11th Hour

by James Patterson

  Chapter 30

  BLAYNEY WAS AT the leading edge of the pack of reporters, some of whom I’d known for years. Others had to be out-of-towners who’d just blown into the Bay Area for a big, banging story that would be making headlines indefinitely: murder at the Ellsworth compound.

  The reporters were on the move, sticking elbows into ribs, treading on toes, jostling video equipment as they angled for position on the Hall’s front steps.

  Microphones advanced.

  Cameras fired in a 180-degree arc around my face.

  I’d been mobbed by the press hundreds of times before, but today, I’d been told to keep my mouth shut and let Brady do the talking.

  Jason Blayney called out to me, “Sergeant Boxer. What does Harry Chandler have to do with the bodies at his house? Is he a suspect?”

  Overlapping questions came at me like flights of arrows: How many bodies had been found? Had the victims been identified? Had the SFPD arrested anyone?

  “Is Harry Chandler a suspect, Sergeant?”

  “Lindsay, please give us something, okay?”

  I looked for a way out, but the crowd was dense and shifting, too thick to bull through. I reminded myself to adopt the wise and cool mind-set Bec Rollins had advised.

  Suddenly, that seemed like a good idea.

  I took a breath, said, “Sorry, everyone. You know the drill. I have nothing to tell you at this point. I have to protect the integrity of the investigation. That’s all I’ve got, so if you’ll please excuse me, I’ll see you some other time.”

  The reporters weren’t taking no way for an answer. I looked around for anyone leaving the Hall of Justice who could step in and take the cameras off me. I was hoping to see the DA or Jackson Brady.

  But that wasn’t happening, and Jason Blayney was still in my face.

  “Sergeant Boxer, the public has a right to know something. If there’s a murderer on the loose —”

  “Mr. Blayney? We can’t give out information about an ongoing investigation. You know that, or you should know that. You want a statement, contact Media Relations in the morning. Thank you.”

  I ignored the renewed flight of questions and parted the throng by lowering my head and making gravity my friend. I’d gotten down the steps and across Bryant, all the way to my car in the lot, when I heard footsteps, someone running up behind me. It was Jason Blayney, damn it, and he was calling my name.

  I kept my back to him, got into the Explorer, had the door half closed behind me when Blayney put his hand on the door handle and pulled.

  Was he kidding? This was over the freaking top.

  I whipped around and faced him down.

  “Blayney, are you crazy? The answer is no. No statement. No nothing. Now back the hell off.”

  Grinning, he took my picture, then shut off his tape recorder and said, “Thanks for your nothing statement, Sergeant.”

  I knew I was going to see my picture on the Post’s front page and that I was going to look insane.

  So much for wise and cool.

  I was steaming as I drove out of the lot. Blayney was a cockroach, but frankly, he and I both had the same questions.

  Who were the victims?

  Why had heads been dug up at Harry Chandler’s mansion?

  And why didn’t we have a single bloody clue?

  Chapter 31

  CINDY NOT ONLY dubbed our gang of four the Women’s Murder Club but also branded Susie’s Café our clubhouse. It was a small miracle to have this big hug of a hangout where we could get lost in a cheerful crowd and one another’s company.

  I was checking my rearview mirror to see if that a-hole Jason Blayney was following me, and at the same time I was looking for a parking spot on Jackson.

  I was about to go around the block again when a car pulled out from the curb, leaving me a space right outside Susie’s front door.

  I got out of the Explorer, my legs wobbling with exhaustion, and then I was inside Susie’s, enveloped by calypso music, laughing people, golden-yellow sponge-painted walls, and the smells of coconut shrimp and curried chicken.

  Cindy was at the bar in the front room. She was wearing pink with a sparkling barrette in her hair and was putting down a cold one.

  She waggled her fingers and at the same time gave me the evil eye. She was unhappy with me. I knew why, and I didn’t blame her.

  I ordered a root beer and when the bottle was in my hand, I took a swallow, and then I tried to make peace with my friend.

  “I know you’re pissed at me.”

  “I’m pissed at Richie too, so go ahead, both of you can take it personally.”

  “I brought you something,” I said.

  I opened my bag, took out a printout, handed it to Cindy, and watched her expression change.

  “Oh. No. I mean. This is one of the Ellsworth house victims?” She was staring at the artist’s sketch of Jane Doe, the woman whose head was in Claire’s cooler.

  “We need the public’s help in identifying this woman.”

  “What else can I say?”

  “She may be the victim of a crime.”

  “And what about Ellsworth?”

  “I’ll tell you what I can, but don’t say that she was found at Ellsworth yet, okay? We’re not ready to officially open the story to the press.”

  “And what about unofficially? The Post has the damned story, Linds,” Cindy said. “Everyone does.”

  She was mad, but she was clutching the drawing and not letting it go.

  “I’ll tell you officially when I can. But we can go off the record now.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “Seven heads were exhumed. All of them are female, buried over the course of a number of years. We can’t identify any of them. We don’t have a clue what happened to them, how they were killed. We don’t know anything.”

