The 20th Victim

by James Patterson

  I heard Covington through my earbud, “On five.”

  Five seconds passed, then the men with the battering ram bashed in the door. Once SWAT cleared the ground floor, my partner and I went in.

  The house was boxy.

  A staircase in the center hall rose to the second floor. The kitchen was to the left. There were dishes in the sink and breakfast remains on the table. Refrigerator door was hanging open. A TV room to the right was tuned to the History Channel, showing a World War II documentary. In the center of the house a large Rottweiler mix lay groaning in front of a closed door.

  Nothing moved. No one cried out. But our arrival had been a surprise, and someone had fled to the second floor in order to take shots at us. With gun drawn, I took the stairs up and looked into the right-hand bedroom. There was a double bed, piles of clothes on the chair and floor. On the dresser was a framed picture of a bearded man wearing a navy uniform with a SEAL trident. That had to be Barkley.

  A Caucasian woman was lying on a blood-spattered carpet in front of the window seat with a .380 handgun beside her hand.

  The woman was wearing a large T-shirt with an auto repair shop logo. Her long brown hair fell around her shoulders like a shawl, obscuring the tattoos on her neck. I guessed her age as somewhere between thirty and forty, but in any case, she’d had it rough. Now she was breathing hard, and blood ran from a wound in her upper arm.

  I kicked the gun aside, spoke into my shoulder mike, and requested an ambulance. I stooped down and said to the injured woman, “I’m Sergeant Boxer, SFPD. I’ve called for medical help. What’s your name?”

  She didn’t say. She closed her eyes. Could she hear me? Flashbangs could make a person deaf and sick for a while.

  I leaned down close to her ear and said my name again, adding, “You fired on police officers. Do you understand? That’s a serious crime.”

  She gave me a glancing look, gasped for breath, and said, “You are going to feel so stupid.”

  She groaned, rolled onto her side, and threw up, just missing my shoes.

  I got her a wet towel and a glass of water from the bathroom and helped her sit up and use the towel on her tearing eyes. I told her to sip from the glass, but she slugged the water down. With my hand on her back, just us girls, I said, “Help me find Barkley. I only need to establish his whereabouts at the time of a shooting, ask him a few questions. That’s all.”

  She hacked out a short, dismissive laugh I translated as Forget about it.

  Commandos filled the room where I stood over the injured woman. We cuffed her wrists in front of her belly as she yowled in pain. I didn’t enjoy this, but it had to be done. I asked her again, “What’s your name?”

  “Snow White.”

  Barkley’s wife’s name was Miranda White Barkley. Maybe we were getting somewhere after all.

  Out on the street, sirens wailed toward Thornton from Venus Street, getting louder, cutting out suddenly in front of the house. Car doors slammed.

  I said and meant it, “Miranda. We’re running out of time to help your husband. Can you hear me? I want to bring him in safely, but our chief is organizing a manhunt. Barkley can’t hide. Every cop will be combing the city looking for him.”

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs, then Brady appeared in the doorway.

  “Got us a Mincey warrant,” he said, slapping the folded document against his hand. “Conklin and I are going to grab up laptops, phones, whatever. Did she tell you anything?”

  More footsteps sounded on the stairs. Conklin appeared in the doorway with news.

  “The dog was lying in front of the door to the basement. There’s a tunnel down there. If Barkley was here, he’s gone down the rabbit hole.”

  Chapter 33

  I left Conklin at the scene and followed the paramedics taking Miranda White Barkley on her stretcher down to Thornton Avenue.

  By then, because of the SWAT team ruckus, the street was teeming with curiosity seekers and law enforcement officers of every type and stripe. Car horns blatted as frustrated drivers tried to move stalled traffic with the heels of their palms.

  I walked up to one obnoxious jerk, who had buzzed down his window and was blowing his horn, yelling at the ambulance, “Move your ass, goddamnit.”

  I put my badge up to his face and said, “Cut it out.”

  The ambulance hadn’t left the street. I jogged along Thornton and caught up with EMT Andy Murphy as he and another paramedic wheeled Miranda’s gurney up to the back of the bus.

