“What’s the D.A. say?”
“They say the normal stuff: we’ll stick by you, but you have to get us a case we can bring to trial. Speaking of which, is Miss Zhu under arrest for murder or just for questioning?”
Ryker rubbed his eyes again. He contemplated the coffee, then went ahead and sipped some more. A mistake.
“We just got her yesterday. She’s not even due for arraignment until this afternoon, right? You can’t tell me that Chin’s got that much name value. The guy’s an ambulance chaser.”
“Who’s suing the department,” Chee Wei countered. “Three suits at the same time.”
“She was properly Mirandized and went through the same procedures as anyone else we pick up. Big deal. This Chin guy can play with himself in Union Park, for all I care.”
“Well, you know—”
Ryker waved Chee Wei to silence.
“Skip it, that’s out of our hands. Let the D.A.’s office handle it. We need to start the murder book. You get the surveillance video from the hotel?”
Chee Wei reached into a desk drawer and pulled out six DVDs. They were in evidence bags.
“Yep. One master disc and one copy of each. Already entered as evidence.”
“Good. Criminologist reports?”
“Not due until this afternoon or tomorrow.”
Ryker grunted. He hadn’t expected anything any sooner. That would have been a genuine miracle, and his morning wasn’t shaping up that way.
“All right,” he said wearily, “let’s get started.”
Ryker spent the next hour working on his initial report, filling out the required departmental forms and annotating all evidence collected. He also added notes from the night’s interrogation of Xiaohui Zhu, currently locked up in the department’s detention cells. Ryker had made sure she was separated from the rest of the detainees in one of the “Hilton suites”, so she wouldn’t run the risk of being injured by one of the other women in lockup.
One of the more interesting aspects of the case was that Xiaohui’s high-end Diamond Heights residence had all the signs of being expertly tossed when the other two detectives on Ryker’s squad, Kowalenko and Morales, had arrived armed with a telephone warrant and keys to search it for themselves. They had recovered the clothes which matched those on the hotel surveillance footage, and had delivered them to the criminologists for inspection. Ryker checked the day planner which served as a blotter on his desk; Kowalenko was scheduled off, and Morales was in court, but was expected back before noontime.
Bit by bit, the murder book began to come together. It was still thin—very thin—but at the very least, the evidentiary process was coming along. Once they had the results from the criminology lab, then they could start tying up the loose ends from a physical evidence perspective. The coroner’s report on the body wouldn’t be seen until the end of the week at the very earliest, as there had been two other homicides earlier in the week. Not that the cause of death was an issue, but Ryker was keenly interested in the DNA evidence the coroner might turn up.
“You ready to watch the video again?” Ryker asked. He checked his watch. It was already ten minutes to eleven in the morning.
“Born ready,” Chee Wei said. “It might even be better than watching HBO.”
“At least this time it’s for free,” Ryker replied. He pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He took a moment to stretch, and felt his back pop and crack in different places. Getting old certainly could suck.
A monitor with DVD player was on a wheeled rack at the other side of the room. As Ryker and Chee Wei walked toward it, Metro homicide’s commanding officer stepped into the office. He carried a cup of Starbuck’s coffee in one hand.
“Heya Lou,” Ryker said. “Just showing up for work, are we?”
Lieutenant Phil Furino was a tall, thin man with gangly limbs that had earned him the nickname of Spider. He had thick brown hair and dark brown eyes that dwelled deep in his head. His nose was almost as thin as a rifle sight, and he swiveled that targeting apparatus toward Ryker as he continued on to his office, located at the far end of the room.
“We have a meeting at eleven-thirty, you and me,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere I can’t find you.”
Ryker stopped short.
“What meeting?”
Spider continued on, targeting his office with his nose now.
“If I knew, I’d tell, but I don’t. So just stick around.” With that, he disappeared into his glass-paneled office and closed the door. Ryker watched as Spider sidled into his chair and swigged some of his overpriced but doubtless non-lethal coffee and began going through the contents of his inbox.
