The 6th Target (16 page)

Yuki felt sharp, part of the A-team. The
winning
A-team. She carved into her rotisserie chicken and Len tucked into his spicy prawn pizza, the two of them reviewing the day as they ate, trying on potential roadblocks, planning how to detonate those roadblocks in their next day’s presentation of the People’s case against Alfred Brinkley.

Leonard refilled their wineglasses with a sixty-dollar merlot, saying, “Grrrrr. Beware of Team Red Dog.”

Yuki laughed, sipped, put her papers into a large leather bag as the dinner plates were taken away. Working as a civil litigator had never felt as good as this.

The large brick oven across the room perfumed the air with burning hickory wood, and as the restaurant and bar filled up, conversation and laughter caromed off the walls and high ceilings.

“Coffee?” Len asked Yuki.

“Sure,” she said. “And I’m so stoked, I think I’m gonna go for the profiteroles.”

“I’ll second that,” Leonard said, raising his hand to signal their waitress. And then, in midgesture, his face went slack. Len put his hand on his chest and half stood, leaning against the seat back, which caused the chair to topple over, throwing him onto the floor.

Yuki heard a tray fall behind her. Dishes broke, and someone screamed.

She realized that the scream had come from
her
.

She jumped from her seat, crouched beside the big man who was rolling from side to side and moaning.

“Leonard! Len, where does it hurt?”

He mumbled, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying over the roar of concern all around them.

“Can you raise your arms, Len?”

“My
chest
,” he groaned. “Call my wife.”

“I can drive him to the hospital,” a man was saying over Yuki’s shoulder. “My car is right out front.”

“Thanks, but that’ll take too long.”

“Look, the hospital is only
ten minutes
—”

“Please. No, thank you. EMS brings the hospital to
him
, okay?”

Yuki pulled her satchel toward her, emptied it onto the floor, and located her cell phone. She blocked out the well-meaning guy behind her, pictured the traffic jam, the three hours’ wait outside the emergency room — which is what would happen if anything but an ambulance took Len to the hospital.

That was the mistake they’d made with her dad.

Yuki gripped Len’s hand as she listened intently to the ring tone. She hissed, “
Come on, come on
,” and when the 911 operator answered, she spoke distinctly and urgently.

“This is an emergency. Send an ambulance to Restaurant LuLu at 816 Folsom. My friend is having a heart attack.”

CONKLIN AND I WERE WORKING phone leads on the Ricci/Tyler case when Jacobi popped out to the squad room, said to us, “You two look like you need some air.”

Fifteen minutes later, just before seven p.m., we pulled up to an apartment building near Third and Townsend. Three patrol cars, two fire rigs, and the medical examiner’s van had gotten there before us.

“This is weird. I know this place,” I told Conklin. “My friend Cindy lives here.”

I tried to reach Cindy but got a busy signal on her cell. No answer on her home phone, either.

I looked for but didn’t see Cindy among the tenants standing in tight knots on the sidewalk, giving their statements to the uniforms walking among them, looking up at the brick face of the Blakely Arms and the pale curtains blowing out of windows on the fifth floor.

Cindy lived on three. My relief was sudden and short-lived.
Someone
had damned well died prematurely in Cindy’s building.

The doorman, a middle-aged man with a sloping forehead and frizzy gray hair springing out from his hatband, paced outside the main door. He had a fading flower-power look, as if he’d been beached by the ’60s revolution. He told us that his name was Joseph “Pinky” Boyd and that he’d been working at the Blakely Arms for three years.

“Miss Portia Fox in 5K,” he told us. “She’s the one who smelled the gas. She called down to the desk a half hour ago. Yeah,” he said, looking at his watch.

“And you called the fire department?”

“Right. They were here in about five minutes.”

“Where’s the complainant? Miss Fox.”

“She’s probably outside here. We cleared the whole fifth floor. I saw her . . . Mrs. Wolkowski. Terrible thing to see some-one dead in real life, someone you know.”

“Can you think of anyone who’d want to hurt Mrs. Wolkowski?” Conklin asked the doorman.

“Nah. She was a bit of a crank. Complained about getting the wrong mail in her box, scuff marks on the tile, stuff like that. But she was a pussycat for an old girl.”

