Guilty Blood

by Rick Acker

  “Oh.” Brandon was silent for a moment as he absorbed the news. “No wonder everyone’s tense. Every time I’m out there, it feels like a fight is about to start—guys looking around or pulled together in little clumps, no one laughing or joking, that sort of thing. You know what I mean.”

  “I do,” Father Vicente said. “I’ve noticed it too. I mentioned it to the guards, and they say they’re keeping an eye on it, but . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “Watch yourself if anything happens.”

  CHAPTER 61

  July

  “Wow, this place looks even seedier than I imagined,” Sofia said as she, Jessica, and their newly acquired bodyguard drove past the Captain’s Lounge.

  Jessica agreed. It was a 1970s-era blond-brick storefront that hadn’t been maintained particularly well. Rusty water stains streaked the walls at the corners of the metal roof, except where they had been covered by graffiti taggers. A faded painting over the door showed a scantily clad and improbably proportioned woman wearing a sailor’s cap and swigging a beer.

  A narrow, grimy alley ran along the back of the bar, leading to a parking lot. Even during the day, it looked dark and dangerous.

  A chill ran through Jessica. “Is that where Linc Thomas was killed?”

  Sofia glanced over, following Jessica’s gaze. “Yep.”

  Jessica looked around the neighborhood. In addition to the Captain’s Lounge, it held a 7-Eleven, a liquor store, a dubious-looking deli, a payday lender, a large warehouse, and several buildings that appeared to be vacant and were almost entirely covered by graffiti. Jessica reflexively checked to make sure her door was locked.

  She glanced into the backseat, where the bodyguard sat. Her name was Amy Xiang, and her résumé said she had over two decades of experience in “personal security” guarding executives and celebrities. She seemed alert and focused, scanning the streets methodically for threats. Whenever Amy turned to the left, Jessica could see the butt of a gun in a shoulder holster inside her jacket.

  Nate had found Amy based on a referral from a client. He had also hired her and insisted on paying her bills. Which made Jessica feel even more in his debt.

  Why was he doing all of this? He had always been a kind man and deeply loyal to his friends, but this went well beyond friendship. She had thought it might be because his feelings for her also went beyond friendship, but then he had rejected her after that dinner at his house.

  Why had he pushed her away? At first, she thought it was because he couldn’t bear the thought of being romantic with another woman, especially not in the house he built with Sarah. She could understand that—she had felt the same way when she and Nate became close during the year after Tim died. Nate probably felt it too—like he was cheating on both his wife and his best friend. But then she remembered what he actually said when he pulled away from her. He hadn’t mentioned feeling guilty, and he never brought up either Sarah or Tim. He said he had to be alone. Why?

  “Here we are,” Sofia announced, interrupting Jessica’s amateur psychoanalysis of Nate. She pulled her Prius into the parking lot of a McDonald’s a quarter mile from the Captain’s Lounge. This was the spot picked by the witness they were meeting five minutes from now. His name was Victor Tran, and he was an assistant manager at the Captain’s Lounge. Jade Li had managed to track him down and persuade him to talk with them, promising him that they “would make it worth his while.”

  They parked and walked into the McDonald’s. A handful of customers sat at dingy Formica tables or waited by the register. Jessica noticed a young Asian man in the corner, eating fries and sipping a drink. And watching them. He made eye contact and nodded slightly.

  “I think that’s him,” Jessica said to Sofia.

  The three of them walked over. “Victor?” Sofia asked.

  He nodded again. “Please sit down.”

  Sofia sat facing him, set her bag on the floor, and pulled out a well-used padfolio. Jessica slipped into the seat beside her and took out a notebook and pen. Amy took a place beside Victor, where she could watch the door.

  “Thanks for meeting with us,” Sofia said.

  “No problem,” he said. His gaze flicked nervously around the table. “She, um, Ms. Li said you’d pay me.”

  “And we will,” Sofia assured him. “We won’t be able to set a price until we know what you have to say, but I can assure you that you’ll be treated fairly.”

