The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  No, James Robbins was alive, too, but with that bullet in his head, that could only be called a miracle.

  Why was Jim still alive? There was no question that these guys could shoot and shoot to kill. Why miss Jim?

  Hailey pushed the thoughts of her father-in-law aside as she called and left a message with Oakland PD’s homicide department to get more details on the Blake deaths. Hanging up the phone, she took a breath as Hal returned to her desk.

  “What now?” he asked.

  As soon as the words were out, her phone rang. She lifted the receiver, hoping it wasn’t Jim. She didn’t want to have an awkward conversation.

  “It’s Lusheng, darling. I’ve got your file.”

  Hailey had to smile at the sing-songy voice of the man who kept the records at the juvenile detention center. Lusheng was smaller than more than half the inmates and openly gay. Somehow, he’d managed to stay in the position for more than ten years. Hailey loved his spirit. “Lusheng. I just called down there ten minutes ago.” She put the phone on speaker.

  “You know flattery will get you everywhere,” he cooed.

  Hal shook his head.

  “I can fax it over if you want,” Lusheng offered.

  “Sure, but would you give me the highlights?”

  “Of course. Looks like Mr. Hayden started his career at twelve—shoplifting, possession, drunk and disorderly, more shoplifting. The last one we’ve got in our records is a breaking and entering charge.”

  “When was that?” Hal asked.

  “Well, hello, Inspector Harris.”

  “Hi, Lusheng.”

  “Date was June 15, 2004.”

  “Fredricks was murdered in April,” Hailey said.

  “Where was the B&E?” Hal asked.

  “Oakland.”

  Two months after Fredricks was killed, but that wasn’t a connection. A thousand crimes had taken place in that time frame. “Does it say what was taken?”

  There was a moment of silence. “Some jewelry, a little cash. Looks like a smash and grab.”

  “Convicted?”

  “He spent two weeks in and six months on probation. Looks like the stuff got returned too.”

  “Did Hayden live in Oakland?” Hal asked.

  Lusheng hesitated. “Nope. Driver’s license says San Francisco. Address on his jacket’s in the city too.”

  Hailey looked at Hal, but he simply shrugged.

  “There’s nothing else?” she asked.

  “Not that I can find. He would have turned eighteen four months after the B&E. Any other charges should be in the system.”

  “We already got those,” Hailey said. “Thanks, Lusheng.”

  “No problem. Sorry it wasn’t what you were looking for.”

  Hailey thanked him.

  Hal leaned forward to hang up when he said, “Hey, Lusheng?”

  “Yes?” he cooed.

  “You have the victim’s name on that file?”

  “Hmm.”

  Hailey started to stack the papers on her desk.

  “Ah, here it is,” Lusheng finally said. “Last name was Blake.”

  Hailey froze. That was it—a connection. Finally.

  “Blake?” Hal repeated.

  “You know them?” Lusheng asked. “Donald and Patricia Blake? He was an editor on the local paper. They were out at a work dinner when it happened. Kids were at a neighbor’s. House was empty …”

  Hal and Hailey stared at the phone in silence. Donald Blake’s family was murdered. Blake killed himself.

  A year before that, their dead gunrunner, Jeremy Hayden, had broken into his house.

  That could not be a coincidence.

  Chapter 14

  Hal grabbed his jacket. “I’m going down to evidence to get the keys to Robbins’s house.”

  “Should I come?”

  He shook his head. “You go home. Keep your phone on you, and I’ll call when I’m done.” He took a few steps and turned back. “See what you can find out—”

  “About Blake. I know. I’m going to talk to Ryaan Berry about Regal Insurance Group. She recognized the name when we talked the other night.”

  “Yes.” He was jazzed. “There’s got to be some connection to Regal Insurance.”

  *

  Hal arrived at Hunters Point while it was still light enough to make the projects seem innocuous, especially from a distance. A series of blue and yellow faded blocks rose up around him, the buildings sitting high enough on the hill that it was hard to see their true state.

  Hal figured that was in the design.

