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

And she wasn’t laughing now when she told me she had taken a major fork in the road.

I pounded the ketchup bottle in the direction of my fries and said, “What fork?”

“I took the job,” Yuki said.

She put down her utensils, abandoned her salad, and told

me about a not-for-profit called the Defense League and that her client was dead.

“Who is this dead client and what are you supposed to do for him?” I asked.

“His name was Aaron-Rey Kordell, and he may have been coerced by the police into confessing to a triple homicide he didn’t commit. Then, while awaiting trial in the men’s jail, he was murdered in the showers by person or persons unknown.”

I grunted. A big part of the job was to get confessions. Cops were allowed to lie, and it was conceivable that people got worked over or tricked and confessed to things they didn’t do—but not often. Not that I knew about.

Yuki was saying, “Lindsay, if this story is in fact true, if Kordell was coerced into a confession and was then killed while awaiting trial, this is going to be a case against the city, the SFPD, and probably the cops who interrogated him, for I don’t know how many millions.”

I stopped eating.

A lawsuit against the police department would be a disaster for everyone in it, no doubt about it. A disaster. As Yuki’s friend, I had to be a fair sounding board. But never mind me.

“Your husband is a lieutenant in the SFPD,” I said.

“I know that, Linds.”

“What does he say?”

“He’s pissed off. We’re barely speaking.”

“Oh, man. You’re pretty sure Kordell was innocent?”

“He was caught with the gun on him. He was fifteen. Low IQ. It would have been fairly easy to get him to confess. I’ve seen the video of the interrogation. The narcs lied their faces off, Linds. Like ‘Tell us what you did and then you can go home.’ Then they told him what he did—their version.”

Yuki went on. “It might help me if I knew why Aaron-Rey was killed. Did he just piss someone off in jail? Or was he killed to avenge the deaths of those drug dealers? Because that would go to him being guilty.”

“I hope I don’t live to regret this, Yuki,” I said, “but I’ll see who was in lockup at the same time as Kordell. See what I can see. I don’t promise anything.”

“Just promise that whatever happens, we’re still buds.”

“That I can promise,” I said.

CHAPTER 38

AT JUST BEFORE 5 p.m. that day, Yuki followed Officer Creed Mahoney through several steel doors and gates to the jail on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice. From there she was escorted to one of the claustrophobic counsel rooms with high barred windows, reserved for meetings between prisoners and lawyers.

She’d been waiting for about ten minutes when the door opened and Li’l Tony Willis clumped into the room in chains from wrists to ankles, all five foot nothing of him, wearing an orange jumpsuit and two full sleeves of tattoos, twists in his hair and ’tude on his face.

“Who are you again?” Li’l Tony asked as Mahoney threaded his chains through the hook in the table.

“Fifteen minutes, OK, Ms. Castellano?” said Mahoney. “I’ll be back.”

The door closed and locked.

Yuki said to the man-boy wife beater, drug dealer, and possible killer sitting across from her, “I’m an attorney. Yuki Castellano. I want to hear about Aaron-Rey Kordell getting killed. What happened?”

“Are you kidding me? You want to ask me did I kill him? Because no, I didn’t. Got any cigarettes?”

“I hoped you might be able to tell me who might have killed Kordell, because that could be helpful.”