  “If I write that, I’m going to have to apply for a job at the post office.”

  I guess my frustration was showing, and maybe some panic too, because Cindy was saying, “Okay, okay, Linds. Calm down. Take it easy,” as Yuki and Claire came in together.

  Cindy settled the tab. About forty-two seconds later, the four of us were at our booth in the back room and had ordered jerked pork and pitchers of beer. Yuki was off to the races about how in love she was with Jackson Brady.

  And speak of the devil: Brady picked that minute to call me and tell me he needed my butt back at the Hall.

  Chapter 32

  THAT NIGHT, REVENGE sat in his Hyundai SUV, engine running, under a shot-out streetlight on Sunnydale Avenue, an ugly and dangerous artery that wound through the decrepit heart of the Sunnydale Projects. All around him, packed tight and wall to wall for a square mile, were squalid housing units on streets dominated by two violent and warring bands of thugs, the DBG and Towerside gangs.

  A four-dimensional map of these badlands and its occupants was engraved on his mind — every unit and alley in the projects, every felon, juvenile offender, innocent citizen.

  Revenge was watching both vehicular and pedestrian traffic centered on the Little Village Market up ahead at the intersection of Sunnydale and Hahn, and he was also focused on a block of tan stucco housing units to his right: two stories high with bars on the lower windows and burned-out grass between the footings and the street.

  A shadow emerged from between two units.

  It was Traye, a slouching young man wearing a ball cap and baggy gangsta clothes that swallowed his slight build.

  Accompanied by the pulsing music pounding out of cars and windows, Traye made his way across the avenue, slipped into the passenger side of Revenge’s car, and slumped below the line of sight.

  He was nineteen and had burn scars on his neck and arms from a meth-lab explosion that had occurred inside his housing unit while he was playing outside, almost out of harm’s way.

  The boy had survived, but he had never had much of a chance until a year ago, when Revenge took him on as a confidential informant.

  Revenge said, �
��I spoke to the arresting officer. He’s not going to show up in court.”

  “You for sure?”

  “I said I’d get the charges dropped.”

  “You say so.”

  Revenge gave the boy a paper bag. Inside were three meat-loaf sandwiches his wife had made for Traye, a bottle of chocolate milk, a bag of Chips Ahoy, twenty dollars, and a pack of smokes.

  The boy opened the bag, unwrapped a sandwich with shaking hands, and said between bites, “I don’t got nothing for you.”

  “It’s okay. Take your time.”

  Revenge dialed up the volume on the radio. Car accident on Mansell. Domestic violence on Persia. Backup requested at the Stop ’n Save. It was a slow night.

  The boy chugged down the milk, put the twenty inside his shoe, rolled up the mouth of the bag, and then put it under his shirt. He looked at Revenge.

  It was thank-you enough.

  “I gotta go.”

  “Another time.”

  Traye got out of the vehicle, crossed the street to the alley between the buildings, and went from there to a basement hole, where whatever was left in the bag would be commandeered or the kid would get hurt — or both.

  The man known as Revenge worried about Traye, wondered how long he would survive. Another year? Another week?

  Deafening so-called music grabbed Revenge’s attention, coming from a car heading up the avenue behind him. He checked the mirror, saw the black BMW with the death’s-head stencils on the chassis.

  Okay.

  Now things were getting interesting.

  Revenge put the SUV in drive and when the BMW passed him, he pulled out into traffic behind it.

  Chapter 33

  REVENGE KNEW WHO was driving the BMW and who was going along for the ride.

  Jace Winter, Bam Cox, and Little T Jackson were small-time drug dealers with long sheets for heavy crimes. They forced children into theft and females into prostitution; they broke down families; they caused destruction and desperation; and they sent young kids toward certain death.

  They were, in a word, scum.

  Revenge took a Boost phone from his glove compartment. He’d confiscated it during a bust and it couldn’t be traced to him. He dialed 911 as he drove up Sunnydale, the BMW’s taillights in view right up ahead.

  The 911 operator asked him what his emergency was, and he put on a ghetto accent stained with panic.

  “They’s a shooting going down right now. Oh God. They’s shooting at cops. They shot a cop!”

  He gave an address three miles south of his current location, then clicked off and tossed the phone out the car window.

  Revenge followed the BMW east on Sunnydale, and as the gangsters sped up, he followed them through the thick of the ghetto and out the other side to where the housing was single-family homes, flat fronts with garages and driveways on the street level.

  The BMW took a right onto Sawyer and when it hit Velasco Avenue, Revenge put on his siren and his grille lights. Stuff started flying out of the windows of the BMW. Small glassine packets, a couple of guns.

  He spoke into the bullhorn. “Pull over. Pull the car over. Now.”

  The BMW did slow, went from sixty to forty down Velasco, took a right onto Schwerin, and stopped next to an abandoned lot fenced with broken chain link and filled with garbage.

  Revenge braked behind the BMW.

