15th Affair (10 page)

“Local PD is on the way,” he said. “We can’t wait.”

Brett Chan was covered in blood. He might be the last living member of his family, or someone inside could be bleeding out right now. No one would blame us if we waited for backup before going into a hot situation, but my partner and I would blame ourselves if someone died because we were too late.

We got our vests on and our guns in our hands, and I shouted at the doorway, “
This is the police! We’re coming in.
”

Then I nodded to Conklin and he kicked open the door.

The foyer and front room floors were crisscrossed with bloody footprints. Conklin took a right toward the bedrooms and I followed the tracks to the left.

As I approached the kitchen, the hair at the back of my neck lifted like I’d been brushed by cold, dead fingers. What would I find at the intersection of all those small footprints? Was I walking into a room where a shooter had his gun braced and was ready to fire again?

I hugged the doorway, and with gun extended, I peered into the kitchen.

Shirley Chan was lying faceup on the floor between the counter and the refrigerator, her blood forming a wide red halo around her head. I stooped beside her and felt for a pulse that I knew I wouldn’t find. Her skin was still warm, and the smell of gunpowder lingered in the air.

I looked around. There was no brass on the floor and no sign of forced entry through the kitchen door. A bowl of milky Cheerios was on the table. A broken coffee mug and a puddle of coffee were at my feet, and a matching blue earthenware mug was on the counter near the coffeemaker.

I saw how this had gone down. Shirley Chan had been making coffee for another person. Maybe she’d turned to say something when she was shot through her forehead. This was no suicide, no accident, no holdup gone wrong. No shots had been wasted. Mrs. Chan had been killed by a pro.

I heard Conklin saying, “You’re OK now, Haley. Let’s go find Brett, OK?”

I left the kitchen and shook my head, indicating to my partner,
Do not take her in there
. I lifted my arms and Conklin handed Haley to me, saying, “You were in the closet, weren’t you, sweetie?”

“Haley,” I said as Conklin checked out the scene in the kitchen. “I’m a police officer. Did you see someone in the house this morning? Someone who didn’t belong here?”

I took my phone from my pocket, pulled up a photo of Ali Muller, and showed it to the five-year-old.

“Haley? Do you know this woman? Have you seen her?”

The child tightened her hold on me and sobbed hot tears into the crook between my neck and shoulder. Poor little girl.

What was her life going to be like now?

FIFTEEN MINUTES AFTER
we’d parked in front of the Chan house, our car was hemmed in by cops, CSI, an ambulance, and the coroner’s van.

Six CSIs were processing the scene inside the house as Conklin and I met with Lieutenant Todd Traina of the Palo Alto Police Department.

Of course, Conklin and I wanted to work this crime. Not only had we been first on the scene, but we were also involved with Shirley, her murdered husband, and the mysterious wrinkle of a
second
dead Michael Chan, killed in the crash of WW 888.

Bottom line, we were thoroughly briefed and highly motivated.

But this hideous crime had happened in Palo Alto, not our turf. The best we could hope for was a free exchange of information between our department and the Palo Alto PD.

Conklin, Lieutenant Traina, and I stood under a tree on the parched grass between the sidewalk and the street, and we told the lieutenant how we’d happened upon a fresh murder scene in Professorville.

I said to the young lieutenant, “We wanted more time with Mrs. Chan. We hoped she might have remembered something that would help us with her husband’s murder. We knocked. Brett Chan answered the door.”

After describing the little boy’s heartbreaking appearance, I gave Lieutenant Traina my take on the crime scene.

“Looks to me like Mrs. Chan knew the shooter,” I said. “There was no forced entry and she was making coffee for two when she was shot in the forehead at close range. I saw no sign of a robbery—just a well-executed hit.”

Traina took notes and said, “Uh-huh. Please go on.”

Conklin said, “Haley, she’s five. She was eating her breakfast when a lady with ‘striped’ hair came in through the outside kitchen door. According to Haley, Mommy told her to get dressed for school. When she went back toward the kitchen, she heard ‘big bangs,’ so she ran to her room and hid.”

