20th Victim (Women's Murder Club #20)(26)

Then he put his hands over his eyes and cried.

Joe tried to comfort him, but he was worried. Although he had accepted without question that Dave loved his father, he couldn’t ignore the nagging feeling that had come up almost a week ago when he had gone with Dave to the hospital to see Ray.

Ray had treated Dave like a kid or like an employee, sending him to the cafeteria, ordering him around.

“You told me that you were very close,” Joe said to Ray, carefully steering his friend back to the present. “So what happens to you now?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I’ll sell the place. Move to LA or New York. I’ve been here for so long, mainly to help out my parents. Mom was a buffer between me and Ray.”

“More about that,” Joe said.

“Well, he was bitter at how things turned out. How I turned out. He made unnecessary cracks. Like, ‘Why don’t you run to the store, Dave?’ If he was drinking, he’d tell me that this was God’s punishment for getting Rebecca killed.”

“Oh, Christ, Dave.”

“I’ve forgiven him. I understand his disappointment. I felt the same way about what I did, a line of thought that dead-ends on that damned highway. But, as you know, my dad took care of me, gave me a job … responsibilities. And before I do another thing with my life, I have to get to the truth about why Ray died. I have to square things. If Dr. Murray is killing people, he has to be stopped. He has to pay.”

Joe said, “I want to see Ray’s medical records, the name of the medical examiner, and Ray’s death certificate.”

“I’ve scanned all of that to my laptop. I’ll get it.”

While Dave went for his laptop, Joe used the bathroom. As he ran the water in the sink, he opened the medicine cabinet. Dave had shelves of medications: antidepressants, drugs for pain and sleep. Joe pointed his phone at all of the little bottles and snapped photos. He had an unwelcome suspicion and he had to allow it.

Like himself, Dave was closing in on fifty. Had he tired of being Ray’s disappointing, damaged child? Had he come up with a plan to get away from his father—for good?





CHAPTER 40





THERE WAS AN empty corner office at the end of the fourth-floor corridor that had once belonged to a crooked cop who didn’t need it anymore or ever again.

I told Brady my plan to turn that office into a war room for the Baron case, and he said, “Be my guest.” Then I told him I was going to form a task force with the primaries on the sniper shootings in other cities.

Brady said, “You’re about to learn what it means to herd cats.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a hell yes,” he said.

He took the elevator up to Jacobi’s former office on five and didn’t look back. A half hour later Rich and I had taped up photos of the deceased on the war room walls, our computers had been moved to our new office, and we each had a mug and a thermos full of coffee.

We arranged for a conference call with Detective Richards from Chicago, Detective Noble in LA, Chi and McNeil from out on the street, and Conklin and myself on whatever lines we could grab at that hour, all of us telephonically together at noon.

Richards’s victim was the small smoke shop owner, Albert Roccio. Richards had been miserly with whatever he had gleaned about the shooting, telling us that so far he hadn’t made any progress. Noble had taken the lead in the case of Fred Peavey, killed by a single shot outside his son’s school. He was coming late to his case and had sounded eager to be part of our team.

McNeil and Chi were the lead investigators on Jennings’s assassination at the Duboce Avenue Taco King.

Jennings, the first to die, had been shot from a distance through his windshield. His rear window had been marked with the word Rehearsal, written with a finger in the dust on the window. However, Jennings had been shot slightly later than 8:30, like the other victims. It was unclear whether Jennings was part of the same collection of executed drug dealers.

Conklin and I were under the most pressure. Paul and Ramona Baron, unlike the other victims, were well known and had a fan base of rich and influential citizens. Those friends were talking to the press and clogging the mayor’s phone lines with demands for an arrest of the killer or killers, pronto.

I thought Brady was right that egos would be involved in this task force, but I also believed that to varying degrees the “cats” wanted to be herded if it would result in closing their cases.

Rich and I had an immediate and specific goal.

At one o’clock we’d be meeting with Miranda White Barkley and her attorney, who would be pushing to get his client released and had a fair chance of getting his way. We had no evidence that Randi had participated in the murders.

Still holding her as a material witness, we would have to release her at 2:00. I hoped that by the time the conference call ended, we’d have the leverage we needed to get Randi to talk.

I wasn’t just hopeful, I was damned-well determined.





CHAPTER 41





TED SWANSON’S FORMER office had been cleaned, but no flowery air freshener could eradicate the stink of that dirty cop who’d cost the lives of eighteen people.

He was at Chino for life, but that was old stinking news.

I closed the door to our new war room, with its large gray desk and two phone consoles, and my partner and I booted up our laptops.