The 6th Target (4 page)

Edmund’s voice was hoarse and breaking when he said, “Claire just came out of X-ray. She’s got internal bleeding.”

“Eddie, I don’t get it. What happened?”

“The bullet bruised her liver. . . . They have to operate on her — again.”

I’d been lulled by Dr. Sassoon’s smile when he’d said that Claire was as good as home free. Now I felt nauseated with fear.

When I arrived at the ICU waiting room, it was half full of Claire’s family and friends, plus Edmund and Willie and Reggie Washburn, Claire and Edmund’s twenty-one-year-old who’d just flown in from the University of Miami.

I hugged everyone, sat down beside Cindy Thomas and Yuki Castellano, Claire’s best girlfriends and mine, the four of us making up the entire membership of what we half jokingly call the “Women’s Murder Club.” We huddled together, waiting for news in that cheerless room.

Throughout the long, tense hours, we camouflaged our fear by topping one another’s kick-butt Claire stories. We downed bad coffee and Snickers bars from the vending machines, and during the early morning hours, Edmund asked us to pray.

We all joined hands as Eddie asked God to please spare Claire. I knew we were all hoping that if we stayed close to her and had enough faith, she wouldn’t die.

During those grueling hours, I flashed back to the time I’d been shot — how Claire and Cindy had been there for me.

And I remembered other times when I’d waited in rooms much like this one. When my mom had cancer. When a man I’d loved had been shot in the line of duty. When Yuki’s mom had been felled by a stroke.

All of them had died.

Cindy said, “Where is that son-of-a-bitch shooter right now? Is he having a smoke after his dinner? Sleeping in a nice soft bed, planning another shooting spree?”

“He’s not sleeping in a bed,” Yuki said. “Ten bucks says that dude is sleeping in a Maytag box.”

At around five in the morning, a weary Dr. Sassoon came out to give us the news.

“Claire’s doing fine,” he said. “We’ve repaired the damage to her liver, and her blood pressure is picking up. Her vital signs are good.”

A cheer went up, and spontaneously we all started to clap. Edmund hugged his sons, tears in all their eyes.

The doctor smiled, and I had to admit — he was a warrior.

I made a quick trip home to take a sunrise run around Potrero Hill with Martha, my border collie.

Then I called Jacobi as the sun rose over the roof of my car. I met him and Conklin at the elevator bank inside the Hall at eight.

It was Sunday.

They’d brought coffee and donuts.

I loved these guys.

“Let’s get to work,” I said.

CONKLIN, JACOBI, AND I had just settled into my glass-cubicle office in the corner of the squad room when In-spectors Paul Chi and Cappy McNeil entered the dingy twenty-by-thirty-foot workspace that’s home base to the twelve members of the homicide crew.

Cappy easily weighs two hundred fifty pounds, and the side chair creaked when he sat in it. Chi is lithe. He parked his small butt on my credenza next to Jacobi, who was having one of his not-infrequent bouts of coughing.

With all the seats taken, Conklin chose to stand behind me, his back against the window and its view of the on-ramp to the freeway, one foot casually crossing the ankle of the other.

My office felt overcrowded, like a shot glass stuffed with a fistful of crayons.

I could feel heat coming off Conklin’s body, making me too aware of his six-foot-one, perfectly proportioned frame, his light-brown hair falling over his brown eyes, his twenty-nine-year-old looks reminding me of a Kennedy cousin crossed with maybe a U.S. Marine.

Chi had brought the Sunday
Chronicle
and placed it on the desk in front of me.

The shooter’s photo, a fuzzy still shot taken from Jack Rooney’s low-resolution movie footage, was on the front page, and under it was the caption
DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN
?

We all leaned in to study that furred face again.

The shooter’s dark hair hung around to his jaw, and his beard hid everything from his top lip down to his Adam’s apple.

“Jesus Christ,” said Cappy. We all looked at him.

“What? I’m saying he
looks
like Jesus Christ.”

I said, “We won’t be getting anything back from the lab on a Sunday morning, but we have this.”

I took the photocopy of the brown-wrapped package of Turkish Specials out of my in-box.

“And we have all this.”

I put my hand on the two-inch pile of witness statements, phone messages, and e-mail printouts that our PA, Brenda, had taken off the SFPD Web site yesterday.

