There was a gun safe in the corner, five by three by two, and it was open, saving them the trouble of blowing off the door with explosive charges. The safe was full of packets of heroin, and next to the safe were stacks of small cardboard cartons and a half dozen army-green duffel bags. Three unzipped the bags and announced, “A whole lot of cash, One.”
One heard a racking cough coming from a closet. Gun readied, he opened the door to find a man sitting in a crouch, covering his eyes with his arms. The man looked up, his face swollen from the pepper bomb. He cried out, “I can’t see.”
One said, “Where’s Donnie? Where’s Rascal?”
The man in the closet hacked and wheezed. “They left.”
One said, “OK. Sorry. I have to do this, bro.”
He pointed his weapon at the man on the closet floor and fired. The guy screamed, then collapsed.
One called out, “You guys OK?”
After Two and Three said they were fine, One went over to the cartons stacked on the floor. He opened flaps and did a rough tally of the eight-by-six-by-four-inch parcels, neatly wrapped in glittery paper, taped and labeled BLUE WAVE, MAD FANTASY, SUNNY DRAGON.
There were hundreds of pounds of synthetic pot in these packets, the kilos of H in the gun safe. With the duffel bags of cash already packed, they were good to go.
The three men made several trips up and down the stairs, which were littered with bodies and shell casings. They carried the bags of money, the cartons and packets of drugs, and the laptop down to the van.
When the last of the haul was safely stowed, One went back into the house, where he checked to make sure the downed men were all dead. Then he turned out the lights and locked the door.
Wicker House was out of business, but One and his crew were very damned close to early retirement.
Job well done.
CHAPTER 41
THE BLEEPING PHONE rang way too early.
Joe said to me in his sleep, “I’ll get her.”
“Stand down, pardner,” I muttered. “I got this.”
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and noticed that the time was 5:51 and that my caller was Brady. As far as I knew, I was off duty. I took the phone into the bathroom. “What’s wrong, Brady? Personal or business?”
“Business.”
Thank God. I didn’t want to hear that he or Yuki was in a jam. Once that was out of the way, I had to know, why the hell was Brady calling me at oh-dawn-hundred?
“What’s up?” I said.
Martha came into the bathroom and made circles around my legs until she successfully herded me into the kitchen. Her bowl was empty.
“I’m in your neighborhood,” he said.
“You’re saying you want to stop by? It’s not even six.”
“I’ve just come from the scene of a massacre,” he said.
“I’ll put the coffee on,” I told him.
By the time I’d showered and dressed in whatever was on the bedroom chair, Brady was at the door. He looked blanched, and this wasn’t the fault of the lighting.
“Sit,” I said, indicating a stool at the kitchen island. I double-checked that both bedroom doors were closed. Then I poured coffee and set out milk and sugar. I leaned against the stove, arms crossed, and waited for him to speak.
He said, “Why did you turn down the lieutenant’s job? I mean, you had it before you stepped down. Then, when Jacobi moved up, you could’ve had the job. But you turned it down again.”
“I couldn’t stand the paperwork, the meetings, the middle-management crapola,” I told him. “I wanted to work cases. One at a time.”
He said, “No kidding. I feel like a shit sandwich about ninety percent of the time.”
He sipped coffee. The suspense was killing me.
“What happened, Jackson?”
“Narcotics had been watching this house in lower Bernal Heights for a couple of months. It’s a factory disguised as a furniture showroom. They had eyes on the place, but they didn’t know what was going down until it was over.
“The scene inside that house.” He shook his head. “Like a freaking war zone.”
“Fatalities?” I asked him.
“You bet. I think seven.”
“What was it? A robbery?” I asked.
“That’s what it looks like. The dead men look like employees. We think the shooters got away,” Brady said. “Narco caught a nanosecond of video showing three guys in a white panel van leaving the Wicker House parking lot. At least one of them was wearing an SFPD Windbreaker.”
“Come onnnn.”
