The 17th Suspect Read online

  Rathburn was saying, “Margot, I said no. And if that doesn’t work for you, talk to your grandmother. I’m hanging up.”

  Which he did.

  He shouted out the open door to his assistant, “Beverly, no calls unless it’s James Giftos or my mother.”

  Scowling, Rathburn came over to the seating area and took the ergonomic recliner, lowering the back a few degrees.

  He said, “My back. Sciatica. Sorry about that call. My daughter backed out of the driveway into my mother’s car. Everyone’s okay. My daughter asked me to open an Uber account for her. Hah.”

  Beverly stuck her head back in the doorway.

  “Mr. Giftos is on the way up. And your mother’s on line two.”

  “Excuse me again,” the judge said to Yuki and Art. “I’ll be right back.”

  He left the room and closed the door behind him.

  Yuki walked over to the wall with the quotes from two presidents, a great actor, and a saint. There was also one from Vince Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers’ legendary coach: “We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.”

  Yuki rejoined Art, who quipped, “Seems like the judge is in a pretty good mood. Am I right?”

  “I’m feeling lucky,” she said.

  The door opened and Judge Rathburn came in, with James Giftos right behind him. Giftos nodded at Yuki as he and the judge settled in, all the parties facing one another across a coffee table.

  Rathburn said, “Everyone know each other? Good.”

  He reached under the coffee table to the shelf beneath it, pulled out a sparkly stick about two feet long, and shook it a couple of times.

  “This is my magic wand. I use it to solve those problems that can’t get fixed any other way. Don’t make me use it. All right?”

  He dropped the wand onto the coffee table.

  “All right, then,” said Judge Rathburn. “Let’s get to it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  THE ESTIMABLE JUDGE Kevin Rathburn and opposing counsel in the case against Briana Hill were sitting around the coffee table in the judge’s chambers, ready to discuss the critical issue.

  Rathburn said, “James, you filed a motion to exclude the video of the alleged rape. Talk about that.”

  Giftos said, “The prosecution claims that my client, Ms. Hill, raped Mr. Christopher. The alleged victim recorded this sex act. We contend that this so-called sexual abuse was a game designed by the so-called victim himself. Mr. Christopher’s pregame setup is not in the video, and therefore it does not accurately reflect what happened that night.”

  “I see,” said Rathburn. “Ms. Castellano? You say what?”

  “Judge, Mr. Christopher is a victim, no ‘so-called’ about it. Ms. Hill had aimed her gun at his head. He most definitely did not design a game to be raped. As shown in the recording, he protested throughout the sex act, which was clearly not consensual. And that’s why Mr. Giftos wants this evidence excluded.”

  Rathburn leaned back in his recliner and stared at a place above the bookcases on the opposite wall. After a minute he righted his chair.

  “I’m going to allow the video. James, you’re free to attack its accuracy during the trial.”

  Yuki exhaled, but Giftos leaned forward and said, “Your Honor, I move for a change of venue.”

  Yuki had been afraid of this, had worried about it. Change of venue meant that the case would leave San Francisco, and if Marc Christopher still wished to press charges, she would be reading about the trial like every other person in the world. She really wanted to try this case.

  Rathburn said, “Really, James? And why would I grant that motion?”

  “Because the press has been all over this, Your Honor.”

  Giftos opened his briefcase, took out a folder, and put it down on the coffee table. Then the shark criminal defense attorney fanned out the papers.

  “I’ve collected some of the articles and blog posts about Ms. Hill, who has already been painted as the villain,” Giftos said. “The public has her tied to the stake and is ready to light her up. We will not be able to find an unbiased jury.”

  Rathburn said, “Ms. Castellano?”

  Yuki said, “Your Honor, if Ms. Hill can’t get a fair trial in San Francisco, where can she get a fair trial? As Mr. Giftos knows full well, if the story is out, it’s out. The internet isn’t restricted to this city, and pretrial noise is just fake news. Ms. Hill is sometimes painted as the villain. And sometimes Mr. Christopher is the baddie. It’s even steven.”

