14th Deadly Sin: (Women’s Murder Club 14) (7 page)

She kept her father’s little Colt in her pocket. And when the man reached over the counter to get his hands on her money, she saw her chance.

She had the gun pointing at his heart, her finger on the trigger, and she said very clearly and firmly, “Drop your gun.”

Maya barely saw the second man move, he was so fast. His hand came down hard on her arm. She got off a shot, but even in that split second, she knew her shot had gone into the floor.

After that, the bullets punched into her and everything went black.

IT WAS AFTER 8 p.m. when Conklin and I left the Hall, both of us wiped out and done for the day. My partner walked me to my car in the Harriet Street lot. We were making comfortable small talk about whose turn it was to bring breakfast to our desks in the morning. I told him I’d see him then.

I rolled up my window and had just fired up the engine when Brady called on my cell. I slapped my window, signaling to Richie to hang in.

Brady sounded edgy.

“Boxer, a tipster has reported multiple gunshots coming from a Mercado de Maya on South Van Ness Avenue. He saw cops exiting the store in a hurry. Sounds like a possible Windbreaker cop hit. Check it out.”

He gave me an address and I said, “We’re on the way.”

Rich was still standing next to my car.

“On our way where?” he said.

I headed my car toward South Van Ness with sirens and lights full on, while Rich called Joe and Cindy to say we’d been detoured. Within five minutes, I pulled up to the sidewalk twenty yards down the street from a small market with a sign over the window reading
MERCADO DE MAYA
.

A cruiser pulled up behind us. I got out of my vehicle and asked the two uniformed officers to drive around to the rear of the shop. Then Conklin and I advanced on the front entrance to the little grocery store.

This is always the worst moment: when you don’t know if the scene is still hot, if bullets are going to fly, if victims are being used as shields.

The front door of the market was wide open when my partner and I approached with guns drawn. The doorjamb was intact, lights out in the store. Smell of gunfire.

Hugging the doorway, I called out, “Police. No one move.”

I heard a moan and then a woman’s voice saying, “Over here.”

We entered the store. Conklin found the lights and covered me while I followed the voice to the floor behind the counter only yards away.

I holstered my gun and knelt beside the victim. She was writhing in pain and bleeding from what looked to be several gunshot wounds.

“I’ve been shot,” she told me. “He shot me.”

The cash drawer was open. Bottles had fallen off the shelves. There had been a struggle.

I heard Conklin speaking to dispatch, and backup was coming through the back door. I said to the victim, “Hang on. Paramedics are on the way. What’s your name?”

“Maya. Perez.”

I said, “Maya, an ambulance will be here any minute. You’re going to be OK. Do you know who shot you?”

“I’m pregnant,” she said. “You have to save my baby.”

“Don’t worry. The baby will be fine.”

I said it, but Maya Perez had lost a lot of blood. It was pooling on the floor, and she was still bleeding heavily from a gunshot wound to her thigh. I pulled my belt through the loops and cinched her thigh above the wound.

It really didn’t help.

I asked her again, “Maya, do you know who did this to you?”

“A cop,” she said. “Two of them.”

She coughed blood, and tears streamed down her face. She groaned and cupped her stomach through the blood-soaked fabric of her dress. “Please. Don’t let my baby die.”

I GRIPPED MAYA PEREZ’S hand and mumbled assurances I didn’t quite believe.

Where were the EMTs? Where were they?

“This cop who shot you,” I said. “Have you ever seen him before? Has he come into the store?”

She whipped her head from side to side. “They were wearing. Police. Jackets. Masks. Gloves. Latex.”

“Is there someone I can call for you? Maya? Do you want me to call a friend, a relative?”

Colored lights flashed through the front window as the ambulance parked on the sidewalk outside the market.

Conklin shouted, “She’s over here!”

I stood up to give the paramedics some room.

“Her name is Maya Perez. She’s pregnant,” I said.

The EMTs spoke to one another and to their patient, lifting her onto the stretcher and wheeling her out the door. I followed them.

My heart was aching for Maya, imagining her fear for her unborn child. I stood for a moment and watched the receding taillights as the van took her toward Metropolitan Hospital.

