The Trial Read online

  “That would nail it.”

  When the coffee containers and doughnut box were in the trash and we were alone at last, Rich said, “Cindy should run it in the Chron online.”

  “Like, ‘SFPD needs info from anyone who was at the Vault on Wednesday night and saw the shooting’?”

  “Yep,” said Rich. “It’s worked before.”

  Chapter 12

  Rich went back to the crime scene for another look, and I called the former Mrs. Jorge Sierra, now Ms. Maura Steele. She didn’t answer the phone, so I signed out a squad car and drove to her address in Nob Hill.

  I badged the doorman and asked him to ring up to Ms. Sierra-a.k.a.-Steele’s apartment.

  He said, “You just missed her.”

  “This is important police business,” I said. “Where can I find her?”

  “She went to the gym. She usually gets back at around ten o’clock.”

  It was quarter to. I took a seat in a wingback chair with a view of the street through two-story-tall plate-glass windows and saw the black limo stop at the curb. A liveried driver got out, went around to the sidewalk side of the car, and opened the rear door.

  A very attractive woman in her late twenties or early thirties got out and headed toward the lobby doors while she went for the keys in her bag.

  Ms. Steele was slim and fine boned, with short, dark, curly hair. She wore a smart shearling coat over her red tracksuit. I shot a look at the doorman and he nodded. When she came through the door, I introduced myself and showed her my badge.

  “Police? What’s this about?”

  “Jorge Sierra,” I said.

  She drew back. Fear flickered in her eyes, and her face tightened.

  She said, “I don’t know anyone by that name.”

  “Please, Ms. Steele. Don’t make me take you to the station for questioning. I just need you to ID a photograph.”

  The doorman was fiddling with papers at the front desk, trying to look as though he wasn’t paying attention. He looked like Matt Damon but didn’t have Damon’s talent.

  “Come upstairs with me,” Ms. Steele said to me.

  I followed her into the elevator, which opened directly into her sumptuous apartment. It was almost blindingly luxurious, with its Persian carpets, expensive furnishings, and what looked to me like good art against a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge and San Francisco Bay.

  I’d looked her up before getting into the car. Ms. Steele didn’t have a job now and had no listing under Sierra or Steele on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Who’s Who in Business. Odds were, she was living on the spoils of her marriage to one of the richest men west of the Rockies.

  Steele didn’t ask me to sit down.

  “I want to be absolutely clear,” she said. “If you quote me or depose me or in any way try to put me on the record, I will deny everything. I’m still married. I can’t testify.”

  I took the mug shot out of my pocket and held it up for her to see. “Is this Jorge Sierra?” I asked. “Known as Kingfisher?”

  She began nodding like a bobblehead on crack. I can’t say I didn’t understand her terror. I’d felt something like it myself.

  I said, “Thank you.”

  I asked follow-up questions as she walked with me back toward the elevator door. Had her husband been in touch with her? When was the last time she’d spoken with him? Any idea why he would have killed two women in a nightclub?

  She stopped moving and answered only the last question.

  “Because he is crazy. Because he is mental when it comes to women. I tried to leave him and make a run for the US border, but when he caught me, he did this.”

  She lifted her top so that her torso was exposed. There was a large scar on her body, about fifteen inches wide by ten inches long, shirring her skin from under her breasts to her navel. It looked like a burn made by a white-hot iron in the shape of a particular bird with a prominent beak. A kingfisher.

  “He wanted any man I ever met to know that I belonged to him. Don’t forget your promise. And don’t let him go. If he gets out, call me. Okay?”

  “Deal,” I said. “That’s a deal.”

  Chapter 13

  Early Friday morning Conklin and I met with ADA Barry Schein in his office on the second floor of the Hall. He paced and flexed his hands. He was gunning his engines, which was to be expected. This was a hugely important grand jury hearing, and the weight of it was all on Barry.

  “I’m going to try something a little risky,” he said.

