The 20th Victim Read online

  Yuki smiled at her number two. She sipped coffee without getting any on her suit and picked up the folder.

  “Ready, steady, go,” she said.

  Danusa Freire locked the office door behind them.

  Chapter 97

  Yuki and Danusa left the DA’s offices and walked fifty yards along the corridor, their heels clacking in time against the terrazzo floor.

  Yuki felt her pulse speed up as a court officer opened the door to 6A, and she and her deputy entered the small, oak-paneled courtroom. The gallery was filling as they walked down the center aisle, through the gate, and took their seats at the prosecution table.

  Yuki looked across the aisle to where Clay Warren sat beside Zac Jordan at the defense table.

  Zac was going over his notes, and Clay—Clay looked as he had the last few times Yuki had met with him. His expression was fixed and hard, wordlessly expressing his decision not to defend himself.

  Yuki turned another ninety degrees to check out the spectators. Clay’s mother was watching her with drill-bit eyes, boring holes through Yuki. Yuki dipped her head in respect and then took in the rest of the gallery and got an entirely different feeling. Wall-to-wall cops gave her nods of encouragement.

  Yuki had just settled back into her seat when Judge Steven Rabinowitz entered the courtroom through his private door behind the bench. Yuki had tried two cases before Rabinowitz. She’d found him fair and even-tempered. You couldn’t ask for better than that.

  The bailiff stood at the base of the bench and called, “All rise”—and all did.

  Rabinowitz took his chair, which was positioned between the Stars and Stripes and the flag of the great state of California. The legal teams and spectators also took their seats with a considerable amount of shuffling and whispering.

  The judge exchanged a few words with his clerk and the bailiff. Someone sneezed. A cell phone tinkled a little tune. Rabinowitz said, “No phones. Are we clear? Turn ’em off.”

  Yuki felt like a young racehorse inside the gate waiting for the bell and the release. She was ready for this trial, prepared and involved and sharp. The jury filed in and took their seats. The bailiff read out the case number and announced that Judge Steven Rabinowitz was presiding.

  The judge brought his gavel down, calling the court to order, and greeted the jury. As he began his instructions to them, Yuki thought this case was hers to win.

  She would make sure that happened.

  Chapter 98

  Joe woke to morning light slashing across his face, the sheets twisted around his ankles, and the rumbling of Dave’s chair rolling across the rough-hewn boards on the floor below. He remembered now, the late-night call from Dave, the drive to Napa.

  He heard Dave talking with Jeff the Chef clearly enough to get the gist. They were insulting each other like old friends, going over the menu and getting ready for the day.

  Joe had a job, too. Or call it a moral obligation. All he had to do was solve the mystery of Ray Channing’s suspicious death without having a badge or any authority at all.

  Joe no longer believed that Dave had killed his father.

  But he had become convinced that some of Dr. Perkins’s hospitalized patients had been murdered. That wasn’t enough to bring in the law. There had to be a viable suspect. And there had to be evidence.

  Currently, he didn’t even have a theory.

  Joe kicked off the sheets and thought about the people he had met over the last couple of weeks: Dr. Perkins himself; Ted Scislowski, who’d slept in the bed next to Ray, who’d been wheeled out of the room, his face covered with a sheet.

  He thought about meetings with three of the people who’d lost loved ones—all Perkins’s patients—his interviews with night-shift nurses and four people who worked in the winery itself, including the elderly handyman who brought his dogs with him in his truck when he mowed the lawn.

  Motive, anyone?

  One person rose to the surface of Joe’s mind. Not as a suspect but because he felt he hadn’t given the man enough attention, hadn’t asked enough questions.

  Johann Archer, the writer who’d lost his thirty-eight-year-old fiancée, Tansy Mallory, and had written a touching tribute to her in Great Grapes. Tansy had been a fit long-distance runner and had shown no signs of cardiovascular disease.

