23rd Midnight, page 18
part #23 of Women's Murder Club Series
She said, “Brady?”
“Yuki, it’s Mo Switzer.”
“Hi, Mo—”
“Yuki. I’m sorry to say, she’s dead.”
“What? Who?”
“Sorry. I’m a mess. Barbara Sullivan. I dropped over to hand deliver a note from Lewis. He wanted Barbara to know that he was truly sorry. And though I cautioned him against it, he made a confession. Lew was the one who wrote ‘I love you’ in blood on the basement wall. The door was unlocked. I found Barbara in bed. Dead. Her throat was cut.”
“She killed herself?”
“Unlikely. There were words written in blood on the bedroom wall. ‘I love you,’ just like in trial evidence. This time with a signature. ‘Blackout.’ I’m on her porch right now with Inspectors Alvarez and Conklin. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Oh my God. I can’t believe this.”
“Poor effing Barbara,” Switzer said. “May she rest in peace. By the way, Lewis Sullivan is still in lockup awaiting transfer to prison.”
Yuki thanked Switzer for the call. Then, she speed-dialed Lindsay and without preamble told her, “I think Blackout killed Barbara Sullivan.”
Lindsay said, “Are you serious? Says who?”
“Mo Switzer. He’s at her house.”
“Why does he think it was Blackout?”
Yuki said, “The wall. Bloody finger-paint writing.”
There was a long silence.
“Lindsay?”
“Yuki, you okay?”
“Not at all.”
“Did you tell Brady?”
“Not yet.”
“Okay,” Lindsay said. “I’ll do it and call you back.”
CHAPTER 82
BRADY STOPPED ME before I could say a word.
“Boxer. Hold up.”
I said, “Barbara Sullivan was murdered.”
“I know. I spoke to Hallows. I’ve assigned Conklin and Alvarez. You’re needed here. Task force meeting down the hall.”
I pictured Barbara: half blind, mostly crippled, maybe sedated, alone in a dark house. Her sons with their grandmother because Barbara was too sick to care for them. She’d never had a chance. I updated Yuki, then walked along the corridor to the war room.
Team Blackout was less than half present: Joe Molinari, Mike Wallenger, Brady, and me. The others were checking out tips, leads, and a fresh murder.
Brady said, “Cindy’s been missing for seventy-two hours. We’re borrowing time from a serial killer.”
He locked the door and said, “Boxer. You’re up.”
I reported on Barbara Sullivan, waiting now for the ME report, for the forensics lab, and added her to the Blackout case files. I wrote her name at the top of a whiteboard and leaned it against the wall. Then we compared notes, triple-checked procedures for oversights, anomalies, unfounded coincidences. We watched Blackout’s video reel again as well as the bookstore surveillance footage from different camera angles. I kept one eye on my inbox to see if Blackout had sent a new murder tape.
In that intense frame of mind, I silenced my phone. Brenda had called and finally knocked. Instead of screeching What? I got up and answered the door.
“You have a call from the tip line,” she said. “I screened it. You should take it.”
“Transfer the call. Thanks, Brenda.”
I picked up the receiver, said my name, and the caller told me hers. Marion Witmar. She sounded youngish and rattled. I was impatient, thinking about Barbara Sullivan and at the same time urgently wanting to get back to the meeting.
Witmar said, “Sergeant Boxer. I saw that YouTube and I recognized his voice. The man who called himself Blackout? His real name is Bryan Catton.”
That focused me.
I asked Witmar to spell the name and typed it into my browser while asking, “How do you know him?”
“He’s my ex. We lived together for two years. It ended five or six years ago. His face looks different in the video, like maybe he’s had work done. His nose is smaller. His eyes are narrower, and his hairline has receded. But that’s him.”
“You’re sure?”
Witmar got louder.
“I’ll never forget his voice. The rhythm of his speech and the volume when he’s making a point. Listen, Sergeant. I’m lucky to be alive. He choked me nearly to death. That woman in the video is in serious danger.”
“How can we find Catton?”
