Women's Murder Club [10] 10th Anniversary

by James Patterson

  Yuki asked, “When did you contact the police, Mr. White?”

  “Last week. When I saw the story about this trial in the paper. I recognized Mr. Martin’s picture.”

  “Thank you, sir. Your witness,” Yuki said to opposing counsel.

  Hoffman stood, walked across the well, and greeted the witness.

  “Mr. White, I think you know that the serial number of the gun you sold Mr. Martin is not on the sales receipt. Did you file a transfer of registration, as required?”

  “I’m not a gun dealer. I’m in the antiques business. I bought that gun as part of a box lot at an auction last year.”

  “So you didn’t comply with the law?”

  “Like I just said, I didn’t even know there was a gun in the box I bought for thirty bucks. I’m not a gun dealer. I work alone in the store. Man comes in, sees the gun in the case. He also bought a fountain pen. And a book on electricity from the 1920s. These things are memorabilia. I wrote up a receipt. I didn’t know I had to file anything. Look, I checked his gun license. I don’t think a lot of people with my kind of business would even have done that.”

  Stephen White cast his eyes toward Yuki as if to say, “Did I just get into trouble here?”

  Hoffman continued his cross-examination.

  “So, to be clear, you didn’t write down the serial number of the gun you sold to Mr. Martin on the receipt. Do you have the serial number anywhere?”

  “Extremely doubtful.”

  “So there’s no way to know if the gun you sold Dennis Martin is the gun that killed him, isn’t that right?”

  “I didn’t say I did know.”

  “That’s all, Mr. White. Thank you.”

  The judge folded his hands on his desk. “Redirect, Ms. Castellano?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  Yuki opened the folder in front of her, pulled a photograph from the file, and walked toward the witness. This was going just the way she’d hoped it would.

  “Mr. White. This is a picture of the murder gun, a Smith and Wesson twenty-two. Is this the type of gun you sold to Mr. Martin?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many of these guns did you sell in April last year?”

  “I sold just the one.”

  “How many twenty-two Smith and Wesson guns did you sell in the entire year?”

  “I sold just the one.”

  “To Mr. Dennis Martin?”

  “Yes, exactly like I said. I wrote his name on that receipt.”

  “Thanks, Mr. White. I’m finished, Your Honor.”

  Yuki kept her expression neutral as she walked back to the prosecution table, but she was doing handsprings in her mind.

  White was a very credible witness. He’d checked Dennis Martin’s gun license and driver’s license and he’d positively identified Dennis Martin from his photo. And he’d positively sold Dennis Martin a gun.

  It wasn’t proof—but it was damning testimony.

  Yuki waited for Stephen White to step down from the box and then called her next witness.

  Chapter 54

  I STOOD IN THE BACK of the packed courtroom watching Yuki interrogate level-two investigator Sharon Carothers, the CSI who had tested Candace Martin’s hands for GSR less than a half hour after Dennis Martin was gunned down.

  I’d known Carothers for about four years and had worked a dozen cases with her, and I had never known her to make a mistake. She went strictly by the book but knew how to look around corners without breaking the rules.

  “Ms. Carothers, are you the lead investigator on the Martin case?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Did you test Dr. Martin’s hands for gunshot residue at approximately six-forty-five on the night of September fourteenth?” Yuki asked.

  “I did. The test was positive for GSR.”

  A woman sitting near the wall broke into a fit of wet coughing that seemed like it would never quit. Yuki waited it out, every last sputter, then asked, “Ms. Carothers, did you ask the defendant if she fired the gun that was found on the scene?”

  “Yes, I did. She said she had.”

  “And what was her explanation for firing the gun?”

  “She had one explanation before I tested her hands and a more detailed explanation afterward.”

  “She had two explanations?” Yuki said, turning to shoot Candace Martin a look. Had that look been a gun, it would’ve gone bang.

