The 9th Judgment

I said to Benbow, "No question, this is the same shooter. He's spelling out the acronym. It's his signature. I don't have a theory on this case. I wish I had one frickin' clue."

I put my back against a concrete pylon and called Claire, saying to her voice mail, "I'm at the Pier Thirty-nine garage. Three more victims, two are little kids."

Claire picked up. She doesn't swear often, but she let loose an impressive stream of curses before saying she was on her way. As she hung up, I heard footsteps on concrete. I turned to see Jackson Brady coming up the ramp with two other men: a uniformed police officer and a wiry white male with graying hair. Brady's eyes had brightened, and there was a new expression on his face that gave me hope.

He smiled.

I felt storm clouds part and a godlike finger of light break through the concrete ceiling when Brady said to me, "This is Mr. Kennedy. Says he's a witness."

Chapter 88

SIX LAW ENFORCEMENT officers surrounded the man called Daniel Kennedy. We were standing so close we were pretty much sucking up his air, but he seemed glad for the attention. Kennedy said that he was a crime buff and had read everything about the Lipstick Killer. He told us that he was the owner of U-Tel, a telephone shop at Pier 39, and then he got into his story.

"A white guy in his early thirties came into my store," Kennedy said, "and right away, I thought he was wrong."

"Why was that?" Benbow asked him.

"He goes over to the rack of prepaid phones, picks one with a camera and a two-gig chip. Cheap prepaids fly off the shelves, but expensive phones? Who throws away an expensive phone? Anyway, this guy knows what he wants. And he keeps his head down, never even looks up when he pays."

"Was he wearing a cap?"

"Yeah, baseball cap, blue, no logo but a different jacket than the one in the artist's rendering on TV. This jacket was brown leather, kinda distressed, American flag on the right sleeve."

"Flight jacket," Conklin said. "What color was his hair?"

"Brown, what I could see of it. So after he buys the GoPhone, he leaves, and I tell my manager to take over for a couple of minutes."

"You followed the guy?" Brady asked.

"Sure did. I kept back a few yards so he wouldn't notice me, and pretty soon I see him talking to this pretty African-American woman with two kids in a double stroller. He was gesturing to her, like, asking if he could give her a hand with her packages.

"Then, damn it, my manager called asking me to sign off on a personal check for a big sale. I turned around for a minute, and when I turned back, I'd lost him-the place was packed, you know? I go back to the store, and next thing, there's sirens coming up the road. I turn on my police band and hear that there's been a shooting."

"Could you ID this guy from photos?" I asked.

"I can do better than that. Everything that guy did inside and in front of my store was recorded on high-quality digital media. I can make you a disk off my hard drive right now."

"Was he wearing gloves?"

"No," said Kennedy. "No, he wasn't."

"How'd he pay for the phone?" Conklin asked.

"Cash," Kennedy said. "I gave him change."

"Let's open your register," I said.

Chapter 89

MY CELL PHONE rang at some bleary predawn hour. I fumbled with it in the dark and took it into the living room so Joe could sleep. My caller was Jackson Brady. Despite the weariness in his voice, I caught his excitement as he told me he'd been at the crime lab all night watching the CSU dust every bill from U-Tel's cash drawer.

"You've got something?" I asked, daring to hope.

"Only some partial prints that match to a former marine."

"No kidding. That was your hunch."

"Captain Peter Gordon. Served in Iraq, two back-to-back tours."

I stood in my blue flannel pj's looking down on the quiet beauty of Lake Street as Brady told me of this former marine officer who, after he was discharged, went off the radar. There was nothing unusual in his military record, no postduty hospitalizations-also no homecoming parades.

"After Gordon's discharge," Brady told me, "he returned to Wallkill, New York, where he lived with his wife and little girl for a couple of months. Then the family moved to San Francisco."

"So what do you think, Brady? You like him as our killer?"

"He sure looks like Lipstick," Brady said. "Of course the garage videos are crap, and what we've got from U-Tel isn't conclusive. Gordon bought a prepaid cell phone twenty minutes to an hour before Veronica Williams and her kids were killed-that's all. Can't do much with that."

"Wait a minute. Gordon was seen talking to Veronica Williams," I said. "She had two children in a stroller. Christ!"

"We don't know if the woman Kennedy saw was Veronica Williams. We've got six people screening all of the Pier Thirty-nine surveillance videos," Brady said. "Look, Lindsay, I'd love to pick him up, but when we do it, we want to nail him good."

Brady was right. I would've been giving him the same lecture if our positions were reversed.