2nd Chance (3 page)

“Good to be seen.”

A TV blared above the bar, a broadcast of Chief Mercer’s news conference. “We believe it was a single gunman,” Mercer announced to a flash of photographers’ bulbs.

“You stay for that?” I asked Cindy, taking a welcome swig of my ice-cold beer.

“I was there,” she replied. “Stone and Fitzpatrick were there, too. They filed the report.”

I gave her a startled look. Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick were her competition on the crime desk. “You losing your touch? Six months ago, I would’ve found you coming out of the church as soon as we arrived.”

“I’m going at it from another angle.” She shrugged.

A handful of people crowded around the bar, trying to catch the breaking news. I took another chug of beer. “You should’ve seen this poor little girl, Cindy. All of eleven years old. She sang in the choir. There was this rainbow-colored knapsack with all her books on the ground nearby.”

“You know this stuff, Lindsay.” She gave me a bolstering smile. “You know how it is. It sucks.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “But just once, it’d be nice to pick one of them up… you know, brush them off, send them home. Just once, I’d like to hand one back their book bag.”

Cindy tapped her fist affectionately on the back of my hand. Then she brightened. “I saw Jill today. She’s got some news for us. She’s excited. Maybe Bennett’s retiring and she’s getting the big chair. We should get together and see what’s up with her.”

“For sure.” I nodded. “That what you wanted to tell me tonight, Cindy… ?”

She shook her head. In the background, all hell was breaking loose; in the news conference on the screen Mercer was promising a swift and effective response. “You’ve got a problem, Linds… ”

I shook my head. “I can’t give you anything, Cindy. Mercer’s handling everything. I’ve never seen him so worked up. I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t ask you here to get something, Lindsay… ”

“Cindy, if you know something, tell me.”

“I know that boss of yours better be careful what he’s committing to.”

I glanced at the screen.
“Mercer… ?“

In the background, I heard his voice asserting that the shooting was an isolated incident, that we already had tangible leads, that every available cop would be on the case until we tracked the killer down.

“He’s telling the world you’re gonna nail this guy before it happens again… ?”

“So… ?”

Our eyes met solidly. “I think it already has.”

T
HE
KILLER
WAS
PLAYING
DESERT
COMMANDO
and he was a master.

Phffft, phffft, phffft… phffft, phffft
.

Impassively he squinted through the illuminated infrared sight as hooded figures darted into view. As if by an extension of his finger, the darkened, maze-like chambers of the terrorist bunker exploded in balls of orange flame. Shadowy figures burst into narrow halls,
phffft, phffft, phffft.

He was a champion at this. Great hand-eye coordination. No one could touch him.

His finger twitched on the trigger.
Ghouls, sand mites, towel-heads
. Come at me, baby…
Phffft, phffft…
Up through the dark corridors… He smashed through an iron door, came upon a whole nest of them, sucking on tabbouleh, “laying cards. His weapon spit a steady orange death.
Blessed are the peacemakers.
He smirked.

He squinted one more time through the sight, replaying the scene at the church in his mind, imagining her face. That little Jemima, with her braided hair, the rainbow-colored knapsack on her back.

Phfft, phfft.
An on screen figure’s chest exploded. This next kill was for the record. Got it! His eye flashed toward the score.
Two hundred seventy-six enemy dead
.

He took a tug on his Corona and grinned. A new personal record. This score was worth keeping. He punched in his initials: FC.

He stood at the machine in the Playtime arcade in West Oakland, flicking the trigger long after the game had ended. He was the only white guy in the room. The only one. In fact, that was why he chose to be here.

Suddenly, the four large television sets overhead were blaring the same face. It sent a chill down his back and made him furious.

It was Mercer, the pompous ass who ran the San Francisco cops. He was acting like he had everything figured out.

“We believe this was the act of a single gunman…,” he was saying. “An isolated crime… ”

If you only knew.
He laughed.

Wait until tomorrow… You’ll see. Just you wait, Chief Asshole.