  I was torn, both rooting for Yuki and at the same time feeling compassion and fear for Candace Martin. A lot of people I knew and respected had bet their careers on their belief that Candace Martin had killed her husband. Could they all be wrong?

  Why was my gut telling me that she was innocent?

  Yuki said to her witness, “Please tell us about those two explanations.”

  Carothers turned unblinking eyes on the jury and said, “Before I did the test for GSR, Dr. Martin told me that an intruder shot her husband. After the test, she repeated that an intruder had shot her husband but added that when she called out to her husband, the intruder dropped the gun and took off. She said that she picked up the gun and ran after the intruder. That she had fired out toward the street to scare him off.”

  I left the courtroom quietly. I was still nowhere on the Richardson case and Brady had made it superclear to me that the Candace Martin case was closed.

  What he didn’t know was that I had gone through the Martin case file last night. I had read all of Paul Chi’s notes and had found a lead I wanted to check out. I needed to check it out so that I could shut down Candace Martin’s voice in my head saying, “I didn’t kill him, Sergeant. Please help me. I’m on trial for my life.”

  Chapter 55

  WHAT I HAD GLEANED from Chi’s notes was that Caitlin and Duncan Martin had a piano teacher who came to their home to give them lessons twice a week.

  His name was Bernard St. John.

  Chi had interviewed St. John during the Martin investigation, and according to his notes, St. John had no idea who the killer was. In fact, he’d made a point of saying that he did not believe that Candace Martin shot her husband.

  Chi had never interviewed St. John again, but because the piano teacher felt so strongly that Candace Martin was innocent, I wanted to hear from him how and why he had formed that opinion.

  St. John’s rented apartment was in a Victorian house in the mostly residential 2400 block of Octavia Street. He was expecting me, and when I rang the bell on the ground floor, he buzzed me in.

  I sized St. John up at his doorway.

  He was in his early forties, five foot eight, with a slim build and spiky hair. I followed him into his apartment and saw that he clearly liked drama in his furnishings. The parlor was gold with red draperies, faux zebra-skin rugs were flung about, and a very nice Steinway grand sat near the bay window.

  After offering me a chair, St. John sat down on a tassel-fringed hassock and told me he was glad that I had called.

  “But I don’t understand why the police want to talk to me now,” he said. “No one wanted me as a witness.”

  “You weren’t in the Martin house the night of the murder, were you?”

  “No. I wasn’t there. I saw no gun. Heard no threats,” he said with a shrug.

  “From what you said in our phone call, I take it that you were privy to certain behaviors in the household that you thought might be important.”

  “Well, I have some thoughts and observations, Sergeant. I certainly do. Starting with when Candace had breast cancer a couple of years ago.”

  St. John needed no encouragement to fill me in on the last two years of his employment with the Martins, a story laced with petty complaints and gossip. Still, the fact that he was a gossip didn’t make him a bad witness.

  On the contrary.

  “Candace was bitchy to everyone when she was in chemo,” he said. “Especially to Ellen.”

  “Ellen Lafferty. The children’s nanny.”

  “That’s right,” St. John told me. “I don’t kno
w when it started, but it was well over a year ago when Ellen confided in me,” St. John said. “She told me that she was having an affair with Dennis.”

  “Why didn’t you tell this to the police?”

  “I didn’t think it was important. Is it?”

  “I’m not sure. But tell me—why did you say to Inspector Chi that you didn’t think Candace was capable of shooting her husband?”

  “She’s a doctor. ‘First, do no harm.’ Killing Dennis would have harmed everyone in the house. And look. It did.”

  I closed my notebook and thanked St. John for his time. As I left his apartment, I thought about Phil Hoffman telling me that what he knew about Ellen Lafferty could cause the charges against Candace Martin to be dismissed.

  Candace had speculated that her husband had been sleeping with Ellen Lafferty, and now Bernard St. John had confirmed that part of her theory.

  Had Lafferty gotten jealous, as Candace had suggested?