  Barry spent a few minutes reviewing what we already knew about the grand jury—that it was a tool for the DA, a way to try out the case with a large jury in an informal setting to see if there was enough probable cause to indict. If the jury indicted Mr. Sierra, Schein could skip arraignment and take Sierra directly to trial.

  “That’s what we want,” said Barry. “Speed.”

  Rich and I nodded that we got that.

  Schein said, “There’s no judge, no attorney for the defense, as you know. Just me and the jury,” Schein said. “Right now we don’t have sufficient evidence to indict Sierra on a murder of any degree. We can place him at the scene of the crime, but no one saw him fire his gun, and the forensics are inconclusive.”

  I said, “I’m ready to hear about your ‘risky’ move.”

  Schein straightened his tie, patted down his thinning hair, and said, “I’ve subpoenaed Sierra. This is rarely done, because the putative defendant is unlikely to testify against himself.

  “That said, Sierra has to take the stand. Like most people in this spot, he’ll plead the Fifth. So I’m going to try to use that to help us.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Schein cracked his first smile of the day.

  “I’ll lay out my case to the jury by asking Sierra: ‘You had a plan in mind when you went to the Vault on the fourteenth, isn’t that right? Lucille Stone was your girlfriend, correct, sir? But she rejected you, didn’t she? You followed her and learned that she was involved with a woman, isn’t that right, Mr. Sierra? Is that why you murdered her and Cameron Whittaker?’”

  I didn’t have to ask Schein to go on. He was still circling his office, talking from the game plan in his head.

  “The more he refuses to answer,” Schein said, “the more probable cause is raised in the jurors’ minds. Could it backfire? Yeah. If the jury doesn’t hold his refusal to testify against him, they’ll hand me my hat. But we won’t be any worse off than we are now.”

  An hour later Rich and I were in the San Francisco Superior Court on McAllister Street, benched in the hallway. Sierra had been brought into the courtroom through a back door, and as I’d seen when the front doors opened a crack, he was wearing street clothes, had shackles around his ankles, and was sitting between two hard-boiled marshals with guns on their hips.

  Sierra’s attorney, J. C. Fuentes, sat alone on a bench ten yards from where I sat with my partner. He was a huge, brutish-looking man of about fifty wearing an old brown suit. I knew him to be a winning criminal defense attorney. He wasn’t an orator, but he was a remarkable strategist and tactician.

  Today, like the rest of us, he was permitted only to wait outside the courtroom and to be available if his client needed to consult with him.

  Rich plugged into his iPad and leaned back against the wall. I jiggled my feet, people-watched, and waited for news. I was unprepared when the courtroom doors violently burst open.

  I jumped to my feet.

  Jorge Sierra, still in chains, was being pulled and dragged out of the courtroom and into the hallway, where Mr. Fuentes, Conklin, and I stood, openmouthed and in shock.

  Sierra shouted over his shoulder through the open doors.

  “I have all your names, stupid people. I know where you live. Street addresses. Apartment layouts. You and your pathetic families can expect a visit very soon.”

  The doors swung closed and Fuentes rushed to Sierra’s side as he was hauled past us, laughing his face off.

  It was twenty
past twelve. Rich said to me, “How long do you think before the jury comes back?”

  I had no answer, not even a guess.

  Fourteen minutes later Schein came out of the courtroom looking like he’d been through a wood chipper.

  He said, “Sierra took the Fifth, and the jurors didn’t like him. Before he got off the stand, he threatened them, and he didn’t quit until the doors closed on his ass. Did you hear him? Threatening the jurors is another crime.”

  Rich said, “When do they decide, Barry?”

  Schein said, “It’s done. Unanimous decision. Sierra is indicted on two counts of murder one.”

  We pumped Schein’s hand. The indictment gave us the time we needed to gather more evidence before Sierra went to trial. Conklin and I went back to the Hall to brief Brady.

  “There is a God,” Brady said, rising to his feet.

  We high-fived over his desk, and Conklin said, “Break out the Bud.”

