14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14)

by James Patterson

  Hundreds of cops in dress blues packed the chapel and spilled outside, many of them crying, and they formed a thick blue wall behind the broken family at the graveside, where four caskets, two of them child-size, were slowly lowered into the ground.

  The pervasive grief was cut with anger that these hideous, nauseating deaths had happened—and had happened to a cop and his family.

  I’d hardly known Calhoun, but I vividly remembered his optimism that morning at the check-cashing store where three copycat Windbreaker cops had been gunned down by passing patrolmen.

  And that thought nagged me and wouldn’t quite let me go.

  Finally, the funeral was over.

  Conklin and I climbed up into his Bronco and crept along with the traffic moving out of the cemetery. We slowly passed the block where my mother was buried and then the place where Yuki’s hilarious mother, Keiko, had been laid to rest. Washed over by images of so many other funerals, we left Colma and took 101 back to San Francisco.

  When we were within the city limits, I wanted to hit a saloon, a quiet one where old barflies would be watching a ball game and where no one knew my name. I wanted time and space to get my feelings under control before I went home to my family.

  But Conklin said, “I want to look at the Calhoun house again.”

  “Why, Rich?”

  “I just do.”

  I sighed. “OK. If that’s what you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

  CHAPTER 60

  CONKLIN PARKED IN front of the green house on Texas Street. We sat quietly for a moment under a telephone line loaded with blackbirds, then got out, ducked under the tape, broke the seal on the front door, and shouldered it open.

  The murder house had no trace of life in it, but it smelled bad, and in the seconds before we threw on the lights, I could almost hear Marie Calhoun screaming.

  Finally, I suggested we each take a room and try to look at it with fresh eyes. Conklin wanted to see the boys’ room.

  I took the kitchen.

  The first thing I saw was the spoon and bowl in the sink with the remains of a helping of chocolate chip ice cream. I imagined that this had been someone’s last meal. There were blood-spattered drawings of Easter rabbits and Little League baseball schedules stuck up on the fridge with magnets, five feet above the chalk marks on the linoleum floor where Marie Calhoun’s body had come to rest.

  The refrigerator door was open, and the food had gone bad. The smell of rotting meat permeated the room. I looked into the trash can, just in case it had been forgotten, but the garbage had gone to the lab and the bin was empty.

  The knife block on the counter had one knife missing, presumably the paring knife, which had likely been used to slice the lids off Tom Calhoun’s eyes.

  I tried to take my own advice to look at this scene as if for the first time, but it was impossible to keep any distance from a multiple homicide, especially one like this.

  The word that kept echoing in my mind was why?

  Brady had wondered out loud if Calhoun was one of the Windbreaker cops, wondered if he had had knowledge about the large stash of drugs we assumed had been the reason Wicker House had been robbed and the lab rats killed.

  I trusted Brady’s instincts. So if Calhoun was one of those renegade cops, he wasn’t alone. Could he be working with other cops? Could Swanson, Vasquez, even Robertson be part of the crew?

  Conklin, too, had thoughts that Wicker House and this quadruple murder were related. I heard his footsteps and turned as he came into the kitchen.

  He said, “Linds, there’s nothing new upstairs. It was a straight-up execution. I don’t see signs of a robbery. As Clapper said, nothing was tossed.”

  “Who killed them?” I asked my partner, but I was really asking myself.

  “What do you think, Linds?”

  “Let’s say Brady is right, that Calhoun may be one of the Windbreaker cops. Calhoun was pretty excited by those dead Windbreaker-wearing copycats, remember?”

  Conklin nodded.

  “It was like he was saying, ‘Yahoo. The case is closed.’ And maybe it was because if he could convince us that the Windbreaker case was solved, there’d be no heat on him.”

  “Go on,” said my partner.

  “OK,” I said, “let’s take it a step further. If Calhoun was involved in the Wicker House robbery, those drugs were worth a lot to someone. And that someone, let’s say it was Kingfisher. What if Kingfisher knew who robbed him?”

