Women's Murder Club [06] The 6th Target Read online

  I went out to the squad room, said, “We’ve got a lead. I have an address on San Carlos Street.”

  Conklin said, “I want to keep working the phones. New videos of the shooting have been e-mailed to our Web site.”

  Jacobi stood, put on his jacket, said, “I’m driving, Boxer.”

  I’ve known Jacobi for ten years, worked as his partner for three before I was promoted to lieutenant. During the time Jacobi and I were a team, we’d developed a deep friendship and an almost telepathic connection. But I don’t think either of us acknowledged how close we were until the night we were shot down by coked-up teenagers. Being near death had bonded us.

  Now he drove us to a crappy block on the fringes of the Tenderloin.

  We looked up the address Ike Quintana had given me, a two-story building with a storefront church on the ground floor and a couple of apartments on top.

  I rang the doorbell, and a buzzer sounded. I pulled at the dull metal door handle, and Jacobi and I entered a dark foyer. We climbed creaking stairs into a carpeted hallway smelling of mildew.

  There was a single door on each side of the hallway.

  I rapped on the one marked 2R, and a long half minute later, it squeaked open.

  Ike Quintana was a white male, midthirties. He had black hair sticking up at angles and he was oddly dressed in layers. An undershirt showed in the V of his flannel shirt, a knitted vest was buttoned over that, and an open, rust-colored cardigan hung down to his hips.

  He wore blue-striped pajama bottoms and brown felt slippers, and he had a kind of sweet, gappy smile. He stuck out his hand, shook each of ours, and asked us to come in.

  Jacobi stepped forward, and I followed both men into a teetering tunnel of newspapers and clear plastic garbage bags filled with soda bottles that lined the hallway from floor to ceiling. In the parlor, cardboard boxes spilled over with coins and empty detergent boxes and ballpoint pens.

  “I guess you’re prepared for anything,” Jacobi muttered.

  “That’s the idea,” said Quintana.

  When we reached the kitchen, I saw pots and pans on every surface, and the table was a layered archive of news-paper clippings covered by a tablecloth, then more newspaper layers and a tablecloth over that, again and again making an archeological mound a foot high.

  “I’ve been following the Giants for most of my life,” Quintana said shyly. He offered us coffee, which Jacobi and I declined.

  Still, Quintana lit a flame on the gas stove and put a pot of water on to boil.

  “You have a picture to show us?” I asked.

  Quintana lifted an old wooden soapbox from the floor and put it on the pillowy table. He pawed through piles of photographs and menus and assorted memorabilia that I couldn’t make out, his hands flying over the papers.

  “Here,” he said, lifting out a faded five-by-seven photo. “I think this was taken around ’88.”

  Five teenagers — two girls and three boys — were watching television in an institutional-looking common room.

  “That’s me,” said Quintana, pointing to a younger version of himself slouched in an orange armchair. Even then, he had layered his clothing.

  “And see this guy sitting on the window seat?”

  I peered at the picture. The boy was thin, had long hair and an attempt at a beard. His face was in profile. It could be the shooter. It could be anyone.

  “See how he’s pulling at the hairs on his arm?” Quintana said.

  I nodded.

  “That’s why I think it could be him. He used to do that for hours. I loved that guy. Called him Fred-a-lito-lindo. After a song he used to sing.”

  “What’s his real name?” I asked.

  “He was very depressed,” Quintana said. “That’s why he checked into Napa. Committed, you know. There was an accident. His little sister died. Something with a sailboat, I think.”

  Quintana turned off the stove, walked away. I had a fleeting thought: What miracle has prevented this building from burning to the ground?

  “Mr. Quintana, don’t make us ask you again, okay?” Jacobi growled. “What’s the man’s name?”

  Quintana returned to the table with his chipped coffee cup in hand, wearing his hoarder’s garb and the confidence of a rich man to the manor born.

  “His name is Fred. Alfred Brinkley. But I really don’t see how he could have killed those people,” Quintana said. “Fred is the sweetest guy in the world.”

