Women's Murder Club [09] The 9th Judgment Read online

  “Slow down. One question at a time,” Sue said.

  “Sorry. Backing up, now. Did Casey have any proof that Marcus was screwing around?”

  “No, but she was suspicious. Marc’s always been a letch. He put his hand on my butt once or twice. Hell, he’s a movie star. But Casey said, and I quote, ‘He’s gone off me.’ Meaning he didn’t have the hots for her anymore. That’s all the proof she had—none—and at the same time, she was alarmed.”

  “Did she confront him?”

  “Yuki, you’re not thinking Marc shot Casey?”

  “Not at all. He’s clean. But it helps to know if there was trouble in the marriage.”

  “I’m a lawyer, too, remember, and I’m telling you Marcus didn’t do it. Marc totally loved Casey. He thought she was a riot. He said he’d never had a boring moment in the four years he was married to her. Ben and I went over to Marc’s house last night, and he was devastated. He said he was dying from grief. And even if he was fooling around, he wouldn’t have left Casey. He certainly wouldn’t have—I can’t even say it.”

  “Would Casey have divorced him?”

  Sue Emdin sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe. She told me that if she found out he was cheating, she’d leave him.”

  “When did she say that?”

  “Tuesday night.”

  “Sue, Casey was killed on Wednesday.”

  “Look somewhere else, Yuki. Trust me on this. It was that cat burglar. Marcus didn’t do it.”

  Chapter 32

  PETE GORDON WAS hunting along the Embarcadero, the eastern roadway that fronts the bay, running from 2nd and King, past the Ferry Building, and north under the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, an artery traveled by locals and tourists alike. People flowed around him on foot, on bike, on skateboard, as the setting sun licked at the indigo sky.

  Pete had picked his target outside the Ferry Building, a reed-thin blonde wearing a hooded black Windbreaker over her long black skirt, her clothes billowing and snapping in the breeze. Made him think of a woman in a burka.

  The thin blonde was pushing a kiddo in a stroller, a calm child in pink who seemed to be taking in the travelers getting off the ferry and fanning out through the marketplace.

  Pete followed the black-cloaked blonde through the farmer’s market, watching her pick out one loaf of bread, one head of lettuce, and one fish fillet. He stayed on her tail as she left the market, plastic bags looped over her wrists, not talking to her daughter, who in some way seemed to be in charge.

  When his target got to the intersection of Market and Spear, she headed toward the BART entrance. She tilted the stroller up and stepped onto the down escalator, and Pete knew it was time. He gripped his gun in his right hand, the whole of it buried in his pocket, and followed her off the moving stairway.

  “Miss? Ma’am?” he shouted. The third time he called her, she whipped her head around and shot him a look: What is it?

  He ducked his head and gave her a shy smile. “I’m supposed to meet a friend at the corner of California. I’ve, uh, gotten lost.”

  The woman stared at him and said, “I can’t help you,” and pushed the stroller out from the arch toward the entrance to the underground.

  “Hey, thanks, lady!” Pete yelled out. “I appreciate the fucking time of day.”

  Hands jammed in his pockets, Pete continued north. It wasn’t over yet. He wondered if his expression had given him away. Had he looked too eager? Too raw?

  It hadn’t been this way in Iraq. And he wouldn’t mess up here.

  He was steady. He was focused. He had a mission.

  And he would accomplish it.

  Chapter 33

  AS PETE WALKED into the crosswind, he was remembering PFC Kenneth Marshall’s last day.

  Pete had been in the lead vehicle on the dusty road just outside Haditha, his men in a caravan behind him. They were within forty meters of a cluster of houses when the car bomb exploded, blowing Corporal Lennar out of the last vehicle in the line, separating Kenny Marshall from his legs.

  Pete loved Kenny like a brother. He was a smart kid with dimples and a picture of Jesus inside his helmet. He played kick-the-can with the enemy kiddos, gave them rations, believed in the mission—to bring freedom to Iraq. Kenny liked to say that when it was his time, God would find him wherever he was.

