‘The Trial’ Chapters 5-8

Conklin and I took in the scene. Bloody shoe prints tracked across the marble floors. Toppled clothing racks and mannequins lay across the aisles, but nothing moved.

We crossed the floor with care and took an elevator to the second-floor club, the scene of the shooting and a forensics investigation disaster.

Tables and chairs had been overturned in the customers’ rush toward the fire exit. There were no surveillance cameras, and the floor was tacky with spilled booze and blood.

We picked our way around abandoned personal property and over to the long, polished bar, where two women in expensive clothing lay dead. One, blond, had collapsed across the bar top, and the other, dark-haired, had fallen dead at her feet.

The lighting was soft and unfocused, but still, I could see that the blond woman had been shot between the eyes and had taken slugs in her chest and arms. The woman on the floor had a bullet hole through the draped white silk across her chest, and there was another in her neck.

“Both shot at close range,” Richie said.

He plucked a beaded bag off the floor and opened it, and I did the same with the second bag, a metallic leather clutch.

According to their driver’s licenses, the brunette was Lucille Alison Stone and the blonde was Cameron Whittaker. I took pictures, and then Conklin and I carefully cat-walked out of the bar the way we had come.

As we were leaving, we passed Charlie Clapper, our CSI director, coming in with his crew.

Clapper was a former homicide cop and always looked like he’d stepped out of a Grecian Formula commercial. Neat. Composed. With comb marks in his hair. Always thorough, never a grandstander, he was one of the SFPD’s MVPs.

“What’s your take?” he asked us.

“It was overkill,” I said. “Two women were shot to death at point-blank range and then shot some more. Three men were reportedly seen talking to them before the shooting. Two of them are in your capable hands until Claire takes them. We have one alive, being booked now.”

“The news is out. You think he’s Kingfisher.”

“Could be. I hope so. I really hope this is our lucky day.”

 

CHAPTER 7

 

BEFORE THE MEDICAL EXAMINER had retrieved the women’s bodies, while CSI was beginning the staggering work involved in processing a bar full of fingerprints and spent brass and the guns, Conklin and I went back to the Hall of Justice and met with our lieutenant, Jackson Brady.

Brady was platinum blond, hard bodied, and chill, a former narcotics detective from Miami. He had proven his smarts and his astonishing bravery with the SFPD over the last couple of years and had been promoted quickly to run our homicide squad.

His corner office had once been mine, but being head of paperwork and manpower deployment didn’t suit my temperament. I liked working crime on the street. I hadn’t wanted to like Brady when he took the lieutenant job, but I couldn’t help myself. He was tough but fair, and now he was married to my dear friend Yuki Castellano. Today I was very glad that Brady had a history in narcotics, homicide, and organized crime.

Conklin and I sat with him in his glass-walled office and told him what we knew. It would be days before autopsies were done and guns and bullets were matched up with dead bodies. But I was pretty sure that the guns would not be registered, there would be no prints on file, and law enforcement might never know who owned the weapons that killed those women.

I said, “Their car was found on Washington—stolen, of course. The two dead men had both Los Toros and Mala Sangre tats. We’re waiting for ID from Mexican authorities. One of the dead women knew Kingfisher. Lucille Alison Stone. She lived on Balboa, the thirty-two hundred block. Has a record. Shoplifting twice and possession of marijuana, under twenty grams. She comes up as a known associate of Jorge Sierra. That’s it for her.”

“And the other woman? Whittaker?”

“According to the bartender, who read their body language, Whittaker might be the girlfriend’s girlfriend. She’s a schoolteacher. Has no record.”

Brady said, “Barry Schein, ADA. You know him?”

“Yes,” Conklin and I said in unison.

“He’s on his way up here. We’ve got thirty-six hours to put together a case for the grand jury while they’re still convened. If we don’t indict our suspect pronto, the FBI is going to grab him away from us. Ready to take a crack at the man who would be King?”

“Be right back,” I said.

The ladies’ room was outside the squad room and down the hall. I went in, washed my face, rinsed out my mouth, reset my ponytail. Then I walked back out into the hallway where I could get a signal and called Mrs. Rose.

“Not a problem, Lindsay,” said the sweet granny who lived across the hall and babysat Julie Anne. “We’re watching the Travel Channel. The Hebrides. Scotland. There are ponies.”

“Thanks a million,” I told her.

I rejoined my colleagues.

“Ready,” I said to Brady, Conklin, and Barry Schein, the new rising star of the DA’s office. “No better time than now.”

 

CHAPTER 8

 

WHEN KINGFISHER BEGAN HIS campaign against me, I read everything I could find on him.

From the sparse reports and sightings I knew that the five-foot-six Mexican man who was now sitting in Interrogation 1 with his hands cuffed and chained to a hook on the table had been running drugs since before he was ten and had picked up the nickname Martin Pescador. That was Spanish for kingfisher, a small, bright-colored fishing bird with a prominent beak.

By the time Sierra was twenty, he was an officer in the Los Toros cartel, a savage paramilitary operation that specialized in drug sales up and down the West Coast and points east. Ten years later Kingfisher led a group of his followers in a coup, resulting in a bloody rout that left headless bodies from both sides decomposing in the desert.

Los Toros was the bigger loser, and the new cartel, led by Kingfisher, was called Mala Sangre, a.k.a. Bad Blood.

Along with routine beheadings and assassinations, Mala Sangre regularly stopped busloads of people traveling along a stretch of highway. The elderly and children were killed immediately. Young women were raped before execution, and the men were forced to fight each other to the death, gladiator style.

Kingfisher’s publicity campaign worked. He owned the drug trade from the foot of Mexico to the head of Northern California. He became immensely rich and topped all of law enforcement’s “Most Wanted” lists, but he rarely showed himself. He changed homes frequently and ran his business from a laptop and by burner phones, and the Mexican police were notoriously bought and paid for by his cartel.

It was said that he had conjugal visits with his wife, Elena, but she had eluded attempts to tail her to her husband’s location.

I was thinking about that as I stood with Brady, Conklin, and Schein behind the mirrored glass of the interrogation room. We were quickly joined by chief of police Warren Jacobi and a half dozen interested narcotics and robbery inspectors who had reasonably given up hope of ever seeing Kingfisher in custody.

Now we had him but didn’t own him.

Could we put together an indictable case in a day and a half? Or would the Feds walk all over us?

Normally, my partner was the good cop and I was the hard-ass. I liked when Richie took the lead and set a trusting tone, but Kingfisher and I had history. He’d threatened my life.

Rich opened the door to the interrogation room, and we took the chairs across from the probable mass killer.

No one was more primed to do this interrogation than me.

NEXT: Chapters 9-12

 

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