  Dr. Daniel Perkins had been the attending doctor the day Tansy Mallory was brought in to Saint John’s small ER. The surgeon had treated her for heat exhaustion and ordered her kept overnight for observation. Typical recovery time should have been a matter of hours, but Tansy had died overnight.

  What distinguished Tansy from the other two cases was her survivor’s take on her death. Archer believed Perkins had killed Tansy through either neglect or intent. Joe hadn’t bought the murder plot at that time, but now? Dave Channing and Johann Archer had never met, but Dave had gotten Johann’s contact info, and Joe had left him a voice mail last week.

  Joe sat up, retrieved his phone from the floor near the bed, and tapped in Archer’s number.

  “Yes?”

  “Johann. It’s Joe Molinari. I called you last week? Sorry to call again so early. Do you have time to see me? I’d like to get your thoughts about suspicious deaths at Saint John’s Hospital.”

  “Good. I’m having plenty of them,” said Archer. “Something—or rather someone—occurred to me, and it might be the guilty party. I need to tell you.

  “And I mean you, Joe, specifically.”

  Chapter 99

  The courtroom was small enough for Yuki to be heard from the counsel table, but she wanted to speak with the jurors face-to-face.

  She left her notes on the table, crossed the well to the jury box, introduced herself, and thanked the jurors for serving.

  “As an assistant district attorney,” she said, “I work for the people of San Francisco. It’s my job to tell you about the case you will be deciding and why the defendant has been charged.

  “To start, please picture this: At 11:27 on March 15, Officer Todd Morton and his partner, Officer William Scarborough, are driving in the Sunset District on Nineteenth Avenue when a white Chevy Impala speeds through a red light at the intersection of Nineteenth and Taraval.

  “Officer Scarborough is at the wheel, and Officer Morton is in the passenger seat. Morton turns on the flashers and sirens, and Scarborough follows the Chevy. Normally, the driver sees the lights and hears the sirens and pulls over.

  “But the Chevy’s driver speeds up.

  “Officer Morton calls it in, and the police dispatcher tells him that the vehicle in question has been reported stolen. Now the Chevy hits Highway 1 South at ninety-plus miles an hour. Cars are going off the road as they see this car running up on them.

  “But there is something the driver of the Chevy doesn’t expect. The vehicle in front of him doesn’t have enough pickup to get out of his way, and now the Chevy is boxed in by the slow-moving car ahead of him and cars streaming past him on both sides.

  “Officer Scarborough pulls into the fast lane and makes a hard right in front of the Chevy, road-blocking the lane. The Chevy brakes but skids, hitting the rear compartment of the squad car. Fenders bend, drivers lean on their horns. A simple traffic stop has gone all to hell.”

  Leaving that image with the jury, Yuki walked back to her table and returned with a large foam-core board. She turned it so that the jurors could see the attached photos of the white Chevy in various degrees of speeding ahead and burning rubber as it was brought to a halt by the patrol car.

  Yuki told the jury, “Officer Scarborough will take us through the entire fifteen-second video, but for now we’ve cut and pasted the relevant frames. See here. This is Officer Morton. He has gotten out of his cruiser with his gun drawn. Officer Scarborough is still behind the wheel. He’s calling for backup and making sure that the dash cam is working.”

  Yuki continued laying out the sequence of events.

  “Everything is happening very fast,” she said. “The time between when Off
icer Morton gets out of the cruiser to approach the Chevy and when he is shot measures only fifteen seconds.

  “In that brief gasp a good man, a public servant doing his job, dies. His wife becomes a widow, and his three children, fatherless. And the man who shoots him gets away. The defendant knows the shooter’s identity.”

  Yuki let that last sentence hang in the air.

  “But he’s not talking.”

  Chapter 100

  Yuki walked along the rail fronting the jury box, letting the jurors count off the seconds.

  Then she asked, “How does the killer get away?

  “In the few seconds following the crash and the shooting, the gunman makes a plan. Traffic is now crawling with rubberneckers. The man with the gun steps into the far-right lane, where the driver of a RAV4 is slowing for the accident. The gunman points his weapon at the driver’s open window and shouts, ‘Get out of the car.’

