The 9th Judgment (9 page)

Pete was sure he knew who had remotely triggered the IED. They were in the car behind the Humvee that Kenny had been driving.
The next minutes were so vivid, he could smell the cordite and the dust and the fear even now. He could still hear his enemies
scream as he shot them.

Now, on this cool evening in San Francisco, Pete Gordon gripped the gun inside his jacket pocket as he stalked the Embarcadero.
He came to an alley between Sansome and Battery that was set up with plastic tables and chairs. A young mother was cleaning
up after eating there with her bawler.

Petey followed Young Mom and her kiddo into the mall at the ground level of 1 EC, past the pastry shop and the Italian restaurant,
up the escalator to the movie theater that stood apart and alone, anchoring the dead end at the western part of the second
floor.

Mom was sitting on a bench, gazing at the movie posters, combing her baby’s hair with her fingers. It was between shows, and
they had the place to themselves.

Young Mom turned to Petey when he called out, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, could you help me, please? I’m totally lost.”

BY THE TIME I was called to the scene, the cruisers and the ambulances were parked all along Battery and Clay. I ran my Explorer
onto the sidewalk and braked next to Jacobi’s Hyundai, then grabbed one of the uniforms who was doing crowd control at the
western entrance to the mall.

“Second floor, Sergeant,” the uni told me. “Outside the movie theater.”

I called Jacobi and he answered his phone, saying, “Come up, Boxer. And hold on to your dinner.”

Moviegoers who’d been sent out through a back exit had returned to the front entrance, joining commuters and office workers
and tourists who had gathered ten deep outside the entrance to 1 EC.

I held up my badge and edged through the crowd, fending off questions that I wouldn’t answer if I could. A uniform opened
the glass doors for me, and I entered the mall, a stretch of shops bearing famous logos, now unnaturally empty of shoppers.

The escalators had been turned off and crime scene tape stretched across the whole western wing of the mall, so I stooped
under the tape and loped up the stilled mechanical stairs. Jacobi was waiting for me at the top of the escalator, and I could
see from his face how bad it was going to be before I even got near the bodies on the red carpet.

I saw the mother first. She’d fallen onto her back. Her pale-blue cardigan was black over her heart from the two shots to
the center mass, and she’d taken another gunshot wound to the head. I reached over and closed her sightless eyes.

Only then could I bear to look at the small, still figure lying near her.

Damn it, he’d killed the child.

This scene was a horror, and even as I recoiled from the brutality, I was struck by how methodical these shootings had been.
They had been impersonal, dead-on shots fired at close range.

Jacobi stepped aside and I circled the body of the child in the capsized stroller, a boy under the age of one. I didn’t need
to say to Jacobi that it was obvious these killings and the ones in the Stonestown garage were the work of the same killer.

But where was his signature? Where were the letters “WCF”?

Jacobi dropped the young mother’s wallet into an evidence bag. “This is Judy Kinski. She had forty dollars in small bills.
Two charge cards. Library card. She would have been twenty-six years old next week. McNeil is contacting her next of kin.”

“Witnesses?” I asked. “Someone had to see this go down.”

“Chi is talking to the ticket seller. Come with me.”

THE GIRL IN the movie-theater manager’s office was crying into her hands. She looked up when I entered the tiny space. Paul
Chi introduced me to the pale young woman and said, “This is Robin Rose. She may have seen the shooter.”

“Is my mother here?” Robin asked.

Jacobi said, “She’s on her way. As soon as she arrives, we’ll escort you down.”

“I didn’t see the shootings,” the girl said between sobs. “I was opening the booth for the seven o’clock show.”

Chi handed her a wad of tissues and told her it was all right, to take her time.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said, blowing her nose. “But when I rolled up the window…”

I could see it through her eyes. The last moments of her innocence, opening the cash drawer, checking the ticket feed, rolling
up the metal security window, expecting—what? A couple of people wanting to buy their tickets early?

“I didn’t believe it at first,” Robin told us. “I thought it was some kind of alternative advertising for an upcoming show.
Then I realized that those people were
real
. That they were
dead.
”

“Did you see anyone near the bodies?” I asked.

