Backfire (21 page)

Judge Sherlock’s home

Pacific Heights

Tuesday morning

Judge Corman Sherlock said to his son-in-law the next morning across the breakfast table, “You’re frustrated, Dillon, and no wonder, after last night. How about I give you my membership card for the Pacific Heights Club over on Union Street and you get a good workout? I can call Mr. Eddie, he’s usually there, and he’s been looking forward to mixing it up with you. He outweighs you by a good twenty pounds, all of it muscle. Even though he’s older than you, he’s one tough bald bugger.”

Savich hated to say no; he couldn’t think of anything he needed more than a sweaty hard workout. He shook his head. “I’ve got to take a rain check with Mr. Eddie. Lacey and I have to get over to the hospital as soon as we can. Cindy Cahill’s awake, more or less, and this is our first chance to talk to her.”

Five minutes later, after Sean had demolished a bowl of Cheerios and started to rag on his grandmother about the visit to the zoo she’d promised him, even though the zoo wasn’t open yet, Sherlock started up their rental car for the ride across town to San Francisco General Hospital.

Savich booted up MAX as they drove toward Market Street. “Cheney is already working on getting a sketch of Xu from Lin Mei. He said he’d have it out to Hammersmith about now, but it doesn’t look like he’s posted it yet. I wonder how Cindy will react to it.”

“I only hope she’ll be able to talk to us,” Sherlock said. “Cheney said she wasn’t doing well.”

“If she can, I know in my gut that now she’ll tell us everything she knows about Xu, since he tried to have her killed.”

He sat back for a moment, closed his eyes. “Until Xu murdered Milo Siles, and his game plan became clear, it was a nightmare trying to predict him. Sometimes he was controlled and logical, sometimes not. What he pulled off last night was an act of desperation, beyond his control. He was lucky it worked out as well as it did.”

Sherlock turned onto 101 South. “Ripping up an elevator ceiling, throwing down a smoke bomb, and firing down on a bunch of marshals and Ramsey sure wasn’t a logical, controlled act. I still can’t figure that one out.”

“I can’t, either. It’s so over-the-top and out of character for him. Why was he so desperate to kill Ramsey in such a crazy way? Bottom line, he’s a spy, probably has been for quite a while, and a spy’s first watchword, it would seem to me, is discretion. He buried Mickey O’Rourke in a spot no one would ever find, just bad luck for him that those kids were there.

“But then he murdered Milo Siles and Pixie McCray in broad daylight when he could easily have been spotted. He’s all over the place.”

Sherlock said, “I think with Milo it boiled down to eliminating anyone who could hurt him as fast as possible so he can get out of Dodge. It was desperation, like you said. I think if he’d thought he had a choice, he’d have waited until he could get Milo alone, bury him deep, like he did Mickey O’Rourke. I’ll tell you, Dillon, it gives me a headache.”

Savich grinned at her. “I’m hoping Xu is deluded enough or desperate enough to make a try to kill Cindy in the ICU. I doubled her guard. She’s as well covered as Ramsey. If Xu shows up, we’ll get him, no doubt in my mind.”

“You know he’s got to try. The last thing he wants is for her to talk to us, and he’s got to know she would talk, since he tried to have her killed.”

“Ah, here comes the sketch.”

Sherlock looked over at MAX’s screen at the man’s face. “Not very distinctive, is he? Not a single Asian facial characteristic except maybe for the thick black hair. Green eyes, and a thin, longish face. What age would you say, about thirty-five?”

Savich said, “Yeah, that’s about right.” He stared at the man and found himself wondering how Xu had hooked up with the Chinese government, and why he’d become a traitor to his country of birth.
Does he feel more Chinese than American? Or is it all about money?
Savich knew neither was the whole of it. Fact was, though, Xu was a psychopath who happened to be half Chinese and had found a perfect fit getting paid to do what he took pleasure in.

