The 24th Hour, page 21
“I’ll take any old scraps, Bobby.”
He said, “I know, I know, Lindsay, so I took it down verbatim. I didn’t hear every word, but…”
He handed me a sheet torn from a message pad.
The handwritten note read, “Chris is shielding his son who’s threatened people at school. You should check him out.”
Bobby asked me, “Does this help?”
“Maybe. Is Brady in?”
“He’ll be back in five.”
I thanked Bobby and set course for the pod, where Alvarez and Conklin were having sandwiches together. I squeezed in behind Alvarez and claimed my spot between them.
“Is Christophe the man?” Alvarez asked me.
I leaned back in my chair and rocked a little. “I can’t nail him and I can’t clear him,” I said. “But a tip came in for me while I was out.”
I handed it to Alvarez and she passed it across the desks to Conklin.
“Check out Brock,” he said. “Uh. As our killer? Why? Christophe gave him an alibi for Jamie’s shooting, didn’t he?”
“Right,” said Alvarez. “Christophe told you that he and Rae and Brock were together. Venice Beach.”
I said, “Yep. So says Chris.”
“I’m sure Brock was at Holly’s funeral,” she said. “He gave a eulogy.”
Conklin said, “He was also at Jamie’s funeral, for sure. Rae pointed him out.”
I agreed, saying for Alvarez’s benefit, “Rae said he attended only because she asked him to be there.”
Conklin said, “I’ll run his name. Brock Picard?”
“This is like my Padre lead,” said Alvarez. “It almost fits but doesn’t fit at all.”
She passed me her favorite snack, the family-sized bag of truffle oil potato chips. I snatched it before she changed her mind—and that’s when a scuffle started at the front desk. Bobby was tackling someone who’d tried to charge past the desk. Bob had been a court officer before coming to the Homicide desk and he still knew how to jujitsu a man.
Through the shouting and thudding of bodies hitting the floor, I heard my name being shouted from under Bobby’s thick body twenty feet away.
“Sergeant!”
I launched myself toward the sounds of men fighting and saw that it was Christophe, red-faced and struggling to get out from under Bobby’s weight.
I was joined by Conklin and then Brady appeared, coming through the bullpen entrance. He told Bob to step aside.
Brady is instinctively battle-ready. He grabbed a frenzied Christophe Picard with both hands, jerked him to his feet, threw him against the wall, and pinned him there. Then Brady stared around furiously until his ice-blue eyes found me.
“Who is this man, Boxer?”
“Christophe—”
I didn’t finish the introduction. Chris interrupted me, pleaded to talk only to me, and in a fashion he did. His voice was a hoarse, paralyzing scream.
“Rae is dead! She was murdered!”
CHAPTER 108
CHRISTOPHE’S SCREAMS NEARLY stopped my heart. I’d seen him less than an hour before, and he’d told me how much he loved Holly. And now he was here, reporting Rae’s murder.
Was it true? Or had he mentally skidded off the rails into a ravine? No one moved. His next directive broke the spell.
“I sent you the video!” Chris shouted at me. “Open it!”
I shifted my eyes first to Conklin, then Alvarez, then Brady. Christophe was keening.
Brady said to me, “Go ahead. I’ll keep him here.”
A torrent of dread washed over me. I went to the pod, took my chair, and opened my inbox. I stared at the long stack of email on my screen but I made no move to open any of them. Alvarez got up and walked behind me. She reached over my shoulder and found incoming mail from CP@Bonhomie. She clicked on it with a forefinger.
Alvarez is fearless.
The email was blank with a video attachment. Alvarez stood beside me as I opened it. I was looking directly at Rae Bergen’s face, full screen and animated. She was alive, in what looked like a home office, speaking to Christophe, visible in a small window in the corner of the screen.
Chris was saying, “You can’t baby him anymore, Rae—”
There was movement behind Rae’s image. It was the camera’s-eye view of a male torso, from waist to right shoulder, coming into the frame. The figure pointed a .40-caliber at the back of her head and fired.
