Pincus held up three fingers, then turned and marched up the walk to his front door. Was he sticking it to us? I couldn’t tell. When he was inside, I said to Conklin, “Let’s call Cindy.”
Chapter 87
LATER THAT DAY, Conklin, Cindy, and I had MacBain’s Beers O’ the World Pub practically to ourselves. We had a table in the back, a bowl of freeze-dried peanuts, and diet colas all around.
Cindy’s face was flushed, and it had nothing to do with her proximity to my partner.
“You let them go? You didn’t hold them, squeeze them —”
“Sounds like a pop song,” Conklin cracked, and he was so high on Cindy, he actually sang a few lines: “Hold me, squeeze me, never let me go….” But Cindy was not in the mood.
“How can you make fun of me?”
Conklin’s smile dropped. “Cin, we would’ve if we could’ve — but we can’t make an indictable charge. Not yet.”
“But you’re working the case? Swear to God?”
Conklin and I both nodded, Conklin adding, “We are seriously working the case.”
Cindy dropped her head into her hands and groaned. “I put this guy on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. ‘Bagman Jesus, Street Saint.’ And he’s what? Turning teens into drug dealers? And you think that’s why someone killed him? God Almighty. What do I do now?”
“Do what you always do,” I said to my friend. “Run with the truth. And hey, Cindy, this is a better story, right?”
Her eyes got bigger as she saw the size of the headline in her mind. “I can cite reliable sources close to the SFPD?”
“Yes. Sure.”
Conklin paid the tab, and we three left the bar together. Cindy headed back to the Chronicle and an emergency meeting with her boss, and Conklin and I walked over to the Hall.
Back in the gloom of the bull pen, Conklin booted up his Dell. I sorted through the messages that had come in while we were out, found one from St. Jude that Brenda had marked URGENT. I had punched in half of McCorkle’s number when Conklin said, “Unbelievable.”
I stopped dialing. “Whatcha got?”
“Rodney Booker’s van is in impound, Lindsay. The day after he was killed, it was towed from a no-parking zone.”
I called impound, located the car, and put in a rush order to have it brought to the crime lab.
Our dead end had sprung wide open.
And that’s what I shouted over my shoulder to Jacobi, who was advancing on us, breathing fire, as Conklin and I fled the squad room.
Chapter 88
BY SEVEN THAT NIGHT, CSIs were making the most of our warrant to search Booker’s van. The brainiac Brett Feller and his muscular cohort, Ray Bates, had disassembled the blue van into piles of assorted parts. And they’d found Bagman’s bag strapped to the underside of a backseat with a bungee cord.
The two young men weren’t done yet. They unscrewed nuts and bolts and tire rims, hoping for a hidden dope cache or a weapon, but when Conklin and I opened the brown leather mailbag-style pouch and looked inside, I said, “Stand down, guys. This is it.”
I lifted items out of the bag. Conklin laid them out on the light table, and Feller, an intense twenty-four-year-old with a touch of obsessive- compulsive disorder and an eye toward being the next Gil Grissom — for real — lined everything up squarely and took photographs.
My heart was banging ta-dum, ta-dum throughout this process, and frankly I was surprised at my own excitement.
In the past weeks, I had gone in and out of caring about Bagman Jesus. At first I’d written him off as one of the dozens of street people who were killed every year in a dispute over a choice sleeping location or a finger of booze.
By the time Cindy said, “Nobody gives a damn,” I did.
When Bagman Jesus turned out to be a drug dealer, I lost interest again. Now he’d morphed into a predator without conscience, and I was going through Bagman Jesus whiplash.
Who capped this guy?