The 6th Target (23 page)

“And don’t touch anything,” she finished.

The apartment looked like an electronics shop that had been trampled by a rhino on crack. I took a quick count of a desktop computer, three monitors, a stereo, and a forty-two-inch plasma-screen television that had been reduced to shards. Not stolen — destroyed! The desk was banged up, probably collateral damage.

Blaustein said, “It took me years to get all this together just the way I like it.”

“What kind of work do you do?” Cindy asked.

“I design Web sites and games. This stuff cost probably twenty-five.”

“Mr. Blaustein,” I said, “when you went out, did you leave your door open?”

“I never leave my door open.”

“Mr. Blaustein left the music on when he left the apartment,” Rich said. His voice was matter-of-fact, but he didn’t look at me.

“Did anyone complain to you about the music?” I asked.

“Today?”

“Ever,” I said.

“I’ve gotten nasty phone calls from
one
person,” Blaustein said.

“And who was that?”

“You mean, did he tell me his name? He didn’t even say hello. His opening line was ‘If you don’t turn off that shit, I’m gonna kill you.’ That was the first time. We’ve had these shouting matches a couple of times a week for a while now. All the time, cursing me. Cursing my children.”

“You have kids?” I asked, unable to imagine it.

“No. He cursed any future children I might have.”

“So what did you do?”

“Me? I know swearwords this dude never heard before. Thing is, I would’ve recognized the guy’s voice if I’d heard it before. My ears are, like, good enough to be insured by Lloyd’s of London. But I don’t know him. And I know everyone who lives here. I even know
her
,” he said, pointing to Cindy. “Third floor, right?”

“And you’re saying no one else in the building complained about your sound system?”

“No, because
A
, I only work during the day, and
B
, we’re allowed to play music until eleven p.m. Besides which,
C
, I don’t play the music loud.”

I sighed, unclipped my cell phone, and called the crime lab. I got the night-shift supervisor on the line and told him we needed him.

“You have someone you can stay with tonight?” Rich was asking Blaustein.

“Maybe.”

“Well, you can’t stay here. Your apartment’s a crime scene for a while.”

Blaustein looked around the wreck of his apartment, his young face sagging as he cataloged the destruction. “I wouldn’t stay here tonight if you paid me.”

CINDY, RICH, AND I CONNECTED THE DOTS during the elevator ride down to the lobby.

“The dogs, the piano, the treadmill . . .” Rich was saying.

“The Web-meister’s apartment . . .” Cindy added.

“It’s all the same thing,” I said. “
It’s the noise
.”

“Yep,” Rich agreed. “Whoever this maniac is, noise makes him a little bit violent.”

I said, “Rich, I’m sorry I snapped at you before. I had a bad day.”

“Forget it, Lindsay. We close this case, we’ll both feel better.”

The elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out again into the lobby. At the moment, the space was packed with about two hundred freaked-out tenants, standing room only.

Cindy had her notepad out and moved toward the board president as Conklin used his body as a plow. I drafted behind him until we reached the reception desk.

Someone yelled, “
Quiet
!” and when the rumble died, I said, “I’m Sergeant Boxer. I don’t have to tell you that there have been a series of disturbing incidents in this building —”

I waited out the heckling about the police not doing their jobs, then pushed on, saying that we were going to reinterview everyone and that no one was permitted to leave until we said it was okay.

A gray-haired man in his late sixties raised his hand, introducing himself as Andy Durbridge.

“Sergeant, I may have some useful information. I saw a man in the laundry room this afternoon whom I’d never seen before. He had what looked like a dog’s bite marks on his arms.”

“Can you describe this man?” I asked. I felt a new kind of tension in my gut. The good kind.

“He was about five six, muscular, brown hair going bald, in his thirties, I think. I looked around already, and I don’t see him here.”

“Thanks, Mr. Durbridge,” I said. “Can anyone here pin
a name
on that description?”

A petite young woman with caramel-colored bedspring curls waded through the crowd until she reached me.

Her eyes were huge, and her skin was unnaturally pale — something was frightening her half to death.