  Chapter 16

  I CALLED RICH CONKLIN from the car, gave him Brinkley’s name to run through NCIC as Jacobi drove back to Bryant Street.

  Chi and McNeil were waiting for us inside MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub, a dark saloon sandwiched between two bail-bond shacks across from the Hall.

  Jacobi and I joined them and ordered Foster’s on tap, and I asked Chi and McNeil for an update.

  “We interviewed a guy at the Smoke Shop on Polk at Vallejo,” said Chi, getting right into it. “Old geezer who owns the place says, ‘Yeah, I sell Turkish Specials. About two packs a month to a regular customer.’ He takes the carton off the shelf to show us — it’s down two packs.”

  Conklin came in, took a seat, and ordered a Dos Equis and an Angus burger, rare.

  Looked like he had something on his mind.

  “My partner gets excited,” said Cappy, “by a carton of cigarettes.”

  “So who’s the fool?” Chi asked McNeil.

  “Get to it, okay?” Jacobi grumbled.

  The beer came, and Jacobi, Conklin, and I lifted our glasses to Don MacBain, the bar’s owner, a maverick former SFPD captain whose portrait hung in a frame over the bar.

  Chi continued, “So the geezer says this customer is a Greek guy, about eighty years old — but ‘hold on a minute,’ he says. ‘Let me see that picture again.’ ”

  Cappy picked up where Chi left off. “So I push the photo of the shooter up to his snoot, and he says, ‘This guy? I used to see this guy every morning when he bought his paper. He’s the guy who did the shootings?’ ”

  Jacobi called the waitress over again, said, “Syd, I’ll have a burger, too, medium rare with fries.”

  Chi talked over him.

  “So the Smoke Shop geezer says he doesn’t know our suspect’s name but thinks he used to live across the street, 1513 Vallejo.”

  “So we go over there —” Cappy said.

  “Please put me out of my misery,” Jacobi said. His elbows were on the table, and he was pressing his palms into his eye sockets, waiting for this story to pay out or be over.

  “And we got a name,” Cappy finished. “The apartment manager at 1513 Vallejo positively IDed the photo. Told us that the suspect was evicted about two months ago, right after he lost his job.”

  “Drumroll please,” said Chi. “The shooter’s name is Alfred Brinkley.”

  It was sad to see the disappointment on the faces of McNeil and Chi, but I had to break it to them.

  “Thanks, Paul. We know his name. Did you find out where he used to work?”

  “Right, Lieu. That bookstore, uh, Sam’s Book Emporium on Mason Street.”

  I turned to Conklin. “Richie, you look like the Cheshire cat. Whatcha got?”

  Conklin had been leaning back in his chair, balancing it on its rear legs, clearly enjoying the banter. Now the front legs of his chair came down, and he leaned over the table. “Brinkley doesn’t have a sheet. But . . . he served at the Presidio for two years. Medical discharge in ’94.”

  “He got into the army after being in a nuthouse?” Jacobi asked.

  “He was a kid when he was at Napa State,” said Conklin. “His medical records are sealed. Anyway, the army recruiters wouldn’t have been too picky.”

  The fuzzy image of the shooter was starting to come clear. Scary as it was, I knew the answer to what had been messing with my mind since the shooting.

  Brinkley was a sure-shot marksman because he’d been trained by the army.

  Chapter 17

  AT NINE THE NEXT MO
RNING, Jacobi, Conklin, and I parked our unmarked cars on Mason near North Point. We were two blocks from Fisherman’s Wharf, a tourist area crammed with huge hotels, restaurants, bike rentals, and souvenir shops, where sidewalk vendors were setting up their curbside tag sales.

  I was feeling keyed up when we entered the cool expanse of the huge bookstore. Jacobi badged the closest desk clerk, asking if she knew Alfred Brinkley.

  The clerk paged the floor manager, who walked us to the elevator and down to the basement, where he introduced us to the stockroom manager, a dark-skinned man in his thirties, name of Edison Jones, wearing a threadbare Duran Duran T-shirt and a nose stud.

