The 19th Christmas (Women's Murder Club #19)(58)

The lights were on. The hardwood floors gleamed. The white walls were hung with large, framed graphics, and a Christmas tree twinkled in a corner of the sparsely furnished reception area.

Ahead of us, against the far wall, was an unoccupied reception desk festooned with pin lights. Beside the desk, a short staircase and a wheelchair ramp led to an elevator bank.

To our left was a wooden interior door. I tried the handle but the door was locked. Across the room on our right was an identical door—ajar, as if it had been opened in a hurry and not pulled shut.

I phoned Brady and got him. I said, “There’s a gunshot fatality outside the south side entrance to Building Three.”

“Noted. What else have you got?” I told him I thought that the shooter was inside the building, that he wasn’t alone, that the building had to be evacuated and a perimeter set up around the murder scene.

“Conklin and I are inside the building, going after the shooter. We need backup.”

I clicked off, and moments later a bullhorn cleared its throat with an electronic squeal and a voice announced, “This is SFPD. We need everyone to evacuate the building right now. Use the front entrance only. Repeat, evacuate through the front entrance only and go to the main parking lot, where you will receive instructions. Thank you.”

Conklin and I blocked the shattered side entrance to protect the murder scene. At the same time, we had a clear view of the large, open lobby. Workers appeared, young people in ones and twos, speaking excitedly into their phones, pouring down the stairs from the elevator bank, threading around coworkers, heading toward the main exit.

I searched the faces of every person coming into the reception area.

If my gut was right and Loman was here, he was wearing a khaki Windbreaker and trousers and maybe a billed cap. He’d been herding a silver-haired guy in a black baseball jacket with the BlackStar logo on the back.

Richie said, “Old guy in blue boiler suit at two o’clock.”

The man crossing the lobby was wearing dark-blue workman’s coveralls. He was balding and paunchy, and he avoided looking at me as he headed for the front doors.

That was him, the man in the photo on Jacobi’s phone.

Rich yelled out, “You! In the coveralls. Stop. We need to talk to you.”

Coveralls said, “Me? Sure. No problem.”

Conklin shouted, “Keep your hands where we can see them!”

The subject said, “I work here. I’ve got ID.”

His hand darted into his coveralls.

Rich and I yelled in unison, “Hands in the air!”

But the man in blue pulled a gun and, gripping it with both hands, aimed it at us.

“Talk to this,” he yelled.

We were fifteen feet away from him, but the lobby was swarming with panicked human obstacles who were running between us and the man and his gun as they streamed toward the exit.

We didn’t have a clear shot, and neither did Loman.

A young man racing for the doors slammed into Loman’s back and shoulder. Loman spun, staggered, then caught himself. He whipped around toward the young man who’d run into him and who was now sputtering apologies as he backed away.

Loman had shifted his eyes away from us. We were closing in on him when the front doors exploded inward and the reception area filled with a dozen SWAT team commandos, fully armed. Terrified BlackStar employees tried to break around the men in black, but the exit was now blocked.

Conklin and I reached Loman in two strides, and I saw his expression change as his mood went from defiance to defeat. There was no way out alive. He was done.

His gun clattered to the floor. He raised his hands high over his head and shouted at us, “Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot!”

We threw him to the floor, and not too gently.

I cuffed him behind his back, and my partner patted him down. Loman was packing a roll of duct tape in a hip pocket and had no wallet or ID, no other weapons.

Conklin and I dragged Loman to his feet, and still high on adrenaline overload, I arrested him on suspicion of murder and read him his rights. Conklin bagged his gun and handed him off to the SWAT commander, Lieutenant Reg Covington, who grinned at us, then marched our prisoner out to the van.

Conklin’s hands were shaking.

I, too, was shaken. And I still had a question.

“Rich, that is Loman, right?”

“Yeah,” he said. “We got him.”





CHAPTER 86





ONCE THE FEISTY man in the blue coveralls was inside a squad car heading to the Hall of Justice, Conklin and I, along with a dozen other cops, searched the four-story building for two men: the silver-haired man wearing a BlackStar jacket and the janitor whose uniform Loman was wearing.

We found a brown-haired man inside a supply closet, tied up with strips of undershirt and gagged with his boxers.

When he was unbound and ungagged, he thanked us and told us his name was Steven Kelly. He was in his mid-forties and had been working at BlackStar in janitorial services for five years. When he was partially dressed in the baggy trousers his captor had left behind, he said, “The guy who made me strip held a gun on Mr. Bavar. He made Mr. Bavar tie me up.”

I said, “Mr. David Bavar? Head of BlackStar?”

“That’s him,” Kelly said. “The boss of bosses. This is his company.”

Kelly walked us to a nearby conference room and pointed out the portrait of David Bavar, founder and CEO of BlackStar VR. That was him, the silver-haired man I’d seen walking between Loman and the tall man wearing the satin baseball jacket.