But Creed’s jaw was tight, his teeth clamped down, all of his senses on alert. One part of him knew that it was all because of last week, of getting shot at. He thought of Nick Sephia’s boast last night that getting shot at made him horny, and couldn’t even find a shred of humor in it. Or truth. Even thinking about it now—
But what was he thinking of? This wasn’t anything like a burglary in process. It was a homeless guy—Creed had seen him, or his shadow anyway. A homeless man who’d somehow scored a bottle of wine and got mad when it was empty. He probably hadn’t even seen Creed, much less aimed at him. Shaking his head at his own demons, he realized with surprise that he still held his weapon, and he holstered it—whatever this was, he was sure it wouldn’t call for a drawn gun—and turned on his flashlight.
Taking a last deep breath, he walked into the alley.
It wasn’t much over ten feet wide, seventy or eighty feet deep. The beam on his light was strong, but at this distance still only dimly illuminated the dumpster at the end, on the left side. Normally, at this time of night, there would be a couple of guys sitting on the delivery dock, maybe three or four piles of debris that turned out to be men wrapped in their newspapers and layers of clothes at the small indentations of doorways along the alley. Tonight he saw nothing.
But the alley had no egress except the way he’d come in. The guy who’d thrown the bottle had to be hiding in or behind the dumpster. Creed walked another ten or twelve steps. “Hey!” he yelled, his voice echoing eerily off the walls on three sides. “Come on out here. We’ve got to talk.”
Nothing.
Creed swore to himself, stood a long moment shining his light on the dumpster. “Come on,” he said again. “Whatever it is, we’ll get it worked out, all right?” He had half a mind to forget about it, to simply turn and walk out of the alley to Stockton and back to the precinct, where he could tell the lieutenant that there was this possible problem he might want to send some guys to look at. That wouldn’t even involve either of the Panoses. And what was he going to do with this guy when he came out, anyway? March him down to the precinct? Knock him upside the head? Clean him up and buy him some coffee? Not.
Screw it, he thought. This is dumb.
He turned around and started back toward the street. He’d gone six or eight steps when another bottle exploded a few feet behind him, the broken glass spraying the ground around him with little diamonds. Creed nearly jumped out of his shoes.
But now, truly pissed off, he turned around. “Okay, asshole, you want to have some fun?” The beam from his flashlight preceding him, he raked the dumpster side to side and front to back. “Come on out! Don’t be stupid.” Ten feet back, he stopped again, gave the flashlight another pass.
Finally, movement at the back of the dumpster. He brought the beam over, took a step in that direction, then heard a noise—a second movement, to his left, at the front of the dumpster, maybe six feet from him.
He was turning in that direction . . .
And then he was dead.
PART TWO
Sometime earlier today—time was routinely meaningless now—Gina Roake had been with them in Dismas Hardy’s office, in David’s building. These men, these unlikely avengers. She knew where they would be going when the meeting broke up, and why.
Now she was back where David had asked her to marry him. The most stunning, shocking and unexpected moment of all her life. She sat straight, unmoving, at the little rickety table, now reduced to its usual state, without the linen or china or crystal. Could that lovely service have been here? When was it now, that eternity ago?
She looked at her hands. The ring caught her short again and she held her left hand within her right and stared at it while more immeasurable time went by.
The kitchen was in a round turret that jutted from the corner of the apartment. The glass in the curved, original windows was probably sixty-five years old. Looking through them was a wavy vision through perfect water, and now she stared downhill at the impossible world going by as though nothing had changed. Cars passed at the intersection a block down; a couple embraced and kissed against a building; a woman pushed a baby stroller up toward her.
She hadn’t dressed for work in several days, so she wore blue jeans and tennis shoes, a UOP sweatshirt, a blue band to hold her hair back. No makeup of any kind. She was rubbing her hands and looked at them again, surprised that now suddenly they struck her as the hands of an old woman. She’d been biting her nails, and the week-old red polish was chipped and pathetic. She made a fist of her right hand, let it go, made it again, and held it until it hurt. Old or not, she recognized that there was still strength in these hands.
Perhaps the biggest shock was what it had taken her this long to process—that her old friends in Hardy’s office had truly scared her. She’d been playing with the big boys in her real life for a long time now, consoling or lecturing her clients, being a goddamned equal to her male friends and lovers, kicking ass in the courtroom, taking no shit and giving no quarter. That’s why she was successful. That’s why David loved her.
She thought it was who she was, but now even that wasn’t clear. Nothing was clear. She didn’t know who she was, who she wanted to be, what she wanted to do. But beyond everything else was raw rage. She’d never known anger like this before, nor even understood that such a thing could exist. The desire to hurt someone was almost a physical pain in her stomach. That scared her more than anything.
Her mind returned to the men in Hardy’s office. She’d known them forever, it seemed. They’d been colleagues in her life with the law. She’d clerked for Dismas at the DA’s when she’d been in law school and he’d just been starting out. Glitsky always a presence, even long before the homicide years, with his passion for justice, for fairness, a stickler for procedure.
But then this morning, these people of the law suddenly making common cause with a man like John Holiday? But Holiday, Dismas and Abe were in this all the way together now, there could be no doubt of that.