  “The driver of the RAV4 is Mr. Jonas Hunt, seventy years old, and he tells Officer Scarborough later on that he wanted to see seventy-one. He complies with the shooter, gets out of his car. The motor is running. The shooter gets into the car, makes a U-turn across a break in the median strip, avoiding the clotted traffic, and makes his escape.

  “The cruiser’s dash cam has recorded the Chevy’s plate number, and although every law enforcement officer in California looks for the car, they can’t find it. The RAV4 is found two days later, abandoned in a junkyard. Mr. Hunt cannot describe the carjacker except to say that he was either white or Hispanic and frightening. Mr. Hunt didn’t want to look at his face, and so his description is vague. The carjacker wore gloves, and to date his prints have not been retrieved. The dash-cam view of the shooter is grainy and doesn’t ring any bells with law enforcement software.

  “Officer Scarborough can’t identify the shooter, either. He tried. He looked at mug shots and he spoke with a police artist, but he couldn’t make a positive ID. He saw the man from a distance, then he saw him at an angle when he shot Officer Morton, and then when the killer hijacked Mr. Hunt’s car, Officer Scarborough saw him with his back turned.

  “But one person does know the shooter’s identity.

  “The driver of the stolen white Chevy at the center of this true story. Officer Scarborough arrests him, and after being futilely interrogated, he is incarcerated in the men’s jail. Right now he’s sitting with his attorney at the defense counsel table. His name is Clay Warren and he is the defendant.”

  Yuki stopped speaking for a moment and let the jurors get a good look at the teenager facing a life sentence.

  Then Yuki said, “Back at the scene of the crime, Officer Scarborough attends to Officer Morton until the ambulance arrives. Sadly, Officer Morton has already passed away.”

  Yuki told the jurors that stealing a car is, by law, grand theft of an automobile, a felony.

  She said, “The defendant may or may not have known that the car was stolen, or that the shooter had a gun, but guns, licensed or not, must be stored in the trunk or another locked box. This gun was not locked up. It was on the shooter’s person. And that felony is charged against the defendant as an accomplice.

  “That’s not all,” Yuki said. “A kilo of high-grade, unadulterated fentanyl was secreted in a suitcase in the trunk of the stolen Chevy—another felony, and another charge against the defendant. As you have seen and I have told you, a police officer making a routine traffic stop was killed during the commission of these crimes. That makes the defendant an accomplice, and just as guilty, under the law, as the shooter.

  “Since Officer Morton’s death, Mr. Warren has not identified his accomplice, nor has he cooperated with the police or the district attorney. Now he is left to take the weight of justice alone.

  “Please find him guilty of felony murder.”

  Chapter 101

  Judge Steven Rabinowitz turned to the defense table.

  “Mr. Jordan. Ready with your opening statement?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Zac stood, patted his client on the shoulder, and stepped out into the well to address the jurors and the court.

  “Your Honor, members of the jury, I’d like to tell you about Mr. Clay Warren, the unfortunate defendant who is also a victim.

  “My client is an eighteen-year-old who failed to graduate from high school. Until recently he lived with his mother and twelve-year-old sister, Trina, in Crocker-Amazon, and worked a part-time job not far away at the Shell station on Alemany Boulevard. He does not know his father. His mother, who is here today, works as a housekeeper.

  “Money is tight in the Warren household.

  “Mr. Warren hasn’t told me how he found himself driving a stolen car, running a light, crashing into a patrol car, and witnessing his passenger shoot a police officer to death.

  “This young man has never before been charged with any crimes, not even for stealing an apple, before he was involved in the very serious crimes of March 15.

  “So what happened on that particular day?”

  Zac focused all of his attention on the jurors.

  He said, “Let me offer a speculative explanation.”

  Yuki stole a look at Clay Warren, at his unchanged, masklike expression, then turned back to watch Zac mount his case.

