21st Birthday

by Patterson, James

  “Inquisitive.”

  “— and I know to lock my phone. Which I forgot to do.”

  He went on to say, “If any of this Evan Burke story is true, you could be poking a serial killer, and if so, Cindy, you’re inviting very big trouble. You look like the kind of victim this killer likes best.”

  “What kind is that?”

  “Cute. Female. Small. With a nice-looking neck. Don’t quote me.”

  “And what’s your type?”

  “Same. Come here so I can bite you.”

  * * *

  Cindy was glad for Richie’s warning, and she wasn’t careless or stupid. If she could locate Evan Burke, she was sure he would talk to her.

  Cindy was driving while casing the area. From the density of the woodland and the narrow bike trail to her right, she felt as if she was finally homing in on the location that she’d gathered from her quick peek at Richie’s phone. She signaled for a turn, pulled onto the verge off Morton Road, and took in her surroundings.

  Cindy looked up the trail on her right, a wider rut than most of them. She put her Acura into third gear, and let the car do the work, the tires wobbling and righting themselves as the trail climbed. At one point, the road forked. Left or right? Eenie, meenie, miney, mo.

  She took the right-hand road.

  Samuels woke up.

  “Where are we?”

  “Damned if I know. This trail is unmarked.”

  A half mile up, the road came to a clearing and in the center was a small, odd, asymmetrical house, without a window curtain or flowerpot or even a clothesline.

  Her take? A man lived here alone.

  Cindy braked, said to Samuels, “Please stay here, but keep your eyes on me. I’m not going in, but just in case.”

  “I got you,” said Samuels. He rubbed his hands together, buzzed down the window.

  Cindy got out of the car and crossed the dirt and gravel car park, then climbed the two narrow steps to the porch. She heard nothing. No dog. No music. No car or bike in the drive or around the house. She was pretty sure no one was home.

  Still, she knocked and waited.

  She knocked, again and called out, “Hello? Anyone home?”

  When her tapping went unanswered, she slipped her business card into the crack between the door and doorframe and hoped that whoever lived there would call her.

  Back in her car, she drove down the rutted trail, taking the left-hand turn this time, and a few minutes later, arrived at a very different kind of woodland house.

  Also hemmed in by forest trees, this house was cedar shingled and had a proper flower garden in front, a wheelbarrow planter, and a shiny late-model SUV in the driveway.

  These homeowners were a definite possibility for an interview. They might want to help her.

  Cindy heard jazz coming from inside the house. A red tabby cat sat on the back of a sofa watching her through the living room window.

  A neat-looking woman with silver-blond hair came to the door and opened it.

  She smiled. “Hello. May I help you?”

  “Hi, I’m Cindy Thomas from the Chronicle. I’m writing a story about the killings in San Francisco and a resident of this community was one of the victims —”

  The woman in the doorway said, “Fuck off” and slammed the door in Cindy’s face.

  Cindy yelled, “Hey!”

  Samuels was getting out of the car. Cindy waved him back and knocked on the door again.

  Inside, the music was turned up loud. The cat continued to watch Cindy until she left the doorway, got into her car, and started the engine.

  “Nasty,” said Samuels, when Cindy told him what had happened. “Want me to punch some holes in her tires?”

  “Jonny, don’t you know that journalism is a glamour job?”

  He laughed. “Absolutely. Where to, now?”

  “Down the mountain, over the bridge, and back to work. We live to fight another day.”

  CHAPTER 68

  IT WAS STILL THE DARK before dawn and Joe and I were in bed, awake, and talking.

  He said, “No, yeah, wear it. I love the red.”

  I had to laugh. I still looked hot in my red floor-length silk gown, even after my pregnancy. In the ten years since I’d bought that dress, I’d worn it maybe four times.

  Today wasn’t going to be the fifth.

  The individual known as Berney was in San Francisco. He had some information for Joe, but it had to be strictly confidential, untraceable. When they talked over the phone last night about where to meet, I’d been sitting next to Joe on the couch with my ear close enough to hear Berney’s voice.

