3rd Degree (19 page)

I wasn't waiting around for police reports to call in the damage or casualties. I ran out of the Emergency Command Center with Claire a step behind. We hopped in her medical examiner's van. It took about fifteen minutes for us to race downtown and fight our way through the maze of traffic, fire vehicles, and bystanders crowded around the stricken area.

Reports coming over the radio said the bomb had gone off in the atrium, where it would be busiest at noon.

We ditched the van at the corner of Beale and Folsom and started to run. We could see smoke rising from the Rincon a couple of blocks away. We had to go to the Steuart Street entrance, running past the Red Herring, Harbor Court Hotel, the Y.

“Lindsay, this is so bad, so bad,” Claire moaned.

The first thing that hit me was the blunt cordite smell. The outside glass doors were completely blown away. People sat on the sidewalk, coughing, bleeding, slashed by explod-ing glass, expelling smoke out of their lungs. Survivors were still being evacuated left and right. That meant the worst was inside.

I took a deep breath. “Let's go. Be careful, Claire.”

Everything was covered with hot black soot. Smoke stabbed at my lungs. The police were trying to clear some space. Fire crews were dousing sporadic blazes.

Claire knelt next to a woman whose face was burned and who was shouting that she couldn't see. I pushed past them, farther in. A couple of bodies were crumpled in the center of the atrium near the Rain Column, which continued to pour water into a pond built into the floor. What have these people done? Is this their idea of war?

Experienced cops were barking into handheld radios, but I saw younger ones just standing around, blinking back tears.

In the center of the atrium, my eye fell on a mangle of twisted wood and melted wire - the remains of what looked like a piano. I spotted Niko Magitakos from the Bomb Squad crouched next to it. He had a look on his face that I will never forget. Something terrible like this, you pray it will never come.

I pushed my way over to Niko.

“The blast site,” he said, tossing a piece of charred wood in the piano pile. “Those bastards, those bastards, Lindsay. People were just having lunch here.”

I was no bomb expert, but I could see a ring of devasta-tion - benches, trees, burn smears - the location of the casualties blasted out from the center of the atrium.

“Two witnesses say they saw a well-dressed black male. He left a briefcase under the piano and then split. My guess, it's the same work as the Marina case. C-4, detonated elec-tronically. Maybe by phone.”

A woman in a Bomb Squad jacket came running up, hold-ing what looked like a fragment from a blown-apart leather case.

“Mark it,” Niko instructed her. “If we can find the handle, maybe there'll even be a print.”

“Wait,” I said as she started to walk away. What she had found was a wide leather strap, the piece that closed over the top of a briefcase and buckled into the clasp. Two gold letters were monogrammed into the strap. AS.

A sickening feeling rose up inside me. They were fucking with us. They were mocking us. I knew what the letters stood for, of course.

A.S. August Spies. My cell phone went off and I grabbed it. Cindy was on

the line. “Are you there, Lindsay?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

“I'm here. What's up?”

“They took credit for the bombing,” she told me. “Some-body called it in to the paper. The caller said he was August Spies. He said, `Three more days, then watch out!' He said this was just practice.”

BY LATE AFTERNOON it finally caught up with me that I hadn't gotten even an hour's sleep for the second night in three days.

I also started to feel that I was missing something impor-tant about the case. I was sure of it.

I called Cindy and Claire together. I'd been so focused on finding Hardaway, I'd missed something else.

Claire had spent the day in the morgue with the grim task of trying to identify the victims of the Rincon Center blast. There were sixteen dead so far, and more to come, unfortu-nately. She agreed to meet for a few minutes across the street at Susie's, our familiar corner table.

The minute I hit the street on the way to Susie's, I could feel the anxiety, see it on faces. Claire and Cindy were wait-ing for me inside.

“The note about Jill is the key.” I told them my latest the-ory as we sipped our tea.

“The note said she was part of the state,” Claire said, looking puzzled.

“Not that one. Cindy's e-mail. It said, `This one wasn't like the others....' ”

“This one was personal,” Cindy finished it off.

“You're thinking Jill had some personal contact with this guy?” Claire blinked. “Like what?”

