2nd Chance (8 page)

Mayor Fernandez was there, along with other important faces I recognized from city government. Vernon Jones, the activist, was stationed an arm’s length from the family. Chief Mercer was there, too. This little girl was getting the biggest funeral the city had seen in years. It made her death seem even sadder.

Standing in the rear of the chapel, in a short black suit, I spotted Cindy. We both nodded as we caught each other’s eye.

I took a seat near Mercer among a delegation from the department. Soon, the famous La Salle Heights choir began a haunting rendition of “I’ll Fly Away.” There is nothing more stirring than uplifting hymns resonating through a filled church. I have my own private credo, and it starts not far from what I’ve seen on the streets: Nothing in life ever breaks down simply into good or bad, judgment or redemption. But when the swell of voices lifted up the church, it didn’t seem wrong to privately ask for mercy to shine down on this innocent soul.

After the choir finished, Aaron Winslow stepped up to a microphone. He looked very elegant in a black suit. He spoke about Tasha Catchings as someone who had known her most of her life could: her little-girl’s giggle; the poise she showed being the youngest in the choir; how she wanted to be a diva, or an architect who would rebuild this neighborhood; how, now only the angels would get to hear her beautiful voice.

He didn’t speak like some gentle minister exhorting people to turn the other cheek. He kept it hopeful, very emotional, but real. I couldn’t watch him without thinking that this handsome man had been on the battlefields of Desert Storm, and that only the other day he had put his life at risk to protect his children.

He said, his voice soft but powerful, that he could not forgive, and he could not help but judge. “Only saints don’t judge,” he said, “and believe me, I’m no saint. I’m like all of you, just someone who has grown tired of having to make peace with injustice.” He looked toward Chief Mercer. “Find the killer. Let judgment be in the courts. This isn’t about politics, or faith, or even race. It’s about the right to be free from hate. I am convinced that the world doesn’t break in the face of its worst possible deed. The world mends itself.”

People rose up, and they clapped and they cried. I stood with them. My eyes were wet. Aaron Winslow brought such dignity to these proceedings. It was over within an hour. No blazing sermons, only a smattering of amens. But a sadness none of us would ever forget.

Tasha’s mother looked so strong as she followed the casket out, her young daughter being carried to her final rest.

I walked out to a chorus of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” feeling numb, and broken.

O
UTSIDE
, I
WAITED
FOR
CINDY
, and I watched Aaron Winslow mingle among mourners and weeping schoolmates. There was something about him I liked. He seemed genuine to me and he definitely had a passion for his work, and these people.

“Now, there’s a man I could share a foxhole with,” said Cindy, coming up to me.

“And just how do you mean that?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. All I can say is I came out here yesterday to talk with him, and I left with the hairs on my arms standing up at attention. I felt like I was interviewing Denzel Washington, or maybe that new guy on
NYPD
Blue.”

“You know, ministers aren’t the same as priests,” I said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it’s okay to go in foxholes with them. Just to get out of the line of fire, of course.”

“Of course.” She nodded. Then she mimicked an exploding mortar shot, “
Pow!”

“He is impressive. His speech made me cry. Is that what you meant to show me?”

“No,” she said with a sigh, coming back to the matter at hand. She dug in her black shoulder bag and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I know you told me to butt out… I guess I’ve just gotten used to covering your ass.

“Right,” I said. “So what do you have for me? We’re a team, right?”

As I unfolded the paper, to my shock I found myself staring at the same lion, goat, and snake rendering I had just given Kirkwood to identify. Professional restraint couldn’t keep my eyes from opening wide. “Where did you get this?”

“You
know
what you’re looking at, Lindsay.”

“My guess is that it’s not Tyco’s new toy craze.”

She didn’t laugh. “What it is, is a hate group symbol. A white supremacist thing. A colleague at the paper did research on these groups. I couldn’t help looking into it after our meeting the other night. This is used by a small, elite group. That’s why it was hard to find out about.”

I stared at the image that I had seen over an dover again since Tasha Catchings had been killed. “This thing has a name, doesn’t it?”

