“What I want to stress,” the chief of police declared, “is that under no circumstance will we permit this city to be terrorized by racial attack. . . .”

  This city. He spat. What do you know about this city? You don’t belong here.

  He clutched at a C-1 grenade in his jacket pocket. If he wanted to, he could blow everything open right here. Right now.

  But there was work to do.

  Tomorrow.

  He was going for another personal record.

  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.

  “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 Iiked 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 longtime civilian secretary, as I got into the office. “He sounds mad. Of course, he always sounds mad.”

  I could imagine the folds under the chief’s jaw getting even deeper with the afternoon headline. In fact, the entire Hall was buzzing with the news that the La Salle Heights murder victim had been related to one of our own.

  There were several other messages waiting for me on my desk. At the bottom of the pile I came across Claire’s name. Tasha Catchings’s autopsy should be finished by now. I wanted to hold off on Mercer until I had something concrete to report, so I called Claire.

  Claire Washburn was the sharpest, brightest, most thorough M.E. the city ever had, notwithstanding the fact that she also happened to be my closest friend. Everyone associated with law enforcement knew it, and that she ran the department without a hitch while Chief Coroner Righetti, the mayor’s stiff-suited appointee, traveled around the country to forensic conferences working on his political résumé. You wanted something done in the M.E.’s office, you called Claire.

  And when I needed someone to set me straight, make me laugh, or just be there to listen, that’s where I went, too.

  “Where you been hiding, baby?” Claire greeted me with her always upbeat voice, which had the ring of polished brass.

  “Normal routine.” I shrugged. “Staff appraisals, case write-ups . . . city-dividing, racially motivated homicides . . .”

  “Just my region of expertise.” She chuckled. “I knew I’d be hearing from you. My spies tell me you’ve got yourself a bitch of a case out there.”

  “Any of those spies maybe work for the Chronicle and drive a beat-up silver Mazda?”

  “Or the D.A.’s office, and a BMW five-thirty-five. How the hell do you think information ever gets down here, anyway?”

  “Well, here’s one, Claire. Turns out the dead little girl’s uncle is in uniform. He’s at Northern. And the poor kid ends up being a poster child for the La Salle Heights project in action. Top-of-the-line student, never once in trouble. Some justice, huh? This bastard leaves a hundred slugs in the church and the one that hits finds its way into her.”

  “Uh-uh, honey.” Claire cut me off. “There were two of them in there.”

  “Two . . . ? She was hit twice?” EMS had been all over the body. How could we have failed to catch that?

  “If I’m hearing you right, my guess is you think this shot was some kind of accident.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Honey,” Claire said soberly, “I think you better come on down for a visit.”

  Chapter 11

  THE MORGUE was on the ground floor of the Hall, out a back entrance and accessible from an asphalt path that led from the lobby. It took me no more than three minutes to rush down two flights of stairs.

  Claire met me in the reception area outside her office. Her bright and usually cheery face bore a look of professional concern, but as soon as she saw me, she eased into a smile and gave me a hug.

  “How you been, stranger?” she asked, as if the case were a million miles away.

  Claire always had a way of defusing the tension in even the most critical of situations. I’d always admired how she could relax my single-minded focus with just a smile.

  “I’ve been good, Claire. Just swamped since I got the job.”

  “I don’t get to see you much now that you’re Mercer’s pet butt-boy.”

  “Very funny.”

  She smiled that coy, wide-eyed smirk of hers that was partly, Hey, I know what you mean, but maybe a lot more, You gotta make the time, girl, for those who love you. But without as much as a reproving word, she led me down an antiseptic, linoleum-tiled hallway toward the morgue’s operating room, called the Vault.

  She glanced behind and said, “You made it sound like you were sure Tasha Catchings was killed by a stray bullet.”

  “That’s what I thought. The gunman fired three clips at the church and she was the only one hit. I even went and cased the area where the shots came from. There was no way he had anything even close to a clean shot. But you said two. . . .”

  “Uh-huh.” She nodded. We burst through a closed compression door into the dry, cold air of the Vault. The icy chill and chemical smell always made my skin crawl.

