CHAPTER 50
ON THE WAY home, Joe dropped me off at Susie’s Café. Susie’s is the Women’s Murder Club “clubhouse,” where Cindy, Claire, Yuki, and I get together more or less weekly to brainstorm our cases, to bitch about the lumps life hands out, and of course to celebrate good news, both tiny and huge, over hot Caribbean food and cold beer on tap.
I blew kisses to Joe, then turned toward the bright light coming through Susie’s windows and the faint plinking sound of steel drums, which got louder when I opened the front door.
Hot Tea was warming up, and regulars at the bar waved as I walked through the main room, down the narrow corridor past the kitchen, and into the back room, where Claire and Yuki were waiting at our cozy red leather booth.
Claire was telling Yuki something that required vigorous use of her hands, and Yuki was listening intently as I slid in beside her. I got and gave a couple of good hugs, and Claire said, “I’m telling Yuki about this stinkin’ case I got.”
“Catch me up,” I said.
I signaled to Lorraine that I needed beer, and Claire said to me, “Yesterday morning, EMTs bring in this eight-year-old girl. The one in charge says Mom’s story is that she gave the little girl a bath at four in the morning, went to get a fresh towel, and when she came back, the little girl had drowned.”
I said, “A bath at four in the morning?”
Claire said, “Exactly. The EMT quotes the mom as saying the little girl is hyperactive and sometimes a bath calms her down. So I’m checking out this poor little girl, and damn, there’s no foam in her mouth, fingers aren’t wrinkled up, the lungs do not cross at the midline, but her hair is wet. I look her over. No bruises. No nothing.”
Lorraine came with a glass and a pitcher of beer and said, “Lindsay, I recommend the coconut shrimp with rice.”
I told her I was up for that, and Yuki and Claire said, “Me, too,” in unison. Then Claire went on.
“I give her the full-body X-rays and they’re fine. No broken bones, and I send her blood to the lab and it comes back negative for drugs or poison.”
Yuki said, “What the hell? She had something viral? Bacterial?”
“Nope,” said Claire. “I checked. But when I’m doing the internal exam, I find pizza in the little girl’s stomach.”
We all pondered that bit of information for a few moments. Then Lorraine brought the food We all sat back as the plates were set down, and Yuki said, “Don’t stop now, Claire. Go on.”
“OK, hang on,” said Claire. She sampled the shrimp and rice, swallowed some beer, dabbed at her lips, and said, “So I call Wayne Euvrard. You know him, Lindsay. Vice, Northern District. He finds out that Mom’s got a sheet for prostitution and now this whole four a.m. bath and pizza story is just grabbing me all wrong. And I still don’t know what killed this little girl.
“So I ask Euvrard to have Mom come in for a chat. And he does and tells me she comes in to see him wearing a new outfit, has her face on and her hair done. And he says to her, ‘What happened to your baby?’ And he’s pretty sure she’s going to say, ‘She drowned.’
“But instead, he tells me, ‘Mom takes a deep breath and squeals the deal. She says, “I had an outcall. Steady customer, and I needed the money. Anita has a seizure disorder but hardly has seizures anymore and when she does, we just leave her on the floor and she gets over it.”’
“Mom goes on to tell Euvrard that Anita must’ve gotten up and eaten something and then had a seizure, because she was dead on the floor when Mom came home from her call. And Mom decides if she leaves her there and calls the police, they’ll take her kids away. So she put her daughter in the tub and called nine-one-one.
“And I thought, Christ, they’d be right to take away her children. She’s irresponsible. Maybe criminally negligent. And I say to Euvrard, ‘Did she say, “If only I had stayed home, my daughter would be alive”?’ And Euvrard said, ‘Nope. Nothing like that. I saw no remorse at all.’
“So I write Anita up as probable seizure disorder, manner of death natural.”
I said, “You’re going to let this lady slide?”
Claire said, “That’s up to the prosecutor, but Inspector Euvrard did book her on child endangerment resulting in a homicide.”
