14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (17 page)

“He’s both a legend and a myth,” Joe said. “No one knows what he looks like, but it’s said that he gets a piece of all the drug action in the state. Or else.”

“Yeah,” I sighed.

“Not to overworry, Linds, but you think Kingfisher’s gang tortured a cop who may have been involved in the case you’re working.”

“Right, I know,” I said. “I know.”

The oil and the veal were sizzling in the pan, and Joe poured the wine.

“Linds, it concerns me.”

“I’ll be careful. I won’t take any unnecessary chances.”

Joe nodded. He set the security system while I dished up dinner. We ate at the dining table for a change, Martha sitting hopefully between our chairs. When the coffee was brewing, Joe changed the subject and told me he had a lead on “his” case, Claire’s Birthday Murders.

“I’ve got a possible suspect,” Joe said. “His name is Wayne Broward, and he was charged with slashing a neighbor’s car tires. The judge fined him, and Broward responded by threatening to kill the judge, rape his wife, and suffocate their children.”

“Whoa. A seriously crazy person.”

“He was sentenced to the max for threatening a judge, which is a five-thousand-dollar fine and a year in the hoosegow. Broward got out early for good behavior. You ask—when was that? And I answer, just before Claire’s birthday five years ago.”

“Huh,” I said. “Let’s see what else you’ve got.”

While I cleaned up, Joe brought over his laptop. I looked at the files he had found, then tapped into the SFPD database and looked up this madman, Wayne Lawrence Broward, who lived in the Bayview neighborhood at Hollister Avenue and Hawes Street.

Apart from the attack on the neighbors’ tires, Broward had a record for assault on a neighbor who had put his garbage cans too close to Broward’s driveway. And in addition to these attacks, there was a domestic abuse complaint from Broward’s wife.

She had dropped the charges, but her statement made interesting reading.

“Joe, listen to this. Mrs. Broward described her husband as ‘ruined by his crazy-ass schizo mother and has intermittent explosive anger disorder.’”

“And she stuck with him.”

“Yes, she did. If I can find a spare moment tomorrow, I’m going to check up on this guy,” I said.

“Be very careful,” said my dear husband.

WAYNE LAWRENCE BROWARD’S house was a brown, wood-shingled shanty, the third one in from the intersection of Hollister Avenue and Hawes Street. Standing behind a chain-link fence that was hung with a dozen no trespassing signs, the house looked like a seething box of paranoia.

I parked in front of the fence and clipped my badge to my lapel so that the gold metal would glint against the navy-blue twill. I unbuttoned my jacket so that my gun was visible on my hip. Then I pushed open the short chain-link gate.

Even as I put my hand on the gate, I knew I was way off the rails here. Tina Strichler’s murder was being worked by Inspectors Michaels and Wang of our department, but even though they were new, or maybe because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable asking them to look into a fairly baseless hunch conceived by Joe and me.

Still, a hunch was hard to put aside. And I had to check it out. I went through the gate and up the poured-cement path to the front door, upon which was taped another
NO TRESPASSING AND THAT MEANS
YOU notice.

I pressed the buzzer.

I heard a dog woofing deep inside the house, and a man’s voice said, “OK, Hauser. Let’s see who this damned son of a bitch is.”

There were sounds behind the door, a peephole sliding, a chain coming off a track, a bolt unracking. Given the modest means of residents of this neighborhood, either Wayne Broward was stashing gold bullion at home, or he was an officer in a one-man war.

Or maybe he had stabbed a woman to death on each of the past five May twelfths.

There was more barking, and then the door was pulled open. A brown-haired white man of average height and weight, in a denim shirt and jeans, holding a Winchester rifle, showed himself in the slice of open doorway.

“What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

“I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer,” I said, showing him my badge. “I’m looking for Wayne Lawrence Broward.”

The dog, a boxer as it turned out, lunged at the door, and the gent with the rifle used his leg to push the dog back from the doorway.

“I said, ‘What. The fuck. Do you
want?
’”

I pushed my badge forward. “I’m the police. Put the gun down.”

