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Brady looked at me and said, “Sergeant, got a moment for me?”
I sighed. “Sure, Lieu.”
“In my office,” he said.
Reluctantly, I got out of my chair and followed him back down the aisle. He held his door for me and I took a seat, put my feet up on the side of his desk.
He settled into his chair and fixed me with his sharp blue eyes. “Got any big plans?” he asked.
“No, and I’m liking that.”
“We need to go out to San Quentin.”
“Why, Brady? What for?”
“Trust me now,” he said. “Thank me later.”
As my more spiritual sister, Cat, likes to say, “Let it go.” So I tried that and found my morning thoughts were still circling. Things to do, things not to do, and a premonition of something behind the curtain about to jump out and yell, “Gotcha.”
I went back to the pod, shut down my computer, told my partners to hold the fort.
“Wassup, Lindsay?”
I shrugged, grabbed my phone, and took the fire stairs withBrady down to Bryant Street, where his favorite SUV was waiting. He signed the log and we both got into the vehicle. I buckled up. Brady started the engine, then, turned to me and said, “You’re going to be glad you did this, Boxer. For years.”
Prove it.
CHAPTER 105
BRADY AND I were escorted by guards to a big concrete room with a cage at the center and a man in the cage. There were two doors, each one twenty feet away from the cage, one to the left, one to the right. The room was not the attorney-client one Burke had earned by his six murder confessions and cold-case assistance but served as a pass-through. As we sat in folding chairs looking at the killer inside the cage, a number of guards came through one door and left by the other.
Brady had spoken with Warden Hauser early this morning and told me the plan during our drive. I knew what to do, what to say, but I didn’t know what to expect. Now, looking at Evan Burke, his face four feet away from mine, he raised hackles I didn’t know that I had.
Burke’s shaved head had grown in since I’d seen him last week. His face was stubbly and his fingernails were rough. But he was jocular in that know-it-all way he has, even with a stack of life sentences against him and no possibility of parole.
Today he wore an orange jumpsuit and shiny metal accessories: cuffs, chains, and shackles. We’d exchanged greetings and now that we’d had a chance to sniff each other out, Burke said, “How’s Cindy? I hear some criminal roughed her up?”
“She’s doing fine,” said Brady. “The criminal’s name is Bryan Catton.”
“Oh?”
Brady said, “He claims to know you.”
“Me? How?” said Burke.
“You don’t know his name?”
“How’m I supposed to know him? You know more about me than just about anyone. I don’t have friends. I moved around a lot … Now I’m in solitary.”
Brady said, “Boxer?”
I said, “Okay, Evan. Catton came to visit you every few months, posing as your attorney. He wore minimal disguise, signed the log Brian Catalina—an alias varying his first name plus your ‘Ghost of Catalina’ nickname. Here’s a copy of the sign-in sheet.”
Brady produced pages folded lengthwise from his briefcase and passed them to me. I flattened them and held them up one at a time against the wire cage.
Burke said, “You’re saying he came here? I don’t see a Bryan Catton. Len Woods, an ad man. Wyatt West. Some kind of a producer. Oh. Okay, that one is Brian Catalina. Oh. I think he was interested in the book I did with Cindy than anything to do with my appeal.” Burke was getting impatient. “What the hell is this about? I hate cops. If you’re still here in three minutes, I’m calling the guards.”
I said, “Three minutes is all it’s going to take, Evan.”
