A Plague of Secrets

3

At a few minutes past seven-thirty a sergeant inspector of homicide named Darrel Bracco double-parked on Ashbury. He unhooked his squawk box handset and draped the cord up over the rearview mirror, so that a meter person coming by might surmise that this was a police vehicle and as such shouldn’t get a parking ticket. Just to be double sure, though, he left his business card on the dashboard of his city-issue Pontiac. He knew from bitter personal experience that even these precautions might not be enough.

A crowd of perhaps sixty souls stood beyond the yellow crime-scene tape that the responding unit had strung across the mouth of the alley and again farther down. Bracco saw that the coroner’s van hadn’t yet arrived, but two black-and-white squad cars also helped to close off the entrance to the alley from the inquisitive populace.

His badge out, excusing himself as he went, he pushed his way through the mass of people and ducked under the tape. A no-nonsense guy, he met no real resistance-Bracco was forty-two years old, just under six feet tall, clean-cut, casually buffed. He nodded to the two uniformed officers who were keeping the crime scene from being violated.

Over by the body, obvious enough on the ground by the back door to one of the local establishments, another uniform with graying hair and the start of a gut, undoubtedly the lieutenant from Park Station, was standing talking with Bracco’s new partner, Debra Schiff. Debra was thirty-eight, wore her sandy hair short, and possessed a very good if tough-looking face that looked tougher without makeup. For which reason she never wore any.

Bracco flashed his badge and stuck his hand out. “How you doin’, Lieutenant? Darrel Bracco.”

“Bill Banks.”

“Nice to meet you. Thanks for holding down the fort. I miss anything fun yet?”

Schiff answered, shaking her head no. “Waiting on the techs. Story of our lives, huh? You’d think these people would have the good grace to get themselves shot during regular business hours. But here it is, first thing on a weekend. Time the techs get mounted and rolling, they might not get here till noon.” She turned to Banks. “But Darrel and I can handle things here, Lieutenant, if you want to get back to your station or go home. Your call.”

Banks clucked and shrugged. “Thanks, but if you don’t mind, I’ll just hang awhile. See where this goes a little.”

“He was just telling me he knows the guy,” Schiff said.

Banks nodded. “Everybody in the neighborhood knows him. Dylan Vogler. He managed this place.”

“And what place is that?” Bracco asked.

“The coffee shop, Bay Beans West. Takes up the whole corner.” Banks pointed. “This is the back entrance he’s up against. Also, I was just showing Inspector Schiff, see on the side wall that hole in the stucco…”

“The bullet. But, hmm…” Bracco moved over to look more closely.

“What?” Schiff said.

Bracco, his face right up against the wall, said, “No blood?”

Schiff, now over next to him, pointed down and said, “Backpack.”

“Backpack.” Bracco repeated. “That’d do it.” Then he went down into a squat.

“Darrel,” Schiff began, a warning note in her voice.

But he put out a hand. “I’m not moving him, Debra. If my eyes don’t deceive me, that holster on his belt’s got a cell phone in it.” He flipped the leather top open. “Aha!” Extracting the device from its holder, he stood back up and opened it.

“Ice?” Schiff asked.

Pushing buttons on the phone, Bracco nodded.

Banks’s gaze went from Bracco over to Schiff. “Ice?”

“ ‘In case of emergency,’ ” Schiff said. “ICE. They’re telling everybody to put that in their cell phones now. You don’t have that in yours?”

Banks shook his head. “I’m lucky if I can keep the damn thing charged.”

“Here you go.” Darrel pushed the send button and held the phone to his ear. “Hello,” he said after a brief moment, then identified himself. “I’m calling because you’re the emergency number on a cell phone in the possession of a man named…” He raised his eyebrows at Banks, a question, and got the name again from the lieutenant.

“Dylan Vogler.” Bracco paused, listened. “Yes. Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid so. Well, at the moment I’m in the alley behind his place of business. Sure. Just tell the officers who you are and they’ll let you through. No, you don’t want to bring your child. Can we send someone up to your house to get you? Okay, then. Okay. There’s no hurry, ma’am. We’ll be here.”

Closing the phone, he shrugged and let out a heavy breath. “The wife.” Then, cocking his head and checking his watch, he turned to Schiff. “Not too bad for a weekend. There’s a siren now.”

By the time the first cops had arrived, there had been no question that Dylan Vogler was completely and absolutely dead-no hint of a pulse, the skin just warm to the touch, his eyes wide open and unresponsive to light or other stimulation. Nevertheless, the first responding squad car cops got some EMTs down to pronounce him. The photographer took a couple of dozen photos, memorializing the scene, before anyone else touched the body at all.

