12th of Never (Womens Murder Club 12) (16 page)

He stopped running, and when I told him to drop to the ground and interlace his hands behind his neck, he did it. He laughed at me when I kicked the knife into the gutter. When Jacobi cuffed him, Fish told Jacobi he was so fat he was headed for a heart attack.

Frankly, I couldn’t believe what Fish looked like in person. I had to shake my head and reorder my thoughts. But never mind his appearance—he was down. The FBI took him into custody and we were all jubilant.

It was frigid and I was shaking from the cold. It was one of the best moments of my life.

THE NIGHT WE captured Randolph Fish, Ronald Parker, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco field office, said that Fish would be more responsive to a female interviewer than to the men working the case.

“He’s all about control,” Parker said. “He’s like a drug addict, and his drug of choice is dominating women. He’ll try to get under your skin, Lindsay. If there’s any chance of getting Sandra Brody back, you’ll have to get under his.”

I interrogated Randolph Fish for fifteen hours on each of three consecutive days. I used every interview technique I knew. I threatened him. I negotiated with him. When these methods failed, I shut off the camera and I threw the man to the floor. I kicked him nine times, once for each of his victims.

Fish laughed and told me what a cute piece I was when I was mad. He had gotten under my skin after all, and he never told me or anyone else what happened to Sandra Brody.

Fish was tried, convicted on five counts of homicide in the first degree, and sent to the federal prison at Atwater, where he was locked in a nice private cell.

A year later, he was on the way to the infirmary for shooting pains in his chest when a riot broke out and a guard was shot. Fish made a break for an exit—and was clubbed across the back of the head.

He slipped into a persistent coma and was handcuffed to a bed in the prison wing of a nearby hospital, where he had been for the last two years.

I’d long hoped that Randolph Fish would wake up with his memory intact. There were four families who wanted to know where their daughters were buried, and nine families who wanted to watch Randolph Fish die in the chair.

Now I gripped the phone and said to Brady, “What’s his condition?”

“He spoke in full sentences,” Brady said. “He told the warden he’ll take the feds to the missing bodies if he gets a deal, and if he gets to talk to you. Do you want in on this, Boxer? Ron Parker asked for your assistance.”

I didn’t want to say no to Ron Parker.

“I’ll do it,” I told Brady, “but I can’t make it tomorrow. I just can’t.”

“Fish could go back into a coma. It happens, you know. Parker’s not going to wait,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“Are you all right, Lindsay?”

“I’m absolutely terrific. Joe and I were just saying that these are the best days of our lives.”

“Uh-huh. Go feed your baby. I’ll ask Jacobi to call Parker. See what he can do.”

JOE, JULIE, AND I were in Dr. Gordon’s office promptly at nine the next morning. I looked down into my baby’s sweet face, hoping for a smile, some little sign that would make me say, “She’s fine.”

“I’m not so happy with the results of the blood test,” Dr. Gordon said.

I tried to read her inscrutable face. I realized that Dr. Gordon was younger than I am. And for the first time, that really worried me. Did she have enough experience to help Julie? Was she the best doctor in the world?

“What about her blood tests? What’s wrong?”

“Her white blood cells are abnormal in shape.”

Abnormal? I grabbed the desk with both hands, as if to stop myself from lifting off and rocketing away from the planet. I had never heard more terrifying words in my life.

“What do you mean by ‘abnormal’?” I said.

Joe shielded the baby from me and from what the doctor was saying. He said, softly, “What’s the worst-case scenario?”

Dr. Gordon said, “Let’s not go to worst cases. We’re not at that point, not even close. I want to check Julie into the hospital and get a full clinical workup,” the doctor said. “I think she may have an infection, but I want a second opinion.”

“An infection like the flu? Is that what you mean?” I said, my grip on the desk relaxing a tad.

“I think so, but I want other doctors to look at her. Look, Lindsay, she’s not gaining weight. She’s running intermittent fevers. It could be just how Julie is, or maybe she picked up something from one of the firemen who delivered her. But I’m guessing.

“I want to test for everything, aggressively. We should do X-rays, biopsies, the works.”

I shouted, “Oh, my God. You don’t think she has the flu. What is this? What do you think she has?”

