Fatal Truth
Chapter One

The ring of the phone jarred me from a sound sleep and I reached for it, not wanting to see the time. It was still dark out, I’d started my vacation, and the only news that could come at this hour was not good.

“Gillespie?”

“Yes,” I said, eyeing the clock, its orange face reminding me of a full moon. Two-ten.

“Rocky Markowski. We need you down here.”

So much for my week of leisure. “What’s up?”

“Stabbing. Blue versus red this time. Got about fifteen witnesses that need to be interviewed. It was you or Zim. I sorta begged the LT.”

“My lucky day.” Not that I blamed him. Zim was not a well-liked member of the Homicide detail. “Give me about forty minutes. Kevin’s staying with me for a few days,” I said, referring to my late brother’s thirteen-year-old son. “I need to get my landlord up here to watch him.”

“Sure. One other thing…”

His tone told me I wasn’t going to like what followed. “Yeah?”

“It was Nita Gonzalez.”

I closed my eyes. Nita’s death made the fifth gang killing in as many days. Another victim of a senseless war.

“Yeah,” he said, reading into my silence. “See ya in a few.”

My landlord, Jack, lived downstairs with his wife. I called him, dressed in jeans and a sweater, dragged a brush through my shoulder-length brown hair, and then hurried to wake Kevin, who was asleep on the couch. “You need to go to Jack’s,” I told him, tousling his dark curls. He was past the kissing age, at least in his opinion. “I have to go into work.”

“Okay,” he said, then rolled over. We’d done this routine before. Numerous times. I’d helped my aunt raise Kevin ever since my brother, Sean, had overdosed twelve years ago. Sean’s was a death I had yet to reconcile, perhaps because he had always been a clean-cut, all-American kid. The poster child for wholesome. And he was a Narcotics officer at SFPD at the time. His death by heroin had devastated my father, so much so that when social services had discovered Kevin’s existence -— we knew nothing about him -— my father had refused to acknowledge the child.

My aunt, on the other hand, took one look at Kevin, said in that no-nonsense way of hers, “He’s a Gillespie, all right,” and immediately set about raising him as one. His drug-addicted mother fled to avoid prosecution for my brother’s overdose, and I enrolled in the police academy, trying to make up for my father’s loss -— right the wrongs that had taken my brother’s life. My goal was to save the world -— for Kevin.

How naïve I was back then, I thought, tucking my weapon into my waistband and zipping up my coat.

I passed Jack on the steps. The grandfather Kevin never had, he was dressed in striped pajamas and a green robe. “Take your time, Kate,” he said. “I’ll get him to school if you’re not back.”

“Thanks.” My car was parked in the driveway behind Jack’s. I figured I’d stop for a caffeine fix somewhere between my Berkeley Hills apartment and the Hall of Justice in San Francisco. The Bay Bridge was almost deserted heading into the city, and I found that I couldn’t quit thinking about Nita. In addition to my duties as a Homicide inspector, I helped on occasion with the police Explorer post, a division of the Boy Scouts that allowed kids to learn about police work. The Gang Task Force brought Nita to me, hoping to get her off the streets and involved in something worthwhile. She’d told me she wanted to be a cop. And now she was dead.

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