10th Anniversary (20 page)

“I could use a copy of that.”

Yuki shook her head no. But at the same time, the printer made a grinding sound, and a black-and-white photo chugged into the tray. Yuki handed it to me.

“I’d give you a harder time,” she said, “but the judge wants to see me in chambers. I’m in the bad-girl corner again. Don’t make trouble for me, Lindsay. I mean it.”

I wished her luck with LaVan and ran for the exit before Yuki could change her mind.

MINUTES AFTER LEAVING Yuki’s office, I signed the visitor’s log at the entrance to the women’s jail on the seventh floor. It was loud in this wing. The clanging of metal doors and the angry clamor of prisoners rose up around us as an officer escorted me to one of the small, bare conference rooms.

Candace Martin soon appeared in the doorway. She made eye contact with me as the guard removed her cuffs, then took the chair across from me at the scarred metal table.

“This is an unexpected surprise,” she said.

Candace didn’t have any makeup on, hadn’t had her hair done professionally in a year, and was wearing a prison jumpsuit in a shade of orange that didn’t flatter blondes.

Still, Candace Martin had her dignity and her professional demeanor.

I said, “I’m here unofficially.”

“With good news, I hope.”

I pulled the printout of the photo from my pocket and placed it faceup on the table. “Please look at this picture and tell me why you’re inside this vehicle with this man.”

She said, “I’ve seen that picture. That’s not me.”

The overhead light cast three hundred watts of bright white fluorescence, lighting every part of the small room. The red eye of a security camera watched from a corner of the ceiling as the woman in orange slid the photo closer and picked it up.

“I don’t know
either
of these people,” she said. Then, as though she had been struck with an afterthought, she studied the photo intently again and asked me, “What do you see in this woman’s hand?”

She pushed the grainy black-and-white printout back across the table. The woman in the picture had her head tipped forward, her blond hair covering half her face, and she seemed to be clutching a chain that was fastened around her neck. I saw the glint of a pendant dangling from her clasped fingers.

“Maybe some kind of charm,” I said.

“Could it be a cross?” Candace Martin asked me.

“I suppose.”

“I don’t wear thin gold chains with charms or crosses,” Candace Martin said to me. “But you know Ellen Lafferty, don’t you? Ellen always wears a cross. I’ve got to say, I wonder what it means to her.”

CANDACE MARTIN was due back in court in an hour, and if my belief in her innocence was warranted, I couldn’t “mess around” with Yuki’s case fast enough. Every day that Candace was on trial, she was a day closer to being convicted of murder in the first degree.

As hard as it would be to convince the court that the wrong person was on trial, it would be a snap compared with getting a murder conviction overturned.

I jogged down the Hall’s back stairs to the lobby, thumbed a number into my cell phone, and waited for private investigator Joseph Podesta to pick up. His voice was thick with sleep, but he said, “Aw-right,” to my request to see him in twenty minutes.

I crossed the Bay Bridge, drove to Lafayette, and found Podesta’s yellow suburban ranch on Hamlin Road, a street
lined with a mix of trees and similar ranch-style houses. I parked my car in his driveway, then walked up some stone steps through a rock garden and rang the bell.

Podesta came to the door barefoot, wearing a sweat suit with a sprinkling of bread crumbs on the front. I showed him my badge and he opened the door wide and led me to his home office at the back of the house.

I looked around at the warehouse of spy equipment Podesta had stored on his metal bookshelves. He wheeled his chair up to his computer, lifted an old tabby cat down from his desk, and put her on his lap.

“If my client wasn’t dead,” he said, palming the mouse, “I wouldn’t show these to you without a warrant.”

“I appreciate your help,” I said.

Podesta clicked on the folder containing the digital photos he’d taken of Candace Martin in a car with someone who had been tentatively identified as Gregor Guzman, a contract killer who was wanted by cops in several states and a few foreign countries as well.

The first photo Podesta pulled up on his screen was the one Yuki had offered into evidence.

“I know these photos suck eggs,” he said. “But I couldn’t use the flash, you know? I can’t swear that’s Guzman, but that woman
is
Candace Martin. I followed her that night from her house on Monterey Boulevard right to the I-280 on-ramp north. She got off on Cesar Chavez, took a right on Third and then onto Davidson. I was on her tail the whole time.

