The overhead light cast three hundred watts of bright white fluorescence, lighting every part of the small room. The red eye of a security camera watched from a corner of the ceiling as the woman in orange slid the photo closer and picked it up.
“I don’t know either of these people,” she said. Then, as though she had been struck with an afterthought, she studied the photo intently again and asked me, “What do you see in this woman’s hand?”
She pushed the grainy black-and-white printout back across the table. The woman in the picture had her head tipped forward, her blond hair covering half her face, and she seemed to be clutching a chain that was fastened around her neck. I saw the glint of a pendant dangling from her clasped fingers.
“Maybe some kind of charm,” I said.
“Could it be a cross?” Candace Martin asked me.
“I suppose.”
“I don’t wear thin gold chains with charms or crosses,” Candace Martin said to me. “But you know Ellen Lafferty, don’t you? Ellen always wears a cross. I’ve got to say, I wonder what it means to her.”
Chapter 86
CANDACE MARTIN was due back in court in an hour, and if my belief in her innocence was warranted, I couldn’t “mess around” with Yuki’s case fast enough. Every day that Candace was on trial, she was a day closer to being convicted of murder in the first degree.
As hard as it would be to convince the court that the wrong person was on trial, it would be a snap compared with getting a murder conviction overturned.
I jogged down the Hall’s back stairs to the lobby, thumbed a number into my cell phone, and waited for private investigator Joseph Podesta to pick up. His voice was thick with sleep, but he said, “Aw-right,” to my request to see him in twenty minutes.
I crossed the Bay Bridge, drove to Lafayette, and found Podesta’s yellow suburban ranch on Hamlin Road, a street lined with a mix of trees and similar ranch-style houses. I parked my car in his driveway, then walked up some stone steps through a rock garden and rang the bell.
Podesta came to the door barefoot, wearing a sweat suit with a sprinkling of bread crumbs on the front. I showed him my badge and he opened the door wide and led me to his home office at the back of the house.
I looked around at the warehouse of spy equipment Podesta had stored on his metal bookshelves. He wheeled his chair up to his computer, lifted an old tabby cat down from his desk, and put her on his lap.
“If my client wasn’t dead,” he said, palming the mouse, “I wouldn’t show these to you without a warrant.”
“I appreciate your help,” I said.
Podesta clicked on the folder containing the digital photos he’d taken of Candace Martin in a car with someone who had been tentatively identified as Gregor Guzman, a contract killer who was wanted by cops in several states and a few foreign countries as well.
The first photo Podesta pulled up on his screen was the one Yuki had offered into evidence.
“I know these photos suck eggs,” he said. “But I couldn’t use the flash, you know? I can’t swear that’s Guzman, but that woman is Candace Martin. I followed her that night from her house on Monterey Boulevard right to the I–280 on-ramp north. She got off on Cesar Chavez, took a right on Third and then onto Davidson. I was on her tail the whole time.
“It’s a very dodgy place. I’m sure you know it, Sergeant. I had to watch out for myself. It’s a trash heap. A junkyard. I could have gotten mugged, and she could have, too.
“I watched her get out of her Lincoln and get into this guy’s SUV. Ten minutes later, she got out.”
“Can you burn those pictures onto a disc for me?”
“Why not, under the circumstances?” he said.
The computer whirred.
The cat purred.
And pretty soon I had a disc with a lot of grainy pictures taken a couple of weeks before Dennis Martin was killed.
Chapter 87
AT NINE-FIFTEEN I was back at the Hall of Justice, Southern Station, Homicide Division, my home away from home.
I hung my jacket on the back of my chair, then found Conklin in the break room. He was eating a doughnut over the sink, his yellow tie flipped over his shoulder.
“Yo,” he said. “I saved you one.”