Rae’s eyelids flashed wide-open for a split second as the bullet sped from the back of her head through her forehead, blowing out a hole the size of a golf ball.
Instinctively, my eyes slammed shut and when I opened them a second later, Rae’s head and upper torso had fallen forward across her laptop. I heard Chris’s voice coming over Rae’s computer. He screamed “Rae!” and the picture went black.
The image of Rae’s last breath had burned into my brain, and I couldn’t blink it away. I heard Alvarez repeating my name. Christophe bellowed from the wall beside the front desk.
“He killed her, Sergeant. Rae is dead.”
“Who? Who did it?”
That was Conklin crossing in front of Bobby, calling to Christophe.
Christophe’s answer was an anguished, wordless cry. I sat with my elbows on my desk, palms over my eyes, knowing that I would never forget what I’d just seen. It was as if I’d been sitting across the table from Rae Bergen myself, watching as a bullet tunneled through her head.
CHAPTER 109
BRADY SAID, “BOXER, I’m calling the LA Sheriff’s Department. Get ready to move out.” I snapped out of it, as Bobby called for medical assistance and Brady dialed the LASD and asked for the sheriff. He waited as the desk sergeant hunted him down and then explained what he wanted to do. Ten minutes after placing the call, Brady hung up the phone.
He came to our pod and summarized ground zero for me and Conklin. He’d reported the murder to the LA sheriff, who knew Clapper and was happy to cooperate with us. LA’s CSU would leave the scene intact until we arrived, then they would process it, give us the results. Uniformed officers were being dispatched to Rae Bergen’s apartment now.
I told Brady I wanted to see Christophe while we waited for transportation to the airport. I took the elevator up to the seventh-floor jail, where I asked desk sergeant and old friend Bubbleen Waters where I could find Christophe Picard.
“I’ll let you see him, Lindsay, but EMTs just gave him a tranq to knock him out. He was hysterical, banging his head against the bars.”
“He’s unconscious?”
“Yup. I know you’re going to ask for how long, and I asked and was told that time out differs from person to person.”
I said, “When he wakes up, call Brady.”
“Copy that, Sarge,” she said, saluting me.
It was the first time I’d smiled that day.
I peeked in on Christophe, who was lying on his back on a slab inside a cell. He was out cold. I tried to rouse him by calling his name, but he was way under.
Because Rae Bergen’s murder was attached to the Fricke murders, and all three had happened in California, the case was ours. Rae Bergen went on the board back in our squad room.
A few minutes later, Conklin and I were in a patrol car speeding toward SFO, and from there we shuttled to LAX, where a pair of uniforms were waiting for us when we landed. They also had the keys to a loaner squad car and handed them to me.
Once we were on Pacific Coast Highway, heading to Malibu, I dialed up the radio, introduced myself to dispatch, and got a dedicated channel. Conklin typed Rae’s address into the GPS while I had a conference call with Brady and a sheriff’s deputy.
Two teams were assigned to us as backup and once the administrative formalities were buttoned up, an APB was put out so that every officer in LA was on alert to a murder with no actual suspect. Our squad moved out and, with all lights on, sirens blaring, we headed to the murder scene: an apartment building in Malibu.
CHAPTER 110
FOUR PATROL CARS were already parked outside a three-sided grouping of town houses on a bluff in Malibu. They were all white with red tiled roofs and decks with a view of the ocean. The building where Rae had lived was the first condo in the A block, the one closest to the street.
Conklin double-parked and our backup teams got out of their cars and cordoned off the street. We badged the uniforms at the entrance to the compound. The ranking officer was Chief William Taverno. I introduced Conklin and myself and asked him if he’d seen the crime scene.
“I was there. Left my lunch in the toilet.” I nodded as he added, “We’re waiting for the ME.”
A CSU mobile was parked at the curb unpacking their gear. I wanted to get into Rae’s apartment right now and get out, leaving everything as I found it. I hoped that before I left Rae’s place, I would uncover a clue to the identity and whereabouts of Rae’s killer.
