“Listen, I’m hurting here. Tell you how bad it is. Edwina has got me doing this series called Bay Area’s Unsolved Murders. One cold case per week. She’s got this idea that if I we can solve one of these forgotten crimes, we’ll win the Pulitzer. But I know the real reason. She’s setting me up to fail, so she can fire me. I’m the only newspaper hack in the country that has to solve a goddamn murder to keep his job.”

  Cannon lowered his bray to a whisper. “But she can’t bury me yet, because I’m chasing a good one. This tipster told me it’d be worth my while to dig into a particular cold case. Turns out it’s even better than I hoped.”

  Cannon sat back and waited for them to ask. When they ignored him, he leaned forward in his chair.

  “Rich Telegraph Hill couple gets slaughtered in their home by crazed hippies in 1969. Manson-type stuff. They never catch the killers. That’s the unsolved murder.”

  Shake raised his eyebrows, suddenly animated. “Sixty-nine? Rough year, man. Altamont. Bad acid in the Haight. Negative vibes all around.”

  “So I talk to this old geezer I know named Bernie Looman, an old Chronicle reporter who was around back in those days. Now he’s gumming his supper in a Burlingame retirement home. Bernie tells me that six months before the rich couple got sliced and diced, their one-year-old daughter fell off their back deck in the middle of the night and broke her neck. That’s bedrock up there on Telegraph Hill, you know. How the hell does a baby get out and fall off the deck in the middle of the night, you ask? Apparently the rich couple, Baxter and Helen Fielding, left their only child in the care of the babysitter next door, a Stanford co-ed home for winter break. Baxter was some kind of diplomat, always traveling. Miss Co-Ed’s overcome with guilt that she failed in her prime babysitting duty, which is to make sure the baby stays alive. She takes one of the guns Baxter Fielding’s got stashed in a drawer and blows her own brains out.”

  “You get this story on the level,” Shake said, eyes on the street, “or you pay someone off? Like that time you gave that Middle Eastern corner-store owner $100 so he’d swear beat cops were regularly receiving sexual favors from prostitutes in Tenderloin alleys. Only the guy had an attack of conscience and reported your ass. And your little bribe was caught on surveillance tape.”

  Cannon frowned. “The footage was inconclusive and I was cleared of all charges.”

  “But suspended from the paper anyway because everyone knew it was true.”

  “I was treated unfairly. And eventually they brought me back. I’m too valuable. Nobody gets scoops like me.”

  “I heard you’re on some kind of double secret probation,” Shake said. “One more slip-up and you’re covering the city council in Walnut Creek.”

  Cannon waved it away. “That ain’t happening.”

  Shake looked at Karen. She felt a silent message in it: This is who you lay down with when you deal with the media.

  “Back to my story,” Cannon said, turning to Karen. “My tipster asks me if I remember the La Traviata coffeehouse massacre a couple years ago. Of course I remember, I tell him. Twelve people shot dead by a Vietnamese gangster who was paying off S.F. cops to deal heroin, how am I gonna forget that? It was one of the biggest stories in years. Tipster tells me, maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe someone who died in that massacre was targeted, and the massacre was the cover. Maybe that person who was targeted knew something about the Fielding murders.”

  Cannon paused and waited, looking from Karen to Shake to make sure they were listening. “So, I’m doing my due diligence. Looking into all the people who died that night.”

  “Where are you going with this, Cannon,” Shake said, bored.

  “Donna Bell was one of the twelve people killed in that massacre. The wife of one of your esteemed colleagues, Marko Bell. And before you say anything, yes, I know damn well that thing in Telegraph Hill happened before she was even born. Like I said, due diligence. I’m obsessive that way. I gotta track down every potential lead. Only problem is Marko won’t talk to me about it. I’ve been trying for weeks. Stone wall."

  Karen watched Wingfield’s reaction at the mention of Marko. Not a flinch. She followed his lead and ignored Cannon. She looked out the window for Dontae Atkins and saw no sign. It was after 7 a.m. and he’d likely be arriving home any minute.

