2nd Chance (Women's Murder Club 2)

I glanced at my watch and placed a call to Simone Clark in personnel, catching her just as she was preparing to leave. “Simone, I need you to pull a file for me tomorrow.”

“Sure, whose do you need?”

“A cop who retired maybe eight, ten years ago. His name was Edward Chipman.”

“That’s a while back. It would be out on the docks.” The department outsourced its old records to a document storage company. “Early afternoon, okay?”

“Sure, Simone. Best you can do.”

I was s

till bristling with nervous energy. I took out another stack of Kirkwood’s hate files and plopped them on my desk.

I opened one at random. Americans for Constitutional Action… Ploughs and Fifes, another hayseed militia group. All these assholes, they seemed like such a bunch of right-wing jerk-offs. Was I wasting my time? Nothing jumped out. Nothing gave me any hope that this was the right track.

Go home, Lindsay, a voice urged. Tomorrow new leads might develop. There’s the van, Chipman’s file… Call it a night. Take Martha for a run.

Go home…

I stacked the files, about to give in, when the top one caught my eye. The Templars. A Hells Angels offshoot out of Vallejo. The original Templars were Christian knights from the Crusades. Immediately, I noticed the FBI’s assessment of threat. Their rating was High.

I took the file off the pile and leafed further in. There was an FBI report outlining a series of unsolved felonies the Templars had been suspected of involvement in, bank robberies, hits for hire against Latino and black gangs.

I leafed on, case files, prison records, surveillance photos of the group. Suddenly, the breath emptied out of my lungs.

My eyes fixed on a surveillance shot: a bunch of heavy, muscled, tattoo-covered bikers huddled outside a Vallejo bar they used as a headquarters. One of them hunched over his bike, back to the camera. He had a shaved head, a bandanna, and a sleeveless denim jacket over massive arms.

It was the embroidery on the back of the denim jacket that caught my eye.

I was staring at a two-headed lion with the tail of a snake.

Chapter 25

SOUTH OF MARKET, in a run-down warehouse section of the city, a man in a green windbreaker ducked along a shadowy curb. The killer.

This time of night, in this decrepit neighborhood, no one was around, only a couple of scum-bums huddled over a blazing trash can. Abandoned warehouses, daytime businesses with shorted-out electrical signs: CHECKS CASHED TODAY… METAL WORKS… EARL KING, CITY’S MOST TRUSTED BAIL BONDSMAN.

His eyes drifted across the street, toward Seventh, to the dilapidated shell of an abandoned residential hotel: 303. He had carefully staked the place out over the past three weeks. Half the apartments were vacant, the other half the nightly resting place for homeless bums with nowhere else to go.

Spitting onto the trash-littered street, he threw a black Adidas sport bag over his shoulder and headed around the block onto Sixth and Townsend. He crossed the dingy street toward a boarded-up warehouse marked only by a scratched-out sign: AGUELLO’S… COMIDAS ESPANOL.

Making sure he was alone, the killer pushed in the paint-chipped metal door, then he ducked inside. His heart was starting to pump pretty good now. He was addicted to the feeling, actually.

A foul odor met him in the lobby, a firetrap that was littered with old newspapers and oily corrugated boxes. He hit the stairs, hoping not to run into any of the homeless scum camped out in the halls.

He climbed all the way to five, where he quickly made his way to the end of the hall. He pushed through a grating and stepped out onto the fire escape. From there, it was only a quick flight up to the roof.

Up here, the desolate streets gave way to the luminous aura of the city’s skyline. His position was in the shadow of the Bay Bridge, which loomed over him like a hulking ship. He rested the black sport bag on an air-conditioning vent, unzipped it, and carefully removed the parts of a customized PSG-1 sniper rifle.

At the church, I needed maximum saturation. Here I only get one shot.

As traffic rumbled over him on the Bay Bridge freeway, he screwed the long barrel of the rifle to the shaft and locked it in place. Handling guns was like handling a fork and knife to him. He could do this in his sleep.

He fastened on the infrared sight. He squinted through it, amber-colored shapes coming into focus.

He was so much smarter than them. While they were looking for white vans and silly-ass symbols, he was here, about to blow the lid wide open. Tonight, they would finally begin to understand.

His heart slowed as he aimed across the street, at the rear of the transient hotel marked 303. On the fourth floor, a dimly lit apartment shone through the window.