  Was Ellen Lafferty the so-called intruder who killed Dennis Martin?

  Chapter 56

  I THOUGHT PAUL Chi might still be steamed at me for questioning the slam-dunk first-degree murder charge against Candace Martin. If he wasn’t fuming now, he would be after I told him I was still turning over stones on his case, that I still wasn’t prepared to let it go.

  It was about 5 p.m. when I brought him a latte and sat down across from him at his very tidy desk in the squad room.

  Chi looked at me, his expression absolutely blank, and said, “You still trying to pry open my closed case?”

  I nodded. “You just have to let me get this out of my system,” I said. “If you were me, you’d do the same.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  “You remember Bernard St. John?” I asked him.

  “The piano teacher. How could I forget that guy?”

  “I just spoke with him.”

  “I’m not pissed off, Lindsay. I just want to understand you better. Fifty homicides a year come through here. We solve only half of them. And that’s in a good year. So, here we got one that we actually close. Why has this case gotten to you?”

  “I can’t explain it.”

  “Can’t explain an insult to me, McNeill, Brady, the SFPD as a whole, and the DA’s entire office? You think this is going to score us any points with the DA?”

  “I’ve got to do this, Paul. If Candace Martin is guilty, my poking around isn’t going to change that.”

  “But you don’t think she is guilty, do you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Chi grinned. A rare occurrence. Like a blue moon in June.

  “What’s funny?” I asked him.

  “I like this about you, Lindsay. You never give up. But you know, Brady doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  “I’ll deal with him when I have to.”

  Chi shrugged and said, “So what did Bernard St. John tell you?”

  “That Dennis Martin was sleeping with Ellen Lafferty. Lafferty confided in him.”

  “Whoa-ho. Well, there’s your motive, Sergeant. You’re making the case against Dr. Martin even stronger. Candace found out her husband was sleeping with the nanny, so she shot him. Motive as old as the history of mankind.”

  “Or—what if it was the other way around?”

  “You think Lafferty was the shooter?”

  “It’s not so crazy, Paul. I want to talk to you about that contract killer. Gregor Guzman.”

  Chi just shook his head and sighed.

  “Doggedness suits you, Lindsay. Okay, what do you want to know about Gregor Guzman?”

  “Tell me everything you’ve got.”

  Chapter 57

  AS CHI TAPPED on the computer keyboard, he told me, “Eleven hits are attributed to Guzman—that’s eleven unsolved that match his MO.”

  I scooted the chair so close to Chi’s desk, I could see my reflection in the monitor.

  “It’s a very elegant MO,” Chi was saying. “First, he’s stealthy. He’s never seen and he leaves no evidence. Two, he always uses a twenty-two and his kill shots are head shots. His first shot does the job. His second shot is almost on top of the first. I’d say that second shot is just for insurance. He’s a hell of a marksman.”

  “Dennis Martin took two shots to the chest.”

  “That’s correct.”

  Chi hit some keys on his computer and brought up a series of photos of the elusive hit man. The first was a grainy black-and-white still shot that had been lifted from a video of a man leaving Circus Circus, the famous casino in Vegas.

  The next photo was of a balding man in a car, taken by a tollbooth surveillance cam outside of Bogotá.

  The third picture was of possibly the same man in a dark suit, standing beside an advertising kiosk, watching the crowd enter a public building. The picture was titled, “Lincoln Center, New York.”

  The last picture was the money shot.

  It was taken at night with a long lens pointed at the passenger-side window of a dark SUV, time-dated September 1 of last year. Candace Martin was in profile in the passenger’s seat. The way her hair fell obscured part of her face.

  Next to her in the driver’s seat was a balding man who had turned to face her. His features were difficult to make out because of the shadow inside the car’s interior.

  It was hard to say if the man pictured was Gregor Guzman or even if the woman in the passenger seat was Candace Martin.

  “How sure are you that this man is Guzman?” I asked Chi.