Behind Bracco and Schiff the three-person crime-scene investigation unit under Lennard Faro continued scouring the alley and its environs for evidence, although within the first minutes they’d already called Faro over to identify and bag as evidence a.40-caliber semiautomatic Glock pistol that had recently been fired and a brass bullet casing that probably went with it. After watching them poking around and letting the assistant coroner and the photographer finish, at long last Bracco got to the body.

The first thing he did was take off Vogler’s light blue backpack so he could turn the body over and look at where the shot or shots had entered. He then turned the backpack over to verify the location of the bullet hole. And there it was, high up in the fabric adjacent to where the slug had exited Vogler’s body, surrounded with the bloom of blood that Bracco had expected and failed to see around the hole in the stucco. After he flipped the backpack over and saw the corresponding exit hole on the other side, he sat back and turned to his partner, squatting next to him.

“I love opening presents.” Bracco undid the clasp, pulled the top up, and held it open.

“Well, look at that,” Schiff said.

“I am.” The pack was filled to about the two-thirds mark with sandwich-size baggies of marijuana. Bracco removed one of them, opened it, smelled it again, and passed it over to his partner. “What I don’t get,” he said, “is why they didn’t take this.”

“Maybe they didn’t know it was in there,” Schiff said.

“They definitely didn’t know it was in there,” Bracco said. “They couldn’t have known about this much weed and just left it. That’d skew my whole worldview.”

Someone tapped him on his shoulder, and Bracco half turned. “Sorry, Inspector,” Banks said, “but the wife’s here.”

Nodding, Bracco sighed, then straightened up. “Hide that backpack,” he said to Schiff. “We don’t know nothing about no stinking backpacks.”

“Got it,” his partner replied.

Debra Schiff dropped the backpack onto the asphalt out of sight behind Banks’s squad car. Turning around, she saw that her partner had already gone over to greet the widow, who was standing just inside the crime-scene tape next to one of the uniformed officers.

From Schiff’s distance the woman appeared young and very pretty. Her shoulder-length black hair, still wet-her morning shower?-framed a face of pale beauty, with wide dark eyes, strong cheekbones, red lips. She wore a long-sleeved 49er T-shirt tucked into her jeans, but the blousy shirt camouflaged neither her breasts nor her tiny waist.

Coming closer, though, Schiff saw something else around the eyes too-a swelling that might be from the crying but might have another source. And under the swelling did she discern a faint yellowish cast to the skin? An ancient, or not-so-ancient, bruise?

“I can see that it’s him from here,” she was saying to Bracco. Her left hand-no wedding band-was at her mouth now. “I don’t know if I can… if I need to go any closer.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. Vogler.” Schiff inserted herself into the conversation, identifying herself and laying a hand on Bracco’s shoulder.

“I’m not Mrs. Vogler.” The woman corrected her right away. “My name is Jansey Ticknor. We’re not married. Weren’t married. But just call me Jansey, okay?” Her shoulders sagged. “God.”

Schiff wanted to get her away from her immediate reaction. “My partner mentioned a child when he talked to you.”

Ms. Ticknor nodded. “My son, Ben. He’s with our boarder. He’s fine.” Her eyes went back to the body. “My God, how did this happen?”

“We don’t know yet, ma’am,” Bracco said. “We did find a gun. Did your husband own a gun?”

Jansey Ticknor blinked into the sun for a moment. “He couldn’t.”

“He couldn’t? Why was that?” Schiff asked.

Jansey’s face went flat. She looked from one inspector to the other. “He served some time in jail when he was younger.”

“What for?” Bracco asked.

She shrugged. “He was a driver in a robbery. It was the only time he ever did anything like that. Anyway… he went to prison. So, no, he couldn’t have a gun.”

Schiff threw a quick look at Bracco. There was a real difference, they both knew, between going to jail, which meant the city and county lockup downtown, and spending time in prison. Prison was hard time, and in San Francisco, the probation capital of the Western world, time in the joint argued strongly against Jansey’s description that it had been the only wrongdoing of Dylan Vogler’s life.

“Jansey,” Schiff asked, “did you see Dylan before he went to work this morning?”

“No, he got up early with Ben, our boy. He lets me sleep in on weekends sometimes.” The body over on the asphalt drew her gaze again.

Bracco spoke up. “Did Dylan have any enemies that you know of? Somebody who was mad at him?”

“Not really, no. I guess it’s possible, but he didn’t have any power. He just ran this coffee shop. There wasn’t any drama in his life.”

“Maybe he fired somebody recently?” Schiff suggested. “Something like that.”

“No. The staff, it’s like only ten people or so and they’ve all been here forever.” She shook her head, dismissing the thought. “Whatever it was, it wasn’t about his job, I’m sure.” Her eyes went to the doorway. “Maybe somebody robbed him.”

“His wallet was on him,” Bracco said. “Cell phone. No sign of robbery.”

“Maybe they were going to take his stuff and something scared them away.”

“That’s possible,” Schiff said.

