Now there were nine dead. She was convinced they were all connected, and that the same person, or group of people, was responsible, but she had no solid leads.

  They decided to get lunch. Karen drove.

  She waited a few minutes before asking him the question that had been needling her since the night before. “How was dinner with Cuddy?”

  “Fine. Hadn’t been to his place in a while.”

  “Like old times?”

  “Not exactly. Our trajectories have, how shall we say, diverged.”

  “Must be weird, with him being the boss and all.”

  “Yeah. Weird.”

  She waited another minute to see if he would continue. When he didn’t, she said, “Anything I should know about the case?”

  “We barely talked about it.”

  She turned to give him a look, which he noticed while continuing to stare forward.

  “I mean, he made it clear it was important, needed to be wrapped up,” Shake said. “But we didn’t go beyond that.”

  Karen still didn’t believe him but decided to let it drop.

  They winded their way along the Embarcadero and hit traffic around the ballpark. “I’m gonna take the side streets, this will take forever.”

  “Make a right up here, loop around and take Terry Francois Boulevard, along the water. It’s usually practically deserted.”

  In another minute they had escaped the crush of cars and were driving along the less well-known part of the waterfront near China Basin, past the ancient houseboats in the channel and sporadic homeless encampments.

  “We could stop at the Ramp, it’s just up ahead,” Shake said. “Out on that rickety old deck they got.”

  “Yeah? Won’t be too cold?”

  “Nope. Best weather in the city right at that spot, and good burgers too. We’ll turn you into a San Franciscan yet.”

  Karen smiled, glad that the tension that had existed between them seemed to have eased. She liked Shake. And despite the secrets she knew he was still keeping from her, she felt he was a good man.

  She looked in her rear-view mirror and saw a late model-sedan coming up behind her.

  Fast.

  Karen instinctively swerved left to avoid being hit from behind. Just before she did, she saw a thin-faced man wearing dark shades reach out through the driver’s side window. She saw the gun and she heard the two shots, one right after the other, pop-pop, and breaking glass from the rear window showered the back seat.

  She pulled over into a ditch and looked over at Shake, who had crouched down. She did the same and heard the car squeal by them. For a few seconds they stayed motionless, until the sounds of the screeching tires had raced up ahead in the distance.

  “Good thing you swerved,” Shake said.

  Karen was breathing heavily. “Yeah.”

  They waited another minute until the adrenaline had coursed through their bodies and their heart rates returned to something resembling normal.

  They finally raised their heads above the dashboard and looked around. They heard a car slowly drive up behind them, then carefully drive around until it was next to them. A middle-aged woman whom Shake recognized as a waitress at the Ramp was in the driver’s seat, looking at them in shock.

  “Oh my God, are you OK?”

  Shake nodded. “Did you see what happened?”

  “I turned around the corner off of Third Street and saw the dark car driving really fast. Then I heard the two shots, and it raced away.”

  “Did you get a good look at the driver? The license plate?”

  “No, nothing like that. It all happened so fast.”

  Shake assured her they were alright and told her she should drive on, he didn’t want her to be late for work. She nodded, still in shock, and drove ahead.

  “Good thing she came along when she did,” Karen said. “Probably stopped the shooter from finishing the job.”

  Shake watched the waitress turn left into the parking lot of the Ramp. He imagined in another minute or so there’d be a crowd coming out for a look. “You realize this means we have to tip the hell out of her every time we go in there,” he said.

  “Gladly.”

  Shake called the office to report what had happened. They waited for help to arrive. The car was tilted sideways, its left-side tires in the ditch, and Shake had slid toward Karen.

  “Did you get a good look at the car or the guy?”

  Karen leaned against the side window, closed her eyes and tried to reimagine those few seconds. Her body felt wired, electrified by the threat they’d just faced, and her thoughts were racing. “It was quick. Car was brown, nondescript. The guy had a look, though. I’d say mid-fifties. Dark hair, thin face. Dark glasses. Might have been wearing a leather jacket but hard to tell. ”

  Shake looked up and down the street. “I’m not seeing any likely spots for surveillance cameras around here.”

  She turned to him, again feeling her partner knew more than he was letting on. So many secrets. “That description I just gave you. Ring any bells?”

  Shake paused, and Karen sensed him weighing carefully how much he could tell her without giving away whatever he was hiding. He looked out the window, away from Karen, and kept his voice casual, like he was asking for the time. “Was there something lupine in his features? You know, wolf-like?”

  “I know what lupine means. Yeah, there was something lupine about his face. Long and thin and predatory. Except wolves are beautiful creatures, and this guy looked weird. Waxy, or something.”

  Karen had read the old newspaper stories of La Traviata. She’d seen pictures of Wayne Bordelay and read descriptions of him. His facial scarring, about which there were many rumors but no clear explanation, made his face look burned, slick. Waxy.

  “Sounds like Bordelay,” Shake said. Casual.

  Karen recalled the split second she had seen his face in the rearview mirror. She remembered reading once in college that humans were experts at reading faces, intentions, even character. It was a survival mechanism dating back hundreds of thousands of years. The cave people who survived to procreate and spread their DNA were the ones who could tell the difference between a harmless stranger coming through the trees and a potential aggressor. In the split second she had seen the face of Wayne Bordelay, that primal part of Karen’s brain recognized malevolence.

