2nd Chance Page 3

  “We were headed to pay our respects,” I said.

  “They live over there. Building A.” He pointed toward the projects. “I guess you’ll find a warm reception, given that there’s some of your own.”

  I looked at him, puzzled. “I’m sorry? What was that?”

  “Didn’t you know, Lieutenant? Tasha Catchings’s uncle is a city cop.”

  Chapter 10

  I VISITED THE CATCHINGS’S apartment, paid my respects, then I headed back to the Hall. This whole thing was incredibly depressing.

  “Mercer’s looking for you,” hollered Karen, our long-time civilian secretary, as I got into the office. “He sounds mad. Of course, he always sounds mad.”

  I could imagine the folds under the chief’s jaw getting even deeper with the afternoon headline. In fact, the entire Hall was buzzing with the news that the La Salle Heights murder victim had been related to one of our own.

  There were several other messages waiting for me on my desk. At the bottom of the pile I came across Claire’s name. Tasha Catchings’s autopsy should be finished by now. I wanted to hold off on Mercer until I had something concrete to report, so I called Claire.

  Claire Washburn was the sharpest, brightest, most thorough M.E. the city ever had, notwithstanding the fact that she also happened to be my closest friend. Everyone associated with law enforcement knew it, and that she ran the department without a hitch while Chief Coroner Righetti, the mayor’s stiff-suited appointee, traveled around the country to forensic conferences working on his political résumé. You wanted something done in the M.E.’s office, you called Claire.

  And when I needed someone to set me straight, make me laugh, or just be there to listen, that’s where I went, too.

  “Where you been hiding, baby?” Claire greeted me with her always upbeat voice, which had the ring of polished brass.

  “Normal routine.” I shrugged. “Staff appraisals, case write-ups… city-dividing, racially motivated homicides…”

  “Just my region of expertise.” She chuckled. “I knew I’d be hearing from you. My spies tell me you’ve got yourself a bitch of a case out there.”

  “Any of those spies maybe work for the Chronicle and drive a beat-up silver Mazda?”

  “Or the D.A.’s office, and a BMW five-thirty-five. How the hell do you think information ever gets down here, anyway?”

  “Well, here’s one, Claire. Turns out the dead little girl’s uncle is in uniform. He’s at Northern. And the poor kid ends up being a poster child for the La Salle Heights project in action. Top-of-the-line student, never once in trouble. Some justice, huh? This bastard leaves a hundred slugs in the church and the one that hits finds its way into her.”

  “Uh-uh, honey.” Claire cut me off. “There were two of them in there.”

  “Two…? She was hit twice?” EMS had been all over the body. How could we have failed to catch that?

  “If I’m hearing you right, my guess is you think this shot was some kind of accident.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Honey,” Claire said soberly, “I think you better come on down for a visit.”

  Chapter 11

  THE MORGUE was on the ground floor of the Hall, out a back entrance and accessible from an asphalt path that led from the lobby. It took me no more than three minutes to rush down two flights of stairs.

  Claire met me in the reception area outside her office. Her bright and usually cheery face bore a look of professional concern, but as soon as she saw me, she eased into a smile and gave me a hug.

  “How you been, stranger?” she asked, as if the case were a million miles away.

  Claire always had a way of defusing the tension in even the most critical of situations. I’d always admired how she could relax my single-minded focus with just a smile.

  “I’ve been good, Claire. Just swamped since I got the job.”

  “I don’t get to see you much now that you’re Mercer’s pet butt-boy.”

  “Very funny.”

  She smiled that coy, wide-eyed smirk of hers that was partly, Hey, I know what you mean, but maybe a lot more, You gotta make the time, girl, for those who love you. But without as much as a reproving word, she led me down an antiseptic, linoleum-tiled hallway toward the morgue’s operating room, called the Vault.

  She glanced behind and said, “You made it sound like you were sure Tasha Catchings was killed by a stray bullet.”

