Women's Murder Club [06] The 6th Target

by James Patterson

  “What bravery,” I said. “My God.”

  “Too damned brave,” Edmund muttered, running his hand over the top of his silvering head. “Claire and Willie, both of them, too damned brave.”

  The shooter’s back was to the camera as he pulled the trigger. I saw the gun buck in his hand. Claire grabbed at her chest and went down.

  Again, the point of view shifted to horrified faces in a roiling crowd. Then the gunman was on the screen in a crouch, his face turned away from the camera. He stepped on Claire’s wrist, shouting into her face.

  Edmund cried out, “You sick son of a bitch!”

  Behind me, Claire moaned in her bed.

  I turned to look at her, but she was still asleep. My eyes flashed back to the television as the shooter turned and his face came into view.

  His eyes were down, his beard swallowing the lower half of his face. He was coming toward the cameraman, who finally lost his nerve and stopped filming.

  “He shot at Willie after that,” Edmund said.

  And then, there I was on the TV screen, my hair tangled from my race through the farmer’s market, Claire’s blood transferred from Willie’s T-shirt to my jacket, a wide-eyed look of shocked intensity on my face.

  My voice was saying, “Please call us with any information that could lead to this man.”

  My face was replaced with a freeze-frame shot of the killer. The SFPD phone number and Web address crawled under a title in big letters at the bottom of the screen.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  Edmund turned to me, his face stricken. “Have you got anything yet, Lindsay?”

  “We have Jack Rooney’s video,” I said, stabbing my finger at the TV. “We have nonstop media coverage and about two hundred eyewitnesses. We’ll find him, Eddie. I swear we will.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking: If this guy gets away, I shouldn’t be a cop.

  I stood, gathered up my shopping bag.

  Eddie said, “Can’t you wait a few minutes? Claire will want to see you.”

  “I’ll be back later,” I told him. “There’s someone I have to see right now.”

  Chapter 10

  I LEFT CLAIRE’S ROOM on the fifth floor and took the stairs to the Pediatric ICU on two. I was bracing myself for what was sure to be an awful, heart-wrenching interview.

  I thought about young Tony Canello, watching his mother taking a bullet an instant before being shot himself. I had to ask this child if he’d ever seen the shooter before, if the man had said anything before or after firing the gun, if he could think of any reason why he and his mom had been targeted.

  I shifted my shopping bag from my right hand to my left as I took the last flight of stairs, knowing that how I handled this interview was going to stay with this little boy forever.

  The police department keeps a stash of teddy bears to give to children who’ve been traumatized, but those small toys seemed too cheap to give to a kid who’d just seen his mother violently killed. I’d stopped off at the Build-A-Bear Workshop before coming to the hospital and had a bear custom-made for Tony. Before it was dressed in a soccer outfit, a fabric heart had been stitched inside the bear’s chest, along with my wish that Tony would get well soon.

  I opened the door to the second floor and stepped into the pastel-painted corridor of the Pediatric Unit. Cheery murals of rainbows and picnics lined the walls.

  I found my way to the Pediatric ICU and flashed my badge for the nurse at the desk, a woman in her forties with graying hair and large brown eyes. I told her that I had to talk to my witness and that I wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

  “You’re talking about Tony Canello? The little boy who was shot on the ferry?”

  I said, “I have about three questions. I’ll make it as easy on him as possible.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” the nurse said, holding my eyes with hers. “His surgery was touch and go. The gunshot wound involved several major organs. I’m sorry to tell you we lost him about twenty minutes ago.”

  I sagged against the nurses’ station.

  The nurse was speaking to me, asking if she could get me anything or anyone. I handed her the shopping bag with the Build-A-Bear inside and asked her to give it to the next kid who came into the ICU.

  Somehow, I found my car in the lot and headed back to the Hall of Justice.

  Chapter 11

  THE HALL IS A GRAY granite cube of a building that takes up a full block on Bryant Street. Its grungy and dismal ten floors house the superior court, the DA’s offices, the southern division of the SFPD, and a jail taking up the top floor.