Brady said, “If those were our guys, they’re escalating from ripping off drug slingers and mercados to major scores like this. We may have caught some kind of break.”
Brady sank into thought.
“What, Brady? What kind of break?”
He snapped out of it. “We’ve got visuals of two punks leaving the house earlier in the morning, before the raid went down. They don’t look like our shooters, but they gotta know something. And we’ve ID’d them. Punks. Like I said.
“You call Conklin. I’ll call Swanson and Vasquez. Clapper is at the scene right now,” he said, referring to my friend the forensics lab director.
Brady stared into his coffee mug and said, “Look, Lindsay. I know I’ve been a dick lately. I’m worried about all this renegade-cop shit going down. I don’t mean to take it out on you. And I’m sorry.”
His voice caught in his throat. That was Brady apologizing.
“It’s OK. I totally understand.”
“I’m on your side. Always.”
I smiled at him. He smiled back. Sometimes I dislike Brady, and sometimes I love him. Right now, I loved him. Before someone started to tear up, he gave me the crime scene coordinates and told me to check it out and to call him every hour.
When he had gone, I texted Conklin.
He texted back.
We arrived at Wicker House within ten minutes of each other. After touring the bloodbath, my partner said, “I have a hard time believing cops did this.”
Four of the seven dead men were unarmed, and spent brass littered the floors and stairwell.
Swanson, Vasquez, Conklin, and I were looking over the CSIs’ shoulders when Clapper came over to me and said, “We’ve got more prints than a frame shop. As for the casings, we’ve got all kinds. From the position of the bodies, it looks to me like the shooters had the advantage of surprise. And they used suppressors.”
Then Clapper nicely told us we were in the way.
“As soon as I know anything, I’ll call you,” he said.
CHAPTER 42
IT WAS JUST after 5 a.m. and Donnie Wolfe was parked on a free-parking residential street in the Inner Sunset neighborhood.
He was leaning against the hood of his red 2003 Camaro. There were attached houses on both sides of Twelfth Avenue, short flights of steps up to the front doors, slopes down to the garages, almost an apple-pie-and-baseball feel to it.
He’d been out all night and was talking to his girl on the phone, saying, “I was working late, Tamra. You just pack everything you need for a couple of days and don’t talk to your friends. Do not talk to your mother, or that stupido downstairs. I got a couple of meetings and then I’m coming home to sleep. And then we’re outta here.”
Tamra was pregnant. Twenty weeks. Donnie didn’t tell her his business, and she was cool. But obviously, she didn’t like breezing out of town on the sneak, not knowing where they were going and not telling her mother, neither.
“It’s going to be beautiful, Tam,” he said. “Trust me. Don’t talk. Pack. Chill.”
The gray Ford was coming up on him, slowing and parking right behind his ass. Donnie pulled on his shirttails, making sure they covered the piece he’d stuck in his waistband. Then he got out of his car and walked toward the man he knew as One.
“How you make out? Everything good?” Donnie asked the stocky man wearing big shades and a ball cap pulled down low over his eyes.
/> “That’s close enough,” One said to his inside man at Wicker House. Donnie stopped walking and showed his empty hands.
One asked, “Where’s your buddy?”
“Rascal’s cool,” Donnie said. “He’s staying out of sight.”
One nodded. He said, “Here’s your go bag.” He reached over to the passenger seat, then tossed a black nylon duffel bag though the open window to Donnie.
Donnie caught the bag, stooped to the sidewalk, and unzipped it. There was a pair of Colorado plates at the side of the bag, which was filled with stacks of banded used bills.
The kid riffled through the money. It looked good and like it added up to the agreed-upon hundred thousand, his cut and Rascal’s.
He said to One, “So I guess this is bye-bye.”
“As long as you keep quiet. Don’t make me come looking for you.”
“The big boss—”
“The last I saw of the big boss, he had a mouthful of carpeting.”
“Not Mr. Royce,” said Donnie. “I’m talking about his boss, man. The King. He has an idea who you are. So don’t blame me for that.”
