The 6th Target, Page 2

  It really hit me then.

  What Willie had done. My voice was loud, and I grabbed his shoulders.

  “What if you’d caught up with him? Willie, did you think about that? That ‘skinny white man’ was armed. He would have killed you.”

  Tears jumped out of Willie’s eyes, rolled down his sweet, young face. I relaxed my grip on his shoulders, took him into my arms.

  “But you were very brave, Willie,” I said. “You were very brave to stand up to a killer to protect your mom.

  “I think you saved her life.”

  Chapter 6

  I KISSED WILLIE’S CHEEK through the open patrol-car window. Then Officer Pat Noonan drove Willie to the hospital and I boarded the ferry, joining Tracchio in the open front compartment of the Del Norte’s top deck.

  It was a scene of unforgettable horror. Bodies lying where they’d fallen on the thirty or forty square yards of bloody fiberglass deck, footprints leaving tracks in all directions. Articles of clothing had been dropped here and there — a red baseball cap was squashed underfoot, mixed with paper cups and hot dog wrappers and newspapers soaked in blood.

  I felt a sickening wave of despair. The killer could be anywhere, and evidence that might lead us to him had been lost every time a cop or a passenger or a paramedic walked across the deck.

  Plus, I couldn’t stop thinking about Claire.

  “You okay?” Tracchio asked me.

  I nodded, afraid that if I started to cry, I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  “This is Andrea Canello,” Tracchio said, pointing to the body of a woman in tan pants and a white blouse lying up against the hull. “According to that fellow over there,” he said, pointing to a teenager with spiky hair and a sunburned nose, “the doer shot her first. Then he shot her son. A little kid. About nine.”

  “The boy going to make it?” I asked.

  Tracchio shrugged. “He lost a lot of blood.” He pointed to another body, a male Caucasian, white haired, looked to be in his fifties, lying halfway under a bench.

  “Per Conrad. Engineer. Worked on the ferry. Probably heard the shots and tried to help. And this fellow,” he said, indicating an Asian man lying flat on his back in the center of the deck, “is Lester Ng. Insurance salesman. Another guy who could have been a hero. Witnesses say it all went down in two or three minutes.”

  I started picturing the scene in my head, using what Willie had told me, what Tracchio was telling me now, looking at the evidence, trying to fit the pieces into something that made sense.

  I wondered if the shooting spree had been planned or if something had set the shooter off and, if so, what that trigger had been.

  “One of the passengers thinks he saw the shooter sitting alone before the incident. Over there,” Tracchio told me. “Thinks he was smoking a cigarette. A package of Turkish Specials was found under a table.”

  I followed Tracchio to the stern, where several horrified passengers sat on an upholstered bench that wrapped around the inner curve of the railing. Some of them were blood spattered. Some held hands. Shock had frozen their faces.

  Uniforms were still taking down the witnesses’ names and phone numbers, getting statements. Sergeant Lexi Rose turned toward us, saying, “Chief, Lieutenant. Mr. Jack Rooney here has some good news for us.”

  An elderly man in a bright-red nylon jacket stepped forward. He wore big-frame eyeglasses and a digital Minicam about the size of a bar of soap hanging from a black cord around his neck. He had an expression of grim satisfaction.

  “I’ve got him right here,” Rooney said, holding up his camera. “I got that psycho right in the act.”

  Chapter 7

  THE HEAD OF THE Crime Scene Unit, Charlie Clapper, crossed the gangway with his team and came on board moments after the witnesses were released. Charlie stopped in front of us, greeted the chief, said, “Hey, Lindsay,” and took a look around.

  Then he dug into the pockets of his herringbone tweed jacket, pulled out latex gloves, and snapped them on.

  “This is a fine kettle of fish,” he said.

  “Let’s try to stay positive,” I said, unable to conceal the edge in my voice.

  “Cockeyed optimist,” he said. “That’s me.”

  I stood with Tracchio as the CSU team fanned out, putting out markers, photographing the bodies and the blood that was spattered everywhere.

