The 9th Judgment Read online

  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 asked. “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 h
it,” 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 terrorist. 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.

  As Conklin and I strode up the winding center double aisles between the rows of parked cars, I braced myself for what Jacobi had described as a “horror show.” We found him talking with Chief Anthony Tracchio on the third-floor landing. The chief’s face was blanched, and Jacobi’s hooded eyes were drawn almost closed, both men looking as though they’d peered over the abyss into the devil’s own lair.

  “Chi and McNeil are on four,” Tracchio said, his mouth hardly moving. “Swing shift is canvassing the perimeter. I’ve expanded the team to any cop who volunteers or who crosses my path.”

  “Were there any witnesses?” I asked. It was more a small, doomed wish than a question.

  “No,” Jacobi said. “No one saw or heard a fucking thing.”

  Chapter 39

  CONKLIN AND I climbed past the angled rows of parked cars, my feelings of dread increasing the higher we went. By the time we greeted McNeil and Chi at the top of the fourth floor, I felt as if spiders were using the tops of my arms as a freeway, working their way under the hair at the back of my neck.

  I didn’t want to see the victims, yet I had to look. I forced my eyes down. And there, lying in an empty parking space between two vehicles, were the bodies.

  The woman had been pretty, and she still retained grace in death. Her white sweater and long brunette hair were soaked with blood, which pooled around her and ran in long runnels down the sloping concrete floor. There were bloody footprints around her and blood on the bottoms of her shoes.

  The child was tucked into the curl of the woman’s body. It looked as though they had been posed.

  My vision started to fade. I felt the ground shift under my feet and heard Conklin’s voice. “Linds? Lindsay?” His arm around my waist stopped me from dropping to the floor.

  “What’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  I nodded and mumbled, “I’m fine. Fine. I haven’t eaten today.” I was annoyed at myself for looking weak. For looking female. My superiors, the guys, my friends in the squad, would be looking to me for leadership. I had to get a grip.

  The victims were bracketed between a red Dodge Caravan and a silver Highlander. An open handbag lay on the ground, and the contents of the victim’s purse were scattered.

  All of the Caravan’s doors were open. I lifted my eyes to the windshield and saw the letters “CWF” written in red.

  That strange signature again. What t
he hell did it mean?

  Paul Chi called my name from behind my shoulder, and I turned to see his blanched face. I knew that, like me, Chi was shocked to the core by this terrible crime.

  “The vic’s name is Elaine Marone,” Chi said. “Mrs. Marone was thirty-four. She had fifty-six dollars in her wallet, credit cards, a driver’s license, and so on. We don’t know the little girl’s name.”

  “Did you find the lipstick?” I asked, hoping that it had rolled under a vehicle, that the killer had left a fingerprint on its shiny case.

  “We found no makeup of any kind,” Chi said. “But here’s something new: check out the bruising on Mrs. Marone’s wrist. Maybe she tried to disarm the shooter.”

  I crouched next to the body of Elaine Marone. As Chi said, there were bluish finger marks on the woman’s right wrist, and I counted five distinct bullet holes in her sweater. Elaine Marone hadn’t just put up a struggle. She’d fought like hell.

  And then the screaming started, a heartrending howl twisting up through the concrete cavern.

  “Laineeee. Lilllly.”

  Oh God, no.

  Footsteps pounded on concrete. Jacobi yelled, “Stop! Freeze right where you are!”

  It was a clear warning, but the footsteps kept coming.

  Chapter 40

  I RAN DOWN the incline toward the third floor, then rounded the turn to see Tracchio and Jacobi tackling a big man wearing jeans and a flannel shirt. The man was a bruiser, a charging bull on full adrenaline. He shook off Tracchio and Jacobi as if they were small dogs, then continued running up the ramp toward the crime scene. It looked like he was going to blast right through me.

  Jacobi yelled, “FREEZE,” then pulled his Taser from his belt. I shouted, “Jacobi, NO! Don’t do it, don’t-” But I knew he had no choice. I heard the electric chattering of the stun gun, and the big man was jerked off his feet, going down as if his spinal cord had been cut. He flopped and slid down the incline, a five-second ride, and during that time he was paralyzed and unable to scream.