She nodded and said, “He must’ve heard the window go up. He met my eyes for a fraction of a second. I saw the gun, so I ducked
down.”

The man Robin Rose saw was a white male, wearing a blue-and-white baseball jacket and a cap pulled down over his eyes. She
didn’t think she could describe him, but she would try. Same with his gun. And she didn’t see which exit he took out of the
mall.

Maybe he’d taken the skywalk over to another of the malls in the Embarcadero Center, or he could just as easily have gone
down the escalator and out onto the street.

I asked Robin if she’d come in to the station to look at surveillance tape, and then I left the manager’s office with Jacobi.
He was putting out an APB on a white male in a blue-and-white baseball jacket when Claire stomped up the escalator with her
chief assistant, Bunny Ellis, behind her.

Claire wore a furious look as she moved in on the victims’ bodies with her Minolta. I stood next to her as she said to me,
“Lookit. Same weird stippling, Lindsay. Same point-blank shooting. Same bastard kid killer. Was anything stolen?”

“Mom’s wallet was full.”

It was Claire who saw the writing on the underside of the stroller.

I stared at the letters as cameras flashed in a stroboscopic frenzy. The message was written in lipstick. The signature was
the same—but different.

FWC

“What the hell?” I said to Claire. “Not WCF? Now it’s FWC?”

“You ask me, Lindsay? This guy isn’t leaving clues. He’s purely fucking with us.”

OUR PINCH HITTER, Jackson Brady, said he’d taken workshops at the FBI headquarters in Quantico.

“I spent two full summers learning to profile serial killers. That doesn’t make me a pro, but I have educated opinions.”

Jacobi commandeered a conference room in the Crimes Against Persons Division, and we all sat around the chipped fake-wood
table, looking at Brady. Paul Chi told Brady what we’d gathered from the first scene and the latest, and Brady took notes.

All eyes were on him when he told us, “Killing children is reactive, maybe to a bad childhood, or it’s possible this killer
is so dead inside, he just wastes the kids because they’re witnesses.”

“The kids were babies,” Jacobi said.

Brady shrugged. “The killer probably isn’t using that kind of logic. As for the killing of the mothers, you’re seeing a real
hatred for women.”

“In terms of finding this guy,” Jacobi said, “his early childhood isn’t relevant, is it? How he feels isn’t going to lead
us to him.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. In fact, I’m going to say this guy can hide in plain sight. Look at what you know from the way
he committed the crimes, how he got away without being seen. He’s highly intelligent, he’s focused, he’s organized, and he’s
working alone. Most important, he passes as ordinary. That’s the only way he could get so close to his victims. They don’t
even scream.”

“And he’s got a gun that doesn’t bring up a hit,” I said.

“That’s an interesting detail,” Brady said. “This guy knows weaponry. Makes me think he may have military training.”

“We’ve got a witness ID and video surveillance,” I said. “We think we have some idea what he may look like.”

“Nothing distinctive, am I right?”

“Yeah,” said Chi. “White male, thirties, wears a cap. We’ll get another look when we go over the security tapes from One EC.”

Conklin asked, “If this guy is military, if he’s at least highly competent and trained, what’s going to trip him up?”

“Overconfidence,” Brady said. “He could get too sure of himself and leave a clue. But, you know, it could be a long time before
he makes that kind of mistake.”

I sat back in my seat. It was another way of saying what I’d been thinking since the Bentons were killed in the Stones-town
garage.

More people were going to die.

TEN DAYS AGO, “Dowling trumped everything.”

Now the entire threadbare Homicide squad plus dozens of conscripted cops from other departments were canvassing the Embarcadero
Center, following up every phoned-in, crackpot lead, working twelve-hour shifts under Jacobi in single-minded determination
to nail the Lipstick Killer.

I was in the morgue with Claire when the ballistics report from the Feds was dropped into her in-box. I tried not to scream
out my impatience as she carried on a phone call while gingerly peeling up the envelope flap. She finally hung up on her caller
and took out the single sheet of paper. She skimmed the page and said, “Hey-hey. Our case was reviewed by Dr. Mike himself.”

“Forgive my ignorance—and will you please give me the damned report?”