Taverno said, “Don’t worry, Sergeant Boxer. Nothing but nothing moves until after you’ve seen it.”
As if Taverno had conjured it up, the ME’s van rolled up the street and double-parked.
Taverno said, “That’s Dr. Camille Gray, the ME.”
The ME exited from the rear of the van with her bag and camera. She looked to be in her early forties and lithe, moving with speed and purpose. I intercepted her as she reached the sidewalk.
“I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer. My partner, Inspector Conklin,” I said. “I’m the primary officer—”
“The sheriff called me,” said Gray. “Good to meet you, despite the circumstances. I hear that the cause of death is apparent. Let’s see the scene. After we’ve got pictures, I’ll take the victim to my offices and send you a full report after the autopsy.”
Dr. Gray, Taverno, and two uniforms headed into the A building. Conklin and I followed them to 1A, Rae’s apartment. Rae’s office was too small to accommodate all of us at once. The others stayed back as Conklin, Dr. Gray, and I approached the nightmare that had been Rae Bergen.
The manner of death was as shocking now as when I had seen the shooting in action earlier, because now there was no screen separating us. A massive amount of blood had poured over the laptop keyboard and desk, dripping onto the floor and forming a pool the size of a kitchen sink. I stepped around the puddle to the opposite side of the desk and saw brain matter and fragments of bone, the shattered remains of Rae Bergen’s skull.
I turned away and tapped Brady’s direct line into my phone.
“We’re in Rae’s house,” I said. “Did Christophe give up who killed her?”
“He wouldn’t talk to me. So I sent in Paul Chi.”
Brady is heavily muscled and rarely smiles. From a perp’s point of view, Brady looks like he could mash human flesh into pulp. Chi, on the other hand, is about five six and cagey. So regardless of whether or not Christophe could read people, Chi could likely outfox him.
And he did.
CHAPTER 111
CONKLIN TURNED THE car off Pacific Coast Highway south to John Tyler Drive, the entrance to Pepperdine’s Malibu campus. There was a parking area at the junction where the road split and continued along the perimeter of the campus while the other road forked into one of the parking lots.
We were looking for a late-model silver Porsche convertible registered to Brock Picard. We had to track him down.
First, locating his car would tell us if he was on campus. There was no place we could park where we could see all the cars in the main lot. So, we drove between the rows, weaving a path, passing many expensive cars, some of them silver, all with parking stickers on the windshields, many with Greek affiliation bumper stickers on the back.
I saw the car at the end of the row we were plowing.
“Slow, Richie. I think that’s it.”
My partner braked behind the Porsche, blocking it in. There were vehicles on both sides of the car and, since it was the last row in the lot, a curb behind it with landscaping in an enclosed bed. The Porsche was a convertible, and the top was down. A young man wearing a brown jacket was lying in the front seat, his knees bent, his feet on the passenger-side upholstery, his head on the driver’s-side armrest. His eyes were closed.
It was Brock Picard, Rae and Christophe’s son. I recognized him from Jamie’s funeral.
Using hand gestures and one-word sentences, Conklin and I unlocked and opened our doors. Brock was a light sleeper or maybe not sleeping at all. He bolted upright, saw Conklin, and vaulted out of his car. He ran alongside the Porsche, through the curb-contained plantings, and ducked under the branches of a sapling. And he kept going.
My partner and I yelled at Brock to stop running, that we were police, but a bullet whizzed past my ear as he headed uphill toward a block of buildings. We chased him up the twisting walkway from the parking lot, where he ran across the street and into a large building marked ADMINISTRATION. Conklin and I were of the same mind. We split up, Conklin following Brock into the admin building while I circled around the right side of it in the hope of cutting him off, should Brock attempt to escape through the back entrance.
It was a large building and circling around it was no joke, but I forced myself to move as quickly as I could without stumbling and falling to the ground. As I finished circling the building, I saw up ahead to my right a semi-cylindrical building that looked like a large tube lying on its side.
I spotted Brock running down the steps of what appeared to be a small amphitheater with Conklin several lengths behind him. Brock was making for the semi-cylindrical building and was able to reach it before I could cut him off or Conklin could overtake him from behind.