  Aside from his house and the department, he’d visited these buildings more than any place in San Francisco—a sad statement to his personal life.

  And to the state of things in these projects.

  When Hal turned off Third Street and onto Evans, the dampening light warned that night was closing in. He turned up Keith Street and passed two kids pedaling across the cracked blacktop, the bikes so small their knees nearly touched their chins. Farther down, a handful of others played hockey with loose chunks of asphalt.

  This was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the Bay Area. The kids who grew up here had almost no chance of getting out. According to some statistics, more than a quarter of them wouldn’t live to see eighteen.

  Almost none lived with both parents. Some didn’t live with any parents at all. Maybe half went to school, fewer regularly. Even Hal wasn’t safe here. No police officer was.

  He arrived at the building where James Robbins lived and looked around for the backup patrol officers who were supposed to meet him. He’d arrived first.

  Robbins’s mother had died of cancer two years earlier. His father was AWOL. He and his sister were in the care of a woman named Betty Parker, although Records showed Parker had a different apartment number than Robbins and his sister. Dispatch confirmed the car was en route, so Hal went to take a look around, maybe talk to a couple of Robbins’s neighbors. He climbed the stairs to the third floor.

  Smells of trash and urine filled his nose as he stopped at Robbins’s door, the first unit on the west end of the building.

  To the left of the door was a small patch of concrete balcony, maybe three feet square, littered with trash, cigarette butts and bits of broken bottles. He walked to the edge and looked down at the street. The kids still rode their miniature bikes. The shouts of the hockey players rose up from below.

  When he turned back toward the door, he noticed chalk drawings on the outside wall of Robbins’s house, just a foot or so above the ground. Beneath them, the dirty patio had been swept clean of debris.

  He squatted down and looked at a child’s rendering of a cat or rabbit. The chalk wiped off on his fingers, so he assumed it had been done recently. A short piece of chalk was wedged in a crack in the wall.

  He wondered about the artist.

  At Robbins’s door, yellow police tape sealed the scene. Along the hinge, the tape was pinched, as though the door had been opened. On the opposite side, someone had slit the seal to enter. He knocked twice, hard, standing against the wall beside the door and holding his thumb over the peephole.

  The door groaned, scraping in its jamb, and then opened. A small girl stood in the hallway, loading books into a backpack. Her hair was in two loosely braided plaits, frizzy around her scalp as though she’d gone few days without restyling it. She wore a faded yellow T-shirt and jeans that were both too short and too big on her bony body.

  “I’m just getting my books—” Her gaze shifted from the bag to his feet. She looked up and began to shriek.

  Dropping the bag, she shoved the door closed with two hands. Hal held it open by putting his foot in its path.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Mrs. Parker!” She ran back into the apartment.

  A door down the hallway burst open.

  “You get ’way from there. I’m calling the police,” shouted a heavyset woman in a green flowered dress. Mrs. Parker?

  Hal lifted his badge. “Hal Harris,
ma’am. I’m an Inspector with the San Francisco PD.” He turned toward her, his foot still in the open doorway, but she stepped back into her apartment.

  “You ain’t fooling me, mister,” she shouted from behind the door. “Don’t take but fifty cents to get you one of those badges.”

  Hal pulled his phone from his pocket slowly, showed it to her as he radioed dispatch. When he requested a status on his backup, he was told they were still en route.

  He kept his back to the wall between Robbins’s apartment where the girl was still hiding and the big angry woman down the hallway, not ready to turn his back on either one. “I’m here because of James Robbins,” he said loud enough for both to hear. “He’s confessed to a shooting that I don’t think he committed.” He waited a minute and added, “I need to get some answers, so I can prove he’s innocent.”

  Mrs. Parker poked her head out from behind the door. “You the police, and you don’t believe he did it?” She narrowed her eyes, pointed a finger at him. “Now I know you a fake.”

  “I’m not a fake, ma’am,” Hal insisted, taking a quick glance into Robbins’s quiet unit and feeling more than a little on edge. This was no place for a stranger, let alone a police officer without backup. Where the hell was the black and white? “Do you know James Robbins, ma’am?”

