The 17th Suspect Read online

  “There’s been another murder,” she said. “And before you ask if the police were called, they were, but no one has arrived. You have to see this, Sergeant. You really have to see this. In the name of God, something has to be done.”

  My partner and I had spent the day in court, testifying for the prosecution on a carjacking homicide that had taken a year to get to trial. I was tired. I knew Conklin was dragging his back end, too. But I called him anyway and summarized Millie’s call.

  “We can just kick it to Brady,” I said. “He can call Central. That may be enough.”

  Conklin said, “Fisherman’s Wharf, near the museum. I’ll meet you there.”

  I told Joe the breaking news while I changed out of my jammies into jeans, a sweater, and flat-heeled boots. I explained that I had a bit of a moral debt to Millie and that I would call home as soon as I had scoped out the situation.

  He was very understanding, but he said, “You’re skipping dinner again.”

  “I have PowerBars in the car. Save a plate for me?”

  “Be careful,” he said.

  “I will.”

  I strapped on my gun, hung my badge on its chain around my neck, and grabbed my keys, and after I had buttoned up my jacket, I went for the stairs. I had just started the downward jog to the street when a wave of light-headedness and nausea swept over me.

  I clutched at the railing, stopping my fall, and I sat down on the staircase. What was going on?

  Was it the hot shower and rushing to dress compounded by an empty stomach?

  I put my head between my knees until the feeling passed, then got to my feet. I walked down the last flight of stairs, steady as she goes. I was okay. I thought I was okay. Out on the street I got into my vehicle and switched on the ignition. I did a personal systems check, too. I was fine. Much better now.

  I warmed up the engine, then called Richie to say that I was on the way.

  CHAPTER 24

  AT EIGHT THIRTY that night I drove to Fisherman’s Wharf, a neighborhood best known for Pier 39, attracting tourists with its rambunctious sea lions and tours of the bay. Within walking distance were Ghirardelli Square and the cable car turnaround at Hyde Street, which took visitors across Nob Hill to Union Square on the other side.

  I made a turn off the Embarcadero and onto Pier 45, busy with foot traffic. The restaurants were open, street vendors sold Dungeness crab from their steaming cauldrons, and tourists mingled happily in the seaside-resort atmosphere.

  I also noted the shadow population of street people who had set up their carts and sleeping bags in gaps between buildings, begged from tourists, and searched trash bins for food.

  Millie Cushing had told me that the murder had taken place next to the Musée Mécanique, a museum of antique penny arcade games and musical instruments.

  I saw the museum up ahead.

  It was closed for the night, but still, red lights winked inside the arcade. I turned onto the road to the parking area at the side of the museum but didn’t get far before I was stopped by two uniformed officers standing beside a police cruiser that partially blocked the entrance to the pier.

  I buzzed down my window and badged the patrolmen, explaining that I’d gotten a citizen call about a homicide, and asked to be pointed to the first officers on the scene. I was told that Officers Baskin and Casey were just inside the perimeter.

  I drove into the desolate parking area, bounded on both sides by the rear walls of buildings, open to the Embarcadero on one end and to San Francisco Bay at the other. Panhandlers were known to use this area after hours to gather and sleep.

  I expected my headlights to illuminate a scrum of law enforcement vehicles around the crime scene. Instead I saw one other solitary cruiser. Two uniformed cops had taken up positions near a taped-off area enclosing an inert, lumpy form on the ground. A small gaggle of homeless people loitered in the vicinity, some of them taunting the cops.

  A horn honked behind me. It was Conklin in his ancient Bronco. We parked and greeted each other, the cold wind coming off the bay blowing the words out of our mouths.

  My partner looked around the gray, dimly lit scene. “Where is everyone?” he said.

  “My question exactly.”

  We approached the beat cops and the small, restive crowd and exchanged introductions with officers Roger Peet and Donald Baskin from Central Station. Casey looked seasoned and unaffected, while Baskin looked green and anxious.

  Casey said, “We just got here. We taped off the area as best we could but haven’t had a chance to secure any witnesses.”