  They dug out a projectile from the hull, and they bagged an item that might lead us to a killer: the half-empty packet of Turkish cigarettes that had been found under a table in the stern.

  “I’m going to take off now, Lieutenant,” Tracchio told me, looking down at his Rolex. “I have a meeting with the mayor.”

  “I want to work this case — personally,” I said.

  He gave me a hard, unblinking stare. I’d just pushed a hot button on his console, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Tracchio was a decent guy, and mostly I liked him. But the chief had come up through the ranks by way of administration. He’d never worked a case in his life, and that made him see things one way.

  He wanted me to do my job from my desk.

  And I did my best work on the street.

  The last time I’d told Tracchio that I wanted to work cases “hands-on,” he’d told me that I was ungrateful, that I had a lot to learn about leading a command, that I should do my goddamned job and feel lucky about my promotion to lieutenant.

  He reminded me now, sharply, that one of my partners had been killed on the street and that only months ago, Jacobi and I had both been shot in a desolate alley in the Tenderloin. It was true. We’d both nearly died.

  Today, I knew he couldn’t turn me down. My best friend had a slug through her chest, and the shooter was free.

  “I’ll work with Jacobi and Conklin. A three-man team. I’ll have McNeil and Chi back us up. Pull in the rest of the squad as needed.”

  Tracchio nodded reluctantly, but it was a green light. I thanked him and called Jacobi on my cell. Then I phoned the hospital, got a kindhearted nurse on the line who told me that Claire was still in surgery.

  I left the scene with Jack Rooney’s camera in hand, planning to look at the video back at the Hall, see the shooting for myself.

  I walked down the gangway and muttered, “Nuts,” before I reached the pavement. Reporters from three local TV stations and the Chronicle were waiting for me. I knew them all.

  Cameras clicked and zoomed. Microphones were pushed up to my face.

  “Was this a terrorist attack, Lieutenant?”

  “Who did the shooting?”

  “How many people were killed?”

  “Give me a break, guys. The crime just happened this morning,” I said, wishing these reporters had grabbed Tracchio or any one of the other four dozen cops milling around the perimeter who’d love to see themselves on the six o’clock news.

  “We’ll release the names of the victims after we’ve contacted their families.

  “And we will find whoever did this terrible thing,” I said with both hope and conviction. “He will not get away.”

  Chapter 8

  IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon when I introduced myself to Claire’s doctor, Al Sassoon, who was standing with Claire’s chart in hand at the hub of the ICU.

  Sassoon was in his midforties, dark haired, with laugh lines fanning out from the corners of his mouth. He looked credible and confident, and I trusted him immediately.

  “Are you investigating the shooting?” he asked me.

  I nodded. “Yes, and also, Claire’s my friend.”

  “She’s a friend of mine, too.” He smiled, said, “So here’s what I can tell you. The bullet broke a rib and collapsed her left lung, but it missed her heart and major arteries.

  “She’s going to have some pain from the rib and she’s going to have a chest tube inside her until that lung fully expands. But she’s healthy and she’s lucky. And she’s got good people here watching out for her.”

  The tears that had been dammed up all day
threatened to overflow. I lowered my eyes and croaked, “I’d like to talk to her. Claire’s assailant killed three people.”

  “She’ll wake up soon,” Sassoon told me. He patted my shoulder and held open the door to Claire’s room, and I walked inside.

  The back of Claire’s bed was raised to make it easier for her to breathe. There was a cannula in her nose and an IV bag hanging from a pole, dripping saline into a vein. Under her thin hospital gown, her chest was swaddled in bandages, and her eyes were puffy and closed. In all the years I’ve known Claire, I’ve never seen her sick. I’ve never seen her down.

  Claire’s husband, Edmund, had been sitting in the armchair beside the bed, but he jumped to his feet the moment I walked in the door.

  He looked awful, his features twisted with fear and disbelief.

  I set down my shopping bag and went to him for a long hug, Edmund saying into my hair, “Oh, God, Lindsay, this is too much.”