  I’d said, “I want to meet him.”

  Joe shook his head no.

  I’d nodded emphatically yes, and Joe said to the magician of the dark side, “Lindsay wants to meet you.”

  To our surprise, Berney said, “I can come to your place.”

  Joe said, “Excellent. Six thirty tomorrow morning?”

  Now, Joe’s projection clock flashed five fifteen on the ceiling.

  “Do you want to shower first, or me?”

  “Me,” I said. “I’m quicker.”

  After my shower, I opened Julie’s door and brought Martha into her room, to keep the elderly dog out of our way. Julie’s eyelids flew open.

  She asked, “Did you have a bad dream?”

  “No, I wanted to check on you, straighten your blankets. Go back to sleep,” I told her. “It’s very early.”

  She yawned and then said, “Why are you up?”

  “Daddy and I are having a meeting with an old friend. You and Martha go back to sleep.”

  When Martha jumped into bed, Julie hugged our old dog. Conversation over.

  I left her room quietly, put the coffee on, and found a bag of muffins in the freezer. I turned on the oven and the TV to hear what the morning anchors had to report, and of course the unsolved murders of Tara and Lorrie Burke, Misty, Wendy, and Susan, were still top of the news even now, a month later. There was a close-up of Brady and me talking to Cindy outside the Hall. Yuki was saying that Lucas Burke was going on trial for the murders of his wife and daughter. Pictures came on the screen of mother and child.

  It was painful to see.

  If only we were sure that we had the right guy.

  Maybe Berney would give us something Yuki could use in the trial. Anything.

  Joe emerged from the bathroom, freshly shaven, wearing a nearly identical outfit to mine, jeans and a white cotton shirt. He lined up the muffins on a cookie pan, and slid them into the preheated oven.

  I’ve gotten over Joe being more domestic than I am. I’m glad he is. I’m glad about everything Joe.

  I asked, “Is Berney his first name or last?”

  “I don’t know if it even is his name. It’s what he goes by and it’s all I need to know.”

  At precisely 6:30, the intercom buzzer sounded. Joe told his friend to take the elevator, and, a few minutes later, opened the door to the mystery spy, one-name Berney.

  He looked nothing, but nothing, like what I was expecting.

  CHAPTER 69

  I GUESS I WAS EXPECTING a scruffy World War II–type spy. Berney was five eight, mid-forties, with thinning blond hair, wire metal-rimmed glasses, khakis, and a pink sweater hiding the pudge around his midsection.

  In short, he looked like a modern-day middle-aged Protestant minister.

  When we were seated at the kitchen table, he said, “Lindsay. Don’t take this wrong, but since we’ve just met, I must advise you. I’m a terrible conversationalist. Can’t tell you where I work or live or what I do for fun. Nothing I tell you now can be tied back to me in any way. I won’t testify. I won’t talk to the DA. I don’t exist.”

  “Got it,” I said. “And thanks for your help.”

  “Joe,” said Berney. “Okay?”

  “A-OK.”

  “Good,” said Berney. “So.” He took a muffin but passed up the sugar and cream for his coffee.

  “This is
what you’d call a postcard from the field. Overheard by a friend of the company, Evan Burke told a friend of his that his rotten son, Lucas, put the cops on him for the recent murders. Then he says, ‘Luke’s smart. But not as smart as he thinks.’”

  I said, “He said almost the same thing to me outside his cabin on Mount Tam. He said that Lucas killed his mother and sister and was psychotic. I gotta say, Evan was convincing.”

  “Evan is convincing,” Berney said. “It’s one of the secrets of his success. And he was trained in special forces.”

  I looked across the table at Joe. Special forces was big news.

  “We’ve been watching him for decades,” Berney continued. “We call him the Ghost of Catalina, or Quicksilver, because he never slips up and he never gets caught. We’ve never had evidence we could link to him. Now all of a sudden, fresh bodies appear. Burke likes to mix it up. Sometimes a strangling. He’s used a gun. What is consistent is the absence of evidence. No sexual assault, no trace we can pin on him.”

