23rd Midnight, page 16
part #23 of Women's Murder Club Series
He looked up and gave us a sicko wink.
“That’s right. It’s me,” he said, delighted with himself.
He was an entertaining speaker but I wasn’t amused. I was barely able to keep my fury in check while sitting across from him.
Burke was saying about Cindy, “I picked the right writer, for sure. But I didn’t tell her everything.”
Brady said, “Who’d you leave out?”
Burke laughed and said, “You’re going to have to wait. If I get my computer back, I’ll be finishing my book by the end of the year. Let the victims’ families try to sue me for the profits. There will be plenty to go around.”
With cuffs jangling, Burke put his tray on the floor and called for the guard standing outside the cage.
“You can take me back now, Mitchell. We’re done here. Lindsay, if you ever see Cindy, tell her I said hi.”
Mitchell lifted Burke out of his chair by his armpits.
Brady and I turned our backs as we’d done before. We didn’t call Burke names, didn’t give him a card or offer another “incentive.” We walked twenty yards to the door to the corridor. It beeped, opened, and we were escorted out.
Brady and I didn’t speak until we were walking down the ramp toward the ferry slip. Brady looked at the schedule. “We’re in luck,” he said. “Next ferry in thirty-five minutes.”
“Perfect,” I said.
I couldn’t read Brady, but as for me, I regretted not getting Burke out of the Q and into a restaurant. If we’d done the impossible, we might have a lead to Cindy’s whereabouts.
So, I was depressed. Burke had played us and if he knew where Cindy was, he was never going to give it up. It had been a wasted trip, but as we walked out toward the ferry the rainy weather had cleared and the image of Burke being lifted up like a doll in chains felt a lot better than a kick in the butt.
I sent my mind back to Blackout. There was still plenty of day left. With about a hundred cops looking for Cindy, there might be news back at the Hall.
CHAPTER 71
AT NINE THURSDAY morning, Yuki had gotten the call that the jury had reached a verdict, and by that afternoon, Yuki and Nick Gaines were at the prosecution table across the aisle from Mo Switzer and Lewis Sullivan. Barbara sat in her wheelchair on the outside aisle. Judge Froman was at the bench and the room was quiet as the jury filed in and took their places.
Yuki held her clenched hands below the table out of sight, but her eyes were on the jurors. She studied their faces, looking for tells, anything that would give her a hint as to their decision. She particularly looked at the foreman, George Campbell.
Campbell was retired now, but he had been a high school science teacher for forty years. During voir dire, Campbell had told the attorneys that he always followed the facts. Had Campbell been satisfied with the prosecution case? As if he felt her eyes on him, Campbell turned his head to look at Yuki. Yuki didn’t look away, didn’t smile or frown, just met his gaze and for several moments they maintained their distant connection; her dark eyes fixed on his blue ones.
This stalemate was broken by Judge Froman’s voice sounding through the small courtroom.
“Will the defendant please stand.”
Lewis Sullivan did as requested and his attorney stood beside him.
The judge addressed the jury.
“Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?”
Campbell stood. “We have, Your Honor.”
The bailiff crossed to the jury box, received the single page with the decision. Campbell continued to stand as the bailiff carried the verdict to the judge. Froman examined the single page with a small amount of hand printing, decisions that would impact Barbara Sullivan directly, as well as people all over the country who would take comfort or become enraged by the decision of these twelve men and women, good and true.
Froman passed the verdict back to the bailiff who returned it to the foreman.
Froman asked, “On count one, endangerment of the minor child Kenneth Sullivan, how do you find?”
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
“On count two, endangerment of minor child, Stephen Sullivan, how does the jury find?”
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
Judge Froman adjusted her glasses. “On count three, aggravated assault of Barbara Sullivan. How do you find?”
“We find the defendant guilty, Your Honor.”
Yuki clenched her fists, her fingernails making half-moon cuts in the palms of her hands as Judge Karen Froman asked, “And on the count of attempted murder of Barbara Sullivan, how does the jury find?”