  I said, “I got a call more than a half hour ago. What took you so long to get here?”

  Casey said, “Who are you again?”

  I told him that I was from Homicide, and he understood that for the moment I outranked them. I asked, “Have your investigators given you their ETA?”

  “We’re waiting for them. They’re on another case.”

  “Did you call CSI?”

  “For this?” Casey asked incredulously. “A hit on a vagrant?”

  I snapped, “Call them. Do it now.” The two cops didn’t report to me, but that didn’t mean I’d stand by and watch them not do their jobs.

  I walked over to the body of a woman who was splayed out faceup on the asphalt. She was wearing a hippy-style multicolored cloth coat over a long blue sweater and leggings with holes in them. Her hair was dark, and blood had puddled around her upper torso. It looked to me like she’d taken a couple of shots to the chest. So she’d seen the shooter. Had she known the person?

  I turned back to Casey and asked, “What about bystanders? Did anyone see something? Say something?”

  Baskin found his voice. “I talked to one guy who said he saw the doer. Described him as a tall white man wearing a nice coat.”

  “You didn’t want to bring him in and get a statement?”

  Casey said, “Shit, Sergeant. There were thirty-forty bums walking around when we got here. Until our backup showed up, it was the two of us trying to keep people from walking through the blood and stealing the victim’s stuff.”

  I got it. It wasn’t their fault that they were virtually alone at this scene. But forty-five minutes had gone by since Cushing called me. Meaning the shooting could have gone down long before that.

  I pressed on, regardless.

  I asked Casey, “Was there any ID on the victim?”

  “I didn’t actually pat her down. Mostly, I just checked to make sure she was dead.”

  I told Casey and Baskin to expand the perimeter. As they looped crime scene tape around parking stanchions, then blocked off the bay end of the area with their cruiser, Conklin and I walked a few of the onlookers into the shelter of concrete building walls.

  Someone in this crowd we’d gathered up might know something. Hell, for all we knew, one of them could be the shooter.

  CHAPTER 25

  AS CONKLIN TOOK statements, I called Brady and brought him up to date on the untethered murder scene on Pier 45.

  “Four uniforms are here, Brady, and a half dozen homeless people. No investigators, no one here from CSI. We don’t have an ID on the victim. Conklin and I are doing interviews now.”

  Brady said, “Do I need to tell you, you’re on Central’s turf?”

  “I’m not looking for a war, but I had to step in, Lieu. This isn’t right.”

  “I’ll put in a call to Central Homicide,” he said.

  I rejoined Conklin and the individuals shifting around him at the side of the museum.

  My partner said to me, “Sergeant, this is Bettina Strauss. She knew the victim. Ms. Strauss, tell the sergeant what you know.”

  With that, Conklin took off with Officers Casey and Baskin to canvass the immediate area.

  I said hello to Bettina Strauss. She looked to be forty, had piercings, and had tattoos on her neck and hands. She wore an old leather jacket over denim overalls and had a fluttering red chiffon scarf around her neck. Her face was red and swollen from crying.


  “That’s Laura Russell,” she said of the victim. “She was the sweetest person. She wasn’t hard-core homeless. More like displaced. She used to teach third grade, I think. Got laid off last year, as I remember it, and she started, you know …” Strauss acted out guzzling from a bottle, then went on.

  “She had a family, but she didn’t talk about them. I got the feeling she ran off, but I didn’t push her, you understand. We all have stories.”

  I asked Strauss a slew of questions: Had she seen the shooting? Did she know who the shooter was or if there had been an incident before the shooting that had set the gunman off? Did she know anyone who wanted to hurt Laura?

  She told me simply that she hadn’t been here when the shooting happened.

  “Laura and I were going to meet here and then go over to Pier 39,” Strauss choked out between sobs, “but when I got here, oh, my God, she was on the ground. I shook her. I pressed on her chest.”

  She showed me her bloody hands. Tears sprang from her eyes, and she covered her face with the crook of her arm.

  I told Strauss that I was sorry, but still, I asked once more, “Do you have any idea who may have wanted to hurt Laura?”

