“And here’s what else is strange, Frank. With all the publicity this case has generated, no one is banging at our door asking, Is my daughter one of those victims?”
“That is remarkable,” Frank said.
“We’re going to close this case. We’re determined to do it. But the real pressure inside the SFPD is about the shooter cop.”
Frank sighed, ran his hands through his hair, said again, “Oh, man.”
I wasn’t deterred. I brought him up to date on the shooter cop’s activities.
“The shooter killed three drug dealers on a back road —”
“And torched their car.”
“Right. Two days after that, he killed a dealer in a shopping-center parking lot.”
“I read that. You’re sure it was the same shooter?”
“The ballistics matched to another of our stolen guns.
What you didn’t read is that Jackson Brady thinks Jacobi is the shooter.”
“Come on. Brady believes that?”
“Conklin and I were assigned to tail Jacobi, and he caught us sitting outside his house. Now Jacobi hates me. And we’re no closer to finding a killer who has probably worked himself up and is ready to kill again.”
Frank told me not to put too much pressure on myself, said that stress wasn’t good for the baby.
“Maybe you should take yourself off the case.”
“I can’t, Frank. I just can’t.”
He nodded, told me that I could call him day or night if I needed him. I thanked him, and then he asked if we could go to my desk so he could use my computer.
“I’m expecting a big document by e-mail,” he told me. “It’s waiting for me in the cloud. Do you know what that is?”
I smiled, said, “It’s a public server. Do you have an access code?”
“I wrote it on the inside of my eyeglass case.”
“Come with me,” I said.
I gave my chair to Frank and made fresh coffee as he did his work. When he’d put his reading glasses back in his jacket pocket, I walked him out and thanked him for his help with Constance Kerr.
“Any time. Take care, Lindsay. I mean it.”
I returned to my computer and went to open what I expected to be an avalanche of mail that had come in over the last few hours.
When I touched the mouse, the screen lit up, and instead of my usual desktop screen, a document I’d never seen before appeared. It took me a moment to figure out that it was the personnel file of a cop, William Randall. I knew his name, but I didn’t know much about him.
Frank Cisco, either accidentally or on purpose, had left this document for me to read. Or maybe Dr. Freud had made him do it.
I saved Sergeant William Randall’s file to my computer and went looking for Conklin.
Chapter 83
“OKAY, LET’S HAVE the whole story,” Brady said to me and my partner. We were in Brady’s office with the door closed and the blinds down. Brady was both aggravated with us and hopeful we’d gotten a new angle on the case. He didn’t sit down.
“How’d you hear this about Randall?”