It was immediately clear to me that this storage account was for Joe’s personal stuff. The Brooks Findlay file wasn’t there, for instance, nor any of Joe’s freelance clients. I found a file for football scores, and clips from blogs he followed. I found nothing marked top secret. And his contact list didn’t include Alison Muller’s info.
Before giving up, I clicked on the calendar icon, and when it opened, I flashed over the entries for the many empty days and months when Joe had worked from home.
The notes were brief and straightforward, but there were a couple of cryptic entries at the end of March. Joe had taken a trip back east to see his mother, who’d just had surgery to put in a pacemaker. He’d made notes of his flight reservations on this, his personal calendar.
But what I was reading showed me that Joe hadn’t made a round trip from SFO to New York’s JFK. He had booked connecting flights from SFO through JFK to Brandenburg, an airport in Berlin. And he’d noted the confirmation numbers for two seat assignments.
One for J. A. Molinari. And the second for a fellow traveler, Sonja Dietrich.
Joe had gone to Berlin with Alison Muller.
Who was he? I didn’t know my husband at all.
CHAPTER 62
JOAN RONAN MACLEAN was an attractive twenty-five-year-old bartender from Palo Alto who’d come to San Francisco on her own dime to see Conklin and me. She made himself comfortable in the visitor’s chair next to our desks, flipped her sandy-colored hair out of her eyes, and said Michael Chan frequented the Howling Wolf and had been at the bar a couple of nights before he was killed.
According to MacLean, “Chan was drinking alone, and he had more than his usual two beers.”
“How did he seem to you?” Conklin asked.
“Pensive. The bar was kinda empty and he wanted to talk. I speak a little Chinese because I had a Chinese nanny, so we’re kinda friends. But I was completely unprepared for this.”
“Please go on,” Conklin said.
“Yeah, yeah. He told me he was in love with a woman, not his wife, and that they were going to run away to Canada together.”
“Did he mention the woman’s name?”
“He called her Renata one time, and the other times he called her ‘my love.’ I asked him if he was serious about running away, because he has a wife and kids, you know? And he said she was married, too. And he said this lady carried a gun. So I said, ‘She’s a cop?’
“And he said, all dreamy-like, ‘I don’t really know.’”
I asked MacLean, “As you see it, does this affair have anything to do with Chan getting killed?”
“Well. It made me wonder if his wife killed him. Or if his girlfriend did.”
More questions in a case that was nothing but questions. I thanked MacLean for the tip and walked her out to the gate. When I got back to my desk, Conklin was hanging up the phone. He said, “Chi has a lead on the Chinese guys who’ve been dogging you.”
Chi was Sergeant Paul Chi of our homicide squad. He was born here but speaks some Chinese and has cultivated a stable of CIs in and around Chinatown.
I said to Conklin, “What’s he got?”
Conklin tapped on his keyboard and said, “Here you go.”
I was looking at a low-res photo of a broad-shouldered Chinese man, maybe in his twenties, wearing a black T-shirt, sports jacket, and jeans. He’d been snapped getting out of a partially obstructed vehicle that might be a BMW SUV.
“When was that taken?” I asked.
“Yesterday, half past noon, near a noodle shop in Chinatown.”
“What noodle shop? Where, exactly?”
Conklin turned his head and looked up at me. “What do I look like? Google Maps?”
I laughed, went around to my desk, and threw myself down into the chair. I pawed my mouse and opened my browser.
“Name of noodle shop? Or is that too much to ask?”
“Mei Ling Happy Noodles.”
I put the name in, clicked a few times, and got a picture of a noodle shop on Stockton, a major artery through Chinatown. I swiveled my monitor so my partner could see the shop and then the wide view of the street. At midday, the stores and markets on Stockton and the neighboring intersecting streets of Washington and Jackson were fairly seething with traffic and pedestrians.
“So, this was taken noonish,” Conklin said. “Maybe this guy was stopping for lunch.”
“Uh-huh. Noodles to go.”
“I could go for some yat gaw mein,” Richie said.
I was ready to punch out and go home to my child before nightfall for once.
“You mean now?” I said. “How about tomorrow, first thing?”
“That works for me,” he said.
I thought, Little Julie. Here I come.
CHAPTER 63
IT WAS JUST before six p.m. when I headed out to the parking lot on Harriet Street. Rain had been threatening most of the day and was now bordering on torrential. I ran with my head down and my keys in hand. After disabling the alarm, I swung up into the Explorer’s high driver’s seat, which, after ten years of daily use, fits me like my Calvins.
I turned on my lights and got the wipers going, then pulled out to my left, heading along the narrow one-lane street, which was banked by chain-link fences and parking lots. I could see my turn onto Harrison a block away when a car came barreling straight at me through the gloom, hitting its brights when it was only a few car lengths in front of me.
I had no time to think.
I swerved my wheel hard to the right and jammed on my brakes, and at the same time, the oncoming vehicle screeched to a full stop, smashing my left fender and shattering the headlight.
Freaking idiot. Was he insane?
I had my hand on the door handle and was about to get in that driver’s face when another vehicle pulled up on my left, stopping right there. A chain-link fence was on my right, effectively blocking my exit from the passenger-side door. Then brights in my rearview mirror brought it all into sharp focus.
I was completely boxed in. I was trapped.
I whipped my head around to face the driver on my left and was hardly surprised to see the Asian man with the scar on his chin, the one who’d body-blocked me as I was leaving the NTSB meeting.
I yelled, “What do you think you’re doing?”
He grinned, lifted a handgun, and took aim at my face.
I ducked a fraction of a second before a succession of bullets shattered my window. I kept my head down at the level of the dashboard, pulled my gun from my shoulder holster, and fired back. I got off a couple of shots, but the man with the scar ducked, and I didn’t wait to see if I’d hit him.
I jerked the gearshift into reverse and stepped on the gas. I backed up hard and fast into the car behind me. Metal shrieked as the rear of my vehicle and the front of his crumpled from the impact.
At the same time, bullets from the car to my left and the one in front of me came through my windshield, spider-webbing the glass, which fell onto my dash.
I hunched down and shifted into drive, and the Explorer lunged forward. I had to avoid hitting the car that had caved in my left headlight and was still partially blocking the road. I veered to my right, scraped along twenty feet of chain-link fencing, and floored it.
My car filled with light.
I peered over the steering wheel for a split second and saw that the shooter in front of me, taking up his lane and half of mine, had opened his car door and was using it as a shield. His head was haloed in the streetlights behind him, and I could see him very well as he rested his gun on his door frame and took aim.