11th Hour

by James Patterson

  I said to Frank, “What are your thoughts? Is she playing us?”

  “She’s playacting for sure, but her nuttiness neither confirms nor eliminates her as the killer. I will say this. Based on my ten minutes of observation, I think she’s going to great lengths to hide something. Could be related to this case, could be something else she doesn’t want anyone to know.”

  I laughed, said, “Brilliant analysis, Frank. Thanks a lot.”

  He laughed too. “Yeah, what did you expect? That I can unwrap her crazy little mind in ten minutes?”

  On the other side of the glass, Conklin was still trying to pry something useful out of Connie Kerr.

  “Connie, your friend who brings you food. Who is it?”

  “Ahhh,” she said dramatically. “Is he a man with a past? Or is it a lady friend she doesn’t want to expose?”

  “Connie, this isn’t helping you.”

  “I don’t have to tell you all my secrets. And I won’t. If I’m not under arrest, I want to go home. You can’t keep me here without probable cause.”

  Conklin sat back and said without any malice, “You’re wrong, Connie. I can book you for trespassing, for theft of services, for obstruction of justice.”

  “Listen,” Kerr said, slapping the table and leaning toward Conklin. “You’re wrong about the trespassing and all the rest. Tommy Oliver knows that I live in number six and he’s known it for years. I’m sure he has told Harry Chandler.”

  “Tommy Oliver? Is that T. Lawrence Oliver? Harry Chandler’s driver?”

  “Yes. Tommy hooked up my electricity. He fixed the locks.”

  “Okay. We’re holding you as a material witness while we check out your story, talk to a few people, and so forth. The law gives us forty-eight hours.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “I can. I’m doing it. Please stand up.”

  “I demand to make my phone call.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “Of course. By the way, we don’t have single-occupancy accommodations here, so you’re going to be sharing a cell with some other ladies. If you remember something helpful about the boneyard underneath your window, please reach out to me, Connie. I’ll be happy to talk to you anytime.”

  Chapter 82

  WHILE CONKLIN BROUGHT Connie Kerr to booking, I invited Frank Cisco to the break room for leftover cookies and stale coffee. He accepted.

  We were alone for the moment, sitting across from each other at an old table, and what had started as a consultation suddenly felt like a therapy session. I guess that’s because after Jacobi and I got shot on Larkin Street, I’d had to see Frank for a couple of months or lose my job.

  I’d been furious that the department sent me to a shrink to determine my mental fitness, but even though I was insulted, I had gotten a lot from my sessions with Frank. Actually, he was a great therapist.

  Now he asked me, “What’s going on with you, Lindsay?”

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  “Heyyy. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  I dipped my head. I didn’t want to tell him that Joe had cheated on me, that I had thrown him out, that working non-stop meant I didn’t have to concentrate on how I was going to provide for my baby without my husband.

  “Oh, man. If you could see your face. I gotta ask again. What’s going on, Lindsay?”

  Frickin’ mind reader.

  “This case,” I said, “is a bear. We’ve got seven victims, their heads buried on the property of a big movie star, and we can’t find the bodies. Were they murdered? Or is this a very creepy art installation? We don’t know.

  “And here’s what else is strange, Frank. With all the publicity this case has generated, no one is banging at our door asking, Is my daughter one of those victims?”

  “That is remarkable,” Frank said.

  “We’re going to close this case. We’re determined to do it. But the real pressure inside the SFPD is about the shooter cop.”

  Frank sighed, ran his hands through his hair, said again, “Oh, man.”

  I wasn’t deterred. I brought him up to date on the shooter cop’s activities.

  “The shooter killed three drug dealers on a back road —”

  “And torched their car.”

  “Right. Two days after that, he killed a dealer in a shopping-center parking lot.”

  “I read that. You’re sure it was the same shooter?”

  “The ballistics matched to another of our stolen guns.

  What you didn’t read is that Jackson Brady thinks Jacobi is the shooter.”

  “Come on. Brady believes that?”

  “Conklin and I were assigned to tail Jacobi, and he caught us sitting outside his house. Now Jacobi hates me. And we’re no closer to finding a killer who has probably worked himself up and is ready to kill again.”

  Frank told me not to put too much pressure on myself, said that stress wasn’t good for the baby.

  “Maybe you should take yourself off the case.”

  “I can’t, Frank. I just can’t.”

  He nodded, told me that I could call him day or night if I needed him. I thanked him, and then he asked if we could go to my desk so he could use my computer.

  “I’m expecting a big document by e-mail,” he told me. “It’s waiting for me in the cloud. Do you know what that is?”

  I smiled, said, “It’s a public server. Do you have an access code?”

  “I wrote it on the inside of my eyeglass case.”

  “Come with me,” I said.

  I gave my chair to Frank and made fresh coffee as he did his work. When he’d put his reading glasses back in his jacket pocket, I walked him out and thanked him for his help with Constance Kerr.

  “Any time. Take care, Lindsay. I mean it.”

  I returned to my computer and went to open what I expected to be an avalanche of mail that had come in over the last few hours.

