The 20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(11)

But I knew that by taking Cindy up on this offer, I was essentially giving her a green light to grill me for twenty-five minutes in the car.

She was going to be disappointed.

“Fine, Cindy. Thanks.”

An attractive man elbowed his way through the gathering crowd toward me. He was about thirty, was wearing expensive, classic-cut clothes, and had the intensity of a reporter hot on a scoop. He pushed past Cindy, interrupting us to say, “Sergeant, I’m Jeb McGowan from the Chronicle. Can you tell us what happened here?”

Cindy looked at me, switched her eyes toward McGowan, and gave off a subzero vibe.

“Mr. McGowan? I can’t discuss an investigation in progress.”

“Sergeant, it’s all right. I’m only asking for a quote.”

“Sorry. No can do.”

It hadn’t taken long for news of the Barons’ deaths to get out. A news chopper chattered overhead. An ABC7 News van rolled up the street and stopped at the tape.

Cindy said, “My car’s a block away. Follow me.”

I followed, got into her car, strapped in, and got ready to keep Cindy at arm’s length all the way back to the Hall. In fact, although she huffed and puffed, everything I told Cindy was off the record.

I said that the fatal shootings this morning had added two young orphans to the world, and that we had no suspects or witnesses to the murders. I did not tell her about the probable millions in drugs inside the supply closet. Their value was still to be determined.

My thoughts shifted to what Cindy had told the Women’s Murder Club this morning: That a veteran ballplayer had been shot through his windshield while leaving a Taco King last Friday. That the word Rehearsal had been scrawled on the rear window of the victim’s very expensive vehicle. That anonymous yet reliable sources had reported to Cindy that Jennings had been dealing drugs.

Jennings’s execution was similar in style to the Barons’ murders. Now I wondered if that drive-through murder had been a rehearsal for the killings this morning. Was there a drug connection between Roger Jennings and the Barons?

There was a lot to do before I would have answers.

But this I knew: my long weekend in Napa Valley with Joe seemed so long ago and far away, it might have occurred in a dream.





CHAPTER 19





CONKLIN AND I waited in the little area outside Jacobi’s former office, now Brady’s part-time corner on the fifth floor.

His door was closed and his assistant was at her desk. She looked up and said, “He’ll only be a minute.”

Conklin took chairs for us in a row along the wall and used the time to catch up.

“CPS has the Baron kids, DeeDee and Christopher,” he told me. “Ramona’s sister, Bea, is on a cruise. Her ship docks in Athens in four days, then she’ll fly home, pick them up. Telling her was awful. She refused to believe me, and when she did, the satellite dropped the call. Awful, terrible, painful.”

“Did Gretchen have any ideas who wanted the Barons dead?”

“She said that they had friends and haters, and it was hard to tell the difference.”

“Oh. That’s great.”

Rich took his phone out of his shirt pocket, tapped until his notes came up. He showed me the screen, scrolled down, saying, “Gretchen had a guest list. About a hundred and fifty people attended their movie premiere party last month, not counting the band and the help.”

I scoffed. We both knew we could spend weeks checking alibis from the Barons’ circle of associates and never get a clue. Or we could get too many clues that went nowhere.

I said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky with the neighborhood canvass ….”

Brady opened his door, stuck his head and shoulders out. “Come on in,” he said. “Sit yourselves down.”

The look on his face told me something was up. Conklin and I took seats on the sofa positioned at a right angle to Brady’s desk. I was agitated and tried not to show it.

Brady said, “Clapper found a pill presser in the basement of the Baron house. It was still in a crate. He found hazmat suits, scales, glassine envelopes, a few ounces of product still in shipping envelopes addressed to them. The Barons were about to go big-time in the fentanyl business.”

He got up from his seat, scrunched up the blinds, and looked out at the traffic on Bryant.

I said, “So what are you thinking, Brady?”

“Boxer, don’t worry yourself. You, either, Conklin. The homicide is still your case. I’m worried about the way fentanyl is spreading, mixed into the heroin supply, killing tens of thousands because it’s probably fifty to a hundred times more powerful than morphine, and multiple times stronger than heroin, at a fraction of the price. You know how this works?”

He didn’t wait for us to say.

“You buy it on the dark web, dead cheap with crypto. Middlemen, that is, folks like the Barons, cut it with lactose or something, press it into pills, and mail out little envelopes through the US Postal Service or a courier service. And the customers? They’re caught in the perfect storm between heroin drying up and that nice, cheap opioid high. No needles. Just snort it up and nod off. The more deadly it is, the more they want it.”

Brady had been a narc with the Miami PD. This was hitting him personally.

“That’s all,” Brady said. “Try to get a lead on who killed the Barons. Talk to Chi and McNeil about that baseball guy who got killed last week. See if there’s a link.”