The 8th Confession (13 page)

"I wouldn't know where to start," Wilde said. "Sara was a snob. If you were a mover or a shaker, she was a sweetheart.

"Otherwise, man, she could be
cold.
I don't know her friends from her enemies, and frankly I don't think she knew either."

S
ARA NEEDLEMAN was still chilling in the morgue that evening when the teams working her case were summoned to Chief Anthony Tracchio's office with its high view of Bryant Street and a photographic panorama of the Golden Gate Bridge mounted across from his mahogany desk.

Tracchio was a bureaucrat by trade, had come up through the ranks by political appointment. He had no street experience, was squishy around the middle, and had a silly hair-sprayed comb-over, but I was starting to appreciate that he was politically shrewd, a quality that I lack entirely.

Tracchio was agitated in a way I'd rarely seen him. He said, "People, tell your families you won't be home until we've got this case wrapped up. And buck up. Whoever solves this thing is going to be a hero. Or hero
ine,
" he said in my direction.

Teams reported, and Tracchio, Hampton, and I questioned them before they were tasked to new assignments.

Conklin and I collected the names of every person interviewed regarding Sara Needleman, then went back to our desks to compare them with a similar list on the Baileys.

"Compare and contrast" was eye-glazing work, but it had to be done. I pulled my chair over to Conklin's desk and read off names.

Whenever we had a match, Conklin slapped the Staples Easy Button and it squawked, "That was easy."

By nine that night, our empty pizza box was in the round file. We'd eliminated the Baileys' live-in household staff and a few hundred others, but still the lists yielded dozens of overlapping names.

The Baileys and Sara Needleman went to the same gym, were all members of the opera society, frequented the same restaurants and clubs. They even shared the same dry cleaner.

"Sara Needleman was thirty-three and so was Isa Bailey. Bet they went to the same school," said Conklin.

I nodded. It was something.

Something that expanded the search.

I drained my soda can, tossed it in the trash, and said, "I read about a lab experiment. First up were the rats. Two lights, one flashes green, one flashes red. Guess the light that's about to flash, and if you go to the correct light, you get food. Eight out of ten times, the green one flashes."

"Go on."

"The green light flashes so many times, the rats go to that chute every time. Why not? They're rewarded eighty percent of the time.

"Now the behaviorists did the same experiment with humans."

"Never been high on rat chow myself."

I laughed. "The humans got M&M's."

"I
know
this is going somewhere," said my partner.

"The people tried to
predict
when each light would go on. They were looking for a
pattern
—so many reds before a green, like that. And they were rewarded only sixty-seven percent of the time."

"Proving that rats are smarter than people."

I shook my head no.

Conklin tried again. "Proving that we should interview every name on both lists whether they're red people or green?"

I laughed, said, "Proving that sometimes people think too much."

"You're tired, Linds."

"Let's compare the lists again. And this time, we don't overthink. We just pull the names of the rats who had keys to the victims' houses."

Rich hit the Staples button, and it yapped, "That was easy."

P
ET GIRL WAS handing over Sara Needleman's dogs to the caretaker, Lucas Wilde-boy, she liked to call him, when the squad car pulled up to the curb and two familiar cops got out. The woman cop was tall, blond, looked like Sheryl Crow had landed a gig on
Celebrity Cops.

The guy cop was a couple of inches taller than the blonde, buffed, maybe thirty.

Sheryl Crow showed her badge, reintroduced herself as Sergeant Boxer and her partner as Inspector Conklin, and asked if Pet Girl would mind coming with them to the Hall of Justice to answer some questions.

Pet Girl said, "Okay."

She was cool. All she had to do was
play
along, and they'd
move
along—just like they'd done the last time, when they'd questioned her about Isa and Ethan Bailey.

She slid into the backseat of the squad car, thought about the night she'd done it, pretty sure she hadn't forgotten anything.

She flashed on Wilde-boy, positive that he hadn't seen her go into Sara's house because he'd walked naked past his window, the light going on in his bathroom, and she'd heard the shower running before she'd gone in the main entrance.