  “Andy, I need to ride with my prisoner.”

  I held up the handcuff key. He nodded okay, and we swapped out my handcuffs for Flex-Cuffs and secured Miranda’s wrists to the gurney’s rails.

  Murphy gave me a hand up, said “Brace yourself,” and pulled the doors closed. I used the shoulder harness to buckle up, and sitting on the narrow bench, my knees up against the gurney, I also grabbed an overhead strap. The sirens whooped and the ambulance shot up Thornton. I leaned down close to the injured woman’s ear.

  “Miranda.”

  “Randi.”

  “Randi. For everyone’s sake, I need to find your husband before he makes another mistake.”

  “Go away.”

  She tried to turn away from me, but I persisted.

  “If I talk to him first…look at me, Randi. I’m trying to stop this from ending in a funeral.”

  The bus took a hard right on Bayshore Boulevard and Randi yelped. Then she opened her eyes and looked into mine. “Leave him alone. Okay? He didn’t do anything except run. He has PTSD.”

  I squeezed her good arm and gave it a little shake. “That may be true, but that’s only one part of what’s happening here.”

  She watched as I took out my phone, then shouted, “He doesn’t have his phone. It’s on the nightstand. Charging.”

  Well, damn it, so much for giving him a friendly call. I barely clung to my seat on the bench as the ambulance pitched and yawed. If Barkley had executed the Barons, he might not have told his wife about it. If he had told her, she was legally protected from testifying against him.

  That thought led to another.

  Randi had said that I was going to feel stupid. Why was that? Was she working undercover? Was Barkley?

  I needed more information, and at about that time the bus took a hard turn, and with tires squealing, we pulled into Metro’s ambulance bay.

  The driver opened the rear doors. I jumped out ahead of the gurney and walked around the corner of the building to the main entrance to the ER. I’d been here so many times for family, for suspects like Randi Barkley, for my own injuries, I knew every corner of the bland beige waiting room by heart. Only the diverse collection of loved ones waiting for news and the magazines ever changed.

  I knew the intake nurse as Kathleen. She spoke with a trace of an Irish brogue, asking, “How can I help you, Sergeant?”

  I pointed to the doors to the ER. She buzzed me in, and I waved my thanks as I breezed through. I searched the curtained stalls and found Randi and a nurse in one of them.

  The nurse had cut the plastic restraint on Randi’s bad arm and was cleaning up the wound. She said to her patient, “See how lucky you are? The bullet missed the bone.”

  I entered the stall, closed the curtain, and said, “Randi, how’re you feeling?”

  “Awesome. Haven’t you heard? This is my lucky day.”

  I pulled up a chair. “Explain something to me, will you? Because I’m a little mystified. Why’d you fire on police with a handgun?”

  She said, “Ever read a book called Competitive Shooting?”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “I used a target pistol because that’s what I had. Before you showed up, I was going to go to the range and practice shooting to compete.”

  I wanted to shout at her, Are you crazy? You fired on SWAT. You should be dead.

  I just stared at her. She went on.

  “SWAT was outside my field of vision. I only saw you and that cop with you. I wasn�
�t shooting to kill. I shot over your heads. Did you notice?”

  The nurse was openmouthed. Randi was looking at me—like I was stupid—saying, “Ever hear of a diversion?”

  Now I got it. She’d created cover so that Barkley could get away.

  “Helping your husband escape from the police makes you an accessory to whatever he’s done. Get me? At present, he’s under suspicion of committing murder.”

  Chapter 34

  It was after 6 p.m. when Brady pulled up a chair to our desks, tightened his white-blond ponytail to keep his hair out of his eyes, and, gripping a red grease pencil, made notes as we summarized our last ten hours.

  Item one: Miranda White Barkley was in a cell waiting for her lawyer. Two: Conklin had traveled with SWAT through the tunnel under Barkley’s house, which was a short sprint to the nearest commuter rail station; Barkley had probably boarded the train and could now be anywhere.

  “Son of a bitch,” Brady said.