  When I touched the mouse, the screen lit up, and instead of my usual desktop screen, a document I’d never seen before appeared. It took me a moment to figure out that it was the personnel file of a cop, William Randall. I knew his name, but I didn’t know much about him.

  Frank Cisco, either accidentally or on purpose, had left this document for me to read. Or maybe Dr. Freud had made him do it.

  I saved Sergeant William Randall’s file to my computer and went looking for Conklin.

  Chapter 83

  “OKAY, LET’S HAVE the whole story,” Brady said to me and my partner. We were in Brady’s office with the door closed and the blinds down. Brady was both aggravated with us and hopeful we’d gotten a new angle on the case. He didn’t sit down.

  “How’d you hear this about Randall?”

  “I can’t tell you my source,” I said. “I just can’t.”

  “Fine. Actually, I don’t give a rat’s ass about your source, Boxer. What do you have on him?”

  I took a printout of Randall’s file and put it on Brady’s desk, turning it around so he could read along as I pointed out the highlights.

  “William Randall has been with the SFPD for twelve years. He got bumped up to Narcotics in ’04 and did a stint as part of a task force for the DEA. He moved to Vice in ’09. His oldest son, Lincoln Randall, almost OD’d on heroin the next year. It’s possible that this was the boy’s first time trying hard drugs.”

  “His son almost OD’d. Go on,” Brady said. He sat down and began tapping the underside of his desk with his foot.

  “Randall found him lying in the street, got him to a hospital. His life was saved, but the kid’s brain took a bad hit. He was a bright boy, but now he has the mind of a baby.”

  “So are you saying the kid’s overdose is Randall’s motive?”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Randall has a good, clean record in the department and a sad personal story. Our working theory is that he’s on a one-man crusade to take out dealers who sell drugs to kids.”

&n
bsp; “But here’s the thing, boss,” Conklin said. “Meile and Penny both interviewed Randall. He has an alibi for the Morton Academy shooting. He says he was home with his wife and family when Chaz Smith went down. Mrs. Randall vouched for her husband, said, ‘Will was at home. He’s always home after work.’ The top cops bought it.”

  “And so why exactly do you like him for the shootings? Put me out of my misery, will you, Boxer?”

  “He’s obsessed with drug dealers. Obsessed with them.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “My source says that Randall has compiled dossiers on every dealer in the Bay Area. He knows things about them that Narcotics doesn’t know. He has sources on the street, both dealers and hookers. Add it up. He had access to our property room and could’ve stolen the guns. He’s an excellent marksman. Maybe he’s got a whole lot of anger because of his brain-damaged son.”

  Brady said, “Yeah, okay. It’s plausible. What’s your plan?”

  “Same as before. The three of us and two teams from Narcotics. We take shifts and we watch Randall’s movements. And we stay off the radio.”

  “I like it,” said Brady. “Set it up.”

  Chapter 84

  CONKLIN AND I followed William Randall, at a discreet distance, from the Hall to his home, cutting the headlights when we crossed the intersection of Elm and Scott in the Western Addition. I found a spot toward the end of the block where we could get a good three-quarter view of Randall’s yellow Edwardian-era house.

  It was now 11:30 p.m. and we’d been watching Randall’s street for five hours. There wasn’t a house or alleyway or garbage can I hadn’t committed to memory, and I knew every line and plane of Randall’s house by heart.

  His three-level home was typical of its time and this neighborhood. There was a small garage on the lower level. The second floor was the main floor: living room, kitchen, and bedrooms. The third level, the attic, had probably been converted into two small rooms.

  Lights were on in the house and Randall’s midsize black SUV was parked in his driveway. It had been there since before we began our shift.

  It’s been said that stakeouts are as interesting as watching grass grow, paint dry, water boil. But working Homicide means you don’t get neat nine-to-five shifts, and Conklin and I don’t mind sitting together for long hours at a stretch. We’re compatible and maybe a little more than that.

  Once upon a time, before he was seeing Cindy and at a point when Joe and I had split up, the spark between us kindled and almost burned up a hotel bed in Los Angeles.

  I’d called a breathless halt to what would have been a hot fling with a short duration and no future. I’d reconsidered that decision many times, but as Conklin was telling me that he loved me, I was thinking about how much I loved Joe. How much I missed Joe.

  Joe and I got together again.

  Conklin hooked up with Cindy and they were so perfect as a couple, you had to wonder why it had taken them so long. I put on the big diamond ring Joe had given me and we got married in a magical ceremony by the ocean. And now I was running it all through my head again.

  Conklin passed me the thermos of coffee. I took a couple of sips and passed it back to him. He stowed the thermos in the door pocket and called Cindy.

  “You going to bed?” he asked her.

  Pause as she said either yes or no.

  “I don’t know when. I can nuke something. Don’t worry.”

  Pause as Cindy said okay.

  “I don’t care how late it gets, I’m going to wake you when I come in.”

  He laughed at something she said.

  “You too.”

  He closed the phone. Put it in his pocket.

  “She’s okay?” I asked. “She’s writing. Don’t bother her when she’s writing. Look,” he said.

  I looked past the sofa that had been put out at the curb for garbage pickup, and saw a man, probably Randall, moving around on the main floor of the house.