  We arrayed ourselves around the stockroom — concrete walls lined with adjustable shelves, corrugated metal doors opening to the loading dock, guys rolling carts of books all around us.

  “Fred and I were buddies,” Jones said. “Not like we hung out after work or anything, but he was a bright bulb and I liked him. Then he started getting weird.” Jones dialed down the volume on a TV resting atop a metal table crowded with invoices and office supplies.

  “ ‘Weird’ like how?” Conklin asked.

  “He’d say to me sometimes, ‘Did you hear what Wolf Blitzer just said to me?’ Like the TV was talking to him, y’know? And he was getting twitchy-like, humming and singing to himself. Made management uneasy,” Jones said, lightly running a hand across his T-shirt. “When he started missing work, it gave them a reason to ax him.

  “I saved his books,” Jones told us. He reached up to a shelf, pulled down a box, set it on the table.

  I opened the flaps, saw heavy stuff in there by Jung, Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Reich. And there was a dog-eared paperback of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.

  I picked the paperback out of the box.

  “That was his pet book,” said Edison. “Surprised he didn’t come back for it.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “According to Fred, Jaynes had a theory that, until about three thousand years ago, the hemispheres of the human brain weren’t connected,” Jones said, “so the two halves of the brain didn’t communicate directly.”

  “And the point is?” Jacobi asked.

  “Jaynes says that back then, humans believed that their own thoughts came from outside themselves, that their thoughts were actually commands from the gods.”

  “So Brinkley was . . . what?” Jacobi asked. “Hearing voices from the television gods?”

  “I think he was hearing voices all the time. And they were telling him what to do.”

  Jones’s words sent chills out to my fingertips. More than forty-eight hours had passed since the ferry shooting. While dead ends piled up, Brinkley was still out there somewhere. Taking orders from voices. Carrying a gun.

  “You have any idea where Brinkley is now?” I asked.

  “I saw him hanging out in front of a bar about a month ago,” Jones said. “He was looking pretty ragged. Beard all grown out. I made a joke that he was returning to the wild, and he got a wacky expression on his face. Wouldn’t look me in the eye.”

  “Where was this?”

  “Outside the Double Shot Bar on Geary. Fred doesn’t drink, so maybe he was living in the hotel over the bar.”

  I knew the place. The Hotel Barbary was one of the several dozen “tourist hotels” in the Tenderloin, rent-by-the-hour rooms used by prostitutes, junkies, and the nearly destitute. It was one step above the gutter, and not much of a step.

  If Fred Brinkley had been living at the Hotel Barbary a month ago, he might still be there now.

  Chapter 18

  THE WEATHERMAN SAID it would rain, but the sun was high and milky overhead. When Fred Brinkley held out his hand, he could see right through it.

  He headed for the dark of the underground, jogging down the steps into the Civic Center BART, where he used to go when he still had his job.

  Brinkley lowered his eyes, marking off his paces on the familiar white marble-tiled floor with black granite borders, walking steadily across the mezzanine, not looking up at the corporate slaves buying their tickets and flowers and bottled water for their commute. He didn’t want to pick up any thoughts from their hamster-wheel brains, didn’t want to see the prying looks coming from their hooded eyes.

  He took the escalator down to the tunnels, but instead of feeling calmer, he realized that the deeper he went, the more agitated, angry, he became.

  The voices were on him again, calling him names.

  Ducking his head, Brinkley kept his eyes on the floor, and he sang inside his mind, Ay, ay, ay, ay, BART-a-lito-lindo, trying to quash the voices, trying to shut them down.

  As soon as he got off the escalator on the third level down, he realized his mistake. The platform was packed with deadheads going home from work.

  They were like thunderclouds, with their dark coats, their eyes boring into him, closing in and trapping him where he stood.

  Pictures he’d seen on the wall of TVs in the electronics-shop window streamed into Fred’s mind: the images of himself, shooting the people on the ferry.

  He did that!

  Brinkley sidled through the crowd, mumbling and singing under his breath until he stood at the edge of the platform, standing on one square only, his toes curled over the void.

