15th Affair (19 page)

When the top-floor hallway was packed with the SWAT force, the commander gave me a nod. Conklin and I took positions on either side of the apartment door.

I knocked and announced, screaming, “
Police!
Drop your weapons and come out.”

There was no answer, no sound but the pounding of my heart. We stepped aside and SWAT battered the door open and tossed two stun grenades into the room before closing the door again.

A deafening concussion knocked plaster off the ceiling, and a dozen heartbeats later, SWAT stormed the premises. I heard shouts. Automatic rifles chattered in long bursts, and then there was the sound of heavy boots as our team walked the rooms, opened doors, shouted “Clear.”

When the commander said we could do so, Conklin and I entered the small apartment.

The bodies of four armed and very dangerous men were sprawled around the front room. The tac team had done the job they were trained to do. They’d done it by the book.

Bullet holes pocked the walls, and blood had spattered and sprayed and was pooling on the floor.

A half dozen automatic rifles lay on the floor under the windows, along with many open boxes of ammo. And something unusual was on the kitchen table. It was like a metal tube about five feet long, with a scope, a muzzle, a handgrip, and a butt end that was meant to brace against a shoulder.

I’d never seen one before, but I knew a portable missile launcher when I saw it. I was pretty sure it had a range of three miles and was used to take down aircraft.

Two thoughts slammed together in my mind. These men who had been after me since the day of the crash were
arms dealers
.

Were they involved in what had happened to WW 888?

Counting casualties on the ground, 430 people had been
killed
in that crash. Had these men taken part in that unspeakable horror?

I turned back to the array of dead men lying shot to pieces in this shabby room. I walked from one to the other, getting an angle on their faces, looking for the one who had made me his personal target, the one who’d leveled his gun at my head last night.

And then I saw him at the far end of the room near the bedroom doorway. After he’d been shot, he’d slid down the wall into a sitting position on the floor and had left a long, wide smear of blood behind him. His head and shirt were entirely bloodied, and his arm and shoulder had taken bullets in several places.

I moved closer. By God, I wanted to be sure.

The man’s closed eyes were widely spaced and there was a thin scar across his chin.

This was the son of a bitch who’d tried to kill me.

I wanted him dead. But I wanted to talk to him even more. I leaned down and grabbed his shot-up arm, hoping he would scream, hoping he was faking it. I got nothing. No scream, no taunts, no answered questions.

But I swear, the way his lips were set in death, he was still smirking.

I released his shoulder and he toppled, dead weight falling sideways onto the floor.

I was still staring at his body when Conklin called my name. He was on the phone. He said to me, “Wang’s on the line. They’ve got that waiter guy, Henry Yee. He’s in custody.”

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
after the takedown on Stockton Street, we were still cleaning up the mess and trying to get answers.

Chi was recovering from surgery and in stable condition. Two pedestrians had been hurt, a woman and her young daughter who had been hit by the spray of gunfire when the men in the apartment opened up on the street.

The press was all over us. It didn’t matter that the shots that had injured the passersby had been fired by criminals. The fallout was all on the SFPD.

Under pressure, Jacobi gave a press conference, saying that military-grade automatic weapons had been seized from apartment 3F at 1035 Stockton, but he didn’t mention the missile launcher and he didn’t take questions, saying only, “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

No documents or identification had been found on the dead men in 3F. There were also no fingerprint matches, and no one had come forward to claim the bodies. We had too many questions without answers, but we did have the sorry patsy, young Henry Yee.

Conklin and I were with Yee and his lawyer in our small, gray interview room. A camera rolled tape from a corner of the ceiling, and the observation room behind the glass was packed with high-level cops, including Brady, Jacobi, and our DA, Leonard Parisi.

Henry Yee was five feet tall, nearsighted, and pretty much lost. His lawyer, Ernest Ling, was a mild-mannered man who went by the street name of Daddy. Mr. Ling negotiated for Yee, and given Yee’s importance as a material witness, Parisi himself had agreed to drop the gun charge as long as we were satisfied with what Yee told us.