Then I called Brady.

He asked, “So, this was another cop heist?”

“’Fraid so,” I said. “Windbreakers. Masks. Gloves. She didn’t know the shooter.”

As I talked to Brady, I was looking at all the likely places for a security camera to be positioned inside the store. I was hoping for an eye on the front door or the cash register. I found nothing, so, still talking with Brady, I went outside and looked for cameras on other shops that might be angled so that they caught the front of the mercado.

I said, “Brady. I don’t see a security camera. Anywhere.”

He cursed and we had a few more exchanges until I couldn’t hear him over the sirens coming toward us from all points. Conklin and I closed the shop door and were waiting for CSU when I got another call from Brady.

“Maya Perez didn’t make it,” he told me.

“Damn it!” I shouted. “Killed for the contents of her cash register. Does this make sense, Brady?”

“No. Come back to the house. I’ll wait.”

IT WAS CLOSE to midnight when Conklin and I got back to the Hall. Brady was in his office, and although we’d been in constant contact for the last four hours, he wanted to talk to us.

The fluorescent bulbs overhead cast a cold light over the night shift behind their desks in the bullpen, making them look as bloodless as zombies. Brady, too, looked half dead, and I would say that my partner and I didn’t look any better.

Conklin and I took the two chairs in Brady’s cubicle. My partner tipped his chair back and put his shoes on the edge of the desk, which Brady hates, but this time, he let it go.

“The MO was the same as the last two times,” Conklin said. “The shooters left nothing behind except the rounds in Maya Perez’s body. The ME is sending them to the lab.”

“We have to turn over every stone,” said Brady. “And the dirt under every stone.”

I said, “Assuming these are the same Windbreaker shooters, they’re slick, Brady.”

I went on to say that in the morning we’d go through the cop records again and look for motive: cops who were ambitious but undistinguished, those who were disgruntled, or had been suspended, or had retired early. I said to Brady, “But even saying they’re actually cops, they may not be from our station, or even our city.”

Brady nodded.

Then he said, “I’m assigning additional people to this case.”

I had been focusing on the work ahead, so Brady’s comment totally snapped my head around.

I said, “Another team?”

“Inspectors Swanson and Vasquez are now on loan to me from Robbery, along with four guys who are working for them.”

Ted Swanson and Oswaldo Vasquez were reputed to be great cops. But assigning them and their teams to this case, rather than other detectives from Homicide, only tangled the chain of command. I wasn’t pleased. Brady read my expression.

He said, “Here’s what we’ve got: three big-money heists, two DBs in six days, no evidence, media attention of the worst kind, and pressure from upstairs.

“So don’t get territorial, Boxer. Swanson knows robbery homicide cold. Vasquez grew up on the streets. Whether the doers are cops or pretend cops, it doesn’t matter. If we don’t get those mopes into lockup, all of our jobs will be compromised. Understand?”

I admire Brady. Sometimes I even like him. But he was ticking me off. Swanson and Vasquez had nothing on Conklin and me.

“Get in touch with Swanson and Vasquez,” he went on. “I want all of you canvassing around that shop until you get somewhere or someone. This spree has got to stop and I don’t care who stops it.”

“We’re on it, boss,” Conklin said.

“Read you loud and clear, Lieutenant,” I said through clenched teeth. I felt a sleepless night coming on.

THE SQUARE BRICK apartment house was at the dead end of a street lined with other plain three-story buildings on Taylor Street at Eddy: the worst part of the Tenderloin.

Yuki pushed in the outer door and pressed the intercom button marked
KORDELL
.

The buzzer blared and Yuki climbed three stinking flights of graffiti-tagged stairs and knocked on the door at the end of the hallway. A woman cracked the door open.

“I’m Yuki Castellano. Mr. Jordan from the Defense League sent me. Did you get a call?”

“Yes, yes, please come inside.”

Mrs. Kordell was African-American, very thin, about forty; she wore a red bandana over her hair and had yellow rubber gloves peeking out of the pockets of her cargo pants.