Traina asked, “Striped hair? What’s that mean to you?”

I said, “Like brown hair with blond streaks.”

“Hunh. Did she know this lady?”

“Never saw her before,” Conklin said.

“And the little boy? Brett?”

“He was in the shower when this went down,” I said.

I told Lieutenant Traina we would share information and he said he’d do the same, “Sure thing.”

We exchanged cards and were getting into our car as Child Protective Services arrived.

Why had Michael and Shirley Chan—two college professors—been targeted hits? And what, if anything, could this tell us about the dead man with Michael Chan’s name and address who’d been on WW 888 from Beijing?

Was there a connection?

Someone had to know.

THE BEAUTIFUL AND
expansive Stanford University campus is accessed by broad palm tree–lined avenues and dotted with hundreds of other varieties of trees. The handsome buildings are predominantly Mediterranean and Spanish-style sandstone with red-tile roofs. Just lovely.

We had an appointment with the history department chair, Michael Chan’s former boss, Eugene Levy. Levy was short, bearded, wearing thick eyeglasses. He got up from behind his desk, shook our hands, asked us to have seats, and closed his door.

Levy said, “What a tragedy. I only knew Michael professionally, but for more than eight years. I liked him. He was reliable. Conscientious. Knew his stuff cold. Although, in light of how he died, maybe I didn’t know him at all.”

Levy had prepared a list of several of Chan’s colleagues and students, in alphabetical order with phone numbers. He’d starred the names of a few people he thought had personal relationships with Chan.

“I’m just sick about this. The whole school is rocked. You’ll let me know if I can help further?”

I told Levy we would do that. After leaving his office, Conklin and I interviewed two dozen people over the rest of the morning, ending late in the afternoon.

We asked the standard questions:
How well did you know Michael Chan? Had he been acting strangely? Did he have any enemies? Can you think of a reason why someone might have killed him last week in a five-star San Francisco hotel?

Not one person offered a shadow of a clue.

By five in the afternoon, we were no closer to cracking open a door into Michael Chan’s death than we had been four days ago. We were heading for the car when a breathless voice called out, “
Officers.
”

A brawny twenty-something young man in shorts and a school T-shirt was jogging up the walkway behind us. When he caught up, he stopped and introduced himself as Stiles Paul Titherington, assistant football coach. According to Levy’s list, he was a friend of Michael Chan.

He said, “Got your message. Yeah, Michael and I were tight.”

The man was bouncing on his feet, seemed hot to tell us what he knew.

“OK, I don’t know who the hell killed him, but I can tell you this: he was having an affair, like made-in-Hollywood in-love. Michael was not, like, an emotional guy and suddenly, he meets this woman, and she’s the meaning of life.”

Titherington went on to say that Michael hadn’t been planning to leave Shirley and that apparently Alison was also married with children.

The name Alison hooked me.

“He had plans to meet her a couple days ago,” said Titherington. “He was going to let me know how it went. Next thing, I heard that Michael was dead.”

I said, “Did Michael tell you Alison’s last name?”

“I’ve told you what he said. She’s gorgeous, smart, funny, a total package.”

After leaving Titherington, Conklin and I talked nonstop on the drive back to the city. We had some leads to go on, but we couldn’t tie them into a bow. Alison Muller had gone to Michael Chan’s room at the Four Seasons. He was in love with her. Both were married; it was an assignation.

Many questions remained. Why hadn’t Muller called the police when her lover was shot? Had she been abducted? Was she dead? Or had she killed Chan and had gone into hiding?

I was calling Brady to tell him about our day at Stanford when Conklin’s phone rang.

He said, “OK, sure. Thanks, Cin. We’ll meet you there.”

“What was that?” I asked him. “We’ll meet Cindy where?”