So far, we had established that Yee was twenty years old with two years of high school. He had two small-time drug arrests and no parents.

The lease for apartment 3F had passed to Yee when his mother died. And then, about a month ago, Yee had sublet the apartment to four men from China who paid him eight hundred dollars over the rent for him to sleep elsewhere. Yee worked as a waiter and dishwasher for Mei Ling Happy Noodles and had been sleeping in the storeroom. His subtenants hired him to bring them take-out and do occasional odd jobs. He also stopped by the apartment to change clothes.

Sometimes the four men joked around with him, and he also overheard some of their conversations. So he said.

Yee had been carrying a gun under his apron when Wang and Michaels snatched him up. He had no license to carry, and certainly no need for a gun in his job. The Colt .45 was a gift from his subtenants, and apparently, to Yee, it was a prize.

That gun had been lucky for us, too.

Yee was an adult with a sheet. He was looking at prison time for the illegal possession, and if he could be implicated in the crash of WW 888, he would be eligible for the death penalty.

Daddy Ling had made the best and only deal for his client. Now we needed Henry Yee to tell us everything he knew.

HENRY YEE WAS
sipping from a can of Coke, looking at morgue photos of the deceased.

Said Yee, “This one. He’s called Dog Head or Dog. I don’t know his real name. This one is called Jake. This one speaks no English. He’s called Weisei. But this one,” he said, pointing to the picture of the man with the scar, “he goes by Mr. Soo. He is not a gangster. He says he works for the government.”

Conklin asked, “What were the weapons for, Henry?”

“I don’t know,” said Yee. “Mr. Jake told me it was private business.”

I said, “Did these men ever discuss the airplane that went down at SFO?”

“That airplane from Beijing? No, I didn’t hear that.”

I said, “We think they
did
have something to do with that airplane, Henry. Think hard. Did you hear anything at all?”

Ling said to his client, “Henry. You don’t have to worry. None of those men can hurt you.”

“They didn’t tell me anything,” said Henry Yee.

I said to the lawyer, “Mr. Ling, this isn’t working. Your client has given us his name, rank, and serial number. That’s not the deal we made.”

Daddy Ling said, “He’s afraid it’s going to come back on him. That’s not crazy, Sergeant.”

Ling had a whispered talk with his client, who looked up at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. He nodded and heaved a long sigh.

Then he said, “This is the only thing I know about the airplane. I don’t think it means anything, and please don’t get mad at me.”

I felt a chill, as if we were on the edge of a breakthrough, but I was afraid to trust the feeling. This mutt had been a total disappointment.

“Night before last,” said Yee, “me and Mr. Soo both got home at the same time and I notice that Mr. Soo’s car is all banged up. I say, ‘What happened, Mr. Soo? You all right?’”

“He’s very mad. He got into a car fight with a police lady he calls Dirty Mary.”

Did he mean
me
?

“Why Dirty Mary? Like Clint Eastwood?”

The kid nodded and went on.

“Anyway, Mr. Soo had already told me after the crash that he needed proof for his boss that some man was on that plane. He said Dirty Mary stopped him from doing his job. That made him look bad. But I think he did find the body,” said Yee.

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Like a week and a half ago, I helped him unload his car and I saw a body in the back wrapped in a sheet. I just saw a foot that was all burned. Mr. Soo shut the trunk before I could see more.”

Pictures were coming up in my mind and tumbling end over end. The first time I saw Mr. Soo outside the ME’s office, he’d said he wanted to see his son. I’d turned him away and a bunch of cops had backed me up.

“Was he looking for his son?” I asked Henry Yee.

“No, it wasn’t his son,” said Yee. “It was someone else.”

I thought of the missing victim of WW 888. The body had gotten mysteriously lost at Metropolitan Hospital. I remembered the chaos that night, the exhausted, traumatized people, more corpses than any one morgue could handle.