  He hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay, but I’m not going to do anything except talk until I get paid. The pictures will have to wait.”

  Pictures? Jessica resisted the urge to get optimistic.

  “That’s fine,” Sofia said. “Let’s get started. What do you know about Linc Thomas?”

  “He was a regular. He came in alone most of the time, but sometimes he brought girls with him. He usually ordered cheap stuff when he was by himself, but he went top-shelf when he had a girl with him—probably because he knew they were paying. They always did.”

  “How did they pay?” Sofia asked. “Cash or credit card?”

  “Both, kind of,” Victor said. “They each gave us this thing that looked like a credit card, but if you tried to run it through the machine, it came back with an error message. There was a number on the back of the card that you were supposed to call. A guy would answer and you would read him the number on the front of the card. Then you would tell him where you were calling from and the amount of the bill. Once a month, someone came by with an envelope with enough cash to pay off all the bar tabs they owed.”

  It sounded like an odd system, but Jessica realized it made sense. Lan Long wouldn’t want to use a real credit card because then the transactions could be traced. But they probably wouldn’t want to give large amounts of cash to sex slaves and trust them to bring back the change. The fake credit card solved both problems, and if anyone happened to get hold of it, they wouldn’t know what it was.

  “What was the number you called?” Sofia asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember the area code?”

  He shook his head. “No. I think it was international.”

  “Okay. Did you talk to any of the girls Linc brought in?”

  “Not really. Just basic stuff like What can I get for you, Thank you, and stuff like that. They didn’t speak much English.”

  Sofia glanced down at her notes. “Switching gears a little, were you working on the night Linc Thomas was killed?”

  He nodded. “What do you want to know about it?”

  Sofia reached into her bag and pulled out a picture of Brandon. “For starters, did you see this man at the bar or in the neighborhood that night?”

  He looked at the picture for a few seconds, then handed it back and shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him before.”

  Sofia put the picture away. “Okay, did you see anything that seemed at all unusual that night? A guy who hadn’t been in the bar before, for example.”

  “New people come into the bar pretty often, and I don’t remember all of them. I don’t remember anyone new that night, but I guess it’s possible that there was someone.”

  “Okay. How about anything unusual with Linc Thomas? Did he seem angry or nervous or scared?”

  “Well, Linc had a temper, but he didn’t seem unusually angry that night. Or nervous or scared, for that matter. He—” He stopped and his brow furrowed. “But my boss was on edge all night long. He’s usually pretty laid-back.”

  “What’s his name?” Sofia asked.

  “Tim Fitzpatrick. He owns the bar.”

  “Was there anything else going on that might have upset him? Had anyone quit or was he in financial trouble or something?”

  Victor shook his head. “Not that I know of. That’s why it was weird. He was jumpy all night for no reason—or no reason until Linc got killed, anyway.”

  “Tell me about that,” Sofia said. “Did you see anything or hear raised voices or a struggle?”


  “Unh-uh,” he said, shaking his head. His face became somber. “I was back in the kitchen doing inventory. Then Frank—he was the bartender that night—went out back to have a cigarette in the alley. I heard him yell, so I went out to see what the problem was. And there was Linc, lying there dead.”

  “You heard Frank yell,” Sofia said thoughtfully. “Do you think you would have heard if someone else had been yelling in the alley?”

  “Yes, though I wasn’t doing inventory for that long. Before that, I was in the office, which isn’t as close to the alley. But yeah, I still probably would have heard if someone was yelling back there.”

  “Hmm.” Sofia drummed her fingers on the table, frowning in thought. “Is there anything else you remember about Linc Thomas’s death that we haven’t talked about yet?”

  He stared at the remains of his fries for a moment, then shook his head. “No, I think you’ve covered everything.”

  “Good. We may need you to testify at trial. Do you have any travel plans in the next couple of months?”

  “Testify?” He shook his head. “No way. I’m not getting in the middle of this. Besides, I’m joining the navy. I just gave my two weeks’ notice on Monday. Who knows where I’ll be in two months.”