“We can divvy it up,” said Jacobi.

Loud discussion followed, until Chi said emphatically, “
Hey
. Cigarettes are big business. Any place that’s going to sell a brand like Turkish Specials is going to be one of your mom-and-pop stores. And one of those moms or pops might remember this shooter.”

I said, “Okay. You guys run with it.”

Jacobi and Conklin took two-thirds of the witness statements out to their desks in the squad room and got on the phones while Chi and McNeil made a few calls before hitting the streets.

Alone in my office, I looked over what Brenda had gathered on the victims — all solid citizens, every one.

Was there a connection between the killer and any of the people he’d shot?

I started dialing the numbers on the witness statements, but nothing in the first few calls lifted me out of my seat. Then I reached a fireman who’d been standing only ten feet from Andrea Canello when the shooter opened fire.

“She was yelling at her kid when the shooter popped her,” the witness said. “I was about to tell her to take it easy. The next minute, uh, she was dead.”

“What was she saying? Do you remember?”

“ ‘You’re driving me crazy, buddy.’ Something like that. Terrible to think . . . Did the boy make it?”

“I’m sorry to say, no, he didn’t.”

I made more notes, trying to fit fragments together into pieces, pieces into a whole. I slugged down the last of my coffee and dialed the next person on my list.

His name was Ike Quintana, and he had called late yesterday afternoon, saying maybe he’d been friends with the shooter some fifteen years before.

Now Quintana said to me, “It looks like the same guy for sure. If that’s him, we were both at Napa State Hospital in the late ’80s.”

I gripped the phone, pressing my ear hard against the receiver. Didn’t want to miss a syllable.

“You know what I mean?” Quintana asked me. “We were both locked up in the cuckoo’s nest.”

I SCRIBBLED A STAR next to Ike Quintana’s phone number.

“What’s your friend’s name?” I asked him, pressing the receiver against my ear. But suddenly Quintana was evasive.

“I don’t want to say, in case it turns out
not
to be him,” he said. “I have a picture. You can come over and look, if you come now. Otherwise, I have a lot of things to do today.”

“Don’t you dare leave home! We’re on our way!”

I went out to the squad room, said, “We’ve got a lead. I have an address on San Carlos Street.”

Conklin said, “I want to keep working the phones. New videos of the shooting have been e-mailed to our Web site.”

Jacobi stood, put on his jacket, said, “I’m driving, Boxer.”

I’ve known Jacobi for ten years, worked as his partner for three before I was promoted to lieutenant. During the time Jacobi and I were a team, we’d developed a deep friendship and an almost telepathic connection. But I don’t think either of us acknowledged how close we were until the night we were shot down by coked-up teenagers. Being near death had bonded us.

Now he drove us to a crappy block on the fringes of the Tenderloin.

We looked up the address Ike Quintana had given me, a two-story building with a storefront church on the ground floor and a couple of apartments on top.

I rang the doorbell, and a buzzer sounded. I pulled at the dull metal door handle, and Jacobi and I entered a dark foyer. We climbed creaking stairs into a carpeted hallway smelling of mildew.

There was a single door on each side of the hallway.

I rapped on the one marked 2R, and a long half minute later, it squeaked open.

Ike Quintana was a white male, midthirties. He had black hair sticking up at angles and he was oddly dressed in layers. An undershirt showed in the V of his flannel shirt, a knitted vest was buttoned over that, and an open, rust-colored cardigan hung down to his hips.

He wore blue-striped pajama bottoms and brown felt slippers, and he had a kind of sweet, gappy smile. He stuck out his hand, shook each of ours, and asked us to come in.

Jacobi stepped forward, and I followed both men into a teetering tunnel of newspapers and clear plastic garbage bags filled with soda bottles that lined the hallway from floor to ceiling. In the parlor, cardboard boxes spilled over with coins and empty detergent boxes and ballpoint pens.

“I guess you’re prepared for anything,” Jacobi muttered.

“That’s the idea,” said Quintana.

When we reached the kitchen, I saw pots and pans on every surface, and the table was a layered archive of news-paper clippings covered by a tablecloth, then more newspaper layers and a tablecloth over that, again and again making an archeological mound a foot high.

“I’ve been following the Giants for most of my life,” Quintana said shyly. He offered us coffee, which Jacobi and I declined.