  We talked about Barkley, clever enough and physically able to dig out an exit. No doubt he’d been well trained by the military. At this point, Brady told us, teams were stationed to watch his house, and Caltrain had pulled surveillance footage from the ticketing area at the Twenty-Second Street station.

  “Three,” said Brady, nodding to Conklin. “Stempien is going through Barkley’s devices now.”

  “Item next,” I said. “Randi told me that she deliberately fired over our heads. She didn’t hit anyone, so that could be true. The slugs she fired were blanks.”

  As Brady made notes, I thought about the two bodies, one sprawled across the desk, the other lying faceup on the carpet. Two perfectly placed kill shots had done that.

  Who had done the shootings and why? What on earth would have motivated Barkley to murder the Barons, and how did those killings link up with the homicides of drug dealers in LA and Chicago at precisely the same time?

  Brady pushed back his chair, linked his hands behind his neck. “Bottom line,” he said, “we don’t know where Barkley is, the wife ain’t talkin’, and there’s no known connection between Barkley and the Barons. Got a whole lot of parts on the floor of the shop, but can’t make a car.”

  I repeated a version of what Joe always says to me when I’m overstimulated and a wreck about how much time is flying by.

  “It’s ‘day one,’ Brady. Day one and we have Randi White Barkley in custody. That’s a start.”

  Brady added that the picture of Leonard Barkley standing behind his car door on San Anselmo Avenue two days before the killings had been disseminated to every cop on the force—Northern, Central, and Southern Stations, as well as the motorcycle cops and the Sheriff’s Department.

  Brady said, “I don’t have to tell you, unless we nab the son of a bitch, we gotta break the wife.”

  Randi hadn’t cracked while she was in pain and with me questioning her. Conklin was good with everyone, but he was especially good with women. His sincerity always came through.

  I said, “Sounds like a job for my partner.”

  Cappy called over from his desk, “Hey, Richie. Cindy’s on the tube.”

  Brady rearranged things on my desk until he got his hand around the remote. He pointed it at the TV mounted on the wall, where it could be seen throughout the squad room, and boosted the volume.

  And there was Cindy Thomas standing in front of the Barkleys’ house, miked up, made up, a lower-third screen graphic displaying her name and San Francisco Chronicle. Brian Whalen, a TV reporter from the local CBS affiliate said, “Cindy, can you bring us up-to-date on the incident that took place here this morning?”

  “Brian, this is what we know. This man”—she held up an enlargement of a photo I had scrutinized dozens of times—“Leonard Barkley, is wanted for questioning in the murders of Paul and Ramona Baron.”

  “You’re saying he’s a suspect in those murders?”

  “The police department is calling Barkley a person of interest. He may be a witness and have useful information. The incident this afternoon involved the police trying to bring him in, but he got away, and his whereabouts are unknown.

  “If anyone knows or sees this man, do not approach him. He’s presumed to be armed and dangerous. Call the SFPD hotline immediately.”

  She gave the number.

  Then she added, “Mr. Barkley, if you’re listening, the police want you to know that your wife has been injured by gunfire and is in police custody. Please call the number on the screen. The SFPD and your wife need to speak to you.”

  I was pretty sure that if Barkley was watching from his bunker, he was scoffing and loading his weapon. Brady muted the volume on the TV.

  He said, “Before you start looking for leakers, I’m Cindy’s police source.”

  I said, “You told her?”

  “Thanks, Brady,” said Conklin. “We owed her one.”

  “That’s what she said. Y’all go home now and brace for a deluge coming over the tip line. Let’s hope for a lead that pays off.”

  Chapter 35

  I can’t leave Dave right now,” Joe told Lindsay.

  He was sitting in his car in the parking lot, watching a rabbit hop across the patio outside the Channing restaurant.

  “Hang on a sec,” she said. “I’m parking the car.”

  He heard her shut the door and set the car alarm. He wanted to be home with her, talk to her, hold Julie-Bug on his lap and rock her to sleep.

  “He’s a mess, huh?” Lindsay asked.