  I nodded, thinking about the morgue photos of Misty Fogarty.

  “On those bodies you attribute to Evan. Were there ever any nonfatal wounds on the upper chest? Little gashes about the size of pocket change?”

  “Nope. That’s new. He might’ve had a new idea. Seems possible. He has the blade in his hand.”

  I thought back to what Claire had said after performing the autopsies on Wendy Franks and Misty Fogarty, terming this kind of knife work “serial killer gibberish.”

  “What’s your theory on Lucas?”

  Berney shrugged. “I know more about Evan than I want to and I still don’t have anything to go on. I’m not watching Lucas. But the reason I’m here is because I brought you something, Lindsay.” Berney took a small brown envelope from inside his shirt pocket under the pullover. “You got this on your own, right, Joe? When you were on the job.”

  He passed it to Joe, who said, “Do I want this?”

  “Someone you love may find it comes in handy. If not, burn it and scatter the ashes.”

  “I got this item from Pentagon files,” Berney explained, “after Burke’s wife, Corinne, and daughter, Jodie, went missing fifteen years ago. There were no digital copies and it wasn’t on any known database.

  I was holding a ten card, ten inked fingerprints with a photo of Evan Burke when he’d joined the Green Berets at age eighteen.

  “We couldn’t use the prints officially without jamming you up,” I said to Berney, “but we could run the prints against suspicious unidentified prints. For instance, there may have been assorted prints on Misty Fogarty’s car.”

  Berney nodded in agreement.

  I continued to spin the theory out. “If Forensics got a match to Evan Burke’s prints, that could prove that senior had been in proximity to Misty before she was killed.”

  That ten card with photo gave me hope.

  CHAPTER 70

  JOE WALKED BERNEY OUT, and when he returned minutes later, I had to ask, “So whodunit? Lucas or Evan?”

  “Uh. There’s only one guy, a changeling space alien posing as both father and son.”

  In other words, Joe didn’t know, either.

  As I started up my car, I thought again about what Evan Burke in his Jake Winslow persona had stated while holding Conklin and me under the cold black eye of his gun. He’d said that Lucas has been killing since he was a child psycho, had killed his mother and sister, that he’d never been caught.

  I didn’t like father or son at all, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling I had that Burke senior was telling the truth.

  When I was only a few blocks from the Hall my phone buzzed. I took a quick peek at the caller ID. It was Yuki.

  “Could we meet in my office?”

  “You bet,” I said. “Okay if Richie joins us?”

  “Sure. I’ll call him.”

  My fifteen-minute drive to the Hall was through the normal Friday morning stop-and-go. I watched traffic without seeing it while I thought about Yuki, readying herself to try Lucas Burke for a double homicide while Lucas’s star defense attorney mocked her case built on circumstantial evidence. It was strong evidence. The dead were Lucas Burke’s pretty young wife and adorable daughter. He had the means and the opportunity — that case could be made.

  But one juror insisting on a smoking gun could tip the prosecution’s case.

  I left my car in the day lot across from the Hall, and as I crossed with the green I saw that Cindy and a few dozen other reporters had set up on the sidewalk.

  Cindy was with her photographer, Jonny Samuels, and the grieving Kathleen Wyatt.

  As Kathleen had told Cindy the day she’d barged into the Chronicle offices demanding to know why her post on Cindy’s crime blog accusing Lucas had been removed, Tara and Lorrie were at the center of her life. Tara called her mother every morning, and when she didn’t call or answer her phone the day of Tara and Lucas’s fight, Kathleen knew something was wrong. Why? Because she’d been afraid Lucas might harm her daughter.

  I waved to Girl Reporter and she waved back, made a move toward me, but I kept walking. Took the front steps two at a time, cleared security, and jogged up two flights of the back stairs to the second floor.

  Yuki was waiting for me at the entrance to the DA’s offices, which took up half a floor. She buzzed me in and I told her that Conklin was coming directly.

  “He’s in my office already,” Yuki said.