And good lawyer that she was, where did that leave her? With them? If she didn’t believe in the rule of law under all circumstances, then what kind of fraud had she been for all these years? If it seemed to these men that the law wasn’t working as it should to protect them, did that give them the right to take it into their own hands? When the police didn’t exactly move mountains to identify shooters in the various ghettos and barrios, did that condone or mitigate even slightly the violent retribution of a victim’s relatives or friends?
She didn’t think it did. No, she knew it didn’t. She knew Glitsky and Hardy and they felt the same way. Or always had, until today.
Today everything was different.
And Gina now found herself with them. These men had become her true allies in this. The import of the collective decision as Abe had left Diz’s office had been clear. He was going down to make the arrests himself if he couldn’t move his own police department to do it for him. That was the pretext.
The subtext was that Panos and his gang would not go gently into the night. They’d proven themselves not only capable of violence, but committed to it as the way they dealt with obstruction. And the clock was running.
So Glitsky, left without an option, had come to his decision. He gave lip service to the arrest, but she knew without doubt that he’d get down to Pier 70 early, maybe a couple of hours early to avoid an ambush—in any event long before the four o’clock appointment he’d made with Gerson. And when they showed up, he’d be prepared to fight, quite possibly to kill. He had never asked Hardy or Holiday, and certainly not Gina, to back him up in any way. In actual fact, he’d been adamant on the point, expressly reminding them that he was a police officer acting in the line of duty. Diz, Holiday, anyone else who showed up to help him would, in the eyes of the law, be vigilantes. They must not be part of it.
To be part of it at all, if they lived, would ruin them.
But of course, he told them exactly where he was going, and when; what he
planned to do, what he believed was going to happen.
A gust shook the ancient windows, then howled away down the street like the passage of the Angel of Death, the howl modulating down to a moan and finally fading to a dirge, then silence.
Gina had kept a Beretta .40 caliber automatic locked in her desk drawer ever since one of her early cop boyfriends had convinced her that one day she’d need it. She had often thought to get rid of it—lawyers needed to believe that they didn’t have to carry guns—but could never quite make the decision. And because it really would have been the height of absurdity to keep a gun she couldn’t load or shoot properly, she went to the range every few months and fired off a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition to keep herself sharp. Over the years, she’d not only become comfortable with her gun and, in the process, turned into a capable marksman, she’d come to enjoy the experience—the smell of powder, the deafening noise, the awesome kick and power so far removed from the cops-and-robbers fantasy she’d entertained when she’d started.
She knew now. To shoot a high-caliber handgun was to taste death, in some ways to embrace the idea of it. The thing ruined flesh, obliterated bone. It snuffed out life instantly. As fast, she thought, no—faster than God could take it. The feeling was intoxicating.
Still at David’s kitchen table, she looked at her hands a last time. Her ring, again, caught her eye, and suddenly the reality of all she’d borne coursed through her body like a current.
She nearly ran to the front door and outside to the street. She had to get to her desk, then to her car. Enough reflection. She was who she was—equal in her heart and soul and body to any man, and to her allies in particular. She’d suffered along with them, and now belonged with them. They were all in this and they would need her.
She checked her watch and broke into a jog.
10
The smartest inspector in the San Francisco homicide detail if not on the planet worked solo. Paul Thieu, a six-year veteran, was on when the call came in at a little after one in the morning. A security guard named Matthew Creed had not reported back to his liaison at the Tenderloin Station at the end of his shift, and the ensuing search of his route by both city and private patrolmen had turned up his body. He’d been gunned down—two shots at very close range—and lay sprawled by a dumpster not two blocks from Union Square.
Although the pickin’s were very slim, Thieu spent most of the rest of the night at the scene with the Crime Scene Investigation unit. He did notice a few potential anomalies that might possibly shed light on elements of the crime. There were two concentrations of broken glass, where bottles had obviously been broken—one out on Stockton across the street and up a few yards from the mouth of the driveway, and another at its mouth. It wasn’t that broken glass rose anywhere to the significance of evidence—it was as common as the dew on many city streets—but Thieu believed in collecting all the data that came his way in the hopes that some of it would acquire relevance. He asked the CSI team to gather any shards that might be large enough to hold a fingerprint.
He also had a reasonably defined size twelve-and-a-half shoe print from a leather- or smooth-soled shoe. The dumpster had been dripping a stinky, gooey miasma and somebody had stepped in it and then onto relatively drier pavement. Thieu knew that the footprint might not belong to the shooter. The scene by the loading dock at the end of the long driveway was a known rendezvous for some of the city’s homeless, so there was a strong likelihood that the footprint belonged to one of the bums.
On the other hand, Thieu was a stickler for precision and they’d done some preliminary blood spatter analysis, complete with photos—a difficult task in the middle of the night. The footprint location was at least consistent with where the shooter must have been standing, which was at the front, or Stockton Street corner, of the dumpster. This was hardly conclusive evidence, but it was something. He was going to take it. He asked the CSI team to gather some of the liquid and bag it as evidence.
