“Sorry,” he said. “Work. My phone is always open.”
He couldn’t turn off his phone for an hour? That clinging sadness she’d been carrying around had finally lightened, and now it was weighing her down again.
They skipped dessert and coffee. Later that night when they were both in bed, and rain clouds veiled, then revealed, the full moon outside their bedroom window, Yuki lay wide awake.
Had Brady been telling her the truth when he said he was just overly busy? Or was he keeping something from her?
What in the world was wrong?
CHAPTER 31
YUKI DROPPED OFF to sleep sometime after two and slept through the alarm that went off at half past seven. Later, when she started awake, Brady’s side of the bed was empty.
She would just get to work on time if she pulled herself together fast—and somehow she did it, walking smartly through the doorway to the DA’s suite of offices at nine fifteen. Apart from the fact that her hair was still damp, she was good to go.
The DA’s office was organized with small windowed rooms at the perimeter, surrounding a maze of cubicles at the center. The cubes were fully occupied with paralegals and assistants on the phones, making casework hum.
As Yuki passed Len’s corner office, his assistant, Toni Reynolds, who manned the desk outside his door, waved her down.
“Yuki, Len needs to see you and Arthur. Right away.”
“Now?”
“As soon as his meeting breaks up,” Toni said. “Oh.
Good. Here’s Arthur. Both of you, please sit down. He’ll be right with you.”
Yuki was surprised at this summons to Len’s office. “Right away”? What had happened?
Yuki and Arthur had hardly settled into chairs in the hallway when Len Parisi’s office door blew open.
Len’s assistant said to Yuki, “I hope you don’t mind, but I had to coordinate a lot of schedules. Judge Rathburn wants to see all concerned at ten.”
Yuki didn’t know why the judge wanted to see them, and she didn’t get a chance to ask. Parisi appeared in his doorway looking exasperated and told Yuki and Art to come in.
They took the love seat and watched the big man edge behind his cluttered mahogany desk and sink heavily into his chair.
He moved stacks of papers around on his desk, lined up his pens, then got into the business at hand.
“Giftos filed a motion to suppress the sex video,” he said. “That video is all we’ve got. I’ve never felt at peace with that. Rathburn is reasonable,” he said. “He listens and he can be reached. Don’t let Giftos intimidate you, Yuki. And he will try.”
Yuki said, “People underestimating me is my secret weapon.”
Parisi cracked a smile, then said, “Toni set the meeting for ten. It’s nine thirty. Don’t be late.”
She and Arthur sprang from the sofa and out the door. At the elevator bank Yuki watched the indicator lights track the car down from the jail on the seventh floor. The elevator was old. Creaky. Slow. Like everything in the Hall of Justice, outmoded.
“Stairs,” Art said.
“Done.”
They took the fire exit, and as they jogged down to the second floor, Arthur said, “I had a dream. We were in court and a pack of dogs came rushing through the door. They were on the scent of something big, and they were determined.”
“How’d you know that?”
“I don’t know. I woke up.”
Yuki laughed. “That’s it? The whole dream?”
“The lead dog had red fur.”
She smiled at her new deputy. “Well, Arthur, we’re about to face off against the man who set Len’s hair on fire.”
As they walked along the hallway, Yuki turned her mind back to this complication that could kneecap the case against Briana Hill.
Without the video, it was Marc Christopher’s word against Briana Hill’s, a coin toss that left plenty of room for a jury to find reasonable doubt.
Yuki didn’t know Judge Rathburn, but she knew James Giftos.
He was the type of defense lawyer who was sometimes called a bomb.
Would Rathburn allow the video into evidence? Or would James Giftos, a man twenty years older than she, with twice as much trial experience, blow up her case before she ever presented it to the jury?
CHAPTER 32
MY HEAD WAS still swimming with images from the Pier 45 murder scene when I arrived at my desk the morning after.
I envisioned the sparse crowd on the pier; the deceased, Laura Russell, in her blood; her crying teenage daughter. I thought about the sketchy secondhand report that the shooter was white, and had worn a nice coat. And of course, I was still stuck on the rude dismissal by Sergeant Garth Stevens.
Conklin hadn’t yet punched in, so I headed for the break room and found that Sergeant Paul Chi and his partner, Cappy McNeil, had appropriated the table. I’ve worked with these two homicide pros since back in the far-distant day, when Jacobi and I were partners.
Chi is precise, diligent, a man Jacobi refers to as “human ground-penetrating radar.” I remember Jacobi toasting Chi when he was promoted to sergeant, saying, “Chi can see around corners and beyond time.”
Cappy is a different kind of cop—a career detective who, in twenty years on the force, has solved case after case without ever getting ruffled or into a jam.
I thought Chi and McNeil could give me some advice about the murder of Laura Russell. They made room for me at the table, and we sat together with a box of pastries between us. When I had laid it all out, including the intel from my confidential informant and my personal experience with Stevens and Moran, I asked, “Do either of you know these guys?”
“I know Stevens,” Cappy said, tucking into a honey bun. “What do you want to know?”
“Whatcha got?”
He chewed slowly, swallowed, and finally said, “This is just between you, me, Chi, and Honey Bun, and I’m about to take Ms. Bun down.”
“Agreed,” I said.
Between bites the wise Cappy McNeil told me that Stevens was a dedicated drinker—no surprise, since he and my father had been fellow barflies. Cappy added that Moran had been violent with two different girlfriends, or so he’d been told.
“He didn’t introduce his gun into the fights, but he knocked those women around pretty bad. If he was a pro ballplayer, he’da been suspended for at least a year.”
I pushed for more.
“Any known misbehavior on the job?”
Chi said, “This is all gossip, you understand, Boxer?”
“I understand. What’s the gossip?”
“When Stevens was in Narcotics, there was talk that he may have gotten payoffs from a big-time dealer. Well, I only heard about it after some evidence against that guy went missing.”
“Come on. He’s that dirty?”
“The talk never became an investigation,” said Cappy. “Stevens’s boss, Lieutenant Chris Levant, liked him then and likes him to this day. Their wives are friends. So Stevens was moved to Central Station’s investigative team and later partnered up with Moran. The two them became the hub of Levant’s Homicide detail.”
Cappy continued, “They did close out that case of a teenage girl who went missing in Polk Gulch. Found her body in a storage locker, and they collared the perp, who was then convicted. So whatever else, they do a good job.”
I told Chi and McNeil what my CI had said: that a string of homeless people had been shot, with no arrests.
“She said about three, and that was before the last two.”
“You sure about that? You checked out the database?” Chi asked me.
“I did. But I don’t have names. I’m not even sure if the victims had IDs. If the cases weren’t worked up, they could have easily been filed as ‘identity unknown,’ case to be solved after the second coming.”
The bull pen was starting to get noisy. The night shift was checking out, and the day shift was drifting into the break room, calling back and forth, laughing, filling up their mugs and grabbing sugared breakfast treats.
Chi hunched over the table and said, “Say there’s something to this, Boxer. What would be the point of Stevens lying down on the job?”
I shrugged. “I hoped you’d tell me.”
“Careful,” said Cappy. “Like I said, Levant is Stevens’s godfather. He has weight with the mayor.”