San Francisco General Hospital

Tuesday morning

They found Cindy Cahill in the surgical ICU only one cubicle away from where Ramsey had fought for his life, shot by the same man who’d ordered Cindy killed. Officer Colley looked them over from beside Cindy’s cubicle and smiled at them. He’d also done a guard shift when Ramsey had been here.

“Good to see you, Agent Savich, Agent Sherlock. Agent Christoff and Deputy Barbieri have been waiting inside for you for a couple of minutes. There’ve been lots of doctors and nurses in and out. I think she’s in trouble.” He held up his cell phone to show them the sketch of Xu. “Just got it.” He nodded to Sherlock. “No sign of him. You can bet they’ll strip-search any guy who looks like him before he leaves the lobby, ball cap or not.”

Cindy looked white as death, her eyes closed, her eyelids bruised, her hair matted down. There was a plastic oxygen mask over her mouth, and when she breathed, it was with effort, as if it was hard work for her. The single sheet pulled over her was stained pink where it touched her chest, and looked to be draped over a maze of gurgling tubes, packings, and pressure dressings, some of them stained pink as well. One of her IVs held a bag of blood that was slowly dripping into her arm. Without makeup, without a show of her usual attitude and the force of her personality, she looked young and vulnerable, and gravely ill.

Savich nodded to Eve and Harry. “Has she been asleep since you got here?”

Eve shook her head. “She’s awake, but she hurts and she’s dopey from all the drugs they’re pumping into her. The doctor told me he didn’t know whether she’d make any sense or not.”

Sherlock said, “All we can do is try.”

“Ah, there’s an eye opening.” Eve leaned over her. “Good morning, Cindy. You want to blink at me so I know you’re there?”

Cindy Cahill blinked. “I’m here,” she whispered.

“Are you in pain?” Savich asked.

Incredibly, she smiled. “It doesn’t feel like I’m swimming in Bali with the sun beating down on me, if that’s what you mean. I’ve always wanted to go to Bali, but I don’t know if I’m going to make it there now. Do you know she apologized to me after she stuck that knife in my chest?”

Everyone felt a pang of pity until Cindy whispered, a heap of venom in her voice, “I even went out of my way to talk to that skinny little bitch. I mean, I didn’t have anything better to do, so why not? And all she did was yak, yak about her son, as if I cared.” The real Cindy, attitude and all, had snapped back into focus, as ill as she was.

Harry grinned. “Sounds like you’re getting back to normal, Cindy,” he said, and kept his fingers crossed she’d stay with it.

“I won’t be back to normal ever. Look at me. At least the bitch didn’t kill me.”

“Her name’s Lin Mei,” Sherlock said.

“Who are you?”

“I’m an FBI agent.”

Cindy said, “I like your hair. I once had red hair, well, more auburn, really, but I didn’t curl it like you do yours.” She cut her eyes to Eve. “What I hate is blond ponytails. I mean, it’s so dated, like a woman trying to regain her girlhood. It’s pathetic.”

Eve said, “The reason Lin Mei tried to kill you is because Xu threatened to murder her little boy if she didn’t.”

They all saw how quickly Cindy computed this, even as sick and drugged as she was. “Poor kid’s dead now. I mean, since I’m alive, it means Mom failed, and Xu will find that out fast enough.”

“Her boy is being protected,” Sherlock said. “He’ll be fine.”

Eve continued, “Do you know Lin Mei’s in shock and here in the psychiatric unit?”

“She’s probably faking it. I hope she goes down hard for this.” They saw a hand clench. “I actually pretended to
listen
to her! I actually paid her some attention, and this is how she repays me.”

Savich said, “I’m sure you agree she was smart to pay more attention to Xu. She didn’t think the police could protect her son from him.”

“All right, so she was smart to believe him. I mean, he shot Judge Hunt, murdered Mickey O’Rourke and poor Milo, the greedy idiot. Wait—” Sudden panic bloomed in Cindy’s eyes. “Clive. Where’s Clive?”

Savich hadn’t wanted to go there, not yet, but Cindy’s face was flushed, her eyes focused on him. He didn’t have a choice now. He said, “Xu hired a prisoner to stab him in the shower, just as he had Lin Mei stab you. Clive didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Cindy.”

