It was a mutual lapse of judgment and could have been the biggest mistake of our lives.
The girl went for her learner’s permit and pulled out a gun. She got off five shots, hitting me twice, and her brother put three rounds into Jacobi before I managed to take them down. Then we lay on the deserted street and almost bled to death before the ambulance came.
Jacobi’s injuries that night had slowed him down. He couldn’t run. He put on weight. He was in constant pain, and about ten months ago, Jacobi had been promoted to chief.
The pain got to him though, and recently, Jacobi had taken medical leave to have his damaged hip replaced.
“He’s been out for three months,” Brady said to me now. “Jacobi was either off duty or on leave when the first three shootings occurred. He was off the radar when Chaz Smith was taken out and when those three shits were wasted on Schwerin.”
Brady talked over my objections. Told me to hear him out.
“Jacobi can use his radio two ways: to gather intel and to create a distraction. He has street sources. He could go into the property room at any time. He’s chief of police, Boxer. Who’s gonna suspect him? He can hide in plain sight the way only a fifty-five-year-old white guy with a limp can.”
“He’s not a killer.”
“Let’s say you’re wrong,” Brady said.
“He’s like family to me,” I said.
“I don’t buy it either,” Conklin said. “He’s a great cop. He just wouldn’t go off the deep end and become a vigilante.”
Brady waved our comments away.
“I need you both to work closely with me. We’re not going to say anything to Jacobi or to anyone else. We’re just going to watch him.”
My mind drifted.
I hadn’t been in touch with Jacobi in months. I’d gone to the hospital after his operation. I’d brought flowers, but I’d called him only a couple of times after that. It was embarrassing to think about it. I wondered now how was he doing.
Was he depressed?
Was he angry?
Did getting shot on Larkin Street by a drug user constitute motive to go on a killing spree?
According to Brady, it did.
“Are you listening to me, Boxer?”
“I’m sorry. No. What did you say?”
“I said, if anyone can talk him in, it’s the two of you. I’ll tell you where to be and when. That’s all.”
Chapter 53
AT JUST AFTER 6:00 p.m. Revenge was standing at the counter at Peet’s waiting for take-out coffee for his drive home.
Someone had left the Post behind and he read the front-page story about the shooting outside the projects. Despite the overheated writing about the deaths of the three dirtbag drug dealers, it was clear that the cops had nothing on the shooter except the gun he’d tossed into the car, the gun that had been used to take out Chaz Smith.
There were no prints on that gun, and there was no way to link it or anything else to him.
The primary on the case was Lindsay Boxer. He had met Boxer a couple of times back in the day. She was a hands-on homicide cop, maybe gifted, and certainly tenacious. But smart and dogged could only help you so much when you didn’t have a clue.
Martina, the girl behind the counter, took cash from an old man with a limp, said, “Thank you. Come back soon.”
She closed the cash drawer, dropped the small change into a cup, and exhaled a long sigh.
Revenge knew that Martina was depressed about her pending divorce. Although she laughed it off, called it “losing a hundred and seventy-five pounds,” Martina was obviously heartsick.
She put on a brave face for him and said of the front-page story, “That’s something, isn’t it?”
She poured hot coffee into a cardboard coffee cup, leaving two inches at the top for milk, the way he liked it. “Some kind of vigilante is killing drug dealers. Have you heard about him? He’s called Revenge.”
“Just reading about it now,” he said. “I don’t read the paper all that often.”
“But you do watch TV, right? One of the guys Revenge killed was a big-deal undercover cop, and his wife is going to be on TV tonight. With Katie Couric.”
“No kidding. Well, maybe I’ll watch it then.”
He smiled at the waitress, poured milk into the cup, and capped it. He left four dollars on the counter, told Martina to take care, and went out into the strip mall.
He got into his vehicle and called his wife, told her he’d be home in half an hour; did she need him to pick up anything?
“No, thanks. We’re good, sweetie,” she said.
