“A stranger? I don’t see that,” Cindy said. “I wouldn’t let a stranger into my apartment, would you?”
“Okay, I get that,” Conklin said. “But anyway, she’s sitting at the piano. The music covers the sound of the door opening, and this nice, thick carpet absorbs the sound of footsteps.”
“Right,” I agreed.
“Is that her handbag?” Cindy asked.
A woman’s shiny black purse rested on a slipper chair. I opened it, took out the wallet, showed Conklin the wad of twenties and a full deck of credit cards.
“So there goes the robbery theory,” I said.
“I was there when one of those dogs was found,” Cindy said, sketching in the story.
Rich shook his head, hair swinging in front of his eyes. “Sign of a potential psycho killer escalating to . . . this? Talk about overkill. So on the one hand we have the beating and the trashing of the piano. But why bother with the gas?”
“He either wanted to make sure she was discovered,” I said, “or he wanted to make sure she was dead.” I looked at Cindy. “Not one word of this in the Chronicle.”
Chapter 71
YUKI COULDN’T STOP THINKING about Len’s face, twisting with pain as his heart attack tried to kill him. She’d left him in the hospital last night, stabilized but incapacitated, and called David Hale’s answering machine at home. “There’s been an emergency. Meet me at the office at six a.m. and be ready to go to court.”
Now Yuki sat across from David in the grungy, pine--paneled conference room, her notes and instant coffee in front of her, bringing her fellow ADA up to speed.
“Why aren’t we getting a continuance?” he asked her. David was presentable today, in a tan herringbone jacket, blue pants, striped tie. Needed a haircut, but that couldn’t be helped. Of all the people available to her at short notice, she’d get the best work from Hale.
“Three reasons,” Yuki said, tapping the table with a plastic spoon.
“One, Leonard doesn’t want to lose Jack Rooney as a witness. Rooney is frail. He was on vacation when the shooting occurred. We might not be able to get him back when we need him, which means his tape might be excluded.”
“Okay.”
“Two, Len doesn’t want to chance losing Judge Moore.”
“Yeah, I get that, too.”
“Len says he’ll be in court in time to do the summation.”
“He said that?”
“Yep, when they were prepping him for surgery. He was lucid and adamant.”
“What did his doctor say?”
“His doctor said, and I quote, ‘There’s a reasonable possibility that the damage to Leonard’s heart is reversible.’ ”
“Did they have to crack open his chest?”
“Yes. I checked with Len’s wife. He came through the surgery fine.”
“And so he’ll be doing a summation in a little more than a week?”
“Probably not. And he won’t be doing the tarantella, either,” Yuki said. “So that brings me to number three. Len said that I’m as prepared as he is, that he’s confident in us. And we’re not to let him down.”
David Hale stared at her, openmouthed, before finally saying, “Yuki, I don’t have any trial experience.”
“I do. Several years.”
“Your experience is in civil cases, not criminal.”