Cindy’s face went perfectly blank. She tried to shake her head at them but couldn’t seem to make her head move. She closed her eyes and didn’t make a sound, except for her labored breathing. Tears seeped from beneath her eyelids and streamed down her white cheeks.

Eve thought,
So Cindy hadn’t been simply using Clive after all.

Savich said, “You can’t help Clive now, but you can help yourself. I’ve got that offer from the U.S. attorney for you, Cindy. Are you ready to tell us what you know about Xu?”

Cindy whispered, her eyes still closed, “Is it fifteen years, like I wanted?”

“Yes, since Xu’s now a serial killer, fifteen years is on the table if what you tell us helps us find him.”

“You got that in writing?”

“There hasn’t been time, Cindy, and we don’t have much of it now. He could be leaving the country as we speak.”

“Can I trust you, Agent Savich?”

Savich leaned down close to her face. “You can trust me.”

Cindy opened her eyes and studied his face. She whispered, “Xu’s first name is Xian,
X-i-a-n,
but he’d always been called Xu, said it was easier than Xian. He’s a lot younger than Clive, but he didn’t tell me his age. I teased him enough for him to tell me he was from Indiana, got out of there when he was eighteen. He said he changed his name to Joe Keats, but when he was working, he was Xu. I don’t know if he’s using Joe Keats now, since I never saw his passport. I think he’s got lots of aliases.”

“Does this look like him, Cindy?” Savich showed her the sketch of Xu on the cell phone.

“That’s not too bad. He’s handsomer, though, really pretty green eyes. He did tell me he got his eyelashes from his mom, Ann.”

“Do you know where he’s staying?”

“No, he never told us that. He showed up when he wanted to. I think he moved around.”

“What was Xu after from Mark Lindy’s computer?”

“He never told us that, either. He said the less we knew about it, the better for everyone. Lindy did tell me he was an expert on computer worms and viruses, stuff like that. He bragged to me once when he was lying on top of me after sex that he was one of the major designers of the worm that shut down Iran’s bomb plans.”

An alarm went off on one of the electronic monitors Cindy was connected to, and a nurse and resident rushed into the cubicle. “Please leave now,” the doctor said. “She needs some help.”

The four of them were hurried out of Cindy Cahill’s cubicle. They stood motionless outside the cubicle. “Is she going to die?”

No one had an answer for that.

Savich punched the elevator button. They said nothing more, waited until they were inside. Savich said, “Since there’s nothing we can do about Cindy, I need to sit down somewhere, run the information she gave us on Xu through MAX.”

As they walked to the cafeteria, Eve said, “I want her to make it, I really do. I’ll admit I was surprised she was so upset about Clive. I always thought she was using him, like he was some sort of father figure to her. It’s all just so—useless.”

Savich shook his head. “I’d say they had a mutual dependence, strange as it was.”

Eve nodded. “I also think she had a bit of contempt for him, since she knew very well Clive was weaker than she was—but yeah, she depended on him, he was always there for her. I wonder what will happen to her now.”

San Francisco General Hospital

Cafeteria

Sherlock set down her coffee cup as she looked over Dillon’s shoulder. Xu had been born and raised in Lampo, Indiana. He was the son of a Caucasian mother, Ann Xu, a history teacher at Lampo High School, and a Chinese father who had first immigrated to the Gulf-side town of Paxico, Florida, before moving to Indiana and buying a gas station.

At eighteen, Xu and his parents had left Lampo for a long summer vacation at Bronson Lake, fifty miles from Lampo, Mrs. Xu had told neighbors.

The family had simply never returned. The gas station Mr. Xu had owned remained vacant; the history position at Lampo High School had been filled when Ann Xu hadn’t returned for the fall term. No one ever heard from the son. Cursory inquiries were made, but there was simply no sign of the Xu family after they’d gone on vacation. They were eventually forgotten, since no one knew of any family on either the mother or father’s side to contact.

