I thought he might get away with killing this young woman as he had done so many times before. He would hit and run again.
Chapter 15
Monday morning Rich and I reported to Brady what we had learned that weekend.
Rich said, “Sarah was twenty-five, took violin lessons at night, did paperwork for a dentist during the day. She had no boyfriend, no recent ex, and lived with two other young women and an African gray parrot. She had a thousand and twenty dollars in the bank and a fifty-dollar credit card balance for a green down jacket. No enemies, only friends, none known to have a motive for her killing.”
“Your thoughts?” Brady asked me.
“Maybe the King would like to brag.”
Brady gave me a rare grin. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
I took the stairs from our floor, four, to maximum security on seven. I checked in at the desk and was escorted to Sierra’s brightly lit, windowless cell.
I stood a good five feet from the bars of the King’s cage.
He looked like someone had roughed him up, and the orange jumpsuit did nothing for his coloring. He didn’t look like the king of anything.
He stood up when he saw me, saying, “Well, hello, Officer Lindsay. You’re not wearing lipstick. You didn’t want to look nice for me?”
I ignored the taunt.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
I was hoping he had some complaints, that he wanted a window or a blanket—anything that I could use to barter for answers to questions that could lead to evidence against him.
He said, “Pretty good. Thank you for getting me a single room. I will be reasonably comfortable here. Not so much everyone else. That includes you, your baby girl, even your runaround husband, Joseph. Do you know who Joseph is sleeping with now? I do. Do you want to see the pictures? I can have them e-mailed to you.”
It was a direct shot to the heart and caught me off guard. I struggled to keep my composure.
“How are you going to do that?” I asked.
Sierra had an unpleasant, high-pitched laugh.
I’d misjudged him. He had taken control of this meeting and I would learn nothing from him about Sarah Brenner—or about anyone else. The flush rising from under my collar let both of us know that he’d won the round.
I left Jorge Sierra, that disgusting load of rat dung, and jogged down the stairs to the squad room, muttering, promising myself that the next point would be mine.
Conklin and I sat near the front of the room. We’d pushed our desks together so that we faced each other, and I saw that Cindy was sitting in my chair and Conklin was in his own. There were open Chinese food cartons between them.
I said hello to Cindy. Conklin dragged up a chair for her and I dropped into mine.
“Nice of you to bring lunch,” I said, looking at the containers. I had no appetite whatsoever. Definitely not for shrimp with lobster sauce. Not even for tea.
“I’ve brought you something even nicer,” she said, holding up a little black SIM card, like from a mobile phone.
“What’s that?”
“This is a ray of golden sunshine breaking through the bleak skies overhead.”
“Make me a believer,” I said.
“A witness dropped this off at the Chron for me this morning,” Cindy said. “It’s a video of the shooting at t
he Vault’s bar. You can see the gun in the King’s hand. You can see the muzzle aimed at Lucy Stone’s chest. You can see the flare after he pulled the trigger.”
“This is evidence of Sierra shooting Stone on film?”