  The medical examiner’s office is in an adjacent building, but you can get there by way of a back door in the Hall’s ground floor. I pushed open the steel-and-glass doors at the rear of the lobby, exited out the back of the building, and headed down the breezeway that led to the morgue.

  I opened the door to the autopsy suite and was immediately enveloped by frosty air. I walked through the place as if I owned it, a habit encouraged by my best friend, Claire, the chief medical examiner.

  But of course Claire wasn’t on the ladder taking overhead shots of the deceased woman on the table. The deputy chief, a fortysomething white man, five eight or so with salt-and-pepper hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, had taken her place.

  “Dr. G.,” I said, barreling into the autopsy room.

  “Watch where you’re stepping, Lieutenant.”

  Dr. Humphrey Germaniuk had been in charge of the ME’s office for about six hours, and already stacks of his papers lined the walls in neat rows. I used the toe of my shoe to straighten the pile that I’d accidentally dislodged, lined it up just right.

  I knew Germaniuk to be a perfectionist, fast with a joke, and great on the witness stand. In fact, he was as qualified to be CME as Claire was, and some said that if Claire ever stepped down, Dr. G. would be a shoo-in for her job.

  “How’s it going with Andrea Canello?” I asked, nearing the body on the autopsy table. Dr. G.’s “patient” was nude, lying faceup, the gunshot wound centered between her breasts.

  I leaned in for a closer look, and Dr. Germaniuk stepped between me and the dead woman’s body.

  “No trespassing, Lieutenant. This is a cop-free zone,” he cracked — but I could see he wasn’t kidding. “I’ve already had a suspected child abuse, a traffic fatality, and a woman whose head was opened up with a steam iron.

  “The ferry victims are going to be an all-day sucker, and I’m just getting started. If you have any questions, ask me now. Otherwise, just leave your cell number on my desk. I’ll call you when I’m done.”

  Then he turned his back on me and began to measure Andrea Canello’s gunshot wound.

  I stepped away, my head throbbing from the angry outburst I was keeping in check. I couldn’t afford to alienate Dr. G., besides which, he was within his rights. Without Claire, the already understaffed ME’s office was in a state of emergency. Germaniuk barely knew me, and he had to protect his department, his job, the rights of his patients, and the overall integrity of the investigation.

  And he had to autopsy every one of the ferry victims himself.

  If a second pathologist got in on this multiple homicide, a good defense attorney would pit the two pathologists against each other, look for inconsistencies that would undermine their testimonies.

  Assuming we would find the psycho who killed these people.

  And also assuming we would bring him to trial.

  It was almost four in the afternoon. If Andrea Canello was Germaniuk’s first ferry victim, his all-day sucker was going to be an all-night sucker, too.

  Still, I had my own problems. Four people were dead.

  The more time that passed, the more likely the ferry shooter would get away.

  “Dr. G.”

  He turned from his diagram and scowled.

  “Sorry if I came on too strong, but the shooter killed four people, and we don’t know who he is or where to find him.” />
  “Don’t you mean three?” Germaniuk said. “I have only three victims.”

  “This woman’s little boy, Tony Canello, died a half hour ago at San Francisco General,” I told him. “He was nine. That’s four dead, and Claire Washburn is sucking air through a chest tube.”

  A wave of sympathy swept the indignation from Dr. Germaniuk’s face. The edge was gone from his voice when he said, “Tell me how I can help you.”

  Chapter 12

  DR. GERMANIUK USED A SOFT PROBE to gently explore the wound that had torn through Andrea Canello’s chest. “It looks like a K-5 right through the heart. I wouldn’t swear to it until the firearms examiner says so, but it looks to me like she was shot with a .38.”

  It’s what I’d thought from the video, but I wanted to be certain. Jack Rooney’s camera lens had swung away from Andrea Canello as soon as she was shot. If she’d lived for a moment, if she knew her killer, she might have called out his name.

  “Could she have lived after she was shot?”