“I’m Portia Fox,” she said, her voice quavering. “Sergeant, may I speak with you privately?”

I STEPPED OUTSIDE the Blakely Arms with Portia Fox.

“I think I know that man that Mr. Durbridge was referring to,” Ms. Fox told me. “He sounds like the guy who lives in my apartment during the daytime.”

“Your roommate?”

“Not officially,” the woman said, casting her eyes around. “He rents my
dining room
. I work during the day. He works at night. We’re like ships crossing, you know?”

“It’s
your
apartment, and this man is a sublet, is that what you’re saying?”

She bobbed her head.

“What’s his name?”

“Garry, two Rs, Tenning. That’s what’s printed on his checks.”

“And where is Mr. Tenning now?” I asked.

“He’s at his job with a construction company.”

“He works in construction — at night?” I asked. “You have a cell phone number for him?”

“No. I used to see him every day for about a year in the Starbucks across the street. Sometimes we’d say hello, share a newspaper. He seemed nice, and when he asked if I knew of a place he could rent cheap . . . well, I needed the money.”

This
child
had let a stranger move into her apartment. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to report her to her mother. Instead I asked, “When do you expect Mr. Tenning home?”

“Around eight thirty in the morning. Like I said, I’ve always left for work by the time he comes in, and now that I’ve got a coffeemaker at work, I don’t go to Starbucks anymore.”

“We’re going to want to search your apartment.”

“Absolutely,” she said, pulling her key out of her handbag and offering it to me. “I really want you to. My God, what if I’m sharing my place with a murderer?”

“JUST LIKE MINE,” Cindy said as we walked into Portia Fox’s apartment. The front door opened into a large living room facing the street — roomy, sunny, furnished in office-girl modern.

There was a galley-style kitchen off the living room, but where Cindy’s dining room was open, Ms. Fox’s had been boxed in with plasterboard walls and a hollow-core door.

“He stays in there,” Ms. Fox told me.

“Any windows in his room?” I asked.

“No. He likes that. That’s what sealed the deal.”

It was too bad that the dining room had been walled off, because now we’d need either permission from Tenning to enter it or a search warrant. Even though Tenning wasn’t on Fox’s lease, he paid rent to her, and that gave him legal standing.

I put my hand on the doorknob to Tenning’s room on the off chance that it would turn, but no surprise — the door was locked.

“You have a friend you can stay with tonight?” I asked Ms. Fox.

I put a patrolman outside the apartment door while Portia gathered up some things.

I gave Cindy my keys and told her to go to my place. She didn’t even fight me.

Then Rich and I spent another two hours questioning the tenants of the Blakely Arms. We returned to the Hall at ten p.m.

As grim as the squad room was during the day, it was worse at night, the overhead lighting giving off a deadening white illumination. The place smelled of whatever food had been dumped into the trash cans during the day.

I threw a container of cold coffee into the garbage and turned on my computer as Rich followed suit. I called up a database, and although I was prepared for a long search for Garry Tenning’s life story, everything we needed flashed onto my computer screen in minutes.

There was an outstanding warrant for Tenning’s arrest. It was a small-potatoes charge of failure to appear in court for a traffic violation, but any arrest warrant was good enough to bring him in.

And there was more.

“Garry Tenning is employed by Conco Construction,” Rich said. “Tenning could be patrolling any of a hundred job sites. We won’t be able to locate him until Conco’s office opens in the morning.”

“He have a license to carry?” I asked.

Rich’s fingers padded across his keyboard.

“Yep. Current and up-to-date.”

Garry Tenning owned a gun.

THE NEXT MORNING a heavy gray torrent came down on San Francisco like one of the forty days of the flood.

Conklin parked our squad car in a vacant construction zone on Townsend in front of Tower 2 of the Beacon, a residential high-rise with retail shops on the ground floor, including the Starbucks where Tenning and Fox had met.

On a clear day, we would have had a good view of both the front doors of the six-story redbrick Blakely Arms and the narrow footpath that ran from Townsend along the east side of the building, leading back to the courtyard and rear entrance.

But today’s rain nearly obliterated our view through the windshield.

