“The uniforms came in,” Calhoun told us excitedly, making his hands into guns. He said, “Pow-ka-pow-pow-pow.”
“I’m guessing the shooters had wallets on them,” I said.
Swanson grinned. “Wouldn’t that be nice? No wallets, but CSI just got started. We’ll know who these guys are in an hour.”
Was it over?
I was ready to exhale, I really was. I stepped around the blood and the CSIs taking pictures and stooped to get a look at one of the dead men.
He’d taken a couple of shots to the chest and one to his face through his mask—a pig mask. That was new. The Windbreaker cops on the video we’d seen were wearing plain face masks.
Then I noticed that the doer wasn’t wearing gloves. I looked over at the second man, who’d taken out half a block of folding chairs when he was shot. Same kind of pig mask. And he wasn’t wearing gloves, either.
Why had the slick gunmen we’d seen on surveillance footage changed their MO from nighttime robberies to morning, when there would be less money in the safe and more possibility that customers would enter the store?
Why had they gotten sloppy?
Swanson answered his phone, saying, “Yeah.” And “Uh-huh.”
“Amateur hour,” Conklin said to me under his breath.
“Copy that,” I said.
Swanson said into the phone, “Yeah, I think it’s a done deal, Chief. When CSU finishes up, I think you can tell the press we got the bad guys.”
I hadn’t taken Swanson for an optimist, and while I hoped he was right, I knew he was wrong. The dead men on the floor of the Cash ’n’ Go?
They were copycats.
I would bet my badge on it.
CHAPTER 34
YUKI ENTERED THE paneled and richly furnished conference room at Moorehouse and Rogers, Attorneys-at-Law.
Six of the firm’s lawyers sat around the large mahogany table, and so did the first of the two narcotics cops she had come to depose.
Inspector William Brand was stout and muscular and had a two-day-old beard. She knew from watching him on video that he had the initials WB tattooed on the side of his neck, as if they’d been burned there with a branding iron.
He smiled at her when she came into the room. Like What’s up, honey?
This was the problem with being small. And, OK, cute.
The pricey lawyers hired by the City of San Francisco introduced themselves, and hands were shaken all around. Someone offered her coffee while another pulled out a chair.
So far, all of this fit her expectations, right down to the oil paintings of the founding partners on the wall.
What she wasn’t prepared for was the knock on the door, for one of the lawyers to open it, and for Len Parisi to walk in. The floor shook a little when he crossed it, and not just because he weighed almost three hundred pounds.
Len Parisi was like a force of nature.
She’d thought he would present himself in court at the most effective moment, but clearly, her case and his hinged entirely on Whitney and Brand’s interrogation of Aaron-Rey Kordell.
She and Parisi exchanged the briefest of pleasantries, and when that was over, Yuki asked for the video to roll.
Then she said to Inspector Brand, “I’ve seen the footage of your interview of Aaron-Rey Kordell. I just need some background. What did you think his motive was to shoot those three crack dealers?”
“Motive?” said Brand. His eyebrows shot up and he pushed back a bit from the table. “It was a holdup. He wanted the money. Or the drugs. Or both.”
“And what did he have on him when he was arrested?”
“The patrolmen who nabbed him just found the gun,” said Whitney. “He either passed off the loot or it was taken offa him.”
“Kordell confirmed that?” Yuki asked.
“He denied everything,” Brand said. “And as the victims were dead, we didn’t have anything else to go on.”
“I see,” said Yuki. “So when Aaron-Rey confessed, it was open and shut.”
“We earned our pay,” said Brand. “He denied everything until he couldn’t deny it anymore. Then he spilled. Said he found the gun. He shot the dealers. He ran.”
“And you believed him?” Yuki said. “He was fifteen. He had a below-normal IQ. He had no record.”
“He said he was eighteen, and he was bright enough to put bullets into three scumbags,” said Brand. “You have to commend him for that. Too bad the kid got killed. He did a public-service triple homicide.”
“Were Mr. Kordell’s hands and clothing tested for gunshot residue?”
“No. We had him in the box right after his arrest for carrying the weapon. We thought he would confess pronto. But it took longer and the gunshot residue just slipped our minds.”
Yuki said, “But there’s no doubt in your mind to this day that Aaron-Rey Kordell did those shootings?”
“None,” said Brand. “I have not a doubt in the world.”
CHAPTER 35
INSPECTOR STAN WHITNEY was more refined than his partner. He had fine features and a short beard; he was wearing wire-frame glasses and a blue denim shirt under his blue gabardine jacket.
Yuki asked Whitney the same questions she had asked Brand and got the same answers. Aaron-Rey Kordell had been arrested for carrying a gun that had recently been fired. He said he didn’t shoot anyone, but his explanation of why he had the gun was weak and he was a prime suspect. And then he confessed to a triple homicide.
She asked Whitney why Aaron-Rey hadn’t been represented by a lawyer, and the detective told her he had waived his right to an attorney. And because he had no record and had lied about his age, and didn’t ask for his parents, his parents hadn’t been present.
During the depositions, Parisi said nothing, asked nothing, just fixed Yuki with his brooding and steady glare. It was a look that was far from his customary benign countenance. And it was freaky. When Yuki finished deposing Stan Whitney, Parisi’s co-counsel from Moorehouse and Rogers asked, “Anything else we can help you with, Ms. Castellano?”
“I’m good,” Yuki said. “Thanks for your time.”
She really couldn’t get out of the conference room fast enough. Brand was an intimidating cop, and Whitney’s straight-shooter manner could assure anyone of his good intentions—to their detriment. Having heard their testimony and seen clips from the videoed interrogation, a jury with an open mind would be moved and would see the cops’ determined manipulation of a kid who had no resistance to them.
In the few minutes between leaving the law offices and reaching her car, doubt crept into Yuki’s mind.
Parisi.
She would be going up against Parisi in front of a judge and jury. Parisi had had fifteen years of litigation experience before he came to the DA eight years ago.
And he would do whatever he could do to build up Whitney and Brand and their lawful interrogation and subsequent arrest. That was the only thing he had to do. Show that the interrogation had lawfully produced Aaron-Rey’s confession.
If he could convince the jury of that, the Kordells would lose their righteous lawsuit, and she would be humiliated. She just couldn’t let any of that happen.
She could not.
CHAPTER 36
CINDY LEFT THE Chronicle Building and caught a cab the second she stuck out her hand—a lucky break at rush hour. She gave the driver the address of Quince, a terrific restaurant in the Jackson Square area. Then she sat back in the seat and thought about how mysterious Richie had seemed when he called and asked her to meet him for dinner. She hadn’t been able to get anything out of him, but he was at a crime scene and unable to talk.
Still, she wondered what he wasn’t saying.
She flashed back, as she always did, to their recent past: how they’d been wonderfully, fabulously engaged when their opposing issues had caught up to them and overwhelmed the magic of their living-together love affair.