The 8th Confession

  Cindy dropped her head into her hands and groaned. “I put this guy on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘Bagman Jesus, Street Saint.’ And he’s what? Turning teens into drug dealers? And you think that’s why someone killed him? God Almighty. What do I do now?”

  “Do what you always do,” I said to my friend. “Run with the truth. And hey, Cindy, this is a better story, right?”

  Her eyes got bigger as she saw the size of the headline in her mind. “I can cite reliable sources close to the SFPD?”

  “Yes. Sure.”

  Conklin paid the tab, and we three left the bar together. Cindy headed back to the Chronicle and an emergency meeting with her boss, and Conklin and I walked over to the Hall.

  Back in the gloom of the bull pen, Conklin booted up his Dell. I sorted through the messages that had come in while we were out, found one from St. Jude that Brenda had marked URGENT. I had punched in half of McCorkle’s number when Conklin said, “Unbelievable.”

  I stopped dialing. “Whatcha got?”

  “Rodney Booker’s van is in impound, Lindsay. The day after he was killed, it was towed from a no-parking zone.”

  I called impound, located the car, and put in a rush order to have it brought to the crime lab.

  Our dead end had sprung wide open.

  And that’s what I shouted over my shoulder to Jacobi, who was advancing on us, breathing fire, as Conklin and I fled the squad room.

  Chapter 88

  BY SEVEN THAT NIGHT, CSIs were making the most of our warrant to search Booker’s van. The brainiac Brett Feller and his muscular cohort, Ray Bates, had disassembled the blue van into piles of assorted parts. And they’d found Bagman’s bag strapped to the underside of a backseat with a bungee cord.

  The two young men weren’t done yet. They unscrewed nuts and bolts and tire rims, hoping for a hidden dope cache or a weapon, but when Conklin and I opened the brown leather mailbag-style pouch and looked inside, I said, “Stand down, guys. This is it.”

  I lifted items out of the bag. Conklin laid them out on the light table, and Feller, an intense twenty-four-year-old with a touch of obsessive- compulsive disorder and an eye toward being the next Gil Grissom — for real — lined everything up squarely and took photographs.

  My heart was banging ta-dum, ta-dum throughout this process, and frankly I was surprised at my own excitement.

  In the past weeks, I had gone in and out of caring about Bagman Jesus. At first I’d written him off as one of the dozens of street people who were killed every year in a dispute over a choice sleeping location or a finger of booze.

  By the time Cindy said, “Nobody gives a damn,” I did.

  When Bagman Jesus turned out to be a drug dealer, I lost interest again. Now he’d morphed into a predator without conscience, and I was going through Bagman Jesus whiplash.

  Who capped this guy?

  What will we learn from his stuff?

  Opening Bagman’s bag felt like waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa had left his entire carryall under the tree.

  I took out my notebook, kept track of our findings.

  Items one through fourteen were miscellany: a moldy sandwich in a Ziploc bag, several bundles of bills rubber-banded according to denomination — looked to be no more than two thousand dollars.

  There was a worn Bible inscribed with Rodney Booker’s name in the flyleaf, and what seemed to be the biggest score: a half dozen bags of sparkling white powder — maybe six ounces of crystal meth.

  But of real interest was item number fifteen: a leather folder about five inches by eight inches, what travelers use to hold their plane tickets and passports.

  Conklin opened the folder, removed the contents, and unfolded the papers, handling them as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. As my partner put papers down on the table, Feller took photos and I named the documents out loud.

  “Service record for the van. Oil change and lube, one hundred seventy-two thousand, three hundred thirty-four miles. Looks like a winning lottery ticket, five out of eight numbers, dated the day before Booker’s body was found.”

  I noted some deposit slips, a little more than three thousand in cash over a three-day period, and there were receipts from fast-food restaurants.

  But when CSI Bates found Bagman’s wallet deep inside a door panel, the contents nearly blew down the walls of the crime lab.

  Chapter 89

  THE WALLET WAS SLIM, a good-quality goatskin with the initials RB stamped in gold on the corner. I took out Booker’s driver’s license and found a sheet of yellow paper in the bill compartment.