Still, Quintana lit a flame on the gas stove and put a pot of water on to boil.

“You have a picture to show us?” I asked.

Quintana lifted an old wooden soapbox from the floor and put it on the pillowy table. He pawed through piles of photographs and menus and assorted memorabilia that I couldn’t make out, his hands flying over the papers.

“Here,” he said, lifting out a faded five-by-seven photo. “I think this was taken around ’88.”

Five teenagers — two girls and three boys — were watching television in an institutional-looking common room.

“That’s me,” said Quintana, pointing to a younger version of himself slouched in an orange armchair. Even then, he had layered his clothing.

“And see this guy sitting on the window seat?”

I peered at the picture. The boy was thin, had long hair and an attempt at a beard. His face was in profile. It could be the shooter. It could be anyone.

“See how he’s pulling at the hairs on his arm?” Quintana said.

I nodded.

“That’s why I think it could be him. He used to do that for hours. I loved that guy. Called him
Fred-a-lito-lindo
. After a song he used to sing.”

“What’s his real name?” I asked.

“He was very depressed,” Quintana said. “That’s why he checked into Napa. Committed, you know. There was an accident. His little sister died. Something with a sailboat, I think.”

Quintana turned off the stove, walked away. I had a fleeting thought:
What miracle has prevented this building from burning to the ground
?

“Mr. Quintana, don’t make us ask you again, okay?” Jacobi growled. “What’s the man’s name?”

Quintana returned to the table with his chipped coffee cup in hand, wearing his hoarder’s garb and the confidence of a rich man to the manor born.

“His name is Fred. Alfred Brinkley. But I really don’t see how he could have killed those people,” Quintana said. “Fred is the sweetest guy in the world.”

I CALLED RICH CONKLIN from the car, gave him Brinkley’s name to run through NCIC as Jacobi drove back to Bryant Street.

Chi and McNeil were waiting for us inside MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub, a dark saloon sandwiched between two bail-bond shacks across from the Hall.

Jacobi and I joined them and ordered Foster’s on tap, and I asked Chi and McNeil for an update.

“We interviewed a guy at the Smoke Shop on Polk at Vallejo,” said Chi, getting right into it. “Old geezer who owns the place says, ‘Yeah, I sell Turkish Specials. About two packs a month to a regular customer.’ He takes the carton off the shelf to show us — it’s down two packs.”

Conklin came in, took a seat, and ordered a Dos Equis and an Angus burger, rare.

Looked like he had something on his mind.

“My partner gets excited,” said Cappy, “by a carton of cigarettes.”

“So who’s the fool?” Chi asked McNeil.

“Get to it, okay?” Jacobi grumbled.

The beer came, and Jacobi, Conklin, and I lifted our glasses to Don MacBain, the bar’s owner, a maverick former SFPD captain whose portrait hung in a frame over the bar.

Chi continued, “So the geezer says this customer is a Greek guy, about eighty years old — but ‘hold on a minute,’ he says. ‘Let me see that picture again.’ ”

Cappy picked up where Chi left off. “So I push the photo of the shooter up to his snoot, and he says, ‘
This
guy? I used to see this guy every morning when he bought his paper.
He’s
the guy who did the shootings?’ ”

Jacobi called the waitress over again, said, “Syd, I’ll have a burger, too, medium rare with fries.”

Chi talked over him.

“So the Smoke Shop geezer says he doesn’t know our suspect’s name but thinks he used to live across the street, 1513 Vallejo.”

“So we go over there —” Cappy said.

“Please put me out of my misery,” Jacobi said. His elbows were on the table, and he was pressing his palms into his eye sockets, waiting for this story to pay out or be over.

“And we got a name,” Cappy finished. “The apartment manager at 1513 Vallejo positively IDed the photo. Told us that the suspect was evicted about two months ago, right after he lost his job.”

“Drumroll please,” said Chi. “The shooter’s name is Alfred Brinkley.”

It was sad to see the disappointment on the faces of McNeil and Chi, but I had to break it to them.

“Thanks, Paul. We know his name. Did you find out where he used to work?”

“Right, Lieu. That bookstore, uh, Sam’s Book Emporium on Mason Street.”

I turned to Conklin. “Richie, you look like the Cheshire cat. Whatcha got?”