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CHAPTER 17

THE “I SAID. You dead” task force met in an empty corner office at the far end of the fourth-floor corridor. Cappy, Chi, Conklin, Alvarez, and I sat on opposite sides of a long table, leaving the desk chair at its head for Brady. The tension in the room was palpable. We were all shocked and anguished over the death of our friend and former colleague Warren Jacobi. And there was more.

This so-called war room was the largest office in the Homicide department and the most depressing. It had a history overrun with ghosts caused by disgraced former lieutenant Ted Swanson, who’d gone to prison but left his stink behind at SFPD Southern Division. It was a stink no amount of scrubbing or air freshener could remove, and from which the Southern Division still hadn’t fully recovered.

But his old office was huge, so now we used it as a conference room.

The circumstances surrounding Jacobi’s so-called retirement had been due unequivocally to Swanson’s actions. Swanson had been devious but smart and persuasive, and he’d headed up a squad of a dozen cops assigned to Robbery and Narcotics—then he’d redefined the term “corruption” by turning the cops reporting to him into thieves and killers, inveigling his department into a get-rich scheme by targeting a drug dealer who’d been doing big business in San Francisco.

For a couple of years, Swanson Inc. had robbed this drug boss of multiple millions, inevitably leading to a shootout between his people and ours, the bloodiest wholesale murder ever known within our Homicide department.

Warren Jacobi had been in the dark about Swanson’s drug business. Still, as Swanson’s boss, my good friend had to take the fall for internal and public relations reasons.

Knowing how Swanson’s detestable criminal behavior had affected Jacobi’s life, career, and legacy, sitting here bothered me now more than ever.