  Karen turned to him. “Tell me a little more about Wayne Bordelay.”

  Shake wanted to tell her that after La Traviata he woke up thinking about Wayne Bordelay every morning. With a knot in his stomach he would eat breakfast and assume that today his career would end. That Wayne would talk.

  But he hadn’t.

  There were others who didn’t talk.

  The day Phong was killed in prison, Shake said a silent prayer of thanks, then dropped to his knees and wept, saying, Forgive me, Lord.

  But he couldn’t say any of that to Karen. He had barely begun to admit to himself how compromised he had let himself become.

  “A few years ago a prostitute was raped and brutally beaten on Capp Street,” he said. “Cut up pretty bad, for good measure. She was thrown into the bay, except she decided she was going to live. She hung on in the hospital for close to two weeks, and right at the end we got a tip from another girl that Bordelay had been seen with her that night. I stood next to her hospital bed. She’s one step above a coma, can only just blink, every bone in her body broken and her face cut up bad. I showed her a picture of Wayne Bordelay. When she saw the picture, something happened in her eyes and her heart rate went through the roof. She wouldn’t make a formal ID. I think she was scared of him coming back and getting her somehow. The thing that broke my heart about it was that she was planning to stick around, see? If she knew how bad off she was, she might have fingered him so he couldn’t do it to anyone else. She died the next day.”

  “Where does Bordelay live now?”

  “He slinked off to Southern California after the Phong trial.”

  Karen closed her eyes and began talking out what she knew, trying to nudge the various pieces of the puzzle into shape. “When La Traviata happened, it came out that Bordelay was on the take. Big scandal. He gets fired. Then Roland Solorzano tells Maurice Weathersby that Frank Flanagan was talking to a Wayne the night of the massacre. Mentioning a Tommy. Doesn’t take a great leap of intuition to assume exactly what Marko assumed, which is that he was talking to Wayne Bordelay about Tommy Phong.”

  “With you so far.”

  “Maurice winds up dead, because suddenly he knows about Flanagan’s possible connection to La Traviata. Same with Rafe Strauss. Same with Walter Roark.” She turned to look at him. “And maybe the same with Marko Bell.”

  “What are you saying, they killed Marko too, but framed him for the murders?”

  “I don’t think you can discount the possibility.”

  “I don’t know, Karen.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because think about it. A bunch of years ago, people who start nosing around the Fielding murders wind up dead. And now, people who start nosing around La Traviata wind up dead, or nearly so. But we still don’t have a connection between the two crimes. And no, I’m not counting Donna Bell as a connection.”

  “Again, why not?”

  “Because if she was the link, that means La Traviata wasn’t a random massacre. It means Tommy Phong, or someone directing him to do it, shot the place up specifically because Donna Bell was there. It means she knew something, and she was a target.”

  Karen had to admit Shake was right. Without knowing whether Donna was even looking into the Fielding murders, there was no basis to believe there was any link with La Traviata.

  She opened her eyes and blew air through her lips, still coming down from the adrenaline. “So where does that leave us? This is all just about La Traviata?”

  “I think we should proceed that way for now. Let’s take things a step at a time and try to figure out whether it really was Bordelay who tried to kill us. And why.”

  “He shouldn’t be that hard to track down,” Karen said. “We can get another team of detectives on him.”

  “I don’t think we should tell anyone,” Shake said.

  “Why not?”

  “Trust me on this, partner.”

  Karen’s pent-up tension boiled over. “Goddamit, tell me what’s going on. Why don’t you want anyone to know it was Bordelay who shot at us?”

  “I said you need to trust me,” Shake yelled, his voice booming in the car.

  Some cop cruisers pulled onto Terry Francois Boulevard, along with a tow truck and other police vehicles. Shake and Karen carefully got out of the car, trying to disturb the scene as little as possible.

  When they were standing on the sidewalk, Karen’s cellphone rang.

  “Detective, this is Marko Bell.”

  Karen pointed at the phone and mouthed “Marko” to Shake.

  She listened for a minute, then hung up.

  “He’s alive. And he wants to talk.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Where does he want to meet us?”

  “Not us, Shake. Just me.”

  Chapter 22

  Karen came down the escalator of the Embarcadero BART station and took in the scene. It was the last stop in San Francisco for the rapid-transit rail line, before trains headed across the bay to Oakland and points east. Smack in the middle of the financial district, it served downtown office workers, and its crowded platforms pulsed with activity from 7 a.m. until 9 p.m. or so, by which time most of the late workers, happy-hour lingerers and people catching dinner downtown had caught their trains home.

  Now, at 10 p.m., the platform was nearly deserted. A handful of retail workers heading home after a long day. A couple of homeless people shuffled aimlessly.

  She was on edge, having repeatedly reviewed the brief instructions Marko had given her over the phone hours earlier. He told her that she should meet him at the Embarcadero station, down on the platform, at exactly 10 p.m. She was to arrive at exactly the appointed time, and Marko made it clear she was to bring no one else, especially not Shake.