Witmar didn’t know. Last time she spoke to him, Bob Brooks had hired him to work in the stockroom of Brooks’s Books nights and weekends. Then he joined the Marines. Last she heard he’d been sent to Afghanistan.
“The important thing,” said Witmar, “is that he had a 4.6 grade point average without trying. He’s cold, brilliant, and loves an audience. I loved him. Crazy neurotic kind of love. Now he terrifies me. I despise him. If you find him, don’t mention my name. I’m certain he’d kill me.”
Marion Witmar doubted that she had any old contact info for Catton, his friends, family, or his photo. “I burned all of it. But a guy named Austin Reynolds was Bryan’s roommate at Berkeley, and they moved back in together after Bryan and I split up. They were both drama majors and movie freaks. I heard Austin stole an idea for a play from Bryan. Austin would steal toilet paper from your bathroom. What a jerk. I haven’t seen him since I last saw Bryan.”
I signed off with Witmar and briefed the team. Our meeting broke into individual parts as we plugged Catton’s name into databases from DMV to USMC. Twenty minutes later we had three addresses for Catton. His last-known residence was a house in the Haight-Ashbury district, currently listed as a short sale by the bank. The ad read, “Classic Victorian in the Haight. Former beauty, now a teardown or candidate for total renovation. Uninhabitable.”
Downstairs at the motor pool, Joe and I signed out a patrol car. Wallenger and Brady took another squad and Reg Covington pulled up in a Bearcat fully loaded with his SWAT crew. With all lights and sirens blaring, we headed to U.S. 101 North.
We had a location, an A-plus team, and a clear shot to a teardown in the Haight. I could see Blackout/Catton stashing Cindy at this unoccupied wreck—because that made total sense. Who would look for her there?
CHAPTER 83
THE SULLIVANS’ WOOD-FRAME house on a well-kept street near Alamo Square was being cordoned off by uniforms when Conklin and Alvarez finished taking Switzer’s statement. They said hello to Sergeant Nardone who said, “You’re not going to like what you see in there, kids.”
“We’ve heard,” Conklin said.
Officer Einhorn, Nardone’s partner, approached from a house across the street. He said, “Barbara’s neighbor Tom Watkins lives over there. Here’s his number. Ever since the trouble started with Barbara and Lew, Watkins took to watching the Sullivan house. He says he saw a car he didn’t recognize waiting two houses down from the Sullivan house before sunup. The car was there for about a half hour. He also saw the driver, a man, when he opened the door to drive away. Watkins might be able to identify him.”
“Tell Watkins we’ll be with him in a few,” said Alvarez.
Nardone lifted the tape and Conklin and Alvarez proceeded up the walkway to the Sullivans’ front door. CSU director Gene Hallows opened it. “Welcome to hell. Glove up,” he said. “Put on booties and mind the scene and I’ll give you a peek at the victim.”
The primary crime scene was a pale-green bedroom featuring a hospital bed with a raised head section, a vanity, a floral area rug, a nightstand, and a standing lamp that had fallen to the floor.
Barbara Sullivan’s body was in the bed, half covered by a sheet. There was a white patch over her left eye and her mouth was open above the gaping slash across her throat. Her right leg, encased in a plaster cast from ankle to mid-thigh, stuck out over the edge of the mattress. She’d bled out, her blood soaking the bedcovers, pooling onto the floor. If she’d struggled, it hadn’t been for long.
Alvarez asked Hallows, “Estimated TOD?”
Hallows said, “The ME will have a better fix, but I’d say this only happened two, three hours ago.”
“And the weapon?”
“We haven’t found it. Looking at the neck wound it’s going to be a fixed-blade weapon.”
Alvarez looked at Conklin. She didn’t have to tell him what she was thinking. Evan Burke’s weapon of choice was a straight-edge razor. Blackout was Evan Burke’s number one fan.
Conklin asked, “Where’s the mirror?”
Hallows said, “Stay out there and one at a time, peek around the door frame and take a look at the wall.”
Conklin peered first. From fifteen feet away, he couldn’t believe what he was reading on the pale green wall.