  After God called Kenny, after the IED killed this good American son and soldier, after the troops in Captain Peter Gordon’s command came out of their crouches, they looked to Pete for orders. It was easy. He did it by the book. His book.

  Pete was sure he knew who had remotely triggered the IED. They were in the car behind the Humvee that Kenny had been driving. The next minutes were so vivid, he could smell the cordite and the dust and the fear even now. He could still hear his enemies scream as he shot them.

  Now, on this cool evening in San Francisco, Pete Gordon gripped the gun inside his jacket pocket as he stalked the Embarcadero. He came to an alley between Sansome and Battery that was set up with plastic tables and chairs. A young mother was cleaning up after eating there with her bawler.

  Petey followed Young Mom and her kiddo into the mall at the ground level of 1 EC, past the pastry shop and the Italian restaurant, up the escalator to the movie theater that stood apart and alone, anchoring the dead end at the western part of the second floor.

  Mom was sitting on a bench, gazing at the movie posters, combing her baby’s hair with her fingers. It was between shows, and they had the place to themselves.

  Young Mom turned to Petey when he called out, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, could you help me, please? I’m totally lost.”

  Chapter 34

  BY THE TIME I was called to the scene, the cruisers and the ambulances were parked all along Battery and Clay. I ran my Explorer onto the sidewalk and braked next to Jacobi’s Hyundai, then grabbed one of the uniforms who was doing crowd control at the western entrance to the mall.

  “Second floor, Sergeant,” the uni told me. “Outside the movie theater.”

  I called Jacobi and he answered his phone, saying, “Come up, Boxer. And hold on to your dinner.”

  Moviegoers who’d been sent out through a back exit had returned to the front entrance, joining commuters and office workers and tourists who had gathered ten deep outside the entrance to 1 EC.

  I held up my badge and edged through the crowd, fending off questions that I wouldn’t answer if I could. A uniform opened the glass doors for me, and I entered the mall, a stretch of shops bearing famous logos, now unnaturally empty of shoppers.

  The escalators had been turned off and crime scene tape stretched across the whole western wing of the mall, so I stooped under the tape and loped up the stilled mechanical stairs. Jacobi was waiting for me at the top of the escalator, and I could see from his face how bad it was going to be before I even got near the bodies on the red carpet.

  I saw the mother first. She’d fallen onto her back. Her pale-blue cardigan was black over her heart from the two shots to the center mass, and she’d taken another gunshot wound to the head. I reached over and closed her sightless eyes.

  Only then could I bear to look at the small, still figure lying near her.

  Damn it, he’d killed the child.

  This scene was a horror, and even as I recoiled from the brutality, I was struck by how methodical these shootings had been. They had been impersonal, dead-on shots fired at close range.

  Jacobi stepped aside and I circled the body of the child in the capsized stroller, a boy under the age of one. I didn’t need to say to Jacobi that it was obvious these killings and the ones in the Stonestown garage were the work of the same killer.

  But where was his signature? Where were the letters “WCF”?

  Jacobi dropped the young mother’s wallet into an evidence bag. “This is Judy Kinski. She had forty dollars in small bills. Two charge cards. Library card. She would have been twenty-six years old next week. McNeil is contacting her next of kin.”

  “Witnesses?” I ask
ed. “Someone had to see this go down.”

  “Chi is talking to the ticket seller. Come with me.”

  Chapter 35

  THE GIRL IN the movie-theater manager’s office was crying into her hands. She looked up when I entered the tiny space. Paul Chi introduced me to the pale young woman and said, “This is Robin Rose. She may have seen the shooter.”

  “Is my mother here?” Robin asked.

  Jacobi said, “She’s on her way. As soon as she arrives, we’ll escort you down.”

  “I didn’t see the shootings,” the girl said between sobs. “I was opening the booth for the seven o’clock show.”

  Chi handed her a wad of tissues and told her it was all right, to take her time.

  “I didn’t hear anything,” she said, blowing her nose. “But when I rolled up the window…”

  I could see it through her eyes. The last moments of her innocence, opening the cash drawer, checking the ticket feed, rolling up the metal security window, expecting—what? A couple of people wanting to buy their tickets early?