  I unfolded it, my eyes taking in the data, my brain, a few beats behind, trying to make sense of it.

  I said, “This is a bill of sale. Rodney Booker bought a bus from a used-car lot in Tijuana on May second, just days before he died.

  “It was an old school bus, says here, nineteen eighty- three.”

  I stared at the yellow paper, but my inner eye was on Market and Fourth right after an old school bus had blown up, filling the air with bloody mist, littering the street with body parts.

  Ten innocent people had died.

  Others had been injured, scarred for life.

  I remembered hunkering down on shattered glass, talking with the arson investigator Chuck Hanni as he pointed out the broken parts and melted pieces in what was left of the rear of the bus, showing me that the vehicle had been a mobile meth lab.

  The owner of the bus had never been identified.

  “What did Sammy say?” I asked my partner. “Bagman used to cook meth in the house — but it was too dangerous?”

  “Right.”

  I took a second piece of paper from the wallet. It was plain white, six by four inches with a glue-strip edge, obviously torn from a notepad, folded in half. Handwritten on the paper was a tally converting pesos to dollars. A scribbled word jumped out at me: “ephedrine,” the main ingredient in methamphetamine.

  Conklin was breathing over my shoulder. “That’s a signature, isn’t it? J something Gomez.”

  “Juan.”

  The name Juan Gomez was as common as John Smith. That might not mean much, but it was the name on the ID of the meth cook who’d been blown across the intersection at Fourth and Market, dead from the blast before his head had been bashed in against a lamppost.

  I could hardly believe the treasure I held in my hands.

  Rodney Booker had been branching out from small-time crack sales to big-time meth. He’d bought the ingredients, hired a cook, bought a bus, and turned it into a meth lab.

  And on its first drug run, Booker’s lab had sent ten people to God. Bagman’s motto had never seemed as ironic to me as it did right now: Jesus Saves.

  Chapter 90

  YUKI WAS WORKING OUT with her video trainer when the intercom buzzed and her doorman’s voice crackled over the box on the wall, saying, “Dr. Chesney is here to see you.”

  Elation shot through her.

  Doc was early! The doorbell rang, and Yuki opened the door wide — and Doc kissed her. And Yuki made the most of it, putting her hands all through Doc’s blond Ricky Schroder hair, wriggling and moaning in the doorway.

  He grinned at her, said, “Glad to see me?”

  She nodded, smiled, said, “Uh- huh,” and they kissed again, Doc kicking the door shut behind him.

  This was the thing that was priceless: how these kisses were even theirs.

  Only she and Doc kissed this way.

  “Hi, honey. How was your day?” Yuki said, coming up for air, laughing at the idea of making a “couple” joke.

  When was the last time she’d done that?

  Ever?

  “Not too bad, sweetie,” Doc said, scooping her up and walking her backward to the couch, where he dropped her gently into the overstuffed cushions, but she said “oof” anyway, and he settled down beside her.

  “Bee sting, broken collarbone, and a baby halfway delivered in the waiting area,” Doc said, touching her hair,
stroking the half-inch- high stand-up buzz cut that he’d started with his clippers weeks ago and liked so much.

  She was starting to like it, too.

  “Any day I don’t get stabbed by a syringe from an HIV-positive patient is a good day for me,” he said.

  “I second that,” said Yuki. “So are you gassed up, packed up, ready to go?”

  Because she was. As soon as she zipped up her bag, they’d be off for their Memorial Day weekend in Napa, the long, romantic drive, the beautiful hotel, the huge bed with a view.

  “I am. But there’s something I have to tell you first.”

  Yuki searched his eyes. Thinking back a couple of minutes, she remembered that Doc had looked a little jittery when she’d first opened the door, and since she’d been feeling a little nervy herself, she’d chalked it up to their upcoming big weekend. That soon they’d be making love for the first time.

  Now his smile was tentative, and that alarmed her.

  Was their weekend going to be cut short?

  Or was it worse than that?