  “It’s self-evident that the man Mr. Warren was driving in the white Chevy was dangerous,” Zac said. “He had a gun, a stolen car, and a million dollars of drugs in the trunk. He killed a police officer in cold blood. Mr. Warren was arrested as an accomplice. I’m going to add ‘unwitting.’ That he was an unwitting accomplice, and he may have been forced to take part in this criminal endeavor.

  “After his arrest my client was locked up in the general population of old-time jail in the Hall of Justice. He recently attempted suicide by hanging. Despite being placed under observation, within days he was attacked by one or more prisoners and stabbed repeatedly to his abdomen with a sharp implement and nearly bled to death.

  “Since then Mr. Warren has been held in solitary confinement, under constant watch, so that he isn’t murdered and doesn’t kill himself for being victimized by the true criminal, and to the eternal grief of his family.

  “One could even say that he has been punished and has paid his debt to society.

  “Clay’s life is now hell, and the only way out is through the good graces of the twelve men and women of this jury.”

  Chapter 102

  I was texting an apology to Claire for standing her up for yesterday’s lunch, when my desk phone rang.

  I snatched up the receiver.

  “Boxer.”

  “Sergeant, it’s May Hess.”

  May Hess is a dispatch supervisor who calls herself the Queen of the Batphone. She also works the tip line because she’s good at helping people, cutting through the panic and distress.

  She said, “I’ve got something for you, Sergeant. A tourist witnessed the shooting at the jazz center.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “I can do better than that. I’ve cued up the tape. Listen here.”

  I heard a recorded voice over my phone.

  “Police? Police?”

  Hess’s voice answered on the tape. “This is the police. Do you have an emergency?”

  “No. It’s about the shooting yesterday. At the jazz center.”

  “Okay. And what’s your name?”

  “Sharon Fogel.”

  “Spell it for me?”

  After the caller spelled it out, Hess said, “What do you know about the shooting, Ms. Fogel?”

  “I saw it, but I didn’t know it. I was taking pictures. I’m from Sheboygan. Wisconsin. I’m on vacation. I was going to go to the jazz center, and I took some pictures of the building, and then those men were shot and I ran. I only realized what I had on my phone this morning.”

  “Tell me about the pictures,” said Hess.

  “It’s two pictures, actually. One shows his car. The other shows him.”

  I heard the caller panting, and
I was panting a bit myself. Had Sharon Fogel really snapped a photo of the killer?

  Hess said, “Ms. Fogel, give me your address. I’ll have a police officer come by and get your statement and take a look at the photos while she’s there.”

  I heard a man’s voice speaking in Sharon Fogel’s room.

  Fogel’s voice was muffled. I thought she was saying, “Just a minute.” Then she was back on the line.

  “My husband wants me to stay out of this.”

  “Ms. Fogel, you won’t be involved in any way—”

  “I can’t.”

  “You may have something of real value to the ongoing investigation. What about this? Send the pictures to me. I’ll forward them to the homicide team.”

  “Give me your email address,” said Fogel.

  The voice of the man speaking in Fogel’s room was growing louder. “You’ve always got to be the star of the show, Sharon.”

  “Have you got them?” Fogel asked Hess.

  “Let me open your email.…”

  I heard the clatter of the phone hitting the floor. Then the click of the phone disconnecting. The taped call was over, but Hess was there.

  “Lindsay. Did you hear all of that?”

  I said, “Maybe. Did you get the pictures?”

  “Forwarding them to you now. She’s staying at the Hilton. I have her cell number.”

  I told Hess, “Great job.”

  And then I waited for Hess’s email to hit my inbox.

  Chapter 103

  Conklin looked over the top of his computer and asked, “What was that all about?”

  “Roll your chair over.”

  He pulled his chair around to my desk so that he could see my monitor.

  I said, “Hotline thinks we might have a witness to the jazz center shootings. And…the witness sent pictures.”

  “Let’s see.”

  I opened the email, daring to hope.