Friday morning at 9 a.m., give or take a few minutes, homicide lieutenant and acting police chief Jackson Brady strode down the center aisle of the bullpen.
The night shift was punching out, day shift straggling in, calling out, “Hey, boss,” “Yo, Brady.” He nodded to Chi, Lemke, Samuels, Wang, kept going.
At the front of the room there were two desks pushed together face-to-face. Boxer and Conklin’s real estate. Brady had partnered with both of them when he first came to the SFPD as a switch-hitter. Stood with them with bullets flying more than once. He counted on them. Would do anything for them.
Brady slid into Boxer’s desk chair. He looked at Conklin over Lindsay’s small junkyard of personal space, swung the head of the gooseneck lamp aside, moved a stack of files and a mug to make space for his elbows.
Conklin looked up, said, “You okay, Lieu?”
Brady knew that he looked like shit. Too many hours here. Too much junk food. Too little sleep. Worried eighteen hours a day. His collar was tight. He loosened his tie. Undid the top shirt button.
“So the way I understand it,” Brady said, “Boxer had a doctor’s appointment yesterday afternoon. A checkup. She calls to say, ‘I’m fine, boss. Doctor said I need to start taking me time.’”
Conklin said, “She told me the same.”
Brady thought about when Boxer had been very sick. Took off a couple of months and came back. Said she felt perfect. So now what was she saying?
“You think she’s all right?” said Brady.
Conklin said, “She’s fine. Doctor told her she shouldn’t run herself into the ground like she does. So her sister has the wild child, and Lindsay and Joe took off to parts unknown for the weekend, maybe another day or two. You know, Brady. Most people take weekends off.”
“Oh, really? I don’t know many.”
Brady gathered up loose pens and pencils and put them into a ceramic mug.
Conklin said, “What worries me is how you look.”
“Don’t rub it in.”
Brady had been working two jobs since Chief Warren Jacobi had been retired out. Filling Jacobi’s old chair on the fifth floor as well as running the Homicide squad room felt like having his head slammed in a car door.
The mayor was pressuring him; choose one job or the other, but decide.
Brady had talked it over with Yuki, who’d offered measured wifely advice, not pushing or pulling, just laying it out as a lawyer would.
“I can make a case for taking on more responsibility while working fewer hours per day. I can also give you reasons why Homicide is where your strengths lie. And you love it. But you have to make a decision PDQ, or the mayor is going to make it for you.”
Conklin was saying, “I can work with Chi and McNeil until Boxer is back.”
“Yeah. Do that.”
Brady left Conklin and the bullpen, took the fire stairs one flight up to five. When he got to his office, his assistant, Katie, said, “Lieu, I was just about to look for you. Check this out.”
He took a seat behind the desk. Katie leaned over his shoulder and brought up the Chronicle online, paused on the front page, and read the headline, “‘Roger Jennings Shot at Taco King,’” then added the takeaway, “He’s in critical condition.”
Jennings was a baseball player, a catcher nearing the end of his professional career.
Why would anyone want to kill him?