Claire stabbed a shrimp with her fork, held it up, and said, “And that’s how we close cases in the Medical Examiner’s Office.”
Claire’s delivery was priceless, and Yuki spat out her beer, and yes, this was a bad story, but it was good to hear Yuki’s merry-bells laughter, which I hadn’t heard in a while. And of course, that was when my phone rang.
“Sorry to interrupt your day off,” Conklin said.
“What’s up?”
“Tom Calhoun—”
“Calhoun who’s working with us on the mercado shooting?”
“Yeah,” said Conklin. His voice sounded terrible. “Calhoun and his whole family. They were murdered.”
CHAPTER 51
I APOLOGIZED TO my girlfriends and tried to pick up the check, but they objected, hugged me, and watched me go.
Conklin met me at the curb in his Bronco, PDQ. I got into the passenger seat and buckled up. He turned on the siren and we sped toward Potrero Hill, revving over the slopes and slamming the undercarriage on the downhill drops.
There were only a few streaks of light left in the sky when we got to Potrero, but I knew this neighborhood in the dark. Knew it cold. I had lived a few streets over from the murder house until a few years ago, when my own house burned to the ground.
We turned off Eighteenth Street onto Texas, which looked like a Saint’s Day street festival. Lights blazed from every window on the block, and strobes flashed from dozens of law enforcement vehicles crowding the street. After parking between two CSU vans, Conklin and I badged the unis at the barricade between the street and yard, ducked under the tape, and took the short walk up to the front of the two-tone green Victorian house.
When we got to the front steps, I saw vomit on the foundation plantings and that the door knob and lock assembly had been shotgunned out of the door.
Charlie Clapper met us on the doorstep. Even on the weekend, he dressed impeccably; his hair was freshly combed, the creases in his pants were crisp, and his jacket looked like it had just come from the cleaner’s.
But Charlie looked stunned.
“This is as bad as it gets,” he said.
Clapper is director of the forensics unit at Hunters Point, but before he took over the CSU, he was a homicide cop. A very good one. Top dog at a crime scene, he does a first-class job without grandstanding or getting in our way.
I was about to ask him to run the scene for us when Ted Swanson came out of the kitchen, shaking his head and looking pale and as shocked as if one of his arms had been ripped off.
He moaned, “This is fucked up.”
Conklin and I gloved up, slipped booties over our shoes, and entered the kitchen, where we saw the formerly animated robbery cop, Tom Calhoun.
Calhoun was naked, duct-taped to a kitchen chair. He’d been beaten up so badly, I wouldn’t have recognized him but for his bald spot. There was no doubt in my mind. He’d been tortured for a good long time by professionals.
All of his fingers had been broken; his soft white underparts had been burned with cigarettes; his eyelids had been sliced off; and finally, probably mercifully, he’d been shot through his temple.
“He didn’t go fast,” said Swanson, who was standing behind us. “Those fucks cut up Marie, too, before they shot her.”
Clapper said, “Marie was found lying over there by the stove. She’s on her way to the morgue.”
Conklin asked about the kids and Swanson said, “Butch and Davey were asleep when they were shot, looks like. I don’t think they knew anything, right, Charlie?”
Clapper said, “I’d have to agree with you there. They didn’t wake up.”
“I knew these people,” Swanson said. “I had dinner here last week. What the hell was the point of this?”
He began to cry, and I put a hand on his arm and told him how sorry I was. Swanson’s partner, Vasquez, came into the kitchen, saying, “Sergeant, the second floor is off limits. CSI is dusting everything. We should all get out of here and let these people work.”
CHAPTER 52
I TOLD VASQUEZ and Swanson we’d catch up to them later, but first I wanted to chat with Clapper.
The front door opened and closed, and Conklin and I were alone in a brightly lit living room with CSIs taking pictures, dusting for prints, and swabbing for trace.
Conklin and I had to piece all this into a narrative that made sense, something that would explain what now seemed inexplicable.
Conklin said, “What do you think happened here, Charlie?”
