The 9th Judgment

Chapter 34

BY THE TIME I was called to the scene, the cruisers and the ambulances were parked all along Battery and Clay. I ran my Explorer onto the sidewalk and braked next to Jacobi’s Hyundai, then grabbed one of the uniforms who was doing crowd control at the western entrance to the mall.

“Second floor, Sergeant,” the uni told me. “Outside the movie theater.”

I called Jacobi and he answered his phone, saying, “Come up, Boxer. And hold on to your dinner.”

Moviegoers who’d been sent out through a back exit had returned to the front entrance, joining commuters and office workers and tourists who had gathered ten deep outside the entrance to 1 EC.

I held up my badge and edged through the crowd, fending off questions that I wouldn’t answer if I could. A uniform opened the glass doors for me, and I entered the mall, a stretch of shops bearing famous logos, now unnaturally empty of shoppers.

The escalators had been turned off and crime scene tape stretched across the whole western wing of the mall, so I stooped under the tape and loped up the stilled mechanical stairs. Jacobi was waiting for me at the top of the escalator, and I could see from his face how bad it was going to be before I even got near the bodies on the red carpet.

I saw the mother first. She’d fallen onto her back. Her pale-blue cardigan was black over her heart from the two shots to the center mass, and she’d taken another gunshot wound to the head. I reached over and closed her sightless eyes.

Only then could I bear to look at the small, still figure lying near her.

Damn it, he’d killed the child.

This scene was a horror, and even as I recoiled from the brutality, I was struck by how methodical these shootings had been. They had been impersonal, dead-on shots fired at close range.

Jacobi stepped aside and I circled the body of the child in the capsized stroller, a boy under the age of one. I didn’t need to say to Jacobi that it was obvious these killings and the ones in the Stonestown garage were the work of the same killer.

But where was his signature? Where were the letters “WCF”?

Jacobi dropped the young mother’s wallet into an evidence bag. “This is Judy Kinski. She had forty dollars in small bills. Two charge cards. Library card. She would have been twenty-six years old next week. McNeil is contacting her next of kin.”

“Witnesses?” I asked. “Someone had to see this go down.”

“Chi is talking to the ticket seller. Come with me.”

Chapter 35

THE GIRL IN the movie-theater manager’s office was crying into her hands. She looked up when I entered the tiny space. Paul Chi introduced me to the pale young woman and said, “This is Robin Rose. She may have seen the shooter.”

“Is my mother here?” Robin asked.

Jacobi said, “She’s on her way. As soon as she arrives, we’ll escort you down.”

“I didn’t see the shootings,” the girl said between sobs. “I was opening the booth for the seven o’clock show.”

Chi handed her a wad of tissues and told her it was all right, to take her time.

“I didn’t hear anything,” she said, blowing her nose. “But when I rolled up the window…”

I could see it through her eyes. The last moments of her innocence, opening the cash drawer, checking the ticket feed, rolling up the metal security window, expecting-what? A couple of people wanting to buy their tickets early?

“I didn’t believe it at first,” Robin told us. “I thought it was some kind of alternative advertising for an upcoming show. Then I realized that those people were real. That they were dead.”

“Did you see anyone near the bodies?” I asked.

She nodded and said, “He must’ve heard the window go up. He met my eyes for a fraction of a second. I saw the gun, so I ducked down.”

The man Robin Rose saw was a white male, wearing a blue-and-white baseball jacket and a cap pulled down over his eyes. She didn’t think she could describe him, but she would try. Same with his gun. And she didn’t see which exit he took out of the mall.

Maybe he’d taken the skywalk over to another of the malls in the Embarcadero Center, or he could just as easily have gone down the escalator and out onto the street.

I asked Robin if she’d come in to the station to look at surveillance tape, and then I left the manager’s office with Jacobi. He was putting out an APB on a white male in a blue-and-white baseball jacket when Claire stomped up the escalator with her chief assistant, Bunny Ellis, behind her.

Claire wore a furious look as she moved in on the victims’ bodies with her Minolta. I stood next to her as she said to me, “Lookit. Same weird stippling, Lindsay. Same point-blank shooting. Same bastard kid killer. Was anything stolen?”

“Mom’s wallet was full.”

It was Claire who saw the writing on the underside of the stroller.

I stared at the letters as cameras flashed in a stroboscopic frenzy. The message was written in lipstick. The signature was the same-but different.

FWC

“What the hell?” I said to Claire. “Not WCF? Now it’s FWC?”

“You ask me, Lindsay? This guy isn’t leaving clues. He’s purely fucking with us.”

Chapter 36

OUR PINCH HITTER, Jackson Brady, said he’d taken workshops at the FBI headquarters in Quantico.

“I spent two full summers learning to profile serial killers. That doesn’t make me a pro, but I have educated opinions.”

Jacobi commandeered a conference room in the Crimes Against Persons Division, and we all sat around the chipped fake-wood table, looking at Brady. Paul Chi told Brady what we’d gathered from the first scene and the latest, and Brady took notes.

All eyes were on him when he told us, “Killing children is reactive, maybe to a bad childhood, or it’s possible this killer is so dead inside, he just wastes the kids because they’re witnesses.”

“The kids were babies,” Jacobi said.

Brady shrugged. “The killer probably isn’t using that kind of logic. As for the killing of the mothers, you’re seeing a real hatred for women.”

“In terms of finding this guy,” Jacobi said, “his early childhood isn’t relevant, is it? How he feels isn’t going to lead us to him.”