10th Anniversary (Women's Murder Club 10)

“Or — what if it was the other way around?”

“You think Lafferty was the shooter?”

“It’s not so crazy, Paul. I want to talk to you about that contract killer. Gregor Guzman.”

Chi just shook his head and sighed.

“Doggedness suits you, Lindsay. Okay, what do you want to know about Gregor Guzman?”

“Tell me everything you’ve got.”

Chapter 57

AS CHI TAPPED on the computer keyboard, he told me, “Eleven hits are attributed to Guzman — that’s eleven unsolved that match his MO.”

I scooted the chair so close to Chi’s desk, I could see my reflection in the monitor.

“It’s a very elegant MO,” Chi was saying. “First, he’s stealthy. He’s never seen and he leaves no evidence. Two, he always uses a twenty-two and his kill shots are head shots. His first shot does the job. His second shot is almost on top of the first. I’d say that second shot is just for insurance. He’s a hell of a marksman.”

“Dennis Martin took two shots to the chest.”

“That’s correct.”

Chi hit some keys on his computer and brought up a series of photos of the elusive hit man. The first was a grainy black-and-white still shot that had been lifted from a video of a man leaving Circus Circus, the famous casino in Vegas.

The next photo was of a balding man in a car, taken by a tollbooth surveillance cam outside of Bogotá.

The third picture was of possibly the same man in a dark suit, standing beside an advertising kiosk, watching the crowd enter a public building. The picture was titled, “Lincoln Center, New York.”

The last picture was the money shot.

It was taken at night with a long lens pointed at the passenger-side window of a dark SUV, time-dated September 1 of last year. Candace Martin was in profile in the passenger’s seat. The way her hair fell obscured part of her face.

Next to her in the driver’s seat was a balding man who had turned to face her. His features were difficult to make out because of the shadow inside the car’s interior.

It was hard to say if the man pictured was Gregor Guzman or even if the woman in the passenger seat was Candace Martin.

“How sure are you that this man is Guzman?” I asked Chi.

“All pictures of Guzman are educated guesswork. We have no official photos to compare them to, but the face-recognition software found an eighty-three percent correlation between the four photos I just showed you.”

“Paul, if your case hung on this picture in the SUV, Candace Martin would walk.”

“The DA wanted to use it. It shows premeditation. I gotta admit something to you, Lindsay.”

“I’m right here, Paul. And I’m listening.”

“Apart from this piece-a-crap picture with Candace Martin, no one in law enforcement has reported seeing Gregor Guzman in the past three years. Who knows if he’s even alive?”

Chapter 58

CINDY STOOD AT the windy corner of Turk and Jones just before six that evening. The Tenderloin was a rough neighborhood, arguably the worst in San Francisco.

As a light rain came down, the homeless pulled up their hoodies, hunched over their shopping carts, crouched under the eaves of the rent-by-the-hour Ethel Hotel and Aunt Vicky’s, the down-and-dirty gay bar next to it.

Cindy buttoned her coat and pulled up her collar, staring at the cab company across the street that took up the northeast corner of the intersection. There were two plate-glass windows at the street level, each with a flickering neon sign, one reading QUICK EXPRESS TAXI, the other, CORPORATE ACCOUNTS WELCOME. There was nothing welcoming about that storefront.

Rich had told her to meet him in a coffee shop a couple of doors down, but Cindy couldn’t wait. She called Rich, and when she got his voice mail, she left him a message and then crossed Turk against the light.