Revenge hung up and had just started the engine when he saw something that almost snapped his head back. It was Raoul Fernandez, a scumbag drug dealer who was moving up in his world from small-timer selling teenths in the hood to distributor with young kids doing the dealing for him.
While Revenge was with the DEA task force, he’d looked for evidence against this ugly piece of work. Fernandez was cagey and elusive, and after serving two years for dealing, he had been released.
That should never have happened. Now Revenge watched Fernandez lock up his sporty little Mercedes and head across the parking lot toward the Safeway.
The strip mall was busy. Revenge had just been seen by Martina and everyone who’d been in Peet’s. He knew he ought to let Fernandez go. He should drive home to his family, just drive away.
But fuck it. He might not get this chance again.
Revenge got his gun out of the glove box and stepped out of his car. He walked past the Mercedes and followed a dozen yards behind the drug dealer, his gun pressed against his leg.
Fernandez might have heard something, or maybe he just had a sixth sense; the dealer turned toward Revenge, and he had a gun in his hand.
Revenge felt his heart rate spike.
The voice inside his head was saying, This was a mistake. This is where I go down. I guess I want it to happen. Today.
Chapter 54
CONKLIN AND I stood with Charlie Clapper on the bricks behind the Ellsworth compound watching CSU pack up their gear. The garden was pocked with holes and heaped with mounds of dirt; it looked as if a hundred woodchucks on crack had run amok there.
Still, no additional heads or any other body parts had been found. There was no new evidence of any kind.
I was struck again by how twisted this case was, how unusual in every way.
Ninety-nine percent of the time, a homicide investigation revolves around a body and a scene where the crime actually took place.
You’ve got an assortment of material to work with: clothing, blood, fingerprints, hard evidence that can tell you who the victim was, what caused his death, and possibly when the victim died. You can even compare a photograph of the victim with the DMV’s database and most of the time can come up with a name.
Or you start with a missing-person report and you work the case from the other side. You start with dental records, maybe DNA, a list of friends, coworkers, phone numbers, the time the missing person was last seen.
All we had were holes, piles of dirt, unidentified remains, and a list of suspects that barely made the needle jump.
We couldn’t even say for sure that the seven victims had died from homicidal violence. Maybe they had all died of natural causes and their heads were brought to the site for burial.
All we knew for certain was that whoever buried those heads had access to the garden behind the Ellsworth compound over a period of perhaps ten years or more.
As we waited for the forensic anthropologist to complete her measurements and run the data through software that could put virtual features on bare skulls, we could do nothing but hope for a lucky break or — please, God — a confession.
Now Clapper unzipped his coveralls, stripped off his gloves, and sighed.
“We’ve sifted every square foot of this place. We’ve got everything there is to get. Those artifacts we pulled out of the graves were clean. No prints. No DNA. Just doodads.”
<
br /> “If we identify the victims, the doodads may mean something to the families,” I said.
Clapper said, “Okay, then. I gotta get out of here. My wife is expecting me home for dinner, first time this week.”
I felt deflated and frustrated. I was about to suggest to Conklin that we go to the firing range and put a lot of holes in some paper targets when Brady’s phone reached out and connected with mine.
“Boxer, there’s been a shooting. Looks like another one of these freaking Revenge killings. That son of a bitch. Is Conklin with you? Good. You two go to Potrero Center. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.”
Chapter 55
POTRERO CENTER WAS ON Sixteenth and Bryant, a modern strip mall of wall-to-wall retail stores: Office Depot, Safeway, Jamba Juice, and more. A stone wall with a metal rail on top enclosed the vast parking lot that was nearly always packed.
The sun was going down when we drove between the stone pillars on Sixteenth and identified ourselves to the uniformed cops at the entrance. I asked for the name of the first officer, then Conklin parked our car near the dozen or so squad cars right inside the gates.