  “I didn’t believe it at first,” Robin told us. “I thought it was some kind of alternative advertising for an upcoming show. Then I realized that those people were real. That they were dead.”

  “Did you see anyone near the bodies?” I asked.

  She nodded and said, “He must’ve heard the window go up. He met my eyes for a fraction of a second. I saw the gun, so I ducked down.”

  The man Robin Rose saw was a white male, wearing a blue-and-white baseball jacket and a cap pulled down over his eyes. She didn’t think she could describe him, but she would try. Same with his gun. And she didn’t see which exit he took out of the mall.

  Maybe he’d taken the skywalk over to another of the malls in the Embarcadero Center, or he could just as easily have gone down the escalator and out onto the street.

  I asked Robin if she’d come in to the station to look at surveillance tape, and then I left the manager’s office with Jacobi. He was putting out an APB on a white male in a blue-and-white baseball jacket when Claire stomped up the escalator with her chief assistant, Bunny Ellis, behind her.

  Claire wore a furious look as she moved in on the victims’ bodies with her Minolta. I stood next to her as she said to me, “Lookit. Same weird stippling, Lindsay. Same point-blank shooting. Same bastard kid killer. Was anything stolen?”

  “Mom’s wallet was full.”

  It was Claire who saw the writing on the underside of the stroller.

  I stared at the letters as cameras flashed in a stroboscopic frenzy. The message was written in lipstick. The signature was the same—but different.

  FWC

  “What the hell?” I said to Claire. “Not WCF? Now it’s FWC?”

  “You ask me, Lindsay? This guy isn’t leaving clues. He’s purely fucking with us.”

  Chapter 36

  OUR PINCH HITTER, Jackson Brady, said he’d taken workshops at the FBI headquarters in Quantico.

  “I spent two full summers learning to profile serial killers. That doesn’t make me a pro, but I have educated opinions.”

  Jacobi commandeered a conference room in the Crimes Against Persons Division, and we all sat around the chipped fake-wood table, looking at Brady. Paul Chi told Brady what we’d gathered from the first scene and the latest, and Brady took notes.

  All eyes were on him when he told us, “Killing children is reactive, maybe to a bad childhood, or it’s possible this killer is so dead inside, he just wastes the kids because they’re witnesses.”

  “The kids were babies,” Jacobi said.

  Brady shrugged. “The killer probably isn’t using that kind of logic. As for the killing of the mothers, you’re seeing a real hatred for women.”

  “In terms of finding this guy,” Jacobi said, “his early childhood isn’t relevant, is it? How he feels isn’t going to lead us to him.”

  “You’re right, Lieutenant. In fact, I’m going to say this guy can hide in plain sight. Look at what you know from the way he committed the crimes, how he got away without being seen. He’s highly intelligent, he’s focused, he’s organized, and he’s working alone. Most important, he passes as ordinary. That’s the only way he could get so close to his victims. They don’t even scream.”

  “And he’s got a gun that doesn’t bring up a hit,” I said.

  “That’s an interesting detail,” Brady said. “This guy knows weaponry. Makes me think he may have military training.”

  “We’ve got a witness ID and video surveillance,” I said. “We think we have some idea what he may look like.”

  “Nothing distinctive, am I right?”

  “Yeah,” said Chi. “White male, thirties, wears a cap. We’ll get another look when we go over the security tapes from One EC.”

  Conklin asked, “If this guy is military, if he’s at least highly competent and trained, what’s going to trip him up?”

  “Overconfidence,” Brady said. “He could get too sure of himself and leave a clue. But, you know, it could be a long time before he makes that kind of mistake.”

  I sat back in my seat. It was another way of saying what I’d been thinking since the Bentons were killed in the Stones-town garage.

  More people were going to die.

  Chapter 37

  TEN DAYS AGO, “Dowling trumped everything.”

  Now the entire threadbare Homicide squad plus dozens of conscripted cops from other departments were canvassing the Embarcadero Center, following up every phoned-in, crackpot lead, working twelve-hour shifts under Jacobi in single-minded determination to nail the Lipstick Killer.