  “Oh. OK, so you’re saying maybe this wasn’t torture for information,” Conklin said. “Maybe the Calhoun family was the message. ‘Screw with us, this happens.’”

  “It’s a leap,” I said, staring at the blood on the kitchen floor.

  Conklin said, “It’s a leap. But it makes more sense than anything I’ve heard so far.”

  CHAPTER 61

  I WAS HOME before dinner, and after showering and changing into sweats, I took Julie onto my lap and fed her strained lamb and peas while listening to Valerie June singing “Pushin’ Against a Stone.” After that, I put Julie in Joe’s arms. I filled Martha’s bowl with a premium kibble I’d been saving for a special occasion, and I told Joe I was cooking dinner.

  “I have to do something that I can control and that will make me feel like I’m doing something good.”

  “You had me at ‘I’m cooking,’” Joe said.

  I laughed, first time that day, and even laughed a little too long and hard. My husband joined in, then gave me a glass of cold orange juice, which is our code for “chill.”

  As I chopped vegetables, I told Joe about my shitty day.

  “I said I’d go with you to Colma,” he told me.

  “Nah, it was better I went with the troops.”

  I gave Joe a brief verbal tour of the after-funeral return to the Calhouns’ house of horrors. And while I pounded the veal cutlets with a mallet, I told him my thoughts that Kingfisher had been involved. When the cutlets were so thin they were almost transparent, I felt Joe gently taking the mallet out of my hand.

  I laughed again, which was very cathartic, I’ve got to say.

  While I sipped my juice, Joe talked about drug kingpins he has known and about Kingfisher in particular, a brutal psychopath who earned his name by annihilating anyone who got in his way.

  “He’s both a legend and a myth,” Joe said. “No one knows what he looks like, but it’s said that he gets a piece of all the drug action in the state. Or else.”

  “Yeah,” I sighed.

  “Not to overworry, Linds, but you think Kingfisher’s gang tortured a cop who may have been involved in the case you’re working.”

  “Right, I know,” I said. “I know.”

  The oil and the veal were sizzling in the pan, and Joe poured the wine.

  “Linds, it concerns me.”

  “I’ll be careful. I won’t take any unnecessary chances.”

  Joe nodded. He set the security system while I dished up dinner. We ate at the dining table for a change, Martha sitting hopefully between our chairs. When the coffee was brewing, Joe changed the subject and told me he had a lead on “his” case, Claire’s Birthday Murders.

  “I’ve got a possible suspect,” Joe said. “His name is Wayne Broward, and he was charged with slashing a neighbor’s car tires. The judge fined him, and Broward responded by threatening to kill the judge, rape his wife, and suffocate their children.”

  “Whoa. A seriously crazy person.”

  “He was sentenced to the max for threatening a judge, which is a five-thousand-dollar fine and a year in the hoosegow. Broward got out early for good behavior. You ask—when was that? And I answer, just before Claire’s birthday five years ago.”

  “Huh,” I said. “Let’s see what else you’ve got.”

  While I cleaned up, Joe brought over his laptop. I looked at the files he had found, then tapped into the SFPD database and looked up this madman, Wayne Lawrence Broward, who lived in the Bayview neighborhood at Hollister Avenue and Hawes Street.r />
  Apart from the attack on the neighbors’ tires, Broward had a record for assault on a neighbor who had put his garbage cans too close to Broward’s driveway. And in addition to these attacks, there was a domestic abuse complaint from Broward’s wife.

  She had dropped the charges, but her statement made interesting reading.

  “Joe, listen to this. Mrs. Broward described her husband as ‘ruined by his crazy-ass schizo mother and has intermittent explosive anger disorder.’”

  “And she stuck with him.”

  “Yes, she did. If I can find a spare moment tomorrow, I’m going to check up on this guy,” I said.

  “Be very careful,” said my dear husband.

  CHAPTER 62

  WAYNE LAWRENCE BROWARD’S house was a brown, wood-shingled shanty, the third one in from the intersection of Hollister Avenue and Hawes Street. Standing behind a chain-link fence that was hung with a dozen no trespassing signs, the house looked like a seething box of paranoia.

