20th Victim: (Women’s Murder Club 20) (Women's Murder Club)

by James Patterson

  Getting out of the van was proving to be harder than getting in. There was no light back there, and now she was feeling nauseous. She’d left the papers in the front seat. She had to get them. She carefully backed out of the rear compartment, made for the front door, passenger side—and gasped. Something hard had poked her in the back and was pressing against her spine.

  It could only be a gun.

  A man’s voice said, “Put your hands behind you, Ms. Atkins. I’m taking you into custody.”

  She recognized the voice but still turned her head to check. It was Dave’s friend. Joe something. He was strong. A former football player. She couldn’t outrun him, but maybe she could talk him down.

  “Dave said he left something for me in the back. You should call an ambulance. He took all of his father’s pills. I wanted to call 911, but he wouldn’t let me.”

  Atkins continued to look at the man who was threatening her with a gun. “I’ve done nothing wrong. You’ll see the papers. Dave decided to commit suicide. He wrote it all down.”

  Carolee Atkins planned her next move. She would leave the papers and just start walking toward the office. It was only thirty yards to the door. Her key card was in her bag inside the van, but people leaving the building would let her in. Even now the parking lot was coming to life. The sounds of electronic locks opening. Headlights coming on. She heard the purr of a motor. She was taking a chance, but she didn’t believe that this Joe guy would shoot her in the back.

  She’d taken a few steps toward the medical building when Dave came around the side of the van, maneuvering his chair so that whichever way she walked, he blocked her way.

  What was going on? He looked wide awake and fully cognizant. And he, too, held a gun on her. He had his phone in his lap, and he lifted it, pressed a button.

  She heard her own voice saying, “Your father had been sedated, Dave. They’re all sedated. I put a little something in the drip line. They’re already asleep and they’re asleep when they die. Ray felt nothing. He didn’t have to suffer like you.”

  Then Dave’s voice: “You do that. For them?”

  “I’m a helper. Someone has to do it, and I know how.”

  CHAPTER 113

  THE GROUND WAS swimming.

  Atkins said to Dave, “What? What’s in the wine?”

  “Napa Valley’s best Cabernet. Nothing more.”

  Joe Something said, “Do what I told you to do, Ms. Atkins. Put your hands behind your back. You’re under arrest.”

  It was coming to her now. She’d been tricked. Dave had feigned his suicide, every bit of it. And now she was filled with rage. It wasn’t legal to tape people without telling them.

  She said to Joe, “Arresting me? By what authority, mister?”

  “My authority as a citizen. It’s quite legal. And if you’re thinking a taped telephone conversation can’t be used in court, the confession you made to Dave, in person, is allowable, and strong evidence.”

  Joe forced her arms back and cuffed her wrists. Then he picked her up and gently laid her in the back of the van on the nest of quilted mover’s blankets.

  “Next stop, police station,” Dave called in to her. “We can all give our statements. That goes for Mr. Archer and Mr. Horowitz, who’ll meet us there. They saw and heard you in the rooms of the deceased. They know what you did.”

  “Don’t you understand?” she shouted, her voice echoing lazily against the inside walls of the van. “I was doing a good. A good thing. I’m a helper. I was helping people.”

  Joe said, “You’re a serial killer, Carolee. But tell your story to the police. And then you can tell it to the FBI.”

  He slammed the rear doors shut and locked them. Then he said to Dave, “The SFPD and the Napa sheriff have an arrangement on cases involving the DEA. He’ll be handing her off to SFPD.”

  Dave was grinning so hard it hurt.

  “My God, Joe. We did it. We did it.”

  “We sure did,” Joe said.

  The two friends grinned and exchanged a high five, a low five. The kicking from the rear of the van stopped. Joe said, “So what was in the wine?”

  “Grapes. But I took a couple of Dad’s pills, beta-blockers, to lower my blood pressure, slow down my heart. I needed to make her believe I was checking out. But then she got greedy for our Private Reserve Cab. She’s just tipsy.”