The man in the doorway scowled, but he lowered the muzzle.

I took a photo of Tina Strichler from my breast pocket. Her bloody death on a pedestrian crossing in front of about a hundred tourists was still vivid in my mind.

I said, “Do you know this woman?”

Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”

BROWARD HAD AS much as said he recognized Tina Strichler. But I wanted to hear him actually say it.

“You know this woman?” I asked.

“Come in,” he said. “I don’t bite. Even Hauser don’t bite.”

He yanked on the dog’s collar, shoved the dog into a bedroom, and closed the door.

I put my hand on my gun, cautiously entered the house, and looked around. The interior of the place looked like
American Pickers
meets
Hoarding: Buried Alive
.

There wasn’t one inch of clean or uncluttered surface. There were live chickens in a slatted box under a table, canned food stacked against the walls to the ceiling, boxes of ammo on countertops, and guns hanging from racks on the walls.

I scanned the room for trophies of dead women. I was looking for photos or newspaper clippings taped to the wall or signs of the abused wife. I also looked for a collection of assorted knives that might have been used to commit murder and then been taken away by the killer.

But mainly, I was so stunned by the chaos that I lost sight of Broward—until I felt a cold gun muzzle against the back of my neck.

Wayne Broward said, “Why don’t you take off your gun and stay awhile.”

“Love to,” I said, fear and shame flooding my body to my fingertips and out through my eyes. I was a jerk. I’d walked right into this, and I might die in this very room.

“I’m taking my gun out very slowly,” I said, my back to him. “Just using my fingertips.”

As I was trained to do, I spun around fast, knocked the barrel of Broward’s rifle away from me, grabbed the rifle with both hands, and wrenched it out of Broward’s grip, throwing him off balance. I flung the rifle far from where I stood. As it clattered against a wall hung with hubcaps, I pulled my Glock and leveled it at Broward’s nose.

From the chill at the back of my neck to the Glock in my hand took about ten seconds, but it felt like the last ten seconds of my life. Hauser was barking his head off, and I wondered at my luck, that Broward had underestimated me and had put the dog behind a door.

“Bitch,” Broward spat at me. “I shoulda shot you. I coulda done anything to you. No one would ever know what happened to you.”

“Turn around. Put your hands on your head,” I said.

He did it.

“I coulda given you a real good ride first,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t had a blond in a while.”

“Shut the hell up,” I said.

I holstered my gun, wrenched Broward’s arms down, and cuffed him behind his back.

“You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” I said. And then I read him his rights.

I HAD BROWARD in the back of my vehicle, behind the Plexiglas and in cuffs.

As for me, I was still twitching with adrenaline because he could have killed me. That would have been my fault entirely for having made such a dumb-ass, rookie mistake.

I couldn’t stop flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to look at him. He was wild-eyed crazy, for sure, but whatever kind of psycho he was, he didn’t seem to know or care that he was on his way to jail.

Broward said loudly, “Remember when we were living with my mama?”

“Yep. It was a trip, Wayne.”

“You used to call me Honey-boy. I just loved when you did that.”

“That was then, Wayne,” I said, playing along. “I’m over you now.”

Wayne Broward began to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

I turned up the squawk box and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t like what I was going to have to say to a judge about why I had been inside the house of a man who hadn’t been under suspicion of anything; my probable cause was a hunch. Thank God Broward had invited me to come in. Perhaps that and his history of threatening a judge would help me sound a little less stupid.

Twenty minutes later, I parked in the all-day lot on Bryant and tossed the keys to the guy who worked days in the shed. Broward gave me no trouble as I escorted him across the street and into the building in cuffs. I walked him through the metal detector and up the stairs to the desk sergeant on the third floor.

I said, “Sergeant, we need to book Mr. Broward for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Make sure he gets a psych eval.”

Sergeant Brooks asked questions and filled out a form, and a uniformed cop came up and took Broward to booking. My rifle-wielding collar would be kept busy for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours while being processed: There would be a body search, fingerprints, a shower, and examinations by a nurse and a shrink. Then he’d be given a jumpsuit and locked in a holding cell until I could get back to him.

