14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (10 page)

Why had the slick gunmen we’d seen on surveillance footage changed their MO from nighttime robberies to morning, when there would be less money in the safe and more possibility that customers would enter the store?

Why had they gotten sloppy?

Swanson answered his phone, saying, “Yeah.” And “Uh-huh.”

“Amateur hour,” Conklin said to me under his breath.

“Copy that,” I said.

Swanson said into the phone, “Yeah, I think it’s a done deal, Chief. When CSU finishes up, I think you can tell the press we got the bad guys.”

I hadn’t taken Swanson for an optimist, and while I hoped he was right, I knew he was wrong. The dead men on the floor of the Cash ’n’ Go?

They were copycats.

I would bet my badge on it.

YUKI ENTERED THE paneled and richly furnished conference room at Moorehouse and Rogers, Attorneys-at-Law.

Six of the firm’s lawyers sat around the large mahogany table, and so did the first of the two narcotics cops she had come to depose.

Inspector William Brand was stout and muscular and had a two-day-old beard. She knew from watching him on video that he had the initials
WB
tattooed on the side of his neck, as if they’d been burned there with a branding iron.

He smiled at her when she came into the room. Like
What’s up, honey?

This was the problem with being small. And, OK, cute.

The pricey lawyers hired by the City of San Francisco introduced themselves, and hands were shaken all around. Someone offered her coffee while another pulled out a chair.

So far, all of this fit her expectations, right down to the oil paintings of the founding partners on the wall.

What she wasn’t prepared for was the knock on the door, for one of the lawyers to open it, and for Len Parisi to walk in. The floor shook a little when he crossed it, and not just because he weighed almost three hundred pounds.

Len Parisi was like a force of nature.

She’d thought he would present himself in court at the most effective moment, but clearly, her case and his hinged entirely on Whitney and Brand’s interrogation of Aaron-Rey Kordell.

She and Parisi exchanged the briefest of pleasantries, and when that was over, Yuki asked for the video to roll.

Then she said to Inspector Brand, “I’ve seen the footage of your interview of Aaron-Rey Kordell. I just need some background. What did you think his motive was to shoot those three crack dealers?”

“Motive?” said Brand. His eyebrows shot up and he pushed back a bit from the table. “It was a holdup. He wanted the money. Or the drugs. Or both.”

“And what did he have on him when he was arrested?”

“The patrolmen who nabbed him just found the gun,” said Whitney. “He either passed off the loot or it was taken offa him.”

“Kordell confirmed that?” Yuki asked.

“He denied everything,” Brand said. “And as the victims were dead, we didn’t have anything else to go on.”

“I see,” said Yuki. “So when Aaron-Rey confessed, it was open and shut.”

“We earned our pay,” said Brand. “He denied everything until he couldn’t deny it anymore. Then he spilled. Said he found the gun. He shot the dealers. He ran.”

“And you believed him?” Yuki said. “He was fifteen. He had a below-normal IQ. He had no record.”

“He said he was eighteen, and he was bright enough to put bullets into three scumbags,” said Brand. “You have to commend him for that. Too bad the kid got killed. He did a public-service triple homicide.”

“Were Mr. Kordell’s hands and clothing tested for gunshot residue?”

“No. We had him in the box right after his arrest for carrying the weapon. We thought he would confess pronto. But it took longer and the gunshot residue just slipped our minds.”

Yuki said, “But there’s no doubt in your mind to this day that Aaron-Rey Kordell did those shootings?”

“None,” said Brand. “I have not a doubt in the world.”

INSPECTOR STAN WHITNEY was more refined than his partner. He had fine features and a short beard; he was wearing wire-frame glasses and a blue denim shirt under his blue gabardine jacket.

Yuki asked Whitney the same questions she had asked Brand and got the same answers. Aaron-Rey Kordell had been arrested for carrying a gun that had recently been fired. He said he didn’t shoot anyone, but his explanation of why he had the gun was weak and he was a prime suspect. And then he confessed to a triple homicide.

