Women's Murder Club [08] The 8th Confession

by James Patterson

  Which meant that she was out of her league.

  She called a number she knew by heart. “Rich,” she said, “we’ve got to talk.”

  Chapter 80

  CONKLIN FOUND SKIP WILKINSON at MacBain’s, one hand in a bowl of peanuts, the other around a mug of freshly drawn brew. Wilkinson was a skinny kid with a buzz cut, went to the academy with Conklin. He was now in Narcotics and Vice, or as he called it, “Drugs and Whores.”

  “So you want to talk about Bagman?” Wilkinson said.

  “Anything you can tell me. He’s a homicide that’s going cold.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t tell you too much. We had a few brushes with him. He was strictly a small-time drug dealer.”

  “What kind of drugs?”

  “Crack. I brought you his file.”

  Wilkinson lifted a dog- eared folder out of his battered briefcase, passed it to Conklin. “We never had enough probable cause to arrest him. Sickening, what he was doing.”

  “What was that?” Conklin asked. There was no arrest sheet, no mug shot, just handwritten notes stapled to the back of the folder marked BAGMAN JESUS. They hadn’t known his name.

  “He was turning teenage girls into pushers. He had a network of them. Sent them out on the street to sell. I’m not sure he wasn’t having sex with them all.

  “This is all from street talk, not reliable sources. So we planted a couple of female cops on the street, waited for him to take the bait, but he didn’t do it.”

  “And you gave up? Look, I’m not being critical. We haven’t had time to work his murder more than a handful of hours —”

  “We didn’t quit,” Wilkinson said. “But as I said, Conklin, he was small-time. Crack is bad, but we’re being overrun by meth, which is far worse. Kids were making it in their basements. It was easy and cheap, but since the crackdown on ephedrine, meth has become big business.

  “It’s huge, going out of control. Organized crime is getting involved. The stuff is streaming in from Mexico. I don’t mean to chew your ear off, but it’s getting away from us. And it’s killing good kids. One hit, and they don’t stand a chance.”

  Conklin said, “So Rodney Booker was a crack dealer. We didn’t have that.”

  “We would’ve landed Bagman eventually, but we had bigger dogs to worry about. And then someone got to that bastard first. And I say great. Glad they took that fucker down and made sure he was down for good.”

  Chapter 81

  AT JUST BEFORE EIGHT on a gray morning, Cindy stood between me and Conklin, pointing her finger in the direction of a young woman striding up Fifth Street.

  “That’s her. Red shirt, blond braid. That’s Sammy.”

  Sammy heard her name, turned her head, saw Conklin sprinting toward her, and took off like she had jets on the heels of her shoes. She flew off the sidewalk and into the street, ducked in front of a fish truck that was accelerating as the light turned green.

  I thought the truck might have clipped her — but the gears ground into third and the truck sped up as Conklin rounded the tailgate. I was running, too, slipping through openings in the clogged street and sidewalks, barking out, “Police! Step aside!” as I ran.

  I could hear Conklin huffing, that’s how close I was, when a crack in the sidewalk grabbed the toe of my shoe and I went down. My breath left me.

  I staggered to my feet, and then a citizen pointed the way. By the time I caught up with them, Conklin had boxed Sammy into an alcove between two buildings, was yelling to the wide-eyed and panting kid, “Stop running and listen.”

  A cluster of homeless people rose up from the sidewalk outside the soup kitchen, some sidling away, others circling around Conklin and Sammy. It was a menacing crew, and there were a lot of them. I flashed my badge, and the grumbling crowd backed off, gave us room.

  “We want to talk to you at the station,” Conklin was saying to the girl. “You’ll come in, be a good citizen. Understand? Cooperate, and we won’t book you.”

  “No. I don’t understand. I haven’t done anything.”

  “See, I want to believe you,” said Inspector Conklin of the melting brown eyes. “But I don’t.”

  Chapter 82

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Sammy, last name still unknown, sat across from us in Interview Room Number One, the video camera peering from its spider perch in the corner of the ceiling.

