James Patterson - 11th hour

Conklin and I walked with Degano to where the body of a heavily tattooed twenty-something man was splayed on the asphalt. His arms were flung out like wings, his legs were twisted. It looked to me as if he’d been walking toward the shopping center, had turned toward his killer, and had been blown off his feet by the four bullets he’d taken to his face.

It took a steady hand and an automatic gun to throw four shots in such a tight pattern. I’m a good shot, and I couldn’t have done it.

I took another look around the lot as lights came on. Shopping carts were adrift, like dinghies on a blacktop sea. Broken paper bags spilled groceries where they’d fallen. I saw surveillance cameras on light poles, but the shooting had taken place a good hundred yards from the closest camera.

“Were there any witnesses?” I asked Degano.

“Yes, ma’am, we have one sort of witness. Mr. Jonathan Nathan, over there. Old white dude. Red shirt. He heard the shots.”

Jonathan Nathan was in his seventies, stooped, glasses balanced on the lower slope of his nose, red-and-white aloha shirt under a windbreaker, khaki pants. Flip-flops. His eyes switched between us and the parking lot, as though anything could happen, as though he didn’t feel safe.

I said, “Can you tell us what you know?”

“Sure. Happy to. I was putting my groceries into the trunk of my car when I heard the shots. I looked around, but I didn’t know where the shots came from,” Nathan told us. “My head was inside the trunk when the gun went off, you know? Plus a lot of cars were coming and going. It was crazy noisy.”

“What happened then, Mr. Nathan?” I asked.

“Then I saw the body,” Nathan said, spreading his fingers, framing his face with his hands. “I ran over to him, but the guy wasn’t breathing. He was absolutely dead. I didn’t touch him, okay? There was no point.”

“Sure, I understand. Please go on.”

“My phone was also dead, so I waved down this guy in an SUV and asked him to call the cops. He did it, and then he drove off.”

Conklin and I had the same thought at the same moment. The so-called cop who had stopped the drug dealers on Schwerin had been driving an SUV.

Conklin launched into his trademark rapid-fire interrogation with a smile.

“The guy in the SUV,” Conklin said. “What did he look like?”

“What did he look like? Jeez. I don’t know. Regular guy.”

“Black? White? Hispanic?”

“White.”

“Young? Old? Fat? Skinny?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Hair color?”

“I was on the far side of the car. He was in shadow.”

“Okay, Mr. Nathan. What about the SUV?”

“It was black, I think. No, it was definitely black.”

“American make? Foreign?”

“I have no idea. Look,” Nathan said, getting steamed. “There were bullets flying around. I’m supposed to notice what kind of car the guy with the phone was driving? Listen, I’ve gotta get home. My wife is sick with worry. Plus we got people coming over. I just ran out for some groceries.”

I took Nathan’s contact information, gave him my card.

My partner and I went back to view the body, stood off to the side as the CSU van rolled up and techs piled out onto the parking lot.

I said to Conklin, “Look at how close the shooter gets to the vics. Chaz Smith. Those guys in the BMW the other night. Now Mr. Fernandez, dope dealer to Potrero Hill. This shooter knows these guys. He’s organized. He’s a perfectionist.”

“And most of all, he’s insane,” said Conklin. “He’s taken out five people this week, for a total of eight, Lindsay.

“And Brady thinks Warren Jacobi is capable of this?”

“Here comes Brady now.”

Brady’s car braked with a squeal only yards from the barrier tape. Lieutenants Brady and Meile boiled out of the vehicle, both of them agitated and demanding to be briefed.

Brady said, “What have we got?”

“Raoul Fernandez,” I said, pointing to the deceased. “Meth dealer, former convict. He was dead before he hit the ground.”

“Witnesses?”

“One so far. He maybe saw our shooter, a generic white male driving a black SUV. Our witness asked the driver to call nine-one-one, and he apparently did it. Dispatch is pulling the tape now.”

I went on to say that uniforms were taking down the name and number of everyone who’d been in the lot when the police showed up. Other uniforms were canvassing the shops.

“Plate readers have been down the rows,” I said, “and it was a decent sweep. Two stolen cars, two other drivers with outstanding warrants, but none stand out as our shooter.

“I asked the ME to give us an hour with the scene. Meanwhile, we’ve got surveillance tapes on the way from the security chief.”

“Let’s hope we got that black SUV on tape…”

Brady let his words trail off but I knew where he was going. Digital forensics was getting so refined that even a partial shot of the vehicle’s fender could yield enough information to identify the make and type of car.

I stood with Brady and Conklin and watched the light trucks come in. CSU was working fast and well, photographing scrapes on car doors, marking blood spatter, bagging found objects on the asphalt.

Soon the ME would remove the body, and CSU would take the car back to the lab on a flatbed truck. By tomorrow morning, the shopping center would be open again, like the shooting had never even happened.

But it had happened.

A spree killer was running the table.

I told Conklin I’d be back in a couple of minutes. I ducked under the tape, turned my back to the crime scene, and called Jacobi.

His voice sounded so real to me that I actually said, “Jacobi, it’s me, Lindsay.”

The voice kept talking, said, “Leave me a message.”

I told my old partner’s voicemail that I missed him, wanted to get together with him, asked him to call me.

I really did miss him.

I wanted to tell him about this spree killer, hear what he had to say. Maybe he had an idea we hadn’t thought of and maybe in the course of the conversation, he’d tell me something that would establish his innocence. I was sure that Brady was delusional. My old friend wasn’t the killer.

It just couldn’t be Jacobi.

Cindy wasn’t the only person working after close of business, not even close. A dozen offices in her line of sight had the lights on; loud laughter came in bursts from the corner office; and down the hall, the copy machine in the hallway chugged out copies.

These days, no one left work early.

Everyone wanted to be sure of a chair if the music stopped.

Cindy turned on her desk lamp and read Richie’s text message again. Caught a homicide. Cya later. XXX. She texted back: Copy that. Ttys.

She put her phone down and asked herself why she’d let Richie’s message go unanswered for so many minutes, why she’d withheld returning the XXXs, wondered again if she was becoming like her parents.

Her mom was a shrink, her dad was a math teacher, and when she was a kid, she had called them Robo-Mom and Robo-Pop because they both overanalyzed absolutely everything. Every. Little. Thing.

This was what she was doing with her relationship with Richie: Yes, no, maybe. Repeat.

She was also obsessed with her story, treating the numbers found with the Ellsworth heads as if they were the da Vinci code.

She justified her obsession like this: If she didn’t decode those numbers, someone else would. Jason Blayney would. And so, partially because of him, partially because she would have done it anyway, Cindy had been flipping the flipping numbers every which way, forward, backward, inside out.