Page 19 of 25 Alive

“Slide a little closer, Lindsay. I’ll be your photo tour guide.”

I’d checked out Jacobi’s iPhone from evidence, and now I placed it on the table and Muriel pulled her chair around, so we sat side by side. I pulled on gloves and removed it from the evidence bag, then fixed my eyes on the screen as Muriel gave me the log-in code, and we went through Jacobi’s photo library together.

“That’s the great blue heron,” she said, pointing. I poked the thumbnail to enlarge it. “Have you ever seen this bird in flight?”

“Warren never mentioned bird-watching to me.”

“Ah,” she said. “Well, I’ll let you in on the secret, Lindsay. He enjoyed the bird-watching, but it was a cover. He did it mainly for show. He was actually going to Golden Gate Park to look for a man he suspected of killing a teenage girl in the park years ago. Warren saw him drag her body into the Lily Pond. And then the guy disappeared into the shadows. He was never identified or caught, and Warren was the only witness.”

“Tell me more.”

“Well. He told me it was on a night when he was taking a walk through the park to work off his dinner. It was pretty dark, and he said that it happened fast—like, in seconds—but Warren was sure he saw a guy manhandling a girl’s dead body, tossing her into the pond. He was too far away to make any kind of ID on the guy. He reported it, and the girl’s body was recovered a few hours later, but she had no ID and was probably homeless. I think it was attributed to a suicide.”

Muriel shrugged. That was all she knew.

I asked, “So, Warren kept returning to the Lily Pond, and eventually he saw a guy there he thought might be the murderer? Thought the guy might’ve come to relive his crime all this time later?”

“Warren didn’t know why, but this one guy kept showing up there. And this case still woke him up at night. He wanted to do something about it.”

Muriel and I then went back to the photo gallery. I saw tranquil wildlife pictures of birds flying, pecking tree trunks, and feeding baby birds. But I was thinking like a cop.

If Jacobi was watching for a killer, maybe the killer knew he was being watched. Did Jacobi take a picture of him? Maybe there’s a better picture on one of his hard drives.

Muriel rummaged in her handbag and pulled out three external drives held together with a rubber band. She pushed the packet over to me, and I plugged one drive after the other into my tablet. As we reviewed the digital images, I did see a few pictures of a man in the park near the Lily Pond. He was lanky, looked to be of average height, wearing tattered jeans, work gloves, and a dark sweatshirt with the hood pulled up. The hood did its job of obscuring the man’s face beyond any chance of identification. And if that wasn’t enough of a handicap, Jacobi’s images were underexposed and unfocused.

Still, Jacobi had taken several pictures of this person. Was this the same man Jacobi assumed had killed a homeless teenaged girl? Or was he just a guy who liked the park in the early hours? Was he a serial killer? Or was this the man who’d sunk a KA-BAR into Jacobi’s kidney, then encircled his neck with the blade? Had he left messages inside matchbook covers, spelling out, “I said. You dead”?

Who the hell is he?

I had to find out, to complete the circle, to close this open case in Jacobi’s name.

CHAPTER30

TWO DAYS AFTER Frances Robinson was shot and Warren Jacobi was knifed to death, and we were still nowhere. It made me sick. I’d organized my schedule, my to-do list, but from the moment I arrived at the Hall, it became a running-in-place kind of day.

It was just before eight in the morning when I met with sergeants Nardone and Einhorn in the war room. They had been the first officers on Jacobi’s scene, and I needed to review their work for the record. I didn’t care if it pissed them off. I read over their notes and grilled them with elementary questions, but they took it well, telling me that they’d canvassed the park after I’d left, and that Einhorn had filmed the area around where Jacobi’s body had been found. Nothing new had been uncovered after the matchbook was found.

Cappy and Chi were next up.

They’d been the first officers at Robinson’s apartment, and Chi’s notes were precise. Although we had all of the forensic data, including more in-depth information on Robinson,we still had less than nothing. I’d seen the photos of Frances Robinson’s body where she’d fallen, before she’d been trundled off to the morgue. Chi handed over a printout of his notes with his impressions, and I would file them in the Robinson murder book.

In both cases, all procedures had been followed properly, all paperwork had been completed, and both bodies had been fully autopsied. The cause of death—both homicide—had been filed with the coroner, and the bodies had both been released for burial.

Results? Nothing we hadn’t already known.

I thought about my last session with Dr. Greene. I knew I had to separate my feelings from Jacobi’s death so that I could work on these horrible, pointless crimes, but my emotions were sloshing around inside my head, threatening to break free.

For now, they stayed under wraps.

Leaving the war room with my notes and the photos that had been taped to the wall, I went to the well-lit break room, which had a good-sized table. I made small stacks of materials: notes from the medical examiner (Claire), notes from the CSU (Hallows), notes from the first responders (Nardone/Einhorn and Cappy/Chi), plus my own scribbles. Everything gathered in the interest of compiling two murder books.

One for Jacobi, the other for Robinson, both binders would be updated as long as the cases were open.

It was a sad but necessary process, and as I worked, colleagues came through the break room to ask how I was doing and if I needed any help. “Thanks. I’m fine.” Several of my coworkers ate their lunches over the sink without complaintwhile I used the table, and I thanked Officer Lemke for making more coffee.

At one o’clock, Brenda Fregosi joined me and we sorted through a million go-nowhere leads from the tip line. It was a six-hour job that we compressed into three hours, but all we got for our efforts were condolences, rants about crime in San Francisco, and other iffy remarks that couldn’t be called leads.

There had been one legitimate sighting of Jacobi watching birds. A pair of joggers had seen him engrossed in his phone. The couple ran past him, and no words were exchanged. Another jogger thought she had heard a shot. But she hadn’t seen anyone with a gun.

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