  Rathburn looked impatient and somewhat distracted. Would he decide to send the case elsewhere? Or, like most judges, would he want to preside over what was looking to be a high-profile case, with all of the valuable publicity that would accrue to him?

  He adjusted his chair, placed his feet firmly on the floor, and said, “Okay, here it is. The case stays in this jurisdiction. The two of you, with my help, will pick a jury untainted by gossip and chatter. We’re all capable of doing that.

  “Anything else?”

  There was silence for the next five or six seconds.

  “No? Good,” said the judge. “See you in court.”

  Yuki, Art, and James Giftos left the judge’s office together and when they reached the stairs, Giftos leaned down to speak into Yuki’s ear.

  “I’ve only just begun, young lady. I’m going to crush you. Do you hear me?”

  Yuki stepped away from him and said, “Do your best and your worst, James. Our case is solid. Do you hear me?”

  “Wonderful,” he said. “Game on.”

  CHAPTER 35

  AT ABOUT NINE o’clock on a drizzly Sunday night, Michael walked south along the four-lane-wide section of Columbus Avenue that cuts through the North Beach neighborhood.

  The asphalt was slick with rain. The mist haloed headlights and reflected the brilliant neon signage on both sides of the busy roadway.

  Michael was restless, and his temper was simmering. He had eaten his microwaved lasagna dinner over the kitchen sink. After that he’d gone to his closet full of work clothes and reached for the newest coat.

  The coat was hip length, charcoal gray, with a zip-in lining, and had been purchased at one of the many vintage clothing and secondhand thrift shops around town. He opened a drawer, took out the well-used leather gloves, scissors, his knit cap, and his gun.

  He cut the tags off the coat, put the gun into his right-hand pocket, pulled on the cap and gloves, shut the drawer. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked completely unremarkable.

  Leaving the house on Russian Hill, Michael grabbed the still-wet umbrella from the doorstep, crossed the street, and dropped his alimony check into the mailbox on the corner.

  He could have wired the money, but the check was better. She would have to open it. She would have to read the word bitch he’d put in the memo line. She’d have to cash that check, and the bank teller would see that someone hated her.

  From his end, writing her name and filling in the blanks by hand forced him to recall the way his marriage had dropped dead, ending against his will. And he thought about what had led to the loss of his wife, and his prospects for a happy life ever after. His life interrupted.

  As always, all roads led to HER. She was to blame for his failed relationships. But he would deal with her sins. He put up his umbrella, patted his gun through the pocket of his coat, and walked toward Columbus Avenue.

  It was a busy night, the sidewalks and street spilling over with pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Michael stayed on Greenwich and headed toward downtown. At Mason he waited for the Powell–Mason cable car to pass, rattling its way downhill to the waterfront. Then he took a right onto Columbus toward the heart of North Beach.

  He pressed on, passing the Condor and then Tosca Cafe on his left and the City Lights bookstore on his right, all the shops and clubs and bars brightly lit. Inside, customers were socializing, enjoying their tiny little plans.

  Stupid people. Aliens. He told himself that
he wasn’t bothered by their pointless cheerfulness. He thought about the ways he was different from other people as he fixed his eyes on the Transamerica Pyramid up ahead. It was like a beacon urging him to focus.

  Humming his own take on a popular tune, Michael veered right onto Kearny at Cafe Zoetrope—and that’s when he saw HER. She was only thirty feet up ahead of him, no doubt heading toward the Tenderloin, where the vermin liked to congregate.

  The woman was bundled up, carrying a heavy shopping bag in each hand, wearing a pink, translucent poncho, her head lowered against the fine, unrelenting rain.

  God, he hated her.

  And finally the odds of doing something about that were on his side.

  CHAPTER 36

  IT ALMOST SEEMED to Michael that he could kill that woman by just drilling through her back with his eyes.

