“Van or not,” the mayor’s man, Fred Dix, cut in, “you know where you have to start on this. Mayor Fernandez is going to come down hard on anyone operating in the area espousing a racist or antidiversity message. We need some heat to fall their way.”
“You seem pretty sure that’s what we’re looking at,” I said with a noncommittal glance. “Your garden-variety hate crime?”
“Shooting up a church, murdering an eleven-year-old child? Where would you start, Lieutenant?”
“That girl’s face is going to be on every news report in the country,” Carr, the press liaison, pitched in. “The effort in the Bay View neighborhood is one of the mayor’s proudest accomplishments.”
I nodded. “Does the mayor mind if I finish my eyewitness interviews first?”
“Don’t worry yourself with the mayor,” Mercer cut in. “Right now, all you have to be concerned with is me. I grew up on these streets. My folks still live in West Portal. I don’t need a TV sound bite to see that kid’s face in my mind. You run the investigation wherever it leads. Just run it fast. And Lindsay… nothing gets in the way, you understand?”
He was about to get up. “And most importantly, I want total containment on this. I don’t want to see this investigation being run on the front page.”
Everyone nodded, and Mercer, followed by Dix and Carr, stood up. He let out a deep blast of air. “Right now, we have one hell of a press conference to muck our way through.”
The others filed out of the room, but Mercer stayed behind. He leaned his thick hands on the edge of my desk, his hulking shape towering over me.
“Lindsay, I know you left a lot on the table after that last case. But all that’s d
one. It’s history now. I need everything you have on this case. One of the things you left behind when you took that shield was the freedom to let personal pain interfere with the job.”
“You don’t have to worry about me.” I gave him a solid stare. I’d had my differences with the man over the years, but now I was ready to give him everything I had. I had seen the dead little girl. I had seen the church torn up. My blood was on fire. I hadn’t felt this way since I left the job.
Chief Mercer flashed me a smile of understanding. “It’s good to have you back, Lieutenant.”
Chapter 7
AFTER A HIGHLY CHARGED news conference conducted on the steps of the Hall, I met Cindy at Susie’s as we had arranged. After the frenzied scene at the Hall, the relaxed, laid-back atmosphere at our favorite meeting place was a relief. She was already sipping a Corona as I arrived.
A lot had happened here—at this very table. Cindy; Jill Bernhardt, the assistant district attorney; and Claire Washburn, the chief medical examiner, my closest friend. We had started to meet last summer, when it seemed that fate had pulled us together with links to the bride and groom case. In the process, we had evolved into the closest of friends.
I signaled our waitress, Loretta, for a beer, then planted myself across from Cindy with a worn-out smile. “Hey…”
“Hey, yourself.” She smiled back. “Good to see you.”
“Good to be seen.”
A TV blared above the bar, a broadcast of Chief Mercer’s news conference. “We believe it was a single gunman,” Mercer announced to a flash of photographers’ bulbs.
“You stay for that?” I asked Cindy, taking a welcome swig of my ice-cold beer.
“I was there,” she replied. “Stone and Fitzpatrick were there, too. They filed the report.”
I gave her a startled look. Tom Stone and Suzie Fitzpatrick were her competition on the crime desk. “You losing your touch? Six months ago, I would’ve found you coming out of the church as soon as we arrived.”
“I’m going at it from another angle.” She shrugged.
A handful of people crowded around the bar, trying to catch the breaking news. I took another chug of beer. “You should’ve seen this poor little girl, Cindy. All of eleven years old. She sang in the choir. There was this rainbow-colored knapsack with all her books on the ground nearby.”
“You know this stuff, Lindsay.” She gave me a bolstering smile. “You know how it is. It sucks.”
“Yeah.” I nodded. “But just once, it’d be nice to pick one of them up… you know, brush them off, send them home. Just once, I’d like to hand one back their book bag.”
Cindy tapped her fist affectionately on the back of my hand. Then she brightened. “I saw Jill today. She’s got some news for us. She’s excited. Maybe Bennett’s retiring and she’s getting the big chair. We should get together and see what’s up with her.”
“For sure.” I nodded. “That what you wanted to tell me tonight, Cindy…?”
She shook her head. In the background, all hell was breaking loose in the news conference on the screen—Mercer promising a swift and effective response. “You’ve got a problem, Linds….”