14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (11 page)

“Are you kidding me? You want to ask me did
I
kill him? Because no, I didn’t. Got any cigarettes?”

“I hoped you might be able to tell me who might have killed Kordell, because that could be helpful.”

“To who? I got nothing to tell you because I didn’t do nothing to that retard. So if that’s all, this is good-bye, Ms. Cassielandro.”

“Here’s what I know. You’ve given evidence against Jorge Sierra,” she said, referring to a savage Southern California drug lord who was known as Kingfisher, a man whose whereabouts were unknown. Even his true identity was a mystery.

“You were one of his inner circle, weren’t you, Tony? Don’t bother to lie. I know a lot of cops and I know you cooperated. If Sierra finds out, you’re going to have a very short li’l life.”

The kid looked scared for the first time. He shot his eyes around the small room, searching for a camera.

“Who said that?” he said. “Whoever said I ratted on the King is lying, lady. I’m no snitch.”

Yuki said, pressing on, “Let me be very clear. I’m not looking to pin Kordell on you. I’m looking to find out why that kid was killed.”

“Same thing,” said Tony Willis. “OK, listen, it wasn’t me. It mighta been a couple of guys in here working for the King that took him out. But tell you the truth, Kingfisher’s name was in the air, but I don’t think he had nothing to do with it.

“I’m spekalating, Ms. Cassielandro. I don’t know shit about who killed A-Rey. That’s all. And it’s for free.”

“I’ll have cigarettes for you in the canteen.”

“That’s it?”

“Here’s my card. You have any new thoughts about who killed A-Rey, get in touch. I’d consider that a big favor.”

After Tony Willis was taken away, Yuki rode the elevator down to the street, went to the underground garage, and found her car. She drove to her office, her mind on what Li’l Tony had told her, which was nothing.

Shit.
She thought of Aaron-Rey, that sweet look on his face in the picture in his mother’s hands. She couldn’t imagine that boy killing three drug dealers who’d befriended him.

No matter how many ways she looked at it, Aaron-Rey killing three drug dealers made no sense at all.

WICKER HOUSE PURPORTED to be a wholesale showroom for imported wicker and rattan furniture. It was on the edge of Bernal Heights, on Cortland Avenue, a medium-rent light-industrial area that became more residential as the two-lane road ran uphill.

This particular building was in the middle of the block, blending in with the row of chunky, putty-colored or gray cinder-block two- and three-story buildings, some with wood siding under the eaves, several with fire escapes, none of them giving off a feeling of welcome.

The back of the shop opened onto a parking lot, which was accessed by a service road. The back door was made of reinforced steel and posted with signs reading
TO THE TRADE ONLY
and
APPOINTMENT REQUIRED
. The name of the shop wasn’t posted, and neither was a phone number.

At just before three in the morning, there were seven cars in the parking area at Wicker House’s back door. One was a Mercedes SL belonging to the proprietor of Wicker House, Nathan Royce. The other vehicles belonged to the staff.

Also parked in the lot, not far from Wicker House’s back door but out of range of the surveillance camera, was an unmarked white Ford panel van. The man who went by the name of One was behind the wheel.

One had learned the Wicker House layout from an informant. The front part of the building’s ground floor was a half-assed showroom. The back of the ground floor was a lab with rear-door access, convenient for moving chemicals and product quickly.

The lab techs made synthetic drugs: cathinones, known on the street as bath salts, and cannabinoids, synthetic marijuana. The second floor of Wicker House was a short-term warehouse for the product waiting to be shipped out. There was also quite a lot of heroin on that floor, and at certain times, a lot of cash was in transit through the premises.

One’s informant had told him when shipments would move out of Wicker House to the hub of the larger enterprise, final destination unknown. Altogether, the payload was worth upward of five and a half million.

Men inside the building were armed and alert, which made this job riskier than taking out a couple of stoned junkies in a crack house.

One said to his crew of two men, “Ten minutes, OK? We waste men, not time.”