“It’s called a chimera, Lindsay. It’s from Greek mythology. According to my source, the lion represents courage, the body of the goat stubbornness and will, and the serpent’s tail stealth and cunning. It means that whatever you do to crush it, it will always prevail.”

I stared at the symbol, the chimera, the bile roiling in my gut. “Not this time.”

“I haven’t run with it,” Cindy said. “But it’s out there. Everybody thinks these murders are connected. This symbol is the key, right? Let me give you a second definition I found:
‘a grotesque product of the imagination.’
That fits, right?”

I found myself nodding.
Back to square one. Hate groups.
Maybe even the Templars. Once Mercer found out, we’d be busting the doors down on every hate group we could find. But how the hell could the killer be black? It didn’t make sense to me.

“You’re not mad at me, are you?” Cindy asked.

I shook my head. “Of course I’m not mad” So that source of yours, did he tell you just how they killed this chimera back then?”

“He said they called in some big hero who rode a winged horse and cut off its head. Nice to have dudes, or dudesses, like that around in a pinch, huh?” She looked at me seriously. “You have a winged horse, Lindsay?”

“No.” I shook my head again. “I’ve got a Border collie.”

C
LAIRE
MET
ME in the lobby of the Hall just as I returned with a salad. “Where you heading?” I asked.

She kept my eye coyly dressed in an attractive purple coat-dress, a Tumi leather briefcase slung over her shoulder. “Actually I was coming to see you.

Claire had a look on her face that I had learned to recognize. You wouldn’t call it smugness or self-importance; Claire didn’t run that way. It was more of a twinkle that read,
I found something
. Or more like,
Sometimes I even amaze myself.

“You had lunch?” I asked.

She snickered. “Lunch? Who has time for lunch? Since ten-thirty I’ve been under a microscope across the bay covering for you.” She peeked into my bag and caught a glimpse of my curried-chicken salad. “That looks tempting.”

I pulled it back. “That depends. On what you came up with.”

She pushed me into the elevator.

“I had to promise Teitleman parterre box seats to the symphony to calm him down,” Claire said as we got to my office. “You can consider it Edmund’s treat.” Edmund was her husband, who for the past six years had played kettle drums for the San Francisco Symphony.

“I’ll send him a note,” I said as we sat around my desk. “Maybe I can get Giants tickets.” I set out my lunch.

“You mind?” she asked, dangling a plastic fork over the salad. “Saving your ass is tiring work.”

I pulled the container away. “Like I said. Depends on what you have.”

Without hesitating, Claire speared a piece of chicken. “Didn’t make sense, did it, why a black man would be acting out hate crimes against his own race?”

“All right,” I said, pushing the container her way. “What did you find out?”

She nodded. “Mostly it was pretty much like you told me. None of the normal abrasions or lacerations you would connect with forced submission. But then there were those unusual dermal specimens from under the subject’s nails. So we scoped it. They did reveal a hyperpigmented skin type. As the report said, ‘normally consistent with a non-Caucasian.” Samples are out being histopathologied as we speak.”

“So what are you saying?” I pressed. “The person who killed that woman was black?”

Claire leaned over, lifting the last piece of chicken out from under my fork. “At first blush, I could see how someone might feel that way. If not African American, a dark Latino, or Asian. Teitleman was inclined to agree, until I asked him to perform one last test.

“I ever tell you,” – she mooned her wide brown eyes – “I did my residency at Moffitt in dermapathology?”

“No, Claire.” I found myself shaking my head and smiling. She was so good at what she did.

She shrugged. ” No, huh? I don’t know how we overlooked that. Anyway, basically, what a lab is going to be looking for is whether that hyperpigmentation is
intra
cellular, as in melanocytes, which are the dark, pigmented cells that are much more concentrated in non-Caucasians, or
inter
cellular…
in
the tissue, more on the surface of the skin.”

“English, Claire. Is the subject white or black?”

