“He’s staying in San Leandro. Supposedly with his sister, but if she’s on the property there’s no evidence of it. He’s still on parole, supposedly. But from the company he keeps, you wouldn’t know it—the house is biker central. Plenty of known felons. Or so I’d assume. His PO must be a real soft touch.”
“In other words, if I’m going to talk to the guy, I shouldn’t try to do it on his turf.”
“Why would you try to talk to him?” Car asked with deep irritation. “The last thing I need is lawyers messing around in my investigation.”
To my knowledge, the only lawyer who’d ever done so in the past was me. Car waited for a beat. “It’s especially distressing when the lawyer in question has a personal agenda that he seems to be putting ahead of his client’s interest.”
“You’re talking about the picture I showed the witness last week.”
“Yeah, you hit the nail on the head right there. I think it’s time for you to tell me what it’s all about.”
I realized, of course, that he deserved to know. So I told him what I’d withheld before, summarizing Sims’s kidnapping of Carly at the baseball game and my father’s promise to deal with him, followed closely by the pair of brutal deaths.
“And you’ve kept this information from the police,” Car said grimly. “Or do you plan to sit on it for a while and then tell them?”
I didn’t shirk his gaze. “I plan to do what I need to do to keep my family safe.”
His tone was deeply sarcastic. “So you’re going to go talk to this guy. That’s your plan.”
“You have a better idea?”
I thought about telling Car what Wilder had said: Justice will be done. He’d also told me to leave Sims to him. But where justice was concerned, I trusted Bo about as far as I trusted the FBI.
Which was something else I continued to keep my investigator in the dark about.
“I might have one, if you give me a minute,” Car said. “Remember, this guy may well realize you suspect him of killing your dad.”
He looked up then, as if checking whether I was okay with him talking about my father’s murder the same way we’d have discussed any other case.
I nodded impatiently. He went on. “Sims doesn’t have a clue that you can place him at the scene of Edwards’s murder. That’s one potential advantage I can see. He thinks no one can connect him to his old prison buddy’s killing.”
“And he must think we can’t possibly connect him with the girl.”
“Which is true, at least for the time being. He’s got her so scared about who-knows-what that she’d rather die than implicate him. If you could just persuade her to tell you her name …”
“I know,” I said. “I’m trying. But what about Edwards?”
“I’m working that angle. It’s pretty murky so far. I told you before, it appears the guy was still a loyal soldier for the Aryan Brotherhood. It’s a safe bet the police know about his prison record, and if they do, they ought to put the pieces together pretty quick.”
“What pieces?” I was startled.
“I first was tracing his whereabouts before his prison sentence—basic background work. He’d been sent away in 2000. An address history has him living in a house in San Leandro prior to that. Guess who owned it?”
“I give up.” I pretended to check my phone.
Car grinned. “One of Wilder’s shell companies owns the house. It’s probably part of those properties Teddy and your dad were supposed to be in charge of. The thing is, Bo never lived there himself. But that’s not surprising, right?”
“Nope.” I saw where he was going. “You’ve got Sims showing up there, too.”
“Bull’s-eye.” Car nodded. “Edwards and Sims were sent to prison in 2000 for two different jobs. Prior to that, they were roommates in that house in San Leandro. Safe bet they were in the armed robbery business together.”
“They joined the AB in prison or before?”
“Likely they had a prior connection. Both their daddies had also done time. But before ‘98, neither of them had yet been in prison.”
“You know what they say—the only way you leave the AB is in a box.”
Car shook his head. “If that was the motive, Sims would’ve done the job himself. It’d have been his death warrant to use an outsider for Brotherhood business. Especially an African-American female.”
This was true, of course. “I figure Jane Doe was around seven years old when they went to prison. I showed her Sims’s picture. Her instant concern when she saw it was for Carly. She asked right away if Carly was in danger.”
“Who wouldn’t be worried about her?” Car asked. “These people’s threats aren’t empty, as the hit on your father and Dot proves. That’s why you can’t just rush in there and confront Sims.”
A wave of fear momentarily clouded my thoughts, but I didn’t swerve from my purpose. I made the next jump on my own. “So Jane Doe might have known Sims because she lived in his neighborhood?”
“It’s possible. The timing works, in theory. The cross-racial aspect is puzzling, given that this guy is a hard-core white supremacist. But I’m thinking what we have here could well be the key.”
“If they knew each other … Well, it’s hard to imagine.”
“The trouble with you lawyers is you always want to do things backward. You get an idea in your mind, then you set out to find the facts to fit it. But I don’t work that way, and neither does the real world. We need to trace the players, find the facts, then look for the pattern that connects them. We’ve already got the prison connection. That’s a big one.”
“So walk me through it.”
“I started with a list of the neighbors who’d have been there around the same time as Edwards and Sims. I included the apartment building next door, the house on the other side, the three directly across the street, and the one in back. I ran background checks on the names of everyone who’d lived at those addresses when our two guys were in the neighborhood.”
“And what did you come up with?”
