14th Deadly Sin (Women's Murder Club 14)

I WAS OBSESSING about Tina Strichler as I drove to work that morning. Yesterday, Strichler had been ripped up her midsection with a long, sharp blade, a vicious murder that felt personal. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was a connection between her and the other women who had each been killed with knives on May twelfth, now three years in a row.

Brady has a keen investigative mind, and I really wanted his thoughts on this.

I walked through the gate to the squad room and saw that Brady was in his small, glass-walled cubicle at the back of the bullpen. He was behind his desk, his blue shirt stretched across his chest and his bulging biceps. His white-blond hair was pulled back into a short pony, revealing where a part of his left ear had been shot off during a fierce gunfight in which he had acted heroically and saved a lot of lives.

Right now, however, he was fixated on his laptop.

I said “Hey” to Brenda, waved at a few of the day-shift guys who looked up as I strode past, then rapped my knuckles on Brady’s door. He waved me in and I took a seat across from him.

I said, “About that homicide yesterday on Balmy Alley—”

“Yep. Michaels and Wang are working it.”

“I know. What I’m thinking is that there’s something familiar about this killing—”

“Tell Michaels. Jacobi’s calling me three times a day about the Windbreaker cop robberies. I’m worried about Jacobi. I know he doesn’t want to retire with the stink of these douche bags all over him. Or all over us. And now the press has sniffed it out. I’ve got questions from I don’t know how many papers and TV reporters, and, of course, a ton of e-mail from the concerned citizens.”

He waved his hand at the laptop.

“I understand, Lieutenant,” I said. “We’re on it.”

“OK,” he said, fixing his ice-blue eyes on me. “Bring me up to date.”

I summarized the footage of the first Windbreaker cop holdup in the mercado, saying that the quality was worse than the footage of the one at the check-cashing store. But still, we were able to see three men in SFPD jackets, carrying guns.

“The job took about five minutes from A to Z,” I said. “They scored about twenty grand. Sergeant Pikelny interviewed the store owner, who said the men in the SFPD Windbreakers locked them in the back room and then shot up the cash drawer. Hardly any words were spoken. No one was hurt.”

“Did they leave any evidence?”

“Nothing. They picked up the shell casings. They wore gloves. Conklin and I are going to look at the scene of last night’s check-cashing robbery, where the owner was killed. And we’re doing a follow-up interview with the survivor.”

“OK. Come back with something, will you?”

Brady was done. I left him hunched over his computer and met Conklin in the all-day parking lot on Bryant.

We were both impatient to interview Ben Viera, the young man who’d been working at the check-cashing store when his boss had been shot to death.

Luckily, the kid had lived to talk about it.

CHAPTER 17

BEN VIERA, THE surviving witness to the robbery-homicide at the check-cashing store, cracked open his door about four inches, which was the length of the chain lock. He demanded to see our badges, and we held them up. He asked our names, and after we told him, he closed the door in our faces.

I heard his voice on the telephone; he spoke and listened for a couple of minutes.

The door opened again, this time wide enough to let us in. Viera was of medium height and build, wearing green-striped boxers and a Giants T-shirt. He was saying, “I called the police station. To make sure you are who you say you are.”

“OK. I get that,” Conklin said.

The one-room apartment on Poplar Street was dark, and messy with pizza boxes and soda cans, dishes in the sink, and laundry on the floor. Viera folded his futon bed into a sofalike object, offered us seats, then got into a reclining chair and leaned back.

“I’m on Xanax. Prescribed for me. Just so you know.”

“OK,” said Conklin.

“I already talked to the police the night of the … thing,” Viera said to the ceiling.

“I know this is hard, Ben,” said Conklin. “You’ve told the story, and now we want you to do it again. Some new thought could jump into your mind. Right now we don’t have a clue who those guys were. They’re killers. You saw them, and we have to catch them.”