Brock opened the heavy double doors in the tubular structure and entered just as Conklin and I converged a few steps from the doors and a few seconds late. Out of nowhere, two campus cops appeared.
I flashed my badge and shouted, “We’re detectives from San Francisco! The guy in the brown jacket. He’s wanted for murder. Please clear students from the area.”
One of the campus cops dropped away. The other stayed with us as backup. I peeled off my jacket as I ran and left it on the grass nearby. The Kevlar vest I wore under my coat was stenciled SFPD front and back, ID in case of gunfire.
As I turned to the campus cop and asked him what building this was, I was struck by the wall facing the amphitheater. It consisted entirely of stained glass.
The policeman said, “That’s Stauffer Chapel.”
Conklin asked him about ways inside.
“There is a pair of double doors, heavy ones, inside the grillwork protecting the glass. But there are also a couple of service doors down toward the other end that open near the altar.”
“Please lead the way,” I said. Conklin was quick off the mark. I was still breathing hard and I had somehow turned my ankle. The pain was catching up with me. Even so, I ran toward the chapel with the campus cop and kept my partner in sight.
CHAPTER 112
CONKLIN FOLLOWED THE path Brock had taken toward the glass wall of the chapel. I had fallen behind Conklin, and the campus cop—twenty years my senior—was jogging behind me.
“Hey, hey, slow down,” he called out.
“Catch up!” I shouted back.
“I’m Jerry,” the campus cop shouted to me. “Stay with me.”
“I’m with you,” I panted.
Jerry caught up then took the lead. We ran along the length of the chapel. He reached the side door, opened it, and went in and I followed him inside. We were standing on the dais at the far end of the chapel facing the enormous wall of stained glass. There were four people in the pews facing us, praying, meditating. I told them to please leave quickly by the side door to my left and that there was no time to answer questions.
The students jumped up from their seats, whispering and clutching at one another, and quickly filed out the side door. I saw Conklin at the far end of the chapel from me, but I didn’t see Brock.
And then I did.
One of the side doors was kicked in and Brock entered pushing and dragging a female student, a brunette with two braids, wearing a cardigan over a long blue skirt. She was one of the girls who’d been praying moments ago, and when she made her exit, Brock had scooped her up. His left arm had a vice grip around her neck. A gun was in his right hand. The girl struggled and cried out and begged him to let her go.
Conklin, having hidden behind a pew, now came up behind Brock, his gun drawn, yelling, “Release her, Picard! Let her go. Drop your weapon and no one will get hurt.”
Jerry and I had both pulled our guns and moved toward Brock and his hostage at the front of the chapel. Including Conklin, the three of us triangulated Brock Picard. He didn’t look frightened. Rather, he had a twenty-year-old boy’s bravado.
“Move back,” Brock said. “Move back and drop your guns or I will put a bullet in this girl and we won’t need to talk.”
At that moment and in these circumstances, there was only one thing to do.
We backed off. No guns were dropped.
CHAPTER 113
WE WERE IN a standoff with a killer who had blown his mother’s brains out. Now he had a hostage in a choke hold. If we didn’t pull a miracle out of our hats, more people were going to die.
I called out to Brock down the length of the chapel.
“Brock. I’m Sergeant Lindsay Boxer, SFPD.”
“Yeah. I know. What do you want?”
“I want you to release that young lady and let her walk out of here. She has nothing to do with any of this.”
Brock, haloed by stained glass, loosened his grip on his hostage, who was red-faced and gasping for air.
“Get out of here, okay?” he said to the girl. “Sorry I had to do that to you, Becky.”
Becky stumbled for the door closest to her and pushed it open without looking back. The door slammed behind her, and for a full ten seconds, no one moved or spoke.
Then, I said to Brock, “Thanks. Now, what do you want?”
“I want to know why you’re after me.”
I said, “Okay. Christophe recorded his video conversation with your mother this morning. You know what I mean? Bloody horrific in-real-life images of what you did to your mother.”