  She looked like she’d slept on a bed of nails. Jacket misbuttoned, hair sticking up in back, lipstick on her teeth.

  I wanted to say, “Everything’s going to be fine,” but this was Yuki and she ran on her own instincts. I knew she had big moments of doubt, asking herself why she kept running, wondering if she should have babies and devote herself to keeping her family and home. Sometimes she’d blame herself for the pothole that had suddenly opened just before the finish line. And sometimes, she’d be the first through the tape and the crowd went wild.

  I always told her she was living her passion. How many people get to do that?

  I followed her into her hard-won office. And there he was. My good-looking-good-doing partner of many years, the brother I never had, and a friend I entrusted with my life as he entrusted his with me.

  He was lounging on the two-seat sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him, brown hair falling over his eyes. Today, Conklin looked calm, like it was a day at the beach. Which it was not.

  Yuki did not look calm. She didn’t sit; rather, she paced her small office, speaking in her trademark rapid-fire delivery. Her ability to tell a story with confidence and in so doing engage her juries was one of her strengths.

  She summed up her situation for her audience of two.

  Today was Friday. The trial started on Monday. She knew the material cold. Her opening statement was killer. But the weakness in her argument was that all she had against Lucas Burke was his association with the victims, and that he had no documented alibi.

  If she did her job well, that would be enough to convict him. Yuki cited several major cases of this size and interest that had been won with circumstantial evidence. Scott Peterson came immediately to my mind. On the other hand, O. J. Simpson had been famously acquitted.

  “Look at this,” Yuki said.

  She held up the front section of the Bay Area Herald, a quality paper that ran straight-up mainstream news. She turned it this way and that way so that Rich and I could both read the headline, see the picture of her leaving the building last night with her computer bag, her blond streak of hair falling over her eye, looking up the street for her car.

  The headline read, “Parisi subs out Burke trial to an ADA with spotty track record.”

  Yuki’s voice quavered as she read the lede: “Accused of double homicide, defendant Lucas Burke’s chances of acquittal just improved by facing off against prosecutor Yuki Castellano, an ADA with an iffy conviction track record in criminal court.”

  Conklin said, “Don’t let that a-hole throw yo
u, Yuki,” and I said something much the same. I believed it. Yuki was terrific; through no fault of hers, she’d had some stinkers tossed her way. She’d lost a couple of big cases, not because she was unprepared or overmatched but because of circumstances such as key witnesses changing their stories — or dying — during trial.

  Even so, Yuki had won more cases than she’d lost, and she was an attractive woman, now married to a top cop. The camera liked her and sometimes reporters found her an easy target.

  Yuki said, “The jury is going to love Burke’s showboat defense counsel. Newt Gardner has a made-for-TV personality and believable charm. He can spin arguments seamlessly, and the jurors buy it. I’ve seen him do it. He even makes me think, Jesus, do I have the wrong guy?”

  I had nothing for her. Certainly not the thing she wanted most: bulletproof, direct evidence that Lucas Burke had killed his wife and baby.

  Yuki said, “I know you all have been working nonstop, but I can tell you that Newton Gardner’s opening and closing statements are going to be one and the same. ‘Lucas didn’t do it. The prosecution can’t and didn’t prove that he did.’

  “And then all of us — you, you, me, Brady, Red Dog, Clapper, and the whole of the SFPD — are going to take hard indelible hits to our careers, and the psycho is going to go free.”

  CHAPTER 71

  AN HOUR HAD PASSED since the meeting with Yuki.

  Rich Conklin was at his desk, facing Inspector Sonia Alvarez in Lindsay’s old seat at the front of the bullpen.

  They had coffee containers at hand while their computers continued their daily searches for pattern murders of young females across the country over the previous thirty years. So far, the neck-slashing pattern accompanied by a constellation of gashes across the top of the women’s chests seemed unique.

  The personal line on Richie’s desk phone lit up. He punched it, said “Conklin,” and put Claire on speaker.

  “Hi, Claire,” Rich said. “I’m putting you on speaker so Sonia can hear this, too.”