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

Mr. Kordell seemed to realize that he was rocking the baby too hard, said into the carriage, “Sorry, sweetheart,” and clasped his hands in his lap. He was agitated and clearly grieving for his grandson.

Yuki said to the elderly man, “As I understand it, the police found the gun on Aaron-Rey’s person.”

“Yes, that’s true. He picked up the gun. He didn’t think more than Oooh. A gun. And the police took him in and they questioned him for hours and didn’t call us.”

Mrs. Kordell picked up the story.

“If Aaron-Rey hadn’t been wrongly arrested, if the police hadn’t played him by saying how great he was for killing those drug dealers, my son wouldn’t have waived his rights and he wouldn’t have confessed. And he wouldn’t have been killed in jail while waiting for trial. My son would still be alive.”

Yuki felt the sharp pain of the people who had loved Aaron-Rey, and she could see that now that she was with the Defense League, terrible stories like this one would be her life.

Mrs. Kordell was saying, “The police should pay for what they did, right, Ms. Castellano? They should pay so that they don’t do this to anyone else’s child.”

Yuki said, “I agree. We’ve already filed the case against the City and the SFPD. It’s going to be difficult, Mrs. Kordell. The City is going to defend itself. You may have to testify. Tough questions are going to be asked, and the City’s lawyers are going to put Aaron-Rey in a bad light, if they can.”

“We’re all in,” said Mrs. Kordell.

“So are we,” said Yuki.

Actually, joining the Defense League seemed like a rash and very crazy idea. Was she even remotely cut out for this?

Yuki embraced the Kordells and said good-bye.

She hoped to hell she’d made the right decision.

Because when Parisi and his expensive law firm hired by the City were through chewing her up, she might never want to practice law again.

CHAPTER 25

AFTER LEAVING THE Kordells, Yuki drove four blocks and parked her car directly across the street from the crack house where three months before, Aaron-Rey’s life had taken a very bad turn at Turk and Dodge Place. As Aaron-Rey’s mother had said, the Tenderloin was a bad place to raise children. No kidding. It was the worst.

The impoverished district was an underworld of savagery, mayhem, and despair, populated with aggressive drunks and crackheads, runaways, derelicts, streetwalkers, and violent thieves. The best you could say of people who survived on these streets was that they were pitiable; most of them were doomed.

Yuki knew better than to get out of the car.

She was here to see the scene of Aaron-Rey’s death, to get the picture in her mind so that she could make a moving and watertight narrative for a jury.

She stared ahead at the peeling, sagging wood-frame building with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor. The abandoned second floor, according to Yuki’s information, was a flophouse for junkies. The third floor was the trading floor, where wads of folding money and small packets of powder changed hands.

She saw the scarred metal door that opened from the interior of the house and emptied out to the street. It was clear from the numbers of men and boys who looked both ways before going through that door that the crack house was doing a brisk business.

Yuki imagined Aaron-Rey Kordell hanging out at this place because it was cool, then being shocked and confused when the shooting went down. She saw him picking up the gun—a shiny, valuable object—and running.

If this version of the story was true, and Zac Jordan believed it was, Aaron-Rey had suffered wrongful death and his family deserved justice that could only be delivered in the form of a multimillion-dollar settlement from the SFPD and the City.

Yuki was thinking about the work yet to do when there was a rap on the window. Startled, she turned to see a uniformed officer, making a circle with his index finger, indicating that she should roll down her window.

“Officer?”

“You having car trouble, miss?”

“No, not at all.”

“You know it’s not safe here, right? A woman got shot over on Hyde a couple of hours ago. Wait—”

The patrolman leaned down to get a better look at her face.

“Aren’t you the lady who’s married to Lieutenant Brady?”