Across the mall, a coatless man in a white shirt was walking away from us, blending in with the crowd. He was about six two, 230, dirty-blond hair, smoking a cigarette.

A bruiser.

I drew my weapon, called out his name over the echoing rumble of the milling crowd.

“Louis Bergin. This is the police. Stay right where you are. Put your hands in the air.”

Chapter 86

Chapter 86

LOUIE BERGIN SWUNG his big head toward me. We locked eyes over the crowd for a fraction of a second, and I yelled again. “Bergin. Stop right there. Don’t make me shoot you!”

He snapped his head back around—and began to run.

Adrenaline poured into my bloodstream as Conklin, Jacobi, and I dodged shoppers, followed Bergin at a run, out through the southeast exit of the mall into the morning rush on Market Street.

Bergin had to be fleeing for a reason.

Was there a warrant out for his arrest?

Or was he running from us because he’d murdered three girls?

I had another blinding moment as I tried to see through the cars whizzing by on the street, screen the pedestrians through my mind, pick a man in white shirtsleeves out of the bustling crowd.

My heart hammered as I finally saw him thirty yards ahead, loping across Market against the light, taking a right onto Powell.

“There!” I yelled out to Jacobi and Conklin. I fixed my eyes on Bergin, who was cutting a path through the shrieking crowd ahead of us.

The sidewalks flanking Powell were an obstacle course of pedestrians, street vendors, passengers lined up for the trolley.

I was already feeling the takedown as a reality, anticipating the rush of throwing Bergin to the ground—but Bergin knocked aside a man selling pottery on the sidewalk, mugs and bowls smashing as Bergin took to the street.

That’s where he picked up speed, his long strides eating up the asphalt, expanding the distance between us.

The gangly man whose pottery stall had been overturned joined the chase, as did a group of brainless, cheering kids who’d been loitering around the newsstand.

I held up my badge, turned my fury on them all.

“Get out of the street. You could get shot!”

Jacobi was wheezing and hacking behind me. The uphill run was too much for him, and he dropped back, limping from the gunshot wounds he’d taken last May.

I shouted, “Warren, send mobile units to Union Square.”

Up ahead, Conklin backpedaled in a circle. That’s when I knew we’d lost Bergin.

I swept the doorways of dozens of shops with my eyes. If Bergin had ducked into one of the small hotels or restaurants, or, God forbid, shot underground into the BART station, he was gone.

A blur grabbed my attention—Bergin running alongside the trolley up ahead, using it as a barrier between us.

“Conklin!”

“I see him, Lou.”