She asked Whitney why Aaron-Rey hadn’t been represented by a lawyer, and the detective told her he had waived his right to an attorney. And because he had no record and had lied about his age, and didn’t ask for his parents, his parents hadn’t been present.

During the depositions, Parisi said nothing, asked nothing, just fixed Yuki with his brooding and steady glare. It was a look that was far from his customary benign countenance. And it was freaky. When Yuki finished deposing Stan Whitney, Parisi’s co-counsel from Moorehouse and Rogers asked, “Anything else we can help you with, Ms. Castellano?”

“I’m good,” Yuki said. “Thanks for your time.”

She really couldn’t get out of the conference room fast enough. Brand was an intimidating cop, and Whitney’s straight-shooter manner could assure anyone of his good intentions—to their detriment. Having heard their testimony and seen clips from the videoed interrogation, a jury with an open mind would be moved and would see the cops’ determined manipulation of a kid who had no resistance to them.

In the few minutes between leaving the law offices and reaching her car, doubt crept into Yuki’s mind.

Parisi.

She would be going up against Parisi in front of a judge and jury. Parisi had had fifteen years of litigation experience before he came to the DA eight years ago.

And he would do whatever he could do to build up Whitney and Brand and their lawful interrogation and subsequent arrest. That was the only thing he had to do. Show that the interrogation had lawfully produced Aaron-Rey’s confession.

If he could convince the jury of that, the Kordells would lose their righteous lawsuit, and she would be humiliated. She just couldn’t let any of that happen.

She could not.

CINDY LEFT THE Chronicle Building and caught a cab the second she stuck out her hand—a lucky break at rush hour. She gave the driver the address of Quince, a terrific restaurant in the Jackson Square area. Then she sat back in the seat and thought about how mysterious Richie had seemed when he called and asked her to meet him for dinner. She hadn’t been able to get anything out of him, but he was at a crime scene and unable to talk.

Still, she wondered what he
wasn’t
saying.

She flashed back, as she always did, to their recent past: how they’d been wonderfully, fabulously engaged when their opposing issues had caught up to them and overwhelmed the magic of their living-together love affair.

They’d broken up, and bad times had followed for each of them in different ways. And then circumstances had thrown them back together and they’d connected on an even deeper level.

Now they were living together again, and Cindy was afraid.

Not by the closeness and the magic, but because she could see Rich loving her and them so much that he would want them to repledge their commitment and he would propose marriage again. Which, sadly, would bring them exactly back to their main point of conflict: Richie wanting kids. Which he wanted many of and soon. And Cindy figuring there was time for all that—later.

Take the last three weeks, for example.

She’d been working a hideous story about a man who’d killed his wife, mother-in-law, and two small sons. She had researched, written, and polished her five-thousand-word piece and had gotten it into Tyler’s in-box three minutes before closing today. Tomorrow she was taking off for a ten-day book tour.

And her book was a tremendous source of pleasure. Not just that she’d been a big part of solving a terrible crime, but that she’d written a book-length work that had been published and was, if not exactly catching fire, performing well. Her editor had asked her to sketch out new book ideas for the publisher. Which was holy freakin’ wow. A lot of great things were coming true, things she’d worked toward for years. Years!

But at the same time, she didn’t want to lose Richie. She loved him so much, had missed him so much, loved coming home and getting into his lap and holding him while they breathed and hugged out the tension of the day.

Oh, please, Richie, please don’t push this. Please don’t try to close the deal.

“This where you wanted to go, miss?” the driver asked.

“Yes. Totally. Thank you.”

Cindy paid the driver and went inside the restaurant. The maître d’, a man named Arnold, took her to the more private back room, a very pleasant space with exposed-brick walls and Venetian glass chandeliers and aromas of wonderful house specialties floating on the air.

She took her seat, ordered a double Scotch, and had made progress with her stiff drink by the time Arnold brought Richie to their table. Her lover bent to kiss her and swung down into his chair, cool air from the street coming off him along with the smells of detergent and shampoo. He just looked great.

“Umm,” he said, pointing to her glass of Scotch. “What’s the occasion?”