  Joe and Dave laughed for a good long time. And then Dave said, “What a day. I wish I could tell my dad. He went crazy with happiness seeing the two of us together again, Joe. Have I thanked you lately?”

  “Yeah. You have. And thank you, Dave.”

  “For what?”

  “For believing in me.”

  CHAPTER 114

  MIKE STEMPIEN WAS in his office at the Hall, remotely hacking into Randi Barkley’s computer.

  Randi wasn’t online, but Leonard Barkley had just signed on from a new location near his house. Piggybacking onto Barkley’s screen name, Stempien followed Barkley from his IP address at his new location on Thornton Avenue to an internet café in Gotland to a private home in Budapest to a travel agency in Medellín, working his way layer by layer, ever deeper into the onion layers of the dark web.

  He had a pretty good idea that the final location would be Moving Targets. This time Barkley would be his unknowing tour guide.

  Stempien wasn’t wrong.

  After virtually hopscotching around the globe, he watched as Moving Targets’ front page slowly came up on his screen, like an image taking form on old-fashioned photo paper inside a tray of fixer.

  In the center of the screen was the wheel of fortune. To the left side was a map of the USA with blinking pin lights marking Detroit and Miami and San Francisco.

  Stempien thought those cities were the locations of upcoming hits. “It’s part of the Moving Targets program,” he said. “Go time, Zero-eight-thirty.”

  He homed in on the winking city lights and took a series of screen shots, planning to enlarge them later. He might be able to decode names or addresses. He made a mental note that Barkley hadn’t spun the wheel.

  What Barkley did instead was jump into the chat room, where, using the screen name Kill Shot, he typed, I’m here.

  Screen names joined Kill Shot in the chat room, and rolling lines of applauding emoticons, yahoos, and fireworks burst onto the screen.

  Fellow players urged him to talk, virtually chanting, Kill Shot. Kill Shot. Kill Shot.

  Tell us about it, Kill Shot. Everything.

  Stempien picked up his cell phone and called Brady.

  “Lieutenant, this is Mike Stempien with a red alert. I have a physical location on Barkley …. Yeah. San Francisco, 430 Thornton. Right now.”

  CHAPTER 115

  IT WAS NEARLY six in the evening when Conklin and I arrived at Silver Terrace.

  A uniform standing beside his cruiser at the top of Apollo told us to park in front of the green house, one of dozens just like it, stairstepped down both sides of the sloping avenue.

  Conklin drove us down the hill, passing the herd of black armored SWAT and FBI vehicles banked at the curb in front of a brown stucco house that Stempien had identified as belonging to Barkley’s Moving Targets comrade Marty Floyd.

  We slowed in front of the green house with an overgrown front yard and a stubby, empty driveway and parked as directed. This was the house between the Barkley and Floyd residences, and the interior was dark. The brown house to its left belonged to the Barkleys. Two unoccupied unmarked cars and a cruiser formed a barricade in front of it.

  Overhead, an Eyewitness News helicopter chopped at the air, and any minute now the press would attempt to penetrate the scene. They would be barred from this section of the street, but there was every chance that Leonard Barkley would flip the table, set off explosives, and turn this porous residential neighborhood into a shooting gallery.

  As I had those thoughts, a pair of black-and-white cruisers parked crosswise on the north and south ends of the 800 block, cordoning off the area
, bracketing Floyd’s brown house, Barkley’s brown house, and the green house in between.

  The stage was set.

  Richie and I were there mainly to arrest Barkley, and I hoped to God that that would happen without anyone firing a shot. I had an edgy feeling, a cross between high anxiety and disbelief. We’d been looking for Barkley so intently, and he had gotten away so many times, that I could hardly accept that he was trapped, that we would be reading him his rights within minutes or hours.

  As I mentally prepared for the unknowable, Conklin spoke on the phone with Paul Chi. I picked up that Chi and McNeil were inside the Barkley house with Randi and her personal cop escort, Officer Pat Hudson. That Randi and her husband were separated by one twenty-five-foot-wide front yard had to have been planned.