  And it was no different now. A single inhabited gurney was visible from its refrigerated vault. A small mound was on it, covered by a white sheet. It barely filled half the length of the gurney.

  “Hold on,” Claire warned. Naked post-op victims, rigid and terrifyingly pale, were never an easy sight.

  She pulled down the sheet. The child’s face shot into my view. God, she was young. . . .

  I looked at her soft ebony skin, so innocent, so out of place against the cold, clinical surroundings. Part of me wanted to just reach out and lay a hand against her cheek. She had such a lovable face.

  A large puncture wound, freshly cleaned of blood, tore up the flesh around the child’s right chest. “Two bullets,” Claire explained, “basically right on top of each other, in rapid succession. I could see why EMS might’ve missed it. They almost tore through the same hole.”

  I sucked in a horrific double take. A fit of nausea gripped at my gut.

  “The first one exited right through her scapula,” Claire went on, easing the tiny body over on its side. “The second bounced off the fourth vertebra and lodged in her spine.”

  Claire reached over and picked up a glass petri dish resting on a nearby counter. With a tweezer, she held up a flattened lead disk about the size of a quarter. “Two shots, Linds . . . The first tore through the right ventricle, doing the trick. She was probably dead before this one even struck.”

  Two shots . . . two one-in-a-million ricochets? I replayed the likely position of Tasha as she exited the church and the killer’s line of fire in the woods. One seemed plausible, but two . . .

  “Did Charlie Clapper’s crew find any bullet nicks in the church above where the girl was positioned?” Claire inquired.

  “I don’t know.” It was standard procedure in all homicides to painstakingly match up all bullets with their marks. “I’ll check.”

  “What was the church constructed of where she was hit? Wood or stone?”

  “Wood,” I said, realizing where she was heading. No way wood on its own would deflect a bullet from an M16.

  Claire pushed her operating glasses high on her forehead. She had a cheery, amiable face, but when she was certain, as she was now, it had a glow of conviction that admitted no doubt. “Lindsay, the angle of entry is frontal and clean for both shots. A ricocheting shell would likely have come in from a different trajectory.”

  “I went over every inch of the shooter’s position, Claire. The way he was firing, he’d have to be a goddamn sharpshooter to set up that shot.”

  “You say the fire was sprayed irregularly across the side of the church.”

  “In a steady pattern, right to left. And Claire, no one else was struck. A hundred shots, she was the only one hit.”

  “So you assumed this was a tragic accident, right?” Claire peeled off her plastic medical gloves and tossed them deftly into a waste receptacle. “Well, these two were no accident at all. They didn’t ricochet off of anything. They were straight and perfectly placed. Killed her instantly. You willing to consider the possibility that maybe your gunman hit exactly what he was aiming at?”

  I brought back the scene in my mind. “He would have only had an instant to line up such a shot, Claire. And only a foot or two of clearance from the wall to squeeze it in.”

  “Then either God didn’t smile on that poor girl last night,” Claire said with a sympathetic sigh, “or you better start looking for one hell of a shooter.”

  Chapter 12

  THE SHOCKING POSSIBILITY that Tasha Catchings might not have been a random victim after all dogged me all the way back to the office. Upstairs, I ran into a wall of detectives anxiously awaiting me. Lorraine Stafford informed me there was a positive from the auto search, a ’94 Dodge Caravan reported stolen three days ago down the peninsula in Mountain View. I told her to see if any of the characteristics matched.

  I grabbed Jacobi and told him to wrap up his bagel and come with me.

  “Where we headed?” he groaned.

  “Across the bay. Oakland.”

  “Mercer’s still looking for you,” Karen shouted as we hit the hall. “Whaddaya want me to say?”

  “Tell him I’m investigating a murder.”

  Twenty minutes later, we had crossed the Bay Bridge, woven through the drab, antiquated skyline that was downtown Oakland, and pulled up in front of the Police Administration Building on Seventh. Oakland’s police headquarters was a short gray panel-and-glass building in the impersonal style of the early sixties. On the second floor was Homicide, a cramped, dreary office no larger than our own. Over the years, I’d been here a few times.

