James Patterson - The 8th Confession

CONKLIN AND I got into the squad car we’d parked outside Alan Pincus’s house.

I owed Jacobi a call and an explanation, and knew he’d go bug-nuts when I told him we’d spent our day chasing Bagman’s hit man when a psycho was dropping the mayor’s friends with a poisonous reptile.

I was about to say so to Conklin, but now that we were alone, the elephant in the car could not be ignored.

Conklin turned down the radio, jumbled the car keys in his hand for a moment, and said, “Cindy talked to you about… uh… us.”

“Yep. It was quite a surprise,” I said, holding his gaze until he looked away.

“She said you were upset.”

I shrugged.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Linds -”

“Hey. I’m fine. Fine,” I lied. “Once I thought about it, I realized you two are a natural.”

“It’s only been, like, a week.”

“Whatever. As Jacobi says, ‘I love you guys.’ ”

Conklin laughed, and that laugh told all. He was having a wonderful time with my bodacious, cheeky, bighearted friend, and he didn’t want to stop.

The guy who’d kissed me last week – that guy was gone. Sure, I’d rejected him, and sure, I didn’t own him. But even so, it hurt. I missed the Richie who’d mooned over me.

I wondered if his sleeping with Cindy was a roundabout way of sleeping with me. It was a crummy thought, hardly worthy of me, but – ha! – I thought it anyway.

And I remembered Yuki’s advice: “Let him go. Let yourself go.”

Conklin was watching my face for a sign, perhaps my blessing, so I was glad when knuckles rapped on my window. It was Alan Pincus, home early from work.

He was bigger than his older brother, had more hair. Otherwise, they were clones.

I buzzed down the glass.

“Sergeant Boxer? Are you people done? Because I want to get my family life back to normal.”

“We’re done for now, but we’re not going away.”

“I understand.”

“Anything comes up we should know about, call us.”

“Boy Scout honor.”

Pincus held up three fingers, then turned and marched up the walk to his front door. Was he sticking it to us? I couldn’t tell. When he was inside, I said to Conklin, “Let’s call Cindy.”

LATER THAT DAY, Conklin, Cindy, and I had MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub practically to ourselves. We had a table in the back, a bowl of freeze-dried peanuts, and diet colas all around.

Cindy’s face was flushed, and it had nothing to do with her proximity to my partner.

“You let them go? You didn’t hold them, squeeze them -”

“Sounds like a pop song,” Conklin cracked, and he was so high on Cindy, he actually sang a few lines: “Hold me, squeeze me, never let me go…” But Cindy was not in the mood.

“How can you make fun of me?”

Conklin’s smile dropped. “Cin, we would’ve if we could’ve – but we can’t make an indictable charge. Not yet.”

“But you’re working the case? Swear to God?”

Conklin and I both nodded, Conklin adding, “We are seriously working the case.”

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.

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.

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.