  I murmured all the things you say when words are just plain inadequate. “She’ll be on her feet soon, Eddie. You know I’m right.”

  “I wonder,” Edmund said when we finally stepped apart. “Even saying she heals up okay. Have you gotten over being shot?”

  I couldn’t answer. The truth was, I still woke up some nights sweating, knowing I’d been dreaming again about that bad night on Larkin Street. I could still feel the impact of those slugs in my mind, remembering the helplessness and the knowledge that I might die.

  “And what about Willie?” Edmund was saying. “His whole world turned inside out this morning. Here, let me help you with that.”

  Edmund held the sides of the shopping bag apart so that I could extract from it a big silver get-well balloon. I tied the balloon to the frame of Claire’s bed, then reached over and touched her hand. “Has she said anything?” I asked.

  “She opened her eyes for a couple of seconds. Said, ‘Where’s Willie?’ I told her, ‘He’s home. Safe.’ She said, ‘I gotta get back to work,’ then she conked out. That was a half hour ago.”

  I searched my mind for the last time I’d seen Claire before the shooting. Yesterday. We’d waved good-bye in the parking lot across from the Hall as we’d left work for the day. Just a casual flap of our hands.

  “See ya, girlfriend.”

  “Have a good one, Butterfly.”

  It had been such an ordinary exchange. Taking life for granted. What if Claire had died today? What if she had died on us?

  Chapter 9

  I WAS GRIPPING CLAIRE’S HAND as Edmund returned to the armchair, switched on the overhead TV with the remote. Keeping the sound on low, he asked, “You’ve seen this, Lindsay?”

  I looked up, saw the disclaimer — “What you’re about to see is very graphic. Parental discretion is advised.”

  “I saw it right after the shooting,” I told Edmund, “but I want to see it again.”

  Edmund nodded, said, “Me, too.”

  And then Jack Rooney’s amateur film of the ferry shooting came on the screen.

  Together, we watched again what Claire had lived through only hours before. Rooney’s film was grainy and jumpy, first focusing on three tourists smiling and waving at the camera, a sailboat behind them, and then a beauty shot of the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The camera panned across the ferry’s open top deck, past a gaggle of kids feeding hot dog buns to the seagulls. A little boy wearing a backward red baseball cap was drawing on a table with a Sharpie. That was Tony Canello. A lanky bearded man sitting near the railing plucked at his own arm dis-tractedly.

  The shot froze, and a spotlight encircled the bearded man.

  “That’s him,” Edmund said. “Is he crazy, Lindsay? Or is he a premeditated killer, biding his time?”

  “Maybe he’s both,” I said, my eyes pinned to the screen as a second clip followed the first. An ebullient crowd clung to the railing as the ferry pulled into dock. Suddenly the camera swung to the left, focusing on a woman, her face screwed up in horror as she grabbed at her chest and then collapsed.

  The little boy, Tony Canello, turned toward the camera. His face had been digitally pixilated by the news producers so that his features were a blur.

  I winced as he jerked and spun away from the gunman.

  The camera’s eye jumped around crazily after that. It looked as though Rooney had been bumped, and then the picture stabilized.

  I covered my mouth and Edmund gripped the arms of the chair as we watched Claire stretch out her hand toward the shooter. Even though we couldn’t hear her over the screams of the crowd, it was clear that she was asking for the gun.

  “What bravery,” I said. “My God.”

  “Too damned brave,” Edmund muttered, running his hand over the top of his silvering head. “Claire and Willie, both of them, too damned brave.”

  The shooter’s back was to the camera as he pulled the trigger. I saw the gun buck in his hand. Claire grabbed at her chest and went down.

  Again, the point of view shifted to horrified faces in a roiling crowd. Then the gunman was on the screen in a crouch, his face turned away from the camera. He stepped on Claire’s wrist, shouting into her face.

  Edmund cried out, “You sick son of a bitch!”

  Behind me, Claire moaned in her bed.

  I turned to look at her, but she was still asleep. My eyes flashed back to the television as the shooter turned and his face came into view.

