14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) Read online

  He came to the side of the bed, sat on the edge of it, and kissed his wife.

  “Why are you up?” she asked him.

  “A drug lab was shot to shit. Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”

  Yuki thought, Later might be too late. He was checking his gun, strapping on his shoulder holster.

  “Brady?”

  “Hmm?”

  “C’mere a sec.”

  He came back to the bed and stood above her in the dark, zipping up his Windbreaker.

  “I have to tell you something big,” she said. “I’m going to leave the DA’s Office.”

  “What? Yuki, what are you talking about?”

  “I have a job offer with a not-for-profit. The Defense League. Impeccable credentials. I’ll get the same salary, don’t worry. But I’ll be defending people with inadequate representation. They already have a case for me.”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Brady said. He unhooked his phone from its charger and put it in his pocket.

  “Sure. We can talk about it,” she said. “But I’ve got to give the Defense League an answer.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes. And I’ve got to tell Parisi before I accept, and he’s on his way out of town at the end of the day.”

  Brady took his wallet off the dresser and put it in his back pocket. He was moving in a pretty herky-jerky fashion. Yuki read his body language. He was processing something he really didn’t like. She knew her timing sucked.

  “Sounds like you’ve made up your mind.”

  “It was sudden. I just met with the director yesterday, and I wanted to think about the offer overnight.”

  “Thanks for your faith in me.”

  Yuki trusted Brady with her life. This wasn’t about faith in Brady.

  “OK,” he said after five or six silent seconds had elapsed. “I guess you should do what you want. I hope it works out for you.”

  “Brady? Please don’t be like this.”

  “People are waiting for me, hon. I’ll see you later.”

  She listened to him leave the apartment, closing the door hard; she heard the door lock. And she heard her dead mother’s voice inside her head.

  You hurt your husband’s pride, Yuki-eh. Why didn’t you ask him if he approved of this move?

  She didn’t have to answer her mother. She felt defiant, knowing that truly, Brady would have pressured her out of the job. And he would have had valid reasons. He would have said it was good for her to work in the Hall, to be near him.

  As a lifetime cop, he would have told her patiently that it was good for her to be part of the city government, where her job was secure, where she was moving up, making a reputation, and locking in a pension plan. He would have said that her hours might be long, but they were predictable. And he would have said that he wouldn’t be able to stop worrying if she was working in bad neighborhoods.

  And he would have been right on all those points.

  But he would also have been wrong.

  Safe was good. But she had another idea about what she should be doing with her life and her abilities. She wanted to do work that would make her feel good about herself.

  Yuki looked at the clock, then slipped a sleep mask over her eyes.

  She tried to fall back to sleep, but there was no way.

  As bad as it was fighting with her husband, she couldn’t stand thinking about what Red Dog was going to say to her. It wasn’t going to be good.

  But she had to get it over with.

  CHAPTER 15

  YUKI SAW THAT Leonard Parisi’s office door was open and that he was at his desk, with its wide, uninspiring view of traffic and the handful of gritty low-rent businesses on Bryant Street.

  Parisi’s assistant was away from her post, so Yuki rapped on her boss’s door frame. He smiled at her and waved her in, pointing to the phone at his ear.

  She came inside and closed his door behind her. Then she took the chair across from him at his leather-topped desk and stared past his shoulder to the wall hanging behind him that showed the caricature of a big red dog gripping a bone in its teeth.

  Yuki had thought about what she was going to say to Len; she knew that in some ways, it was as critical as an opening statement to a jury. Len was that important a person in her life. But she knew that once she’d made her speech, the meeting could go very wrong, depending on what Len said to her.

  Parisi was talking to a witness for an upcoming trial. The man had just had an emergency quintuple bypass. Yuki let her mind float until Parisi hung up the phone.

  “Sorry, Yuki. That was Josh Reynolds. He’s not feeling too well.”