“Like shit he doesn’t know,” said Detective Sergeant Wallace, a portly man with a thick mustache and bald head. As bad luck would have it, his desk was right beside the A/V cart. “Spider got in at seven-thirty, then got his ass yanked by the High and the Mighty.”
Ryker looked down at Wallace.
“What’s that, Cueball?” he asked, even though he already knew.
“Jericho came stomping in here at about seven-forty-five looking like he was about to piss himself. Went into Spider’s office and asked about you, then he and Spider went off someplace else.” Wallace leaned back in his chair, which creaked beneath his bulk, and interlaced his fingers across his round belly. “You piss someone off again there, Supercop?” he asked, his dark, porcine eyes locking with Ryker’s.
“The day’s too early for that,” Ryker said.
“Never too early to put your ass in a sling,” mused a short, thick black detective named Johnson. He sat at one of the desks in Wallace’s pod.
Ryker shrugged, nonchalant. He then motioned Chee Wei to put the DVD in the player.
“Let’s get the show on the road,” he said.
“Or on the tube, to be more precise,” Chee Wei said, sliding the disc into the unit. As he fiddled with the buttons on the player’s control panel, he asked, “Any idea what’s up?”
“I can only think James Lin,” Ryker responded dryly.
“That chink’s got a hard-on for you, Ryker,” Wallace said. Apparently Chee Wei’s racial status was outside his ability to detect, which made sense: Putting him in the field pretty much guaranteed a case would appear on television’s “Unsolved Mysteries” program.
“You’re a charming man, Cueball,” Ryker said. He noticed the hard set to Chee Wei’s jaw as he switched on the monitor.
“No offense, Fong,” Cueball said belatedly.
“No problem, Wallace. How’s the Weight Watchers coming along?” Chee Wei pressed the DVD unit’s play button, and stood up straight, hands on his hips.
“Hey, what’s this?” Wallace asked, curious.
“Surveillance from the hotel cameras,” Ryker said. “What the hell else would it be?”
“Don’t get testy there, Supercop.” Wallace’s phone rang, and his chair squeaked as he spun around toward his desk. He snatched up the handset.
The surveillance video was of the hallway outside the Taipan Room. It showed the door to the suite, and further down, the elevator bay. Ryker and Chee Wei also had separate footage taken from the elevators themselves, as well as the front desk. They’d already watched the front desk surveillance, which was how they’d established Xiaohui Zhu as being with Lin Dan before he died.
There wasn’t a lot in the video. It wasn’t full-motion action, but a series of stills taken every few seconds. They watched as Lin Dan and his “kept woman” entered the suite, and not much else. There was some of the expected activity, such as guests coming and going from other rooms, but nothing of note until Xiaohui left the suite in a hurry, dressed in the coat she had worn earlier. Her gait was fast and furious, but neither Ryker nor Chee Wei could determine if it was from fear of a sudden, grotesque discovery, or from fear of being caught and branded a murderess. After that, there was no further activity until room service arrived.
“So how did the killer get in the suite if it wasn’t her?”
Chee Wei asked after a time.
“Great question,” Ryker said. “No one else approached the room at all, as far as I could see.”
“So it’s her, then,” Chee Wei decided.
Ryker shrugged, but said nothing.
Chee Wei popped the disc out of the player and looked back at him.
“What, you think someone else did it?”
“It doesn’t make a lot of sense, her doing it,” Ryker said. “Lin was her gravy train. He gave her everything she could have wanted, and all she had to do was lie on her back and take it for a few hours at a time. Even if they’d had a rip-roaring argument over something, where she was a couple of nights ago was a hell of a lot better than where she came from.”
“Come on, Ryker, she’s a dame who got pissed because the john wasn’t going to leave his wife for her,” Wallace opined. He’d spun around in his chair and watched the footage after finishing his phone call.
Ryker didn’t even bother looking at him.
“You got a case of your own, right Cueball? Why not solve yours and let the pros take care of this one?”
Wallace’s chair squeaked in protest and he spun back to his desk.