“Nothing much. Just an unsolved murder from 1999, a few months before Sims and Edwards went to prison.” Car’s tone was nonchalant, as if, to him, such discoveries were routine. But he couldn’t hide the excitement in his eyes. “The victim’s name was Leann Ward. She lived in a four-unit apartment building next door to your boys. All in all, they were neighbors for at least ten years.
“She worked in restaurants, and in 1999, the year she died, she was employed at a new one on Park Boulevard up in the Oakland Hills. The Plum Tree. It happened to be a cash-only business. The place was held up one Friday night in November of that year by a pair of masked men.
“An interesting feature of the Plum Tree job is they took the restaurant back to front. They came in the rear, rounded up the back-of-the-house staff, locked them in a cooler, and gained access to the safe, all without the customers realizing what was going on. After they’d taken all of the house’s cash, they went through to the dining area and forced everyone there to empty their pockets.
“The job was going perfectly until one of the diners refused to hand over his Rolex. Maybe the dude tried some kind of move, or could be they just didn’t like his attitude. It ended with one of the robbers shooting him dead. But they escaped out the front and were long gone by the time the cops showed up.
“They cleared about ten grand in cash that night between the till, the safe, and the diners’ pockets, not counting the jewelry and watches. Not a bad haul if it had been a clean job with no repercussions. But not nearly the kind of money that can make up for having a murder charge hanging over your head.”
I saw where this was going. “And it’s especially insufficient if you’ve got an accomplice on the inside who wasn’t expecting anyone to get hurt.”
Car nodded. “The security camera in the back had been disconnected. The robbers wore masks and disguised their voices. The getaway car turned out to be stolen and was found hours later abandoned in a busy parking lot.
The only lead the police had was the idea that maybe someone on the inside knew the identity of the robbers.”
“What happened to Leann Ward?” I asked.
“It’s clear the police viewed her as a suspect. But what’s not clear is whether she’d begun to talk to them before she was killed. I could reach out to the detective who worked the case and try to learn more. Once I do that, however, word would probably end up filtering back to the DA’s office here in San Francisco, and there’s no guarantee that the Oakland cops would even talk to me. Up to this point, I haven’t left any tracks.”
“Good,” I told him. “I don’t know where this is going yet. Until I do, no footprints is the idea.”
“That’s what I figured. Anyway, this part of the story ends with Leann Ward turning up dead in her apartment about a week after the restaurant job with a needle in her arm.” Car’s voice paused. Then he went on, saying, “Her seven-year-old daughter was the one who discovered her. At first it looked like an accidental overdose, but then they found bruising on the body. Anyway, the investigation seems to have dead-ended.”
For a moment I couldn’t speak, reeling from what Car had told me about Ward’s daughter finding her dead, a detail that seemed dredged from my own past, leaving me feeling breathless.
“Sims and Edwards were picked up a month later for different jobs. I don’t imagine they were completely off the radar for the restaurant killing, or for Ward’s murder. All I know is the police apparently didn’t find the proof they needed to make a case.”
“You say Ward’s daughter found her. That means she must have been there when the men came.”
“Who knows?” Car said. “Probably. It’s just a detail that didn’t turn up in anything I saw. As I said, I could try and talk to the detectives who investigated the case, but …”
“Let’s not go there yet,” I said. I was beginning to sense the outlines of a plan emerging: If Jane Doe could give the police enough information to convict Sims for these two cold cases, perhaps the DA would look favorably on a lenient sentence for the more recent murder.
“The question is, why’d Ward help them, assuming she did?” I asked. “Money? It seems like a crazy risk. She had a good job, one that probably made her enough money to keep her and her child afloat. Why throw it all away?”
Car agreed this was the question that needed answering. “My next step would be to start knocking on doors,” he said. “There’s one neighbor, Jennifer Sullivan, from back then who’s still living in the building now. In the apartment beneath Leann’s. But I thought I should check first with you before I talked to her.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. I was thinking now that if Car ever needed to testify in Jane Doe’s case, there might be aspects of the case I’d prefer him not to know. I needed an angle that could lead to a plea bargain for Jane Doe, which he could help me with.
However, I also needed information I could leverage as blackmail against Sims or as a negotiating position with the FBI for my family and myself. In those two areas, I couldn’t rely on Car’s help. Rather, I was on my own.
“Look,” he said. “It could be the reason the police never made a case against your guys was that they weren’t involved. The only connection we have is that they lived next door to Ward.”
“With guys like this, isn’t that practically enough to convict them of murder?”
“Good point. Which brings us back to the question of you confronting Sims….”
“I want his sister’s address,” I said, deliberately provoking him.
Car rose, his beer half finished. “You’re not gonna get it from me.”
CHAPTER 11
The address for Sims’s sister wasn’t hard to find, as Car must have known. He also knew I wasn’t about to rush over there and cause a scene. If I was right about Sims being the murderer, that rash act almost certainly would get me killed, especially considering that Bo Wilder’s “protection” hadn’t saved my father.
Instead, I decided to focus on Jennifer Sullivan, the woman who’d lived beneath Leann Ward. After I confirmed that she hadn’t moved since Ward’s death, my initial thought was to call first, but then I decided just to head over there instead.