  It was a great moment. The Feds and the Mexican government had to step back. Jorge Sierra had been indicted for murder in California.

  The King was in our jail and he was ours to convict.

  Chapter 14

  Joe and I were dancing together close and slow. He had his hand at the small of my back, and the hem of my low-cut slinky red gown swished around my ankles. I couldn’t even feel my feet because I was dancing on cotton candy clouds. I felt so good in Joe’s arms—loved, protected, and excited, too. I didn’t want this dance to ever end.

  “I miss you so much,” he said into my ear.

  I pulled back so I could look into his handsome face, his blue eyes. “I miss you—”

  I never got out the last word.

  My phone was singing with Brady’s ring tone, a bugle call.

  I grabbed for the phone, but it slipped out of my hand. Still half under the covers, I reached for it again, and by that time Martha was snuffling my face.

  God!

  “Boxer,” I croaked.

  Brady’s voice was taut.

  “A juror was found dead in the street. Gunned down.”

  I said, “No.”

  He said, “’Fraid so.”

  He told me to get on it, and I called Richie.

  It was Saturday. Mrs. Rose was off, but I called her anyway. She sounded both half asleep and resigned but said, “I’ll be right there.”

  She crossed the hall in her robe and slippers and asked if I wouldn’t mind taking Martha out before I took off.

  After a three-minute successful dog walk I guzzled coffee, put down a PowerBar, and drove to Chestnut Street, the main drag through the Marina District. This area was densely lined with restaurants and boutiques, normally swarming with young professionals, parents with strollers, and twentysomethings in yoga pants.

  All that free-spirited weekend-morning traffic had come to a dead halt. A crowd of onlookers had formed a deep circle at the barrier tape enclosing a section of street and the victim’s body.

  I held up my badge and elbowed my way through to where Conklin was talking to the first officer, Sam Rocco.

  Rocco said, “Sergeant, I was telling Conklin, a 911 caller reported that one of the grand jurors in the Sierra jury had been ‘put down like a dog.’

  “The operator said the caller sounded threatening. She got the street and cross street before the caller hung up,” Rocco continued. “Feldman and I were here inside of five minutes. I opened the victim’s wallet and got her particulars. Sarah Brenner. Lives two blocks over on Greenwich Street. From the coffee container in the gutter, looks like she was just coming back from Peet’s on Chestnut.”

  “Anyone see the shooting?” I asked.

  “None that will admit to it,” said Officer Rocco.

  “Cash and cards in the wallet?”

  “Yep, and she’s wearing a gold necklace and a watch.”

  Not a robbery. I thanked Rocco and edged around the dead body of a young woman who was lying facedown between two parked cars. She wore jeans and a green down jacket with down puffing out of its bullet holes, and nearby lay the slip-on mules that had been blown off her socked feet by the impact or the fall. Shell casings were scattered on the asphalt around the body, and some glinted from underneath the parked cars.

  I lifted a strand of Sarah Brenner’s long brown hair away from her face so that I could see her features. She looked sweet. And too young. I touched her neck to be sure she was really gone. Goddamnit.

  Putting Sarah Brenner “down like a dog” was a crude term for a professional hit meant to scare everyone connected with Sierra’s trial. Inciting fear. Payback. Revenge.

  It was just Kingfisher’s style.

  I thought he might get away with killing this young woman as he had done so many times before. He would hit and run again.

  Chapter 15

  Monday morning Rich and I reported to Brady what we had learned that weekend.

  Rich said, “Sarah was twenty-five, took violin lessons at night, did paperwork for a dentist during the day. She had no boyfriend, no recent ex, and lived with two other young women and an African gray parrot. She had a thousand and twenty dollars in the bank and a fifty-dollar credit card balance for a green down jacket. No enemies, only friends, none known to have a motive for her killing.”

  “Your thoughts?” Brady asked me.

  “Maybe the King would like to brag.”

  Brady gave me a rare grin. “Knock yourself out,” he said.