  “John, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “This is going to be rough, Yuki.” He was holding her hand, but he kept lowering his eyes.

  “The problem is, you tell someone too soon, and it’s presumptuous. You tell them too late, and you’ve messed with their minds. In our case it’s both: too early and too late —”

  “You’re scaring me, John. Spit it out.”

  “A few days ago when you said that you hadn’t had sex in a couple of years —”

  “That was stupid of me. It’s true, but I was nervous. My brain… just overflowed.”

  Doc fixed his slate-blue eyes on her. “I haven’t had sex in a couple of years either.”

  “You? Come on. I don’t believe you.”

  Yuki’s brain was on rewind, thinking how she’d gone to the hospital to see Doc after the car accident. She’d agreed to show him the city. After their first soft kiss, she’d dived in for a longer, sexier one — like she’d done just now.

  She’d been driving the whole fantasy.

  He’d been following her lead.

  Yuki was mortified. Why hadn’t she listened to her mother?

  “Be like swan, Yuki- eh. Hold head high. Swim strong and silent.” She had no patience. Instead she’d taken after her father. The tank driver.

  “Please, just say it,” Yuki said.

  And then he did tell her, his voice halting, the story coming out in bits and pieces on a jagged time line. And although Yuki could hardly grasp what he was saying, her vision narrowed. There was a loud humming in her head.

  And then everything went black.

  Chapter 91

  I SAT IN a wobbly chair across from Yuki and Cindy at Casa Loco, a Mexican joint near Cindy’s apartment specializing in two- star chicken fajitas. It was dark outside, and the windows reflected our colorless images, making us look like ghosts.

  Especially Yuki.

  Cindy was both propping Yuki up and pumping her for more information when Claire arrived, dropped down in the chair next to me.

  “You were right not to go away with him,” Cindy was saying to Yuki. “You can’t make decisions when your head’s been through a blender.”

  The teenage waitress removed our plates, and Claire ordered coffee all around. Yuki said, “I keep thinking maybe I should have toughed it out. Just gotten into the car —”

  “And if you hadn’t felt better?” Cindy asked her. “What a bloody awful weekend this would’ve been if you’d been stranded in Napa with someone who might have repulsed you.”

  “I hate it when you sugarcoat things, Cindy.”

  “Well, I’m not wrong, am I?”

  “So let me get this straight,” Claire said, bringing herself up to date since talking to Yuki on the phone. “Doc was born with ambiguous genitalia? The doctors didn’t know for sure if he was a boy or a girl?”

  Yuki nodded, used a forefinger to wick the tears out from under her eyes.

  “They told his parents that if they conditioned him as a girl, he’d never know.”

  “They got that wrong,” I said.

  Claire said, “It’s a damned tragedy, Yuki. I’m sure the parents were under a lot of pressure to tell people the baby’s sex. Anyway, it was a theory based on practicality. Even if the chromosomes read XY, if the parts looked messed up, they did the surgery. ‘Easier to make a hole than a pole,’ they used to say. Then, they’d advise, treat the kid like a girl. Give her estrogen at adolescence, and by God, she’ll be a girl.”

  “They named him Flora Jean,” Yuki sputtered. “Like you said, Claire, they took a baby boy and made him a girl! But he never felt like one, ever — because he wasn’t a girl. Oh my God. It’s so sick!”

  “So he reversed the process when he was how old?” Claire asked.

  “Started when he was twenty-six. After that, he went through about four or five years of hell.”

  “Oh man. That poor guy,” I said.

  Yuki lifted her teary eyes to mine. “I’m crazy about Doc, Lindsay. He’s sweet. He’s funny. He’s seen me as a real bitch and as a total wimp. He gets me — but how am I going to stop thinking of him as a guy who used to be a girl?”

  “Aw, Yuki. Where did you leave things with him?”

  “He said he’d call me over the weekend. That we’d go out to dinner next week and talk.”

  “Doc cares about you,” I said. “He’s showing you how much he cares by telling you what happened. Giving you time.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Yuki choked out.