  “Not a chance,” Germaniuk told me. “Slug to the heart like that, she was dead before she hit the deck.”

  “That’s some shooting,” I said. “Six slugs, five direct hits. With a revolver.”

  “Crowded ferry boat, lots of people. Bound to hit some of them,” said Dr. G. matter-of-factly.

  We both looked up when the stainless steel doors to the rear of the autopsy suite banged open and a tech wheeled a gurney inside, calling out, “Dr. G., where do you want this?”

  The body on the stretcher was sheeted, about fifty inches long. “This” was a child.

  “Leave him,” Germaniuk said to the tech. “We’ll take it from here.”

  The doctor and I stepped over to the gurney. He pulled the sheet down.

  Just looking at the dead child was enough to tear out my heart. Tony’s skin was a mottled blue color, and he had a freshly stitched twelve-inch incision across his skinny little chest. I fought an impulse to put my hand on his face, touch his hair, do something to comfort a child who’d had the bad luck to be standing in a madman’s line of fire.

  “I’m so sorry, Tony.”

  “Here’s my card,” Germaniuk said, digging it out of his lab coat pocket, putting it in my hand. “Call my cell phone if you need me. And when you see Claire . . . tell her I’ll come to the hospital when I can. Tell her we’re all pulling for her — and that we’re not going to let her down.”

  Chapter 13

  MY SQUAD HAD MOVED their chairs and herded up around me. They were throwing out questions and trying out theories about the Del Norte shooter when my cell phone rang. I recognized the number as Edmund’s and took the call.

  Edmund’s voice was hoarse and breaking when he said, “Claire just came out of X-ray. She’s got internal bleeding.”

  “Eddie, I don’t get it. What happened?”

  “The bullet bruised her liver. . . . They have to operate on her — again.”

  I’d been lulled by Dr. Sassoon’s smile when he’d said that Claire was as good as home free. Now I felt nauseated with fear.

  When I arrived at the ICU waiting room, it was half full of Claire’s family and friends, plus Edmund and Willie and Reggie Washburn, Claire and Edmund’s twenty-one-year-old who’d just flown in from the University of Miami.

  I hugged everyone, sat down beside Cindy Thomas and Yuki Castellano, Claire’s best girlfriends and mine, the four of us making up the entire membership of what we half jokingly call the “Women’s Murder Club.” We huddled together, waiting for news in that cheerless room.

  Throughout the long, tense hours, we camouflaged our fear by topping one another’s kick-butt Claire stories. We downed bad coffee and Snickers bars from the vending machines, and during the early morning hours, Edmund asked us to pray.

  We all joined hands as Eddie asked God to please spare Claire. I knew we were all hoping that if we stayed close to her and had enough faith, she wouldn’t die.

  During those grueling hours, I flashed back to the time I’d been shot — how Claire and Cindy had been there for me.

  And I remembered other times when I’d waited in rooms much like this one. When my mom had cancer. When a man I’d loved had been shot in the line of duty. When Yuki’s mom had been felled by a stroke.

  All of them had died.

  Cindy said, “Where is that son-of-a-bitch shooter right now? Is he having a smoke after his dinner? Sleeping in a nice soft bed, planning another shooting spree?”

  “He’s not sleeping in a bed,” Yuki said. “Ten bucks says that dude is sleeping in a Maytag box.”

  At around five in the morning, a weary Dr. Sassoon came out to give us the news.

  “Claire’s doing fine,” he said. “We’ve repaired the damage to her liver, and her blood pressure is picking up. Her vital signs are good.”

  A cheer went up, and spontaneously we all started to clap. Edmund hugged his sons, tears in all their eyes.

  The doctor smiled, and I had to admit — he was a warrior.

  I made a quick trip home to take a sunrise run around Potrero Hill with Martha, my border collie.

  Then I called Jacobi as the sun rose over the roof of my car. I met him and Conklin at the elevator bank inside the Hall at eight.

  It was Sunday.

  They’d brought coffee and donuts.

  I loved these guys.

