James Patterson - 10th Anniversary

I jogged down the Hall’s back stairs to the lobby, thumbed a number into my cell phone, and waited for private investigator Joseph Podesta to pick up. His voice was thick with sleep, but he said, “Aw-right,” to my request to see him in twenty minutes.

I crossed the Bay Bridge, drove to Lafayette, and found Podesta’s yellow suburban ranch on Hamlin Road, a street lined with a mix of trees and similar ranch-style houses. I parked my car in his driveway, then walked up some stone steps through a rock garden and rang the bell.

Podesta came to the door barefoot, wearing a sweat suit with a sprinkling of bread crumbs on the front. I showed him my badge and he opened the door wide and led me to his home office at the back of the house.

I looked around at the warehouse of spy equipment Podesta had stored on his metal bookshelves. He wheeled his chair up to his computer, lifted an old tabby cat down from his desk, and put her on his lap.

“If my client wasn’t dead,” he said, palming the mouse, “I wouldn’t show these to you without a warrant.”

“I appreciate your help,” I said.

Podesta clicked on the folder containing the digital photos he’d taken of Candace Martin in a car with someone who had been tentatively identified as Gregor Guzman, a contract killer who was wanted by cops in several states and a few foreign countries as well.

The first photo Podesta pulled up on his screen was the one Yuki had offered into evidence.

“I know these photos suck eggs,” he said. “But I couldn’t use the flash, you know? I can’t swear that’s Guzman, but that woman is Candace Martin. I followed her that night from her house on Monterey Boulevard right to the I–280 on-ramp north. She got off on Cesar Chavez, took a right on Third and then onto Davidson. I was on her tail the whole time.

“It’s a very dodgy place. I’m sure you know it, Sergeant. I had to watch out for myself. It’s a trash heap. A junkyard. I could have gotten mugged, and she could have, too.

“I watched her get out of her Lincoln and get into this guy’s SUV. Ten minutes later, she got out.”

“Can you burn those pictures onto a disc for me?”

“Why not, under the circumstances?” he said.

The computer whirred.

The cat purred.

And pretty soon I had a disc with a lot of grainy pictures taken a couple of weeks before Dennis Martin was killed.

AT NINE-FIFTEEN I was back at the Hall of Justice, Southern Station, Homicide Division, my home away from home.

I hung my jacket on the back of my chair, then found Conklin in the break room. He was eating a doughnut over the sink, his yellow tie flipped over his shoulder.

“Yo,” he said. “I saved you one.”

“I’m not hungry. But I do have something to show you.”

“You’re being awfully mysterious.”

“It’s better to show than tell.”

Chi was working at his desk, his computer humming, his coffee mug on a napkin, and about thirty pens lined up with the top edge of his mouse pad.

I handed Chi the disc Joe Podesta had given me and said, “You mind, Paul? I want you to see these, too.”

The three of us focused on one frame at a time as the dozen digital shots PI Joseph Podesta had taken of a blond woman in profile, sitting with a possible hit man in his SUV, came up on the screen.

Conklin asked Chi to enlarge the best of them and to push in on the female subject’s fist to see if she could be holding on tight to a gold cross. But the more Chi blew up the picture, the fuzzier it became.

“That’s the best I can do,” Chi said, staring at the abstract arrangement of gray dots. “What are your thoughts?”

“Run it through the face ID program,” Conklin said to Chi.

“Face ID, coming up.”

Chi opened the program, and two windows came up on his monitor, comparing Candace Martin’s mug shot with the grainy shot of the blond woman in the car.

Chi turned to look at me and Conklin, a spark of excitement sailing briefly across his face like a shooting star. “It’s not her,” said Chi. “Whoever the woman is in this picture — it’s not Candace Martin.”

Chi then compared the grainy-pictured blonde against a database of tens of thousands of photos at blur speed.

And just as I was beginning to lose hope, we got a match.

CONKLIN AND I got into an unmarked car and were soon speeding up the James Lick Freeway. As Conklin drove, I ticked off on my fingers the reasons I liked Ellen Lafferty for Dennis Martin’s murder.

“One, she was in love with him. Two, she was frustrated by him. Three, she had access to his gun. She knew where he would be and where Candace would be at the end of the day.

“That’s four and five. And six, if she didn’t do it, she could have ordered the hit.”

“All that,” Conklin said, “and she’s smart enough to frame Candace.”

“She must be a frickin’ evil genius,” I said.

Fifteen minutes later, Conklin parked the car in front of a pale yellow marina-style apartment building. Built in the ’20s, it was a tidy-looking place with bowed windows facing Ulloa Street. It was about a mile from the Martins’ house.

I pressed the buzzer and Lafferty called out, “Who is it?” And then she opened the door.

Conklin said “SFPD,” flashed his shield, and introduced us to the twenty-something nanny, who hesitated a couple of beats before she let us in.

I had watched Lafferty’s testimony from the back of the courtroom a few days ago. She’d looked quite mature in a suit and heels. Today, wearing jeans and a white turtleneck, her auburn hair pulled back in a ponytail, she looked like a teenager.

Conklin said yes to Lafferty’s offer of coffee, but I lingered behind in the living room as the Martins’ former nanny walked Conklin to the kitchen.

In one visual sweep, I counted five pictures of Dennis Martin in that small room, some of them with Lafferty. Martin was handsome from every angle.

I raised my eyes as Ellen Lafferty returned to the living area with Conklin. She looked happier to see me than she could possibly be. She took a seat in an armchair and said, “I thought the investigation was closed.”

I said, “There are a few stubborn loose ends. Well, one loose end.”

I pulled the photo from my inside jacket pocket and put it down on the coffee table.

Ellen reached over to pick it up and said, “What is this?”

“That man may be a contract killer by the name of Gregor Guzman. The woman in this picture looks like Candace Martin,” I said. “She’s got the same blond hair, same cut as Candace — but it’s not actually her, is it, Ellen?”

“It’s hard to tell. I don’t know,” she said.

“You know how we know it isn’t Candace?” Conklin said. “Because when we ran that photo through forensic software, it matched your picture from the DMV. The woman in this picture is you.”

Conklin went to the mantel and picked up a gold-framed photo of Ellen and Dennis Martin on a sailboat out in the Bay.

“No,” she said, getting up to snatch the picture out of Conklin’s hand. “You can’t have that.”

I said to her, “I think Judge LaVan will give us a search warrant to go through everything in your house. Meanwhile, we need to continue this talk at the police station.”

I pulled out my phone and was calling for a patrol car, but Ellen said, “Wait. I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

I closed my phone and gave her my full attention.

IF ELLEN LAFFERTY didn’t try to hire a killer, why was she in that car with Gregor Guzman? I couldn’t wait to hear her explanation.

“I didn’t do anything wrong, certainly nothing criminal ,” Lafferty said. She reached into the neck of her sweater and pulled out a small gold cross on a thin chain. She kept yanking it from side to side, a nervous habit — and a telling one.