  I parked in front of the fence and clipped my badge to my lapel so that the gold metal would glint against the navy-blue twill. I unbuttoned my jacket so that my gun was visible on my hip. Then I pushed open the short chain-link gate.

  Even as I put my hand on the gate, I knew I was way off the rails here. Tina Strichler’s murder was being worked by Inspectors Michaels and Wang of our department, but even though they were new, or maybe because of that, I didn’t feel comfortable asking them to look into a fairly baseless hunch conceived by Joe and me.

  Still, a hunch was hard to put aside. And I had to check it out. I went through the gate and up the poured-cement path to the front door, upon which was taped another NO TRESPASSING AND THAT MEANS YOU notice.

  I pressed the buzzer.

  I heard a dog woofing deep inside the house, and a man’s voice said, “OK, Hauser. Let’s see who this damned son of a bitch is.”

  There were sounds behind the door, a peephole sliding, a chain coming off a track, a bolt unracking. Given the modest means of residents of this neighborhood, either Wayne Broward was stashing gold bullion at home, or he was an officer in a one-man war.

  Or maybe he had stabbed a woman to death on each of the past five May twelfths.

  There was more barking, and then the door was pulled open. A brown-haired white man of average height and weight, in a denim shirt and jeans, holding a Winchester rifle, showed himself in the slice of open doorway.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer,” I said, showing him my badge. “I’m looking for Wayne Lawrence Broward.”

  The dog, a boxer as it turned out, lunged at the door, and the gent with the rifle used his leg to push the dog back from the doorway.

  “I said, ‘What. The fuck. Do you want?’”

  I pushed my badge forward. “I’m the police. Put the gun down.”

  The man in the doorway scowled, but he lowered the muzzle.

  I took a photo of Tina Strichler from my breast pocket. Her bloody death on a pedestrian crossing in front of about a hundred tourists was still vivid in my mind.

  I said, “Do you know this woman?”

  Broward peered at the photo, then opened the door wide and said, “Why didn’t you say so? Come in.”

  CHAPTER 63

  BROWARD HAD AS much as said he recognized Tina Strichler. But I wanted to hear him actually say it.

  “You know this woman?” I asked.

  “Come in,” he said. “I don’t bite. Even Hauser don’t bite.”

  He yanked on the dog’s collar, shoved the dog into a bedroom, and closed the door.

  I put my hand on my gun, cautiously entered the house, and looked around. The interior of the place looked like American Pickers meets Hoarding: Buried Alive.

  There wasn’t one inch of clean or uncluttered surface. There were live chickens in a slatted box under a table, canned food stacked against the walls to the ceiling, boxes of ammo on countertops, and guns hanging from racks on the walls.

  I scanned the room for trophies of dead women. I was looking for photos or newspaper clippings taped to the wall or signs of the abused wife. I also looked for a collection of assorted knives that might have been used to commit murder and then been taken away by the killer.

  But mainly, I was so stunned by the chaos that I lost sight of Broward—until I felt a cold gun muzzle against the back of my neck.

  Wayne Broward said, “Why don’t you take off your gun and stay awhile.”

  “Love to,” I said, fear and shame flooding my body to my fingertips and out through my eyes. I was a jerk. I’d walked right into this, and I might die in this very room.

  “I’m taking my gun out very slowly,” I said, my back to him. “Just using my fingertips.”

  As I was trained to do, I spun around fast, knocked the barrel of Broward’s rifle away from me, grabbed the rifle with both hands, and wrenched it out of Broward’s grip, throwing him off balance. I flung the rifle far from where I stood. As it clattered against a wall hung with hubcaps, I pulled my Glock and leveled it at Broward’s nose.

  From the chill at the back of my neck to the Glock in my hand took about ten seconds, but it felt like the last ten seconds of my life. Hauser was barking his head off, and I wondered at my luck, that Broward had underestimated me and had put the dog behind a door.

  “Bitch,” Broward spat at me. “I shoulda shot you. I coulda done anything to you. No one would ever know what happened to you.”