  They had to get rid of Cannon.

  Karen sighed. “This Baker Beach thing could have gotten really ugly.”

  “Talk to me, Yancey.”

  “I will if you cooperate with me," she said, turning to face him squarely. "We’re in the middle of a homicide investigation and you’re potentially jeopardizing it. I could take you to the Hall and lock you up right now. So I’m about to tell you something, but it has to be followed by you getting up, walking out of this coffee shop, getting in your car and driving away.”

  Cannon smiled. “You happen to be full of it, Inspector. I’m a law-abiding citizen peacefully enjoying my breakfast in a public place, so you can’t touch me." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "But I’m willing to play nice. Tell me what you’ve got.”

  Karen inched forward, noticing what smelled like yesterday's cheap aftershave on Cannon and avoiding Wingfield’s glare. “That group of kids from the projects. There was some talk they were planning to rob one of the houses overlooking the beach. An argument ensued, ending with a fatal gunshot through the heart.”

  Cannon raised an eyebrow and started jotting in a notebook he pulled from his jacket. “Armed home invaders from the projects. In Seacliff. This is good stuff, Yancey. Real good stuff.”

  "Our deal."

  He got up and snapped his notebook shut. “With a tip that good, it's my pleasure to honor it. Nice doing business with you, inspectors.”

  They watched Cannon leave the diner and disappear around the corner.

  Karen waited for Shake to speak. She felt as though she had stepped over some arbitrary line that he had drawn. It was a line that he and the other veteran cops crossed regularly, but now that she had acted with self interest, she had somehow committed a terrible violation.

  She could feel the fury coming off him. But he said nothing.

  “Nothing I said was inaccurate,” she said. “And it accomplished our main purpose, which was to get rid of him.”

  “Not inaccurate. Just wrong. And you’re putting us in bed with Cannon, who’s a sleaze.”

  “Alright, Shake, relax.” She tried to change the subject. “What was that stuff about Bell’s wife? Some connection to a bunch of murders in 1969?”

  Shake ignored it. “What you just did was amateur hour, Karen. This is going to bite you in the ass. And you’ll tell me it was a learning experience, or some bullshit. You better hope there’s no collateral damage from your little power play.”

  Karen and Shake had been partners for six months. He was one of the most easygoing people she’d ever met. But right now, he was royally pissed. And he was looking down on her from his moral high ground, which made her feel small and weak. Which in turn made her defiant and angry.

  “Objection noted, partner,” Karen said.

  There was no time to dwell on the bad vibe, though.

  Across the street, a young man wearing a blue mechanic’s uniform and fitting the general description of Dontae Atkins bounded up the steps of the Harrison Street apartment and entered the lower flat.

  Chapter 5

  They crossed the street and mounted the six concrete steps of the apartment building, entering a small vestibule. Shake was about to knock on the glass-panel door of the lower flat when Karen stopped him.

  “Let me take this,” she whispered.

  Shake looked at her. He had always taken the lead and it had started to rankle her. His criticism of her ploy with Cannon added to the general sense that he didn’t treat her as a fully-fledged partner.

  She wanted that to change. She wanted to prove herself to Shake. Maybe she thought back to Pop.

  Shake nodded and stepped to the side.

  Karen unclipped the leather latch on her belt and rapped sharply on the door, imagining the shotgun shack, the endless hallway.

  “The gun,” Shake whispered. “Remember, no gun found at the beach. Be ready.”

  She heard soft stirrings from inside the house. A second later the door opened.

  The person who answered the door was not Dontae Atkins. The person who answered was slender and red-eyed, with long, nappy hair. The way Rachelle Dawkins had described him.

  Kevin Atkins.

  He stood in the doorway looking at Karen uncertainly. She glanced over his shoulder down the long corridor, distracted for the length of time it took her to force a breath through her lungs. She sensed ghosts just out of sight somewhere in the apartment.