  Sammy had no ID, but she admitted to being eighteen. She was legal, and we could question her. I’d done my best to befriend her, tell her I understood why she was frightened and offer her assurances, but the kid wasn’t buying it.

  Her answers were evasive, and Sammy’s crappy attitude told me that she was hiding something big. And as pissed off as I was, I had a growing sense that whatever she knew could help us clear the Bagman Jesus case — maybe today.

  The sullen teenager had dark circles under her eyes and the hollow cheeks of a meth addict going through withdrawal. She tore open a roll of Life Savers and ground the candy between her molars. I smelled Wild Cherry, and for the first time, I could swear I smelled her fear.

  Was Sammy afraid that Bagman’s killer would come after her if she talked? Or was she implicated in his death?

  I tried again, nicely. “Sammy, what’s bothering you?”

  “Being here.”

  “Look, we’re not trying to scare you. We’re trying to find out who killed Bagman. Help us, and we’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”

  “Oh, like that’s the problem.”

  “Help me understand. What is the problem?”

  The tough-girl mask dropped.

  Sammy shouted, “I’m just a kid! I’m just a kid!”

  That got to me and made me want to back off.

  Instead, I bore down. I took off my jacket so that Sammy could see my gun.

  I said, “Cut the crap. Tell me what you know, or you’ll be spending the best years of your life in prison as an accessory after the fact in Rodney Booker’s murder.”

  Conklin went along. He deferred to me, called me “Sergeant,” made his eyes hard whenever Sammy looked to him for help.

  We never gave the kid in her a chance.

  Chapter 83

  CONKLIN HAD TOLD ME that Bagman had a network of girl crack dealers, but I hadn’t envisioned a girl like Sammy: still pretty, well-dressed, a white girl who spoke as though she’d had a family-values upbringing and a good education.

  How had Bagman gotten his hooks into her?

  When I leaned on Sammy, she teared up, so Conklin pushed a box of tissues across the table. Sammy dried her eyes, blew her nose, gulped some air.

  And then she started to talk.

  “We sold crack, okay? Bagman paid us with crystal, and we used it with him. Spent days and days blowing clouds, not eating or sleeping, just having out-of-control sex!” she shouted into my face. “These outrageous orgasms, ten, twenty times, one on top of the other —”

  “Sounds great,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Sammy said, missing the sarcasm. “Unreal. Then he’d drive us to work, and when we’d made our numbers, we’d come home to Bagman Jesus.”

  “How many girls are ‘we’?”

  Sammy shrugged. “Three or four. No more than five living in the house at any one time.”

  “Write down their names,” Conklin said, bringing the girl a pad and pen. Sammy came back to earth, gave Conklin a look meaning Are you crazy?

  I asked her, “What do you mean, ‘drive us to work’? Drive what?”

  “Bagman had a van, of course.”

  Sammy’s voice was starting to crack. Conklin went out of the room, returned with a high-octane cola, and handed it to the girl, who drained the can in one long swallow.

  I thought about Rodney Booker, the handsome man who’d gone to Stanford and joined the peace corps, then taken a hard turn into the drug business, giving it an original and especially cruel twist.

  Sammy had described the horror, seemingly without understanding what was making me sick. Booker had kept a willi
ng harem of teenage crack dealers, and he’d addicted them to a drug that delivered mind-blowing sex — until they burned out and died.

  Booker was a modern-day devil.

  Of course someone had killed him.

  I asked Sammy where Booker’s van was, and she shrugged again. “I have no idea. Have I done my civic duty? May I go, please?”

  Conklin pushed on. “So let me get this straight. Booker was cooking meth in his house?”

  “He was for a while, but it was dangerous.”

  Sammy sighed long and loud, remained silent for a few seconds, then resumed.

  “My whole life dried up when Bagman died. Now my freaking parents are ‘cleaning me up.’ You know what it’s like to drop down a well? That’s my life. I’m going out of my mind.”

