2nd Chance (7 page)

“I’m not a tourist,” Cindy said. “I just wanted to see this. Listen.” She swallowed. “I’d like to pretend I just came by to pay my respects… which I did. But I’m also with the Chronicle. On the crime desk.”

“A reporter.” Winslow exhaled. “It makes sense now. For years, everything that
really
goes on here—tutoring, literacy training, a nationally recognized choir—doesn’t crank up a story. But one madman acts, and now
Nightline
wants to do a town meeting. What do you want to know Ms. Thomas? What does the
Chronicle
want?”

His words had stung her a little, but she kind of liked that. He was right.

“Actually, I did a story here once before, when that window was unveiled. It was a special day.”

He stopped walking. He focused his eyes on her, then smiled. “It was a special day. And actually, Ms. Thomas, I knew who you were when I walked up. I remember you. You interviewed me back then.”

Someone called Winslow’s name from inside the church, and a woman came out. She reminded him that he had an eleven o’clock meeting.

“So, have you seen all you came to see, Ms. Thomas? Should we expect you back in another couple of years?”

“No. I want to know how you deal with this. This violence in the face of all you’ve done, how the neighborhood feels about it.”

Winslow let himself smile. “Let me clue you in on something. I don’t deal in innocence. I’ve spent too much time in the real world.”

She remembered that Aaron Winslow wasn’t someone whose faith had been formed through a life of detachment. He’d come up from the streets. He’d been an army chaplain. Only days before, he’d put himself in the line of fire and possibly saved lives.

“You came here to see how this neighborhood is responding to the attack? Come see for yourself. Tasha Catchings is being memorialized tomorrow.”

V
ANDERVELLEN’S
STUNNING
DISCLOSURE
drummed in my head for the rest of the day.

Both murder victims had been related to San Francisco cops.

It could add up to nothing. They could be two random and unrelated victims. People in different cities, separated by sixty years.

Or it could mean everything.

I picked up the phone and called Claire. “I need a big favor,” I said.

“Just how big?” I could feel her grin.

“I need you to take a look at the autopsy of that woman who was hung in Oakland.”

“I can do that. Send it over. I’ll take a look.”

“This is where it gets huge, Claire. It’s still at the Oakland M. E.’s office. It hasn’t been released.”

I waited expectantly as she sighed. “You must be kidding, Lindsay. You want me to stick my nose into an investigation that’s still in progress?”

“Listen, Claire, I know this isn’t exactly procedure, but they’ve made some pretty important assumptions that could determine this case.”

“Want to tell me what type of assumptions I’d be stepping all over a respected M. E.’s toes to review?”

“Claire, these cases are related. There’s a pattern here. Estelle Chipman was married to a cop. Tasha Catchings’s uncle is a cop, too. My whole investigation hinges on whether we’re dealing with one killer. Oakland believes there’s a black man involved, Claire.”

“A black man?” She gasped. “Why would a black want to do these things?”

“I don’t know. But there’s starting to be a lot of circumstantial evidence linking both crimes. I have to know.”

She hesitated. “Precisely what the hell would I be looking for?”

I told her about the skin specimens they had found under the victim’s nails and their M. E.’s conclusion.

“Teitleman’s a good man,” Claire responded. “I’d trust his findings like I would my own.

“I know, Claire, but he’s not you. Please. This is important.”

“I want you to know,” she shot back, “that if Art Teitleman asked to poke his nose into one of my preliminary investigations, I’d have his parking ticket stamped and politely tell him to go back to his side of the bay. I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, Lindsay.”

“I know that, Claire,” I said with a grateful tone. “Why do you think I’ve been working this friendship all these years?”

L
ATE
THAT
AFTERNOON
, I sat at my desk as one by one my staff called it quits for the day. I couldn’t leave with them.

My mind tried over an dover to put together the parts. Everything I had was based on assumptions. Was the killer black or white? Was Claire right, that Tasha Catchings was intentionally killed? But the lion symbol had definitely been there.
Link the victims
, my instincts said.
There’s a connection. But what the hell is it?