Sherlock said, “Do you think Xu killed his parents?”

“Oh, yes,” Savich said. “There’s no trace of Xu after that. If he changed his name legally to Joe Keats, we’ll find him.”

The critical thing was that they had Xu’s first Indiana driver’s license, with a photo taken of him when he was sixteen. Dillon had already sent the photo to the image-processing lab at the Hoover Building to have it updated to show how he would look now, nearly twenty years later. They were waiting for the aged picture now, ready to compare it to the sketch Lin Mei had given the police sketch artist, and then would forward it to Hammersmith and his team as soon as it arrived.

“His features really are Caucasian,” Sherlock said, looking at the driver’s license. “Look at those green eyes. There doesn’t seem to be any resemblance at all to his Chinese father, except they are both on the slight side. He’s a good-looking kid, isn’t he?”

“Look closely,” Savich said. “He’s already got an arrogant tilt to his head, and there’s a dead-on look in his eyes, staring you right in the face, like he doesn’t care what you think or about much of anything.”

A message notification popped up, and they were soon looking at the same face, though more filled out, lines about his mouth and eyes, yet his eyes were more intense, and still had the same dead-on look, easily recognizable. Savich forwarded it to Hammersmith, waited a few seconds, and called him on speakerphone.

Savich said, “Griffin, did you get that picture of Xu I sent you?”

“It’s going out over the network now. I was wrong about Xu moving from the Atherton B-and-B to a middle-of-the-road motel on Lombard or down by the wharf or any of the motels in the Tenderloin. We’ve checked; he ain’t there.

“I’m still convinced, though, he’s got to be close by. I don’t think he knows we’ve identified him yet. It could be he’s staying at one of the most exclusive hotels, like the Stanford or the Fairmont or the Mandarin, figuring we wouldn’t expect that. I’m thinking the Fairmont.”

“Why the Fairmont in particular?” Sherlock asked.

A pause, then Griffin said, “A feeling, just a feeling. No guarantees.”

None needed
, Savich thought.

“Also, from what we know about him and his contacts, he’s not short on money, so why not be comfortable?”

“Then why did he stay at that bed-and-breakfast in Atherton when he first arrived to kill Judge Hunt?”

“I don’t know. I’ve realized he’s not so easy to figure out.” Griffin sighed. “Until he killed Mickey O’Rourke, I had him pegged differently. We’ll canvass all the hotels we can, this time with Xu’s photo in hand. We’ll have them put up his photo behind the registration desks. He might still be wearing that ball cap and sunglasses—well, there’s nothing we can do about that except give them a heads-up.”

“Griffin, do me a favor.”

“Sure, Sherlock, whatever you need.”

“Be careful, Griffin. He’s a very dangerous man. Please don’t forget that.”

“I will. Listen, I could be all wrong about the Fairmont.”

“They tell me that doesn’t happen often,” Savich said. “Call when you get something.”

—

When Eve and Harry
got off the elevator on the fourth floor, Eve looked up the hallway at an SFPD officer and a deputy marshal, on their feet when they spotted them.

Once inside Ramsey’s room, Deputy Marshal Haloran said quickly, “What’s going on?”

Eve said, “I really made a mess of it, Joe.”

Harry squeezed her arm. “She means Cindy Cahill is pretty bad off. But she may have finally given us something useful. We’ll know soon.”

To Eve’s surprise, Ramsey was reading a spy novel, and wasn’t that perfect? She wondered what Savich would find out about Xu, the spy and cold-blooded murderer who wanted Ramsey dead.

She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You look really hot, you know that?”

He also looked tired. But he was back, all hard, dark edges, and the killer smile, Judge Dredd in the flesh. “I look hot? That makes you as much of a liar as my wife. Happy to see you, though, liar or not.” He paused. “Eve, I can tell by looking at you that something’s happened. What?”

Eve said, “Cindy Cahill told us the man who’s been trying to kill you is called Xian Xu. He’s Chinese American, born in Indiana, and looks as WASP as you do. Dillon and Sherlock are trying to track him down. I don’t suppose the name means anything to you?”

