14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (9 page)

“Yeah, I can see that. And since he kills in daylight, and no one sees him, he’s got a cloak of invisibility.”

“I decided to leave something for you to figure out.”

“Awww. Thanks.”

My husband patted my thigh. “I believe my work here is done. Let’s go to bed.”

AT QUARTER TO eight the next morning, my partner and I met in the break room and made coffee. Conklin’s face was lined from sleeping facedown, and I’m sure I looked like I’d gotten no sleep at all. Which was true.

When Julie wasn’t calling for something, Martha was edging me off my side of the bed.

And then there were my vivid, disturbing dreams about Maya Perez, in which she begged me not to let her die. I knew enough pop-culture dream analysis to know that I was Maya in that dream and I didn’t want to die or let anything hurt my baby.

Conklin and I sugared our coffees and went to our computers. I took A to M and he took N to Z as we started going through Human Resources files looking for “sore thumbs.” That was what we were calling disgruntled cops who’d been demoted or dropped or had stalled in dead-end careers—the type of malcontent who might risk life in a federal pen without chance of parole in return for a quick payday.

We found plenty of sore thumbs, none of them named Juan, but every last one of them had guns and a navy-blue Windbreaker with white letters across the chest and back spelling out
SFPD
.

At eight thirty Brady called us into his office.

One look at him and I knew it was Groundhog Day. Just as he’d been every day this week, Brady was grouchy.

I almost said “What now?” but I kept my mouth shut.

Brady said, “I’m sorry I’ve been a pain in the ass.”

What? Say that again?

“Jacobi thinks the whole station is going down the tubes This is between us three, OK?”

“OK,” Conklin said. “What’s happened?”

Brady said, “In the past year, a half dozen drug dealers have been shot in crack houses and stash pads all across the city. The cash and the drugs disappear, never to be seen again. Word on the street is that the robbers are cops.”

No wonder Brady was pissed. There was a bad cop epidemic. And we were just about the last to know.

I said, “Are you thinking these cops who’re ripping off drug dealers could be the same rogue cops we’re looking at for the check-cashing stores?”

“Could be, or maybe not. We’ve got no surveillance of the shooters, of course, and no one’s naming names. I’m just saying, keep this in mind.”

When I got back to my desk, there was a note on my chair, handwritten on my own
FROM THE DESK OF LINDSAY BOXER
notepad.

The note was in block letters.

It read, WATCH YOUR BACK, BITCH. REMEMBER WHO YOUR FRIENDS ARE. THEY WEAR BLUE.

I looked around the squad room.

The night-shift guys were getting ready to check out while the day shift was just settling in. I saw about a dozen and a half cops I’d worked with for years. I loved some of them, liked many of them. But one of these guys was warning me not to cross the thin blue line.

Not even if catching bad cops meant catching murderers.

But then, blind loyalty was a bone-deep part of being a cop. I did wonder, though, if this note was from one of the Windbreaker cops. Could one or more of them work in this very squad? Or was the note from any one of the cops in this room who had simply seen the open investigation file I had left in plain sight on the computer?

I showed the note to Conklin, who gave me a questioning look. I shrugged and put the note in my handbag.

I would watch my back. But I was shaken. Next chance I got, I was going to have to report this to Brady.

AT EIGHT THIRTY that morning Richard Blau had his keys in his hand and was about to open the folding metal gates in front of his check-cashing store on the corner of Market Street and Sixteenth. Blau was a careful man. He and Donna had successfully run their business for over thirty years and were closing in on retirement.

He had heard that a couple of stores like theirs had been robbed in the last week, making him glad he had an alarm tied into a central station and also had a shotgun behind the counter.

His wife had gone to park the car in the underground lot around the corner. Blau always opened the store. First he unlocked the padlock; he had started sliding the metal gates back from the plate glass window when he saw three men get out of a gray sedan two cars up from the entrance to the store.

The three men wore police Windbreakers and billed caps, which gave him pause, but then he caught a look at the identical latex masks they were all wearing.