  “God, no. But someone is shooting people, Officer. Laura and I were both scared.”

  “Bettina, if I want to show you pictures or ask you more questions, how can I find you again?”

  She said, “I’m staying at the Green Street Shelter right now.”

  I thanked her just as Conklin came toward us saying, “Baskin and I went through a few trash cans around the corner. We didn’t find the gun, but we’ve got this.”

  He held up a man’s three-quarter-length coat, gray wool, with an intact lining.

  “It’s not new, but I’d still call this a ‘nice’ coat,” said Conklin. “Knit gloves are in the pockets.”

  A freaking lead. O-kay.

  “If it belonged to the shooter, he just ditched it so he wouldn’t be recognized. This coat wouldn’t have been in the trash for long.”

  Headlights swept the parking area. I looked up to see a van coming around the one-cruiser barricade to the crime scene at the side of the antique-mechanical-game museum.

  It was CSI’s mobile forensic lab.

  Thank you, God. The cavalry had arrived.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE CRIME SCENE investigation van was parked outside the barrier tape, which enclosed a sixty-square-foot area of asphalt, a dead woman, and a double handful of cops and vagrants.

  CSIs and techs poured out of the van and began setting up lights and an evidence tent. Moments later an SUV rolled up to the outer perimeter across the parking area on the Embarcadero side and stopped.

  I heard shouting and saw Casey and Baskin try to block a gray-haired man and a teenage girl who had emerged from the vehicle. But they broke past the cops and ran toward the body on the ground. And now every gory detail was illuminated by professional-grade halogen lights.

  A third person got out of the SUV. I recognized her from a hundred yards, and she saw me. From her gestures and body language I gathered that Millie Cushing was telling the cops at the barrier that she knew me.

  I called out, “She’s okay.”

  The tape was lifted. Cushing skirted the inner perimeter, sticking close to the museum’s stucco wall, and crossed the parking area quickly. When she reached me, she said, “I phoned Laura’s husband. I had to let him know.”

  The teenage girl screamed, “Oh, my Goooood, oh, my Goooood. Mommy, noooo. Get up, Mommy, get up. Oh, my God, Mommy. Pleeease.”

  The shrieks and cries coming from Laura Russell’s daughter pierced the ambient sound of police radios, traffic on the Embarcadero, crowd noise coming from beyond our crime scene out on the pier.

  The man I took to be the young woman’s father grabbed her into a tight hug as a CSI forced them away from the body of someone they loved.

  I was shaken. What had happened here? Why was a former schoolteacher with a family living on the street? Why was she murdered? Was this killing personal or circumstantial?

  Was Millie Cushing right that someone with a beef against the homeless was picking them off one by one?

  My phone rang in my pocket. I looked at the screen. It was Brady.

  He said, “Boxer, Sergeant Stevens and his partner, Moran, are on the way.”

  “The family of the victim is here, Brady. They should be brought in for questioning.”

  “Step back, Boxer. You hear me?”

  I heard him. Central Homicide’s turf.

  I stood with Conklin and Millie Cushing outside the tape at the boundary of the crime scene. I leaned against a patrol car and watched as the CSIs took photos of the murder victim and began to process the corrupted crime scene.

  At long last an unmarked car came through the barrier at the Embarcadero end of the parking area and slowed to a stop near the CSI van. Two men in sports jackets got out.

  Stevens and Moran had arrived.

  CHAPTER 27

  CONKLIN AND I watched Stevens and Moran, the two detectives from Central Station, approach Gene Hallows, a senior CSI on the graveyard shift.

  My partner said, “Let’s give them what we’ve got.”

  He held up the crime scene tape and we ducked under it, then crossed the parking area to join the cluster of CSIs and the pair of detectives. Thanks to the bug Millie Cushing had stuck in my ear and my own eyewitness account, I’d already indicted our colleagues for lateness and a lack-adaisical attitude, until proven otherwise.

  I would try to be diplomatic.