  “Let’s get to work,” I said.

  Chapter 14

  CONKLIN, JACOBI, AND I had just settled into my glass-cubicle office in the corner of the squad room when In-spectors Paul Chi and Cappy McNeil entered the dingy twenty-by-thirty-foot workspace that’s home base to the twelve members of the homicide crew.

  Cappy easily weighs two hundred fifty pounds, and the side chair creaked when he sat in it. Chi is lithe. He parked his small butt on my credenza next to Jacobi, who was having one of his not-infrequent bouts of coughing.

  With all the seats taken, Conklin chose to stand behind me, his back against the window and its view of the on-ramp to the freeway, one foot casually crossing the ankle of the other.

  My office felt overcrowded, like a shot glass stuffed with a fistful of crayons.

  I could feel heat coming off Conklin’s body, making me too aware of his six-foot-one, perfectly proportioned frame, his light-brown hair falling over his brown eyes, his twenty-nine-year-old looks reminding me of a Kennedy cousin crossed with maybe a U.S. Marine.

  Chi had brought the Sunday Chronicle and placed it on the desk in front of me.

  The shooter’s photo, a fuzzy still shot taken from Jack Rooney’s low-resolution movie footage, was on the front page, and under it was the caption DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  We all leaned in to study that furred face again.

  The shooter’s dark hair hung around to his jaw, and his beard hid everything from his top lip down to his Adam’s apple.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Cappy. We all looked at him.

  “What? I’m saying he looks like Jesus Christ.”

  I said, “We won’t be getting anything back from the lab on a Sunday morning, but we have this.”

  I took the photocopy of the brown-wrapped package of Turkish Specials out of my in-box.

  “And we have all this.”

  I put my hand on the two-inch pile of witness statements, phone messages, and e-mail printouts that our PA, Brenda, had taken off the SFPD Web site yesterday.

  “We can divvy it up,” said Jacobi.

  Loud discussion followed, until Chi said emphatically, “Hey. Cigarettes are big business. Any place that’s going to sell a brand like Turkish Specials is going to be one of your mom-and-pop stores. And one of those moms or pops might remember this shooter.”

  I said, “Okay. You guys run with it.”

  Jacobi and Conklin took two-thirds of the witness statements out to their desks in the squad room and got on the phones while Chi and McNeil made a few calls before hitting the streets.

  Alone in my office, I looked over what Brenda had
gathered on the victims — all solid citizens, every one.

  Was there a connection between the killer and any of the people he’d shot?

  I started dialing the numbers on the witness statements, but nothing in the first few calls lifted me out of my seat. Then I reached a fireman who’d been standing only ten feet from Andrea Canello when the shooter opened fire.

  “She was yelling at her kid when the shooter popped her,” the witness said. “I was about to tell her to take it easy. The next minute, uh, she was dead.”

  “What was she saying? Do you remember?”

  “ ‘You’re driving me crazy, buddy.’ Something like that. Terrible to think . . . Did the boy make it?”

  “I’m sorry to say, no, he didn’t.”

  I made more notes, trying to fit fragments together into pieces, pieces into a whole. I slugged down the last of my coffee and dialed the next person on my list.

  His name was Ike Quintana, and he had called late yesterday afternoon, saying maybe he’d been friends with the shooter some fifteen years before.

  Now Quintana said to me, “It looks like the same guy for sure. If that’s him, we were both at Napa State Hospital in the late ’80s.”

  I gripped the phone, pressing my ear hard against the receiver. Didn’t want to miss a syllable.

  “You know what I mean?” Quintana asked me. “We were both locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.”

  Chapter 15

  I SCRIBBLED A STAR next to Ike Quintana’s phone number.

  “What’s your friend’s name?” I asked him, pressing the receiver against my ear. But suddenly Quintana was evasive.

  “I don’t want to say, in case it turns out not to be him,” he said. “I have a picture. You can come over and look, if you come now. Otherwise, I have a lot of things to do today.”

  “Don’t you dare leave home! We’re on our way!”