The 8th Confession

Chapter 88

BY SEVEN THAT NIGHT, CSIs were making the most of our warrant to search Booker’s van. The brainiac Brett Feller and his muscular cohort, Ray Bates, had disassembled the blue van into piles of assorted parts. And they’d found Bagman’s bag strapped to the underside of a backseat with a bungee cord.

The two young men weren’t done yet. They unscrewed nuts and bolts and tire rims, hoping for a hidden dope cache or a weapon, but when Conklin and I opened the brown leather mailbag-style pouch and looked inside, I said, “Stand down, guys. This is it.”

I lifted items out of the bag. Conklin laid them out on the light table, and Feller, an intense twenty-four-year-old with a touch of obsessive- compulsive disorder and an eye toward being the next Gil Grissom – for real – lined everything up squarely and took photographs.

My heart was banging ta-dum, ta-dum throughout this process, and frankly I was surprised at my own excitement.

In the past weeks, I had gone in and out of caring about Bagman Jesus. At first I’d written him off as one of the dozens of street people who were killed every year in a dispute over a choice sleeping location or a finger of booze.

By the time Cindy said, “Nobody gives a damn,” I did.

When Bagman Jesus turned out to be a drug dealer, I lost interest again. Now he’d morphed into a predator without conscience, and I was going through Bagman Jesus whiplash.

Who capped this guy?

What will we learn from his stuff?

Opening Bagman’s bag felt like waking up on Christmas morning to find that Santa had left his entire carryall under the tree.

I took out my notebook, kept track of our findings.

Items one through fourteen were miscellany: a moldy sandwich in a Ziploc bag, several bundles of bills rubber-banded according to denomination – looked to be no more than two thousand dollars.

There was a worn Bible inscribed with Rodney Booker’s name in the flyleaf, and what seemed to be the biggest score: a half dozen bags of sparkling white powder – maybe six ounces of crystal meth.

But of real interest was item number fifteen: a leather folder about five inches by eight inches, what travelers use to hold their plane tickets and passports.

Conklin opened the folder, removed the contents, and unfolded the papers, handling them as if they were the Dead Sea Scrolls. As my partner put papers down on the table, Feller took photos and I named the documents out loud.

“Service record for the van. Oil change and lube, one hundred seventy-two thousand, three hundred thirty-four miles. Looks like a wi

I noted some deposit slips, a little more than three thousand in cash over a three-day period, and there were receipts from fast-food restaurants.

But when CSI Bates found Bagman’s wallet deep inside a door panel, the contents nearly blew down the walls of the crime lab.

Chapter 89

THE WALLET WAS SLIM, a good-quality goatskin with the initials RB stamped in gold on the corner. I took out Booker’s driver’s license and found a sheet of yellow paper in the bill compartment.

I unfolded it, my eyes taking in the data, my brain, a few beats behind, trying to make sense of it.

I said, “This is a bill of sale. Rodney Booker bought a bus from a used-car lot in Tijuana on May second, just days before he died.

“It was an old school bus, says here, nineteen eighty- three.”

I stared at the yellow paper, but my i

Ten i

Others had been injured, scarred for life.

I remembered hunkering down on shattered glass, talking with the arson investigator Chuck Ha

The owner of the bus had never been identified.

“What did Sammy say?” I asked my partner. “Bagman used to cook meth in the house – but it was too dangerous?”

“Right.”

I took a second piece of paper from the wallet. It was plain white, six by four inches with a glue-strip edge, obviously torn from a notepad, folded in half. Handwritten on the paper was a tally converting pesos to dollars. A scribbled word jumped out at me: “ephedrine,” the main ingredient in methamphetamine.

Conklin was breathing over my shoulder. “That’s a signature, isn’t it? J something Gomez.”

“Juan.”

The name Juan Gomez was as common as John Smith. That might not mean much, but it was the name on the ID of the meth cook who’d been blown across the intersection at Fourth and Market, dead from the blast before his head had been bashed in against a lamppost.

I could hardly believe the treasure I held in my hands.

Rodney Booker had been branching out from small-time crack sales to big-time meth. He’d bought the ingredients, hired a cook, bought a bus, and turned it into a meth lab.

And on its first drug run, Booker’s lab had sent ten people to God. Bagman’s motto had never seemed as ironic to me as it did right now: Jesus Saves.

Chapter 90

YUKI WAS WORKING OUT with her video trainer when the intercom buzzed and her doorman’s voice crackled over the box on the wall, saying, “Dr. Chesney is here to see you.”

Elation shot through her.

Doc was early! The doorbell rang, and Yuki opened the door wide – and Doc kissed her. And Yuki made the most of it, putting her hands all through Doc’s blond Ricky Schroder hair, wriggling and moaning in the doorway.

He gri

She nodded, smiled, said, “Uh- huh,” and they kissed again, Doc kicking the door shut behind him.

This was the thing that was priceless: how these kisses were even theirs.

Only she and Doc kissed this way.

“Hi, honey. How was your day?” Yuki said, coming up for air, laughing at the idea of making a “couple” joke.

When was the last time she’d done that?

Ever?

“Not too bad, sweetie,” Doc said, scooping her up and walking her backward to the couch, where he dropped her gently into the overstuffed cushions, but she said “oof” anyway, and he settled down beside her.

“Bee sting, broken collarbone, and a baby halfway delivered in the waiting area,” Doc said, touching her hair, stroking the half-inch- high stand-up buzz cut that he’d started with his clippers weeks ago and liked so much.

She was starting to like it, too.

“Any day I don’t get stabbed by a syringe from an HIV-positive patient is a good day for me,” he said.

“I second that,” said Yuki. “So are you gassed up, packed up, ready to go?”

Because she was. As soon as she zipped up her bag, they’d be off for their Memorial Day weekend in Napa, the long, romantic drive, the beautiful hotel, the huge bed with a view.

“I am. But there’s something I have to tell you first.”

Yuki searched his eyes. Thinking back a couple of minutes, she remembered that Doc had looked a little jittery when she’d first opened the door, and since she’d been feeling a little nervy herself, she’d chalked it up to their upcoming big weekend. That soon they’d be making love for the first time.

Now his smile was tentative, and that alarmed her.

Was their weekend going to be cut short?

Or was it worse than that?

“John, what’s wrong? Are you okay?”

“Depends on how you look at it,” he said. “This is going to be rough, Yuki.” He was holding her hand, but he kept lowering his eyes.

“The problem is, you tell someone too soon, and it’s presumptuous. You tell them too late, and you’ve messed with their minds. In our case it’s both: too early and too late -”