There was tension inside the van as the three men put on Kevlar vests and their Windbreakers, gas masks, and SFPD caps. They screwed the suppressors onto their M-16 automatic rifles with thirty-round magazines. When he was ready, One stepped out of the van and shot out the camera over Wicker House’s back door. The suppressor muffled the sound of the bullet.

Two and Three exited the van, went to the steel-reinforced rear door, and set small, directed explosive charges on the lock and the hinges. They stood back as Two remotely detonated the charges. The soft explosions were virtually unnoticeable in the area, which was largely deserted at night.

One and Two lifted the door away from the frame. Three entered the short hallway that led to the lab and started firing with his suppressed automatic rifle. Glass shattered. Blood sprayed. Once the men in the lab were down, the three men in the Windbreakers rushed the locked door to the second floor.

When the lock had been shot out, the shooters breached the door and bolted up the stairs toward the second floor.

They were met with a furious onslaught of gunfire.

TWO WAS IN the lead as the blast of gunfire shattered the Sheetrock in the stairwell, showering plaster and spent brass down on him and the other guys in the crew.

The gunfire was expected.

The three men flattened themselves against the stairwell wall. One screamed,
“This is the police! Drop your weapons!”

Two aimed his CapStun launcher and fired the military-grade pepper bomb up the stairwell.

There was a loud bang. The canister dropped onto the warehouse floor and hissed as it released the fine mist. A moment later, two men on the second floor stumbled toward the head of the stairs, hands over their watering eyes, coughing helplessly, calling out, “We don’t have guns. Don’t shoot.”

One said, “I’m sorry, but put yourselves in my place.”

He fired two short bursts with his M-16, then stepped out of the way as the bodies tumbled heavily down the stairwell.

The shooters climbed to the second floor, and One looked around the warehouse, which was just as the snitch had described it. It took up the whole second floor.

In front, against the wall facing the street, were stacks of wicker furniture. In back, around where One and his crew stood, office equipment was lined up on the various tables and shelves. There were copiers, rolls of plastic and tape, scales and money counters, cardboard cartons, and a laptop with the screen showing a quadrant security camera view of the inside and outside of the factory, including the static from the camera he’d shot out over the back door.

There was a gun safe in the corner, five by three by two, and it was open, saving them the trouble of blowing off the door with explosive charges. The safe was full of packets of heroin, and next to the safe were stacks of small cardboard cartons and a half dozen army-green duffel bags. Three unzipped the bags and announced, “A whole lot of cash, One.”

One heard a racking cough coming from a closet. Gun readied, he opened the door to find a man sitting in a crouch, covering his eyes with his arms. The man looked up, his face swollen from the pepper bomb. He cried out, “I can’t
see
.”

One said, “Where’s Donnie? Where’s Rascal?”

The man in the closet hacked and wheezed. “They left.”

One said, “OK. Sorry. I have to do this, bro.”

He pointed his weapon at the man on the closet floor and fired. The guy screamed, then collapsed.

One called out, “You guys OK?”

After Two and Three said they were fine, One went over to the cartons stacked on the floor. He opened flaps and did a rough tally of the eight-by-six-by-four-inch parcels, neatly wrapped in glittery paper, taped and labeled
BLUE WAVE, MAD FANTASY, SUNNY DRAGON
.

There were hundreds of pounds of synthetic pot in these packets, the kilos of H in the gun safe. With the duffel bags of cash already packed, they were good to go.

The three men made several trips up and down the stairs, which were littered with bodies and shell casings. They carried the bags of money, the cartons and packets of drugs, and the laptop down to the van.

When the last of the haul was safely stowed, One went back into the house, where he checked to make sure the downed men were all dead. Then he turned out the lights and locked the door.

Wicker House was out of business, but One and his crew were very damned close to early retirement.

Job well done.

THE BLEEPING PHONE rang way too early.

Joe said to me in his sleep, “I’ll get her.”

“Stand down, pardner,” I muttered. “I got this.”

I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and noticed that the time was 5:51 and that my caller was Brady. As far as I knew, I was off duty. I took the phone into the bathroom. “What’s wrong, Brady? Personal or business?”