“Fuck you, Ryker,” he said.
“Now that would be your lucky day.” Ryker walked back to his desk with Chee Wei in tow.
“So if not her, then who?” Chee Wei asked.
“What am I, a psychic?”
Chee Wei pulled out his chair and sat down.
“You know, sometimes things are exactly what they seem,” he said. “I agree we don’t have much in the way of motive, but who else could it have been?”
Ryker sat in his own chair.
“I don’t have a clue,” he said. “But this girl’s in it for the reward, nothing else. Certainly not love, other than the love of money.”
“That much is pretty obvious. So what do you plan on doing? Her DNA’s going to be all over the place.”
Before Ryker could do more than just shrug, Spider stepped out of his office. He pulled on his jacket.
“Ryker, let’s go,” he said simply.
Ryker nodded. He sighed heavily and pushed himself to his feet.
“Call the D.A.,” he told Chee Wei. “Tell him we need to hold onto Zhu as a material witness. And mention that may be revised once the lab work gets done. If we get something good, she could go from material witness to murder suspect.”
Chee Wei cocked his head to one side.
“Why not just go there now, and tell the D.A. she is the murder suspect?”
“Because for some reason, I don’t think she is,” Ryker told him. “I can’t put my finger around it, but she’s not the killing kind of animal—even if she did think Lin was dirt.”
“Ryker,” Spider called again, impatiently. “We’ve got to get downstairs.”
“Coming, Lou.” Ryker looked down at Chee Wei. “Make the call,” he urged.
“She’ll just make bail,” Chee Wei said, “but all right, I’ll do that.”
Ryker shot him a thumbs-up and headed after Furino.
###
Furino wasn’t the most gregarious of sorts, but his silence during the time it took them to ride the elevator down to the second floor convinced Ryker he knew more than what he was letting on. But Spider was a stand-up kind of guy, the type of leader a cop could follow without too much trouble. In Ryker’s mind, if he wasn’t even going to give him a heads-up on what to expect, then whatever was coming was a done deal. No changes would be made, and if Spider had his orders, he had his orders.
There was quite a reception waiting for them in the conference room. Spider opened the door and stood aside, allowing Ryker to enter ahead of him. The first person he saw was Captain Jericho, of course. Almost four inches over six feet in height with dark hair that was going gray at the temples in the most distinguished of ways, he cut an impressive figure in his uniform. Ryker figured there was a lot more gray in Jericho’s hair than just at the temples; it had been that way for years, and the gray was as perfectly delineated as the day Ryker had first laid eyes on him. As he watched, Jericho squared his broad shoulders and smiled, revealing perfectly capped teeth. Obviously, he subscribed to the premium dental plan.
“Detective Sergeant Ryker, thanks for coming,” he said, his voice booming a bit in the functional conference room. “You of course know Chief Hallis?”
There were other people in the room, but all of them faded into the shadows when Ryker looked to his left and saw the Chief of Police rising from his chair. Chief Hallis had been a cop once, and a good one, rising from the ranks as a patrolman in the early 1970s all the way to San Francisco’s top cop. But that had been a while ago; now, Ted Hallis was just another politician, and it showed when he halfheartedly returned Ryker’s salute.
“Detective Sergeant,” the Chief said.
“Sir,” Ryker responded automatically.
The chief immediately lost interest in him. Ryker looked around the room. Sitting at the end of the long conference table like an emperor was James Lin, dressed in an expensive suit. Next to him was the broad white man Ryker had seen the day before outside of Xiaohui’s sister’s house. Ryker’s chest tightened. This wasn’t exactly a good sign.
He turned to Jericho just as the tall captain was beginning to make introductions.
“Captain, what’s Mr. Lin doing here?” he asked, cutting to the chase.
Jericho paused, and from his expression Ryker could tell he was taken aback that Ryker would even dare to speak before such an august assemblage. He recovered a moment later, and his voice was hard-edged.