  “Course I know him,” she said indignantly. “Practically raise him and Tawny since their mama died.” She waddled out into the hallway, pulled the door closed behind her, and keyed the two locks. Coming at him, she filled the hallway almost from one side to the other, and Hal pressed against the wall as she passed.

  She looked into the Robbins’s doorway. “You probably scared her to death, poor child. After what she seen.” She stepped into the apartment, followed by the musty smell of malt liquor that might’ve been a few days old. The floor moaned beneath her. “Tawny!”

  “What did she see?” Hal asked.

  She looked Hal up and down, shook her head, and continued inside.

  Hal searched the street for his backup. Nothing.

  “I’m Mrs. Parker. Betty Parker.” Then once she’d disappeared inside the dim apartment, she shouted back, “You coming in here or what?”

  Hal radioed that he was entering the Robbins’s unit and asked dispatch to please status his backup. They should’ve been there by now. Hal stepped into the apartment and shut the door, pushing hard as it stuck. He kept to one side as he moved down the hallway, back to the wall. The first room he passed was a bedroom, empty. “Ma’am,” he called out. “Mrs. Parker?”

  “We down here,” she said from deep inside the unit.

  “I need to know who’s in the unit, ma’am. How many people.”

  “Ain’t but the two of us,” she said. “Me and Tawny.” She waved her arm and the heavy flesh of it swung back and forth behind her motions. “Come here, girl,” she snapped.

  The young girl emerged from the shadows. “Me,” Mrs. Parker said, then turned to the girl. “And Tawny. Only ones here.”

  Hal kept his badge up in his left hand, the right resting on his holster. “Is James your brother?” he asked Tawny.

  She nodded.

  “You mind if I look around?”

  “What you looking for?” Mrs. Parker barked.

  “Nothing specific, ma’am. I’d just like to see the place.”

  She frowned and then waved at him. “Go ahead. Don’t you touch nothing, though.”

  He nodded and backed into the first bedroom, carpeted in an ugly dark brown, a different shade from the dirty beige of the rest of the place. Remnants of the visit from CSU were visible in the black powder on the desktop and the small bits of numbered tape tacked to the places where they had removed evidence. Otherwise, it was pretty clean, especially for a kid’s room.

  Cleaner than his own.

  A ratty blue and white striped comforter had been thrown back over the pillows in a lazy attempt to make the bed. A few clothes hung over a beat-up wooden desk chair. One of the chairs had a broken leg that had been repaired with duct tape.

  This had to be James’s room. The walls around the bed were plastered with posters of bands Hal had heard of from his sister’s kids and some Sheila had listened to—Drake, Jay Z, Wiz Khalifa. On a small desk beside the bed was a small Bluetooth speaker. In the closet, old jeans and shirts sat folded in stacks on a long shelf, underwear and paired socks in bundles on another.

  No new equipment, no fancy clothes—nothing that suggested Robbins had extra cash from running with Fish.

  On the floor beside the bed lay a binder with a math textbook splayed open across it. Hal bent down, opened the binder, and flipped through pages of homework assignments. At the top of each was a grade circled in red: 8/10, 9/10, a 7/10, where the teacher wrote: “You can do better, James!”

  James was a straight kid. Good grades, tidy. Behind the homework pages he found a test with an 87 written in red at the top. Hell, that was better than Hal had done in high school.

  The floor groaned as Mrs. Parker came into the room, eyeing him suspiciously. “What you planting in here?”

  “Nothing, ma’am.” He nodded to the binder. “Looks like James is a good student.”

  “Course he is.”

  Hal moved past her, down the hall, and found a second bedroom, the girl’s. He paused in the doorway. It was done in yellows, worn and faded.

  Like James’s, the room was kept tidy by someone who cared for her things, even if they were secondhand. In the living room, the girl sat on the floor against the wall, watching him as he walked into the kitchen area where a few dishes sat in the sink, rinsed and stacked.