  I was in the morgue with Claire when the ballistics report from the Feds was dropped into her in-box. I tried not to scream out my impatience as she carried on a phone call while gingerly peeling up the envelope flap. She finally hung up on her caller and took out the single sheet of paper. She skimmed the page and said, “Hey-hey. Our case was reviewed by Dr. Mike himself.”

  “Forgive my ignorance—and will you please give me the damned report?”

  “Hang on, girlfriend. Dr. Michael Sciarra is the FBI’s Dr. Gun,” she said. “Okay. Lemme get to the nub here. Dr. Mike says the gunpowder stippling on those dead babies was atypical because the shots were fired through a suppressor. And not your basic pop-bottle-and-scouring-pad wackadoo, either.”

  “What, then?” I asked.

  “It had to be professionally tooled, cold steel or titanium. Very few of these exist. Dr. Mike says here, ‘There is no record of any homicides in the United States committed with a suppressor like the one that caused the atypical stippling pattern on the Benton and Kinski children.’”

  “Jeez, what the hell does that mean?”

  “For starters, it explains why no one heard gunshots.”

  “And why we didn’t get a hit in the database.”

  “Because it probably came from outside the country,” Claire was saying when my cell phone buzzed. My stomach clenched when I read the caller ID. I showed the phone to Claire, flipped it open, and said, “Boxer.”

  I was thinking, What now?

  “Boxer, that goddamned, shit-for-brains Lipstick Psycho put on another freakin’ horror show!” Jacobi shouted into my ear.

  “No, c’mon, NO.”

  “Yeah, well, a woman and child were killed in the parking garage at Union Square, looks exactly like the last two homicides. I’m at the scene with Chi and Cappy. Tracchio’s on the way, and now he’s going to put his mitts all over this.”

  I hung up with Jacobi, briefed Claire, and got Conklin on the line, then fled to the parking lot behind the Hall. Conklin was waiting for me in the driver’s seat of our squad car, and as soon as I slammed my door closed, he jammed on the gas and we peeled out with flashers on, siren blaring, rubber burning tracks into the asphalt.

  Conklin shouted over the clamor, “He does this smack in the middle of town. What a pair this guy has.”

  “Smack in the middle of town is what he likes. He’s a terro
rist. A damned good one.”

  I had no idea how right I would turn out to be.

  Chapter 38

  I SWEAR CONKLIN got the car up to three G’s in three seconds. I gripped the dash as the Crown Vic roared up Leavenworth and then took us through the stomach-turning roller-coaster climbs, sudden-death drops, and hairpin turns of our city’s streets.

  When I wasn’t mentally trying to steer the car from the passenger seat, I thought about the Lipstick Killer. He wasn’t just insane.

  He was crazy.

  He’d killed four people—and now maybe more. His signature was so cryptic, it was meaningless. How could we predict his behavior if we didn’t get his point?

  Conklin wrenched the wheel right at the bottom of a hill, sending us into a gridlocked intersection. I wanted to get out and beat on car roofs until the road was clear, but instead I shouted into the bullhorn, “Move your vehicles. Pull over now!”

  We started and stopped as cars stalled trying to climb over one another, the seconds dragging until we cleared the jam. Minutes later, Conklin nosed the squad car between a small herd of parked black-and-whites outside the garage at Union Square. I was out of the car before Conklin set the brake.

  Together we waded into the panicky throng of shoppers who had left their cars in the garage. I saw the fear on their faces and could almost hear their collective thoughts: The killer was here. He could have shot me.

  I made a path through the crowd with my badge, signed the log, and asked Officer Sorbero to fill me in.

  “Déjà vu all over again,” Joe said. “The crime scene’s on the fourth floor. We shut the elevators down.”

  Conklin held up the tape and we ducked under it, entering the chill of the garage. There were dark, tunneled access points on the ground floor, passageways coming from all sides—the huge Macy’s, the Saks, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel—perfect opportunities for a predator to stalk his victims unseen.