  Bam. Bam.

  He was keeping her in sight, walking at a comfortable pace. He was starting to wonder where her trek would end, where she’d hunker down for the night, when she picked up her pace and awkwardly trotted across Clay just before the light turned red.

  Damn it. Goddamnit.

  He was stranded on the sidewalk as traffic swept along between himself and her. The sidewalk across the street was opaque with a moving wall of pedestrians shuffling along beneath their umbrellas.

  And then he lost sight of her.

  He was sure that he could catch up with her—if he could still see her.

  Michael wiped rainwater away from his eyes with his sleeve. He was so close. He might not be this close again anytime soon.

  Kearny was one way, but he looked right and left, his usual overabundance of caution, then dashed off the curb into the street, shooting the gap between two vehicles. He narrowly missed getting clipped by a red sports car, whose driver leaned on the horn, letting him know exactly how close he’d come to buying the farm and everything around it.

  But the risk had paid off. He was on the opposite curb unharmed.

  But where was she?

  He jogged ahead, cutting between couples, turning right onto Geary, weaving around a boisterous gang of drunkards leaving Hawthorne, a club teeming with customers.

  And then there was a clearing in the field of umbrellas. Michael peered through the opening and saw her leaning against the 77 Geary building, adjusting the hood of her plastic poncho, setting her bags down at her feet.

  A memory came to him. College graduation day. She hadn’t shown up. When he went to dinner with a few friends, there she was—rooting through the trash outside. He was humiliated.

  His heartbeat was in overdrive. This was it.

  He walked toward her, and when he was close enough to read the name Peking Bazaar on one of her shopping bags, he called out to her.

  “Hey, hey. Imagine meeting you here.”

  The woman looked up.

  She gave him a gappy smile and the dizzy look of a person who couldn’t quite see straight.

  She said, “Hi, good-looking. Got some change? I haven’t eaten today.”

  His disappointment was fierce and sudden. The loopy female leaning against the wall of the historic office building wasn’t HER, wasn’t even close. Michael cried out, “Oh, shit.”

  The woman’s ditzy look changed to concern.

  She said, “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” he snapped.

  He stood in that glistening clearing of sidewalk that would soon close around him.

  “I’m just fine,” he said. “I do have something for you.”

  Holding his umbrella with his left hand, he pulled his gun with his right. He was standing so close to the woman in the many-layered clothing under the shiny plastic wrapper he could almost count the beads of water on her eye-lashes.

  He fired into her chest.

  She gasped, “What?”

  “I fucking hate you,” he said.

  He fired the second round, and as she sagged against the wall, he scooped up the casings and started walking.

  He didn’t look back.

  That dirty old lump of dump. No one would even know she was dead until morning. Michael crossed Geary, his umbrella obscuring his face, but he saw a man running through the rain, coming toward the dead woman with a phone to his ear.

  He was shouting into the phone, “Send an ambulance to Geary and Grant. Hurry.”

  CHAPTER 37

  MICHAEL STOOD OUTSIDE the POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, a gray man within a gray crowd under a heavy night sky, the flashing red and blue lights from the squad cars beaming and slashing through the mist.

  He thought of himself as a cool, professional-grade assassin, but he couldn’t quell the heart palpitations and sweat beading up at his hairline, running out from under his cap and mixing with the rain streaming down his face.

  He rarely had this feeling. This was fear. Extreme fear bordering on panic.

  He knew that he had screwed up. But he didn’t know how badly. Had the woman lived? Could she identify him? What about the man with the phone?

  After firing on the woman, he’d crossed the street, skirted traffic, passed through alleys, and circumnavigated Union Square. He walked among other pedestrians, returning to the wide avenue, and stopped on the sidewalk to put his hands on his knees and take calming breaths.

  Then Michael resumed walking. He made a wide loop around the scene of the shooting, taking a route from one end of Post Street to Kearny, then to Market and back up Grant, finally drawn back to Geary Street and what he’d done there.