If a circus had entered the courtroom with clowns and acrobats and trumpeting elephants, they wouldn’t have thrown Yuki’s concentration off the jury foreman.
Campbell, on the other hand, seemed confident and assured as he said, “We find the defendant, Lewis Sullivan, guilty as charged, Your Honor.”
That was it.
Everything that Yuki had been working toward had come home: guilty on all counts. Guilty.
Lewis Sullivan had a different reaction. Turning to face the gallery, screaming, “You bitch!” at Barbara, only a few lunges away from her husband.
Court officers moved in on Sullivan, cuffed him, and took him toward the side exit. As Sullivan was led away, he shouted, “We’ll appeal! With what we have on you, Barbara, the verdict will be overturned. I’ll see you soon, sweetie. Love you …”
Judge Froman dismissed the court. Yuki stood. Len Parisi appeared at her elbow and Nick pulled back her chair. Together they left the room. By pure reflex, Yuki looked for Cindy as she and the prosecution left through the rear doors. That’s where Cindy usually positioned herself. Electrical outlet. Wide view. Easy exit. Cindy wasn’t there, but Yuki’s husband, Jackson Brady, was.
He reached for her, put his arms around her and pulled her to him. “Great job,” he said. “Congratulations, honey.”
Brady shook Len’s and Nicky’s hands as they cleared the doorway, then steered Yuki into a niche in the corridor.
“How do you feel now?” he asked her.
She felt light-headed, as if she might faint and float away. “There’s still the sentencing hearing,” she said to her husband. “I can’t read the judge at all.”
Yuki heard someone call her name. She looked and saw the bailiff pushing Barbara Sullivan toward her in her wheelchair.
“Barbara, this is my husband, Lieutenant Jackson Brady.”
After the greetings and handshakes and nice to meet yous, Yuki looked up into Brady’s face.
“Thanks for coming, Brady. I’ve got to get Barbara out of here. I’ll see you tonight.”
CHAPTER 72
BACK AT THE Hall at two thirty Thursday afternoon, I found Rich sitting behind Brady’s tidy desk. Rich got to his feet, and I asked if anything had come in while we were out.
“I eliminated some filters on the facial rec hoping we’d get an array of men looking something like Blackout. Didn’t matter. He still doesn’t exist,” he said.
“And Burke?” he asked us.
“Gave us the middle finger,” I said. “I’ll fill you in.”
Rich and I walked back to our desks. I greeted Alvarez and briefed her and Rich on our dead-end excursion to and from San Quentin.
“Steak and potatoes with Burke’s usual BS for dessert. Burke knew one unreported detail—what Cindy was wearing when she was kidnapped—but no real news. We were prepared for the Burke shit show and still fell for it.”
Richie’s face sagged.
“No, listen,” I said. “We’ve just begun to fight.”
He nodded, but he was well aware that when it came to kidnapping, the clock was running out.
I said, “When we were with Burke, I remembered that he’d had work done on his face. Claire thinks Blackout took a page out of Burke’s plastic surgery playbook.”
“That might explain why I get no hits,” said Richie.
Alvarez said, “Cappy got some surveillance tape from the Bay Pharmacy two blocks north of where Rich and Cindy live. Yesterday Cindy came in at eight thirteen a.m., bought some lip balm, and left. She was on the phone, had her computer with her, same jeans and baby-blue sweatshirt she was wearing on the Blackout tape. It’s not much, but it’s a time stamp.”
Bobby brought over a call-in sheet saying, “I just got a hang-up from a no-name caller,” he said. “I said, ‘hello, hello, hello’ and he terminated the call. Check your mail.”
I turned on my computer, started at the top of my office mail inbox and the message at the top carried the subject line “Blackout.”
Rich peered at my monitor, then scootched his chair closer to mine. I opened the mail. There was no message, but there was a video attachment. I hesitated. Rich was right beside me. God only knew what door to hell I could be opening. Rich reached out a finger, downloaded the video, then pressed Play.