“It’s a very dodgy place. I’m sure you know it, Sergeant. I
had to watch out for myself. It’s a trash heap. A junkyard. I could have gotten mugged, and she could have, too.

“I watched her get out of her Lincoln and get into this guy’s SUV. Ten minutes later, she got out.”

“Can you burn those pictures onto a disc for me?”

“Why not, under the circumstances?” he said.

The computer whirred.

The cat purred.

And pretty soon I had a disc with a lot of grainy pictures taken a couple of weeks before Dennis Martin was killed.

AT NINE-FIFTEEN I was back at the Hall of Justice, Southern Station, Homicide Division, my home away from home.

I hung my jacket on the back of my chair, then found Conklin in the break room. He was eating a doughnut over the sink, his yellow tie flipped over his shoulder.

“Yo,” he said. “I saved you one.”

“I’m not hungry. But I do have something to show you.”

“You’re being awfully mysterious.”

“It’s better to show than tell.”

Chi was working at his desk, his computer humming, his coffee mug on a napkin, and about thirty pens lined up with the top edge of his mouse pad.

I handed Chi the disc Joe Podesta had given me and said, “You mind, Paul? I want you to see these, too.”

The three of us focused on one frame at a time as the
dozen digital shots PI Joseph Podesta had taken of a blond woman in profile, sitting with a possible hit man in his SUV, came up on the screen.

Conklin asked Chi to enlarge the best of them and to push in on the female subject’s fist to see if she could be holding on tight to a gold cross. But the more Chi blew up the picture, the fuzzier it became.

“That’s the best I can do,” Chi said, staring at the abstract arrangement of gray dots. “What are your thoughts?”

“Run it through the face ID program,” Conklin said to Chi.

“Face ID, coming up.”

Chi opened the program, and two windows came up on his monitor, comparing Candace Martin’s mug shot with the grainy shot of the blond woman in the car.

Chi turned to look at me and Conklin, a spark of excitement sailing briefly across his face like a shooting star. “It’s not her,” said Chi. “Whoever the woman is in this picture—it’s not Candace Martin.”

Chi then compared the grainy-pictured blonde against a database of tens of thousands of photos at blur speed.

And just as I was beginning to lose hope, we got a match.

CONKLIN AND I got into an unmarked car and were soon speeding up the James Lick Freeway. As Conklin drove, I ticked off on my fingers the reasons I liked Ellen Lafferty for Dennis Martin’s murder.

“One, she was in love with him. Two, she was frustrated by him. Three, she had access to his gun. She knew where he would be and where Candace would be at the end of the day.

“That’s four and five. And six, if she didn’t do it, she could have ordered the hit.”

“All that,” Conklin said, “and she’s smart enough to frame Candace.”

“She must be a frickin’ evil genius,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin parked the car in front of a pale yellow marina-style apartment building. Built in the
’20s, it was a tidy-looking place with bowed windows facing Ulloa Street. It was about a mile from the Martins’ house.

I pressed the buzzer and Lafferty called out, “Who is it?” And then she opened the door.

Conklin said “SFPD,” flashed his shield, and introduced us to the twenty-something nanny, who hesitated a couple of beats before she let us in.

I had watched Lafferty’s testimony from the back of the courtroom a few days ago. She’d looked quite mature in a suit and heels. Today, wearing jeans and a white turtleneck, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a teenager.

Conklin said yes to Lafferty’s offer of coffee, but I lingered behind in the living room as the Martins’ former nanny walked Conklin to the kitchen.

In one visual sweep, I counted five pictures of Dennis Martin in that small room, some of them with Lafferty. Martin was handsome from every angle.

I raised my eyes as Ellen Lafferty returned to the living area with Conklin. She looked happier to see me than she could possibly be. She took a seat in an armchair and said, “I thought the investigation was closed.”

I said, “There are a few stubborn loose ends. Well, one loose end.”

I pulled the photo from my inside jacket pocket and put it down on the coffee table.

Ellen reached over to pick it up and said, “What is this?”

