Unlucky 13 (12 page)

Randy Fish was dead. I was a witness to that.

But his soul mate was still alive.

Cindy said, “How could
this be a coincidence? This murder looks to me like an homage to Randy Fish. And that makes me think Mackie did it.”

Might. Could be. Definite maybe. But there was no evidence that Mackie Morales was connected to this crime at all.

I asked Cindy a lot of questions: Had any ID been found on or near the victim? Were there any witnesses? Any missing persons report leading to the victim? Any anything?

Cindy said, “Linds, I’ve told you everything I know
and
everything I’m thinking.”

I wasn’t buying it.

Cindy was looking straight at me with her big round baby blues, but I wasn’t sure she was seeing me. Maybe
she was inside her head, working on her killer story about a Mackie Morales murder spree.

Or maybe it was something else.

I said, “What is it, Cindy? What aren’t you saying?”

CONKLIN SHOWED UP
at our work space at half past nine, which was late for him. He hadn’t shaved or combed his hair, and he’d missed a couple of shirt buttons. Either he’d taken a tumble in the clothes dryer or I was looking at the hallmark of new love: late nights, morning delight.

“I just made coffee,” I said, tipping my chin toward the break room.

Conklin said, “Thank God.”

“You’re
welcome.”

He headed out and then came back a minute later with a cup of Mocha Java, wrestled his chair out from under the desk, threw himself into it, and raked back his thick brown hair with the fingers of both hands.

He said, “Coffee without doughnuts is like a day without sunshine.”

“Sorry to disappoint,” I said.

I opened my pencil drawer, took out a packet of peanut butter crackers, and
chucked them over to my partner. He caught them on the fly and opened the packet with his teeth.

“Tina and I.”

“Uh-huh.”

“She doesn’t like my politics. I never thought something like that would matter.”

“You had a
fight?
”

“I guess you always think that someone you like shares your values. I keep getting this wrong.”

“Are you two going to be all right?”

He shrugged, chewing his crackers,
and with his mouth full he asked what was new with me.

I found myself telling him that Cindy had come over to my house for dinner last night. I held back that she had wanted to play with the baby.

Conklin said, “How is Cindy? She didn’t look good at the wedding. She’s lost weight. She hardly spoke to me. Is she all right?”

I said, “Men are so clueless.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Anyway.
A few days ago, I stupidly mentioned to her what Brady told us—that Morales might have been seen in Wisconsin. Cindy decided to follow up in person.”

Conklin choked on his coffee, and when he’d stopped sputtering, he stared at me and said, “You’re saying she
went to Wisconsin to find Mackie Morales? By herself? Then what was she going to do?”

I filled my partner in on Cindy’s search for our
former summer intern with a taste for murder—that she was working on a career move. “What she is calling a once-in-a-lifetime story.”

Conklin’s face bent through several gradations of shocked disbelief as I told him what Cindy had uncovered in the past few days, a trail of incidents that spelled Mackie Morales had resurfaced.

“Cindy wasn’t telling me everything,” I said to Rich. “When I prodded
her, she said, and I quote, ‘I’ll tell you if and when I know more.’”

Conklin crumpled his empty cup and tossed it into the trash. He said, “You tried to talk her out of this? Never mind. I know what she’s like. I hope to God Mackie doesn’t find out that Cindy is dogging her.”

My desk phone rang too many times before I finally punched the button.

A man’s voice said, “Sergeant, this is Lou Frye.
From Chuck’s Prime.”

I signaled to Richie to pick up on line four, and I told Frye that Conklin was on the line.

Frye coughed and wheezed, then got enough wind to say, “Jansing got a text from the extortionist saying he’s going to call today with a demand. I guess you want to be here.”

After Cindy and Conklin broke up, my partner lived in his car for a couple of weeks and used the office facilities
until he found a new place to live. Now he opened his
desk drawer and took out his toiletry kit, which still lived in his desk. He rooted around and pulled out a razor, then headed toward the men’s room.

“We’re on our way,” I said to Louis Frye.