  Still, he felt the hate and condemnation all around him, and his own fury rose. The white tile walls seemed to pulse and billow. Fred could see, out of the corners of his eyes, people turning toward him, reading his mind.

  He wanted to yell, I had to do it! Watch out. You could be next.

  He stared down onto the rails, not moving or looking at anyone, keeping his hands in his pockets, the right one curled around Bucky.

  They know, the voices roared in unison. They see right through you, Fred.

  A sharp voice called out from behind him, “Hey!” Brinkley turned to see a woman with a sharp jaw and tiny black eyes shaking a finger at him.

  “He’s the one. He was on the ferry. He was there. That’s the ferry shooter. Someone call the police.”

  Things were breaking up now. Everyone knew the bad thing he’d done.

  Dog shit. Loser.

  Ay, ay, ay, ayyyyyyy.

  Fred pulled Bucky out of his pocket, waved it above the crowd. People all around him screamed and shrank away.

  The tunnel roared.

  Silver-and-blue bullet cars streaked into the station, the noise obliterating all other sound and thought.

  The train stopped, and clots of people boiled out of the cars like rats, others washing back in, buffeting Fred like a tide, slamming him into a pylon.

  Knocking the breath right out of him.

  Freeing himself, wading against the throng, Fred made his way to the escalator. In long, bounding strides, he bolted up past the rodent people on the moving stairway, finding his way up to the air on the street.

  The voice inside his head yelled, Go! Get your ass out of here!

  Chapter 19

  THE DIGITAL CLOCK on the microwave read 7:08. I was physically wrung out and mentally fried after combing the Tenderloin all day, coming up with nothing more than a list of all the places where Alfred Brinkley didn’t live.

  I wasn’t just frustrated, either. I felt dread. Fred Brinkley was still out there.

  I put a Healthy Choice macaroni and cheese into the microwave, pressed the minute button five times.

  As my dinner revolved, I ran the day through my mind again, searching for anything we might have overlooked in our tour of six dozen sleazy hotels, the interviews with useless desk clerks and scores of low-rent tenants.

  Martha brushed up against me, and I stroked her ears, poured dog chow into a bowl. She lowered her head, wagged her plumey tail.

  “You’re a good girl,” I said. “Light of my life.”

  I had just cracked open a beer when my doorbell rang.

  What now?

  I limped to the window to see who had the audacity to ring my bell �
�� but I didn’t know the man staring up at me from the sidewalk.

  He was clean shaven, half in shadow — holding up an envelope.

  “What do you want?”

  “I have something for you, Lieutenant. It’s urgent. I have to deliver this to you personally.”

  What was he? A process server? A tipster? Behind me, the microwave beeped, alerting me that dinner was ready.

  “Leave it in the mailbox!” I shouted down.

  “I could do that,” said my visitor. “But you said on TV, ‘Do you know this man?’ Remember?”

  “Do you know him?” I called.

  “I am him. I’m the one who did it.”

  Chapter 20

  I HAD AN INSTANT of stunned confusion.

  The ferry shooter was at my door?

  Then I snapped to.

  “I’ll be right there!” I shouted down.

  I grabbed my gun and holster from the back of a chair, clipped my cuffs to my belt. As I rounded the second-floor landing, I called Jacobi on my cell phone, knowing full well that I couldn’t wait for him to arrive.

  I could be walking into a shooting gallery, but if the man downstairs was Alfred Brinkley, I couldn’t chance letting him get away.

  My Glock was in my hand as I cracked the front door a couple of inches, using it as a blind.

  “Keep your hands where I can see them,” I called out.

  The man looked volatile. He seemed to hesitate, move back into the street, then forward toward my doorway. His eyes darted everywhere, and I could make out that he was singing under his breath.

  God, he was crazy — and he was dangerous. Where was his gun?

  “Hands up. Stay where you are!” I yelled again.

  The man stopped walking around. He raised his hands, flapping his envelope side to side like a white flag.

  I scanned his face, trying to match what I saw against my mental picture of the shooter. This guy had shaved, and he’d done a poor job of it. Wisps of beard showed dark against his pale skin.