Joe shushed me and put his hand on Julie’s head.

Dr. Gordon said, “I’m going to make sure that next time you ask me what’s wrong, I can give you an unqualified answer. California Women’s has a wonderful pediatric facility. I’d like you to bring her over—now.”

I had been worried for weeks, and now I thought those weeks had been wasted, that we should have pushed harder for answers.

I blamed myself for not overriding Joe and taking Julie to the hospital the first time she had a fever. I should have followed my instincts. I should have done it.

“I’ll meet you at admitting,” Dr. Gordon said.

I held the baby as Joe drove. He looked drained. Gray. “We’ll get to the bottom of this, Linds. We won’t have to wonder anymore, and Julie will get better.”

Yeah? And how did Joe know that?

We found a spot in the outpatient parking, carried the baby through the pale stone lobby, and took the elevator to pediatrics.

We got through the check-in procedure without either one of us blowing up or going crazy. We met the radiologist, who handed Julie to a nurse, who snapped a bracelet around her tiny wrist—and took her away.

Dr. Gordon said, “She’s in very good hands. I’ll call you as soon as I have something to tell you.”

“We’ll be right here, in the waiting room,” I said.

“This will take a couple of days,” Dr. Gordon told us. “Please go home. There’s nothing you can do for your daughter by waiting here when you live ten blocks away. You can look in on her tonight.”

I had a good hard cry in the hospital lobby. Joe held me tight, and then he drove us home.

AT SIX THIRTY the next morning, my former partner, chief of police Warren Jacobi, swooped down on Lake Street in his shiny black sedan. He pulled up to where I was waiting for him outside our apartment building, leaned across the seat, and opened the passenger-side door for me.

He took a look at my face and said, “Good morning, sunshine.”

“Don’t start with me, Jacobi. I haven’t slept.”

“You worried about our meeting with Fish?”

“I meant I haven’t slept since Julie was born.”

“Well, you do look like hell.” He laughed. “On you, it looks good.”

I pulled a face, got into the car, took a container out of the cup holder, and pried off the lid with my shaking hands. Jacobi was a worn-looking fifty-five, white-haired, jowly, and, to my eyes, beautiful.

“Julie is in the hospital,” I said.

“Shit. What for? What’s wrong with her?”

The coffee was black, two sugars. Jacobi knew how I like it. I strapped in, then told my former partner everything I knew about what was wrong with Julie.

I didn’t know much.

Jacobi listened as we cruised up Lake Street, the nose of the car pointed east toward Modesto and then south to the U.S. penitentiary in Atwater.

Jacobi said how sorry he was that the baby was sick, and he also told me that I always worry too much and that everything would be fine.

“Of course, when you stop worrying, that’s when things really turn to shit.”

“I’ve really missed you, Jacobi. Like a migraine.”

He laughed and got me to do it, too.

It was almost like old times.

During the ten years I worked with Jacobi, we logged innumerable twenty-hour days in a squad car, arrested a few dozen killers and unrepentant dirtbags, and we both took bullets one bad night in an unlit alley in the Tenderloin.

We could have died and almost did.

A year later, Jacobi stood in for my dead father and gave me away to Joe Molinari. I tripped down the petal-strewn path, fumbled the wedding ring, and Jacobi laughed out loud on the best day of my life. We’ve had hilarious times and horrific ones, but we’ve never doubted that we’re friends forever.

As Jacobi drove, I told him, “I’ve never been so scared, and I mean never. You don’t know what love is until you have a sick baby.”

Joe had insisted that I go to work and he’d promised he’d sit at the hospital all day, all night, never leave Julie alone. I’d left the house only a half hour before, but I called Joe anyway.

“Just—call me if you learn anything, anything at all.” “I will, sweetie. You know I will.”

After I hung up, Jacobi and I talked about the Faye Farmer case and the ugly shootings foreseen by the so-called clairvoyant professor.

And we talked about Randy Fish.

Jacobi said, “I’m glad that sack of crap is alive and can still use his shit for brains. Doubly glad he’s back in maximum security.”