They were latex pig masks. There was no unseeing that.

He had a panicky thought that if he could somehow get into the store and close the door behind him, this nightmare could be derailed. He could call the police—but he canceled the idea almost as soon as he had it. Last thing he wanted was for Donna to approach the store and get shot.

The men in the pig masks were coming toward him quickly. Their timing was good. There were no pedestrians, and the few drivers were focused on getting through the next traffic light. Blau saw that each of the men had a gun. He had to outthink them. He had to use his brain.

Blau raised his hands.

When the men were six or seven feet away, Blau said, “I’m not armed. I’ll give you whatever you want. Just don’t hurt me.”

“OK, man. We don’t want to hurt anyone,” said one of the robbers. He seemed to be in charge. And he seemed to be a youngish man. His voice was young.

Blau tried to take in everything about him so he could give a good report of the robbery after it was over. He thought the guy who had talked to him was about five ten. And Blau saw from his hands that he was white. He couldn’t describe the man’s build because of the boxy shape of the Windbreaker, but he thought he might be able to recognize the guy’s voice if he ever heard it again.

Blau said, “What do you want? My wallet is in my back pocket. Take it. I’ve got a few hundred in cash in there. And my watch is pretty new. Take that, too.”

Blau was still holding the keys in his hand. There was nothing he could do about that.

A different one of the three men said, “Let’s go into your store, OK, Mr. Blau?”

They
knew
him. They knew who he
was
. Blau felt faint. He’d never had a gun pointed at him before. He almost said, “Do I know you?” but shut the thought down.

If the guy thought Blau knew him … He thought of Donna. He prayed she wouldn’t show up now. She wouldn’t be able to handle this.

Blau said, “OK. I’m going to open the door now, and let’s do this fast before customers come in.”

“Lead the way, Mr. Blau,” said one of the masked men. “Let’s go.”

BLAU FIDDLED WITH the gates and the keys and the double locks. His hands were shaking and he could smell his own sweat. He thought there was every chance he could be living his last minutes on this earth. He got the front door locks open, and then the door creaked and swung wide, and then he hit the lights so that when his wife showed up, she could see through the plate glass window. See that this was a holdup.

Please, Donna, don’t come into the store.

One of the fucking armed robbers complained, “Hey. We don’t need no steenking light, man.”

“I have to see so I can open the
safe
,” Blau said. “Believe me, I want you out fast. I’m happy to give you the money, all right? Just trust me, OK? I’m working with you.”

Blau didn’t wait for a reply. He walked deliberately and quickly past the block of folding chairs, all the way to the back of the store where the lines were painted on the floor, delineating aisles leading to the teller windows. Next to the windows, on the far right side of the wall, was the security door that divided the store into the public space and the office area behind it.

The safe was in the office. Blau turned his back to the robbers to open the door, telling those shits, “After I give you the money, you can go out the back door. Be safer for you.”

The men, maybe they were boys, the way they were all jumpy, were crowding into the office area with him. One of them, the smallest pig, was getting anxious, looking around, saying “Let’s go let’s go let’s go.”

Blau turned his eyes away from the credenza where he kept the shotgun and pointed out the wooden cabinet below the counter.

“The safe’s in here,” he said.

The one who had been saying “Let’s go” was now saying “Come on come on come on.”

Blau’s hands were out of control. He could barely hold a key, and both the key and the cabinet lock were small. He poked at the lock until he finally got the key into it, turned it, and opened the lower cabinet where he kept the old cast-iron safe. Taking no chances, he angled his body so they could see the safe and said to one of the boys, “You’re in my light.”

He tried not to look at the kid, give him any sense whatsoever that he knew who he was, but his mind was running through the faces of all the kids, white, black, Latino, who came into this place to cash checks. His tellers talked to them. The transactions were brief. The only time he ever talked to a customer was when there was a problem.

“Step on it, Daddy,” said a guy with a gun.

Blau said, “I
am
stepping on it.”