  I took the stairs from our floor, four, to maximum security on seven. I checked in at the desk and was escorted to Sierra’s brightly lit, windowless cell.

  I stood a good five feet from the bars of the King’s cage.

  He looked like someone had roughed him up, and the orange jumpsuit did nothing for his coloring. He didn’t look like the king of anything.

  He stood up when he saw me, saying, “Well, hello, Officer Lindsay. You’re not wearing lipstick. You didn’t want to look nice for me?”

  I ignored the taunt.

  “How’s it going?” I asked him.

  I was hoping he had some complaints, that he wanted a window or a blanket—anything that I could use to barter for answers to questions that could lead to evidence against him.

  He said, “Pretty good. Thank you for getting me a single room. I will be reasonably comfortable here. Not so much everyone else. That includes you, your baby girl, even your runaround husband, Joseph. Do you know who Joseph is sleeping with now? I do. Do you want to see the pictures? I can have them e-mailed to you.”

  It was a direct shot to the heart and caught me off guard. I struggled to keep my composure.

  “How are you going to do that?” I asked.

  Sierra had an unpleasant, high-pitched laugh.

  I’d misjudged him. He had taken control of this meeting and I would learn nothing from him about Sarah Brenner—or about anyone else. The flush rising from under my collar let both of us know that he’d won the round.

  I left Jorge Sierra, that disgusting load of rat dung, and jogged down the stairs to the squad room, muttering, promising myself that the next point would be mine.

  Conklin and I sat near the front of the room. We’d pushed our desks together so that we faced each other, and I saw that Cindy was sitting in my chair and Conklin was in his own. There were open Chinese food cartons between them.

  I said hello to Cindy. Conklin dragged up a chair for her and I dropped into mine.

  “Nice of you to bring lunch,” I said, looking at the containers. I had no appetite whatsoever. Definitely not for shrimp with lobster sauce. Not even for tea.

  “I’ve brought you something even nicer,” she said, holding up a little black SIM card, like from a mobile phone.

  “What’s that?”

  “This is a ray of golden sunshine breaking through the bleak skies overhead.”

  “Make me a believer,” I said.

  “A witness dropped this off at the Chron for me this morning,” Cindy said. “It’s a video of the shooting at t
he Vault’s bar. You can see the gun in the King’s hand. You can see the muzzle aimed at Lucy Stone’s chest. You can see the flare after he pulled the trigger.”

  “This is evidence of Sierra shooting Stone on film?”

  She gave me a Cheshire cat smile.

  “The person who shot this video has a name?”

  “Name, number, and is willing to testify.”

  “I love you, Cindy.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean I really love you.”

  Cindy and Rich burst out laughing, and after a stunned beat I laughed, too. We looked at the video together. It was good. We had direct evidence and a witness. Jorge Sierra was cooked.

  Four Months Later

  Chapter 16

  No matter what kind of crappy day life dealt out, it was almost impossible to sustain a bad mood at Susie’s Café.

  I parked my car on Jackson Street, buttoned my coat, and lowered my head against the cold April wind as I trudged toward the brightly lit Caribbean-style eatery frequented by the Women’s Murder Club.

  My feet knew the way, which was good, because my mind was elsewhere. Kingfisher’s trial was starting tomorrow.

  The media’s interest in him had been revived, and news outlets of all kinds had gone on high alert. Traffic on Bryant and all around the Hall had been jammed all week with satellite vans. None of my phones had stopped ringing: office, home, or mobile.

  I felt brittle and edgy as I went through the front door of Susie’s. I was first to arrive and claimed “our” booth in the back room. I signaled to Lorraine and she brought me a tall, icy brewski, and pretty soon that golden anesthetic had smoothed down my edges.

  Just about then I heard Yuki and Cindy bantering together and saw the two of them heading toward our table. There were kiss-kisses all around, then two of my blood sisters slid onto the banquette across from me.

  Cindy ordered a beer and Yuki ordered a Grasshopper, a frothy green drink that would send her to the moon, and she always enjoyed the flight. So did the rest of us.