  I said to Stevens, “Sorry to interrupt, Sergeant. I’m Lindsay Boxer. My partner, Rich Conklin.”

  Stevens said, “I recognize you, Boxer. You look like your father.”

  “I guess I do.”

  “I met you when you were this high. Marty used to bring you to Robbie Crusoe’s, sit you on the bar top while we watched the games outta Candlestick. You didn’t like beer.”

  I smiled. “I do now.”

  “Like I said, you take after your father.”

  I didn’t recognize Stevens and I didn’t want to think about Marty Boxer. My father hadn’t been the worst cop in the world, but he had been a degenerate gambler and worse. He had left my mother with terminal breast cancer when I was thirteen, my sister six years younger. He didn’t reenter our lives again until I was out of college. I’d seen him a couple of times after that, and he’d been in touch with my sister; but just when I might have forgiven him for past crimes and misdemeanors, he stood me up for walking me down the aisle at my wedding.

  As far as I knew, Marty Boxer was dead. At any rate, he was dead to me.

  Conklin told Stevens, Moran, and Hallows, “We’ve been here for about an hour and can fill you guys in on what we found.”

  Stevens said, “Okay, shoot. But before you do, what brings you to our crime scene?”

  I jumped back into the debriefing.

  “Same as when I spoke to you the last time,” I said. “A citizen phoned me about a street person who had been shot dead and left for the buzzards.”

  Conklin shot me a warning look. Stevens smirked and said, “Maybe your informant was the doer. Didja think of that?”

  My partner cleared his throat and continued with his report.

  “Boxer and I arrived at eight thirty to find four uniforms holding down the scene—two at the western perimeter, two standing watch over the body. They had a witness statement but no ID on the witness, and he left the scene. One bystander identified the victim as Laura Russell. Her family members are right over there, by their SUV.

  “I did an area search with Officers Baskin and Casey. We found a perfectly good man’s coat in a trash can on the Embarcadero. A witness who may have seen the shooter told the uniforms that he was wearing a nice coat. So the coat we found qualifies as nice, and there were gloves in the pockets. Maybe it was dumped by the shooter. We handed it off to CSI Hallows.”

  Moran asked about the victim, and Hallows told him
that she had been shot twice in the chest. No casings on the ground. No ID on her person. No phone. Twenty-two dollars and thirty-eight cents in her coat pocket.

  “I’ll have more for you after the lab goes over her clothing and after the ME signs off.”

  Stevens said to Hallows, “You’ve got my number.”

  I told Stevens I’d send him a copy of my report. He said, “Okay, Boxer. You’ve done your good deed. We can take it from here.” He turned his back.

  You’re welcome.

  Conklin and I headed to our cars, making way for the coroner’s van, which was just rolling through the perimeter. We stood outside the tape as the ME’s techs moved in and prepared to remove the body.

  We could hear Stevens joking with Moran, saying that it was a good night for an unsolvable murder. That maybe the seals had seen the action go down.

  Moran said, “Yeah, but no one is barking.”

  Their banter gave me a headache. Someone had been murdered in a tourist area. The crime scene had been contaminated by passersby. The shooter and any witnesses to the crime had fled.

  Stevens and Moran just didn’t care.

  CHAPTER 28

  THE WIND WAS to our backs as Conklin and I unlocked our cars.

  I said across the roof, “Here’s a thought, Richie. They’re padding their time sheets. I wonder how many hundreds of man-hours they can bury in a case with no witnesses. The more dead ends, the better.”

  “Like a factory slowdown, you’re saying. Could be.”

  “What should we do about it?” I asked him.

  “We should go home, Lindsay. I’m gonna have a couple of beers and grab some quality time with my woman before she falls asleep.”

  I felt a pang from a promise I hadn’t kept. I told Conklin I’d see him in the morning, got into my vehicle, and turned on the engine. While the car warmed up, I called Joe.

  When he picked up, I said, “I’m sorry I didn’t call you earlier. We got involved here in a conflict that didn’t quite melt down into a dispute. Is everything okay at home? … Good. I’ll be home in twenty minutes. Tops.”