“Mr. Boyd, were you here all day?”

“Since eight this morning.”

“You have surveillance cameras?” I asked.

“The tenants have a picture phone for when someone buzzes the bell, and that’s it.”

“What’s downstairs?”

“Laundry room, garbage, bathroom, and a door that leads out to the courtyard.”

“A locked door?” Conklin asked. “Is it alarmed?”

“Used to be alarmed,” Boyd told us. “But when they did the renovation, it was made into a common space, so the tenants got keys.”

“Right. So there’s no real security from downstairs,” I said. “Did you see anyone or anything suspicious in the building today?”

Boyd’s laugh was tinged with hysteria. “Did I see anyone suspicious? In this building? This is the first day in a month that I
didn’t
.”

THE UNIFORMED OFFICER standing at the door to apartment 5J was a rookie — Officer Matt Hartnett, tall guy, looked a little like Jimmy Smits. Sweat beaded his upper lip, and his face was pallid under his dark eyes.

“The vic is Mrs. Irene Wolkowski,” Hartnett said, handing the log to me. “Last seen alive this morning in the laundry room around eleven. The husband isn’t home from work, and we still haven’t been able to reach him. My partner and another team are interviewing the tenants on the street.”

I nodded, signed my name and Conklin’s into the log. We ducked under the tape that was stretched across the doorway, walked into a scene already crawling with the CSU and the current ME, who was snapping pictures of the victim.

The room stunk of gas.

Windows on two sides were wide open to vent the room, making it seem colder inside the apartment than it was on the street.

The deceased was on her back in the middle of the floor, arms and legs akimbo, a pose that made her defenseless against both the original attack and now the poking and prodding of strangers. The woman appeared to be in her early sixties.

There was blood coming from the back of her head. I saw that it had soaked into the pale gray carpet, the stain parting around a leg of the piano.

And the piano was wrecked!

What was left of the keyboard was blood-smeared and smashed. Keys were dislocated and broken, and many were scattered on the floor as though someone had hammered at the keys repeatedly.

Dr. Germaniuk had set up portable lights to illuminate every corner of the room. It was both well-lived-in and recently furnished. I saw a scrap of plastic wrap still clinging to one of the sofa legs.

Dr. G. said hello to me, pushed his glasses up on his nose with the back of his hand, and put his camera away.

“What have we got?” I asked him.

“Very interesting,” Germaniuk said. “Except for the piano and every gas jet on the stove being turned on, nothing else looks disturbed.”

The crime scene was organized — that is to say, neat — which nearly always meant that the crime was planned and the killer was smart.

“The victim suffered trauma to her head, front and back,” said Dr. G. “Looks to me like two different implements were used. The piano was one of them.

“I’ll give you more after I get Mrs. Wolkowski on my table, but I’ll tell you this much right now: She’s got no rigor — she’s warm to the touch, and blanching lividity is just starting. This lady’s been dead only a couple of hours, probably less. We just missed the killer.”

I HEARD CINDY’S VOICE at the doorway and broke away from the murder scene long enough to throw my arms around her in the hallway.

“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she murmured. “I just got your messages.”

“Did you know the victim?”

“I don’t think so. Not by name anyway. Let me see her.”

The crime scene was off-limits and she knew it, but it was a battle I’d fought and lost with Cindy before. She had that look in her eyes now. Stubborn. Intractable. Canny.

“Stand to the side. Don’t touch.”

“I know. I won’t.”

“If anyone objects, you have to leave. And I want your word you will not write anything about the cause of death.”

“My word,” she said, giving me lip.

I pointed to an empty corner of the room, and Cindy went there. She blanched at the sight of the dead woman on the floor, but as one of the swarm of people in 5J, she went unquestioned.

“That’s Cindy?” Conklin asked, tipping his chin toward where she stood on the fringes.

“Yeah. She’s trustworthy.”

“If you say so.”

I introduced Rich to Cindy as Irene Wolkowski’s body was wrapped in sheets, zipped into a body bag. We talked over our theories of the crime as the cold wind blew through the apartment.

