“I doubt the lab is going to get prints or DNA off that bottle,” Hanni continued. “But they can try. Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

I was taking it all in, trying to picture it.

I said, “Someone pulls the car over, throws gas inside the vehicle, sets the fire. So why are the victims still inside? When the fire started, why didn’t they get out? Were they already dead?”

“Claire is swabbing their nasal cavities now. She’ll be able to tell you in about five seconds if the victims breathed smoke in or not.”

“Okay. What else?”

Hanni grinned at me and said, “Patience, Lindsay. I’m getting there. I removed all of the debris that fell from the dashboard, headliner, and door panels, and I found a spent round for you. Twenty-two caliber.”

I got a little chill. The good kind you get when your hunches pay off. Doesn’t happen every day. There are a million .22-caliber guns on the street, and our cop shooter had used one of them on Chaz Smith. Maybe he’d used the same gun to take out a few drug dealers from the projects.

I thanked Hanni and started to call Claire to find out if she’d found soot inside the victims’ nostrils but got distracted by the loud whoop-whoop of a siren announcing that another cop car was arriving at the scene.

It was Conklin and he came toward me at a trot. He was hyperventilating and it wasn’t because of the thirty-yard sprint.

“She’s here,” he said. “We’ve got our witness.”

It felt like Christmas and my birthday and Mother’s Day all wrapped up together and tied with a bow.

A witness had seen a cop pull a car over on Schwerin just moments before that car had become a fireball.

The witness had given her name and number to the 911 operator. She wanted to talk.

Chapter 36

ANNA WATSON SAT ACROSS from us at the fold-down Formica table inside the RV that served as our command post. She was sixty-four, black, small, chain-smoking Marlboros and stubbing out the butts in a tinfoil ashtray.

I tried to keep my expectations in check but failed. Anna Watson knew the victims and she’d seen them just before they were shot and their car burned to a turn.

“I was driving along Schwerin,” Watson told us. “I was going to my daughter’s house over in Daly City? I was a ways back from Jace’s BMW,” she said, hooking a thumb in the direction of the crime scene. “But I recognized it easy from the decals, and I know the boys driving that car. I’ve known them since they were small. I used to babysit two of them.”

I pushed a pad and pen over to Watson’s side of the table and asked her to write down the names. As she did it, I saw her eyes tear up and her lips quiver.

Reality was hitting her. Three people she knew were dead. She passed the list over to me and as Conklin continued to question her, I ran the names through the computer: Jace Winter, Marvin “Bam” Cox, Turell “Little T” Jackson.