  His eyes were down, his beard swallowing the lower half of his face. He was coming toward the cameraman, who finally lost his nerve and stopped filming.

  “He shot at Willie after that,” Edmund said.

  And then, there I was on the TV screen, my hair tangled from my race through the farmer’s market, Claire’s blood transferred from Willie’s T-shirt to my jacket, a wide-eyed look of shocked intensity on my face.

  My voice was saying, “Please call us with any information that could lead to this man.”

  My face was replaced with a freeze-frame shot of the killer. The SFPD phone number and Web address crawled under a title in big letters at the bottom of the screen.

  DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?

  Edmund turned to me, his face stricken. “Have you got anything yet, Lindsay?”

  “We have Jack Rooney’s video,” I said, stabbing my finger at the TV. “We have nonstop media coverage and about two hundred eyewitnesses. We’ll find him, Eddie. I swear we will.”

  I didn’t say what I was thinking: If this guy gets away, I shouldn’t be a cop.

  I stood, gathered up my shopping bag.

  Eddie said, “Can’t you wait a few minutes? Claire will want to see you.”

  “I’ll be back later,” I told him. “There’s someone I have to see right now.”

  Chapter 10

  I LEFT CLAIRE’S ROOM on the fifth floor and took the stairs to the Pediatric ICU on two. I was bracing myself for what was sure to be an awful, heart-wrenching interview.

  I thought about young Tony Canello, watching his mother taking a bullet an instant before being shot himself. I had to ask this child if he’d ever seen the shooter before, if the man had said anything before or after firing the gun, if he could think of any reason why he and his mom had been targeted.

  I shifted my shopping bag from my right hand to my left as I took the last flight of stairs, knowing that how I handled this interview was going to stay with this little boy forever.

  The police department keeps a stash of teddy bears to give to children who’ve been traumatized, but those small toys seemed too cheap to give to a kid who’d just seen his mother violently killed. I’d stopped off at the Build-A-Bear Workshop before coming to the hospital and had a bear custom-made for Tony. Before it was dressed in a soccer outfit, a fabric heart had been stitched inside the bear’s chest, along with my wish that Tony would get well soon.

  I opened the door to the second floor and stepped into the pastel-painted corridor of the Pediatric Unit. Cheery murals of rainbows and picnics lined the walls.

  I found
my way to the Pediatric ICU and flashed my badge for the nurse at the desk, a woman in her forties with graying hair and large brown eyes. I told her that I had to talk to my witness and that I wouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.

  “You’re talking about Tony Canello? The little boy who was shot on the ferry?”

  I said, “I have about three questions. I’ll make it as easy on him as possible.”

  “Ah, I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” the nurse said, holding my eyes with hers. “His surgery was touch and go. The gunshot wound involved several major organs. I’m sorry to tell you we lost him about twenty minutes ago.”

  I sagged against the nurses’ station.

  The nurse was speaking to me, asking if she could get me anything or anyone. I handed her the shopping bag with the Build-A-Bear inside and asked her to give it to the next kid who came into the ICU.

  Somehow, I found my car in the lot and headed back to the Hall of Justice.

  Chapter 11

  THE HALL IS A GRAY granite cube of a building that takes up a full block on Bryant Street. Its grungy and dismal ten floors house the superior court, the DA’s offices, the southern division of the SFPD, and a jail taking up the top floor.

  The medical examiner’s office is in an adjacent building, but you can get there by way of a back door in the Hall’s ground floor. I pushed open the steel-and-glass doors at the rear of the lobby, exited out the back of the building, and headed down the breezeway that led to the morgue.

  I opened the door to the autopsy suite and was immediately enveloped by frosty air. I walked through the place as if I owned it, a habit encouraged by my best friend, Claire, the chief medical examiner.

  But of course Claire wasn’t on the ladder taking overhead shots of the deceased woman on the table. The deputy chief, a fortysomething white man, five eight or so with salt-and-pepper hair and black horn-rimmed glasses, had taken her place.