“What stuff?” Bracco asked.

She closed her mouth, pursed her lips, and shifted to her other foot. “I don’t know. What you said, his wallet and cell phone. Like that.”

Bracco kept it low-key. “He didn’t have anything else particularly worth stealing that you know of that maybe wouldn’t be obvious to us? A watch, maybe?”

“I don’t think so, no.” She turned her head back toward the body. “You can’t just leave him lying there.”

“We won’t, Jansey,” Schiff said. “The coroner’s ready to take him to the morgue as soon as we release him.” Lowering her voice, she moved in closer. “It might save you a difficult trip downtown if you wanted to give us a positive identification now. I’d be right next to you, if you think you can handle it.”

Jansey was biting her lower lip and eventually nodded, putting her arm in Schiff’s. “Don’t let go of me,” she said, “in case I fall down or faint or something. Please.”

“I got you.”

“Okay, let’s go.”

With BBW closed up, Schiff told her partner she’d meet him at a place she loved that had been serving breakfasts on Irving Street just west of Nineteenth Avenue for about eighty years. She and Bracco had been partnered up for only about six months and still had favorite haunts that the other didn’t know.

As usual, the place was packed; but also as usual, they moved the customers along right smartly. So the wait for Schiff’s table wasn’t more than ten minutes. She’d just had her first sip of coffee when Bracco came in, caught her eye over the other patrons, and threaded his way over to her. When he sat down, she lowered her cup. “What took you?”

Bracco’s normal sunny disposition sulked under a shadow. He was all but breathing fire but simply shook his head, his eyes dark. “You don’t want to know.”

She sipped coffee. “They gave you another ticket.”

Bracco’s head wagged from side to side. “They are twenty-four-karat idiots, Debra. I’m going to find out who wrote this one up and go after him.”

“Or her,” Schiff said. “Don’t forget saying ‘or her.’ ”

“I never would, of course, not in my real life. But I don’t care if it’s a him or a her. I’m going to take the sucker down, whoever it is. You didn’t get tagged?”

She shrugged.

“But here’s the thing. I parked in the street with my squawker hanging from my rearview mirror and my goddamned card on the dash. You know, Bracco, homicide, with the badge and all. You think it’s possible they don’t know that homicide is actually part of the PD? Maybe they think homicide is like the name of a pest control company.”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

Bracco blew out heavily. “It’s not right, Debra. It’s just so incredibly demoralizing.”

“It is, I agree.”

“I’m not writing up another memo for another bullshit ticket like this.”

The way it worked was that parking tickets incurred by city vehicles required the employee to fill out a form detailing the reason that the parking infraction had been unavoidable, and hence forgivable. The chief had issued a general order. Any officer who got a ticket had to fill out the form before leaving his shift for the day. Of course, a lot of times people couldn’t be bothered, so about every six months they’d get a memo they had to sign and return, acknowledging in a sub rosa fashion that-officially-parking violations were, in fact, about as important as murders.

“I wouldn’t write it up, either, Darrel. Call those bastards on it. Why don’t you bring it up to Glitsky on Monday, let him handle it?”

“He’ll go ballistic. He hates this stuff worse than me.”

“Yeah, but that’s why they pay him the big bucks.”

“Good point. What else is he doing anyway, right?” The waiter appeared at his elbow and Bracco looked up. “Anything better here than everything else?”

Two minutes later, his eggs ordered, Bracco stirred his own coffee and looked across at his partner. “So, how about our victim?”

“I think he hit Jansey.”

“How do you get that?”

“Her cheek didn’t look right. Even under the tears. She didn’t love him, I don’t think. You see how she talked about him? ‘He didn’t have any power. He just ran this coffee shop. There wasn’t any drama in his life.’ That’s not a woman who loves her man.”

“So she knew about the weed?”

“Of course. How could she not?”

“You notice she didn’t say anything about the backpack.”

“She might not have known he had it with him. She didn’t see him leave home, you remember. But as you said, the killing wasn’t about the weed or whoever shot him would have taken it.”

“If he’d known. If it was a ‘him.’ ”

“Well, yes, that.”

Their waiter arrived with their plates and both inspectors dug in for a moment before Bracco took it up again. “You believe her about the gun?”

“Not for a second. I ask if he owns a gun and she says he couldn’t. Not he didn’t.”

“I heard that. So he was shot with his own gun?”

“We’ll find out soon enough, but that’s my bet.”

“He know the shooter?”

“Maybe.” She chewed for a minute. “No sign of struggle, anyway. He gave him his own gun and then the guy shot him with it? How does that play?”

“I don’t know.” Bracco put his fork down. “Actually, maybe Jansey.”

“Pretty early for that, but maybe.” She pushed food around on her plate before she looked up. “We have to search the house.”

“I know.” And Bracco added, “Like yesterday.”