Undoubtedly that basement door was used by the unknown subject who had taken the four packets of cash totaling a hundred grand.
And the game was still on. As the bomber had told Michael Jansing, he was enjoying himself immensely.
That’s when a soft ka-boom went off in my mind.
But was it already too late?
I dashed out to our car and yelled into the radio: “All units to the corner of East Twelfth and Thirty-fifth. Now!”
Three minutes later, we converged on Chuck’s Prime two blocks northeast of San Leandro Street, where grass-fed Chuckburgers were being served by fresh-faced guys and gals in cowboy outfits, every one of them looking too innocent to be real.
In my mind, every employee was a suspect and every customer was a potential victim. Maybe there was a bomb under the broiler lamps now. Or maybe a ticking hamburger had just been served.
There was no time for finesse.
I stood with Conklin and a squad of armed cops at my back and yelled, “SFPD. Everybody stop eating! Put down those hamburgers! Now!”
Chapter 43
Cindy had locked her office door at the Chronicle and was high on extra-sweet coffee, as she liked to be, working a newly hatched Mackie Morales angle, when Claire called her to ask, “Cin? You on tonight? Susie says that laughter and jerked pork are on the menu.”
Cindy said, “Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t miss it.”
She signed off, but her thoughts took a sharp turn toward Susie’s Café, which is where she’d met Mackie Morales in the flesh. The memory was indelible, and sometimes when it came over her, she couldn’t block it.
She had been at Susie’s with the girls, at their regular table in the back, where she, Claire, Lindsay, and Yuki met just about every week.
Mackie had been working her role as squad assistant at the Southern Station Homicide squad, and Lindsay had invited her to Susie’s. It was nice of Lindsay to bring Mackie to their clubhouse, and Cindy had thought Mackie was upbeat, bright, a cute person. It still amazed her how wrong she and innumerable top law enforcement officers had been about her.
That time at Susie’s, Mackie had been in the ladies’ room when Richie showed up at their table, uninvited. He was frustrated and had made the rash decision to bring their increasingly stormy relationship issues to her girls.
He was in mid-rant about what he needed and wasn’t getting when Mackie came back from the restroom. She sat down, became uncomfortable in the middle of this inappropriate conversation, and almost immediately made an excuse to leave the café, saying she had to go home to her child.
Cindy and Richie had continued squabbling at the table, and after too much of that, they’d taken their fight outside and had broken off their engagement on Jackson Street, shouting at each other in the rain.
How long had it taken Richie and Mackie to hook up after that?
Cindy didn’t know and it didn’t matter now.
What mattered was that she locate Morales, help bring her down, and then give Henry Tyler a story the Chronicle readers would never forget.
To that end, she called Captain Lawrence, her police contact in Wisconsin, to ask him about Randy Fish’s father, Bill, who had owned the green house near Lake Michigan.
Captain Lawrence picked up his phone on the first ring. She could tell he liked her now, and as long as he didn’t break the law, he was willing and even happy to help her.
She asked, “Pat, do you know Bill Fish’s wife’s name and her last known address?”
“Her name was Erica Williams before she married Fish. I think she was from Honolulu but I don’t know for sure. As to where she is now? I don’t even know if she’s in the United States. She was so ashamed of Randy. She couldn’t hold her head up. After Bill died, she had a tag sale. Sold most of her things and then just took off.”
Cindy thanked the captain and stared out her window for a couple of minutes, organizing her many disparate thoughts.
She decided to take her laptop out to lunch.
Chapter 44
Chow’s was a coffee shop on 3rd Street, two long blocks down Mission from the Chronicle. It was a popular hole in the wall, serving home-style Thai and Chinese dishes as well as classic American diner fare. The place was packed from noon until three, but at just after eleven, Cindy thought Chow’s would offer the perfect change of scene she was hungering for.
She pushed open the heavy glass doors, waved at George behind the cash register, cruised past the takeout line, and slipped into a two-person booth at midpoint of the center aisle. When the waiter came to her, she ordered French fries and a chocolate milk shake.
“That’s it?”
“For now,” said Cindy.
She opened her MacBook and began a search for Erica Fish. Even before her fries and shake arrived, she found more than a hundred and fifty women with that name, equally distributed across the country. Between courses, she typed “Erica Williams” into her browser and found another four hundred listings, scattered from sea to shining sea.
Her search assumed that Erica Williams Fish was using some version of her actual name and that the closely guarded custody of young Ben Morales Fish had gone to the little boy’s paternal grandmother.
So it was also logical to check out Mackie’s mother, Deanna Mackenzie Morales, and her father, Joseph Morales. Mackie and her parents had lived in Chicago, but the thousands of listings for J. Morales totally swamped any possibility of a fine-tuned search without limitless funds and endless time.
But it took no time and cost nothing to type Mackie’s mother’s name in different permutations into her browser. Cindy did it—and like freakin’ magic, she got a hit. D. M. Morales, the one and only person in the entire country with that name, was listed in the San Francisco white pages.
Just the name.
The number and address were unlisted—which made sense.
If Mackie’s mother had lived in San Francisco prior to her daughter getting busted, she may have gotten custody of the child. If so, she would want to be way under the radar. So she’d blocked her phone and address so that people like Cindy couldn’t find her.
Cindy slurped her milk shake down to the bottom, paid the check at the register, and walked back to the office. As she crossed 3rd Street, she thought about how Mackie Morales’s recent past had taken her from Wisconsin to a bank in Chicago and possibly to a highway in Wyoming. She was heading west.
She might well be coming to San Francisco to visit Ben and her mother.
And here was the dark hunch she’d been harboring. Morales might have other business in San Francisco as well.
Chapter 45
To be honest, I had to force myself to go to Susie’s that night. Normally, a Club meeting was like a dip in the Caribbean Sea—salty, warm, rousing, and comforting at the same time.
But tonight, as I stood in my bare feet in my bedroom, I wanted to take off all my clothes, get into bed, and pull the covers over my head.
But I knew even that wouldn’t assuage my twin feelings of frustration and bone-deep exhaustion from the fruitless day in Fruitvale. And the upshot of the entire pathetic operation was that the belly bomber had the money and was planning to kill again.
Joe said, “You’ll feel better if you go out with the girls. I’ll wait up.”
I showered and changed my clothes and drove to Susie’s, hoping that Claire and Cindy would both be okay if I ate and ran. That was pretty much all I could handle.
I pulled open the big wooden door, and the calypso party spilled out. Hot Tea was working the steel drums, the rum punch and margaritas were flowing, and the whole place smelled like spiced meat on a grill.