Alvarez spent long minutes taking in the bedroom, finally saying, “Frickin’ psycho. It was dark when he did this. Looks to me like he walked behind the bed, leaned over, and made his cut.”
She said to Hallows, “Looks like he wrote that message with a bare finger. You think you can pull some prints off that?”
“Don’t bet on it. The moving finger smears as it writes. We’ll try. Anything else?”
“Send pictures,” Rich said.
Hallows nodded. Conklin and Alvarez carefully left the scene.
Nardone was waiting for them on the sidewalk with a man in his forties, wiry, wearing sweats. “This is Mr. Tom Watkins.”
Conklin introduced himself and Alvarez and asked Watkins if he would come with them to the Southern Station.
“We have some photos we’d like you to look at.”
“Absolutely,” said Watkins. “Can we do it now?”
Conklin noted that there were tears in his eyes.
Just then, Brady’s voice crackled over Conklin’s radio.
“Conklin. Alvarez. Get in your car and drive.”
CHAPTER 84
BRYAN CATTON’S LAST known address had been a “Painted Lady” in the Haight-Ashbury district. Online photos of the Victorian home showed that it was in serious disrepair. Paint peeled, columns tilted, and the yard was overgrown with California buckeye saplings. Vegetation pushed through the roof. The house appeared to be utterly abandoned, no signs of life whatsoever.
Still, was Blackout hiding out in this abandoned wreck with Cindy? I’d run a lot of scenarios through my mind about meeting Blackout. Right now, I was preparing for a shoot-out.
Brady called in a half dozen cars to form a perimeter around the block. When they arrived, Joe manned the rear door and Mike stayed inside what was now a command post. SWAT captain Reg Covington’s team exited the Bearcat and braced their weapons on the roof and door frames. Brady and I zipped up our Kevlar vests and approached the front door. There was a flash-bang in Covington’s hand and our guns were drawn.
The front porch was sagging with planks of rotted wood. Covington advanced to the front door on cat’s feet, twisted the doorknob, and shook the door in its frame. The door was locked but not secure. Covington kicked it in, tossed the stun grenade into the parlor and closed the door. We covered our ears and closed our eyes as the flash-bang went off. Its blinding light and high-decibel blast shut down sight, hearing, and thoughts of anyone inside that house long enough for us to find them.
When the sound died out, Covington opened the door and the tac team ran in, guns out, three commandos clearing the ground and second floors, two taking the basement. Only three minutes had gone by and the house was pronounced safe and uninhabited from top to bottom.
Brady and I checked out the ground floor. The floor and sills were thick with dust. Two-by-fours were stacked in front of the fireplace and a couple buckets of spackle stood in a corner, but no work had been done. We ran up the stairs and found a wide landing with a number of doors including one open to a front-facing room. When we entered, I was nearly knocked over by a blast of déjà vu.
There, against a dull, white-painted wall, was the beige three-seat sofa I’d seen in Blackout’s videos. The armchair where he’d been sitting, twirling his glasses, was on a diagonal to the sofa. And behind the chair were the bookshelves Alvarez had described as a screenshot of Blackout’s mind.
Brady and I took our time opening books, looking for margin notes, holding them open, upside down, shaking them, hoping that something telling would fall out.
Nothing did and the bookshelf wasn’t a door to a secret room. We searched all three floors and found no sign of Blackout and no sign of Cindy. Not a hair band, a broken fingernail, not a flex cuff or a bloodstain. We returned to the second floor and Brady opened a door to a bedroom across the landing from the study.
This room had only one piece of furniture, a large metal desk standing between two unbroken windows.
Joe and Mike came into the room behind us.
“Cindy was stashed in there,” I said, pointing at the kneehole, a rectangular opening between the desk’s two pedestals. Joe trained his Maglite on the floor under the desk while I opened the drawers.
Damn. This was the motherlode.
