The 8th Confession (Women's Murder Club 8)

What will we learn from his stuff?

Opening Bagman’s bag felt like waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa had left his entire carryall under the tree.

I took out my notebook, kept track of our findings.

Items one through fourteen were miscellany: a moldy sandwich in a Ziploc bag, several bundles of bills rubber-banded according to denomination — looked to be no more than two thousand dollars.

There was a worn Bible inscribed with Rodney Booker’s name in the flyleaf, and what seemed to be the biggest score: a half dozen bags of sparkling white powder — maybe six ounces of crystal meth.

But of real interest was item number fifteen: a leather folder about five inches by eight inches, what travelers use to hold their plane tickets and passports.

Conklin opened the folder, removed the contents, and unfolded the papers, handling them as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. As my partner put papers down on the table, Feller took photos and I named the documents out loud.

“Service record for the van. Oil change and lube, one hundred seventy-two thousand, three hundred thirty-four miles. Looks like a winning lottery ticket, five out of eight numbers, dated the day before Booker’s body was found.”

I noted some deposit slips, a little more than three thousand in cash over a three-day period, and there were receipts from fast-food restaurants.

But when CSI Bates found Bagman’s wallet deep inside a door panel, the contents nearly blew down the walls of the crime lab.

Chapter 89

THE WALLET WAS SLIM, a good-quality goatskin with the initials RB stamped in gold on the corner. I took out Booker’s driver’s license and found a sheet of yellow paper in the bill compartment.

I unfolded it, my eyes taking in the data, my brain, a few beats behind, trying to make sense of it.

I said, “This is a bill of sale. Rodney Booker bought a bus from a used-car lot in Tijuana on May second, just days before he died.

“It was an old school bus, says here, nineteen eighty- three.”

I stared at the yellow paper, but my inner eye was on Market and Fourth right after an old school bus had blown up, filling the air with bloody mist, littering the street with body parts.

Ten innocent people had died.

Others had been injured, scarred for life.

I remembered hunkering down on shattered glass, talking with the arson investigator Chuck Hanni as he pointed out the broken parts and melted pieces in what was left of the rear of the bus, showing me that the vehicle had been a mobile meth lab.

The owner of the bus had never been identified.

“What did Sammy say?” I asked my partner. “Bagman used to cook meth in the house — but it was too dangerous?”

“Right.”

I took a second piece of paper from the wallet. It was plain white, six by four inches with a glue-strip edge, obviously torn from a notepad, folded in half. Handwritten on the paper was a tally converting pesos to dollars. A scribbled word jumped out at me: “ephedrine,” the main ingredient in methamphetamine.

Conklin was breathing over my shoulder. “That’s a signature, isn’t it? J something Gomez.”

“Juan.”

The name Juan Gomez was as common as John Smith. That might not mean much, but it was the name on the ID of the meth cook who’d been blown across the intersection at Fourth and Market, dead from the blast before his head had been bashed in against a lamppost.

I could hardly believe the treasure I held in my hands.

Rodney Booker had been branching out from small-time crack sales to big-time meth. He’d bought the ingredients, hired a cook, bought a bus, and turned it into a meth lab.

And on its first drug run, Booker’s lab had sent ten people to God. Bagman’s motto had never seemed as ironic to me as it did right now: Jesus Saves.

Chapter 90