  Jessica fought a sense of deflation. Why couldn’t they find a good witness who was actually willing to testify?

  Sofia frowned but moved on. “You mentioned pictures. What do they show?”

  “The cash ledger. Tim had me copy the stuff you asked for in the subpoena. The subpoena said ‘all records of customer transactions’ for a bunch of dates. But that’s not what you got—Tim only had me copy the other ledger. I know what was left out, and I took pictures of it.” He held up his phone. “If you want it, you’ll have to pay for it.”

  “The cash ledger,” Sofia repeated. “How many ledgers does he have?”

  “Two. One for cash and one for everything else—checks, credit-card payments, wire transfers.”

  “Hmm. Seems inefficient,” Sofia said. “You wouldn’t happen to know whether he uses both ledgers when he’s doing his taxes, would you?”

  “I don’t think he does.”

  Sofia smiled broadly.

  CHAPTER 62

  Nate finished the transcript of the trial in People v. Simmons. He had never been in front of Judge Whittaker, so he wanted to get a sense for how the judge ran his courtroom, whether he was a stickler for procedural rules, and so on. When Nate mentioned his problem to Sofia, she volunteered to send over the transcripts of her last two trials in front of Whittaker.

  Nate had skimmed the first one over the weekend, and he had been reading People v. Simmons on his iPad during his morning rides on the exercise bike in his apartment building’s gym. He went back over Sofia’s closing argument one more time, then closed the iPad cover and looked out at the view of the San Francisco Bay offered by the gym’s panoramic window.

  He now had a reasonably good feel for the judge. Despite being eighty-three, Oswald Whittaker was a sharp jurist. He sometimes asked witnesses or attorneys to speak up or repeat themselves, but that was the only clue to his age in the transcripts. His staff seemed to have been together for a long time, and there appeared to be an unwritten set of rules that meant at least as much in his courtroom as the California Rules of Criminal Procedure.

  And perhaps most importantly of all, Judge Whittaker seemed to like Sofia. He sustained her objections more often than the prosecution’s, gave her more leeway with witnesses, and was less likely to zap her with a caustic remark if she did something wrong. He even once commented during a sidebar that she reminded him of his granddaughter.

  Nate would have liked her too if he were the judge. Her witness examinations were crisp, incisive, and succinct. She rarely made objections that weren’t well founded. Her opening statements and closing arguments were concise and persuasive and stayed well within the boundaries set by the rules. She always seemed to anticipate the judge’s questions and had answers ready. In short, she was a very good courtroom lawyer.

  Probably a better lawyer than him, at least in these circumstances.

  It hurt his pride a little to admit that. He liked to imagine that he was the best attorney in any courtroom he chose to walk into, but he was realistic enough to know that wasn’t always true.

  Early in his career, Nate had tried a case against a famous trial lawyer in his seventies who liked to say, “Trying cases is like riding a bicycle. It’s all instinct once you learn not to fall on your face.” The man had taken over the case two weeks before trial from a better-prepared younger attorney who knew it well, but had only tried one case. Nate won easily. He often told the story when he taught trial-advocacy classes aimed at senior lawyers, and he ended it by saying, “Trying cases may be like riding a bike, but trying a big case in a new field is like riding in the Tour de France. You may have better instincts and you may not fall on your face, but you’re not going to win unless you’re at least as prepared as your opponents.”

  Sofia was better prepared to try this case than he was. She knew the judge better, knew the rules better, and by the time trial came, she would know the evidence better than him. Plus, he was hamstrung by his deal with Peggy, so he couldn’t put in the prep time that Sofia could.

  He reached the end of the workout and got off the bike. He got a cup of cold water and walked out onto the narrow balcony outside the gym to cool off. The brisk breeze from the Bay felt good as it dried the sweat on his forehead.

  No reason to put it off. He pulled his phone out of his shorts and dialed Sofia’s number. It was only seven thirty, but he wasn’t surprised when she picked up the phone. “Hi, Nate. What’s up?”