  Joe said, “Well, he thinks Ray’s doctor murdered him. I don’t know if he’s grief stricken or delusional or both. But I do know that he’s alone and in a bad place.”

  Joe heard Mrs. Rose speak to Lindsay over the intercom. “Come on up, Lindsay dear.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be right there.”

  Lindsay said to Joe, “I never asked. Does Dave have a girlfriend?”

  “He pays for the girlfriend experience.”

  “Aw, jeez. Do whatever you need to do,” she said.

  Lindsay told him that after she put Julie to bed, she’d ask Mrs. Rose to take over for another couple of hours so she could have dinner with the girls.

  “I’ll bring her a case of Channing’s Private Reserve Cab,” Joe said.

  “And one for us.”

  “No problem.”

  Joe said he’d be home tomorrow, and after exchanging good nights and phone kisses, he returned to Dave’s small, two-story stone house, which was identical to the house about twenty yards away—the house where his parents, Ray and Nancy, had lived. Dave had left the lights on, telling Joe, “If Ray’s restless spirit is still around, he’ll want to see the lights.”

  Dave’s living room was sparsely furnished with two upholstered armchairs in front of the fireplace, a standing lamp, and a handmade end table made from what looked like antique wine crates. A collection of framed oil paintings, including one luminous view of the vineyard at sunup, hung over the fireplace. Joe had taken a close look. They were signed “Nancy Channing.”

  An aged-plank dining table dominated the dining area. There were four straight-backed dining chairs, and Joe saw a short stack of folders in front of one of them.

  Joe took a seat and opened the folder on top. It contained a thin sheaf of clippings from local papers, primarily obituaries. Dave brought Joe a cup of tea and said, “Read this one.”

  “This one” was a glossy Napa Valley monthly publication called Great Grapes, which contained a lot of ads, a smattering of local news, and profiles of artists and business owners. Joe opened the magazine to where a slip of paper bookmarked an essay by a writer named Johann Archer.

  Archer had written about the death of his thirty-eight-year-old fiancée, Tansy Mallory, a dance teacher and long-distance runner, who’d been taken to the hospital with heat exhaustion. He’d written that Tansy was in every other way healthy and recovering—when she died.

  Archer had poignantly expressed his shock about the unexpected and still unbelievable loss of the woman he
had dearly loved. The writer hadn’t mentioned the name of the hospital or the doctor, only that he disbelieved the hospital’s stated cause of death.

  He closed the essay by writing, “Inexplicably, a sunny, generous, and optimistic woman is gone. Somehow my heart still beats and I continue to live. That’s inexplicable, too.”

  Joe finished the article and looked up.

  “Dave, you got the idea that your dad was murdered from this article?”

  “Tansy Mallory’s obituary and two others, not counting Ray’s, are in that file. It’s more than smoke, Joe. I’m calling it a fact-based fire.”

  Joe’s thoughts veered to his training in behavioral science with the FBI. He couldn’t read Dave. Of course he was depressed. But he was also edgy and maybe paranoid. That said, in times of tragedy it was common to strike out, blame someone. Dr. Perkins was a logical scapegoat for Ray’s death.

  Joe asked, “Have you spoken with Archer or the families of these other people who died suspiciously?”

  “No. I don’t know how to approach them, so I’m going by what I’ve read here. Two of the obits mention Dr. Perkins, which confirms my strong belief that that son of a bitch is on a roll. That he killed my dad.”

  Chapter 36

  Even on a Wednesday night Susie’s Café was packed with millennials gorging on cheap, spicy food, old men hanging out at their neighborhood bar, and office workers from the nearby financial district loosening their ties, kicking off their shoes, and doing the limbo.

  As for the Women’s Murder Club, we had an easy time letting down our hair in this diverse and rowdy atmosphere, so much so that years ago we’d made Susie’s our unofficial clubhouse.

  The steel-drum band was playing “Happy,” and a group of six was heading out as Claire, Yuki, and I scooted past the kitchen pass-through to the back room, where we could speak without shouting.

  Lorraine was wiping down the table in “our” booth and said, “Jerked beef is the special tonight.”