  Parisi himself had had a massive heart attack a few years ago. Yuki had been with him when it happened and had gotten medical assistance for him, PDQ. Later, he’d said she’d saved his life. It wasn’t true, but she knew he felt that way.

  He certainly regarded her as a close friend. Which was why having to tell him she was quitting was going to royally suck.

  “So what’s on your mind?” he asked her. “Something wrong, Yuki?”

  Yuki gripped the edge of his desk and said, “Len, I got a job opportunity that I want to take.”

  There was dense, soundproof silence. Yuki could hear her words echoing in her head. She’d been honest, respectful, and direct. What was Len going to do now?

  Would he hug her? Or tell her to go fuck herself?

  He rocked back in his chair, then leaned forward, put his forearms on the desktop, and clasped his hands, looking directly into her eyes. He said, “Oh, man, what terrible timing. You know I’m going away tonight for a week. There’s just not enough time for me to get you a counteroffer today, but I will put it in motion. Give me some ammo. What kind of job? How much are they offering?”

  “That’s so nice of you, Len, but I don’t want a counteroffer. I don’t want to leave, either.”

  “Well, don’t. Problem solved.”

  She smiled. “But I need to do it. It’s the Defense League, and there’s an urgent case that I feel drawn to. I think I’ll regret it if I turn this opportunity down.”

  “The Defense League. Really? You’d rather go into a nonprofit than stay here? I thought we had the same goals for this office. You’ve been working the best cases. I mean, not just Brinkley, I gave you Herman, too. I had to fight off piranhas to do that. Every ADA in the office wanted a piece of that guy.”

  “I know. I know, Len, and I don’t want you to think I’m not grateful.”

  “Yuki, speaking from personal experience, let me just say that a near-death event changes a person. I know that’s what happened to you. You’re still processing that you could have died, and for someone your age, that’s heavy. You will feel differently in six months, I promise. Turn down the offer. Let me work on making this a dream job—”

  “Len, I got hooked by a dead teenager,” Yuki said. “He was wrongly arrested and killed while awaiting trial. His family is devastated, rightfully so. The Defense League—”

  Parisi already knew where she was going with this. She felt thunderheads gathering.

  “You’re going to sue the City? The SFPD? You’re coming after us?”

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “I hear you,” Parisi said, “but I don’t understand you.” There was a look of outrage on her friend’s face that Yuki had seen before, just not directed at her.

  Parisi’s chair spun noisily as he got out of it. He crossed the room and opened his door wide.

  He said to her, “Human Resources will bring you some empty boxes and walk you out. You’ll surrender your card, your laptop, and your keys, immediately. I’ll have Payroll cut your check.”

  “Len, I’m indebted to you. I know how much—”

  “Save it,” he said. “I’ll see you in court. And I do mean me. Personally.”

  He returned to his desk chair and picked up the phone. He punched in some numbers, then swiveled around so that his back was to her. He said, “Michelle, it’
s Parisi.”

  Michelle Forrest was head of Human Resources. Yuki left Len’s office and, dazed, walked to her own.

  She hadn’t intended to tear up her life. She wanted a different job. And now her husband was pissed at her. Len was threatening to destroy her in court. And she hadn’t even told Zac Jordan that she was accepting the position.

  Well, she was taking the job, and she was going to win compensation for the Kordell family for the wrongful death of Aaron-Rey.

  There was no turning back now.

  CHAPTER 16

  I WAS OBSESSING about Tina Strichler as I drove to work that morning. Yesterday, Strichler had been ripped up her midsection with a long, sharp blade, a vicious murder that felt personal. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a connection between her and the other women who had each been killed with knives on May twelfth, now three years in a row.

  Brady has a keen investigative mind, and I really wanted his thoughts on this.

  I walked through the gate to the squad room and saw that Brady was in his small, glass-walled cubicle at the back of the bullpen. He was behind his desk, his blue shirt stretched across his chest and his bulging biceps. His white-blond hair was pulled back into a short pony, revealing where a part of his left ear had been shot off during a fierce gunfight in which he had acted heroically and saved a lot of lives.