“What I want to stress,” the chief of police declared, “is that under no circumstance will we permit this city to be terrorized by racial attack… ”

This city.
He spat.
What do you know about this city? You don’t belong here.

He clutched at a C-l grenade in his jacket pocket. If he wanted to, he could blow everything open right here.
Right now.

But there was work to do.

Tomorrow.

He was going for another personal record.

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
Jacobi and I were back examining the grounds of the La Salle Heights Church.

All night long, I had fretted over what Cindy had told me about a case that had come across her desk. It involved an elderly black woman who lived alone in the Gustave White projects in West Oakland. Three days ago, the Oakland police had found her hanging from a pipe in the basement laundry room, an electrical cord tightly wound around her neck.

At first, the police assumed it was a suicide. No abrasions or defensive wounds were found on her body. But the next day, during the autopsy, a flaky residue was found packed under her nails. It turned out to be human skin with microscopic specks of dried blood.
The poor woman had been desperately digging in to someone.

She hadn’t hung herself after all, Cindy said.

The woman had been lynched.

As I went back over the crime scene at the church, I felt uneasy. Cindy could be right. This might not be the first, but
the second
in an onset of racially driven murders.

Jacobi walked up. He was holding a curled-up
Chronicle
. “You see this, boss?”

The front page rocked with the blaring headline, “
POLICE
STUMPED
AS
GIRL
, 11, Is
KILLED
IN
CHURCH
ASSAULT
.”

The article was written by Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick, whose careers had been nudged aside by Cindy’s work on the bride and groom case. With the newspapers stoking the fire, and the activists Gray and Jones railing on the air, soon the public would be accusing us of sitting on our hands while the terror suspect was running free.

“
Your
buddies… ” Jacobi huffed. “They always make it about us.”

“Uh-uh, Warren.” I shook my head. “My buddies don’t take cheap shots.”

Behind us in the woods, Charlie Clapper’s Crime Scene Unit team was going over the ground around the sniper’s position. They’d turned up a couple of foot imprints, but nothing identifiable. They would fingerprint the shell casings, grid-search the ground, pick up every piece of lint or dust where the supposed getaway vehicle had been parked.

“Any more sightings on that white van?” I asked Jacobi. In a strange way it was good to be working with him again.

He grumbled and shook his head. “Got a lead on a couple of winos who hold a coffee klatch on that corner at night. So far, all we have is this.” He unfolded an artist’s rendering of Bernard Smith’s description: a two-headed lion, the sticker on the rear door of the van.

Jacobi sucked in his cheeks. “Who are we after, Lieutenant, the
Pokemon killer?”

Across the grass, I spotted Aaron Winslow coming out of the church. A knot of protestors approached him from a police barrier some fifty yards away. As he saw me, his face tensed.

“People want to help any way they can. Paint over the bullet holes, build a new facade,” he said. “They don’t like to look at this.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid there’s still an active investigation going on.

He took in a breath. “I keep playing it over in my mind. Whoever did this had a clear shot. I was standing right there, Lieutenant. More in the line of fire than Tasha. If someone was trying to hurt someone,
why didn’t they hurt me?”

Winslow knelt down and picked up a pink butterfly hair clip from the ground. “I read somewhere, Lieutenant, that ‘ abounds where guilt and rage run free.”

Winslow was taking this hard. I felt sorry for him; I liked him. He managed a tight smile. “It’ll take more than this bastard to ruin our work. We won’t fold. We’ll have Tasha’s service here, in this church.”

“We were headed to pay our respects,” I said.

“They live over there. Building A.” He pointed toward the projects. “I guess you’ll find a warm reception, given that there’s some of your own.

I looked at him, puzzled. “I’m sorry? What was that?”

“Didn’t you know, Lieutenant? Tasha Catchings’s uncle is a city cop.”

I
VISITED
THE
CATCHINGS’S
apartment, paid my respects, then I headed back to the Hall. This whole thing was incredibly depressing.