He was aided in his work by the fact that the victim was in uniform. Even if he was only an assistant patrol special, Creed was in some ways one of them. Every man and woman on the CSI would take all the time Thieu wanted if it would help him apprehend a cop killer.
Although they found no casing, they also got lucky with one of the two .38 caliber bullets that had passed through the victim’s body, leaving fairly clean small holes in the front and, even with two wounds, something less than a gaping maw of open flesh in the back. This had led Thieu to conclude first that the slugs were probably not hollow points and second that therefore they’d be able to find one or even both of the bullets. Not only was he proved right, but they discovered one of the bullet holes in a makeshift bumper someone had mounted against one of the buildings where the loading trucks would otherwise scrape. So the nearly perfect slug had passed through some rubber tire material that coated the bumper and lodged in the thick wooden beam beneath it.
Again, a slug by itself meant nothing. The odds of them finding the gun and matching it both to a person and to that particular bullet, and thus having it be any use in actually solving the crime, were all but infinitesimal. But Thieu was glad he had the piece of lead bagged and heading for the evidence locker. You just never knew.
Impressions, too, played a role, although in even a more nebulous manner than the other potential evidence. But impressions, unlike the other stuff, were ephemeral. Thieu was conscientiously typing his up so he wouldn’t forget them, when Gerson came in at 8:30 sharp. Thieu had been technically off for two and a half hours, but he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to put in for overtime. He didn’t need the money and he knew that eventually the bean counters who controlled promotion would discover that he solved cases and cost less. Besides, there was nothing he’d rather be doing. Nothing.
His colleagues had been drifting in for fifteen minutes and the homicide detail was filling with sound and the smell of coffee. Sarah Evans had discovered a female country singer with the same name as her, and she had her radio going low. Thieu tried to work through it all, concentrating mightily.
But it was not to be, at least not right then. Gerson made his way through the room and surprisingly—the two men tolerated each other at best—stopped in front of Thieu’s desk, waiting until he looked up. “Got a minute, Paul? I’d appreciate it. In my office. Thanks.” He turned and headed back.
This was a first, but Thieu took it for what it was, a simple summons, undoubtedly some bureaucratic folderol. Sighing, he pushed back in his chair and stood up. He couldn’t help but compare the current lieutenant with his old boss Glitsky, who might have come over to his desk in the same way Gerson just had, but would have seen he was working intently—just possibly on a homicide he was expected to solve. Abe would have either had the sensitivity to let him alone until he was finished, or he would have wanted to know all about what he was working on, what if anything he’d discovered. They’d trade ideas and theories of the case.
But that wasn’t Barry Gerson, who when Thieu got to his office was turned away from the door, studying columns of numbers on his computer screen. He knocked on the wall. “Sir?”
Gerson blackened the screen and spun round in his seat, motioned to the other chairs. “I don’t want to keep you if you were going home,” he began.
“No. I was finishing up, but I’ve got another half hour. What can I do for you?”
Gerson wasted no time. He pointed in the general direction of his desk. “I was reading the IR”—incident report—“on your call last night, what you’re probably working on out there right now, the patrol special . . .”
“Matt Creed,” Thieu said.
“That’s him. I think there’s a good chance he’s part of another case, another homicide.” At Thieu’s unasked question, he went on. “I don’t know if you’ve followed this Silverman case at all . . .”
“Sure.” Gerson didn’t know it, but Thieu followed every case. “Pawnshop on O’Farrell. Last what? Thursday night? Cuneo and Russell, right
?”
“You know everything else and you don’t know about Creed?”
Thieu ignored the facetious tone. “Not everything, sir. In fact, nothing but the bare facts.” But he didn’t want to get into one-upmanship with Gerson. He put on a receptive expression. “What was Creed’s involvement?”
“He was the only witness to the robbery in progress at Silverman’s. He chased the three suspects for a couple of blocks but lost them. Then he came back to the pawnshop and found the body.”
“All right.” For the life of him, Thieu couldn’t figure out where this might be going. He’d let Gerson get to it without prompting him, though. Relaxed in his chair, an ankle resting on its opposite knee, he waited.
Gerson cleared his throat, finally went on. “The thing is, Cuneo and Russell interviewed Creed, and he pretty much identified the suspects.”
This surprised Thieu, but he kept his expression neutral. “Pretty much?” he asked. He didn’t know what that meant. “Positively? By name, sir? Or from a photo spread?”
“By name. The inspectors haven’t had time to get photos together. But Creed narrowed it to a trio of losers in the ’Loin. Clint Terry, Randy Wills, John Holiday.”
Thieu automatically filed the names away in the super-computer he carried between his ears. He was stunned that ninety-six hours after a homicide, no one had shown the main witness a photo spread. Still, he waited, offering nothing but a civil expectancy.
“My point is that if these two homicides are related, maybe committed by the same hand, it might be more efficient to assign Creed to the same inspectors who are working Silverman since they’ve got the early jump. But I wanted to run it by you first.”
Thieu was even more stunned. When two homicides seemed to be related, inspectors on both cases worked together. But he was being pulled off. “I’ve got no problem with that, sir,” he said without inflection. “I’d be happy to brief them if you’d like, though there isn’t much to talk about. But who works the case—that’s your decision.”
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