  He left the engine running as he screwed the suppressor onto the muzzle, grabbed his flashlight, and got out of his car. He approached the driver’s-side window of the BMW, shone his light in the driver’s face.

  The smell of weed coming from the BMW was so strong, one good inhale could produce a profound contact high.

  The driver, Jace Winter, said, “Wus up, Officer?” He was smirking. Laughing with his homeys. Unafraid. Stoned out of his mind.

  “Cox. Jackson. Put your hands on the ceiling,” Revenge said.

  “Man, how’m I going to show you license and registration with my damned hands —”

  “Winter, keep your right hand on the wheel and open your jacket.”

  “Yo, what was I going? Twenty-eight in a twenty-five zone?”

  “Good night, you piece of crap.”

  Revenge pointed the gun into the interior of the car. He shot Winter first, two shots in the chest, another round in the neck. Jackson and Cox went crazy trying to get out of the car, and then the last man they would see in this world sent several shots into various parts of their upper bodies until no one moved.

  Revenge stripped off his jacket, balled it up with the gun, and dumped the bundle into Winter’s lap.

  A car went by fast, didn’t stop, didn’t even slow. Revenge went back to his vehicle, took out the plastic liter bottle filled with gasoline, and returned to the BMW. He poured gas inside the car, front and back, made a good job of dousing the dead men.

  Then he lit a match and tossed it inside the drug-mobile.

  There was a loud puff as the flame caught, then the car started to burn, and within a few seconds, the whole of it was engulfed in fire.

  Keeping his head down, Revenge returned to his SUV. He watched the BMW explode as he backed out, then he made a U-turn and drove through the projects again.

  He felt cleansed and almost high.

  Like he was younger, and lighter, the very best version of himself, and since he would never get credit, he thought it was okay to give himself a pat on the back for a very clean shooting. Three heinous sewer rats were dead.

  In twenty minutes, Revenge would be sitting in front of the TV watching the game, but he’d be thinking of Jace Winter’s smug face and then his expression when he realized he was going to die.

  Revenge listened to the police band, learned that cops were still investigating a report of a cop down but hadn’t yet determined who had been shot or where. He turned off the police band, found a rock station on the radio. He was whistling as he drove home.

  Book Two

  MEDIA CIRCUS

  Chapter 34

  I PACED AROUND a garbage-strewn vacant lot off Schwerin Street, a potholed one-laner that ran between the Sunnydale Projects and through Visitacion Valley.

  Normally desolate, tonight Schwerin was impassable in both directions, cordoned off and hemmed in by twenty-odd police cars, three fire rigs, two ambulances, the fire investigator’s truck, the scene-mobile, and the coroner’s van.

  Outside the lot, between the broken chain-link fence and the street, an incinerated car was turning the night sky opaque with smoke.

  I coughed into my sleeve, kept a good twelve yards between myself and the smoldering car as Chuck Hanni, our chief fire investigator, processed the scene with his crew. One of his key associates was Lacy, an ignitable-liquid-detecting K-9, a black Labrador with an excellent nose.

  The last time I saw Hanni, a meth lab disguised as a school bus had exploded on Market Street during morning rush hour. There had been casualties, but none of them, thank God, were children. Hanni had detailed that horror show with his first-rate expertise, as he was doing now with the remains of a fatal fire that looked to be a triple homicide.

  As I watched, the K-9 alerted Hanni. The fire investigator pulled something out of the car, shone his Maglite on it, then sealed it in a paper bag. Claire and Charlie Clapper walked over to Hanni and had a powwow with him, and then they took over the scene.

  Techs were taking bodies out of the vehicle as Hanni came over to brief me on what he’d learned so far.

  He massaged his scarred right hand as he crossed the lot, the result of an injury he’d gotten in a fire. He wore his everyday chinos and white shirt under a sports jacket, and although Hanni was the first to get his hands dirty metaphorically, I’d never seen him with so much as a smudge of soot on his clothing.

  “I’ve got a lot to tell you,” Hanni said.

  I wanted to know everything.

  He couldn’t tell me fast enough.

  Chapter 35

  “THE FIRE STARTED in the passenger compartment,” Chuc
k Hanni said. “See, the engine compartment is in relatively good shape. Flames probably vented through the open window.”

  “The windows were open?”

  “Just the driver’s window.”

  “License and registration, please,” I said. “Could have been a traffic stop. Go ahead, Chuck. I interrupted you.”

  “Not a problem. So, this is what I see happening. As the interior burned, the windshield failed and the rear seats were consumed. Then the fire entered the trunk and destroyed the back of the car.”

  “Yeah, the rear tires are melted,” I said. “So what caused the fire?”

  “Lacy alerted on what was left of a plastic bottle that had rolled under the front seat. I think gas was inside that bottle, but anyway, some kind of accelerant. It looks to me like the passenger compartment was doused, and the fire was started with a match or a lighter.

  “I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.

  I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”

  “Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”

  “Okay. What else?”

  Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”

  I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million .22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.

  I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.