We headed toward the yellow tape at the perimeter, and as we worked our way through the shifting crowd, I saw fear and anger on the faces of shoppers. Clearly, they’d been told that no one could leave the lot without giving a statement, and the handful of officers on the scene were just starting a process that could go long into the night.
The first officer was Mike Degano, a young guy who had been a block away when the call came over his radio. He wanted to help, had the look of a patrolman who aspired to work homicide.
Degano pointed to a late-model black Mercedes XL, said to us, “That’s probably the DB’s car. He had a Mercedes key ring in his hand when he went down. Car is registered to Raoul Fernandez. I ran his name. He has a record for assault and for possession with intent. Spent a couple of years at Folsom, released in 2010. Wait’ll you see this.”
Conklin and I walked with Degano to where the body of a heavily tattooed twenty-something man was splayed on the asphalt. His arms were flung out like wings, his legs were twisted. It looked to me as if he’d been walking toward the shopping center, had turned toward his killer, and had been blown off his feet by the four bullets he’d taken to his face.
It took a steady hand and an automatic gun to throw four shots in such a tight pattern. I’m a good shot, and I couldn’t have done it.
I took another look around the lot as lights came on. Shopping carts were adrift, like dinghies on a blacktop sea. Broken paper bags spilled groceries where they’d fallen. I saw surveillance cameras on light poles, but the shooting had taken place a good hundred yards from the closest camera.
“Were there any witnesses?” I asked Degano.
“Yes, ma’am, we have one sort of witness. Mr. Jonathan Nathan, over there. Old white dude. Red shirt. He heard the shots.”
Chapter 56
JONATHAN NATHAN WAS IN his seventies, stooped, glasses balanced on the lower slope of his nose, red-and-white aloha shirt under a windbreaker, khaki pants. Flip-flops. His eyes switched between us and the parking lot, as though anything could happen, as though he didn’t feel safe.
I said, “Can you tell us what you know?”
“Sure. Happy to. I was putting my groceries into the trunk of my car when I heard the shots. I looked around, but I didn’t know where the shots came from,” Nathan told us. “My head was inside the trunk when the gun went off, you know? Plus a lot of cars were coming and going. It was crazy noisy.”
“What happened then, Mr. Nathan?” I asked.
“Then I saw the body,” Nathan said, spreading his fingers, framing his face with his hands. “I ran over to him, but the guy wasn’t breathing. He was absolutely dead. I didn’t touch him, okay? There was no point.”
“Sure, I understand. Please go on.”
“My phone was also dead, so I waved down this guy in an SUV and asked him to call the cops. He did it, and then he drove off.”
Conklin and I had the same thought at the same moment. The so-called cop who had stopped the drug dealers on Schwerin had been driving an SUV.
Conklin launched into his trademark rapid-fire interrogation with a smile.
“The guy in the SUV,” Conklin said. “What did he look like?”
“What did he look like? Jeez. I don’t know. Regular guy.”
“Black? White? Hispanic?”
“White.”
“Young? Old? Fat? Skinny?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Hair color?”
“I was on the far side of the car. He was in shadow.”
“Okay, Mr. Nathan. What about the SUV?”
“It was black, I think. No, it was definitely black.”
“American make? Foreign?”
“I have no idea. Look,” Nathan said, getting steamed. “There were bullets flying around. I’m supposed to notice what kind of car the guy with the phone was driving? Listen, I’ve gotta get home. My wife is sick with worry. Plus we got people coming over. I just ran out for some groceries.”
I took Nathan’s contact information, gave him my card.
My partner and I went back to view the body, stood off to the side as the CSU van rolled up and techs piled out onto the parking lot.
I said to Conklin, “Look at how close the shooter gets to the vics. Chaz Smith. Those guys in the BMW the other night. Now Mr. Fernandez, dope dealer to Potrero Hill. This shooter knows these guys. He’s organized. He’s a perfectionist.”