I COULD MAKE
the drive to Chuck’s HQ in Emeryville while handcuffed, blindfolded, and in my sleep, but still, there was no getting there
fast
. We were handicapped by morning rush from the west end of the Bay Bridge, and after we cleared the tunnel at Treasure Island, a panicky driver up ahead braked into a turn and fishtailed across all lanes, forcing me to skin a guard rail. I regained
the road on two wheels.

Conklin, to his credit, didn’t puke. When we got to the straightaway of 580 East, I shut down the sound and fury in case the bomber had eyes on the Emery Tech Building.

It was almost 10:30 when I nosed our car into a spot in Chuck’s executive lot. Therese Stanford, a pretty, bespectacled young woman from our crime lab’s electronic trace division, was waiting for us in
a souped-up red Mustang,
probably a recent confiscation by Narcotics. She got out of the car with a laptop case slung over her shoulder.

Lou Frye, Chuck’s Prime’s attorney, was smoking a cigarette just outside the back door. He stubbed his butt out against the brick wall, and once Conklin and I had feet on the ground, we introduced him to CSI Stanford and he let us into the building by the back
way.

“No phone call, yet,” Frye said, pressing the elevator button. “Jansing is a wreck. I’ve never seen him this way before, but he’s got a big conflict. He wants to do the right thing, but he has to protect the company. He loves Chuck’s. He
is
Chuck’s.”

Michael Jansing was in his office, rocking his desk chair, staring out the window. He dropped the chair into its upright position when we
walked in. He stood up, said hello to the three of us, shook our hands with his sweaty one, and offered us coffee.

As his assistant brought in a coffee tray, Stanford set up her laptop on Jansing’s desk.

“What if the bastard doesn’t call?” Jansing asked Stanford.

“If he wants his money, he will.”

“And what do I do?”

“Try to buy us some time to get a bead on him. Ask his name. Ask, ‘What’s
your beef?’—no, no,” Stanford said, laughing nervously. “I didn’t mean that.”

Conklin took over. “Fumble a little, Mr. Jansing, but don’t overdo it. Get the time and address of the drop and Sergeant Boxer and I will take it from there.”

Everyone took seats and settled in for a wait. The silence
was thick and then thicker. I can’t speak for what was going on in the minds of those around me, but
I knew how much could go wrong.

If the guy called from his cell phone, we’d own him, but would he call? Would he direct us to the drop, or was he the kind of sadist who could race Jansing around from place to place until he was sure that his pigeon had flown alone. Then take the money and split.

And by the way, while Stanford had worded her question indelicately, she was on the right track.
What
was
the killer’s beef? What did he have against Jansing? What did he have against Chuck’s Prime? Or was planting explosives in hamburger meat a crime of opportunity?

Jansing’s office was as quiet as a morgue during a blackout. We’d exhausted our Q and A the last two times we visited Jansing, and he was silent and tense and had no further questions of us. We drank coffee and watched Jansing
rock in his executive chair for forty-seven excruciating minutes.

And then a phone rang. Jansing grabbed at his breast pocket. He took out his cell and showed the caller ID number to Stanford.

She tapped the number into a cell phone attached to her computer, and her tracking software almost instantly pinpointed the base station the bomber was calling from.

Stanford said, “He’s in Emeryville.”

She disconnected the line, then, redialing the caller’s number, nabbed the exact location. By then Jansing’s phone had rung four times.

“He’s going to hang up,” I said.

“Go ahead and answer it,” Stanford said to Jansing.

JANSING PUT HIS
phone on speaker and said his name.

The voice that came back over the phone was electronically modulated, giving the speaker a high-pitched robotic quality that was sick, chilling, and crazy.

“How you doing, Jansing? I hoped I’d catch you in.”

Therese Stanford was at her computer keyboard, typing in the phone number of the no-name phone. Her screen showed the location
of cell towers in Emeryville and environs. With luck, she’d be able to ping the bomber’s phone.

“I don’t understand what you want from me,” Jansing said. “I gave you the money.”

“The first payment doesn’t count because you brought in the cops. Now my fee has doubled.”

“The cops came to
me
,” Jansing protested.