  “All pictures of Guzman are educated guesswork. We have no official photos to compare them to, but the face-recognition software found an eighty-three percent correlation between the four photos I just showed you.”

  “Paul, if your case hung on this picture in the SUV, Candace Martin would walk.”

  “The DA wanted to use it. It shows premeditation. I gotta admit something to you, Lindsay.”

  “I’m right here, Paul. And I’m listening.”

  “Apart from this piece-a-crap picture with Candace Martin, no one in law enforcement has reported seeing Gregor Guzman in the past three years. Who knows if he’s even alive?”

  Chapter 58

  CINDY STOOD AT the windy corner of Turk and Jones just before six that evening. The Tenderloin was a rough neighborhood, arguably the worst in San Francisco.

  As a light rain came down, the homeless pulled up their hoodies, hunched over their shopping carts, crouched under the eaves of the rent-by-the-hour Ethel Hotel and Aunt Vicky’s, the down-and-dirty gay bar next to it.

  Cindy buttoned her coat and pulled up her collar, staring at the cab company across the street that took up the northeast corner of the intersection. There were two plate-glass windows at the street level, each with a flickering neon sign, one reading QUICK EXPRESS TAXI, the other, CORPORATE ACCOUNTS WELCOME. There was nothing welcoming about that storefront.

  Rich had told her to meet him in a coffee shop a couple of doors down, but Cindy couldn’t wait. She called Rich, and when she got his voice mail, she left him a message and then crossed Turk against the light.

  As she approached Quick Express, Cindy noticed the cab company’s vehicle entrance on Turk: a cave of an opening that sheltered a ramp down to the lower parking levels. Yellow cabs were lined up at the curb. Men stood in the drizzle, smoking on the sidewalk, taking swigs from paper bags.

  Cindy walked up to the window and saw the dispatch office on the other side of the glass, much like a ticket office in a movie theater but bigger. She knocked on the glass.

  The man in the office was regular height, in his forties, with dark hair and a pale moon face. He was wearing a rumpled plaid shirt and khakis. He looked agitated as he worked the phone lines while delivering blunt instructions into a radio mic.

  Cindy had to speak loudly over the sound of incoming radio calls.

  “I’m Cindy Thomas,” she said into the grill. “Are you the owner here?”

  “No, I’m the manager and dispatcher, Al Wysocki. What can I do
for you?”

  “I’m a reporter at the Chronicle,” she said. She dug her press pass out of her handbag and held it against the window.

  “What’s this about?”

  “One of your drivers might have saved someone who was having a heart attack. The person who called the paper only remembers that the driver was in a taxi minivan,” Cindy lied.

  “You got a name?”

  “No.”

  “And what’s the driver look like?”

  “All this person remembers is that the minivan had a movie ad on it.”

  “Gee. A movie ad,” Wysocki said. “Okay, look. We have six vans in the fleet. Three are in. Three are out. But you understand, none of the drivers has a call on any of these cabs. They drive what’s here when their shifts start.”

  “May I take a look anyway? It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Knock yourself out.”

  Wysocki told Cindy that the garage had three levels—the main floor, which she was on, and two subterranean levels. Two of the vans were on the first floor down, and the third was on the second floor down.

  Cindy thanked the man and began her tour of the parked taxis in the dark, grimy, stinking-from-gas-fumes underground garage. Twenty minutes later, she’d located all three vans, none of which had a movie ad on its back.

  She took the stairs back to the main floor and left her card with the dispatcher, taking his card in return.

  “Okay if I call you again?”

  “Feel free,” said Wysocki, who grabbed his microphone and barked a street address to a cabbie.

  Cindy left the garage through the front door on Turk and found Richie waiting for her on the street corner.

  “You were suppposed to wait for me in the coffee shop,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Rich. I was a bit early so I thought I’d follow up on something. Honey, this is just legwork. And this is just a cab company.”

  “A cab company, and you suspect a cabbie of being the last person to see a woman who was drugged and raped.”