  “ Uh-huh,” Conklin said. I admired his tenacity. “You told Cindy Thomas that you know who killed Bagman —”

  “I never said that.”

  “Sergeant?” Conklin said.

  “We have enough,” I said, standing up, putting on my jacket.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” Conklin said to Sammy. “Anything you say can and will be used against you —”

  “You’re arresting me?”

  Sammy stiffened as Conklin got her to her feet, clamped the cuffs around her wrists.

  “I want my phone call,” she said. “I want my father.”

  Chapter 84

  SAMMY’S FULL NAME was Samantha Pincus, as we found out when her father blew into the squad room like a winter squall.

  Neil Pincus was a lawyer who worked pro bono for the down-and-out habitués of the Mission District, where he and his brother had a two-man law practice in the same building that housed From the Heart.

  I sized Pincus up as he stood over me at my desk and demanded to see his daughter. He was five ten, a taut 160, late forties, balding, and his scalp was sweating from the steam that was shooting out of his ears.

  “You’re holding my daughter for something she said without counsel present? I’m going to sue you each individually and I’m going to sue the city, do you understand? You didn’t read her her rights until she indicted herself.”

  “True,” I said. “But this wasn’t a custodial interrogation, Mr. Pincus. Her rights weren’t violated.”

  “Sam didn’t know that. You terrified her. What you did was tantamount to torture. I’m a heck of a victims’ rights lawyer, and I’m going to send the two of you to hell.”

  Jacobi was watching from behind the glass walls of his office, and twelve other pairs of eyes in the squad room were cast down, sneaking peeks.

  I rose to my full five-foot-ten, plus two inches for my shoes, and said, “Take it down a few notches, Mr. Pincus. Right now this is just between the four of us. Help your daughter. Get her to cooperate, and we won’t book her.”

  Pincus grunted in disgust, nodded, then followed us to the interrogation room where his daughter was waiting, hands cuffed in front of her. Her father squeezed her shoulder, then wrenched a chair out from the table and sat down.

  “I’m listening.”

  “Mr. Pincus, by her own admission, your daughter is a junkie and a dealer,” I said. “She was involved with Rodney Booker, also known as Bagman Jesus, now violently deceased. Samantha was not only selling crank for Booker but she told a very credible source that she knows who killed him. She’s a material witness, that’s why we’re holding her, and we need her to tell us who Booker’s killer is.”

  “I’m not admitting she was dealing,” Pincus told us, “but if she was, she’s not doing it now and she’s not using either.”

  “Well, everything’s fine, then,” I snapped.

  “Listen, her mother and I are on her. Early curfew. No cell phone. No computer. She volunteers in a soup kitchen so she can see how bad life can get — and she works underneath my office.”

  Pincus lifted his daughter’s cuffed wrists so I could see her watch. “It’s a GPS. She can’t go anywhere without me knowing. Sam has become a model of sobriety. I give you my word.”

  “Is that all, Mr. Pincus?”

  Samantha wailed.

  “Where’s your decency?” Pincus spat. “Booker was scum. He was dealing to kids who sold to kids. Not just to my daughter but to other girls. Many good girls. We reported him.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” I demanded.

  “The Fifth Street Association. Look it up. I filed a complaint on behalf of the association in February, and again in March. Again in April. The cops did nothing. We were told, ‘If you don’t have proof, fill out a form.’ ”

  “You own a gun, Mr. Pincus?”

  “No. And I’m asking you for a break. Release Samantha into my custody. Jail, even for a night, could destroy this child.”

  We agreed to let the girl go, gave Pincus a warning not to let her leave town.

  As soon as the two had left the squad room, Conklin and I went to our desks and called up Pincus’s name in the database. He didn’t have a sheet, but Conklin found something else.

  “Neil Pincus has a license to carry, and he’s got a registered Rohm twenty-two,” Conklin said over the top of his monitor. “A cheap dirty little pistol for a cheap dirty little lawyer. That son of a bitch lied.”