I glanced at my watch and placed a call to Simone Clark in personnel, catching her just as she was preparing to leave. “Simone, I need you to pull a file for me tomorrow.”

“Sure, whose do you need?”

“A cop who retired maybe eight, ten years ago. His name was Edward Chipman.”

“That’s a while back. It would be out on the docks.” The department outsourced its old records to a document storage company. “Early afternoon, okay?”

“Sure, Simone. Best you can do.”

I was still bristling with nervous energy. I took out another stack of Kirkwood’s hate files and plopped them on my desk.

I opened one at random. Americans for Constitutional Action… Ploughs and Fifes, another hayseed militia group. All these assholes, they seemed like such a bunch of right-wing jerk-offs. Was I wasting my time? Nothing jumped out. Nothing gave me any hope that this was the right track.

Go home, Lindsay,
a voice urged.
Tomorrow new leads might develop. There’s the van, Chipman’s file…. Call it a night. Take Martha for a run.

Go home…

I stacked the files, about to give in, when the top one caught my eye.
The Templars
. A Hells Angels offshoot out of Vallejo. The original Templars were Christian knights from the Crusades. Immediately I noticed the FBI’s assessment of threat. Their rating was
High.

I took the file off the pile and leafed further in. There was an
FBI
report outlining a series of unsolved felonies the Templars had been suspected of involvement in, bank robberies, hits for hire against Latino and black gangs.

I leafed on, case files, prison records, surveillance photos of the group. Suddenly, the breath emptied out of my lungs.

My eyes fixed on a surveillance shot: a bunch of heavy muscled, tattoo-covered bikers huddled outside a Vallejo bar they used as a headquarters. One of them hunched over his bike, back to the camera. He had a shaved head, a bandanna, and a sleeveless denim jacket over massive arms.

It was the embroidery on the back of the denim jacket that caught my eye.

I was staring at a two-headed lion with the tail of a snake.

S
OUTH
OF
MARKET
, in a run-down warehouse section of the city a man in a green windbreaker ducked along a shadowy curb. The killer.

This time of night, in this decrepit neighborhood, no one was around, only a couple of scum-bums huddled over a blazing trash can. Abandoned warehouses, daytime businesses with shorted-out electrical signs:
CHECKS
CASHED
TODAY
…
METAL
WORKS
…
EARL
KING
,
CITY’S
MOST
TRUSTED
BAIL
BONDSMAN
.

His eyes drifted across the street, toward Seventh, to the dilapidated shell of an abandoned residential hotel: 303. He had carefully staked the place out over the past three weeks. Half the apartments were vacant, the other half the nightly resting place for homeless bums with nowhere else to go.

Spitting onto the trash-littered street, he threw a black Adidas sport bag over his shoulder and headed around the block onto Sixth and Townsend. He crossed the dingy street toward a boarded-up warehouse marked only by scratched-out sign:
AGUELLO’S
…
COMIDAS
ESPANOL
.

Making sure he was alone, the killer pushed in the paint-chipped metal door, then he ducked inside. His heart was starting to pump pretty good now. He was addicted to the feeling, actually.

A foul odor met him in the lobby, a fire trap that was littered with old newspapers and oily corrugated boxes. He hit the stairs, hoping not to run into any of the homeless scum camped out in the halls.

He climbed all the way to five, where he quickly made his way to the end of the hall. He pushed through a grating and stepped out onto the fire escape. From there, it was only a quick flight up to the roof.

Up here, the desolate streets gave way to the luminous aura of the city’s skyline. His position was in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, which loomed over him like a hulking ship.

He rested the black sport bag on an air-conditioning vent, unzipped it, and carefully removed the parts of a customized PSG-1 sniper rifle.

At the church, I needed maximum saturation. Here I only get one shot.

