21st Birthday by Patterson, James (ebook reader screen .TXT) 📕

With the comforting sound of electronic chickens clucking in the back seat, I slid closer to Joe, put my arms around his neck, and kissed his cheek.

I asked the little chicken counter in the back seat for a kiss and said thanks and good-bye to Mrs. Rose.

“You’re too farrrrr.”

I got out of the car, opened the back door, said, “I’m leaving now, Bugs.”

She threw her little arms around my neck and gave me a kiss.

“Be careful,” Joe said. “Assume he’s a psychopath with a vengeance.”

“I’m just going to see Brady.” I patted my holster. “See you in a bit.”

I walked back into the Hall and up to our department. Brady was on the phone when I slipped into the seat across from his desk.

He said into the mouthpiece, “Love you, too.”

After he hung up with Yuki, I spent ten minutes briefing him on the news from Joe’s mysterious CI.

Brady said, “We have to check it out. Tell all of this to Conklin. I need to make some calls.”

CHAPTER 62

RICH CONKLIN WAS working alone at his desk.

I dropped into the swivel chair that had molded itself to my weight and shape over the years. Then, I stuck out my arm and swept all of Sonia Alvarez’s things aside; sunglasses, thermos, stack of papers, glass paperweight, a number of pens. Then I folded my arms over the space I’d made for myself.

I looked up to see Conklin grinning.

“What?”

“I think you’d like her if you gave her a chance.”

“You’re talking crazy, Richie. I like her fine. She’s been here for what? A week? I’ll take her to lunch, okay? I just need room to spread out.”

“She’s so excited about our everyday —”

“Our everyday is about to get more intense.” I looked at my watch, then back to Richie. “Soon.”

“Tell me.”

I told him everything that Joe had told me, except the name of his source. I told him about Evan Burke changing his name and face, the warning from Joe’s CI that Burke was on the move, that we had nothing on him except Lucas Burke’s untested and self-serving theory that his father was a mass murderer.

I told him we were going to make a move.

Conklin wasn’t grinning anymore, and I wasn’t thinking about singing along with Sheryl Crow on my guitar, either.

I said, “Call Alvarez. Tell her we need her now. Is she ready for this … baptism by fire?”

“I have no doubt.”

By 8 p.m., the Burke task force met on the street in front of the Hall of Justice.

Brady briefed us under a streetlight, laying out our objective: to bring him in to get his comments on his son on the record. “We want to bring him in without a shot fired or a door kicked in. But if it goes that way, we’re ready.”

And then Brady got into a van with Cappy and Alvarez and two other cops with tac team experience.

Conklin and I were assigned an unmarked car with a dedicated channel, high-tech navigation, and vest mics. Conklin wanted the wheel, so I willingly agreed to navigate us to a place I’d never been. Captain Brevoort had assigned the Wendy Franks investigators to join our caravan while Chi stayed back at the Hall and used Brady’s office as command center.

As the mission clarified and became real, my emotions bounced between excitement and something resembling stark fear.

The task force was acting on my secondhand intel. If Berney was wrong, I’d hold myself responsible for sending this crew on a road trip to nowhere, and God forbid resulting injuries or death.

If Berney was right, we were about to confront a crafty killer without probable cause to arrest him. If Evan Burke, aka Jake Winslow, was that killer, he was remarkable for his cold-blooded brutality. He’d murdered his wife, daughter, his son’s wife, child, and lover as well as a few victims who matched his preferred victim profile. Lucas had thought there were more bodies than he knew.

If all of that was true, tonight might be our best chance of capturing a mass murderer of the psychopathic kind. In doing so, we might save untold lives, close cold cases, and overall, feel the deep satisfaction of being a cop.

But it could go wrong and tonight could end in tragedy.

CHAPTER 63

WE STARTED OUR ENGINES and rolled out at 8:15 p.m.

Conklin knew the way, leaving my mind free to picture a dead baby with pale red hair and the bloated, gnawed body of her mother strapped into a red Volvo. I felt Misty Fogarty clinging to me as we’d left the Comfy Corner Diner, four hours before a monster slashed her throat.

I willed Conklin to drive faster. I projected into the near future and saw myself standing with my partner at Evan Burke’s door, hoping he’d put up a fight so we could arrest him for assaulting a police officer. Cuff him. Throw him into the back of the car and then treat him to a marathon interrogation in the box.

“Linds?” Conklin said.

“Hmmm?”

“I asked if you wanted to stop for coffee.”

“No thanks, Rich. Let’s just get there.”

I needed to find out for myself whether Lucas Burke, the man awaiting trial on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice, had been framed by his name-changing, face-changing father who lived in a cabin too remote for even Google Earth to have recorded.

It only took our caravan fifteen minutes to cross the Golden Gate Bridge into Sausalito. Once within the Marin County lines, Brady patched us into his call to Captain Geoffrey Brevoort to let him know that we were in his territory.

“Captain. We have to question a suspect on other homicides. As soon as we have him, we’ll bring you into the loop.”

We exited the highway at 445B, passing the Commodore Dock and a small marina on our right-hand side. About a