  “That’s what I thought. The gunman fired three clips at the church and she was the only one hit. I even went and cased the area where the shots came from. There was no way he had anything even close to a clean shot. But you said two.…”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded. We burst through a closed compression door into the dry, cold air of the Vault. The icy chill and chemical smell always made my skin crawl.

  And it was no different now. A single inhabited gurney was visible from its refrigerated vault. A small mound was on it, covered by a white sheet. It barely filled half the length of the gurney.

  “Hold on,” Claire warned. Naked post-op victims, rigid and terrifyingly pale, were never an easy sight.

  She pulled down the sheet. The child’s face shot into my view. God, she was young.…

  I looked at her soft ebony skin, so innocent, so out of place against the cold, clinical surroundings. Part of me wanted to just reach out and lay a hand against her cheek. She had such a lovable face.

  A large puncture wound, freshly cleaned of blood, tore up the flesh around the child’s right chest. “Two bullets,” Claire explained, “basically right on top of each other, in rapid succession. I could see why EMS might’ve missed it. They almost tore through the same hole.”

  I sucked in a horrific double take. A fit of nausea gripped at my gut.

  “The first one exited right through her scapula,” Claire went on, easing the tiny body over on its side. “The second bounced off the fourth vertebra and lodged in her spine.”

  Claire reached over and picked up a glass petri dish resting on a nearby counter. With a tweezer, she held up a flattened lead disk about the size of a quarter. “Two shots, Linds… The first tore through the right ventricle, doing the trick. She was probably dead before this one even struck.”

  Two shots… two one-in-a-million ricochets? I replayed the likely position of Tasha as she exited the church and the killer’s line of fire in the woods. One seemed plausible, but two…

  “Did Charlie Clapper’s crew find any bullet nicks in the church above where the girl was positioned?” Claire inquired.

  “I don’t know.” It was standard procedure in all homicides to painstakingly match up all bullets with their marks. “I’ll check.”

  “What was the church constructed of where she was hit? Wood or stone?”

  “Wood,” I said, realizing where she was heading. No way wood on its own would deflect a bullet from an M16.

  Claire pushed her operating glasses high on her forehead. She had a cheery, amiable face, but when she was certain, as she was now, it had a glow of conviction that admitted no doubt. “Lindsay, the angle of entry is frontal and clean for both shots. A ricocheting shell would likely have come in from a different trajectory.”

  “I went over every inch of the shooter’s position, Claire. The way he was firing, he’d have to be a goddamn sharpshooter to set up that shot.”

  “You say the fire was sprayed irregularly across the side of the church.”

  “In a steady pattern, right to left. And Claire, no one else was struck. A hundred shots, she was the only one hit.”

  “So you assumed this was a tragic accident, right?” Claire peeled off her plastic medical gloves and tossed them deftly into a waste receptacle. “Well, these two were no accident at all. They didn’t ricochet off of anything. They were straight and perfectly placed. Killed her instantly. You willing to consider the possibility that maybe your gunman hit exactly what he was aiming at?”

  I brought back the scene in my mind. “He would have only had
an instant to line up such a shot, Claire. And only a foot or two of clearance from the wall to squeeze it in.”

  “Then either God didn’t smile on that poor girl last night,” Claire said with a sympathetic sigh, “or you better start looking for one hell of a shooter.”

  Chapter 12

  THE SHOCKING POSSIBILITY that Tasha Catchings might not have been a random victim after all dogged me all the way back to the office. Upstairs, I ran into a wall of detectives anxiously awaiting me. Lorraine Stafford informed me there was a positive from the auto search, a ’94 Dodge Caravan reported stolen three days ago down the peninsula in Mountain View. I told her to see if any of the characteristics matched.

  I grabbed Jacobi and told him to wrap up his bagel and come with me.

  “Where we headed?” he groaned.

  “Across the bay. Oakland.”

  “Mercer’s still looking for you,” Karen shouted as we hit the hall. “Whaddaya want me to say?”