  Right now, however, he was fixated on his laptop.

  I said “Hey” to Brenda, waved at a few of the day-shift guys who looked up as I strode past, then rapped my knuckles on Brady’s door. He waved me in and I took a seat across from him.

  I said, “About that homicide yesterday on Balmy Alley—”

  “Yep. Michaels and Wang are working it.”

  “I know. What I’m thinking is that there’s something familiar about this killing—”

  “Tell Michaels. Jacobi’s calling me three times a day about the Windbreaker cop robberies. I’m worried about Jacobi. I know he doesn’t want to retire with the stink of these douche bags all over him. Or all over us. And now the press has sniffed it out. I’ve got questions from I don’t know how many papers and TV reporters, and, of course, a ton of e-mail from the concerned citizens.”

  He waved his hand at the laptop.

  “I understand, Lieutenant,” I said. “We’re on it.”

  “OK,” he said, fixing his ice-blue eyes on me. “Bring me up to date.”

  I summarized the footage of the first Windbreaker cop holdup in the mercado, saying that the quality was worse than the footage of the one at the check-cashing store. But still, we were able to see three men in SFPD jackets, carrying guns.

  “The job took about five minutes from A to Z,” I said. “They scored about twenty grand. Sergeant Pikelny interviewed the store owner, who said the men in the SFPD Windbreakers locked them in the back room and then shot up the cash drawer. Hardly any words were spoken. No one was hurt.”

  “Did they leave any evidence?”

  “Nothing. They picked up the shell casings. They wore gloves. Conklin and I are going to look at the scene of last night’s check-cashing robbery, where the owner was killed. And we’re doing a follow-up interview with the survivor.”

  “OK. Come back with something, will you?”

  Brady was done. I left him hunched over his computer and met Conklin in the all-day parking lot on Bryant.

  We were both impatient to interview Ben Viera, the young man who’d been working at the check-cashing store when his boss had been shot to death.

  Luckily, the kid had lived to talk about it.

  CHAPTER 17

  BEN VIERA, THE surviving witness to the robbery-homicide at the check-cashing store, cracked open his door about four inches, which was the length of the chain lock. He demanded to see our badges, and we held them up. He asked our names, and after we told him, he closed the door in our faces.

  I heard his voice on the telephone; he spoke and listened for a couple of minutes.

  The door opened again, this time wide enough to let us in. Viera was of medium height and build, wearing green-striped boxers and a Giants T-shirt. He was saying, “I called the police station. To make sure you are who you say you are.”

  “OK. I get that,” Conklin said.

  The one-room apartment on Poplar Street was dark, and messy with pizza boxes and soda cans, dishes in the sink, and laundry on the floor. Viera folded his futon bed into a sofalike object, offered us seats, then got into a reclining chair and leaned back.

  “I’m on Xanax. Prescribed for me. Just so you know.”

  “OK,” said Conklin.

  “I already talked to the police the night of the … thing,” Viera said to the ceiling.

  “I know this is hard, Ben,” said Conklin. “You’ve told the story, and now we want you to do it again. Some new thought could jump into your mind. Right now we don’t have a clue who those guys were. They’re killers. You saw them, and we have to catch them.”

  Viera sighed deeply before describing the holdup and the shooting, which had clearly traumatized him.

  “Like I said, there were three of them. They were wearing police jackets and, like, latex masks. They came through the door fast. One aimed at us through the Plexiglas teller window, and another one kicked open the security door. Then one of them told Mr. Díaz, ‘Give us the money and no one will get hurt.’”

  The young man went on to say that his boss had a gun but never got off a shot. One of the masked robbers shot Díaz in the right arm. Another of them got Viera in a chokehold, put a gun to his head, and demanded that he open the safe. Viera told them the safe was in the floor and that he didn’t know the combination, “I swear on my mother.”