“I don't know what I'm thinking. Just that each of these victims was chosen precisely. None of the killings have been random. So what led them to Jill? They tracked her. They cased her home and picked her up. Lightower, Bengosian... Something tied Jill to the two of them.”

“Maybe one of her cases?” Cindy shrugged. Claire seemed unconvinced.

There was a lull in the conversation. We looked around. The silence brought us all to the same place. The empty seat at the table.

“It's so strange to be here,” Claire said, letting out a breath, “to be doing this, without Jill. To be talking about her.”

“Jill's gonna help us,” I whispered.

I looked at both of them. A renewed sparkle was in their eyes.

“Okay,” Claire said, nodding, “how?”

“We're going to look over her old cases,” I said. “I'll try and get someone on Sinclair's staff to pitch in.”

“And we're looking for what exactly?” Cindy narrowed her eyes.

“You got the e-mail. Something personal,” I said. “Just like this case is for us. Look at the faces in here, and out on the street. Somebody has to stop these bastards, these murderers.”

BENNETT SINCLAIR hooked me up with Wendy Hong, a young prosecutor in his department, and with April, Jill's assistant. We requisitioned Jill's casework over the past eight years. All of it!

It was a mountain of paperwork, wheeled up from the law morgue in large laundry-style pushcarts and stacked in Jill's office in columns of thick, bound files.

So we started in.

By day, I still ran the investigation, trying to close in on Hardaway. But at night, and every other available moment I could find, I went downstairs and plowed through the files. Claire pitched in. So did Cindy. Deep into the night, it seemed Jill's light was the only one left on in the Hall.

This one was personal. The phrase rang in our ears.

But we didn't find anything. A lot of people's time wasted.

If there was a connection to August Spies in Jill's life, it wasn't in her files. Where was it? It had to be there somewhere.

Finally, we loaded the last of the files to go back to the morgue.

“Go home,” Claire said to me, exhausted herself. “Get some sleep.” She struggled up and pulled on her raincoat. She placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “We'll find another way, Lindsay. We will.”

Claire was right. I needed a good night's sleep more than anything in the world, other than a warm bath. I had staked so much on this.

I checked in with the office one more time, then, for the first time I could remember, packed up to head home for some sleep. I got in the Explorer and started heading down Brannan for Potrero. I stopped at a light. I was feeling totally empty.

The light changed. I sat there. I knew inside that I wasn't going home.

I jerked a right when the light changed, and headed out on Sixteenth toward Buena Vista Park. It wasn't as if any bril-liant idea flashed into my brain.... More like a lack of any-thing else to do.

Something connected them. I was sure of that much. I just hadn't found it.

There was a single patrol guy guarding Jill's town house when I pulled up. Crime scene tape blocked the stairs to the landing.

I ID'd myself to the young officer at the door, who was probably happy for the diversion at this time of night. I stepped inside Jill's house.

A REALLY CREEPY FEELING came over me that this might not be something I should be doing. Walking around the home I had been to so many times, knowing Jill was dead. Seeing her things: a Burberry umbrella, Otis's food bowl, a stack of recent newspapers. I was overcome with a sense of loneliness, missing her more than ever.

I went into the kitchen. I leafed through some loose things on an old pine desk. Everything was just as she'd left it. A note to Ingrid, her housekeeper. A few bills. Jill's famil-iar handwriting. It was almost as if she were still there.

I went upstairs. I walked down the hall to Jill's study. This was where she did her work, spent a lot of her time. Jill's space.

I sat down at her desk. I smelled her scent. Jill had an old brass lamp. I flicked it on. Some letters scattered on the desk. One from her sister, Beth. Some photos: her and Steve and Otis at Moab.

What are you doing in here, Lindsay? I asked myself again. What are you hoping to find? Something signed by August Spies? Don't be a fool.

I opened one of the desk drawers. Files. Household things. Trips, airline mileage statements.

I got up and stepped over to the bookshelf. The Voyage of the Narwhal, The Corrections, stories by Eudora Welty. Jill always had good taste in books. Never knew when she found the time to read these things. But somehow she did.