  Lieutenant Ron Vandervellen stood up to greet us as we were led into his office. “Hey, I hear congratulations are in order, Boxer. Welcome to the world of sedentary life.”

  “I wish, Ron,” I replied.

  “What brings you here? You looking to check out how the real world works?”

  For years, the San Francisco and Oakland homicide departments had maintained a kind of friendly rivalry, they believing all we dealt with across the bay was the occasional computer parts salesman found naked and dead in his hotel room.

  “I saw you on the news last night.” Vandervellen cackled. “Very photogenic. I mean her. . . .” He grinned at Jacobi. “What brings you celebrities out here?”

  “A little bird named Chipman,” I replied. Estelle Chipman was the elderly black woman Cindy told me had been found hung in her basement.

  He shrugged. “I got a hundred unsolved murders if you guys don’t have enough to keep you busy.”

  I was used to the Vandervellen barbs, but this time he sounded particularly edgy. “No agenda, Ron. I just want to look at the crime scene, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, but I think it’s gonna be tough to tie it into your church shooting.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  The Oakland lieutenant got up, went out into the outer office, and came back with a case file. “I guess I’m having a hard time putting together how a homicide as obviously racially motivated as yours could be committed by one of their own.”

  “What are you saying?” I asked. “Estelle Chipman’s killer was black?”

  He donned a pair of reading glasses, leafed through the file until he came to an official document marked “Alameda County Coroner’s Report.”

  “Read it and weep,” he muttered. “If you’d called, I could’ve saved you the toll. . . . ‘Dermal specimens found under the victim’s fingernails suggest a hyperpigmented dermis consistent with a non-Caucasian.’ Slides are out being tested as we speak.”

  “You still want to check out the site?” Vandervellen asked, seemingly enjoying the moment.

  “You mind? We’re already here.”

  “Sure, yeah, be my guest. It’s Krimpman’s case, but he’s out. I can take you through. I don’t get out to the Gus White projects much anymore. Who knows? Riding with you two supercops, I might pick something up along the way.”

  Chapter 13

  THE GUSTAVE WHITE PROJECTS were six identical redbrick high-rises on Redmond Street in West Oakland. As we pulled up, Vandervellen said, “Didn’t make much sense. . . . The poor woman wasn’t ill, seemed to have okay finances, even went to church twice a week. But sometimes people just give up. Until the autopsy, it looked legit.”

  I recalled the case file: There were no witnesses, no one had heard any screams, no one saw anybody running away. Only an elderly woman who kept to herself, found hanging from a steam pipe in the basement, her neck at a right angle and her tongue protruding.

  At the projects, we walked right into Building C. “Elevator’s on the fritz,” Vandervellen said. We took the stairs down. In the graffiti-marked basement, we came upon a hand-painted sign that read, “Laundry Room—Boiler Room.”

  “Found her in here.”

  The basement room was still criss-crossed with yellow crime scene tape. A pungent, rancid odor filled the air. Graffiti was everywhere. Anything that had been here—the body, the electrical wire she was hung with—had already been taken to the morgue or entered into evidence.

  “I don’t know what you’re looking to find,” Vandervellen said with a shrug.

  “I don’t know either.” I swallowed. “It happened late last Saturday night?”

  “Coroner figures around ten. We thought maybe the old lady came down to do her laundry, that someone surprised her. Janitor found her the next morning.”

  “What about security cameras?” Jacobi asked. “They were all over the lobby and the halls.”

  “Same as the elevator—broken.” Vandervellen shrugged again.

  It was clear Vandervellen and Jacobi wanted to head out as quickly as possible, but something pulled at me to stay. For what? I had no idea. But my senses were buzzing. Find me . . . over here.

  “The race thing aside,” Vandervellen said, “if you’re looking for a connection, I’m sure you know how unusual it is for a killer to switch methods in the midst of a spree.”

  “Thanks,” I snapped back. I had scanned the room; nothing jumped at me. Just the feeling. “Guess we’ll have to solve this one on our own. Who knows? By now maybe something’s popped up on our side of the pond.”