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“And we got a name,” Cappy finished. “The apartment manager at 1513 Vallejo positively IDed the photo. Told us that the suspect was evicted about two months ago, right after he lost his job.”
“Drumroll please,” said Chi. “The shooter’s name is Alfred Brinkley.”
It was sad to see the disappointment on the faces of McNeil and Chi, but I had to break it to them.
“Thanks, Paul. We know his name. Did you find out where he used to work?”
“Right, Lieu. That bookstore, uh, Sam’s Book Emporium on Mason Street.”
I turned to Conklin. “Richie, you look like the Cheshire cat. Whatcha got?”
Conklin had been leaning back in his chair, balancing it on its rear legs, clearly enjoying the banter. Now the front legs of his chair came down, and he leaned over the table. “Brinkley doesn’t have a sheet. But . . . he served at the Presidio for two years. Medical discharge in ’94.”
“He got into the army after being in a nuthouse?” Jacobi asked.
“He was a kid when he was at Napa State,” said Conklin. “His medical records are sealed. Anyway, the army recruiters wouldn’t have been too picky.”
The fuzzy image of the shooter was starting to come clear. Scary as it was, I knew the answer to what had been messing with my mind since the shooting.
Brinkley was a sure-shot marksman because he’d been trained by the army.
Chapter 17
AT NINE THE NEXT MORNING, Jacobi, Conklin, and I parked our unmarked cars on Mason near North Point. We were two blocks from Fisherman’s Wharf, a tourist area crammed with huge hotels, restaurants, bike rentals, and souvenir shops, where sidewalk vendors were setting up their curbside tag sales.
I was feeling keyed up when we entered the cool expanse of the huge bookstore. Jacobi badged the closest desk clerk, asking if she knew Alfred Brinkley.
The clerk paged the floor manager, who walked us to the elevator and down to the basement, where he introduced us to the stockroom manager, a dark-skinned man in his thirties, name of Edison Jones, wearing a threadbare Duran Duran T-shirt and a nose stud.
We arrayed ourselves around the stockroom — concrete walls lined with adjustable shelves, corrugated metal doors opening to the loading dock, guys rolling carts of books all around us.
“Fred and I were buddies,” Jones said. “Not like we hung out after work or anything, but he was a bright bulb and I liked him. Then he started getting weird.” Jones dialed down the volume on a TV resting atop a metal table crowded with invoices and office supplies.
“ ‘Weird’ like how?” Conklin asked.
“He’d say to me sometimes, ‘Did you hear what Wolf Blitzer just said to me?’ Like the TV was talking to him, y’know? And he was getting twitchy-like, humming and singing to himself. Made management uneasy,” Jones said, lightly running a hand across his T-shirt. “When he started missing work, it gave them a reason to ax him.
“I saved his books,” Jones told us. He reached up to a shelf, pulled down a box, set it on the table.
I opened the flaps, saw heavy stuff in there by Jung, Nietzsche, and Wilhelm Reich. And there was a dog-eared paperback of The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
I picked the paperback out of the box.
“That was his pet book,” said Edison. “Surprised he didn’t come back for it.”
“What’s it about?”
“According to Fred, Jaynes had a theory that, until about three thousand years ago, the hemispheres of the human brain weren’t connected,” Jones said, “so the two halves of the brain didn’t communicate directly.”
“And the point is?” Jacobi asked.
“Jaynes says that back then, humans believed that their own thoughts came from outside themselves, that their thoughts were actually commands from the gods.”
“So Brinkley was . . . what?” Jacobi asked. “Hearing voices from the television gods?”
“I think he was hearing voices all the time. And they were telling him what to do.”
Jones’s words sent chills out to my fingertips. More than forty-eight hours had passed since the ferry shooting. While dead ends piled up, Brinkley was still out there somewhere. Taking orders from voices. Carrying a gun.