“Melanocytes,” she continued as if I hadn’t asked, “are the dark skin cells concentrated in people of color.” She pushed up her sleeve. “You’re looking at Melanocyte Central here. Trouble is, the sampling found under the Chipman lady’s nails didn’t have a one. All that pigment was
inter
cellular – surface coloration. On top of that, it was a bluish hue, atypical for naturally occurring melanin. Any self-respecting dermapathologist would’ve caught that.”

“Caught
what
, Claire?” I asked, fixing on her smug grin.

“
Caught
that it wasn’t a black man who did that terrible thing,” she said emphatically, “but a white man with some topical pigmentation.
Ink
, Lindsay. What that poor woman dug her nails into was the killer’s tattoo.”

A
FTER
CLAIRE
LEFT
, I was buoyed by her discovery. This was good stuff. Karen knocked and handed me a manila folder. “From Simone Clark.” It was the file from personnel I had requested.
Edward R. Chipman.

I slid the file out of the envelope and began to read.

Chipman had been a career street patrolman out of Central who retired in 1994 with the rank of sergeant. He had twice received a Captain’s Commendation for bravery on the job.

I stopped at his photo. A narrow chiseled face with one of those bushy Afros popular in the sixties. It was probably taken the day he joined the force. I looked through the rest of the contents. What would make someone want to kill this man’s widow? There wasn’t a single censure on his record. For excessive force or anything else. In his thirty-year career, the officer never fired his gun. He was part of the Police Outreach Unit in the Potrero Hill projects and a member of a minority action group called the Officers for Justice, which lobbied for and promoted the interests of black officers. Chipman, like most cops, had one of those proud, uneventful careers, never in trouble, never under review never in the public’s eye. Nothing in there drew the slightest connection to Tasha Catchings or to her uncle, Kevin Smith.

Had I read more into the whole thing than was there? Was this even a serial thing? My antennae were crackling.
I know there’s something. C’mon, Lindsay.

Suddenly I was hammered back to reality by Lorraine Stafford knocking at my door. “You got a minute, Lieutenant?”

I asked her in. The stolen vehicle, she informed me, belonged to a Ronald Stasic. He taught anthropology at a community college down in Mountain View. “Apparently the van was stolen from the parking lot outside where he works. The reason it was late being reported missing was that he went to Seattle for a night. Job interview.”

“Who knew he was going to be away?”

She flipped through her notes. “His wife. The college administrator. He teaches two classes at the college and tutors students from other schools in the area.

“Any of these students show an interest in his van or in where he parked?”

She snickered. “He said half these kids come to class in BMWs and Saabs. Why would they be interested in a six-year-old van?”

“What about that sticker on the back?” I had no idea if Stasic had anything to do with these killings, but his van did have the same symbol on it that had turned up in the Oakland basement.

Lorraine shrugged. “Said he never saw it before. I said I’d check his story and asked if he’d take a lie detector on that. He told me to go right ahead.”

“You better check if any of his friends, or his students, have any weird political leanings.”

Lorraine nodded. “I will, but this guy’s totally legit, Lindsay. He acted like he was jerked out of his skin.”

As the afternoon wound down, I had the shaky feeling we were nowhere on this case. I was sure it was a serial, but maybe our best chance was this guy with the chimera embroidered on his jacket.

My phone rang, startling me. It was Jacobi. “Bad information, L.T. We’ve been outside this damned Blue Parrot place all day.
Nothing.
So we managed to find out from the bartender the dudes you’re looking for are history. They split, five, six months ago. Toughest guy we’ve seen was some weight lifter wearing a ‘ Rules’ T-shirt.”

“What do you mean by split, Warren?”

“Vamoose, moved on. Somewhere south. According to the dude, one or two guys who used to hang around with them still come in from time to time. Some big redheaded dude. But basically they hit the road.
Permanent-mente
.”

“Keep on it. Find me the redheaded dude.” Now that the van led nowhere and I had no connection between the victims, that lion-and-snake symbol was all we had.

“Keep on it?” Jacobi whined. “How long? We could be out here for days!”

“I’ll send out a change of underwear,” I said, and hung up.