My hands were shaking as I picked through layers of paper. Something here was going to lead us to Cindy. I found receipts for video glasses and black jersey gloves. The Fleet family’s address was written on a Post-it note. There were clippings from the Chronicle, obituaries of his recent victims in an envelope, and the Chronicle’s front page headlined with Henry Tyler’s offer of a reward for information leading to the return of Cindy Thomas. And there was a picture of Cindy taken at the Poisoned Pen bookstore. She was at the podium, talking to the crowd.
I was right there.
As if my joints were locked, I stared down at the open drawer, stunned. I loved Cindy. And I’d let her down.
Brady’s voice came through to me. “You okay, Boxer?”
No.
I gathered a handful of papers and spread them out on the desk. This, along with the videos Blackout had directed, shot, and produced amounted to almost too much evidence. But the only evidence that would pay off would be capturing Blackout himself.
I opened a file drawer in the lower right section of the desk. I found a yearbook from Berkeley and an envelope full of more receipts. Items paid for in cash. A stun gun. Ammo for a .22, junk food, gasoline.
Blackout had used this desk, but he didn’t live here. Not anymore.
Joe was lying on his back under the desk.
“Got it,” he said.
He slid out from under the desk and stood up, showing us his right thumb and forefinger pinched together.
He said, “This was caught in a sliver under the center drawer.”
Joe was holding a golden strand of hair curled like the letter “C.” Cindy’s hair. A picture came into my mind of Cindy balled up under the desk. I imagined Blackout pulling her out, tossing her over his shoulder and into his car.
Then dumping her body into the bay.
CHAPTER 85
BRADY AND I were back in our car when the radio crackled and Chief Clapper’s voice came over.
“Brady. Need you at the Hall. Now.”
“What happened?”
“Barbara Sullivan media explosion.”
“I’m on the way.”
It had only been a few hours since Barbara Sullivan’s body had been discovered, but to the press, a scoop beat sex, food, love, and a roof in the rain.
Brady said, “Ah, sheet,” and gunned the engine. We were back at the Hall in record time. It was just past two when Brady and I went through the bullpen gate. Brady took a right and headed for his office. I looked around.
Bobby said, “Sergeant, Inspectors Alvarez and Conklin are in Interview Two.”
I thanked him, left the bullpen, and took a turn down the short spur of corridor leading to the interrogation rooms. The observation room shares a mirrored wall with the box. Alvarez and Conklin were interviewing a bespectacled man in his forties wearing gray sweats. He appeared agitated as he looked at a photo array on the table; men who generally resembled Blackout along with a resized picture of Blackout cut from one of his videos, printed on photo paper to match the others.
I knocked on the glass and Rich left interrogation and joined me in observation. I’d called him from the car to tell him that Cindy wasn’t at the house and the question on his face now was plain. Where is she?
I said, “How’re you holding up?”
He shrugged and looked down.
“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating the man sitting across from Alvarez.
“Thomas Watkins,” he said. “Lives across the street from the Sullivans.”
If memory served, Watkins was the neighbor who, in helping Barbara with her groceries, had triggered Lew Sullivan’s rabid, near fatal attack on her.
Rich said, “This morning, Watkins saw a gray car parked a couple of doors away from the Sullivan house. He described the car’s driver as white, slim, wearing black.”
“Did he pick Blackout out of the array?”
“No. No, can’t positively ID any of them.”
“What about the car?”
“Early 2000s gray Ford four-door sedan. But don’t worry about the six thousand other aging gray Ford four-doors in California. The plate number doesn’t compute.”
“Cop car?”
“Yep,” said Rich. “Somehow the perp got his hands on a retired police car with municipal plates.”
“So says Watkins. Is he a suspect?”
“He has an alibi. His wife,” said Richie. “When we catch Blackout, Watkins might pick him out of a lineup.”
Then, Rich looked me in the eyes and I couldn’t look away.
“I need to know more about what happened at Blackout’s house,” he said.
“Let’s talk down the hall,” I said.
Alone together in the war room, I told Rich what we had found at the house in the Haight: papers showing the purchase of weapons, obituaries of his recent victims, and the front-page article in the Chronicle offering the reward for information on Cindy.
Rich said, “So the paper proves he was in the house recently. Did you find anything useful? Like his phone?”
