Chapter 9
THE NEXT MORNING Jacobi and I were back examining the grounds of the La Salle Heights Church.
All night long, I had fretted over what Cindy had told me about a case that had come across her desk. It involved an elderly black woman who lived alone in the Gustave White projects in West Oakland. Three days ago, the Oakland police had found her hanging from a pipe in the basement laundry room, an electrical cord tightly wound around her neck.
At first, the police assumed it was a suicide. No abrasions or defensive wounds were found on her body. But the next day, during the autopsy, a flaky residue was found packed under her nails. It turned out to be human skin with microscopic specks of dried blood. The poor woman had been desperately digging in to someone.
She hadn’t hung herself after all, Cindy said.
The woman had been lynched.
As I went back over the crime scene at the church, I felt uneasy. Cindy could be right. This might not be the first, but the second in an onset of racially driven murders.
Jacobi walked up. He was holding a curled-up Chronicle. “You see this, boss?”
The front page rocked with the blaring headline, “POLICE STUMPED AS GIRL, 11, IS KILLED IN CHURCH ASSAULT.”
The article was written by Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick, whose careers had been nudged aside by Cindy’s work on the bride and groom case. With the newspapers stoking the fire, and the activists Gray and Jones railing on the air, soon the public would be accusing us of sitting on our hands while the terror suspect was running free.
&nbs
p; “Your buddies…” Jacobi huffed. “They always make it about us.”
“Uh-uh, Warren.” I shook my head. “My buddies don’t take cheap shots.”
Behind us in the woods, Charlie Clapper’s Crime Scene Unit team was going over the ground around the sniper’s position. They’d turned up a couple of foot imprints, but nothing identifiable. They would fingerprint the shell casings, grid-search the ground, pick up every piece of lint or dust where the supposed getaway vehicle had been parked.
“Any more sightings on that white van?” I asked Jacobi. In a strange way it was good to be working with him again.
He grumbled and shook his head. “Got a lead on a couple of winos who hold a coffee klatch on that corner at night. So far, all we have is this.” He unfolded an artist’s rendering of Bernard Smith’s description—a two-headed lion, the sticker on the rear door of the van.
Jacobi sucked in his cheeks. “Who are we after, Lieutenant, the Pokémon killer?”
Across the grass, I spotted Aaron Winslow coming out of the church. A knot of protestors approached him from a police barrier some fifty yards away. As he saw me, his face tensed.
“People want to help any way they can. Paint over the bullet holes, build a new facade,” he said. “They don’t like to look at this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m afraid there’s still an active investigation going on.”
He took in a breath. “I keep playing it over in my mind. Whoever did this had a clear shot. I was standing right there, Lieutenant. More in the line of fire than Tasha. If someone was trying to hurt someone, why didn’t they hurt me?”
Winslow knelt down and picked up a pink butterfly hair clip from the ground. “I read somewhere, Lieutenant, that ‘courage abounds where guilt and rage run free.’ ”
Winslow was taking this hard. I felt sorry for him; I liked him. He managed a tight smile. “It’ll take more than this bastard to ruin our work. We won’t fold. We’ll have Tasha’s service here, in this church.”
“We were headed to pay our respects,” I said.
“They live over there. Building A.” He pointed toward the projects. “I guess you’ll find a warm reception, given that there’s some of your own.”
I looked at him, puzzled. “I’m sorry? What was that?”
“Didn’t you know, Lieutenant? Tasha Catchings’s uncle is a city cop.”
Chapter 10
I VISITED THE CATCHINGS’S apartment, paid my respects, then I headed back to the Hall. This whole thing was incredibly depressing.
“Mercer’s looking for you,” hollered Karen, our long-time civilian secretary, as I got into the office. “He sounds mad. Of course, he always sounds mad.”