway vehicle had been parked.

  “Any more sightings on that white van?” I asked Jacobi. In a strange way it was good to be working with him again.

  He grumbled and shook his head. “Got a lead on a couple of winos who hold a coffee klatch on that corner at night. So far, all we have is this.” He unfolded an artist’s rendering of Bernard Smith’s description—a two-headed lion, the sticker on the rear door of the van.

  Jacobi sucked in his cheeks. “Who are we after, Lieutenant, the Pokémon killer?”

  Across the grass, I spotted Aaron Winslow coming out of the church. A knot of protestors approached him from a police barrier some fifty yards away. As he saw me, his face tensed.

  “People want to help any way they can. Paint over the bullet holes, build a new facade,” he said. “They don’t like to look at this.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid there’s still an active investigation going on.”

  He took in a breath. “I keep playing it over in my mind. Whoever did this had a clear shot. I was standing right there, Lieutenant. More in the line of fire than Tasha. If someone was trying to hurt someone, why didn’t they hurt me?”

  Winslow knelt down and picked up a pink butterfly hair clip from the ground. “I read somewhere, Lieutenant, that ‘courage abounds where guilt and rage run free.’ ”