I could imagine someone disguised in hospital scrubs, looking at rows of bodies on gurneys, reading toe tags. I could imagine someone wheeling a corpse out of the hospital emergency room.

No one would have stopped a person in scrubs. Not that night.

I was breathless, almost faint. I stood up and, placing the flats of my hands on the table, I leaned toward our only material witness.

“Think, Henry. Did Mr. Soo mention the name Michael Chan? Was he looking for the body of Michael Chan?”

“He never said the name,” Yee said.

The kid looked terrified. Of me? Or of retaliation?

Ling said his client had cooperated fully. The interview was over. Yee was released.

I still had questions. Plenty of them.

CINDY CALLED TO
say, “
Lindsay
. I’ve got breaking news. Big-time. Can you meet me downstairs in five minutes? I’ll drive you home after.”

“Give me a hint,” I said, shutting down my computer and locking my desk drawer.

She was speed-talking.
Warp
speed.

“A tip came in twenty minutes ago. From a guy who saw the photos I’m running of the Four Seasons’ Jane and John Doe, and he says he’s got
video of them
. In the
hotel
. On a hidden
camera
. He’s going to show me the video. Is that enough
hint
for you?”

It certainly was.

“I’m on my way.”

Conklin had already left for the day. I asked Brenda to call off my ride while I phoned Mrs. Rose to say I’d be late. Then I zipped up my jacket and ran down the stairs.

Cindy had my attention for sure. Was the tipster solid? Would there really be a video of the kids in that room? And if so, would the video reveal their killer? Had Cindy cracked the case on four homicides? I was hoping. I guess I’m still an optimist after all these years.

Cindy was waiting for me in front of the Hall as traffic rushed and dusk fell. I got into her ’09 Honda Civic just two steps ahead of Traffic Control, who was about to shoo her away.

“Start talking,” I said as I buckled up. “Where are we going? You’ve got my undivided attention.”

The car lurched as Cindy put it in gear. “His code name is Jad,” she said. We were heading northeast on Bryant, Cindy turning her head every few words to pin me with her big blue eyes.

“‘Jad’ was doing surveillance for somebody. I took it to be a government agency, but he wouldn’t say who. He was, however,
emphatic
that what he caught on tape could get him
killed
. I could feel him sweating over the phone.”

“And so why did he contact you?”

“Because in my copy I begged anyone with information as to the identities of John and Jane to get in touch with me, confidentially. He also said that what he knew was eating him up inside. His voice was cracking up, Linds. He was
freaked
out.”

“Did you tell him you were bringing me?”

“Well, what I said was that I wasn’t going to meet a stranger alone. That I was bringing my associate. Like Woodward and Bernstein. You know?”

“Oh, man.”

I was shaking my head. This wouldn’t be the first or even the fifth time Cindy had waded into a highly flammable situation because she was onto a big story.

“Linds, he said it was OK to bring you. And there’s more,” said my crime reporter friend. “Along with the video of those two kids, Jad also has footage of what could be
Chan and Muller
. Yeah, Lindsay. Really. Asian guy. Blond woman. I’m thinking,
Oh, my God.
It’s now or never. Jad could take off. This time tomorrow he could be on another
continent
.”

“We should be going in with a tac team, Cindy.”

“I agreed to keep this confidential. And I
believe
him. He’s going to show us the video. He
wants
to. He called
me
. Look, we’re meeting him in the
parking lot
at Washington and the Embarcadero. It’s
wide open
. We’ll be perfectly safe.”

I told her, “We’ll be sitting ducks.”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t you just outwit three armed desperados with nothing more than a quick draw on your stick shift?”

I laughed. “You have a way with words.”

“And that’s why they pay me the OK bucks.”

Cindy grinned at me and threaded her car through a narrow opening in traffic. She maintained maximum possible acceleration from Bryant to the Embarcadero, where she smoothly entered the lot right across from the Ferry Building. She took one of the empty spots facing the street and left the motor running.

She fished her phone out of her bag and made a call. “Jad? It’s Cindy. I’m here.”