  Chapter 85

  CONKLIN AND I were at the door to Pincus and Pincus, Attorneys- at-Law, by noon, and we had four other cops with us. When the door opened, we pushed past the reception area, and I handed Neil Pincus a warrant.

  I said, “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Pincus blinked stupidly. “What?”

  “Did you think we wouldn’t find out about the gun?”

  “That… thing was stolen,” Pincus said. “I reported it.” The lawyer pushed back his chair, said, “I kept it in here.”

  I opened a desk drawer, bottom right, saw the metal gun box. I lifted the lid, stared at a cardboard box for a Rohm .22. The box was empty.

  “You kept this gun box locked?”

  “No.”

  “Where’d you keep the ammo?”

  “Same drawer. Look. I know that’s a violation, but if I was going to need the gun, I was going to need it fast. Sergeant, I rarely opened the box,” said Pincus. “It could have been stolen any time in the last six months. You turn your back for a second around here, take a phone call or take a piss —”

  I stepped in front of Pincus, jerked open the rest of his desk drawers as Conklin did the same to brother Al’s matching desk in the next room.

  Then the six of us jacked open the file cabinets, tossed the supply room, looked under the cushions on the cracked leather sofa. After a short while, the Pincus brothers settled down, talked over us to their clients, acted normally and entirely as though we weren’t there.

  When we came up empty, Conklin and I visited both of the Pincus homes, one in Forest Hill and the other on Monterey Boulevard. Good neighborhoods, places where bad kids didn’t happen. We met the two nice wives, Claudia and Reva, both of whom had been asked by their husbands to cooperate.

  We acquainted ourselves with the insides of the Pincus family closets, cupboards, hope chests, and tool chests, and the Pincus wives voluntarily let us search their cars.

  Their places were as brilliantly clean as white sheets hanging from the line on a sunshiny day.

  Executing those warrants had been physically and emotionally draining. I was wrung out and depressed, and we had nothing to show for our work.

  Had Neil Pincus’s gun been used to kill Bagman?

  I still didn’t know, but if I had to guess where that gun was now, I’d say the shooter had dropped it off the bridge sometime after Rodney Booker’s execution. And at present it was being buried by the shifting sands at the bottom of San Francisco Bay.

  Chapter 86

  CONKLIN AND I got into the squad car we’d parked outside Alan Pincus’s house.

  I owed Jacobi a call and an explanation, and knew he’d go bug-nuts when I told him we’d spent our day chasing Bagman’s hit ma
n when a psycho was dropping the mayor’s friends with a poisonous reptile.

  I was about to say so to Conklin, but now that we were alone, the elephant in the car could not be ignored.

  Conklin turned down the radio, jumbled the car keys in his hand for a moment, and said, “Cindy talked to you about… uh… us.”

  “Yep. It was quite a surprise,” I said, holding his gaze until he looked away.

  “She said you were upset.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Linds —”

  “Hey. I’m fine. Fine,” I lied. “Once I thought about it, I realized you two are a natural.”

  “It’s only been, like, a week.”

  “Whatever. As Jacobi says, ‘I love you guys.’ ”

  Conklin laughed, and that laugh told all. He was having a wonderful time with my bodacious, cheeky, bighearted friend, and he didn’t want to stop.

  The guy who’d kissed me last week — that guy was gone. Sure, I’d rejected him, and sure, I didn’t own him. But even so, it hurt. I missed the Richie who’d mooned over me.

  I wondered if his sleeping with Cindy was a roundabout way of sleeping with me. It was a crummy thought, hardly worthy of me, but — ha! — I thought it anyway.

  And I remembered Yuki’s advice: “Let him go. Let yourself go.”

  Conklin was watching my face for a sign, perhaps my blessing, so I was glad when knuckles rapped on my window. It was Alan Pincus, home early from work.

  He was bigger than his older brother, had more hair. Otherwise, they were clones.

  I buzzed down the glass.

  “Sergeant Boxer? Are you people done? Because I want to get my family life back to normal.”

  “We’re done for now, but we’re not going away.”