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“I’m gonna kill this guy,” I whispered.
Jacobi held me even tighter. Good old Warren.
We were back at zero. I had no idea who it was. I didn’t know where we would start to look for him.
A black Lincoln Town Car wound its way along the barricaded street and swooshed up to the curb. The door opened, and a grim-faced Chief Tracchio stepped out, surveying the shooting scene.
He caught my eye with a guilty swallow, the flashing lights of the crime scene reflected on his glasses.
I glared at him. Proof enough?
Chapter 110
THE NEXT MORNING, half of Homicide banged our heads together in the conference room, reexamining every piece of evidence, every assumption we had made. As the meeting was ending, I took Jacobi aside. “One other thing, Warren. I want you to look at something for me. Make certain that Tom Keating really is in a wheelchair.”
By one o’clock, I had to take a break. I needed thinking outside the box. We weren’t seeing something.
I had to talk to the girls, so I called them together for a quick lunch at the Rialto, across the street from the Hall. Even Cindy said she was coming. She insisted on it.
When she arrived at the Rialto everybody hugged her, and tears came into our eyes. None of us could believe Chimera had gone after Cindy and Aaron—but he certainly had.
“This is crazy,” I said as we huddled around a table, nibbling at salads and calzones. “Everything matched. Coombs’s past, Chimera, the incident in Bay View. Everything pointed there. We can’t be wrong.”
“What you need to do first,” Claire cautioned, “is take the pressure off yourself. It’s horrible, what’s happened. But we can’t get too emotional.”
“I know that.” I exhaled. “It’s probably what the killer wants. Jesus.”
Jill shuffled in her seat. “Listen, Coombs has to be at the center of this. Too many things check out. He may not have pulled the trigger, but what if he got someone else to? What about those asshole buddies of his in South San Francisco?”
“Two are still missing,” I said, “but my gut tells me no. Oh hell, I don’t know anymore. Everybody in Homicide is stumped. Coombs was one madman. Who the hell is the other one?”
“You checked everything you found in his hotel room?” Cindy asked. She had been unusually quiet until then.
“Checked, double-checked,” I replied.
For what seemed like the tenth time, my mind went to the tiny, disheveled hotel room—the suitcase full of Coombs’s prison things, the clippings stashed under his mattress, the numbers on the desk, his letters…
Except this time, something hit….
Cindy was asking if we had ever considered the possibility that someone was trying to set Coombs up, but I didn’t respond. My mind was elsewhere… rooted back in that dingy hotel room. The line of beer cans and cigarette butts on the sill above the bed. Something else there. I had never given it a second thought. I squinted into space, trying to visualize the sight. Then I saw what I was looking for—and what I might have missed.
“Lindsay?” Claire cocked her head. “Everything all right?”
“Earth to Lindsay…,” Jill taunted.
Cindy put her hand on my wrist. “Lindsay, what’s going on?”
I grabbed my bag and stood up. “We’ve got to get back to the Hall. I think I just figured something out.”
Chapter 111
EVIDENCE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY is kept under lock and key in a storage room in the basement of the Hall.
Fred Karl, the day duty officer, looked a little annoyed at the four of us. “This isn’t a social room,” he grumbled, pushing a clipboard in my direction and pressing a button that opened the chain-link gate. “You and Ms. Bernhardt can sign and go in. These other two, they’ll have to wait out here.”
“Arrest us, Fred,” I said, waving everyone through.
The contents of Coombs’s hotel room had been placed in large storage bins near the back. I led the girls to the spot and hung my jacket on a ledge as I pulled a couple of bins down from the shelf coded with Coombs’s case number. I started rummaging through the contents.