  “Tell him I’m investigating a murder.”

  Twenty minutes later, we had crossed the Bay Bridge, woven through the drab, antiquated skyline that was downtown Oakland, and pulled up in front of the Police Administration Building on Seventh. Oakland’s police headquarters was a short gray panel-and-glass building in the impersonal style of the early sixties. On the second floor was Homicide, a cramped, dreary office no larger than our own. Over the years, I’d been here a few times.

  Lieutenant Ron Vandervellen stood up to greet us as we were led into his office. “Hey, I hear congratulations are in order, Boxer. Welcome to the world of sedentary life.”

  “I wish, Ron,” I replied.

  “What brings you here? You looking to check out how the real world works?”

  For years, the San Francisco and Oakland homicide departments had maintained a kind of friendly rivalry, they believing all we dealt with across the bay was the occasional computer parts salesman found naked and dead in his hotel room.

  “I saw you on the news last night.” Vandervellen cackled. “Very photogenic. I mean her.…” He grinned at Jacobi. “What brings you celebrities out here?”

  “A little bird named Chipman,” I replied. Estelle Chip-man was the elderly black woman Cindy told me had been found hung in her basement.

  He shrugged. “I got a hundred unsolved murders if you guys don’t have enough to keep you busy.”

  I was used to the Vandervellen barbs, but this time he sounded particularly edgy. “No agenda, Ron. I just want to look at the crime scene, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, but I think it’s gonna be tough to tie it into your church shooting.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  The Oakland lieutenant got up, went out into the outer office, and came back with a case file. “I guess I’m having a hard time putting together how a homicide as obviously racially motivated as yours could be committed by one of their own.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “Estelle Chipman’s killer was black?”

  He donned a pair of reading glasses, leafed through the file until he came to an official document marked “Alameda County Coroner’s Report.”

  “Read it and weep,” he muttered. “If you’d called, I could’ve saved you the toll….‘Dermal specimens found under the victim’s fingernails suggest a hyperpigmented dermis consistent with a non-Caucasian.’ Slides are out being tested as we speak.”

  “You still want to check out the site?” Vandervellen asked, seemingly enjoying the moment.

  “You mind? We’re already here.”

  “Sure, yeah, be my guest. It’s Krimpman’s case, but he’s out. I can take you through. I don’t get out to the Gus White projects much anymore. Who knows? Riding with you two supercops, I might pick something up along the way.”

  Chapter 13

  THE GUSTAVE WHITE PROJECTS were six identical redbrick high-rises on Redmond Street in West Oakland. As we pulled up, Vandervellen said, “Didn’t make much sense…. The poor woman wasn’t ill, seemed to have okay finances, even went to church twice a week. But sometimes people just give up. Until the autopsy, it looked legit.”

  I recalled the case file: There were no witnesses, no one had heard any screams, no one saw anybody running away. Only an elderly woman who kept to herself, found hanging from a steam pipe in the basement, her neck at a right angle and her tongue protruding.

  At the projects, we walked right into Building C. “Elevator’s on the fritz,” Vandervellen said. We took the stairs down. In the graffiti-marked basement, we came upon a hand-painted sign that read, “Laundry Room—Boiler Room.”

  “Found her in here.”

  The basement room was still criss-crossed with yellow crime scene tape. A pungent, rancid odor filled the air. Graffiti was everywhere. Anything that had been here—the body, the electrical wire she was hung with—had already been taken to the morgue or entered into evidence.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking to find,” Vandervellen said with a shrug.

  “I don’t know either.” I swallowed. “It happened late last Saturday night?”

  “Coroner figures around ten. We thought maybe the old lady came down to do her laundry, that someone surprised her. Janitor found her the next morning.”

  “What about security cameras?” Jacobi asked. “They were all over the lobby and the halls.”

  “Same as the elevator—broken.” Vandervellen shrugged again.