She remembered doing it to Sara when "the dame with the golden needle" was so boozed up, she couldn't even open an eye. Pet Girl felt a thrill, like she wanted to laugh or maybe
pee.

And she listened to the two cops gabbing in the front seat, talking to Dispatch, joking and stuff, seemed to Pet Girl that they weren't acting like they had a
killer
sitting behind them.

More like they'd already forgotten she was even there.

She stood silently between the two cops as they went up in the elevator, turned down the offer of a soft drink when they showed her to the interview room.

"Are you sure?" the sergeant asked her. "Maybe a bottle of water?" Like the cop
cared
instead of wanting to get a DNA sample, a trick so old it was amazing anyone ever fell for it.

"I want to help," Pet Girl said sweetly. "Whatever you want to know."

Inspector Conklin was cute, had light-brown hair that flopped over his eyes. He pushed it away as he read to himself whatever notes he had written about her. And then he asked her where she'd been over the last forty-eight hours.

Pet Girl knew they were locking in her story in case they ever interrogated her again, and hey, no problem.

"I walked the Baileys' dogs four times, morning and evening both days. I wonder what's going to happen to the dogs…"

Then she'd detailed her tight calendar of dog-walking and running errands, including walking Sara Needleman's AKC champs this morning after Lucas Wilde called her to say that Sara Needleman was dead.

"See anything or anyone unusual in this neighborhood in the last week or so?" Sergeant Boxer asked her.

"Nope."

"What do you think of Lucas Wilde?"

"He's okay. Not my type."

"What was your relationship like with Sara Needleman?" asked Inspector Conklin.

"I
loved
Sara," she told him. Found herself giving him a flirty smile. Couldn't hurt. "Sara was smart and funny and generous, too. She gave me samples from her collection. That's just the way she was."

"How often did you walk her dogs?"

"Maybe once a week. She liked to walk them herself. Anyway, if she got into a time crunch, she'd call me and I'd pitch in."

"And the Baileys?"

"Same. Walk the dogs. Run errands. I work for a lot of people in their crowd.
Dozens.
I've got references."

"Sounds pretty good," Inspector Conklin said. "You make your own hours." Then, "Did Sara have any enemies?"

"Christ, yeah. She had three ex-husbands and about thirty ex-boyfriends, but I'm not saying they'd want to kill her."

"Anyone on that list of exes who may have also held a grudge against the Baileys?"

"If you only knew how
little
those people told me about anything."

"Do you have keys to the Needleman house and the Bailey house?" Sergeant Boxer asked her. Pet Girl reached into a side pocket of her backpack, pulled out a key ring the size of a boat anchor.

"I've got lots of keys. That's kind of the point. I keep out of my clients' way. I'm the silent type, and they like that about me. I come in, walk the pets, bring them back. Pick up my check. Most of the time, nobody even knows I've been there."

A
FTER THE dog walker left, I said to Conklin, "You know,
my
dog sitter has had my keys and my alarm code for years and I've never thought a thing of it. Martha
loves
Karen. I trust her."

"So what are you saying now, Sarge-of-My-Heart? You're throwing out the 'rats with keys' theory?"

"I don't know, bud. The dog walker's got access, but what's her
motive?
What's she got to gain by killing her employers?" My intercom buzzed, and Brenda's voice came over, sounding breathy and a little coy. "Lindsay, you have a visitor."

I looked across the squad room. Didn't see anyone.

I pressed the intercom button, asked Brenda, "Who is it?"

"He's on his way back."

I heard him before I saw him, the whir of rubber rolling over linoleum flooring, and then St. Jude was there, doing a wheelie, parking his chair up to my desk, a huge grin on his bearded face.

"Boxer, you look great, kid. Better and better."

I got up and hugged the legendary Simon McCorkle, known around the state as "St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes." McCorkle had been shot in the back while on duty, was paralyzed from the waist down but refused to retire. Since that dark day twenty years ago, "St. Jude" had been in charge of cold cases, worked out of an office suite at the crime lab.