  Cindy held Yuki and let her cry until Claire reached across the table and took Yuki’s hand.

  “Sugar, take it easy on yourself. It seems complicated, but maybe it’s not. And nothing has to be decided right now.”

  Yuki nodded, and then she started to cry again.

  Chapter 92

  I GOT TO the squad room before eight on Monday morning and found a thick padded envelope on my desk. The routing slip showed that St. Jude had messengered it over from the Cold Case Division and had stamped the envelope URGENT, URGENT, URGENT.

  I remembered now — McCorkle had called me, and I hadn’t called him back. I ripped open the envelope, dumped out a tattered detective’s notebook, found a note from McCorkle clipped to the front cover.

  “ Boxer — check this out. This subject knew the last of the nineteen eighty-two snake victims and a few of the new ones. She’s expecting your call.”

  I hoped “she” was a hot lead that hadn’t gone cold over the weekend, because right now, all we had on the “snake killer” was ugly press coverage and five dead bodies twiddling their thumbs in their graves.

  Conklin wasn’t in, so I killed a few minutes in the coffee room, putting milk and sugar in the last inch of coffee sludge left over from the night shift.

  When I returned to my desk, my partner was still absent, and I couldn’t wait for him any longer.

  I opened the notebook to where a neon-green Post-it Note stuck between the pages pointed to a twenty-three-year-old interview with a socialite, Ginny Howsam Friedman.

  I knew a few things about Ginny Friedman.

  She was once married to a deputy mayor in the ’80s, now deceased, and was currently married to a top cardiologist. She was a patron of the arts and a gifted painter in her own right.

  I scanned the cop’s scribbled notes and saw where McCorkle had underscored her phone number, which I dialed.

  Friedman answered on the third ring and surprised me by saying, “I’m free if you come over now.”

  I left a note on Conklin’s chair, then took my Explorer for a spin out to Friedman’s address in Pacific Heights.

  Ginny Friedman’s pretty blue-and-white gingerbread- decked house was on Franklin Street, one of the blocks of fully restored Victorian houses that make San Francisco a visual wonder.

  I walked up the steps and pressed the bell, and a lovely-looking gray-haired w
oman in her early seventies opened the door.

  “Come in, Sergeant,” she said. “I’m so glad to meet you. What can I get you? Coffee or tea?”

  Chapter 93

  MRS. FRIEDMAN AND I settled into a pair of wicker chairs on her back porch, and she began to tell me about the snake killings that had terrorized San Francisco’s high society in 1982.

  Friedman stirred her coffee, said, “There’s got to be a connection between those old killings and the recent ones.”

  “We think so, too.”

  “I hope I can help you,” Friedman said. “I told Lieutenant McCorkle that it was stinking horrible when those prominent people kept dying in eighty-two. Scary as hell. Keep in mind, we didn’t know why they died until Christopher Ross was found with that snake coiled up in his armpit.”

  “And you knew Christopher Ross?”

  “Very well. My first husband and I went out with him and his wife often. He was a very handsome guy. A thrill-seeker with an outgoing personality, and he was wealthy, of course. His gobs of money had gobs of money. Chris Ross had it all. And then he died.

  “Some said it was poetic justice,” Friedman told me. “That he was a snake who was killed with one — but I’m getting ahead of myself.”

  “Take your time,” I said. “I want to hear it all.”

  Friedman nodded, said, “In nineteen eighty-two, I was teaching fifth-grade girls at the Katherine Delmar Burke School in Sea Cliff. You know it, I’m sure.”

  I did. Sea Cliff was an A+ oceanside community, uncommonly beautiful, populated by the uncommonly wealthy.

  “The young girls wore green plaid uniforms and did a maypole dance every year. Streamers and all.

  “Sara Needleman and Isa Booth were both in my class in eighty-two. I still can’t believe that they’re dead! They had charmed lives. And when I knew them, they were both darling children. Look at this.”

  Friedman handed me a small leather book with glassine pages filled with snapshots. She turned to the back page and pointed to stepped rows of ten- year-old girls in a class photo.