After leaving the front desk, I went down the hall and through the door to Homicide. I found Conklin in the bullpen with files on drug dealers fanned out all over his desktop.

“Rich. I’m very sorry. I got hung up.” I fully planned to tell my partner about Wayne Broward, but he cut in with a news flash.

“Ralph Valdeen was hit.”

Ralph Valdeen, aka Rascal, was one of the two former stockroom boys at Wicker House. Valdeen had been charged with assault on a police officer for that punch he’d thrown at Conklin at the ballpark. But he’d been released on bail. Unlike Donnie Wolfe, who had stolen a car, we had had nothing else on Valdeen. There was no evidence that he knew the Wicker House shooters or that he knew what happened to the drugs that had been stolen from that lab.

“What happened?” I asked my partner.

“His mom went over to his place and found him dead in the bedroom,” Conklin said. “Two shots to the chest, one to the head. Makes me think someone was cleaning up after themselves. Maybe he could’ve ID’d the Wicker House shooters.”

“Another dead witness,” I said.

“And he’s all ours,” said Conklin.

BRADY HELD AN impromptu standing-room-only meeting at the end of the shift. We were a ragged-looking crew but highly motivated to stop the growing body count and rescue our reputation, which was getting trashed by the media daily, nightly, and on weekends.

Brady is a hard-ass, but he wasn’t saying “you guys.”

He said, “We have a big problem. All of us. More than a dozen people are dead, including one of our own and his family. Some of the dead are victims of crimes, some are witnesses, and some are perps. I’ll be frank. I’m not sure we always know who is who.

“This is what I see.

“The nature of the war between the drug dealers and us has changed. Cops may be involved in drug-related crime, and drug dealers are firing back. No one can say with certainty who is doing what to whom, and that makes it even more, I don’t know, disgusting.

“This cannot go on.

“Everyone here, you are all working a piece of this war. Talk to your CIs. Think about things that have been said or done and you looked the other way. I don’t want any crap about never ratting out a brother. One of our brothers was tortured before he and his family were murdered.

“This was a first in my experience, and I don’t have to tell you that this can never happen again. My door is open to all of you. If you have a clue, even if it involves someone we know and trust, you tell me in private.”

Brady paced a little in front of the room, then asked if there were any questions. There were none. There were no strangers in our bullpen, just people who’d had our backs for years.

One of them had left an anonymous note on my desk saying WATCH YOUR BACK.

Brady went on.

“Boxer and Conklin are primaries on Wicker House and the homicides of Tom Calhoun and his family. If you’re assigned to those cases, report to them.

“Swanson and Vasquez are responsible for the mercado and check-cashing robbery homicides, past, present, and future.

“Whitney and Brand are point men on cases where drug dealers have been shot. Any information about dealers being ripped off or killed by cops, report immediately to me.

“My cell phone number and private e-mail address are posted in the break room. We’re smart enough to put this trouble down, so let’s do that. Vacations are canceled.

“That’s all.”

The meeting broke up, and Brady made his way through the roomful of cops to his office. When Conklin and I reached our desks, I picked up the phone. I called the men’s jail and in just a few minutes had set up a room for a conference with a car thief and former Wicker House stockroom boy by the name of Donald Wolfe.

DONNIE WOLFE LOOKED to be in a pretty good mood when he was brought into the interview room in orange jumpsuit and cuffs.

“Wassup?” he said, sliding into a chair as the guard left the room. He angled around in his seat, getting comfortable, enjoying the attention or maybe just happy to have company. “You making me miss my dinner.”

Conklin said, “I’ve got some bad news for you, Donnie.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Someone took out your friend Rascal.”

“Nuh-uh, no, they didn’t.”

Conklin took his phone out of his pocket and found the photo of Ralph Valdeen lying facedown on his narrow bed, his blood soaking through the baby-blue covers. Conklin put the phone on the table and turned it so that Donnie Wolfe could see the picture.