The 17th Suspect (Women's Murder Club 17)

“Is this Michael?”

The man at the end of a row of bystanders wore a knit cap and a charcoal-gray ski jacket. His right hand was in his pocket, and he was holding an umbrella handle with his gloveless left hand.

Water dripped from the umbrella spokes.

“Could be him, Boxer. The picture is awful grainy, and it’s hard to really see his face with that hat pulled down over his eyebrows. But I see what you mean.”

I zoomed in on the hand gripping the handle and focused in on the man’s wedding ring.

I said to Richie, “You noticed his ring, right?”

“Silver with gold on the edges.”

“Correct,” I said. “Is this the same ring?”

“It’s possible,” my partner said. “But with this lighting? The shadows, the headlights, a lot of contrast for a phone shot. I want to look at his face again.”

I adjusted the picture on the screen and said, “Well?”

“Let’s go to the videotape,” Rich said.

He went to his desk, picked up the phone, and tapped in a couple of numbers, saying, “Maybe we’ll catch Benny.”

Benny is our interview room AV tech, among other roles.

“Benny,” Conklin said into the mouthpiece. “This is urgent. I need a still shot of the dude Boxer and I just talked to in Interview 1. Find me the best frontal face shot and a profile if you’ve got one. You mind? I’ll wait.”

He hung up and drummed his fingers on the desk.

I knew he and I were both having the same thought. The lab could do a little facial-recognition magic on the two images, compare the Michael Dunn we’d just interviewed with the unknown man under the umbrella on Geary.

While we waited for Benny, I did a database search for everything related to Michael Dunn. I didn’t find much. He had no arrest sheet, no prints on file, not even a traffic violation.

And then I got a hit.

I said, “Holy moly,” and rotated my monitor so Rich could read a line of type in the database. Michael Dunn of Union Street, San Francisco, had a registered 9mm Kimber handgun.

“Good catch,” said Rich.

“Thanks, bud.”

It was a good catch. Michael Dunn had purchased a gun of the same caliber as the one that had killed several homeless people, including Dunn’s mother, Millie Cushing.

The lab had kept the bullets taken from the bodies of Jimmy Dolan, Laura Russell, Lou Doe, and Millie Cushing. Ballistics had logged them all as cold hits. All had been fired from the same gun, a gun that had not been used in a crime or otherwise entered into our system.

It wasn’t a gotcha—yet. But if the mystery man on Geary Street was our Michael Dunn, and he had a weapon that matched the type that had fired bullets into his mother’s body, that would be enough probable cause to arrest him on suspicion of murder.

Had those bullets come from Michael Dunn’s Kimber? We really needed to get his gun.

CHAPTER 85

IT WAS 8:30 A.M. the morning after our interview with Michael Dunn.

Conklin and I sat together in a parked squad car near the intersection of Leidesdorff and Commercial Streets in the Financial District. The Transamerica building was directly behind us, and we were within shouting distance of the red-and-white-brick three-story office building where Dunn worked as a paralegal.

We had confirmation from the lab that the man in our interview room was the same as the one I’d snapped standing across the street from the body of that poor dead woman on Geary.

Michael Dunn hadn’t said a word to us about the scene on Geary. Why wouldn’t he mention that he’d seen the body, as similar as it was to what he now knew about his mother’s death?