The video bloomed on my monitor. Blackout was talking to the camera in his normal, undisguised voice. He was sitting in an armchair, holding his video glasses loosely by an earpiece so that the glasses swung in his hand, swooping past his face, showing us the ceiling light, beige sofa, dingy white walls, the bookcase behind the chair where he sat with one blue-jeaned leg crossed over the other.
Alvarez said, “Take screenshots, Lindsay.”
I captured a nanosecond of Blackout fooling with his glasses. Then he put them back on his face and looked around the room. I kept saving screenshots, scrutinized every inch of the scene, boosted the volume, and still there was neither sight nor sound of Cindy.
And then Blackout spoke to me.
“Hey there, Sergeant. I hope you can see and hear me because I may have an offer for you. See this?”
He held up his cell phone, Apple variety.
“I’ll be able to tell when you open my email, so expect me to call you soon after,” he said.
The video went black. I looked over at Bobby and he waited for the call, with the radio room on standby. But it was my cell phone that rang. Blackout had my goddamn cell number. Must have gotten it from Cindy’s phone.
My phone rang again. I noticed that the caller ID read, “spam?$”
I put the phone on speaker and said, “This is Boxer.”
“I’m enjoying Cindy’s company,” Blackout said, continuing to use his normal speaking voice, “but I’m thinking of making a trade, but we might have to negotiate more. I don’t like the deal.”
“What have you done with her?”
“How much would you like to see her, Sergeant? I’m working on a plan in honor of my mentor, Burke.”
I said, “Why don’t you give me a hint?”
“Here’s the hint,” he said. “Keep your phone on. I’ll call you. I don’t know when.”
As he’d done before, he hung up. The line went dead.
CHAPTER 73
IF THERE WAS ever the time for a Women’s Murder Club meeting, this was it. But not at Susie’s. Not without Cindy. There’s a coffee shop near City Hall called Grumpy Lynn’s. Claire, Yuki, Alvarez, and I piled into my Explorer and headed east on Bryant to McAllister. It was just five on Thursday when we arrived at Lynn’s. The bell over the door dinged as we pushed our way inside the little diner, which was decorated with red linoleum-topped tables, customer artwork on the walls, and redolent with the aromas of French fries and bacon cheeseburgers.
The lunch crowd was long gone. A couple of men were seated separately at the counter having meat loaf and mash, watching a ball game. We took a table by the front window and Lynn pointed to the sign above the cash register: WE CLOSE AT SIX.
She swiped at the table with a rag and handed out menus. One after another, we ordered coffee.
Claire sat beside me. She was wearing pink, a good color on her, but she looked beat. She had autopsied several of Blackout’s victims, including Baby Josie Fleet, in addition to a few hundred other dead people this year. But Claire never got numb to the fact of death.
She opened the photo app on her phone and showed Alvarez a group picture of the Women’s Murder Club standing around me, with newborn Julie Anne Molinari in my arms.
“See Cindy, hogging the camera?” Claire laughed. “Look at her.”
Having seen the last known images of Cindy being dragged across a cement floor by a murdering psychopath, I felt tears welling up, spilling over. Claire closed the app and took my hand. Then she pulled a half-inch of paper napkins from the holder and pressed them to her own eyes.
Across from me, Yuki looked like she’d fallen down a well. She was sleepless from championing a woman who’d been unimaginably tortured and had barely survived. I knew Yuki was second-guessing herself as she waited for sentencing. She’s physically small, but as she always did, she’d put her whole self into this case. She was in the headlines again and had to win, whatever the psychological cost to herself. And now there was fresh worry over Cindy in captivity—or worse.
Yuki told Sonia about Cindy’s fearless investigative crime reporting at the Chronicle, how she’d once shot a killer, herself.
She said, “I don’t know how Cindy lived through writing that book with Burke, that monster, but I don’t have to tell you about Burke.”
Alvarez and I had been moments from being Burke’s victims ourselves, an event that involved gunfire in the dark, an all-sensory memory that would haunt the two of us forever.
