At five thirty p.m. chilly mist was turning to icy fog. The shops fronting the Walnut Square walkway were closed. Few Peet’s Coffee addicts even considered cutting through the walkway from Walnut to Vine. Even fewer were likely to clamber up the Everest of cement steps in the other direction.
Certainly not Jeremy Lampara.
Jeremy Lampara was not ascending any steps.
He was lying dead on the Vine Street sidewalk. White male, middle-aged, blood thick on the chest area of his camel’s hair coat.
“Camel’s hair?” Maduri said aloud.
“Classic Jeremy Lampara,” Detective Harry Shelby snorted.
“The flipper? The guy who owned that building over by campus? The place that got torched?”
“More to the point, someone got him.” Lampara wasn’t likely to get sympathy from anyone in Berkeley, least of all Shelby. Lampara was lucky anyone bothered to put a sheet over his face to keep dirt from blowing up his nose. Not that he was going to be blowing it again.
“Gonna be one bitch of a case,” Maduri said.
“Unless we can run down the perp pronto.”
“Perp’s gone.”
“Gate, gate, paragate.” Shelby liked to drop in Buddhist talk. Liked to make the team ask what it meant.
Maduri’d been on the team awhile. “Perp’s gone, gone, gone beyond, eh?” He motioned at the suspect Callahan was holding on the ground. “You sure the perp’s gone.”
“Twenty says he is. We’ll take your car.”
“Huh?” Maduri wanted to say: Take my car for what? But he wasn’t willing to give Shelby that too. He waited.
“Single witness, that kid over there,” he nodded at a thin, sandy-haired white kid in an inadequate white T-shirt and jeans, standing next to a blonde in a gray CALIFORNIA sweatshirt.
“We got just one witness? At Walnut Square? There are more people standing around holding lattes than that.”
“Not this late. But Brian Janssen is what we got. He saw the perp shoot, saw him run. We’re going to circle the area, hope he can spot him.”
Fat chance. If Janssen didn’t spot the perp, this whole investigation was going to be a field day for the press: Cops’ Cordon Catches Nothing! Cops on Scene 90 Seconds After Shooting; Killer Long Gone. Maduri could just imagine! Real Estate Developer Shot Dead Outside the Original Peet’s Coffee and Tea. There’d be columns detailing the laws Lampara had charged through like a rhino clearing a papier-mâché doorway. There’d be lists of the ordinances he’d skirted, interviews with the tenants he’d evicted, pictures of the buildings he’d demolished, op-ed after op-ed about the shoddy construction of his shoddy new condos. And the fire!
And then there’d be the Shelby connection. And the question: did Detective Shelby give Lampara’s killer a pass?
Shelby sighed. “Small chance, but all we’ve got.” He nodded toward the tall, skinny kid and said to Maduri, “Brian Janssen, nineteen years old, sophomore at Cal, lives up by campus by the building that burned. He saw the fire guys carry out the victim. Saw the vic’s cartons on the sidewalk soaked from the fire hoses. If the poor fuck’d left an hour earlier he’d be home in LA now.”
Maduri shot a glance to make sure no reporter had heard that. They’d be hard enough on Shelby if the perp vanished. From habit he slid into the patrol car and leaned toward the computer screen. Nothing there he didn’t know. He turned on the engine as Shelby lowered his butt into the car and shouted, “Left on Shattuck!”
Two cars, lights and sirens, squealed to stops across from Peet’s. The crime scene van idled in front. An unmarked Maduri knew to be the medical examiner’s blocked the sidewalk.
Maduri turned on the engine, checked the side mirrors then the rearview, and did a double take.
Janssen was in the backseat, with the blonde in the CALIFORNIA sweatshirt beside him.
“Who’s she?” he half shouted even though it was quieter in the car with the doors shut.
“Lisa Kozlovski,” the girl said.
“You saw the shooter too?”
“No, I was down the block, on Walnut, when I heard the shots. When I got here the man was dead. I mean, I think he was dead. He was on the sidewalk, all bloody. Dead.”
Maduri raised a questioning brow to Shelby.
“Mr. Janssen wanted Miss Kozlovski to accompany him. He thought it would be interesting for her.”
“Help me to think,” Janssen sputtered.
Maduri had to jam his jaws together. Half the department would be circling the area. Every cop of the force would be dragged back in. And Brian Janssen was like a twelve-year-old on a date. Like he had Maduri and Shelby driving him and his date to the movies. The girl was a knockout blonde, three levels above what Janssen could ever hope for. But suddenly the kid had a novelty to offer. Want to ride in the back of a cop car? In the cage? Look for a murderer? Maduri didn’t expect Janssen to spot the shooter — then again, he figured if this deer-in-the-headlights kid was managing to sit thigh-to-thigh with this blonde, he had to be sharper than he looked.
Janssen nudged her.
“Would you leave the doors unlocked?” she asked. “Uh... I’m a little claustrophobic.”
You, not him, huh? But Maduri just said, “Sure.” As he clicked the lock, a patrol car Code 3’d around the corner, its sirens screeching in Maduri’s ear as it passed inches away.
“Damn sirens,” Shelby grumbled. “Know why they blast your ears off?”
It took Janssen a moment to realize the question was to him. “Uh-uh.”
“New cars! They’re so airtight; music blaring inside. Drivers don’t hear the sirens anymore. Not ours, not the fire trucks.”
From Janssen’s guilty expression Maduri figured the kid was one of those drivers.
Dark night, pedestrians in black, some under umbrellas. The white Christmas lights snaking up poles turned the dark blacker. Maduri hung the left onto Shattuck. If the perp was planning to escape on BART he’d be running down Shattuck toward it, or jumping on a bus. Or hiding in the Arts and Crafts Co-op standing over a sculpture he had no intention of buying. Or he’d have hidden in the hundred and one spots BPD was not going to uncover on a dark, foggy December night. He’d have gone... anywhere.
Janssen would want to be the hero. Maduri slowed the car. “On the sidewalk, there! In front of the French Hotel!” He pointed to a white guy in a hoodie that could have been mahogany but was more likely black. “What about him?”
Janssen shot a glance at the girl before turning toward the window. Maduri noted Shelby’s mistake — he’d sat Janssen where he’d have a clear view out the passenger window. He should have put the girl next to window and let Janssen look over her since that was the way the kid was looking anyway.
But Janssen was staring toward the dark figure moving into the Andronico’s supermarket parking lot.
“What so you think?”
“No. Not him.”
Maduri caught the kid’s hesitation. “You sure, Mr. Janssen?”
Janssen shrugged. In the rearview Maduri could see him shiver and slide closer to the girl, who looked none too warm herself.
“Sorry about the car. Heater repair isn’t high on the department’s budget plans.”
Janssen started to put an arm around the girl’s shoulder but she gave him a quick head shake. “She’s from LA,” he said quickly. “It’s like Nome here for her, right?”
She nodded.
“It’s like Nome here period tonight,” Shelby said. Back at the scene, officers were standing in the cold, laboriously interviewing every man, woman, and child, writing every name and address, double-checking spelling, triple-checking e-mail addresses, getting colder every minute. Getting no closer to tracking down the perp.