“And most of all, he’s insane,” said Conklin. “He’s taken out five people this week, for a total of eight, Lindsay.
“And Brady thinks Warren Jacobi is capable of this?”
“Here comes Brady now.”
Chapter 57
BRADY’S CAR BRAKED with a squeal only yards from the barrier tape. Lieutenants Brady and Meile boiled out of the vehicle, both of them agitated and demanding to be briefed.
Brady said, “What have we got?”
“Raoul Fernandez,” I said, pointing to the deceased. “Meth dealer, former convict. He was dead before he hit the ground.”
“Witnesses?”
“One so far. He maybe saw our shooter, a generic white male driving a black SUV. Our witness asked the driver to call nine-one-one, and he apparently did it. Dispatch is pulling the tape now.”
I went on to say that uniforms were taking down the name and number of everyone who’d been in the lot when the police showed up. Other uniforms were canvassing the shops.
“Plate readers have been down the rows,” I said, “and it was a decent sweep. Two stolen cars, two other drivers with outstanding warrants, but none stand out as our shooter.
“I asked the ME to give us an hour with the scene. Meanwhile, we’ve got surveillance tapes on the way from the security chief.”
“Let’s hope we got that black SUV on tape …”
Brady let his words trail off but I knew where he was going. Digital forensics was getting so refined that even a partial shot of the vehicle’s fender could yield enough information to identify the make and type of car.
I stood with Brady and Conklin and watched the light trucks come in. CSU was working fast and well, photographing scrapes on car doors, marking blood spatter, bagging found objects on the asphalt.
Soon the ME would remove the body, and CSU would take the car back to the lab on a flatbed truck. By tomorrow morning, the shopping center would be open again, like the shooting had never even happened.
But it had happened.
A spree killer was running the table.
I told Conklin I’d be back in a couple of minutes. I ducked under the tape, turned my back to the crime scene, and called Jacobi.
His voice sounded so real to me that I actually said, “Jacobi, it’s me, Lindsay.”
The voice kept talking, said, “Leave me a message.”
I told my old partner’s voicemail that I missed him, want
ed to get together with him, asked him to call me.
I really did miss him.
I wanted to tell him about this spree killer, hear what he had to say. Maybe he had an idea we hadn’t thought of and maybe in the course of the conversation, he’d tell me something that would establish his innocence. I was sure that Brady was delusional. My old friend wasn’t the killer.
It just couldn’t be Jacobi.
Chapter 58
CINDY WASN’T THE only person working after close of business, not even close. A dozen offices in her line of sight had the lights on; loud laughter came in bursts from the corner office; and down the hall, the copy machine in the hallway chugged out copies.
These days, no one left work early.
Everyone wanted to be sure of a chair if the music stopped.
Cindy turned on her desk lamp and read Richie’s text message again. Caught a homicide. Cya later. XXX. She texted back: Copy that. Ttys.
She put her phone down and asked herself why she’d let Richie’s message go unanswered for so many minutes, why she’d withheld returning the XXXs, wondered again if she was becoming like her parents.
Her mom was a shrink, her dad was a math teacher, and when she was a kid, she had called them Robo-Mom and Robo-Pop because they both overanalyzed absolutely everything. Every. Little. Thing.
This was what she was doing with her relationship with Richie: Yes, no, maybe. Repeat.
She was also obsessed with her story, treating the numbers found with the Ellsworth heads as if they were the da Vinci code.
She justified her obsession like this: If she didn’t decode those numbers, someone else would. Jason Blayney would. And so, partially because of him, partially because she would have done it anyway, Cindy had been flipping the flipping numbers every which way, forward, backward, inside out.
First she’d tried to connect the numbers to Harry Chandler. He’d notched his bedpost innumerable times during his long life as a star. He’d been named People magazine’s sexiest man in the world three times and had been the tabloids’ favorite cover boy for decades because of the many famous girlfriends he had squired to black-tie events.