Grumpy Lynn offered cherry pie and Claire and Yuki were takers. I sipped coffee and looked at my friends, thinking how hard we all pushed ourselves. We were trained, tested again and again, and that made us feel invincible. But we surely weren’t. I thought we were all measuring the infinitesimal space between life and death, and there were no good vibes to be had. We weren’t at Susie’s, and Cindy wasn’t with us.
It was Sonia who shifted the mood, saying, “Blackout’s thirst for the kill is so much like Burke’s, I’m actually feeling like I know him.”
Claire said, “Can you talk about that?”
CHAPTER 74
I WAS RELIEVED when Alvarez took the talking stick. She’d never known Cindy the way Claire, Yuki, and I did and yet she was as involved as we were in getting her back and in locking up the psycho who called himself Blackout.
“He’s wicked smart,” Alvarez said of Blackout. “I’m talking high genius. He killed six people in fourteen days. But did he have help? In the most recent video, he called Burke his ‘mentor.’”
I said, “True. Our knowledge base is evolving by micrometers. But we know that Blackout is a fan of Evan Burke.”
Alvarez took a folded sheaf of paper out of her jacket pocket.
“Okay, Lindsay?” she asked me.
I looked around. The diners at the counter had left. Lynn was in the kitchen. We had the place to ourselves. “Sure.”
Sonia unfolded photocopies of the screenshots I’d taken this afternoon and put them in the center of the table.
My newest partner said, “We have no background on him. Nothing. But by assessing his methods, I can say with confidence he’s an extremely careful SOB. Professional grade. He likes to kill with his hands, but he’s not opposed to garrotes, stun guns, and handguns. And he’s a braggart. Blackout has sent Lindsay hard evidence of him committing murder. Of half of his known victims, anyway. Who in their right mind has the balls to do that?”
Yuki asked, “Why only half?”
“Don’t know,” said Alvarez. “Maybe it was a late-breaking idea. Or he recorded them all and only started sending them once Cindy did her book signing in Corte Madera. His kills in Pasadena and Vegas were local to where Cindy had book signings. We were sure this freak had Cindy on his kill list.
“But apart from those signings, we never found a closer connection to Cindy until the day she disappeared.”
Yuki had a well-honed prosecutor’s ability to screen out all but the indictable specifics.
She said, “So, from what I understand, discounting the homage to Burke, you haven’t found motives for any of the murders.”
“Let’s build on what we know,” I said. “He called Burke ‘his mentor’ and wants Cindy to give him information about Burke like no one else. She’s a direct link to Burke, and Blackout sent a video of himself threatening her. He said that as long as she talks about Burke, she’ll live.”
“When was this?” Yuki asked.
“Lindsay just took these screenshots this afternoon.”
Sonia Alvarez is an exceptional cop and was as interested as Yuki in what she saw in these images. We all focused on the printouts.
“He could be keeping Cindy here—wherever ‘here’ is—or this could be a red herring location,” Alvarez said. “He shoots his videos with his glasses, so this is his view of the sofa. Here, he’s twirling the glasses in his hand …”
“That’s him?” Yuki asked, pulling one of the photocopies closer to her.
“Yep,” said Alvarez. “Claire thinks he may have had work done on his face. I’m interested in this,” Alvarez said of the swooping shot of the bookcase behind Blackout’s chair. “I enlarged it so I could read the book titles and they cover a wide range of subjects. Criminology, classical music, physics, calculus, military history. More books on music, and here, biographies of great creative geniuses of Western Civilization.”
“He could have bought the lot at a tag sale,” Yuki cautioned.
“I agree,” said Alvarez. “And this room could be a rental or abandoned or who knows. But if it’s his, Blackout’s reading range is a full circle. He’s a polymath.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“He’s knowledgeable in a lot of different areas of learning. If this is Blackout’s library, it’s a screenshot of his mind.”
CHAPTER 75
IT WAS AFTER seven that evening and I was home with Martha. I’d set the table, thrown the whites into the wash, and taken a quick shower. Claire had gifted me with an extra-large lavender-blue T-shirt, and I’d pulled it on over sweatpants. I fed Martha, then got into my big chair and closed my eyes.