“I was going to get to that, detective sergeant. Maybe you’d like to have a seat?” Jericho indicated a nearby chair.
Ryker sighed and pulled out the chair. He settled into it with all the aplomb of a truculent adolescent showing up for after-hours study.
“Thank you, Hal. I’ll make some introductions, and then we’ll get this show on the road.”
Ryker nodded absently. He noticed that Jericho wasn’t exactly up to snuff, performance-wise. As far as he could remember, Jericho never met an audience he didn’t like, and being the star performer was one of his more natural traits. This time, his manner was halting and perhaps even a bit obsequious. Ryker wondered if it was because of the chief, but a small part of him was convinced it was because of Lin and all the money he had behind him.
Two of the men in the room were city supervisors, one representing district one, while the other represented district eleven. At first, Ryker couldn’t determine why they were present, then it came to him that Danny Lin lived in Sea Cliff, which was part of district one, and had died in the Mandarin Oriental, which was in district eleven. Both men appeared to be a bit on the nervous side, and Ryker figured that the supervisor from district one—a man named Harrison Newsom, who still looked every bit the hippy even though he must have been in his sixties—wasn’t at all that comfortable with police stations in general and police officers in particular after spending the latter half of the 1960s as something of a counter-culture magnet. Ryker found his presence to be not only incongruous, given his blue jeans, denim jacket over a tie-dyed shirt, and long gray hair tied in a ponytail, but almost laughable as well.
The only woman in the room was well-known to Ryker as she was one of the primary assistant district attorneys he dealt with on occasion. Selma Kaplan was as much a thoroughbred as they came, with her no-nonsense business suits and perfectly-coiffed blonde hair that likely had so much hairspray in it that even a typhoon couldn’t ruffle a single hair on her head out of place. She was also something of a heartbreaker, with those perfect good looks that only California seemed to be able to generate. She was also rumored to be so frigid that she couldn’t even get an Eskimo to date her. All Ryker cared about was that she was a hell of a prosecutor, tough, shrewd, and dedicated.
That left James Lin and what Ryker could only surmise to be his bodyguard. The hulking man was introduced as Lin’s corporate chief of security, Ale
xsey Baluyevsky. Ryker met the man’s eyes, and the big man nodded toward him curtly, his blue eyes as cold as the Arctic Circle. His mammoth hands were clasped before him on the table. Ryker looked at them. They were broad and hard, just like the rest of him, and Ryker had no doubt that he had no trouble using them in the most lethal of ways when the situation required it.
“And you of course know Mister James Lin,” Jericho finished.
“Indeed I do. Good morning, sir.” Ryker nodded to Lin, and felt that wasn’t enough by means of acknowledgement. He lamely added, “Good to see you again.” It sounded false even to him.
“Detective Ryker,” Lin responded simply.
Ryker looked at Spider, but the Lieutenant only continued to stare at the tabletop before him. Ryker cleared his throat and leaned back in his chair.
“So what can I do for you folks?” he asked, turning his gaze toward Jericho.
It was Hallis who spoke instead.
“Detective sergeant, how are things coming with the Lin investigation?” he asked.
The chief was seated almost directly across from him, so Ryker had no problem meeting his gaze. Hallis kept his demeanor pleasant and non-assuming...well, as much as the chief of police of a major metropolitan city could when dealing with a minion.
“It’s just started, chief. We’ve only made one pass at the mur—ah, at the book, and we’re still going through the inventory of physical evidence. We’re also waiting for both the crime lab and the medical examiner to finish up, and as you might suspect, there could be a lot of potential leads in those areas.”
“I’ve asked both departments to expedite their procedures,” Jericho added, which made Ryker smile slightly. A captain didn’t have the horsepower to change jack-diddly when it came to either department.
“I’ve already had a heart-to-heart with Morry,” Hallis said, and Ryker knew that Morry could only be Deputy Chief Maurice Trabak, currently the head of the S.F.P.D. Investigations Bureau. As a matter of fact, he was also Ryker’s top boss, but the two men had had little contact over the years.
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