I bent down and opened a cupboard under the shelf. I came upon boxes of old pictures. Trips taken, her sister's wedding. Some went back as far as her college graduation.

Look at Jill: frizzy hair, thin as a rail, but strong. They made me smile. I sat on the hardwood floor and leafed through them. God, I miss you.

I saw this old accordion-style folder, wrapped tightly by an elastic cord. I opened it. Lots of old things. What it con-tained surprised me. Letters, photos, newspaper clippings. Some report cards from when Jill was in high school. Her parents' wedding invitation.

And a file stuffed with newspaper clippings. I leafed through them. They were mostly about her father.

Her dad was a prosecutor, here and back in Texas. Jill told me he used to call her his little Second Chair. He'd died just a few months before, and it was clear how much Jill missed him. Most of the articles were on cases he had worked on or appointments he had received.

I came upon an old yellowed article. The source sur-prised me.

San Francisco Examiner. September 17, 1970.

The headline read PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE.

The Black National Army. The BNA was a radical group back in the sixties. Known for violent robberies and armed assaults.

I scanned the article. The prosecutor's name sent a chill

racing down my back. Robert Meyer. Jill's father.

AN HOUR LATER I was stabbing at Cindy's front doorbell. Two-thirty in the morning. I heard the locks turn, and the door slowly cracked open. Cindy was staring at me in a long Niners shirt, bleary-eyed. I had probably woken her out of her best sleep in three days.

“This better be good,” she said as she flipped the lock.

“It's good, Cindy.” I shoved the old Examiner article in front of her face. “I think I found out how Jill's connected to the case.”

Fifteen minutes later we were bouncing along the dark-ened, empty streets of the city in my Explorer, down to the Chronicle's office on Fifth and Mission.

“I didn't even know Jill's father worked out here,” Cindy said, then yawned.

“He started here, out of law school, before he moved back to Texas. Right after Jill was born.”

We got to her cubicle at about three A.M. The lights in the newsroom were dimmed, a couple of young stringers man-ning the overnight wires, caught playing video bridge.

“Overnight efficiency audit,” Cindy said to them, straight-faced. “You guys just failed.”

She wheeled herself in front of her screen and fired up the computer. She plugged a few search words into the Chronicle's database: Robert Meyer. BNA. Then she slapped the ENTER key.

Several matches popped up on the screen right away. We plowed through a lot of unrelated articles of antiwar and BNA activity in the sixties. Then we found something.

PROSECUTOR NAMED IN DEADLY BNA RAID CASE.

A series of articles from September 1970.

We scrolled back from there, and bingo! FEDS, POLICE RAID BNA STRONGHOLD. FOUR DEAD IN SHOOTOUT.

It was in the days of the sixties radicals. Constant protests over the war, SDS riots on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. We scrolled through several articles. The BNA had robbed a few banks and then a Brink's truck. A guard, a hostage, and two cops were killed in the robbery. Two BNA members were on the FBI's list of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

We scrolled through whatever the Chronicle had on file. A BNA hideout was raided the night of December 6, 1969. The Feds had surrounded a house on a quiet street in Berkeley based on a tip from a CI. They came in, guns blazing.

Five radicals in the house were killed. Among the dead were Fred Whitehouse, a leader of the group, and two women.

There was one white kid shot dead in the raid, a student at Berkeley. From an upper-middle-class background near Sacramento. Family and friends insisted he didn't even know how to fire a gun. Just an idealistic kid caught up protesting an immoral war.

No one would say what he was doing in the house.

William “Billy” Danko was his name.

A GRAND JURY was convened to investigate the shootings at the BNA hideout. Nasty charges were hurled left and right. The case was given to a rising prosecutor in the D.A.'s office. Robert Meyer. Jill's father.

The jury at the trial found no evidence of any police mis-conduct. Those who were killed, the police argued, were among the FBI's most wanted, though the description seemed a stretch for Billy Danko. Federal agents paraded a cache of guns confiscated in the raid: Uzis, grenade launchers, piles of ammo. A gun was found in Fred Whitehouse's hand - though sympathizers claimed it had been planted.