Inspectors Chi and McNeil were in the car behind us, also peering through the downpour. We were scanning the locale for a white man, five six with thinning brown hair, possibly wearing a uniform and probably packing a Colt revolver.

Unless he changed his pattern, Tenning would stop at the Starbucks, then cross Townsend, arriving “home” sometime between 8:30 and 9:00.

We were guessing that Tenning would take the footpath to the rear entrance of the building, use a key to the back door, and take the fire stairs, avoiding tenants.

I watched through the blurred windows as pedestrians in trench coats, their faces shielded by black umbrellas, stopped at the Walgreens, dropped off laundry at Fanta dry cleaners, scurried for the Caltrain.

Rich and I were both dangerously sleep deprived, so when a man matching Tenning’s description crossed Townsend, no coffee in hand, I couldn’t be sure if he was our guy — or if I just wanted him to be our guy.
Really, really badly
.

“In the gray Windbreaker, black umbrella,” I said.

A light changed to green, and the stream of traffic obscured our view long enough for the suspect to disappear in the crush of pedestrians on the far side of the street. I thought maybe he’d slipped down the Blakely Arms’ back alley.

“Yeah. Yeah. I think so,” Conklin said.

I called Chi, told him we were about to make our move. We let a couple of minutes pass — then Conklin and I put up our collars and made for the front entrance of the Blakely Arms.

We rode an elevator to the fifth floor. Then I used Portia Fox’s key to unlock her front door without opening it.

I drew my gun.

When Chi and McNeil arrived, Conklin breached the door to Fox’s apartment. The four of us stepped inside and checked each of the outer rooms before approaching Tenning’s private space.

I put my ear to the flimsy door, heard a drawer closing, shoes falling one after the other onto the uncarpeted floor.

I nodded to Conklin, and he knocked on Tenning’s door.

“SFPD, Mr. Tenning. We have a warrant for your arrest.”

“Get the hell out of here,”
an angry voice called back. “You don’t have a warrant. I know my rights.”

“Mr. Tenning, you parked your car in a fire zone, remember? August fifteenth of last year. You failed to appear in court.”

“You want to arrest me for
that
?”

“Open up, Mr. Tenning.”

The doorknob turned, and the door whined open. Tenning’s look of annoyance changed to anger as he saw our guns pointed at his chest.

He slammed the door in our faces.

“Kick it in,”
I said.

Conklin kicked twice beside the knob assembly, and the door splintered, swung wide open.

We took cover on both sides of the door frame, but not before I saw Tenning standing ten feet away, bracing his back against the wall.

He was holding his Colt .38 in both hands, pointing it at us.

“You’re not taking me in,” he said. “I’m too tired, and I’m just not up for it.”

MY HEART RATE ROCKETED. Sweat ran down the inside of my shirt. I pivoted on my right foot so that I was standing square in the doorway.

I held my stance, legs apart, my Glock trained on Tenning. Even though I was wearing a vest, he could cap me with a head shot. And the paper-thin plasterboard walls wouldn’t protect my team.

“Drop your weapon, asshole!” I shouted. “I’m one second away from drilling a hole through your heart.”

“Four armed cops on a traffic warrant? That’s a laugh! You think I’m stupid?”

“
You
are
stupid, Tenning
, if you want to die over a fifty-dollar ticket.”

Tenning’s eyes flicked from my weapon to the three other muzzles that were aimed at him. He muttered, “What a pain in the ass.”

Then his gun thudded to the floor.

Instantly we swarmed into the small room. A chair tipped over, and a desktop crashed to the ground.

I kicked Tenning’s gun toward the door as Conklin spun him around. He threw him against the wall and cuffed him.

“You’re under arrest for failure to appear,” Conklin said, panting, “and for interfering with a police officer.”

I read Tenning his rights. My voice was hoarse from the stress and the realization of what I’d just done.

“Good work, everyone,” I said, feeling almost faint.

“You okay, Lindsay?” McNeil asked, putting a beefy hand on my shoulder.

“Yeah. Thanks, Cappy,” I said, thinking how this arrest could have turned into a bloodbath — and still all we had on Tenning was a traffic violation.