21st Birthday (Women's Murder Club #21)(48)
If Berney was right, we were about to confront a crafty killer without probable cause to arrest him. If Evan Burke, aka Jake Winslow, was that killer, he was remarkable for his cold-blooded brutality. He’d murdered his wife, daughter, his son’s wife, child, and lover as well as a few victims who matched his preferred victim profile. Lucas had thought there were more bodies than he knew.
If all of that was true, tonight might be our best chance of capturing a mass murderer of the psychopathic kind. In doing so, we might save untold lives, close cold cases, and overall, feel the deep satisfaction of being a cop.
But it could go wrong and tonight could end in tragedy.
CHAPTER 63
WE STARTED OUR ENGINES and rolled out at 8:15 p.m.
Conklin knew the way, leaving my mind free to picture a dead baby with pale red hair and the bloated, gnawed body of her mother strapped into a red Volvo. I felt Misty Fogarty clinging to me as we’d left the Comfy Corner Diner, four hours before a monster slashed her throat.
I willed Conklin to drive faster. I projected into the near future and saw myself standing with my partner at Evan Burke’s door, hoping he’d put up a fight so we could arrest him for assaulting a police officer. Cuff him. Throw him into the back of the car and then treat him to a marathon interrogation in the box.
“Linds?” Conklin said.
“Hmmm?”
“I asked if you wanted to stop for coffee.”
“No thanks, Rich. Let’s just get there.”
I needed to find out for myself whether Lucas Burke, the man awaiting trial on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice, had been framed by his name-changing, face-changing father who lived in a cabin too remote for even Google Earth to have recorded.
It only took our caravan fifteen minutes to cross the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. Once within the Marin County lines, Brady patched us into his call to Captain Geoffrey Brevoort to let him know that we were in his territory.
“Captain. We have to question a suspect on other homicides. As soon as we have him, we’ll bring you into the loop.”
We exited the highway at 445B, passing the Commodore Dock and a small marina on our right-hand side. About a dozen houseboats were tied up to finger slips and a couple of seaplanes bobbing gently on the water. I didn’t see a cabin cruiser, but I made a mental note. Maybe he’s on it.
For the next several miles, we drove through the pretty, upscale towns of Mill Valley. Our wheels hugged the road as it curved upward, taking us away from genteel civilization toward the deep woods of Mount Tamalpais.
At one point I called Brady and we pulled up on the verge of the paved road, the police van sliding in behind us. We climbed out and leaned against our cars, examined the maps on our phones, and reviewed again the unlit twisting roads and trails that curled around rocky outcroppings and doubled back under the shadow of Mount Tam.
Brady had a collection of drone shots of a cabin presumed to belong to Burke/Winslow. It sat alone in a clearing the size of my fingertip, and in the darkness we would have good cover. There were no other cabins within a quarter mile of Burke’s. We surely would surprise him, and he would agree to come back with us to the Hall. Please, God, without bloodshed. And since I was reaching out to God, I put in another request.
That Evan Burke would say, “You got me. I did it all.”
Brady asked us to run mic checks again. Afterward, we all tightened our vest straps and got back into our vehicles, the van right behind us. As the road climbed, it narrowed, changed from macadam to rutted clay. Tree roots encroached on the dirt roads. It quickly became clear that the van would be unable to negotiate the tree-bound trails. Brady found a better road for the van, but it was a good five minutes from the Burke cabin.
It was the best we could do.
Conklin took a narrow trail on our right, keeping only the parking lights on. Unmarked vehicles were not meant for off-road travel, but surprisingly our tires made good contact with the ruts we were riding. There was one moment of unplanned confusion when our downlights showed our trail diverging into two.
I grabbed the mic and talked to Brady and we decided that Conklin and I would take the right fork; the van would still be within jogging distance of the cabin.
Even with low visibility and little knowledge of the terrain, our plan looked good. We kept driving, startling flapping, scurrying, and leaping creatures as we drove. Conklin made a turn onto a driveway of sorts and we parked there.
We radioed the van, and while waiting for confirmation that they were in place, Conklin and I sized up Burke/Winslow’s house and grounds.
CHAPTER 64
THE CABIN WAS CENTERED in a weedy clearing encircled by a half dozen trees of various types and heights. A toolshed stood off to one side.
Small, approximately four hundred square feet, too makeshift to be a prefab “tiny house” but could have been built from scratch in a few days by a reasonably handy worker or two.
That might explain why there was no record of this house in the tax rolls, no transfer of title. One day this area had been a clearing, part of state protected lands, a few days later a small corner had been confiscated, unnoticed.
I hoped to see a car with a license plate, but there was none such. But I did see the blue light of a screen, and firelight flickering through the windows.
Someone was home.
I radioed Brady, summarized what we knew and that we were about to make our approach.