“I know who he is, too,” said One. “And I know where he lives.”
“Not my boss and not my problem,” said Donnie. “I’m good. I’m checking out. I got plans.”
“Your first plan should be to ditch that flashy car,” said One. “Be careful, Donnie.”
Donnie said, “Back at you, Mr. One. Adios. Take care.”
Donnie got into his car and watched through his rearview mirror until One drove off. Then he took the duffel bag and walked up the block and across the street to the car repair shop on Judah Street, which didn’t open for another three hours.
He went behind the garage and picked out a blue Honda Civic, not new, not old, just right. The car wasn’t locked. There were no keys, but he’d been boosting cars since he could walk. This was cake.
He hot-wired the engine. Then he got out of the Civic and changed the license plates to the Colorado ones from One. Passing his Camaro on the street, Donnie waved good-bye to his flashy car and drove the Honda east toward the Bay Bridge.
CHAPTER 43
AFTER CHARLIE CLAPPER had shooed us out of his crime scene, Conklin and I returned to our desks in Homicide, where we spent the morning reviewing Narcotics’ footage of the street in front of Wicker House.
At 2:34 a.m. precisely, before the shooting went down, two men had left Wicker House by the front door. They were wearing street clothes: jeans, a dark jacket on one, a light jacket on the other. One of the men was tall and wide, the other smallish and skinny.
The two men each had a quick smoke outside before bumping fists and getting into their cars.
The skinny one got into a red 2003 Camaro registered to Donald Francis Wolfe. The heavyset guy got into a brown 1997 Buick wagon belonging to Ralph Valdeen. Both men were in their twenties and Wolfe had an arrest record ranging from attempted home burglaries to possession to assault. He had also done time as a juvie for car theft.
As we’d been told, at 3:12 a.m., the surveillance crew had captured a split-second clip of a white panel van with three unidentifiable men inside—one of whom could be seen in the camera-side passenger seat and might have been wearing an SFPD jacket. The van was speeding past the front of Wicker House. Looked like mud had been smeared over the license plates.
We saw that clip for ourselves now, forward, backward, zoomed in, paused, and enhanced, and there was no way at all that we could ID any of the three men in the van, not in that light. SFPD Windbreakers? Maybe. I saw what looked like white letters on dark blue or gray or black.
Clapper had reported that the surveillance camera at the back of Wicker House had been shot out and that no hard drive had been found inside the store, not a computer, nothing.
At about nine thirty this morning, Donald Wolfe’s red Camaro was called in for blocking a driveway on a residential street a block and a half from an auto repair shop. Then the guy who worked in that repair shop reported that a blue Honda Civic had been stolen and that the plates had been left in the backyard, which wasn’t covered by a security camera.
That meant that Wolfe had abandoned the Camaro and was now likely driving a blue Honda Civic with stolen plates.
An APB for the Honda and the Buick had paid off when both cars were sighted on the 101 Freeway just after three.
Conklin and I, with the help of SFPD Traffic Control, located the two vehicles in AT&T Park’s parking lot at half past three. The Giants were playing the St. Louis Cards, and it was a beautiful, sunny-streamy day. The lot was completely filled.
Conklin and I showed our badges and IDs and entered the stadium through the Willie Mays Gate. Even the worst seats in the ballpark had a view of the Bay Bridge, and from where we descended the field box steps, directly behind home plate, we could see the entire ballpark.
At the plate stood St. Louis’s best hitter, Matt Holliday, with the score tied 1–1 in the bottom of the ninth. All eyes were on the pitcher, Tim Lincecum. All except mine and Conklin’s. We had still photos of both Wolfe and Valdeen in our breast pockets. All we had to do was pick those two out from the other forty thousand spectators.
Lincecum dealt Holliday an inside fastball that he lined over third and into the left-field corner. The fans erupted in unison as everyone sprang to their feet. But it was the last my partner and I saw of the game.
Conklin pointed off to our right and about six rows above us to a group of men standing in front of a Tres Mexican Kitchen.