In another couple of hours, we were going to be talking to that sack of crap. I hoped that, having almost died, Randy Fish would feel some compassion for the parents of the missing girls. He was on death row. He had nothing to lose by telling us where he’d disposed of their bodies.

THE LANDSCAPE SURROUNDING the penitentiary is remarkable for its emptiness. If you stand in one spot and turn a full 360 degrees, you’ll see the stark prison buildings, a few distant farmhouses, and dusty flatlands out to the horizon.

We met Ron Parker at the front gate. He told us that Fish would speak only with me and there was a condition. I had to apologize for the way I treated him.

“Really? He comes out of a coma after two years and that’s what he wants?”

“That’s what he said, Lindsay. He wants to make a deal, but you know, he’s a manipulative prick. I think you should apologize, see if you can get some kind of rapport going. This might be our best and only chance to find out where he put those girls.”

One hour and many checkpoints later, I entered a small room with one glass wall. On the other side of the glass was a maximum-security hospital room. Randy Fish was wearing a hospital gown, sitting up in bed, reading a book.

I felt like Clarice Starling meeting Hannibal Lecter in
The Silence of the Lambs
.

But Randolph Fish was no Anthony Hopkins. He wasn’t a David Berkowitz or a Ted Bundy, either. At close to thirty years old, Randolph Fish looked like a teenage movie star.

I pulled out the straight-backed chair and Fish looked up, recognized me, and gave me an endearing smile.

I said, “Hello, Randy.”

“Well look at you, Lindsay,” he said. “You’ve put on, I’m going to say, twenty-two pounds since I saw you last. You look healthy.”

At five five, Randy Fish might have weighed 135 pounds when I’d kicked him around three years ago, but he weighed less now. His brown hair was clean. He had large brown eyes and bow-shaped lips. He looked unbelievably sweet and vulnerable and frail.

It was easy to see how women had fallen for him, done what he’d asked of them, without having the slightest sense that he was a sexually deviant psychopath with an insatiable desire to maim and kill.

“How’re you feeling?” I asked him.

“Rested,” he said, smiling again.

“I’m glad to see that you’re okay,” I said truthfully. “I still have some questions for you.”

“Don’t you have something to tell me?” asked the killer.

“What are you reading?” I asked.

“
The Poet
by Michael Connelly. I’m not going to beg you, Lindsay. You know what I want.”

I felt literally sick. I’d seen the morgue pictures of the five women we knew Fish had killed. One had had her fingers and toes cut off while she was alive. Another had hundreds of knife slits all over her body. All of them had been brutally raped, bitten, hanged. I knew too much about what this psycho had done and I didn’t want to give him anything.

But if I wanted to find Sandra Brody’s body and those of the three other missing young women, I was going to have to give in.

I quashed my gag reflex, but I still tasted bile at the back of my throat when I said, “I’m sorry I had to be so rough with you, Randy. But you know, you had threatened to kill a hostage. And Sandra Brody was still missing.”

“You call that an apology?”

“You remember Sandra,” I said. “She’s a pretty girl, brunette, size four, has a bit of an overbite. She was a biology major. I might be able to help you if you tell me where she is.”

“I don’t remember a Sandra Brody,” he said. “In fact, I can’t even remember why I was locked up. But I do remember you, Lindsay Boxer. I wish we’d met under different circumstances. You’re very dear to me.”

He showed me the book he’d been reading and said, “This is pretty good. Have you read it? Do you read?”

He was back into his book, turning the pages, seemingly absorbed. As far as Randy Fish was concerned, the interview was over.

I had apologized.

He’d given me nothing in return. And I was absolutely sure he was messing with me. If I had gotten down on my knees and given him an unconditional apology, he would still have messed with me.

He liked the game. He loved it.

I tapped on the glass.

Fish looked up.

I smiled and said, “Go to hell, okay?”

He shouted as I left the room, “I’m crazy about you, Lindsay Boxer. I really am.”

YUKI HAD JUST about gotten a grip on the astounding fact of Lily Herman’s reappearance when John Kinsela called his first witness.

“The defense calls Gary Goodfriend.”

Yuki said, “What?” just loud enough for Nicky to hear. Her associate shrugged and looked at her with big eyes, as surprised as she was that their witness had been called by the opposition.