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BRADY AND I were back in our car when the radio crackled and Chief Clapper’s voice came over.
“Brady. Need you at the Hall. Now.”
“What happened?”
“Barbara Sullivan media explosion.”
“I’m on the way.”
It had only been a few hours since Barbara Sullivan’s body had been discovered, but to the press, a scoop beat sex, food, love, and a roof in the rain.
Brady said, “Ah, sheet,” and gunned the engine. We were back at the Hall in record time. It was just past two when Brady and I went through the bullpen gate. Brady took a right and headed for his office. I looked around.
Bobby said, “Sergeant, Inspectors Alvarez and Conklin are in Interview Two.”
I thanked him, left the bullpen, and took a turn down the short spur of corridor leading to the interrogation rooms. The observation room shares a mirrored wall with the box. Alvarezand Conklin were interviewing a bespectacled man in his forties wearing gray sweats. He appeared agitated as he looked at a photo array on the table; men who generally resembled Blackout along with a resized picture of Blackout cut from one of his videos, printed on photo paper to match the others.
I knocked on the glass and Rich left interrogation and joined me in observation. I’d called him from the car to tell him that Cindy wasn’t at the house and the question on his face now was plain.Where is she?
I said, “How’re you holding up?”
He shrugged and looked down.
“Who’s that?” I asked, indicating the man sitting across from Alvarez.
“Thomas Watkins,” he said. “Lives across the street from the Sullivans.”
If memory served, Watkins was the neighbor who, in helping Barbara with her groceries, had triggered Lew Sullivan’s rabid, near fatal attack on her.
Rich said, “This morning, Watkins saw a gray car parked a couple of doors away from the Sullivan house. He described the car’s driver as white, slim, wearing black.”
“Did he pick Blackout out of the array?”
“No. No, can’t positively ID any of them.”
“What about the car?”
“Early 2000s gray Ford four-door sedan. But don’t worry about the six thousand other aging gray Ford four-doors in California. The plate number doesn’t compute.”
“Cop car?”
“Yep,” said Rich. “Somehow the perp got his hands on a retired police car with municipal plates.”
“So says Watkins. Is he a suspect?”
“He has an alibi. His wife,” said Richie. “When we catch Blackout, Watkins might pick him out of a lineup.”
Then, Rich looked me in the eyes and I couldn’t look away.
“I need to know more about what happened at Blackout’s house,” he said.
“Let’s talk down the hall,” I said.
Alone together in the war room, I told Rich what we had found at the house in the Haight: papers showing the purchase of weapons, obituaries of his recent victims, and the front-page article in theChronicleoffering the reward for information on Cindy.
Rich said, “So the paper proves he was in the house recently. Did you find anything useful? Like his phone?”
“Joe found a hair that could be Cindy’s caught under the desk drawer. It’s at the lab. But, Rich, we knew she was wedged under a desk. Now we know where.”