“Mercer’s looking for you,” hollered Karen, our longtime civilian secretary, as I got into the office. “He sounds mad. Of course, he always sounds mad.”

I could imagine the folds under the chief’s jaw getting even deeper with the afternoon headline. In fact, the entire Hall was buzzing with the news that the La Salle Heights murder victim had been related to one of our own.

There were several other messages waiting for me on my desk. At the bottom of the pile I came across Claire’s name. Tasha Catchings’s autopsy should be finished by now. I wanted to hold off on Mercer until I had something concrete to report, so I called Claire.

Claire Washburn was the sharpest, brightest, most thorough M.E. the city ever had, notwithstanding the fact that she also happened to be my closest friend. Everyone associated with law enforcement knew it, and that she ran the department without a hitch while Chief Coroner Righetti, the mayor’s stiff-suited appointee, traveled around the country to forensic conferences working on his political resume. You wanted something done in the M. E.’s office, you called Claire.

And when I needed someone to set me straight, make me laugh, or just be there to listen, that’s where I went, too.

“Where you been hiding, baby?” Claire greeted me with her always upbeat voice, which had the ring of polished brass.

“Normal routine.” I shrugged. “Staff appraisals, case write-ups… city-dividing, racially motivated homicides… ”

“Just my region of expertise.” She chuckled. “I knew I’d be hearing from you. My spies tell me you’ve got yourself a bitch of a case out there.”

“Any of those spies maybe work for the Chronicle and drive a beat-up silver Mazda?”

“Or the D. A.’s office, and a
BMW
five-thirty-five. How the hell do you think information ever gets down here, anyway?”

“Well, here’s one, Claire. Turns out the dead little girl’s uncle is in uniform. He’s at Northern. And the poor kid ends up being a poster child for the La Salle Heights project in action. Top-of-the-line student, never once in trouble. Some justice, huh? This bastard leaves a hundred slugs in the church and the one that hits finds its way into her.”

“Uh-uh, honey.” Claire cut me off. “There were
two
of them in there.”

“Two…?
She was hit twice?”
EMS
had been all over the body. How could we have failed to catch that?

“If I’m hearing you right, my guess is you think this shot was some kind of accident.”

“What are you saying?”

“Honey,” Claire said soberly “I think you better come on down for a visit.”

T
HE
MORGUE
was on the ground floor of the Hall, out a back entrance and accessible from an asphalt path that led from the lobby. It took me no more than three minutes to rush down two flights of stairs.

Claire met me in the reception area outside her office. Her bright and usually cheery face bore a look of professional concern, but as soon as she saw me, she eased into a smile and gave me a hug.

“How you been, stranger?” she asked, as if the case were a million miles away.

Claire always had a way of defusing the tension in even the most critical of situations. I’d always admired how she could relax my single-minded focus with just a smile.

“I’ve been good, Claire. Just swamped since I got the job.”

“I don’t get to see you much now that you’re Mercer’s pet butt-boy.”

“Very funny.”

She smiled that coy wide-eyed smirk of hers that was partly
Hey, I know what you mean, but maybe a lot more, You gotta make the time, girl, for those who love you.
But without as much as a reproving word, she led me down an antiseptic-linoleum-tiled hallway toward the morgue’s operating room, called the Vault.

She glanced behind and said, “You made it sound like you were sure Tasha Catchings was killed by a stray bullet.”

“That’s what I thought. The gunman fired three clips at the church and she was the only one hit. I even went and cased the area where the shots came from. There was no way he had anything even close to a clean shot. But you said
two… “

“Uh-huh.” She nodded. We burst through a closed compression door into the dry cold air of the Vault. The icy chill and chemical smell always made my skin crawl.

And it was no different now. A single inhabited gurney was visible from its refrigerated vault. A small mound was on it, covered by a white sheet. It barely filled half the length of the gurney.

“Hold on,” Claire warned. Naked post-op victims, rigid and terrifyingly pale, were never an easy sight.