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“You followed the guy?” Brady asked.
“Sure did. I kept back a few yards so he wouldn’t notice me, and pretty soon I see him talking to this pretty African-American woman with two kids in a double stroller. He was gesturing to her, like, asking if he could give her a hand with her packages.
“Then, damn it, my manager called asking me to sign off on a personal check for a big sale. I turned around for a minute, and when I turned back, I’d lost him—the place was packed, you know? I go back to the store, and next thing, there’s sirens coming up the road. I turn on my police band and hear that there’s been a shooting.”
“Could you ID this guy from photos?” I asked.
“I can do better than that. Everything that guy did inside and in front of my store was recorded on high-quality digital media. I can make you a disk off my hard drive right now.”
“Was he wearing gloves?”
“No,” said Kennedy. “No, he wasn’t.”
“How’d he pay for the phone?” Conklin asked.
“Cash,” Kennedy said. “I gave him change.”
“Let’s open your register,” I said.
Chapter 89
MY CELL PHONE rang at some bleary predawn hour. I fumbled with it in the dark and took it into the living room so Joe could sleep. My caller was Jackson Brady. Despite the weariness in his voice, I caught his excitement as he told me he’d been at the crime lab all night watching the CSU dust every bill from U-Tel’s cash drawer.
“You’ve got something?” I asked, daring to hope.
“Only some partial prints that match to a former marine.”
“No kidding. That was your hunch.”
“Captain Peter Gordon. Served in Iraq, two back-to-back tours.”
I stood in my blue flannel pj’s looking down on the quiet beauty of Lake Street as Brady told me of this former marine officer who, after he was discharged, went off the radar. There was nothing unusual in his military record, no postduty hospitalizations—also no homecoming parades.
“After Gordon’s discharge,” Brady told me, “he returned to Wallkill, New York, where he lived with his wife and little girl for a couple of months. Then the family moved to San Francisco.”
“So what do you think, Brady? You like him as our killer?”
“He sure looks like Lipstick,” Brady said. “Of course the garage videos are crap, and what we’ve got from U-Tel isn’t conclusive. Gordon bought a prepaid cell phone twenty minutes to an hour before Veronica Williams and her kids were killed—that’s all. Can’t do much with that.”
“Wait a minute. Gordon was seen talking to Veronica Williams,” I said. “She had two children in a stroller. Christ!”
“We don’t know if the woman Kennedy saw was Veronica Williams. We’ve got six people screening all of the Pier Thirty-nine surveillance videos,” Brady said. “Look, Lindsay, I’d love to pick him up, but when we do it, we want to nail him good.”
Brady was right. I would’ve been giving him the same lecture if our positions were reversed.
“Anything on Gordon since he moved to San Francisco?”
“As a matter of fact, a neighbor called in a domestic disturbance twice, but no charges were filed.”
“You have a picture of this guy?”
“It’s old, but it’s coming at you now.”
The picture on my cell phone was of a man with bland good looks, about thirty, brown hair, brown eyes, symmetrical features, nothing remarkable. Was this the man who’d worn a two-tone baseball jacket and had hidden his face from the security cameras at the Stonestown Galleria? Wishing didn’t make it so, but I felt it in my gut.
Pete Gordon was the Lipstick Killer.
I knew this was him.