"Thanks, McCorkle. I see a little gray in your beard. Looks fine on you."

"Give me your hand, Boxer. No, the left one. Not married? So I still have a chance."

I laughed, introduced McCorkle to Conklin, and they gripped paws like long-lost brothers of the shamrock, and pretty soon we were telling St. Jude about the case of the deceased millionaires, an investigation that was driving us crazy.

McCorkle said, "That's why I'm here, girl-o. When I saw Sara Needleman on the tube this morning, I added it to the Baileys—and guess what, Boxer?

"It rang a bell."

M
C
CORKLE REACHED BEHIND his chair with one of his massive, heavily tattooed arms and pulled a backpack onto his lap.

"I brought you a present," he said, winking at me.

"I can't even guess, but I'm hoping for chocolate."

He took a murder book out of his backpack, a three-ring binder thick with notes and documents from a homicide case. The book was lettered across the cover with a broad-tip marker: PANGORN, 1982.

Two more murder books followed the first, one marked GODFREY, 1982, and the other, KENNEDY, 1982.

"What is all this?" I asked as McCorkle shifted the three binders to my overflowing desk.

"Patience, my pretty. This is the final one. Christopher Ross. He was the last to go, died in December nineteen eighty-two."

"McCorkle, my man, fill me in."

"I'm going to tell you everything, and maybe you, me, and Conklin here are all going to get some closure."

I leaned back in my chair. There were people in the world who lived for an audience, and Simon McCorkle was one of them.

It partly came from being in that lab all the way out there on Hunters Point. It also came from obsessing about cold cases and colder bodies.

But there was another thing. Whether he solved the crime today or next month, St. Jude was always sinking free throws, scoring points that wouldn't have been made without him. His job made for excellent storytelling.

"Here's what these victims all had in common." McCorkle leaned forward in his chair, put a beefy arm across the folders so that I was staring at a hairy, half-naked hula girl on his personal tattoo beach.

"The victims were all high-society types. They all died showing no signs of foul play. But the last victim, this Christopher Ross—the killer left the murder weapon at the crime scene.
And a very distinctive weapon it was.
"

I was just out of school when this terrible killing spree ended, so I hadn't fastened on the particulars of this case—but it was coming back to me now, why those cases were unsolved.

McCorkle grinned as he watched the dawn breaking inside my poor, tired brain. I did remember.

"It was a distinctive murder weapon, all right," I said to my Erin go bro. "Those victims were killed by
snakes.
"

R
ICH CONKLIN had dinner that evening with Cindy at a Thai restaurant across the street from her apartment.

It was not a date, they'd both been very clear about that, but she was twinkling at him as she passed him the files she'd printed out, all the stories on the "high-society murders of nineteen eighty-two" that had run in the
Chronicle
before the personal computer was as common as the telephone.

"I'm
trusting
you," she said. "If you tell anyone I gave you this stuff from our 'morgue,' I'm going to be in the soup."

"Wouldn't want any soup on you," Conklin said.

"So fair's fair," said Cindy. "I share, you share."

Cindy had a rhinestone clip in her hair. Very few girls older than eight could pull off rhinestone barrettes at the same time they were wearing pink, but Cindy somehow looked 100-percent delicious.

And Conklin was absolutely mesmerized watching her strip the meat from a chicken wing with her lips, so delicately and at the same time with such pleasure.

"Rich,"
she said, "fair's
fair.
It's clear that you see a connection between the Baileys and Sara Needleman and the nineteen eighty-two society killings. But are you thinking that the killer from all those years ago has gone back into the murder business?"

"See, the question is, can I trust
you
, Cindy? Because, actually, you're not so trustworthy."

"Awwww. You just have to say the magic words."

"Please, Cindy."

"Richieee. What you want to say is 'off the record.' I'd go to jail before I'd go back on 'off the record.' "

Rich laughed, sat back, let the waiter take away the remains of his sea bass, said, "Thanks for telling me. I don't want you to go to jail. But you realize I'd be in more than soup if I leaked this story to your paper."