“My opinion? A couple of guys wanted something, and they were willing to torture and murder four people in order to get it,” he said. “What did they want? Don’t know. Did they get it? Don’t know that, either. It wasn’t a robbery. Nothing was tossed. There’s small cash and jewelry on the dresser in the bedroom.”
He didn’t have to tell us to be careful. We followed in his footsteps as he showed us that the lock had been shot off the back door as well as the front. That told us that at least two shooters were involved.
Dr. Germaniuk, the medical examiner on call, came back into the house and said he was taking Tom Calhoun to the ME’s office now if that was OK. Clapper said, “Go ahead. We got what we need.”
Then Clapper said to my partner and me, “The wife had duct tape residue on her wrists and ankles and across her mouth, so she’d also been taped to a chair. I’m guessing she was cut loose and beaten while her husband was still alive and watching.”
I said, “Oh, my God” a few times, and Conklin looked like he wanted to punch the wall. I asked Clapper to go on.
“Here’s how it probably went down,” Clapper said. “The family was upstairs, probably asleep. The doers shot out the locks and entered. Calhoun probably came downstairs.”
“He had to be armed,” I said.
“His nine was found in the living room. Fully loaded. The gun is bagged and ready to go to the lab.”
“So Calhoun comes down the stairs with his gun,” I said. “He didn’t shoot?”
“He was outgunned. Outmanned. I think he tried to negotiate. I imagine he told the perps, ‘Get out. Nothing’s happened yet,’ something like that. The doers maybe turned it around on him.”
Conklin said, “Like, ‘Come into the kitchen and let’s talk. We’ll leave your family alone.’”
“Yeah,” Clapper said. “Something like that. Then maybe the wife comes down the stairs.”
Conklin said, “Right. They take the gun from Calhoun. Move him and his wife into the kitchen.”
“Oh, man,” I said visualizing the scene, the terror. I saw the shooters telling the Calhouns to get undressed. She has to duct-tape her husband to the chair, then one of the shooters does the same to her.
Putting the next part of it together in my mind, I figured Mrs. Calhoun was tortured to motivate Calhoun to give them what they wanted. What did they want? Did Calhoun have it?
We followed Clapper upstairs to the bedrooms and saw the blood-drenched sheets in the bunk beds where the two boys had been shot in their sleep. They were now in body bags on the way to the morgue with their parents.
My partner and I stood in the open front doorway with lights flashing red and blue behind us and thanked Charlie for the tour.
He didn’t have to say, “Get these bastards,” and I didn’t say, “Call us if you learn anything.” We all knew what we had to do. Calhoun’s death was job one. Every cop in the Hall of Justice would be on this until the Calhouns’ killers were found. The work would go on all night and it would continue until it was over.
But there was nothing for my partner and me to do in this house. Not tonight.
CHAPTER 53
WHEN I WALKED into our apartment and kicked off my shoes, Jimmy Fallon was on the tube and I no longer felt like the same woman who’d spent the day with windblown dog ears in my face, who had walked and talked with my sister and nieces, who had cuddled with my husband and baby, laughed over nouvelle cuisine, and slugged down beer with two of my best friends.
I briefed my husband on the aftermath of the torture and murder of a cop I knew, and his family, and gratefully accepted a glass of wine and a neck rub.
Then I got on the phone. My first call was to Dr. G., followed by a conference call with Brady and Conklin. After that, I called Ted Swanson, who was not only emotionally involved, but had also been part of the Robbery Division team working the Windbreaker cop case with Vasquez and Calhoun.
When I had all the available information, I called Jacobi, our chief, my dear friend and former partner, and brought him up to the minute. He already knew parts of the Calhoun tragedy, but I gave him a few details he didn’t know.
“A roll of garbage bags had been left on the kitchen counter,” I told Jacobi. “I think the perps changed their clothes and took their bloody ones with them, along with their cigarette butts, shell casings, and sharp instruments.”
Jacobi said, “So let me guess. No prints. No DNA.”
“Nothing yet,” I said.
