The 20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(78)

Joe and Dave laughed for a good long time. And then Dave said, “What a day. I wish I could tell my dad. He went crazy with happiness seeing the two of us together again, Joe. Have I thanked you lately?”

“Yeah. You have. And thank you, Dave.”

“For what?”

“For believing in me.”





CHAPTER 114





MIKE STEMPIEN WAS in his office at the Hall, remotely hacking into Randi Barkley’s computer.

Randi wasn’t online, but Leonard Barkley had just signed on from a new location near his house. Piggybacking onto Barkley’s screen name, Stempien followed Barkley from his IP address at his new location on Thornton Avenue to an internet café in Gotland to a private home in Budapest to a travel agency in Medellín, working his way layer by layer, ever deeper into the onion layers of the dark web.

He had a pretty good idea that the final location would be Moving Targets. This time Barkley would be his unknowing tour guide.

Stempien wasn’t wrong.

After virtually hopscotching around the globe, he watched as Moving Targets’ front page slowly came up on his screen, like an image taking form on old-fashioned photo paper inside a tray of fixer.

In the center of the screen was the wheel of fortune. To the left side was a map of the USA with blinking pin lights marking Detroit and Miami and San Francisco.

Stempien thought those cities were the locations of upcoming hits. “It’s part of the Moving Targets program,” he said. “Go time, Zero-eight-thirty.”

He homed in on the winking city lights and took a series of screen shots, planning to enlarge them later. He might be able to decode names or addresses. He made a mental note that Barkley hadn’t spun the wheel.

What Barkley did instead was jump into the chat room, where, using the screen name Kill Shot, he typed, I’m here.

Screen names joined Kill Shot in the chat room, and rolling lines of applauding emoticons, yahoos, and fireworks burst onto the screen.

Fellow players urged him to talk, virtually chanting, Kill Shot. Kill Shot. Kill Shot.

Tell us about it, Kill Shot. Everything.

Stempien picked up his cell phone and called Brady.

“Lieutenant, this is Mike Stempien with a red alert. I have a physical location on Barkley …. Yeah. San Francisco, 430 Thornton. Right now.”





CHAPTER 115





IT WAS NEARLY six in the evening when Conklin and I arrived at Silver Terrace.

A uniform standing beside his cruiser at the top of Apollo told us to park in front of the green house, one of dozens just like it, stairstepped down both sides of the sloping avenue.

Conklin drove us down the hill, passing the herd of black armored SWAT and FBI vehicles banked at the curb in front of a brown stucco house that Stempien had identified as belonging to Barkley’s Moving Targets comrade Marty Floyd.

We slowed in front of the green house with an overgrown front yard and a stubby, empty driveway and parked as directed. This was the house between the Barkley and Floyd residences, and the interior was dark. The brown house to its left belonged to the Barkleys. Two unoccupied unmarked cars and a cruiser formed a barricade in front of it.

Overhead, an Eyewitness News helicopter chopped at the air, and any minute now the press would attempt to penetrate the scene. They would be barred from this section of the street, but there was every chance that Leonard Barkley would flip the table, set off explosives, and turn this porous residential neighborhood into a shooting gallery.

As I had those thoughts, a pair of black-and-white cruisers parked crosswise on the north and south ends of the 800 block, cordoning off the area, bracketing Floyd’s brown house, Barkley’s brown house, and the green house in between.

The stage was set.

Richie and I were there mainly to arrest Barkley, and I hoped to God that that would happen without anyone firing a shot. I had an edgy feeling, a cross between high anxiety and disbelief. We’d been looking for Barkley so intently, and he had gotten away so many times, that I could hardly accept that he was trapped, that we would be reading him his rights within minutes or hours.

As I mentally prepared for the unknowable, Conklin spoke on the phone with Paul Chi. I picked up that Chi and McNeil were inside the Barkley house with Randi and her personal cop escort, Officer Pat Hudson. That Randi and her husband were separated by one twenty-five-foot-wide front yard had to have been planned.

Conklin hung up from his call with Chi and filled me in on the consensus of the cops inside the Barkley house. Based on Randi’s nothing-to-lose attitude and escape potential, she’d been locked up inside a windowless back room with cops taking shifts at the door.

It was too bad for Barkley that he’d jumped onto Marty Floyd’s computer and logged on to Moving Targets. And I felt bad for Randi, pining for her husband.

But I snapped out of it.

Leonard Barkley didn’t deserve sympathy.

He was the number one suspect in the high-profile killings of Paul and Ramona Baron, and the three men who’d been dropped at the jazz center like puppets with cut strings. And it was entirely possible that Barkley had also shot Roger Jennings and other San Francisco drug dealers we didn’t know were his victims.

Was Barkley in charge of the entire Moving Targets operation? Was he a soldier taking orders? Could he be charged with any of these killings I had just counted up?