I said to Conklin, “So let’s say the killer is someone she knows. Guy who lives in the building. He rings the bell. Says, ‘Hi, Irene. Don’t let me interrupt you. That sounds really nice.’ ”

“Okay. Or maybe it was her husband,” Conklin said. “Came home early, killed her, and split. Or maybe a friend. Or a romantic interest. Or a stranger.”

“A stranger? I don’t see that,” Cindy said. “I wouldn’t let a stranger into my apartment, would you?”

“Okay, I get that,” Conklin said. “But anyway, she’s sitting at the piano. The music covers the sound of the door opening, and this nice, thick carpet absorbs the sound of footsteps.”

“Right,” I agreed.

“Is that her handbag?” Cindy asked.

A woman’s shiny black purse rested on a slipper chair. I opened it, took out the wallet, showed Conklin the wad of twenties and a full deck of credit cards.

“So there goes the robbery theory,” I said.

“I was there when one of those dogs was found,” Cindy said, sketching in the story.

Rich shook his head, hair swinging in front of his eyes. “Sign of a potential psycho killer escalating to . . .
this
? Talk about overkill. So on the one hand we have the beating and the trashing of the piano. But why bother with the gas?”

“He either wanted to make sure she was discovered,” I said, “or he wanted to make sure she was dead.” I looked at Cindy. “Not one word of this in the
Chronicle
.”

YUKI COULDN’T STOP THINKING about Len’s face, twisting with pain as his heart attack tried to kill him. She’d left him in the hospital last night, stabilized but incapacitated, and called David Hale’s answering machine at home. “There’s been an emergency. Meet me at the office at six a.m. and be ready to go to court.”

Now Yuki sat across from David in the grungy, pine--paneled conference room, her notes and instant coffee in front of her, bringing her fellow ADA up to speed.

“Why aren’t we getting a continuance?” he asked her. David was presentable today, in a tan herringbone jacket, blue pants, striped tie. Needed a haircut, but that couldn’t be helped. Of all the people available to her at short notice, she’d get the best work from Hale.

“Three reasons,” Yuki said, tapping the table with a plastic spoon.

“One, Leonard doesn’t want to lose Jack Rooney as a witness. Rooney is frail. He was on vacation when the shooting occurred. We might not be able to get him back when we need him, which means his tape might be excluded.”

“Okay.”

“Two, Len doesn’t want to chance losing Judge Moore.”

“Yeah, I get that, too.”

“Len says he’ll be in court in time to do the summation.”

“He said that?”

“Yep, when they were prepping him for surgery. He was lucid and adamant.”

“What did his doctor say?”

“His doctor said, and I quote, ‘There’s a reasonable possibility that the damage to Leonard’s heart is reversible.’ ”

“Did they have to crack open his chest?”

“Yes. I checked with Len’s wife. He came through the surgery fine.”

“And so he’ll be doing a summation in a little more than a
week
?”

“Probably not. And he won’t be doing the tarantella, either,” Yuki said. “So that brings me to number three. Len said that I’m as prepared as he is, that he’s confident in us. And we’re not to let him down.”

David Hale stared at her, openmouthed, before finally saying, “Yuki, I don’t have any trial experience.”

“I do. Several years.”

“Your experience is in civil cases, not criminal.”

“Shut
up
, David. I was a litigator. That counts. So we’re gonna give Red Dog our best. We’re gonna spend the next three hours going over what we both already know.

“We’ve got credible eyewitnesses, the Rooney tape, and a jury that is going to be rolling its eyes at the insanity defense.

“It’s what Len said at the prep meeting: The more random the crime, the less motive for the killings, the more afraid the jury is going to be that Brinkley will get forty-five minutes in a nuthouse and then go free —”

Yuki stopped to take in the grin spreading across David Hale’s face.

“What are you thinking, David? No, I take it back. Please don’t say it,” Yuki said, trying not to laugh.

“Open-and-shut case,” said her new teammate. “Slam dunk.”

YUKI STOOD IN THE WELL OF THE COURTROOM, feeling as green as if she were trying her first case. She clutched the edges of the lectern, thought how when Len stood behind this thing, it appeared to be the size of a music stand. She was peering over the top of it like a grade-schooler.

The jury looked at her expectantly.

Could she actually convince them that Alfred Brinkley was guilty of capital murder?