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

Berney shrugged. “I know more about Evan than I want to and I still don’t have anything to go on. I’m not watching Lucas. But the reason I’m here is because I brought you something, Lindsay.” Berney took a small brown envelope from inside his shirt pocket under the pullover. “You got this on your own, right, Joe? When you were on the job.”

He passed it to Joe, who said, “Do I want this?”

“Someone you love may find it comes in handy. If not, burn it and scatter the ashes.”

“I got this item from Pentagon files,” Berney explained, “after Burke’s wife, Corinne, and daughter, Jodie, went missing fifteen years ago. There were no digital copies and it wasn’t on any known database.

I was holding a ten card, ten inked fingerprints with a photo of Evan Burke when he’d joined the Green Berets at age eighteen.

“We couldn’t use the prints officially without jamming you up,” I said to Berney, “but we could run the prints against suspicious unidentified prints. For instance, there may have been assorted prints on Misty Fogarty’s car.”

Berney nodded in agreement.

I continued to spin the theory out. “If Forensics got a match to Evan Burke’s prints, that could prove that senior had been in proximity to Misty before she was killed.”

That ten card with photo gave me hope.

CHAPTER 70

JOE WALKED BERNEY OUT, and when he returned minutes later, I had to ask, “So whodunit? Lucas or Evan?”

“Uh. There’s only one guy, a changeling space alien posing as both father and son.”

In other words, Joe didn’t know, either.

As I started up my car, I thought again about what Evan Burke in his Jake Winslow persona had stated while holding Conklin and me under the cold black eye of his gun. He’d said that Lucas has been killing since he was a child psycho, had killed his mother and sister, that he’d never been caught.

I didn’t like father or son at all, and yet I couldn’t shake the feeling I had that Burke senior was telling the truth.

When I was only a few blocks from the Hall my phone buzzed. I took a quick peek at the caller ID. It was Yuki.

“Could we meet in my office?”

“You bet,” I said. “Okay if Richie joins us?”

“Sure. I’ll call him.”

My fifteen-minute drive to the Hall was through the normal Friday morning stop-and-go. I watched traffic without seeing it while I thought about Yuki, readying herself to try Lucas Burke for a double homicide while Lucas’s star defense attorney mocked her case built on circumstantial evidence. It was strong evidence. The dead were Lucas Burke’s pretty young wife and adorable daughter. He had the means and the opportunity — that case could be made.

But one juror insisting on a smoking gun could tip the prosecution’s case.

I left my car in the day lot across from the Hall, and as I crossed with the green I saw that Cindy and a few dozen other reporters had set up on the sidewalk.

Cindy was with her photographer, Jonny Samuels, and the grieving Kathleen Wyatt.

As Kathleen had told Cindy the day she’d barged into the Chronicle offices demanding to know why her post on Cindy’s crime blog accusing Lucas had been removed, Tara and Lorrie were at the center of her life. Tara called her mother every morning, and when she didn’t call or answer her phone the day of Tara and Lucas’s fight, Kathleen knew something was wrong. Why? Because she’d been afraid Lucas might harm her daughter.

I waved to Girl Reporter and she waved back, made a move toward me, but I kept walking. Took the front steps two at a time, cleared security, and jogged up two flights of the back stairs to the second floor.

Yuki was waiting for me at the entrance to the DA’s offices, which took up half a floor. She buzzed me in and I told her that Conklin was coming directly.

“He’s in my office already,” Yuki said.

She looked like she’d slept on a bed of nails. Jacket misbuttoned, hair sticking up in back, lipstick on her teeth.

I wanted to say, “Everything’s going to be fine,” but this was Yuki and she ran on her own instincts. I knew she had big moments of doubt, asking herself why she kept running, wondering if she should have babies and devote herself to keeping her family and home. Sometimes she’d blame herself for the pothole that had suddenly opened just before the finish line. And sometimes, she’d be the first through the tape and the crowd went wild.

I always told her she was living her passion. How many people get to do that?

I followed her into her hard-won office. And there he was. My good-looking-good-doing partner of many years, the brother I never had, and a friend I entrusted with my life as he entrusted his with me.

He was lounging on the two-seat sofa, his long legs stretched out in front of him, brown hair falling over his eyes. Today, Conklin looked calm, like it was a day at the beach. Which it was not.

Yuki did not look calm. She didn’t sit; rather, she paced her small office, speaking in her trademark rapid-fire delivery. Her ability to tell a story with confidence and in so doing engage her juries was one of her strengths.

She summed up her situation for her audience of two.

Today was Friday. The trial started on Monday. She knew the material cold. Her opening statement was killer. But the weakness in her argument was that all she had against Lucas Burke was his association with the victims, and that he had no documented alibi.

If she did her job well, that would be enough to convict him. Yuki cited several major cases of this size and interest that had been won with circumstantial evidence. Scott Peterson came immediately to my mind. On the other hand, O. J. Simpson had been famously acquitted.

“Look at this,” Yuki