As traffic rumbled over him on the Bay Bridge freeway, he screwed the long barrel of the rifle to the shaft and locked it in place. Handling guns was like handling a fork and knife to him. He could do this in his sleep.

He fastened on the infrared sight. He squinted through it, amber-colored shapes coming into focus.

He was so much smarter than them. While they were looking for white vans and silly-ass symbols, he was here, about to blow the lid wide open. Tonight, they would finally begin to understand.

His heart slowed as he aimed across the street, at the rear of the transient hotel marked 303. On the fourth floor, a dimly lit apartment shone through the window.

This was it. The moment of truth.

He calmed his breath to a whisper and licked his dry lips. He aimed at a picture in his mind he had held for so long. He
feathered
the sight.

Then, when it was just right, he squeezed.

Click…

This time he wouldn’t even have to sign it. They’d know from the shot. From the target.

Tomorrow, every person in San Francisco would know his name.

Chimera.

I
KNOCKED
on Stu Kirkwood’s glass office door, interrupting his morning coffee and bagel. I tossed the surveillance shot of the biker wearing the lion with the tail of a snake in front of him. “I need to know what this is. I need it
ASAP
, Stu.”

I followed the shot up with two other versions of the same image: the decal on the rear of the white van and a Polaroid of the basement wall where Estelle Chipman had been killed
. Lion, goat, tail of a snake or lizard.

Kirkwood stiffened. “I don’t have any idea,” he looked up and said.

“This is
our killer
, Stu. So how do we find him? I thought this was your specialty.”

“I told you, gay bashing’s more my bag. We could e-mail the pictures to Quantico.”

“Okay.” I nodded. “How long will it take?”

Kirkwood straightened up. “I know a chief researcher down there I took a seminar with. Let me put in the call.”

“Do it quick, Stu, then finish your bagel. And let me know as soon as you get something back. The minute you hear something.”

Upstairs, I nudged Jacobi and Cappy into my office. I slid Kirkwood’s Templar file and a copy of the biker photo across my desk. “You recognize the artist, guys?”

Cappy studied the photo and glanced up. “You’re thinking these dust mites have something to do with the case?”

“I want to know where these guys are,” I said. “And I want you to be careful. This crew’s been implicated in stuff that makes La Salle Heights seem like a paintball outing. Weapons traffic, aggravated violence, murder for hire. According to the file, they operate out of a bar over in Vallejo called the Blue Parrot. I don’t want you busting in there like you’re razzing a pimp down on Geary And remember,
it’s not our jurisdiction.”

“We hear you, Loo,” Cappy said. “No thumping. Just a little R and R. It’ll be nice to spend the day out of town.” He picked up the file and tapped Jacobi on the shoulder. “Your clubs in the trunk?”

“Guys.
Careful,”
I reminded them. “Our killer’s a shooter.”

After they left, I leafed through a handful of messages and opened the morning
Chronicle
on my desk. There was a headline, with Cindy’s attribution, reading, “
POLICE
WIDEN
CHURCH
SHOOTING
PROBE
,
OAKLAND
WOMAN’S
DEATH
THOUGHT
TO BE
BROUGHT
IN.”

Quoting “sources close to the investigation” and unnamed police contacts,” she outlined the possibility that we had widened our investigation, citing the murder in Oakland. I had given her the green light to go that far.

I speed-dialed Cindy. “This is Source Close to the Investigation calling,” I said.

“No way. You’re Unnamed Contact. Source Close to the Investigation is Jacobi.”

“Oh, shit.” I chuckled.

“I’m glad you have your sense of humor. Listen, I have something important I need to show you. Are you going to Tasha Catchings’s funeral?”

I looked at my watch. It was scheduled in less than an hour. “Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“Look for me,” Cindy said.

A
BITING
DRIZZLE
was coming down as I arrived at the La Salle Heights Church.

Hundreds of black-clad mourners were jammed into the bullet-scarred church. A canvas was draped over the gaping hole where the stained-glass window had been. It flapped like a somber flag whipped by the breeze.