THE GRAND PACIFIC
Hotel was just south of the airport on Old Bayshore Highway. Folding doors between three adjoining conference rooms on the mezzanine level had been opened to create a hall big enough to accommodate the hordes who had come to hear NTSB’s update on the investigation into the crash of WW 888.

The cream-and-maroon room was packed, standing room only, no chairs at all. I stood off to the right of the room with Conklin and Cindy, in view of the rear exit.

At six o’clock on the dot, a blond-haired woman in a charcoal-gray suit with an NTSB patch over her breast pocket walked smartly along a hastily built stage at the front of the room. She took her place behind a podium, tapped the microphone, and, without waiting for the room to quiet down, she began to speak.

“My name is Angela Susan Anton and I’m chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. I know you’ve been waiting since our initial announcement, but we have been working hard to gather meaningful information in the face of the near-total destruction of the aircraft and the tragic deaths of the passengers and crew.”

Waves of weeping swept the room as friends and family of dead passengers heard once more and with official certainty that they would never see their loved ones again.

Chairman Anton resumed her presentation.

“I’ve been working closely with our chief investigator, Mr. Jan Vanderleest, who heads our team of twenty-five investigators. The work so far includes interviews with those who knew the four pilots and relief pilots.”

Anton described the pilots’ seventy-two-hour preflight work-rest history, concluding that the flight crew had been rested and in good physical and mental health, all of which was borne out by the progress of the flight from Beijing up to the moment of the incident.

The chairman pushed through the shouted questions, saying that the air traffic controllers who were in SFO’s control tower when the tragedy occurred had reported that the pilot had checked in on San Francisco tower frequency for landing on runway 28 Left at 8:56 Thursday morning. That landing clearance was issued to WW 888 about a mile and a half from the threshold.

She said, “This is what the air traffic looked like just prior to the incident.”

Anton flicked on her PowerPoint and a large screen to her right depicted a simulation of WW 888’s approach to ward the runway, including the explosion and a graphic interpretation of the breakup of the falling aircraft.

She said, “There have been reports of a flash in the sky just seconds before the aircraft failed. Because of the direction and altitude of the plane in its last moments, we don’t have a clear angle on the right wing, which was the point of impact. And when the fuel inside the wing exploded, the wing failed upward, which can look from the ground like the contrail of a missile.

“That said, the possibility of a missile strike exists….”

The chairman was interrupted by a tsunami of questions and screams and shoving as photographers jostled for a view of the projected visuals. Anton shouted into her mic, “Chief Vanderleest has additional details. Thank you.”

Anton was barely offstage when Vanderleest took the lectern. He stood like a block of stone until the room was silent again.

Then he spoke. “As the chairman said, the possibility exists that WW 888 was brought down by a missile, but until the flight recorders are found and the remains of the 777 are assembled and analyzed—the reason for the crash of WW 888 is still undetermined. Information on the location of those of the deceased who have been identified is on our website and with Worldwide Airlines, who will give daily briefings.

“Thank you for your attention.”

Conklin called out to me and Cindy over the tidal raging of the crowd, “Stay with me.”

We were in the hallway outside the ad hoc auditorium when an Asian man in jeans and a black jacket body-slammed me. I staggered back into a group of people, somehow getting my balance before I fell. I looked around wildly to see who had assaulted me and for a half second, I got a clear look at his face: wide forehead, thin, white scar across his chin.

Just then, the doors opened at the back of the room and hundreds of people stampeded toward the exit, carrying us along with them.

I WAS OUT
of gas when I came through the doorway that night. Martha charged me and I held her back by her shoulders and called out, “Honey,” forgetting that I hadn’t seen Joe in days, or maybe just hoping he would answer.

Mrs. Rose sang out a sweet hello and appeared in the foyer, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Joe isn’t here, but Julie is fine. Are you OK?”

I nodded and tried to block the images of Shirley Chan’s body and the complete devastation of her children’s lives.

Where was Joe?

I wanted my husband. I wanted him to be all right. To be innocent of what felt like betrayal. To spend the night holding me and being held and talking and making love.