  Conklin hung up from his call with Chi and filled me in on the consensus of the cops inside the Barkley house. Based on Randi’s nothing-to-lose attitude and escape potential, she’d been locked up inside a windowless back room with cops taking shifts at the door.

  It was too bad for Barkley that he’d jumped onto Marty Floyd’s computer and logged on to Moving Targets. And I felt bad for Randi, pining for her husband.

  But I snapped out of it.

  Leonard Barkley didn’t deserve sympathy.

  He was the number one suspect in the high-profile killings of Paul and Ramona Baron, and the three men who’d been dropped at the jazz center like puppets with cut strings. And it was entirely possible that Barkley had also shot Roger Jennings and other San Francisco drug dealers we didn’t know were his victims.

  Was Barkley in charge of the entire Moving Targets operation? Was he a soldier taking orders? Could he be charged with any of these killings I had just counted up?

  I brought myself back to the imminent Barkley takedown. Barkley was a dead shot, a proficient killer. His neighbor Marty Floyd was a transit cop and so had also been trained in the use of guns. I was glad to see that Brady had called in the FBI to back up our SWAT team. Commander Reg Covington had a high record of success, and he was in charge.

  Conklin and I watched from our squad car. SWAT was using the hoods of their vehicles as gun braces. A BearCat ran up on Marty Floyd’s lawn, and twelve men in tactical gear swarmed out. Two took positions on either side of the front door. Others took posts near the windows and at the back and side doors.

  I radioed Covington.

  “It’s Boxer,” I said. “What can you tell me?”

  Covington said, “Barkley’s not answering his phone. Neither is the house owner. We’re warning them, then going in.”

  I watched from the relative safety of our squad car as Covington lifted the bullhorn. A high-pitched squeal that felt like an electric current connected every person in the unit as one.

  Covington’s voice boomed toward the brown house.

  “Mr. Barkley, this is Commander Covington, SFPD. We don’t want anyone to get hurt. You and Mr. Floyd open the door and show us your hands. Do not do anything stupid.”

  I watched the door, waiting for it to crack open, for Barkley to step out with his hands above his head. I could almost see him, wearing fatigues and a new beard. Could see him limping from a wartime injury. I waited to hear him say, “Don’t shoot.”

  That’s not what happened.

  Someone panicked. An officer at the barricade twitched his trigger finger and fired a burst of bullets at the brown house. Automatic gunfire was returned from windows on the second floor.

  Conklin and I ducked inside our vehicle as World War III broke out on Thornton Avenue.

  CHAPTER 116

  THE MISFIRE FROM our side was an epic error that had launched a firefight that could cost dozens of lives. It could continue until every last one of us was dead.

  I clapped my hands over my ears and stayed down, actually shaking as I waited for it all to be over. During a brief break in the shooting, I lifted my head from under the dash to scope out the scene and glanced at the Barkley house, ahead and to our right.

  I saw a side door open.

  Randi Barkley darted out, and despite the recent gunfire, she streaked across her side yard toward the rear of the empty house armed with nothing but ragged jeans and a tank top.

  She was trying to get to Barkley.

  I knew that because she’d told me she and Barkley had a “pact with death” and that she expected to die with her husband—and clearly she was trying to make that dream come true.

  Pointing through the windshield, I said to Conklin, “Look.” The BearCat, an armored vehicle resembling a prehistoric reptile, ran up over the curb, crossing the narrow lawn between Floyd’s brown house and the green one in front of our car. They were forming a barrier.

  I heard Covington shout, “Hold your fire,” and the shooting on both sides stopped.

  Conklin was out of the car before the bullhorn’s echo died. I followed. Predicting Randi’s trajectory, Conklin cut her off with a well-timed tackle to her knees. Chi, McNeil, and Hudson burst from the Barkley house and huddled around us.

  In a well-practiced maneuver called a cuff-and-stuff, I got handcuffs on Randi, and Chi and McNeil grabbed her and stuffed her into the BearCat. The driver took off for the outer perimeter, where Randi would be transferred to a patrol car.

