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After a few tense seconds, I signaled Arbichaut for a ram.
Suddenly, the front door cracked open.
“Freeze,” Cappy boomed, swinging his gun into a shooting position. “San Francisco Police.”
A wide-eyed woman in powder blue exercise clothes stood frozen in the door. “Oh, my God,” she screeched, eyes fastened on our weapons.
Cappy yanked her out the front door as Arbichaut’s SWAT team rushed the house. He barked, “Is anyone else at home?”
“Just my daughter,” the frightened woman shrieked. “She’s two.”
The black-vested SWAT team barged past her into the house as if they were searching for Elian Gonzalez.
“Is that your van?” Jacobi barked.
The woman’s eyes darted toward the street. “What is this about?”
“Is that your van?” Jacobi’s voice boomed again.
“No,” she said, trembling. “No…”
“Do you know who it belongs to?”
She looked again, terrified, and shook her head. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
It was all wrong; I could see that. The neighborhood, the plastic kid’s slide on the lawn, the spooked mom in the workout clothes. A disappointed sigh was expelled from my chest. The van had been dumped here.
All of a sudden, a green Audi knifed its way up to the curb, followed by two police cars. The Audi must have gone right through our roadblock. A well-dressed man in a suit and tortoiseshell glasses jumped out and ran toward the house. “Kathy, what the hell’s going on?”
“Steve…” The woman hugged him with a sigh of relief. “This is my husband. I called him when I saw all the police outside our house.”
The man looked around at the eight cop cars, SWAT backup, and the SFPD inspectors standing around with weapons drawn. “What are you doing at my house? This is insane! This is nuts!”
“We believe that van was the vehicle used in the commission of a homicide,” I said. “We have every right to be here.”
“A homicide…?”
Two of Arbichaut’s men emerged from the house, indicating that there wasn’t anyone else inside. Across the street, people were starting to file outdoors. “That van’s been our number one priority for two days. I’m sorry to have upset you. There was no way to be sure.”
The husband’s indignation rose. His face and neck were beet red. “You’re thinking we had something to do with this? With a homicide?”
I figured I had upset their lives enough. “The La Salle Heights shooting.”
“Have you people lost your minds? You suspected us in the strafing of a church?” His jaw dropped, and he fixed on me incredulously. “Do you idiots have any idea what I do?”
My eyes fell on his pinstriped gray suit, his blue button-down-collar shirt. I had the humiliating feeling I had just been made a fool of.
“I’m chief counsel for the Northern California chapter of the Anti-Defamation League.”
Chapter 21
WE HAD BEEN made fools of by the killer. No one on the block knew anything about or had any connection to the stolen van. It had been dumped there, purposely, to show us up. Even as Clapper’s CSU went over it inch by inch, I knew it wouldn’t yield shit. I studied the decal and I was sure it was the same thing I had seen in Oakland. One head was a lion’s, one seemed to be a goat’s, the tail suggested a reptile. But what the hell did it mean?
“One thing we learned.” Jacobi smirked. “The SOB’s got a sense of humor.”
“I’m glad you’re a fan,” I said.
Back at the Hall, I said to Lorraine, “I want to know where that van came from; I want to know who it belonged to, who had access to it, every contact the owner had a month prior to its theft.”