  It was clear Vandervellen and Jacobi wanted to head out as quickly as possible, but something pulled at me to stay. For what? I had no idea. But my senses were buzzing. Find me… over here.

  “The race thing aside,” Vandervellen said, “if you’re looking for a connection, I’m sure you know how unusual it is for a killer to switch methods in the midst of a spree.”

  “Thanks,” I snapped back. I had scanned the room; nothing jumped at me. Just the feeling. “Guess we’ll have to solve this one on our own. Who knows? By now maybe something’s popped up on our side of the pond.”

  As Vandervellen was about to flick off the light, something caught my eye. “Hold it,” I said.

  As if pulled by gravity, I was drawn to the far side of the room, to the wall behind the spot where Chipman had been found hanging. I knelt, tracing my fingers over the concrete wall. If I hadn’t seen it before it would’ve passed right by my sight.

  A primitive drawing, like a child’s, in bright orange chalk. It was a lion. Like Bernard Smith’s drawing but more fierce. The lion’s body led into a coiled tail, but it was the tail of something else… a reptile? A serpent?

  And that wasn’t all.

  The lion had two heads: one a lion, the other possibly a goat.

  I felt a knot in my chest, a tremor of revulsion, and recognition, too.

  Jacobi came up behind me. “Find something, Lieutenant?”

  I drew a long breath. “Pokémon.”

  Chapter 14

  SO NOW I KNEW….

  These cases were probably related. Bernard Smith’s sighting of the fleeing van had been on the mark. We had our getaway car. We might have a double killer.

  It didn’t surprise me that when I finally got back to the Hall, an angry Chief Mercer insisted he be buzzed the minute I walked in.

  I closed the door to my office, dialed his extension, and waited for the barrage.

  “You know what’s going on here,” he said, the sting of authority rippling through his voice. “You think you can stay out in the field all day and ignore my calls? You’re Lieutenant Boxer now. Your job is to manage your squad. And keep me informed.”

  “I’m sorry, Chief, it’s just that—”

  “A child has been killed. A neighborhood terrorized. We’ve got some psycho a brick short out there who’s trying to turn this place into an inferno. By tomorrow, every African American leader in this town will be demanding to know what we’re going to do.”

  “It’s gotten deeper than that, Chief.”

  Mercer stopped short. “Deeper than what?” />
  I told him what I had found in the basement in Oakland. The lionlike symbol that had been at both crimes.

  I heard him suck in a deep breath. “You’re saying these two killings are related?”

  “I’m saying that before we jump to any fast conclusions, that possibility exists.”

  The air seemed to seep right out of Mercer’s lungs. “You get a photo of what you found on that wall over to the lab. And the sketch of what that kid in Bay View saw. I want to know what those drawings mean.”

  “It’s already in the works,” I replied.

  “And the getaway van? Anything back on it yet?”

  “Negative.”

  A troubling possibility seemed to be forming in Mercer’s mind. “If there’s some kind of conspiracy taking place here, we’re not going to sit back while this city is held hostage to a terror campaign.”

  “We’re running the van. Let me have some time on that symbol.” I didn’t want to tell him my worst fear. If Vandervellen was right, that Estelle Chipman’s killer was black, and Claire was right, that Tasha Catchings was an intended target, this might not be a racial-terror campaign at all.

  Even on the phone, I could sense the creases underneath Mercer’s jaw deepening. I was asking him to take a risk, a big one. Finally I heard him exhale. “Don’t let me down, Lieutenant. Solve your case.”

  As I hung up the phone, I could feel the pressure intensifying. The world was going to expect me to bust down the door of every hate group operating west of Montana, and already I had real doubts.

  On my desk, I spotted a message from Jill. “How about a drink? Six o’clock,” it read. “All of us.”

  One full day into the case… If there was anything that would calm my fears, it was Jill, and Claire and Cindy, and a pitcher of margaritas at Susie’s.

  I left a message on Jill’s voice mail that I’d be there.