“Hang on, girlfriend. Dr. Michael Sciarra is the FBI’s Dr. Gun,” she said. “Okay. Lemme get to the nub here. Dr. Mike says
the gunpowder stippling on those dead babies was atypical because the shots were fired through a suppressor. And not your
basic pop-bottle-and-scouring-pad wackadoo, either.”

“What, then?” I asked.

“It had to be professionally tooled, cold steel or titanium. Very few of these exist. Dr. Mike says here, ‘There is no record
of any homicides in the United States committed with a suppressor like the one that caused the atypical stippling pattern
on the Benton and Kinski children.’”

“Jeez, what the hell does that mean?”

“For starters, it explains why no one heard gunshots.”

“And why we didn’t get a hit in the database.”

“Because it probably came from outside the country,” Claire was saying when my cell phone buzzed. My stomach clenched when
I read the caller ID. I showed the phone to Claire, flipped it open, and said, “Boxer.”

I was thinking,
What now?

“Boxer, that goddamned, shit-for-brains Lipstick Psycho put on another freakin’ horror show!” Jacobi shouted into my ear.

“No, c’mon, NO.”

“Yeah, well, a woman and child were killed in the parking garage at Union Square, looks exactly like the last two homicides.
I’m at the scene with Chi and Cappy. Tracchio’s on the way, and now he’s going to put his mitts all over this.”

I hung up with Jacobi, briefed Claire, and got Conklin on the line, then fled to the parking lot behind the Hall. Conklin
was waiting for me in the driver’s seat of our squad car, and as soon as I slammed my door closed, he jammed on the gas and
we peeled out with flashers on, siren blaring, rubber burning tracks into the asphalt.

Conklin shouted over the clamor, “He does this smack in the middle of town. What a pair this guy has.”

“Smack in the middle of town is what he likes. He’s a terrorist. A damned good one.”

I had no idea how right I would turn out to be.

I SWEAR CONKLIN got the car up to three G’s in three seconds. I gripped the dash as the Crown Vic roared up Leavenworth and
then took us through the stomach-turning roller-coaster climbs, sudden-death drops, and hairpin turns of our city’s streets.

When I wasn’t mentally trying to steer the car from the passenger seat, I thought about the Lipstick Killer. He wasn’t just
insane.

He was
crazy.

He’d killed four people—and now maybe more. His signature was so cryptic, it was meaningless. How could we predict his behavior
if we didn’t get his point?

Conklin wrenched the wheel right at the bottom of a hill, sending us into a gridlocked intersection. I wanted to get out and
beat on car roofs until the road was clear, but instead I shouted into the bullhorn, “Move your vehicles. Pull over now!”

We started and stopped as cars stalled trying to climb over one another, the seconds dragging until we cleared the jam. Minutes
later, Conklin nosed the squad car between a small herd of parked black-and-whites outside the garage at Union Square. I was
out of the car before Conklin set the brake.

Together we waded into the panicky throng of shoppers who had left their cars in the garage. I saw the fear on their faces
and could almost hear their collective thoughts:
The killer was here. He could have shot me.

I made a path through the crowd with my badge, signed the log, and asked Officer Sorbero to fill me in.

“Déjà vu all over again,” Joe said. “The crime scene’s on the fourth floor. We shut the elevators down.”

Conklin held up the tape and we ducked under it, entering the chill of the garage. There were dark, tunneled access points
on the ground floor, passageways coming from all sides—the huge Macy’s, the Saks, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel—perfect opportunities
for a predator to stalk his victims unseen.

As Conklin and I strode up the winding center double aisles between the rows of parked cars, I braced myself for what Jacobi
had described as a “horror show.” We found him talking with Chief Anthony Tracchio on the third-floor landing. The chief’s
face was blanched, and Jacobi’s hooded eyes were drawn almost closed, both men looking as though they’d peered over the abyss
into the devil’s own lair.

“Chi and McNeil are on four,” Tracchio said, his mouth hardly moving. “Swing shift is canvassing the perimeter. I’ve expanded
the team to any cop who volunteers or who crosses my path.”

“Were there any witnesses?” I asked. It was more a small, doomed wish than a question.