“That’s Donald Wolfe. Dark jacket, Giants ball cap.”
“You’ve got a good eye, buster.”
I wasn’t sure, but by the time we had trotted up the aisle, I saw that it was Wolfe, beyond a doubt.
I approached Wolfe from behind and tapped him on the shoulder. When he spun around, I said, “Donald Wolfe. I’m Sergeant Boxer, SFPD. We need to have a word with you about your recent grand theft auto.”
I put Wolfe against the wall and frisked him. As I dealt with Wolfe, Valdeen threw a wild roundhouse punch at Conklin. Conklin blocked it and Valdeen threw another, putting his full weight into it. This time Conklin ducked, then landed an uppercut to Valdeen’s chin that made the big guy stagger backward into the Doggie Diner stand.
Tin panels rattled. The vendor squawked. Conklin twisted Valdeen’s arms around his back and clapped on the cuffs, saying, “Ralph Valdeen, you’re under arrest for assault on a police officer.”
No one thought either Wolfe or Valdeen was one of the Wicker House shooters, but there was every chance they knew who had executed the seven men inside. If the shooters were Windbreaker cops, we might have a clue that would help us solve the armed robberies of the check-cashing stores and the mercados, and the shakedowns and shootings of drug dealers all over the city.
I couldn’t wait to get these two into the box.
“Hands behind your back,” I said to Wolfe.
That was when he decided to make a break for it.
CHAPTER 44
RALPH VALDEEN WAS winded, cuffed, and newly docile.
But Donald Wolfe had taken a split second of opportunity, tucked his bag under his arm, and run for his life. He tore off past the Doggie Diner, the Port Walk Pizza stand, and the coffee cart, through a group of fans, knocking them over like bowling pins.
Wolfe was small and he was fast. While I stood with Valdeen and called for backup, Wolfe gave Conklin a workout, vaulting over seats, stiff-arming spectators as he wildly searched for an exit.
Wolfe had reached the lower rows of the stadium when Conklin tackled him. My partner got a cheer from all the fans in that entire section as he dragged Wolfe to his feet and shoved him back up the steps to where I stood with Valdeen at the hot dog concession.
“You have the right to remain silent,” Conklin said to Wolfe. “Anything you say can be used against you, jerk-off …”
Wolfe said, “I gotta call my girl. You gonna hold that against me in a court a law?”
> Wolfe is what’s called a real smartass. There was no fear in his face at all. And there should have been. He was in trouble. I pulled his duffel bag away from him and unzipped it. There was an astonishing amount of money inside, maybe fifty thousand in neatly banded used bills.
“I’ll hold this for you,” I said to Wolfe, “until you can produce your pay stub.”
Meanwhile, we had attracted some attention at the Doggie Diner. The fans were pumped up and buzzed, and now some of them were turning on my partner and me. Oh, I really love the sound of drunken a-holes yelling, “Hey! They didn’t do anything wrong. It’s a free country, isn’t it? We’re all just watching a ball game. What’s the damn problem?”
The backup I’d called for was on the way and stadium security was trotting directly toward us.
I said to the hecklers, “Anyone feel like joining our party? Because we’ve got plenty of room at the jail.”
“Police brutality. That’s what this is,” said a beefy young bruiser showing off for his girlfriend. “I saw it,” he insisted. “I’m going to report you. What’s your badge number?”
The girlfriend and others were pointing their phones in my face and at my badge. And you know what? I finally got mad.
I shouted to the security guards, “Cuff these people. This one. These two. And her. I’m taking you all in for interference with the police. For obstruction. For being drunk and disorderly.”
Hecklers fell back, but not before we had four of them in Flex-Cuffs and were marching them out to the cruisers at the gates.
Two hours later, at half past dinnertime, the night shift was parking at their desks in the squad room. Ralph “Rascal” Valdeen was in holding, and Conklin and I were set to interrogate Donald Francis Wolfe in Interview 1.
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