“Not any more than the name Xu by itself,” Ramsey said. “If they can find him, maybe I can start making some plans to get out of here and back to work.”

“We should get him now, Judge Hunt,” Harry said. “He won’t come after you again.” Ramsey stared from Harry to Eve, considering that, and Eve said, “Hey, do you think you’ll be going home in time for Thanksgiving?”

Ramsey became aware that the pain meds were tugging on his brain, and evidently his hearing as well, because he thought in that moment that Eve had a beautiful speaking voice. He forgot about Thanksgiving, forgot everything but her voice. He stared up at Eve. “You ever have voice lessons?”

“Me? Goodness, talk about playing a rusty saw. That’s what my vocal cords feel like. Ramsey, have you had your pain meds recently?”

“Well, yes, a couple of minutes ago. You’re lucky I’m still awake.”

She took his hand, squeezed it. “Hey, Haloran. If you want to play more poker with Judge Hunt, now’s the time.”

—

Sherlock and Savich
were seated in the security office off the lobby, Griffin on the phone. He sounded so hyper she hoped he wasn’t driving.

“We’ve got him! Amazing what a difference that picture made.”

Sherlock said, “Let me put my cell on speaker, Griffin. Okay, make our day.”

“Xu’s here at the Fairmont Hotel. The registration clerk on duty recognized him after studying the photo. She was used to seeing him in sunglasses and his ball cap, but this morning, he came trooping out of the restaurant after he’d had breakfast and asked the concierge a question. She said good morning to him. He said good morning back to her and smiled. She added he had a very nice smile. So it appears our Mr. Xu either forgot his sunglasses or he didn’t care this morning about hiding his face from prying eyes. Maybe he doesn’t intend to stay much longer.”

They cheered loud enough for Griffin to grin. The guard at the hospital video console turned toward them and toasted them with his coffee, since they looked ready to high-five the world.

Sherlock said, “Griffin, you’re a genius. I worship at your feet. Tell us everything.”

“He’s not at the hotel now. The registration clerk told us the last time she saw him, he was headed toward the hotel front doors.”

Savich asked, “Griffin, did the registration clerk say he was carrying anything, like luggage?”

“I didn’t ask her. Hold on.” Two minutes later, Griffin came back on line. “She doesn’t remember seeing him carrying anything.”

Savich said, “If he believes Cindy is dead, he may think his job here is done. He could have put his luggage in his car before he went in to breakfast. Griffin, speak to the concierge. Find out what question Xu asked.”

Griffin was back on the line in a minute. “The concierge who spoke to Xu is off-duty. I’ll try his cell to see if he remembers what Xu wanted. I’ll get back to you.”

Savich said, “Griffin, stay around the lobby. If Xu comes back, call us, but don’t try to apprehend him, okay? How many agents are with you?”

“There are two of us.”

“Make sure you all look like happy tourists. Cheney or I will call you.”

When he punched off his cell, Savich said, “I’m thinking keep it simple. We wait for him in his room, that way there’s no chance of any bystanders getting hurt.”

Sherlock cocked her head at Dillon. “Do you think he’s leaving for good?”

“I don’t know. He’s careful and he’s smart. He didn’t check out when he left the Fairmont this morning, but if he’s got luggage with him in the car, he may not go back.”

“I would bet he knows Cindy is alive by now, and of course Ramsey is, too. Do you think he’s giving up on it all, running?”

“Nothing he does would surprise me. There are only three places we know he might go—back to the Fairmont, one of the airports, or here, the hospital.”

“He’s got to know we’re ready for him here, Dillon, and that Ramsey and Cindy Cahill are well protected,” Sherlock said.

“So was Ramsey in the elevator. Call Eve, have her alert the deputies with Ramsey. Something big is going to happen today. We just don’t know where.”

They were walking toward the parking lot when Savich got a call from the ICU.

Cindy Cahill had gone into convulsions. She hadn’t made it. She was dead.