  That was when she saw something dark dangling from Kevin’s right hand.

  She had her gun drawn but something kept her from pulling the trigger. The object in his hand did not immediately register as a gun, and she found herself unable to react, her instincts frozen. She realized now she had always expected to be swift and sure when the opportunity came, but a ghostly echo of an event she had never witnessed wormed its way into her consciousness. She felt the residue of indecisiveness it had left in her.

  A split second passed. The contours of the object in Kevin Atkins’ right hand were becoming clearer. She was aware of the object but was watching Kevin’s face, seeing his confused grin and his pinwheeling eyes.

  Time slowed. She had her finger on the trigger but felt no closer to pulling it than she had a second ago. She was too slow, too late, the gun in her hand feeling heavy and foreign. Kevin’s gun — it was a gun, she now knew, without question a gun — was still dangling at his side.

  She saw he didn’t want to shoot her. Or he was too high to know what he was doing. She could have reached out and taken the gun from him.

  But she didn’t. She froze.

  Everything exploded.

  Karen cried out and closed her eyes. When she opened them the boy was no longer in front of her.

  She looked down and saw him lying on his back in the hallway with blood gushing from a crater in his chest and the gun lying on the hardwood floor next to his head. A car alarm had gone off outside and was wailing. Karen heard water shut off somewhere in the apartment.

  Wingfield holstered his gun and moved past her. He knelt down to check the boy’s pulse.

  “He’s dead.”

  Kevin Atkins was no problem.

  That was what everyone kept telling Karen in whispered asides, between the sworn statements she gave and the interviews with Internal Affairs.

  Kevin Atkins was a murder suspect high on booze and crystal meth who pointed a loaded gun at an officer. It was too bad the kid was just sixteen, but there would be no problems for Shake.

  They always mentioned Shake. As though she wasn’t even there.

  At the end of the day Karen was told Jack Cuddy wanted to see her. She walked into his office and saw him on his feet, leafing through a binder on his desk.

  “How are you, Yancey?”

  “Fine, captain.”

  “Close call this morning.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “As you probably know, Shake will be on administrative leave for a few days.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He moved closer to her and gestured with his hand that she sit down. He sat on the edge of his desk, looming above her.

  “I want to ask you a couple of questions about what happened on Harrison Street.”

  Karen nodded.

  “Was the gun pointed at you when you answered the door?”

  Karen hesitated a split-second.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Was it true? Karen didn’t know anymore. She thought she remembered the gun dangling loosely at Kevin Atkins’ side. In that moment she might have disarmed him. But that impression was already beginning to leave her. She had solidified in her mind the notion that Kevin Atkins was pointing the gun at her when the door opened.

  Cuddy looked at her sympathetically and leaned toward her. “You’re going to play this over and over in your head. You’ll probably find something you could have done differently. Don’t let it make you crazy.”

  She would slowly push her mind to crowd out her indecision, her crippling fear. She wouldn’t let Jack Cuddy see that side of her. She wouldn’t let anybody see that.

  “Got it, captain.”

  He picked up a folder and walked behind his desk. “Oh, one other thing, Yancey. I got a call from Danny Cannon. Asking a lot of questions. Is it possible he saw you today at Dontae Atkins’s place?”

  Karen felt her stomach sink. “We saw him just a few minutes before. We believed that we had managed to lose him. But right after the shooting he appeared in front of the apartment. I’m not sure how much he saw.”

  “You sure it went down the way you and Shake said it did?”

  Yes and no, she wanted to say. Kevin Atkins was confused, out of it. He was holding a gun, but it wasn’t pointed at me, in my heart I know I could have reached across and taken the gun from him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well. Good work, inspector.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  She left Cuddy’s office and walked through the homicide bureau. Desultory conversations stopped as she walked by. She kept her head up and her eyes ahead of her, refusing to make eye contact or allow the other inspectors to see her shoulders sag.