  Throughout the telling of this story, Viera’s flat affect hadn’t changed. But there was a tremor in his voice, and I could feel the terror bubbling up just below the tranquilizer.

  He said, “Mr. Díaz was rolling on the floor screaming, but he wouldn’t give up the combination. So then they shot him in the knee. Oh, God, it was—bad. And then Mr. Díaz screamed out the combination.

  “I opened the safe and they took the money and left. I thought maybe Mr. Díaz was going to make it. He was always good to me. I don’t even know why I’m alive.”

  Conklin and I took turns asking questions: Did you notice anything unusual about any of the men? Did you recognize anyone’s voice? Did any of the men seem familiar? Like they’d been in the store before? Did any of them take off his gloves or mask? Did any of the men call anyone by name?

  “Maybe one of the guys called another of them Juan.”

  It wasn’t much, but we’d take it.

  I gave Viera my card and told him to call me day or night if he remembered anything else.

  He said, “I guess. God knows I can’t sleep and I can’t forget.”

  He walked us to the door, and as soon as it was closed behind us, I heard the lock and the chain.

  Our next stop was the check-cashing store with the sign over the window: PAYDAY LOANS. CHECKS CASHED.

  CSU was wrapping up, and CSI Jennifer Neuenhoff walked us through. She showed us where the robbers had kicked in the door between the public space and the back of the store. She showed us the massive bloodstain where Mr. José Díaz had bled out. We looked into the open safe in the floor. It was like looking into a grave.

  Neuenhoff said, “Not more than thirty million prints in here. They shouldn’t take more than three lifetimes to process.”

  Conklin said, “Save yourself some time, Neuenhoff. The witness said the shooters wore gloves.”

  When we were back in the car, I called Brady and told him everything we had, which was pretty much a textbook case of how to stick up a store and make a clean getaway. I said we’d be back in the house in a couple of hours.

  “We’ve got a stop to make first, Lieutenant. Personal matter.”

  After I hung up with Brady, I pulled the rubber band out of my hair, shook out my pony, and tried to shake off my sour mood at the same time. I pulle
d down the visor and slicked on some lip gloss, and even gave my eyelashes a thin coat of mascara.

  When my face was presentable, I said to my partner, “OK. Now you can step on it, Inspector.”

  “You want sirens, Sergeant?”

  “Whatever you have to do.”

  He snapped off a salute, which made me laugh, and not long after that, we parked outside the Ferry Building.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE SAN FRANCISCO Ferry Building is not only the dock for ferries going to and from Alameda and Oakland, it’s a spectacular marketplace. The Great Nave is more than six hundred feet of arched arcade, with a clock tower, and the entire building is a lively hub of restaurants, shops, offices, and a vibrant farmers’ market.

  Conklin and I entered the building from the thirty-foot-wide bayside wharf, skirted the tables of people grabbing quick lunches, and entered Book Passage, an expansive bookstore with floor-to-ceiling windows facing the San Francisco Bay.

  My partner and I made our way between the displays of new fiction and the long shelves of other books and reached the back corner of the store, where nine or ten people had taken seats facing a speaker at a lectern.

  The speaker was our own girl reporter, Cindy Thomas.

  She looked adorable, as always, wearing a soft blue cashmere sweater dress and rhinestone combs in her curly blond hair. She was talking about her hot new book and skipped a beat when she saw us. Then she grinned and neatly recovered as we took seats.

  She said, “Fish’s Girl is the true story of two killers who were bound together by love and serial murder. If that makes you think of Bonnie and Clyde, this pair was nothing like them, but just as crazy. Crazier, actually. And deadlier.

  “Randy Fish and MacKenzie Morales killed separately, almost as if they were inside each other’s minds.”

  Cindy held up the book so her audience could see the grainy cover photo of her subjects walking hand in hand, the only known picture of Fish and Morales together. And then she told her small audience that as a crime reporter for the Chronicle, she had begun covering Randy Fish after he’d been convicted of killing five women in and around San Francisco.