There was an empty corner office at the end of the fourth-floor corridor that had once belonged to a crooked cop who didn’t need it anymore or ever again.
I told Brady my plan to turn that office into a war room for the Baron case, and he said, “Be my guest.” Then I told him I was going to form a task force with the primaries on the sniper shootings in other cities.
Brady said, “You’re about to learn what it means to herd cats.”
“Is that a yes?”
“It’s a hell yes,” he said.
He took the elevator up to Jacobi’s former office on five and didn’t look back. A half hour later Rich and I had taped up photos of the deceased on the war room walls, our computers had been moved to our new office, and we each had a mug and a thermos full of coffee.
We arranged for a conference call with Detective Richards from Chicago, Detective Noble in LA, Chi and McNeil from out on the street, and Conklin and myself on whatever lines we could grab at that hour, all of us telephonically together at noon.
Richards’s victim was the small smoke shop owner, Albert Roccio. Richards had been miserly with whatever he had gleaned about the shooting, telling us that so far he hadn’t made any progress. Noble had taken the lead in the case of Fred Peavey, killed by a single shot outside his son’s school. He was coming late to his case and had sounded eager to be part of our team.
McNeil and Chi were the lead investigators on Jennings’s assassination at the Duboce Avenue Taco King.
Jennings, the first to die, had been shot from a distance through his windshield. His rear window had been marked with the word Rehearsal, written with a finger in the dust on his rear window. However, Jennings had been shot slightly later than 8:30, like the other victims. It was unclear whether Jennings was part of the same collection of executed drug dealers.
Conklin and I were under the most pressure. Paul and Ramona Baron, unlike the other victims, were well known and had a fan base of rich and influential citizens. Those friends were talking to the press and clogging the mayor’s phone lines with demands for an arrest of the killer or killers, pronto.
I thought Brady was right that egos would be involved in this task force, but I also believed that to varying degrees the “cats” wanted to be herded if it would result in closing their cases.
Rich and I had an immediate and specific goal.
At one o’clock we’d be meeting with Miranda White Barkley and her attorney, who would be pushing to get his client released and had a fair chance of getting his way. We had no evidence that Randi had participated in the murders.
Still holding her as a material witness, we would have to release her at 2:00. I hoped that by the time the conference call ended, we’d have the leverage we needed to get Randi to talk.
I wasn’t just hopeful, I was damned-well determined.