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Brady said, “One more time.”
He reversed the video, hit Play. We watched again.
Then we kicked it around for a while, concluding that, based on our combined decades of cop experience and gut instinct, the science teacher was not a team player. He was a textbook megalomaniac working alone.
That said, we’d all been wrong before.
Did he do it?
No idea.
Meeting over, Conklin and I headed out at high speed through Bayview, a gentrifying, mixed-use area that was once home to Candlestick Park, currently home to Connor Grant, our suspected mass murderer.
I hardly spoke as Rich drove us toward Grant’s house on Jamestown Avenue. I was thinking about having seen Joe, being with his devastated brothers. We had tried to buck one another up, but it hadn’t worked. Joe was still deep in the woods without a compass. He could die. Our daughter would lose her father. And I would never be able to forgive myself for not making peace with my husband while I had the chance.
Conklin’s voice broke into my thoughts: “Linds, up ahead on the right.”
Behind a thicket of law enforcement vehicles, positioned between two old cinder-block buildings and sitting far back on its lot, was a tidy blue wood-frame house with white trim.
Conklin parked in the midst of the cruisers, and as he turned off the engine, there was a knock on the glass. CSI director Charlie Clapper was standing between his car and ours, bending down to say hello.
Clapper is a former Homicide cop and one of SFPD’s most valuable players. As always, he was well dressed—jacket, no tie, his salt-and-pepper hair slicked back—and his expression showed that he was itching to getting into the house.
The three of us stood in the sunshine as the bomb squad did their work, and we talked about the monstrous incident on Pier 15, the numbers of dead and seriously wounded—including Joe. I told Clapper that Joe was still in a medically induced coma but holding his own in the ICU.
A door slammed and I looked toward the house to see three bomb squad techs in full protective gear come outside. One of them pushed up his face shield and signaled a thumbs-up.
“All clear,” said Clapper. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER 15
GRANT’S HOUSE WASN’T a crime scene, but Clapper’s techs treated it that way. It was a potentially invaluable source of evidence, and they would be comparing traces from the house with whatever they could scrape off Pier 15. They took pictures, lifted prints, and swabbed hard surfaces. When they’d covered a room and moved on to the next, Conklin and I stepped in.
We were looking for something tangible that would crash Grant’s cat-and-mouse game—a manifesto, a foreign flag, GAR-related or any radical literature, a blueprint of Sci-Tron, a thread to follow, proof of something either to force a confession out of Grant or to blow up his fanciful story.
Conklin went upstairs, and I went through the cramped living room, frisking the TV console and the bookshelves. Grant had the complete DVD collections of Law & Order and The Sopranos. His books were nonfiction, subjects ranging from ancient civilization to law, architecture, art history, military weapons, and of course, everything you ever wanted to know about bombs. He also had about fifty biographies
of artists, writers, and politicians, none of them seditious.
The guy had a wide range of deep interests.
The laptop in the office would be taken back to the forensics lab, but meanwhile, I checked out his stack of unopened mail on the credenza with my gloved hand. I found bills, fliers, assorted catalogs for school chemistry supplies. I flipped through the catalogs and saw only consumer-grade beakers and microscopes for sale in bulk amounts.
Conklin came down the stairs, saying to me, “Second floor has two bedrooms and a bath. One of the bedrooms is in active use, the other is a spare. I tossed the hell out of both of them. He’s a neat guy. No weapons. No bombs. No clutter. Nothing under the mattresses. I didn’t find anything stronger than Advil in the medicine chest.”
He shrugged and turned his attention to the fifties-style kitchen. I watched from the pass-through as he removed the pots and pans from the cabinets, and looked under the range hood and inside the stove, fridge, freezer, and drawers. Everything looked dull and old and normal.
I went into the half bath next to the kitchen. The medicine cabinet had a half-used container of Tums, a pack of razor blades, and a bottle of expired antibiotics. I made note of the doctor’s and pharmacist’s names, checked the cabinet to see if it was possibly a door to a stash hole. It was not. The trash can held an empty bottle of Listerine, used dental floss, used Q-tips.
More work for the crime lab and maybe a lead to DNA in a database.
Conklin and I went to the basement with a CSI, who passed an ALS wand over every square foot of the walls and floor, finding no blood or organic trace. After that we examined the tools, paint cans, canned food on neat wire shelving, but found no secret doors or hidden rooms or 3-D models of the science museum.
Overall, my impression of Connor Grant’s small, dark house was that the man was bookish, organized, isolated, without a speck of whimsy. There were no weapons, no sign of a woman’s presence, nothing to point to Grant being an anarchist or a murderer. And there I was again, still wondering if we’d arrested the wrong man, if Connor Grant had been delusional or a jackass when he told Joe and me that he’d blown up the science museum for artistic expression.
I shared that thought with Richie.
“Actually, delusional jackass is a definite possibility.”