“Business.”

Thank God. I didn’t want to hear that he or Yuki was in a jam. Once that was out of the way, I had to know, why the hell was Brady calling me at oh-dawn-hundred?

“What’s up?” I said.

Martha came into the bathroom and made circles around my legs until she successfully herded me into the kitchen. Her bowl was empty.

“I’m in your neighborhood,” he said.

“You’re saying you want to stop by? It’s not even
six.
”

“I’ve just come from the scene of a massacre,” he said.

“I’ll put the coffee on,” I told him.

By the time I’d showered and dressed in whatever was on the bedroom chair, Brady was at the door. He looked blanched, and this wasn’t the fault of the lighting.

“Sit,” I said, indicating a stool at the kitchen island. I double-checked that both bedroom doors were closed. Then I poured coffee and set out milk and sugar. I leaned against the stove, arms crossed, and waited for him to speak.

He said, “Why did you turn down the lieutenant’s job? I mean, you had it before you stepped down. Then, when Jacobi moved up, you could’ve had the job. But you turned it down again.”

“I couldn’t stand the paperwork, the meetings, the middle-management crapola,” I told him. “I wanted to work cases. One at a time.”

He said, “No kidding. I feel like a shit sandwich about ninety percent of the time.”

He sipped coffee. The suspense was killing me.

“What happened, Jackson?”

“Narcotics had been watching this house in lower Bernal Heights for a couple of months. It’s a factory disguised as a furniture showroom. They had eyes on the place, but they didn’t know what was going down until it was over.

“The scene inside that house.” He shook his head. “Like a freaking war zone.”

“Fatalities?” I asked him.

“You bet. I think seven.”

“What was it? A robbery?” I asked.

“That’s what it looks like. The dead men look like employees. We think the shooters got away,” Brady said. “Narco caught a nanosecond of video showing three guys in a white panel van leaving the Wicker House parking lot. At least one of them was wearing an SFPD Windbreaker.”

“Come onnnn.”

Brady said, “If those were our guys, they’re escalating from ripping off drug slingers and mercados to major scores like this. We may have caught some kind of break.”

Brady sank into thought.

“What, Brady? What kind of break?”

He snapped out of it. “We’ve got visuals of two punks leaving the house earlier in the morning, before the raid went down. They don’t look like our shooters, but they gotta know something. And we’ve ID’d them. Punks. Like I said.

“You call Conklin. I’ll call Swanson and Vasquez. Clapper is at the scene right now,” he said, referring to my friend the forensics lab director.

Brady stared into his coffee mug and said, “Look, Lindsay. I know I’ve been a dick lately. I’m worried about all this renegade-cop shit going down. I don’t mean to take it out on you. And I’m sorry.”

His voice caught in his throat. That was Brady apologizing.

“It’s OK. I totally understand.”

“I’m on your side. Always.”

I smiled at him. He smiled back. Sometimes I dislike Brady, and sometimes I love him. Right now, I loved him. Before someone started to tear up, he gave me the crime scene coordinates and told me to check it out and to call him every hour.

When he had gone, I texted Conklin.

He texted back.

We arrived at Wicker House within ten minutes of each other. After touring the bloodbath, my partner said, “I have a hard time believing cops did
this.
”

Four of the seven dead men were unarmed, and spent brass littered the floors and stairwell.

Swanson, Vasquez, Conklin, and I were looking over the CSIs’ shoulders when Clapper came over to me and said, “We’ve got more prints than a frame shop. As for the casings, we’ve got all kinds. From the position of the bodies, it looks to me like the shooters had the advantage of surprise. And they used suppressors.”

Then Clapper nicely told us we were in the way.

“As soon as I know anything, I’ll call you,” he said.

IT WAS JUST after 5 a.m. and Donnie Wolfe was parked on a free-parking residential street in the Inner Sunset neighborhood.

He was leaning against the hood of his red 2003 Camaro. There were attached houses on both sides of Twelfth Avenue, short flights of steps up to the front doors, slopes down to the garages, almost an apple-pie-and-baseball feel to it.