  Chi was embarrassed by Randi’s escape. He said, “There were no doors or windows in that effing room, Boxer.”

  McNeil said, “However, we didn’t do a microscopic inspection of the floor.”

  I got it. And I didn’t doubt that Barkley’s entire house was swiss-cheesed with hidden shafts leading to Barkley’s beaten path to the Caltrain tunnel that ran under Silver Terrace. But Randi’s dash for the Floyd house hadn’t done her any good. I watched as Randi, cuffed in the back of a patrol car, cleared the barricades and headed to the Hall of Justice.

  I returned to our car in time to hear Covington announce over his mic, “Five seconds. On my go.”

  The front door split open before Covington had counted to five. The commando to the left of the door kicked it in, cracking it in half. A stout man with blood pouring down his face and arms cried out, “I give up. I give up.”

  The commando on his right set down his shield, grabbed the stout man’s arm, and in one fluid move pulled him to the ground.

  That man wasn’t Barkley.

  I got out of the car again and went up to Covington, who was ordering his men to get the injured man into a police car. I touched Covington’s arm.

  He said, “Boxer?”

  “Let me talk to Barkley.”

  Covington reached for and opened the closest armored car door. Then he gripped my upper arms, lifted and moved all five feet ten inches of me like I was a doll, until I was behind the hardened-steel door and as shielded as much as possible from oncoming gunfire.

  Then he handed me the bullhorn.

  I took a breath, then spoke, my voice bouncing off the surrounding houses.

  “Mr. Barkley, this is Sergeant Lindsay Boxer. I’m in contact with Randi. Give yourself up, and you can tell her good-bye. Or in three seconds SWAT command is going to cut you down and take you out of that house alive or dead.”

  I handed off the bullhorn to Covington.

  The broken front door clattered apart, and Leonard Barkley emerged holding his hands above his head. I gave him a visual pat-down. Was he holding a weapon? A grenade? He limped out onto the front steps into the open air.

  “I surrender,” he shouted. “It’s over. You should all be proud. The drug dealers win.”

  CHAPTER 117

  YUKI AND OPPOSING counsel Zac Jordan met with district attorney Len Parisi in his office that Friday morning.

  Parisi was in a decent mood, and Yuki observed lipstick on his collar. Maybe that had something to do with his sunny, “Hello, you two. Come in.”

  Zac shook hands with Parisi, and Yuki flung herself onto the couch. She was so emotionally exhausted, she’d dressed in jeans and a blazer this morning. In her mind, it was casual Friday and to hell with
anyone who objected.

  When Parisi was sitting behind his big-man desk, papers all straight edged and tidy, with the Red Dog clock on the wall showing 8:30 on the dot, Yuki began to explain the situation.

  “Len, the death of Antoine Castro robbed the justice system but was a good thing all around. Castro is of no danger to anyone now, but he was an El Chapo wannabe. Some aspiring drug lord is going to pick up his business unless we get out in front of it.”

  “What do you suggest?”

  Zac said, “I’ve spent a couple of hours with my client, Clay Warren. As you know, he was almost killed in jail, presumably by Castro’s crew, who wanted to stop him from talking. He’s not a bad kid. I wouldn’t call him greedy or psychopathic. He’s about average intelligence for a kid his age, but he was smart enough to stop talking when he was arrested.”

  Zac went on.

  “I’ve got the real story out of Clay, and Yuki can back me up.”

  Parisi said, “And you want to what? I’m not getting it.”

  “If you agree with what you hear,” said Zac, “we’re hoping you’ll drop the charges. Because honestly, he’s not a criminal and the shanking he got is going to shorten his life. Maybe the judge will see that he’s been punished enough. Dismiss the case and get him to a place where Castro’s gang can’t find him.”

  “Make it good,” Len said. “Right now he’s still on the hook for felony murder. Your trial is due to resume early next week.”

  “Clay is outside,” said Yuki. “Let me bring him in so he can tell you himself.”

  CHAPTER 118

  ZAC HELD THE office door for Clay Warren, who leaned heavily on a cane as he came through the entrance.