“I warned you about cops,” the killer said in his eerie, uninflected voice. “You
really should’ve listened to me. There are serious consequences, you know, like
ka-boom
.”

Jansing looked at me helplessly.

I mouthed words at him, and he spoke them into the phone.

“I understand.”

“I want a hundred grand. Small bills. No tracking devices.”

“I-I-I have to go to the bank. I need some time.”

“I’ll call you in a half hour,” said Robo-bomber.

“Wait. Where am I supposed to go
after that?”

“I said, I’ll call you.”

The line went dead.

I said to Jansing, “Where is your bank?”

Jansing got up, walked six yards to the far side of the room, and, lifting a framed poster of Chuck’s iconic snorting bull off the hook in the wall, revealed a wall safe. He punched numbers into the lock and pulled down on the handle. The door swung open and Jansing took out four stacks of hundred-dollar
bills, each with a wrapper reading $25,000.

As Jansing returned the poster to its original position, I called Jacobi and requested cars be stationed at intervals off the main streets in Emeryville—Hollis and 65th in particular—and prepared to follow Jansing’s car at a distance.

Stanford said, “The phone is on the move, traveling west to east over the bridge, crossing now to Oakland.”

I relayed
that information to Jacobi, and as we continued
to track the bomber’s phone while waiting for him to call back, Jansing’s phone rang. Again I listened in as the killer told Chuck’s sweating CEO to get into his car and turn left on 65th, then right on San Pablo, and to keep his phone line open for further instructions.

“Don’t screw it up,” said the bomber’s mechanical voice, “or I will kill again.
You can’t imagine what a good time I’m having.”

And then he laughed.

I conferred with Conklin and we made a spot decision.

He and CSI Stanford would follow Jansing in his BMW. I would take the unmarked Ford to Oakland and await the address of the drop.

As I left the building by the back door, I thought of my daughter, as I did every hour of every day.

The job felt different since Julie was
born. My love for Julie made me very careful, yet at the same time, I was aware that that love could play out as a momentary delay when I was at risk, and a split-second hesitation could prove fatal.

I put on my vest, hung my badge outside it, and shrugged into my Windbreaker with POLICE in big white letters across the back. I touched my hip, double-checking that my Glock was right there, and
I dropped my phone into my jacket pocket.

Then I climbed into the unmarked car and headed out.

I HAD TWO
open lines of communication inside my unmarked Crown Vic. My phone was on speaker for Conklin and Stanford, who were tracking the bomber’s phone and listening in on Jansing’s ongoing conversation with the bomber.

I was also monitoring the staticky blare of my car radio, which was locked on a channel dedicated exclusively to the cops working this case.

I buzzed down my window
as I drove through Oakland’s Fruitvale area, a shopping district that had been economically up, down, and iffy for a long time. I passed a Chuck’s on the corner of East 12th and 35th Avenue. The restaurant was busy, and typical of the chain’s cheery bistro style, aqua-and-white market umbrellas shaded the brunch crowd at the tables outside the restaurant.

Therese Stanford’s voice came over my
cell phone: “The subject told Jansing to go to a vacant liquor store on San Leandro Street. The front door is open, and he’s supposed to leave the package on the counter. Subject says he’s watching Jansing, and he’s telling him to be smart. Okay. Okay. Now Mr. Jansing says he’s got dead air. Subject has shut off the cell phone and disconnected the battery.”

My pulse picked up. I saw the vacant
liquor store up ahead, situated between a bakery and a bike shop. The sign read B
ARNEY
’
S
W
INE AND
L
IQUOR
. The plateglass window had been soaped from the inside and tagged from the outside, and rampant weeds had overtaken the pansies in the flower boxes.

I circled the block, and as I approached Barney’s on the return pass, I saw that Jansing had pulled up to the curb. I slowed and saw him get
out of his car with a taupe metal Zero Halliburton briefcase in his right hand.

Stanford and Conklin, who had been following Jansing two cars back, pulled past him and made a U-turn before parking on the opposite side of the street, facing Barney’s.

Radio dispatch confirmed that plainclothes were covering the rear exit of Barney’s and the parking areas behind the row of shops facing 45th Avenue.

We were as ready as we could be.