Unlucky 13(34)

The case was open. The money was gone and a note had been left inside it. Block letters on lined paper.

NO POLICE, REMEMBER? KA-BOOM.

Two cops went to the basement and returned a minute later. They had found that the basement door that opened out to the parking lot was unlocked and that the basement itself was shared by the bakery next door.

Conklin and I exited Barney’s by the front door and then entered the Frosted Fool Bakery next door, where a browsing crowd of shoppers checked out the glass cases and stood in line with numbers in their hands. I fetched the owner from the kitchen and invited the customers to leave. Then I turned the sign on the door to closed while Conklin gathered the salespeople together for questioning.

We interviewed the owner and the three salespeople who’d been behind the counters all morning.

All four agreed. No suspicious customers had been seen in the Frosted Fool. However, they did say that the basement door they shared with the defunct Barney’s was left unlocked during the day for deliveries and garbage removal.

Undoubtedly that basement door was used by the unknown subject who had taken the four packets of cash totaling a hundred grand.

And the game was still on. As the bomber had told Michael Jansing, he was enjoying himself immensely.

That’s when a soft ka-boom went off in my mind.

But was it already too late?

I dashed out to our car and yelled into the radio: “All units to the corner of East Twelfth and Thirty-fifth. Now!”

Three minutes later, we converged on Chuck’s Prime two blocks northeast of San Leandro Street, where grass-fed Chuckburgers were being served by fresh-faced guys and gals in cowboy outfits, every one of them looking too innocent to be real.

In my mind, every employee was a suspect and every customer was a potential victim. Maybe there was a bomb under the broiler lamps now. Or maybe a ticking hamburger had just been served.

There was no time for finesse.

I stood with Conklin and a squad of armed cops at my back and yelled, “SFPD. Everybody stop eating! Put down those hamburgers! Now!”





CHAPTER 43


CINDY HAD LOCKED her office door at the Chronicle and was high on extra-sweet coffee, as she liked to be, working a newly hatched Mackie Morales angle, when Claire called her to ask, “Cin? You on tonight? Susie says that laughter and jerked pork are on the menu.”

Cindy said, “Yeah, of course. Wouldn’t miss it.”

She signed off, but her thoughts took a sharp turn toward Susie’s Café, which is where she’d met Mackie Morales in the flesh. The memory was indelible, and sometimes when it came over her, she couldn’t block it.

She had been at Susie’s with the girls, at their regular table in the back, where she, Claire, Lindsay, and Yuki met just about every week.

Mackie had been working her role as squad assistant at the Southern Station Homicide squad, and Lindsay had invited her to Susie’s. It was nice of Lindsay to bring Mackie to their clubhouse, and Cindy had thought Mackie was upbeat, bright, a cute person. It still amazed her how wrong she and innumerable top law enforcement officers had been about her.

That time at Susie’s, Mackie had been in the ladies’ room when Richie showed up at their table, uninvited. He was frustrated and had made the rash decision to bring their increasingly stormy relationship issues to her girls.

He was in mid-rant about what he needed and wasn’t getting when Mackie came back from the restroom. She sat down, became uncomfortable in the middle of this inappropriate conversation, and almost immediately made an excuse to leave the café, saying she had to go home to her child.

Cindy and Richie had continued squabbling at the table, and after too much of that, they’d taken their fight outside and had broken off their engagement on Jackson Street, shouting at each other in the rain.

How long had it taken Richie and Mackie to hook up after that?

Cindy didn’t know and it didn’t matter now.

What mattered was that she locate Morales, help bring her down, and then give Henry Tyler a story the Chronicle readers would never forget.

To that end, she called Captain Lawrence, her police contact in Wisconsin, to ask him about Randy Fish’s father, Bill, who had owned the green house near Lake Michigan.

Captain Lawrence picked up his phone on the first ring. She could tell he liked her now, and as long as he didn’t break the law, he was willing and even happy to help her.

She asked, “Pat, do you know Bill Fish’s wife’s name and her last known address?”

“Her name was Erica Williams before she married Fish. I think she was from Honolulu but I don’t know for sure. As to where she is now? I don’t even know if she’s in the United States. She was so ashamed of Randy. She couldn’t hold her head up. After Bill died, she had a tag sale. Sold most of her things and then just took off.”