The 8th Confession

and Conklin and I helped her to a gurney.

“I saw it,” the victim whispered. She pointed to a blackened hulk at the intersection. “That school bus was a bomb.”

“A school bus? Please, God, not kids!”

I looked everywhere but saw no children.

Had they all been burned alive?

Three

WATER STREAMED from fire hoses, dousing flame. Metal sizzled and the air turned rancid.

I found Chuck Hanni, arson investigator and explosion expert, stooping outside the school bus’s side door. He had his hair slicked back, and he wore khakis and a denim shirt, sleeves rolled up, showing the old burn scar that ran from the base of his right thumb to his elbow.

Hanni looked up, said, “God-awful disaster, Lindsay.”

He walked me through what he called a “catastrophic explosion,” showed me the two adult-size “crispy critters” curled between the double row of seats near the driver’s side. Pointed out that the bus’s front tires were full of air, the back tires, flat.

“The explosion started in the rear, not the engine compartment. And I found this.”

Hanni indicated rounded pieces of glass, conduction tubes, and blue plastic shards melted into a mass behind the bus door.

“Imagine the explosive force,” he said, pointing to a metal projectile embedded in the wall. “That’s a triple beam balance,” he said, “and I’m guessing the blue plastic is from a cooler. Only took a few gallons of ether and a spark to do all this…”

A wave of his hand to indicate the three blocks of utter destruction.

I heard hacking coughs and boots crunching on glass. Conklin, his six-foot-two frame materializing out of the haze. “There’s something you guys should see before the bomb squad throws us outta here.”

Hanni and I followed Conklin across the intersection to where a man’s body lay folded up against a lamppost.

Conklin said, “A witness saw this guy fly out of the bus’s windshield when it blew.”

The dead man was Hispanic, his face sliced up, his hair in dyed-red twists matted with blood, his body barely covered in the remnants of an electric-blue sweatshirt and jeans, his skull bashed in from his collision with the lamppost. From the age lines in his face, I guessed this man had lived a hard forty years. I dug his wallet out of his hip pocket, opened it to his driver’s license.

“His name is Juan Gomez. According to this, he’s only twenty-three.”

Hanni bent down, peeled back the dead man’s lips. I saw two broken rows of decayed stubs where his teeth had once been.

“A tweaker,” Hanni said. “He was probably the cook. Lindsay, this case belongs to Narcotics, maybe the DEA.”

Hanni punched buttons on his cell phone as I stared down at Juan Gomez’s body. First visible sign of methamphetamine use is rotten teeth. It takes a couple of years of food- and sleep-deprivation to age a meth head twenty years. By then, the drug would have eaten away big hunks of his brain.

Gomez was on his way out before the explosion.

“So the bus was a mobile meth lab?” said Conklin.

Hanni was on hold for Narcotics.

“Yep,” he said. “Until it blew all to hell.”

Part One. BAGMAN JESUS

Chapter 1

CINDY THOMAS BUTTONED her lightweight Burberry trench coat, said, “Morning, Pinky,” as the doorman held open the front doors of the Blakely Arms. He touched his hat brim and searched Cindy’s eyes, saying, “Have a good day, Ms. Thomas. You take care.”

Cindy couldn’t say that she never looked for trouble. She worked the crime desk at the Chronicle and liked to say, “Bad news is good news to me.”

But a year and a half ago a psycho with an illegal sublet and an anger-management problem, living two floors above her, had sneaked into apartments and gone on a brutal killing spree.

The killer had been caught and convicted, and was currently quarantined on death row at the “Q.”

But still, there were aftershocks at the Blakely Arms. The residents triple-locked their doors every night, flinched at sudden noises, felt the loss of common, everyday security.

Cindy was determined not to live with this kind of fear.

She smiled at the doorman, said, “I’m a badass, Pinky. Thugs had better watch out for me.”

Then she breezed outside into the early May morning.

Striding down Townsend from Third to Fifth – two very long blocks – Cindy traveled between the old and new San Francisco. She passed the liquor store next to her building, the drive-through McDonald’s across the street, the Starbucks and the Borders on the ground floor of a new residential high-rise, using the time to return calls, book appointments, set up her day.

She paused near the recently rejuvenated Caltrain station that used to be a hell pit of homeless druggies, now much improved as the neighborhood gentrification took hold.

But behind the Caltrain station was a fenced-off and buckled stretch of sidewalk that ran along the train yard. Rusted junkers and vans from the Jimi Hendrix era parked on the street. The vehicles were crash pads for the homeless.

As Cindy mentally geared up for her power walk through that “ no-fly zone,” she noticed a clump of street people ahead – and some of them seemed to be crying.

Cindy hesitated.

Then she drew her laminated ID card out of her coat, held it in front of her like a badge, pushed her way into the crowd – and it parted for her.

The ailanthus trees shooting up through cracks in the pavement cast a netted shade on a pile of rags, old newspapers, and fast-food trash that was lying at the base of the chain-link fence.

Cindy felt a wave of nausea, sucked in her breath.

The pile of rags was, in fact, a dead man. His clothes were blood-soaked and his face so beaten to mush, Cindy couldn’t make out his features.

She asked a bystander, “What happened? Who is this man?”

The bystander was a heavyset woman, toothless, wearing many layers and textures of clothes. Her legs were bandaged to the knees and her nose was pink from crying.

She gave Cindy a sidelong look.

“It’s B-B-Bagman Jesus. Someone killed him!”

Cindy thumbed 911 on her Treo, reported what had clearly been a murder, and waited for the police to arrive.

As she waited, street people gathered around her.