  He had a grip on himself now.

  A crowd of curiosity seekers had assembled across the street from the office building behind the police tape that held them back from the scene of the shooting.

  Michael merged into the dull gray crowd, taking a place at the end of a row three people deep. He asked the man in front of him, “What happened over there?”

  “Don’t know. Someone must have died.”

  Michael hoped.

  His view of the dead woman was blocked by two squad cars parked up to the curb. He saw cops talking to one another, heard radios squawking and finally a shrill, whooping siren of an ambulance screaming up the street, braking hard only yards from where Michael stood.

  Ambulance doors flew open. Paramedics jumped down from the back with a stretcher and moved quickly toward where Michael had last seen that woman.

  Did the presence of an ambulance mean that she was still showing signs of life?

  Even in the crowd and under his umbrella he felt exposed and transparent. He wanted to slip away. Go home. Go online. Look for news. He should do that, but instead he stood. More people had joined the crowd, and some of the cops had broken away from their cars to hold back the swelling mob.

  “Go on home, everyone. This isn’t the circus.”

  Michael looked beyond the cop and saw another car pull up, a gray Chevy sedan. Two people got out. The driver was a tall woman with a blond ponytail who was wearing a vest marked SFPD over her jacket. The man with her was the same height and was wearing a matching vest.

  He’d seen cops at the scenes of his other crimes, but he’d never seen these two before.

  The woman cop seemed to be in charge. She walked past the line of cruisers, and for a split second a sight line opened up. Michael saw paramedics standing near the body, not lifting it onto a stretcher, not doing anything.

  Because the lump of dump was dead.

  Relief flooded through his body, lifting his heart like a lifeboat on a swelling sea.

  He watched the female cop pull her phone from her pocket. He thought that she was going to take pictures of the body before it was taken away.

  But no, the cop crossed the street toward the people standing, jammed together, behind the yellow tape. She turned the phone so that it was facing his end of the crowd, and fanning it from left to right, she snapped off several flash shots with her phone.

  Michael felt as though she had actually shot him. His lifeboat of a heart deflated and sank. The cop held up he
r badge and said to the gathering of bystanders, “I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer of the SFPD. Did anyone see what happened?”

  Michael pivoted on his heel and headed away from the crowd, the feeling of exposure making him reel.

  Damn her to hell. That bitch cop who’d just snapped his picture had caught him off guard and pinned him in perpetuity to the crowd standing thirty feet away from the body.

  All women were trouble, and this one, especially this one, looked like she had mastered the art of female bitchery. When she snapped those pictures, he took the mental image of her. Sergeant Lindsay Boxer. He would remember that.

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER 38

  IN CINDY THOMAS’S view, the gossip, rumors, and overheated cross talk about the alleged rape of Marc Christopher had electrified and divided the people of San Francisco before the trial had even begun.

  But in just over an hour the curtain would go up on The People v. Hill, and actual testimony and evidence would deny or feed the internet speculation. With luck, Cindy thought, she would score one of the few available press seats in Judge Rathburn’s courtroom.

  Cindy parked her car in the All-Day lot on Bryant, grabbed her computer bag, and, as she got out of her car, was smacked with a gust of chilly morning breeze. She buttoned her coat, got her ticket from the attendant, and hurried toward the corner, where she waited for the light to change.

  As traffic sped past her, Cindy took note of the media satellite vans jammed tightly at the curb and the press setups on the sidewalk in front of the Hall of Justice. The excessive media coverage of a local event underscored what she’d been feeling for weeks. A cultural belief was being challenged, and this story was going surprisingly large and wide.

  The case against Briana Hill wasn’t Cindy’s first media storm, but it was the first that didn’t involve a kidnapping or loss of life. The rape of a full-grown and athletic man in his late twenties by an attractive young advertising executive weighing in at about 110 pounds had neatly split the followers on her crime blog.