Yuki walked behind her down a long, narrow hallway and entered a living room crowded with what looked to be generations of furniture. An elderly gentleman sat in a lounge chair, his hand on a carriage that he was rocking gently.

Mrs. Kordell introduced Aaron-Rey’s grandfather as Neil Kordell and said her husband was at work.

“My husband is a total wreck,” she said. “He doesn’t sleep. He barely speaks. Aaron-Rey’s death has destroyed him.”

Yuki took a seat on a worn brown sofa, and Mrs. Kordell sat in a matching armchair. On the table between them were pictures of a smiling Aaron-Rey Kordell.

“Why don’t you tell me about your son?” Yuki said.

The boy’s mother picked up one of the photos and held it as she talked. “Aaron-Rey was fifteen. He was so big, he looked older than that—but he had the mind of a child.”

Yuki nodded. Zac had told her that Aaron-Rey was mentally handicapped but had never been in any kind of trouble before his single, fatal incarceration.

“He went to school every day, or so we thought,” said Aaron’s mother. “I only found out later that he hung around bad places.”

“After the shooting at the crack house,” Yuki said.

Mrs. Kordell nodded, and then her father-in-law told the story.

“What happened is that Aaron-Rey saw that these three dealers got shot and he ran out onto the street. The cops came after him and arrested him for killing those men. It was a
joke
. Aaron-Rey had the mind of a five-year-old. He didn’t even know
how
to shoot a gun.”

Mr. Kordell seemed to realize that he was rocking the baby too hard, said into the carriage, “Sorry, sweetheart,” and clasped his hands in his lap. He was agitated and clearly grieving for his grandson.

Yuki said to the elderly man, “As I understand it, the police found the gun on Aaron-Rey’s person.”

“Yes, that’s true. He picked
up
the gun. He didn’t think more than
Oooh. A gun.
And the police took him in and they questioned him for hours and didn’t call
us
.”

Mrs. Kordell picked up the story.

“If Aaron-Rey hadn’t been wrongly arrested, if the police hadn’t played him by saying how great he was for killing those drug dealers, my son wouldn’t have waived his rights and he wouldn’t have confessed. And he wouldn’t have been killed in jail while waiting for
trial
. My son would still be alive.”

Yuki felt the sharp pain of the people who had loved Aaron-Rey, and she could see that now that she was with the Defense League, terrible stories like this one would be her life.

Mrs. Kordell was saying, “The police should pay for what they did, right, Ms. Castellano? They should
pay
so that they don’t do this to anyone else’s child.”

Yuki said, “I agree. We’ve already filed the case against the City and the SFPD. It’s going to be difficult, Mrs. Kordell. The City is going to defend itself. You may have to testify. Tough questions are going to be asked, and the City’s lawyers are going to put Aaron-Rey in a bad light, if they can.”

“We’re all in,” said Mrs. Kordell.

“So are we,” said Yuki.

Actually, joining the Defense League seemed like a rash and very crazy idea. Was she even remotely cut out for this?

Yuki embraced the Kordells and said good-bye.

She hoped to hell she’d made the right decision.

Because when Parisi and his expensive law firm hired by the City were through chewing her up, she might never want to practice law again.

AFTER LEAVING THE Kordells, Yuki drove four blocks and parked her car directly across the street from the crack house where three months before, Aaron-Rey’s life had taken a very bad turn at Turk and Dodge Place. As Aaron-Rey’s mother had said, the Tenderloin was a bad place to raise children. No kidding. It was the worst.

The impoverished district was an underworld of savagery, mayhem, and despair, populated with aggressive drunks and crackheads, runaways, derelicts, streetwalkers, and violent thieves. The best you could say of people who survived on these streets was that they were pitiable; most of them were doomed.

Yuki knew better than to get out of the car.

She was here to see the scene of Aaron-Rey’s death, to get the picture in her mind so that she could make a moving and watertight narrative for a jury.

She stared ahead at the peeling, sagging wood-frame building with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor. The abandoned second floor, according to Yuki’s information, was a flophouse for junkies. The third floor was the trading floor, where wads of folding money and small packets of powder changed hands.