  It was something she remembered about her father. She saw him fight his way through crowds of reporters and protesters as though he were on a victory march. It was only when the doors closed and the howling died down that she saw the fatigue and fear in his eyes.

  In their corner of the bureau she saw Shake taking things out of his desk. She sat down at the desk next to his and wordlessly watched him pack personal belongings into a duffel bag.

  “I think Cannon’s going to town with this,” Shake said, throwing the bag over his shoulder and talking toward the door. “He’s going to bring your father into it. Saying you froze. That you could have disarmed the kid and I wouldn’t have had to shoot him. You need to be ready.” He said it flat, so she couldn’t tell if he agreed with that assessment or not.

  He was limping out the door when Karen realized she hadn’t even thanked him for saving her life.

  “Shake,” she said.

  He turned and looked at her coldly. “Whatever you think you need to say, don’t bother. I was doing my job.”

  He turned and walked out.

  Soon the homicide bureau had emptied around Karen. She thought of how it would play in the papers the next day. She let the telephone ring over and over, until finally in a moment of frustration she picked it up.

  “Day you’ve had, I didn’t expect you to answer the phone.”

  Karen experienced a visceral reaction to Cannon’s voice, an involuntary gag reflex at the back of her throat.

  She closed her eyes and pondered just hanging up. She imagined the next day’s newspaper story: Reached late yesterday, Inspector Karen Yancey hung up the phone, refusing to answer questions about her role in the questionable shooting of a 16-year-old boy.

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Wait, Inspector, don’t hang up,” Cannon said, with a tone approaching sympathy. “I’m not here to make your life miserable. You can’t talk about the Atkins situation. I get that. That’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Why are you calling then?” Karen found herself regretting this. The animals smelled fear and uncertainty.

  “I’m hoping you can help me with Marko Bell. Talk to him, tell him I want to do justice to his wife’s memory, something like that. I just need someone to put in a good word for me, and I figured you might be willing to do me a favor if I would do you a favor.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Remember? Marko’s wife. She got gunned down at that place in North Beach, La Traviata. Never made sense to me, though. Vietnamese gang shakedown, my ass. Grease the wheel for me, Yancey. Tell him I’m alright and I just want to ask him a few questions. Just to rule her out as a possible target.”

  Karen hadn’t slept and she was exhausted. “I’m hanging up.”

  Cannon got impatient. “I thought we could help each other a little, inspector. By the way, what happened at the Atkins place? Freeze up a little? Scared you were going to make the same mistake as daddy?”

  “Go to hell, Cannon. And I hope you didn’t do anything sleazy to find out about Marko’s wife. Because if you did, I’ll take you down. I hear Walnut Creek is nice.”

  She slammed the phone down and looked around the room. The homicide bureau was empty. She buried her head in her hands.

  The bastards never went down. Danny Cannon was scum, but he was still working. Her father, John Yancey, sat in his studio apartment for two years after he was expelled from the Chicago Police Department. One morning he decided that his days were never going to get better, and he wedged the barrel of a .44-caliber semi-automatic upside-down against the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  Karen was making a cup of tea in her kitchen when she heard shots-fired on the police radio she kept on for company. She ran the three blocks to Pop’s house and was the first one to get there. The next and last time she saw her father was at the wake, at which a few straggling anti-police demonstrators showed up to loudly bid him good riddance before they were forcibly removed by three retired cops, the entirety of the Chicago Police Department’s delegation on the day John Yancey was laid to rest.

  Part of her wondered if it was karma that made her freeze when Kevin Atkins opened the door. Maybe she really had crossed a line by taking a stray bit of teenage boasting on Baker Beach and turning it into a narrative that would make her and Shake into stars.

  Karen rubbed her eyes and imagined television cameras and newspaper headlines. She pictured Danny Cannon chortling over his latest scoop.

  She scratched “Marko/Donna,” “La Traviata” and “1969-Telegraph Hill” on a piece of paper, just so she wouldn’t forget.

 

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