He said, “My ex called her ‘thoroughly nutty Millie.’ Anyway, there’s no reason to take the ring off. I like it. I don’t like change.”
And yet his life had been disrupted by his father’s death, his mother’s absence, and then a divorce that Michael apparently hadn’t accepted as final.
I felt a flash of pity for Michael, and I bought Sophie’s view that he was an introvert. But it was odd that he had no curiosity about his mother’s death. And the few times he made eye contact, I thought he was trying to get a fix on me.
I said, “Mr. Dunn, we’re totally in the dark here. Anything you can add, even a guess, would be appreciated. I liked your mother, and I really want to catch her killer.”
Dunn twisted the band on his ring finger, calling my attention to it again. It was pretty nice, white gold with rims of yellow gold.
He said to me, “As I’ve told you, I don’t know her friends, her habits, or anything about what happened to her. I can’t even guess.” Then he looked away.
I said, “I have to ask, Mr. Dunn, where were you the night your mother was shot?”
“Me? What night was that again? No, it doesn’t matter,” said Michael Dunn wearily. “I have the same routine every day and every night. I get to work at nine. I do research for the three lawyers at Peavey and Smith Financial Management. I eat lunch at my desk. I leave work at six, come home, nuke dinner, watch TV for a few hours, and then I go to bed after the news. That’s my Groundhog Day life. It’s what I want. No stress. Quiet. Predictable.”
And he had a predictable alibi, too. I didn’t like that. Something was going on with Michael Dunn that he hadn’t told us. Never mind what he said; what did he know?
He looked at his watch and said, “Look. I’ve got a stack of documents and a needy boss waiting for them. I hope you catch Mom’s killer. She was batty, but she didn’t deserve to be shot.”
He got up from his chair and put on his windbreaker jacket.
“If you catch the guy, let me know, okay?”
Conklin said, “Of course,” and walked Michael Dunn out to the elevator. I sat for a moment and stared at the wall.
I thought about Michael Dunn’s glancing looks. Like he wanted to study me yet avoid my eyes.
But I had looked at him, and now I was thinking that I’d seen him before.
It would drive me crazy until I figured out when and where.
CHAPTER 84
BACK AT OUR desks, I said to Conklin, “Does Michael Dunn look familiar to you?”
“Reminds me a little of Jimmy Fallon, maybe.”
“You think?”
The feeling I was having that I’d seen Dunn before intensified. I kept comparing him in my mind with his sister and mother, but even though they all had hazel eyes, I just didn’t feel that was it.
And then something clicked.
I opened the folder on my computer where I’d filed the shots I’d snapped of the crowd behind the tape on that rainy night on Geary Street. I scrutinized all of them before I stabbed my finger at the face of a man who strongly resembled Michael Dunn. Millie had looked startled when I showed these same photos to her. Had she seen her son in that crowd?
“Come over here, Richie.”
“Yes, boss.”
He came around, looked at where I was pointing.
“Is this Michael?”
The man at the end of a row of bystanders wore a knit cap and a charcoal-gray ski jacket. His right hand was in his pocket, and he was holding an umbrella handle with his gloveless left hand.
Water dripped from the umbrella spokes.
“Could be him, Boxer. The picture is awful grainy, and it’s hard to really see his face with that hat pulled down over his eyebrows. But I see what you mean.”
I zoomed in on the hand gripping the handle and focused in on the man’s wedding ring.
I said to Richie, “You noticed his ring, right?”
“Silver with gold on the edges.”
“Correct,” I said. “Is this the same ring?”
“It’s possible,” my partner said. “But with this lighting? The shadows, the headlights, a lot of contrast for a phone shot. I want to look at his face again.”
I adjusted the picture on the screen and said, “Well?”
“Let’s go to the videotape,” Rich said.
He went to his desk, picked up the phone, and tapped in a couple of numbers, saying, “Maybe we’ll catch Benny.”
Benny is our interview room AV tech, among other roles.
“Benny,” Conklin said into the mouthpiece. “This is urgent. I need a still shot of the dude Boxer and I just talked to in Interview 1. Find me the best frontal face shot and a profile if you’ve got one. You mind? I’ll wait.”
He hung up and drummed his fingers on the desk.
I knew he and I were both having the same thought. The lab could do a little facial-recognition magic on the two images, compare the Michael Dunn we’d just interviewed with the unknown man under the umbrella on Geary.
While we waited for Benny, I did a database search for everything related to Michael Dunn. I didn’t find much. He had no arrest sheet, no prints on file, not even a traffic violation.
And then I got a hit.
I said, “Holy moly,” and rotated my monitor so Rich could read a line of type in the database. Michael Dunn of Union Street, San Francisco, had a registered 9mm Kimber handgun.
“Good catch,” said Rich.
“Thanks, bud.”
It was a good catch. Michael Dunn had purchased a gun of the same caliber as the one that had killed several homeless people, including Dunn’s mother, Millie Cushing.
The lab had kept the bullets taken from the bodies of Jimmy Dolan, Laura Russell, Lou Doe, and Millie Cushing. Ballistics had logged them all as cold hits. All had been fired from the same gun, a gun that had not been used in a crime or otherwise entered into our system.
It wasn’t a gotcha—yet. But if the mystery man on Geary Street was our Michael Dunn, and he had a weapon that matched the type that had fired bullets into his mother’s body, that would be enough probable cause to arrest him on suspicion of murder.
Had those bullets come from Michael Dunn’s Kimber? We really needed to get his gun.
CHAPTER 85
IT WAS 8:30 A.M. the morning after our interview with Michael Dunn.
Conklin and I sat together in a parked squad car near the intersection of Leidesdorff and Commercial Streets in the Financial District. The Transamerica building was directly behind us, and we were within shouting distance of the red-and-white-brick three-story office building where Dunn worked as a paralegal.
We had confirmation from the lab that the man in our interview room was the same as the one I’d snapped standing across the street from the body of that poor dead woman on Geary.
Michael Dunn hadn’t said a word to us about the scene on Geary. Why wouldn’t he mention that he’d seen the body, as similar as it was to what he now knew about his mother’s death?
We could ask him and hold him as a material witness for forty-eight hours while we got an ADA to get us a search warrant for his apartment.
But neither Rich nor I could bear to sit at our desks while waiting for an ADA to find a judge to sign a warrant. Not while our one suspect, Michael Dunn, was walking around with a gun.
Our plan was simple and entirely legal. We would pick Dunn up and bring him back to the Hall for questioning about the shooting of Lou Doe at 77 Geary.
That would buy a little time, and maybe Dunn would give up information we could use to arrest him for murder.
Dunn had told us that he was a creature of habit. Every morning he got to his office by nine, he spent his day doing legal research, and at the close of business he went home. What he’d called his “Groundhog Day life.”
I hoped today would be just another Groundhog Day for Michael Dunn.