“That man may be a contract killer by the name of Gregor Guzman. The woman in this picture looks like Candace Mar
tin,” I said. “She’s got the same blond hair, same cut as Candace—but it’s not actually her, is it, Ellen?”

“It’s hard to tell. I don’t know,” she said.

“You know how we know it isn’t Candace?” Conklin said. “Because when we ran that photo through forensic software, it matched your picture from the DMV. The woman in this picture is you.”

Conklin went to the mantel and picked up a gold-framed photo of Ellen and Dennis Martin on a sailboat out in the Bay.

“No,” she said, getting up to snatch the picture out of Conklin’s hand. “You can’t have that.”

I said to her, “I think Judge LaVan will give us a search warrant to go through everything in your house. Meanwhile, we need to continue this talk at the police station.”

I pulled out my phone and was calling for a patrol car, but Ellen said, “Wait. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

I closed my phone and gave her my full attention.

IF ELLEN LAFFERTY didn’t try to hire a killer, why was she in that car with Gregor Guzman? I couldn’t wait to hear her explanation.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, certainly nothing
criminal,
” Lafferty said. She reached into the neck of her sweater and pulled out a small gold cross on a thin chain. She kept yanking it from side to side, a nervous habit—and a telling one.

“Dennis sent me to meet this ‘Mr. G.’ in the parking lot of Vons,” she said. “He gave me an envelope of money to give to this Mr. G., but when he opened it, he handed it back to me and said, ‘Tell Mr. Martin thanks but no thanks.’ ”

“This Mr. G. gave back the money,” Rich said.

Ellen nodded.

“So, you’re saying you met with a man you didn’t know because Dennis told you to do it. You gave him money—
which he gave back to you, and you didn’t know why you were there. Is that your story?”

“I didn’t know he was an
assassin
until after the trial started and I read about him online. I was just a messenger. This is one hundred percent true.”

“You’re not in any trouble,” Conklin said. “We’re trying to piece some facts together.”

“So, tell us about the blond hair,” I said.

“It was a wig,” Ellen blurted out. “It belonged to Candace when she was having chemo. She threw it out and I took it. Dennis liked me to wear it sometimes. Do you want to see it?”

Ellen Lafferty headed down a hallway toward the bedroom.

“You really think this girl hired a hit man?” Conklin asked me.

“I don’t know. I know less now than I did when I woke up this morning.”

I picked up the sunset-lit, highly romantic photo of Ellen and Dennis Martin and ran it all through my mind again.

Had Ellen hired Guzman to kill Dennis? Was Ellen the intruder, and had she killed Dennis herself? Did Dennis set up the meet between Ellen and Guzman so that his private eye could document a Candace look-alike meeting with a hit man?

If so, had Candace killed her husband before he could kill
her?

As I was turning over the possibilities yet again, Ellen came back into the room holding a black satin bag. She opened the drawstrings and shook out a blond wig.

“Mostly I just wore this when we made love,” she said.

I couldn’t hold back.

“Help me to understand you, Ellen,” I said. “Your lover liked you to wear his wife’s wig in bed? Didn’t you find that sick?”

Tears jumped to her eyes.

I muttered, “Crap,” under my breath. Was I ever going to learn to be the good cop? Conklin took the bag and said to Lafferty, “We need you to come to the station, okay, Ellen?”

“But—you’re not arresting me, right?”

Conklin said. “We want your signed statement to what you just told us.”

I hung back as Conklin walked Ellen out to the street. I called Yuki but got her voice mail.

I waited out the beeps, then said, “Yuki, I need a search warrant for Ellen Lafferty’s premises. Yes, we’ve got probable cause. Call me back ASAP. Uh—I think you’re going to thank me for this.”

I hoped I was right.

YUKI SAT BESIDE PHIL, the two of them in matching leather chairs across from Judge LaVan’s leather-topped desk. The room had been decorated in fox hunt–style: old prints of people in red coats on bay horses, and heavy wooden furniture against forest-green walls.

The judge’s eyes were red behind his glasses, and he explained in the fewest possible words why he had been out for three days.

“My mother had lung cancer,” he said. “She died. Badly.”