  If she got there early to scout out the location, or if Shake was nearby watching them, or if she posted undercover cops at the scene in advance, or engaged in any other kinds of shenanigans, the consequences would be certain and immediate.

  Marko would disappear.

  Karen and Shake briefly considered various ways to outsmart him. They could have an undercover cop replace a station agent in the glassed-in booth on the main level. Or they could watch for Marko on surveillance video. Or they could have backup arrive on the platform on a separate train.

  They decided against it.

  Marko would sniff it out, they decided. And Karen believed him when he said he’d disappear.

  Shake was initially furious at being squeezed out, but Karen pushed back, explaining she had developed a tenuous rapport with Marko during their brief talk outside City Hall.

  Eventually Shake agreed to let her go alone, and Karen felt they had made an unspoken deal: I’ll let you take the lead with Marko if you let me handle Bordelay my way.

  She reached the bottom of the escalator and continued along the platform, which extended for hundreds of feet and wrapped around several escalator banks. As she walked she saw more of the same — very few people, and no one who looked remotely like Marko.

  She paid special attention to the homeless men. She and Shake had talked in advance of the various ways Marko could disguise himself. But each man she saw was physically so different from Marko that there was no chance, absent several hours of Hollywood-level makeup or facial prosthetics.

  She continued up and down the platform until she had covered its entire length, and concluded Marko Bell was nowhere to be seen.

  Ten o’ clock came and went. At ten-oh-four, Karen heard the sound of a train coming, faint at first and then louder as it made its way through the tunnel from the adjacent station, Montgomery Street, and came closer to Embarcadero. The train pushed air through the tunnel and whipped up a mini-tornado of billowing newspaper pages on the platform. The electronic overhead signs blinked “West Oakland.”

  The nearly empty train, five cars long, eased into the station and the doors opened with a whooshing sound. A couple of homeless people got on and a few people got off. The arrivals looked like late-shift janitorial workers — men and women in their thirties and forties, mostly Latino, from the peninsula towns of South City and San Bruno, showing up to clean downtown office buildings in the middle of the night.

  Karen walked down the platform as the train idled in the station. She saw a young man with curly hair and glasses and wearing a backpack get out of the first car. He stepped onto the platform and looked around uncertainly. As soon as he saw Karen, he strode toward her.

  “Hi,” he said. “You’re Karen?”

  “Yes. How did you know that?”

  “I’m supposed to give you this.”

  He handed her a folded piece of paper and started to walk away. She grabbed him by the arm, not hard but forcefully enough to let him know he wasn’t going anywhere just yet.

  “Hang on,” she said to the kid. “Start at the beginning.”

  “Look, I was just doing a favor,” he said, his voice quavering. “I mean, I guess you could call it a favor, even though I didn’t do it for free. I don’t want any trouble.”

  “You won’t get any trouble. Take a deep breath. Just tell me what happened.”

  “I was waiting for my train home at Civic Center Station around nine-thirty. I’m second year at UC Hastings and just got through studying in the law library. A guy came up to me and asked if I would do a favor for him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “White guy, maybe late twenties. Short brown hair. He had a certain way about him, I guess.”

  “A certain way?”

  “He was a little...menacing, I guess. Like maybe I wouldn’t want to refuse his offer. Luckily the offer was pretty good.”

  “What was the offer?”

  “He said he’d give me a hundred bucks if I’d wait to catch the 10:02 train to West Oakland, get off at Embarcadero, and hand this piece of paper to a white woman, early thirties, with short blonde hair, wearing pants and a fleece jacket. It meant I’d have to miss one train. Plus this one, I guess,” he said a bit forlornly, looking behind him at the one he’d just disembarked from, which was still idling on the platform. “So I won’t get home until past midnight. But a hundred bucks lets me make rent this month.”

  “Did he already give you the hundred bucks?”

  “Yeah. He said I had a trustworthy face. He also said if I didn’t do it, he’d find out. I wasn’t sure how he could possibly find out, but he didn’t seem like the type of guy to mess with. And actually, I am pretty trustworthy.”

  The train doors were still open and a soft electronic tone sounded, indicating the doors were about to close.

  “Anything else you’re forgetting to tell me?”

  “No, that’s it, I swear.”

  “Go on, catch your train,” she said, nodding at the doors.

  “Thanks,” the kid said, relieved, and slid back through the doors just as they closed. She watched him wave as the train took off.

  Karen unfolded the piece of paper. The directions were written in pen:

  Heron’s Head Park

  Hunters Point

  15 minutes

  Walk out to the edge

  Same rules as before

  She looked up from the platform, toward the upper level of the station. Marko had known what she was wearing, which meant he’d been watching her over the last few hours. He was probably watching her right now. Watching to see how she handled the kid and whether she’d followed directions.

  She slipped the piece of paper into her pocket and took the escalator two steps at a time.

  Karen got back in her car and drove south on Third Street until the hip new bars and restaurants that had been built up just south of the Giants ballpark gave way to warehouses and construction supply stores that were long closed for the night.

 

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