  On the refrigerator door was a photograph of Robbins and the girl. In it, she grinned widely, her front two teeth missing. Hal pulled the photo loose, turned around, and surveyed the blood spatter that covered the two couches and the walls behind them.

  When he looked over at Tawny, she, too, was eyeing the wall.

  Hal dragged a chair from the kitchen table and sat down.

  Tawny pulled her knees to her chest, hugged them tight.

  “Were you here the night your brother was shot?”

  She looked up at Mrs. Parker, standing in the hallway.

  Hal did, too, but she wasn’t looking at either of them, her gaze somewhere on the ceiling, as though she was making an important decision. Mrs. Parker moved slowly into the room and lowered herself into a corner of the couch, as far from the blood as possible. “Go on and tell ’im, girl.”

  Tawny licked her lips. “I was outside, drawing on the wall.” She paused. “With chalk—not paint or anything. The chalk washes off in the rain—”

  “I saw it. A cat?”

  She nodded. “Started out a bunny, but the tail got too long.” She chewed on her mouth a moment.

  “Who was here that night?”

  “Just my brother and Fish.”

  “But someone else came later, didn’t they?” he asked.

  Tawny looked back at Mrs. Parker.

  “You got to tell ’im all of it, Tawny. Ain’t gonna help James to lie,” the old woman said.

  “I know your brother didn’t shoot his friend,” Hal said. “I need your help to find who really did.”

  Tawny looked at him. “James said not to tell.”

  “I can’t help him unless you tell me.”

  “Go on, child,” Mrs. Parker coaxed, impatiently.

  Tawny looked at the couch on the far side of the room. Where her brother had been sitting.

  “I was drawing when I heard a pop, like someone in a movie getting shot.” She furrowed her brow. “But there weren’t no screaming.”

  “Wasn’t any screaming,” Mrs. Parker corrected.

  “They’re always screaming in the movies when somebody gets shot.” She glanced sideways at Mrs. Parker. “Plus, I saw the movie him and Fish was watching, and it didn’t sound right—too quiet. It weren’t—it wasn’t a quiet movie.

  “So, I stopped drawing and listened. It was real shots. I thought
James would come out to get me. He always knew if trouble was coming. He was real careful about me since Mom—” Tawny blinked hard.

  “Go on, girl,” Mrs. Parker whispered.

  “James always told me to get down on the ground when I heard shots, so I did. I heard someone coming down the hallway, and I thought it was James. But then the door stuck. James knows you got to pull down on the handle to get that door open. All his friends know it too. I stayed in that corner. The door finally opened and the man cussed loud. I didn’t move one single inch.”

  Hal leaned forward, propped his elbows on his knees, and kept his voice steady. “Did you see his face, Tawny?”

  Her eyes grew into dark saucers. “His face was turned. I saw his hands. They were real big. Way bigger than James’s.” She looked at Hal. “Big as yours.”

  Hal studied her, stood up. “You sure he was as big as me?”

  She stared up at him. “I think so. He was real big.”

  Hal figured James was five-eleven. He made notes. Not many guys were as big as he was. Six-four tended to put you on the high end of the spectrum, unless you were talking about the NBA.

  “He had some new shoes on too. Jordans.”

  Hal wrote that down.

  “Black with red,” Tawny continued. “Brand new.”

  “Besides the shoes and his hands, what else did you see?”

  She tugged her lower lip. “He cut his hand when he came out the door.” She looked at Mrs. Parker. “On that metal you always telling me to watch for.”

  “There’s a piece of rebar sticks out of the cement wall over there. Must’ve called on it a dozen times. Don’t anybody come fix things ’round here.”

  “Do you know how badly he cut himself?” Be a nice break if he ended up in a hospital. Hospitals kept records.

  “He was bleeding some,” she said.

  Probably not bad enough for an ER visit, but he might’ve left some DNA.

  “I didn’t see nothing else,” she continued. “He was dressed dark, and there’s not real good light out there. I mostly draw in the dark till my eyes get used to it.” After a few moments, she cocked her head and added, “I guess there was one more thing kinda weird.”