  Then the lights went out.

  I had been hoping that Randall would leave his house, fire up his SUV, and take off so that Conklin and I could follow him and find out where a cop-and drug-dealer-shooting executioner went at night.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Soon the inside of the house was dark except for the attic rooms. I saw a TV jump to life in one of those rooms, and a few minutes later, I saw Randall walk between the lamp and the window shades in the second room. Then that light went out too.

  “He’s packing it in for the night,” I said.

  “Lucky guy,” said Conklin.

  We had three more hours before the next team took over.

  Chapter 85

  WILL RANDALL HAD been watching the two-year-old blue Ford sedan from his rear window, had seen it pull into the empty space on Elm with its headlights off.

  And the car was still there.

  Will had expected to be tailed and surveilled, but his brothers in blue hadn’t seen him do anything and had nothing on him; if they had, they wouldn’t have been sitting outside in their car.

  Will went down the hallway, stopped in each of the bedrooms, and checked on the younger kids, all of whom were sleeping. He filled the hamster’s water bottle in the boys’ room, then went to the den, where his father-in-law, Charlie, was sitting in an easy chair, asleep in front of the television.

  The TV was on really loud, so Will lowered the sound and then the thermostat, opened the sofa bed, and helped Charlie get under the covers. From there, Will went into the hall bathroom and jiggled the handle on the toilet until the water stopped running; after that, he turned off the overhead lights on the second floor.

  Then he went upstairs.

  His oldest son’s room was right off the staircase and next door to the room Will shared with Becky. He pulled a chair up to the hospital-type bed where his son was lying and said, “You want to watch a little TV, Link?”

  “Dah,” Link said.

  “David Letterman it is.”

  Will pointed the clicker, turned on the TV, raised the angle of the bed with the other clicker, and when Link was sitting up, he put a straw into a water bottle and held it to his son’s lips.

  Father and son watched Letterman for a few minutes, Will’s mind drifting to the unmarked car downstairs, to what would happen to his family if he was caught. He’d had these thoughts before, and now he ran through the same questions and came up with the same answers.

  He was in free fall, but he wasn’t done yet.

  He brought his attention back to Letterman, who had finished his monologue and gone to a break. Will put the clickers down and said, “I’ll be back in a little while, okay, son?”

  Will went next door to his bedroom and saw Becky sacked out, completely zonked from a day of running this asylum.

  He loved her, worried for her health, admired her selflessness, couldn’t imagine life without her.

  He sat down on the side of the bed, put his hand on her cheek. She opened her eyes.

  “Coming to bed, honey?” she asked. “In a little while.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Will pulled down the shades, first standing for a moment in front of the window, knowing that a couple of cops down on the street were seeing his silhouette. Then he turned off the light.

  He paused in the doorway and listened to Becky’s breathing. Then he went downstairs to the garage, where he took his leather jacket off a hook and put it on. He took his gun out of a toolbox and tucked it inside his waistband. Then he exited through the rear door and went down the short flight of steps to the backyard.

  There was enough moonlight to see by but not enough to be seen. He crossed the grass and cut around the swing set, disappeared through the gap between the two houses that backed up against his yard and faced onto Golden Gate Avenue.

  He turned onto the deserted road with the grandiose name, kept his head down, walked a block past shabby Victorian homes, and found Becky’s Camaro where he’d parked it. He opened the car and got in,
put his gun under the front seat, then started up the engine.

  A moment later, he was heading east on Golden Gate. He wanted to get this job done before Craig Ferguson started his e-mail segment on The Late Late Show, which would be in about an hour.

  If everything went as planned, he was pretty sure he could make it.

  Chapter 86

  WILL RANDALL DROVE through the light-industrial area in the northern part of the Potrero Hill District as if he had an open barrel of beer in the backseat. He kept an eye on the speedometer, came to full stops at traffic lights, was careful not to attract any attention; he wanted to get this over with and go back home.

  He stopped for a yellow light at the intersection of Alameda and Potrero. Then he continued on for another block, turned right onto Utah, a quiet road adjacent to the Jewelry Center and during the day used mostly for local traffic.

  At night the area was nearly deserted. The lots were empty, and metered parking was open as far as he could see. Will pulled into a spot half a block from Zeus, a club and restaurant that filled a three-story brick warehouse and had the best sound system in San Francisco.

  From where he sat, he could see the 101 Freeway to the north, the newly planted trees up the street, a gang of laughing-out-loud kids stumbling off the wide sidewalk, crossing the street behind him, and heading for the black iron delivery doors that were the unmarked entrance to Zeus.

  Will forced himself to watch and wait as he sat in his wife’s car, a loaded gun under the seat. He thought about good and evil, that the purpose of evil was to overturn the world of good. How he’d operated for half his life on that principle and that the distinction between the two had been lost since Link’s brain had flamed out on bad drugs.

  Will turned up the volume on the police band and listened to the exchanges between radio cars and dispatch, and when enough time had passed and he was sure there was no activity in the northern part of Potrero, he took his .22 out from under the seat. He screwed the silencer onto the muzzle, stuck the gun into his waistband at his back, and exited the car.