It was a building off Dolores Avenue in San Leandro. Arriving before 9 A.M., I felt nervous. It was hard to gauge the best time; maybe evening would have been better. I was aware that from the exterior walkway, I could be seen from the rental house next door, which, according to record, was still owned by Bo Wilder.
Jennifer Sullivan was about fifty years old. Over a turtleneck, she wore a man’s dress shirt marked by streaks of paint. More was visible on her jeans. A respirator mask hung around her neck. Her blond-gray hair was cut short and her eyes were wary. Understandably.
I introduced myself, mentioning I was a lawyer, explaining briefly why I was here. At the mention of Ward’s name, she gave a sigh, then stepped back to let me in.
Her apartment was furnished with secondhand pieces I could see had been selected for both style and comfort. Vertical stacks of landscapes were propped against the wall. I hadn’t imagined this possible witness as a painter. But I’m not sure what I’d expected.
“The police asked me every question in the world eight years ago,” Sullivan said. “In the end, they just gave up.”
“That’s one of the reasons I’m here,” I told her. “To see if there’s anything they might have missed.”
We both recognized that this attempt at justifying my presence was insufficient rationale for knocking on her door to ask questions about an eight-year-old killing. Still, she said I might as well sit down. Two of the four kitchen chairs were free of clutter. She microwaved water for tea, brought me a mug with a tea bag in it, then dropped into the other chair.
“What case are you working on that might be related to Leann’s death?”
I told her I wasn’t free to discuss it. Dissatisfied with this answer, she lit a cigarette.
It was my turn now to ask a question. “What makes you say the police gave up in the end?”
She blew a cloud of smoke, then stabbed out the cigarette in an angry gesture that suggested the police’s failure to delve into Leann’s murder was simply one in the series of grievances that composed her life.
“I knew her better than practically anyone. Better than anyone else in this building, that’s for sure. Every time she or her daughter moved up there, I’d hear it. And late at night after she got home, she used to sit out on her balcony, and I’d sit on my porch, and we’d talk even though we couldn’t see each other.”
“What was her daughter’s name?”
“Alice.” Hearing this, I felt brief elation, followed by sadness. Alice Ward. It now seemed no victory to uncover what my client had sought to hide from the world.
“I’d like to find Alice and talk to her about her mother,” I said. In the deeper sense, this was, of course, true. “What happened to her after she discovered Leann dead?”
“I heard the yelling and ran down. I saw Leann, lying there with the needle in her arm. Alice was shaking her, saying, ‘Wake up, Mommy! Wake up!’ but her eyes were open, staring. That wasn’t Leann. She was no druggie. I knew right away things weren’t what they seemed, that she wouldn’t have given it all up for a needle. I got Alice out of there and up to my apartment, called 911.
“I had Alice here with me for a few days. Then Social Services came. I’d love to believe she turned out all right, but I guess I know better.”
I kept my face neutral. “Maybe the police were wrong. Maybe it was an accidental overdose, just as it seemed.”
She shook her head. “Someone held her down, covered her mouth while they injected her. She couldn’t have given herself those bruises.”
“I’m a criminal defense attorney,” I told her. “We never seem to run out of cases demonstrating that forensic science is an emperor with no clothes. Ideas presented for decades as scientific certainties are revealed to be nothing more than guesses tailored to fit
a specific result. Bite marks, postmortem bruising—all tea leaves.” I paused. “But let me ask you—where was Alice’s room in relation to her mother’s?”
“Next to it,” Sullivan said. “On the other side of the wall.”
“So at least two men break in to the apartment, surprise her mother, hold her down, forcibly inject her with a lethal dose of heroin, and Alice doesn’t hear a thing?”
“Children sleep soundly.”
“I’ll give you that. But you were downstairs, right? And according to you, every time someone moves up there, you know it. Yet you didn’t hear anything?”
She stared back at me, then gave a tiny shake of her head.
“If you had, you’d have called the police, right? And you didn’t see anyone come or leave that night, or you’d have told the police what you’d seen. Just as Alice would have told them if she’d woken up and noticed strangers in her apartment. But you didn’t see anything, and evidently neither did she.”
She was becoming angry. “I think maybe it’s time for you to leave.”
“I’m not accusing you. I’m just stating a fact. If I’m wrong, I’m sure you’ll tell me.”
“You’re not wrong,” she said in a flat voice. “I didn’t hear anything. The first Alice knew anything was wrong was when she woke up and found her mother dead.”
“So maybe there was no disturbance, no struggle.”
“She was no junkie, I’m telling you. She wouldn’t have done that.”
“The week before she died, there was a robbery at the restaurant where she worked. A customer was killed when he refused to give up his watch. You must have known that. There were even intimations she was perhaps somehow involved.”
“We never discussed it, but I’d read the news.”
She seemed about to say something, then stopped. I expected her to further insist that her neighbor could have done no such thing. But she surprised me by stating, “Obviously, they murdered her to keep her from talking.”
“‘They’ meaning who?”
I could see she was getting uncomfortable with the conversation. But now that she’d spoken this much, she needed to voice the rest of the thought.
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