  “I’ve been reading those transcripts you sent and thinking about the, ah, mechanics of how we’ll handle trial.”

  “Yeah, me too,” she said. “Whittaker has enough ground rules to fill a phone book, and he expects you to know them all. I’m sure you’ll be fine, but I was thinking that you could practice by—”

  “I’m sure I’ll be fine,” he said, cutting her off. “I’ll be sitting at the counsel table, watching you play him like a violin.”

  She said nothing for a heartbeat. “I, uh, what did you mean?”

  “I meant that I think you should be the lead lawyer at trial. You’ve done a fine job with the preliminary hearings, you know the judge’s ground rules, and I was impressed by what I saw in the transcripts I just read. Very impressed.”

  “I lost both those trials.”

  “Because your clients were both obviously guilty. I would have done no better. Indeed, I likely would have done worse. The evidence will be much more evenly balanced this time. We need to put up the lawyer with the best chance of winning. That lawyer is you.”

  “Thanks, I’d love to take the lead. I . . . I’m honored.”

  “The honor is deserved. I’m sure you’ll do a terrific job.” The gym door opened and two women came out onto the balcony. He should get off the phone anyway. He had a nine o’clock meeting that he needed to get ready for. “I have to go, but let’s talk later today.”

  He ended the call and walked back inside, confident that he had made the right decision, but not liking it particularly.

  CHAPTER 63

  Jessica’s first—and very likely last—trip inside the Captain’s Lounge came on a Sunday morning less than a week after she and Sofia interviewed Victor Tran.

  Victor had initially asked for $5,000 for the pictures, but ultimately agreed to $500 after Sofia pointed out that she could simply subpoena the pictures from him and give him nothing. Jessica felt a little guilty when she learned that the Public Defender’s Office wouldn’t cover the cost, but Sofia said not to worry about it, and Jessica didn’t have $500 to spare, in any event. When Nate heard about it, he had insisted on reimbursing Sofia.

  The pictures of the ledger pages were legible when blown up, and the image files helpfully included the place where they were taken—which happened to be the Captain’s L
ounge. The handwriting was the same as in the ledger pages that Fitzpatrick had produced in response to Sofia’s subpoena. In other words, it would be hard for him to argue that the pictures were fakes.

  The inside of the Captain’s Lounge matched the exterior view she had gotten last week. It looked basically the same as it had in the surveillance pictures, except sadder. But then, Jessica guessed that all bars looked sad in the morning light. In the pictures, it was a gaudy, crowded place lit by splashes of bright neon. Now it was empty, the neon was just dusty gray tubing, and the floor had worn spots and stains that the night shadows had hidden. The air smelled of stale beer.

  Tim Fitzpatrick looked like he belonged here. He was a big pile of a man who might once have been handsome and muscular. Now he was just a fat guy with a red face and gray roots. He met them inside the door and listened mutely as Sofia introduced them. Then he guided them to a poorly lit back room, saying little. The hairs on the back of Jessica’s neck stood up. Once again, she was glad Amy was with them.

  The room was a cramped office with a disorganized desk, an old computer connected to an older printer, two metal file cabinets, and several chairs. Fitzpatrick sat down behind the desk and folded his arms across his broad chest. “You said you wanted to talk to me here,” he said. “What do you want?”

  Sofia took the chair farthest from the door, and Jessica sat next to her. There was another chair, but Amy stood in the doorway, her gaze alternating between Fitzpatrick and the bar.

  “We had some questions about your document production,” Sofia said. “I think you might have left out some items.”

  Fitzpatrick’s brow furrowed. “I don’t think so,” he replied.

  “I’d like to look at the original of your ledger, if you don’t mind,” Sofia said.

  He frowned, but got up and walked over to one of the file cabinets. He yanked on a drawer, which screeched open. He took out a large red book, flipped through it, and handed it to Sofia. “Here are the pages you wanted.”