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

Gardner said, “This is the paper.”

He held up the Chronicle Yuki had seen enough times to memorize the headline. “Slash-and-Gash Killer Takes Second Victim.” Misty’s sweet face filled the rest of the front page.

Gardner went on.

“Ms. Conroy will testify that she and Lucas were together from the time he arrived in Sacramento until a day and a half later, when they returned to San Francisco. So how can the prosecution have a video of my client killing Melissa Fogarty, flinging the murder weapon into the weeds, and — voilà — it has Melissa’s blood on the blade and Lucas Burke’s fingerprints on the handle?

“I call bull on the prosecution’s theory. It is a theory full of holes because Lucas wasn’t there. They have a possible murder weapon, and it may have belonged to Lucas. But they don’t have proof it was in his hand when Melissa Fogarty was killed.

“I will prove to you that someone else committed these unspeakable murders. He had access to my client’s house. He had access to his razor blade.

“As for Tara’s body. By the time that poor woman’s car floated up near China Beach she had been in the ocean for nearly a week. She was bloated, and ocean animals — fish, crabs, seals, whatever — had been rough on her. But it was still clear that she had been killed with a straight-edge razor sliced across her throat from left to right. When she was dead or dying, her killer weighed down the accelerator and sent her car into the ocean, with mother and baby daughter inside.

“My client, Lucas Burke didn’t do this. And the prosecution can say what they want, but they have no witness, no trace evidence, no clear video of the person who killed Tara Burke.

“My client didn’t do it.

“Lucas killed none of these people.

“He’s never killed anyone in his life. But as his attorney, I don’t have to prove his innocence.

“The prosecution has to prove his guilt beyond reasonable doubt.”

Yuki watched Gardner thank the jury and return to his seat. He put his arm around Burke’s shoulders, and his client put his head down on the table and sobbed loudly and authentically.

The judge called Yuki and Gardner to the bench and said, “I feel strongly we should recess now and pick up again after lunch.”

Gardner said, “Yes, yes, for the love of God, yes.”

Yuki said, “I agree, Your Honor.”

Court was adjourned until one o’clock.

CHAPTER 81

I WAS IN BRADY’S OFFICE when he got the call.

After a moment, he said, “Hold on, hon. I need you to tell Lindsay, too.”

Brady stabbed a button on his console and I went out to my desk and said, “Yuki? What’s wrong?”

Her voice was strained.

“Linds, I asked Brady if you can you take another stab at finding Evan Burke. I want to talk to him.”

“We’ve kept a camera on his house on Mount Tam. He hasn’t been back. His cabin cruiser is still in its slip at Richardson Bay Marina.”

“So, you’re saying this is a dead end?”

It was ten thirty Monday morning.

Yuki asking us to take another run at Evan Burke meant she was having doubts about her case, and if she was feeling that way, jurors would surely feel the same.

I asked, “What happened this morning?”

“I was on fire, but Gardner brought a bomb to the firefight.”

“Say a few more words, please.”

She sighed, “Okay. Gardner made a strong case that Evan did it, killed them all. Lucas broke down. Judge called the game on account of crying. Reconvening after a long lunch break.”

“I’ll call you later,” I said. “Buy you a drink.”

“Or two,” she said.

“Chin up, girlfriend,” I said.

I hung up, left my desk, tapped Cappy and Chi, Alvarez and Conklin, and we went down the hall to our task force office in the corner. We’d gone on to other homicides once the Lucas Burke trial had been scheduled.

As the five of us dragged chairs up to the table, I told the team we had to go over everything again with fresh eyes.

“Look for one unturned stone. Don’t worry if it’s not the holy grail. We need a lead.”

Evan Burke’s ID photo from his military days was centered on the whiteboard. He’d been a kid when the photo was taken, and while Lucas resembled him, Evan was better looking. If he was the killer, I could see how he could put a spell on young females and kill them before they had a hint of the danger.

We had piles of data in both hard copies and digits, and since Paul Chi was super organized, he knew all of it.

He took charge now, calling up files, slapping maps on the whiteboard. There were now cold cases across the West Coast that had fallen into geographical patterns of five to seven victims centering on but not exclusive to California. Oregon, Nevada had a few clusters as well.

The victimology was vague and at the same time told a lot about the killer. Bodies had turned up both fresh killed and long buried. They were all women under thirty, and they’d all been killed by a sharp blade across the throat.

Chi said, “He sticks to the coastline and interior waterways when he can. If you draw lines from the victim locations, you can see that the nexus is San Francisco.”

We looked at the compiled data on the possible victims and found only one case of a woman who had stab marks on her chest like those we’d found on Misty and Wendy Franks. Possibly the killer was only now trying on a style.

Alvarez had told us her theory that Luke had been attached to his father when he was young, but that his father was never there, which caused him to have a longing for his father and to hate him at the same time.

Where was Daddy? On a killing spree out of town before he brought it back home to