Jacobi used strings of expletives in combinations I’d never heard before. The gist of the F-bombs was that all the freaking over-the-top TV crime shows had taught the freaking criminals what not to freaking do.
“They knew a few things from experience,” I said. “It was a very buttoned-up operation.”
I let Jacobi rant for a while, then told him good night, and when I finally hit the sheets, I couldn’t sleep.
I was organizing the case in my mind, getting ready for the squad meeting in the morning, doing all that thinking while lying with my head on my husband’s chest, listening to him sleep. My thoughts circled in and around the Calhoun house, where people had been sleeping in their beds.
I had a bad fantasy of the same guys breaking into our nest on Lake Street. I heard locks being shot off doors. In this bad fantasy, I got my hands on my gun, but it wouldn’t fire. My fantasy didn’t go any further, thank God.
But sleep became an impossible dream.
When Julie woke up at three, I walked her around the living room and looked out at the street below to see if anyone was lurking in an idling car. At six I took Martha for a quick run, and by seven fifteen I was at my desk in the Homicide bullpen.
Conklin arrived a few minutes later. He hung his jacket behind his chair and said, “I had a dream.”
I looked up at him. He wasn’t kidding.
“I woke up thinking there’s a connection between what happened to Calhoun and the Wicker House shootings.”
“What was the connection?” I asked.
“I’m still thinking about it.”
“OK,” I said. “Your subconscious is making a link. Probably from all the dead bodies. All the blood.”
“Probably,” my partner said. “But there is something sticky about those two things together.”
Just then, Richie got a call from Cindy, and then a ragged-looking Brady dropped by our desks. He said to me, “At eight o’clock. You can brief everyone, right?”
“No problem.”
The squad room filled with cops. Some sat behind their desks, others parked themselves in spare chairs, and more cops stood three deep at the back. The room was packed with the day shifts from Homicide, Narco, and Robbery.
Swanson and Vasquez stood at the front of the room with me and I introduced them. Then I told about sixty of my fellow officers what we knew about what had gone down in the green Victorian house on Texas Street.
Brady gave out assignments. And then we went to work.
CHAPTER 54
CONKLIN AND I brought Swanson and Vasquez into Interview 2. When we all had coffee in front of us and were settled in, I started by saying, “I can only guess at how rotten you feel. We need everything and anything that could help us with the Calhoun murders. Any
thing you may have heard or surmised about enemies, disagreements, contacts with informants, shady business dealings, a fight over a parking spot—it doesn’t matter how unlikely it might seem to you.”
Swanson stopped me from going on. He said, “We get it, Boxer. You ask, we answer. You need a handle on this, and we’re counting on you.”
Conklin checked that the camera was on, then sat down next to me, saying, “We’re recording this, just because.”
Vasquez clenched his fists and said, “Calhoun wasn’t dirty. He was a good person. He was a good cop.”
I nodded. And Conklin said, “Tell us whatever you know about him. We’ll ask questions as they come up.”
Swanson sighed and said, “Calhoun transferred in from LA Vice about two years ago with a good reputation. He was partnered with Kyle Robertson, who joined Robbery, don’t remember when offhand, but before that he was in uniform since the Flood. You should talk to Robertson. They were close.”
I nodded. We were seeing Robertson in a little while.
Vasquez said, “Calhoun was a good kid. He wanted to do good in the job. If I had to fault him, I would say he was a little bit overenthusiastic.”
“Meaning what?” I asked.
“He could be seen as not taking things as seriously as an older guy with more years on the job. Or maybe he wasn’t hardened, yet. Whatchacallit? He wasn’t jaded. Either way, Calhoun had a future on the force.”
Conklin asked, “How’d his mood been lately? Was anything bothering him?”
“I didn’t notice anything,” said Swanson.
“Did anyone have it out for him?” I asked. “Anyone he may have busted?”
Swanson said, “When I had dinner at their house last Wednesday, he was in a good mood. He was talking about Little League and how he and Marie were saving up for the boys’ college in a five-two-nine fund. Regular dinner talk. With photos.”