She shrugged. “I was kind of in a mad lather all day. Got my pages in to Tyler on time. And now I’m thinking ahead to tomorrow …”

“I know. Almost two weeks away from home. That’s why I wanted to have dinner at our favorite place. Have a little
us
time.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. Because, shit, Cindy. I miss you already.”

Cindy pushed the glass away and took Richie’s hands.

“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, ever. Ever.”

He pulled her toward him and kissed her—with meaning.

“God, Richie,” she said when the kiss ended. “I’m gonna miss you, too.”

I MET YUKI for lunch at Grouchy Lynn’s in the Dog-patch neighborhood: a cute little greasy spoon with striped wallpaper and two-person booths and the best French fries east of the freeway. I ordered a club sandwich with everything and got my teeth into it while Yuki played with her salad.

Yuki has always been moody in the best possible way, meaning she can be sober and focused one minute, and in the next minute launch her contagious chortle, which could pull anyone’s bad day out of the basement. But since her near-death experience during her honeymoon a few months ago, and it was really near death for hundreds of people, I’ve hardly heard her laugh at all.

And she wasn’t laughing now when she told me she had taken a major fork in the road.

I pounded the ketchup bottle in the direction of my fries and said, “What fork?”

“I took the job,” Yuki said.

She put down her utensils, abandoned her salad, and told me about a not-for-profit called the Defense League and that her client was
dead.

“Who is this dead client and what are you supposed to do for him?” I asked.

“His name was Aaron-Rey Kordell, and he may have been coerced by the police into confessing to a triple homicide he didn’t commit. Then, while awaiting trial in the men’s jail, he was murdered in the showers by person or persons unknown.”

I grunted. A big part of the job was to get confessions. Cops were allowed to lie, and it was conceivable that people got worked over or tricked and confessed to things they didn’t do—but not often. Not that I knew about.

Yuki was saying, “Lindsay, if this story is in fact true, if Kordell was coerced into a confession and was then killed while awaiting trial, this is going to be a case against the city, the SFPD, and probably the cops who interrogated him, for I don’t know how many millions.”

I stopped eating.

A lawsuit against the police department would be a disaster for everyone in it, no doubt about it. A disaster. As Yuki’s friend, I had to be a fair sounding board. But never mind me.

“Your husband is a lieutenant in the SFPD,” I said.

“I know that, Linds.”

“What does he say?”

“He’s pissed off. We’re barely speaking.”

“Oh, man. You’re pretty sure Kordell was innocent?”

“He was caught with the gun on him. He was fifteen. Low IQ. It would have been fairly easy to get him to confess. I’ve seen the video of the interrogation. The narcs lied their faces off, Linds. Like ‘Tell us what you did and then you can go home.’ Then they told him what he did—their version.”

Yuki went on. “It might help me if I knew why Aaron-Rey was killed. Did he just piss someone off in jail? Or was he killed to avenge the deaths of those drug dealers? Because that would go to him being guilty.”

“I hope I don’t live to regret this, Yuki,” I said, “but I’ll see who was in lockup at the same time as Kordell. See what I can see. I don’t promise anything.”

“Just promise that whatever happens, we’re still buds.”

“
That
I can promise,” I said.

AT JUST BEFORE 5 p.m. that day, Yuki followed Officer Creed Mahoney through several steel doors and gates to the jail on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice. From there she was escorted to one of the claustrophobic counsel rooms with high barred windows, reserved for meetings between prisoners and lawyers.

She’d been waiting for about ten minutes when the door opened and Li’l Tony Willis clumped into the room in chains from wrists to ankles, all five foot nothing of him, wearing an orange jumpsuit and two full sleeves of tattoos, twists in his hair and ’tude on his face.

“Who are you again?” Li’l Tony asked as Mahoney threaded his chains through the hook in the table.

“Fifteen minutes, OK, Ms. Castellano?” said Mahoney. “I’ll be back.”

The door closed and locked.

Yuki said to the man-boy wife beater, drug dealer, and possible killer sitting across from her, “I’m an attorney. Yuki Castellano. I want to hear about Aaron-Rey Kordell getting killed. What happened?”