He went for the safe with both hands, but at the last minute, he pressed the silent alarm, a button right under the lip of the cabinet. Then he turned the knurled knob of the safe. He knew the combination as well as he knew his own birthday, but he accidentally went past the second number and had to start over.

The kid standing closest to him put the muzzle of his gun right next to Blau’s temple and said, “You have till the count of three.

“One …”

That was when a lot of things happened at once.

The combination lock clicked into place and Blau swung the safe door open. The guys in the police Windbreakers focused on the envelopes of money inside the safe. And the front door of the shop was kicked open.

Cops swarmed in, yelling
“Everyone freeze! Hands in the air!”

Blau crouched behind the counter and covered his head. He jerked with the sound of every cracking gunshot. And there were a lot of them.

“Please, God,” he prayed, “make this all stop.”

BY THE TIME Conklin and I arrived at the Cash ’n’ Go, Market Street looked like Red Hot Sales Day at a used-car lot. I counted a dozen cruisers with every grille and cherry light flashing, two ambulances parked down the block on Sixteenth, the ME’s van pulling in, and the CSU mobile blocking the view of the store.

That must’ve been a disappointment to the many bystanders behind the barrier tape, crowding the sidewalks on both sides of the narrow street. But then a chopper appeared overhead, guaranteeing live pictures on Eyewitness News.

Windbreaker Cops Strike Again
.

My partner and I left our car up on the curb between a Jilly’s Gym and the Third Hand Rose Consignment Shoppe and walked toward Swanson and Vasquez, our superstar Robbery squad partners also working this case.

They were standing outside the Cash ’n’ Go. After a couple of days canvassing the area around Mercado de Maya with them, I’d found Swanson both efficient and kind. Vasquez was easygoing, and the pair of them were very professional.

I had to admit that Brady had made a good call putting them and their four men on the Windbreaker cop detail.

Vasquez smiled, relief written all over his face, saying, “I got my witnesses in the car. Taking the Blaus back to the house to take their statements. Then I’m gonna go out with my lady and celebrate.”

After some fancy wheel work, Vasquez peeled off, and Swanson said to us, “Three John Does are down inside the store, all wearing Windbreakers, none of them breathing.”

Conklin and I followed Swanson under the tape and through the door. The interior of the Cash ’n’ Go was lined with pressed-wood paneling; counters ran at elbow height around two sides so people could sign their checks and fill out paperwork. There were a dozen metal folding chairs in the center of the store, all of which had been knocked out of line; white strips on the floor leading to three teller windows; and an open security door at the end of the room.

Two bodies lay sprawled on the floor between the chairs, blood pooling on the lino. I could see the body of a third where he had fallen across the threshold of the security door. Bullets had punched holes in the paneling, and shell casings were all over the floor.

Conklin said to Swanson, “Quite the shooting gallery. What happened exactly?”

Swanson called over one of the men on his team, Tommy Calhoun, a young guy, going bald at the back of his head, a cigarette smoker to judge by the nicotine stains on his fingers.

Calhoun gave us an animated summary of the Windbreaker cops’ attack on the check-cashing store, including the owner tapping the silent alarm.

At about the same time Blau hit the alarm, his wife was seeing the robbery in progress through the plate glass. She called it in, then flagged down a cruiser for good measure.

“The uniforms came in,” Calhoun told us excitedly, making his hands into guns. He said, “Pow-ka-pow-pow-pow.”

“I’m guessing the shooters had wallets on them,” I said.

Swanson grinned. “Wouldn’t that be nice? No wallets, but CSI just got started. We’ll know who these guys are in an hour.”

Was it over?

I was ready to exhale, I really was. I stepped around the blood and the CSIs taking pictures and stooped to get a look at one of the dead men.

He’d taken a couple of shots to the chest and one to his face through his mask—a pig mask. That was new. The Windbreaker cops on the video we’d seen were wearing plain face masks.

Then I noticed that the doer wasn’t wearing gloves. I looked over at the second man, who’d taken out half a block of folding chairs when he was shot. Same kind of pig mask. And he wasn’t wearing gloves, either.