  “Turn around. Put your hands on your head,” I said.

  He did it.

  “I coulda given you a real good ride first,” he said mournfully. “I haven’t had a blond in a while.”

  “Shut the hell up,” I said.

  I holstered my gun, wrenched Broward’s arms down, and cuffed him behind his back.

  “You’re under arrest for assault on a police officer,” I said. And then I read him his rights.

  CHAPTER 64

  I HAD BROWARD in the back of my vehicle, behind the Plexiglas and in cuffs.

  As for me, I was still twitching with adrenaline because he could have killed me. That would have been my fault entirely for having made such a dumb-ass, rookie mistake.

  I couldn’t stop flicking my eyes to the rearview mirror to look at him. He was wild-eyed crazy, for sure, but whatever kind of psycho he was, he didn’t seem to know or care that he was on his way to jail.

  Broward said loudly, “Remember when we were living with my mama?”

  “Yep. It was a trip, Wayne.”

  “You used to call me Honey-boy. I just loved when you did that.”

  “That was then, Wayne,” I said, playing along. “I’m over you now.”

  Wayne Broward began to sing “Jesus Loves Me.”

  I turned up the squawk box and kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t like what I was going to have to say to a judge about why I had been inside the house of a man who hadn’t been under suspicion of anything; my probable cause was a hunch. Thank God Broward had invited me to come in. Perhaps that and his history of threatening a judge would help me sound a little less stupid.

  Twenty minutes later, I parked in the all-day lot on Bryant and tossed the keys to the guy who worked days in the shed. Broward gave me no trouble as I escorted him across the street and into the building in cuffs. I walked him through the metal detector and up the stairs to the desk sergeant on the third floor.

  I said, “Sergeant, we need to book Mr. Broward for assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Make sure he gets a psych eval.”

  Sergeant Brooks asked questions and filled out a form, and a uniformed cop came up and took Broward to booking. My rifle-wielding collar would be kept busy for the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours while being processed: There would be a body search, fingerprints, a shower, and examinations by a nurse and a shrink. Then he’d be given a jumpsuit and locked in a holding cell until I could get back to him.

  After leaving the front desk, I went down th
e hall and through the door to Homicide. I found Conklin in the bullpen with files on drug dealers fanned out all over his desktop.

  “Rich. I’m very sorry. I got hung up.” I fully planned to tell my partner about Wayne Broward, but he cut in with a news flash.

  “Ralph Valdeen was hit.”

  Ralph Valdeen, aka Rascal, was one of the two former stockroom boys at Wicker House. Valdeen had been charged with assault on a police officer for that punch he’d thrown at Conklin at the ballpark. But he’d been released on bail. Unlike Donnie Wolfe, who had stolen a car, we had had nothing else on Valdeen. There was no evidence that he knew the Wicker House shooters or that he knew what happened to the drugs that had been stolen from that lab.

  “What happened?” I asked my partner.

  “His mom went over to his place and found him dead in the bedroom,” Conklin said. “Two shots to the chest, one to the head. Makes me think someone was cleaning up after themselves. Maybe he could’ve ID’d the Wicker House shooters.”

  “Another dead witness,” I said.

  “And he’s all ours,” said Conklin.

  CHAPTER 65

  BRADY HELD AN impromptu standing-room-only meeting at the end of the shift. We were a ragged-looking crew but highly motivated to stop the growing body count and rescue our reputation, which was getting trashed by the media daily, nightly, and on weekends.

  Brady is a hard-ass, but he wasn’t saying “you guys.”

  He said, “We have a big problem. All of us. More than a dozen people are dead, including one of our own and his family. Some of the dead are victims of crimes, some are witnesses, and some are perps. I’ll be frank. I’m not sure we always know who is who.

  “This is what I see.

  “The nature of the war between the drug dealers and us has changed. Cops may be involved in drug-related crime, and drug dealers are firing back. No one can say with certainty who is doing what to whom, and that makes it even more, I don’t know, disgusting.