The Night Searchers (A Sharon McCone Mystery) (15 page)

Sometime in the middle of the night…

I
opened my eyes and found Gregor Deeds watching me. He was seated in an armchair beside our kiva-style fireplace, where flames glowed steadily.

“How you feeling?” he asked.

“Too soon to tell.”

“We had that doc RI uses in tricky situations come over and take a look at you. Nothing broken, no serious internal injuries. You remember him being here?”

“Not too clearly.”

“He gave you a shot, left some strong pain meds. Wants you to come in for a checkup and X-rays, though.”

“Hy?”

“He’s still incommunicado.”

Damn!

“Don’t worry about him, he’ll be all right. Worry about yourself. Did you get a look at who attacked you?”

“No. Bastard hit me from behind.” I told Deeds what the man had said to me. “Something about him seemed familiar. I’m getting too close to an answer for somebody’s comfort.”

“Who? Any idea?”

“…As I said, there was something familiar…no, I don’t know.”

“Think. Was it his face? Clothing?”

“No. It’s dark out there; the nearest streetlight is half a block away.”

“So it wasn’t visual. His voice?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Touch?”

“…Maybe. No, I smelled something…”

“You smelled something. What?”

“…Lime juice? Only more bitter.”

“Aftershave or cologne?”

“Maybe.”

My eyes were closing, and I couldn’t talk any more. Deeds started to say something, but I slipped under again.

9:57 a.m.

“Rise and shine, sweetheart.” Rae.

“Fuck that.”

“You must be feeling better.”

“Oh, yeah. I feel ready to jump up and tap-dance.”

“Definitely better. We’ve got scrambled eggs and toast going. Coffee’s brewing.”

I made a face. “You eat. All I want is a pain pill.”

“Okay, but it’ll make you sleepy all day.”

“I
want
sleep.”

“I know you do, but the doc doesn’t advise too many of them. It is, however, a good idea for you to rest and stay out of it.”

“Stay out of what?”

“We’re closing in on the Night Searchers. Gregor and Mick dug up some info.”

“Maybe I will have a cup of coffee.”

Soon Rae entered with two steaming mugs, and I took the one she held out. “What about the Night Searchers?”

“Mick located Marlene Daniels. She hasn’t gone far, just to Oakland. He visited her, had to pay her off to get her to talk. She confirmed that in the last two years the group has been hired by various people to do some nasty stuff. That’s the reason she left them.”

“Nasty stuff. Such as?”

“Frighten an old couple out of their rent-controlled apartment. Intimidate the victim in a rape case so she wouldn’t testify. Entrap a politician—she wouldn’t say who—in a compromising situation. Scare a couple of small business owners into giving up their leases. Extract information from somebody in the D.A.’s office about evidence in an upcoming case. And if that’s just the tip of the iceberg, we’re looking at a lot of misdemeanors and felonies.”

“Quite a little cottage industry they’ve got going there. Did this Zero say who had hired them for these jobs?”

“That she wouldn’t tell. Fear of reprisal.”

“Well, after last night I understand that all too well. Any idea of who tried to put the fear of the Night Searchers into me?”

“No. I doubt it was one of their more prominent members. Their MO seems to be attracting people in search of adventure and assigning them to unpleasant or illegal tasks. None of them stay with the group long because they’re afraid of getting caught.”

“I want to talk to Zero.”

“Shar, you can barely walk. And if you take one of those pills—”

“So bring her here.”

“I don’t know if she’ll—”

“Ask Gregor if he’ll go get her. He looks sufficiently mean.”

9:30 p.m.

Marlene Daniels also looked sufficiently mean when Gregor finally led her into my living room. She was short and heavyset, with long wispy gray hair and a caved-in face, and the sides of her eyes and lips didn’t match. The back of her head was oddly flattened. The deformities were why she’d never been adopted: shortsighted wannabe parents want perfect babies. Her eyes, muddy brown, glittered as she approached the couch where I was propped up.

“A lot of nerve you’ve got,” she said in a deep-South drawl, “sending this ape to manhandle me.” As she spoke, she revealed crooked, yellowed teeth.

This ape.

Not only was she physically deformed, she was also a racist.

I bit back a tart reply along those lines, said to her, “I’m sorry. Please sit down. Somebody assaulted me last night, or else I would’ve come to you. One of the Night Searchers, I think.”

“Well, that’s no big surprise.” She looked closely at me before she took the chair by the fireplace. “Your guy didn’t exactly manhandle me,” she relented, “but he scared the hell out of me. Not that that’s anything new. I been scared for a while now.”

“Since you left the Night Searchers.”

“Ran from them, is more like it. They’re into some pretty bad shit.”

Zero’s gaze shifted nervously around the room, stopping at the bookcases, the big-screen TV, the tables and lamps.

“Must be nice,” she said, “living in a place like this.”

“It’s nice, but we haven’t been here long. Our old house was set on fire and burned to the ground last year. This one is all new, and so far I don’t feel much connection to it.”

“You lost everything?”

“Except for our cats and a pair of my grandmother’s earrings.” I didn’t mention my old .38 Special, which along with the earrings had been in my father’s navy-issue strongbox bolted to the floor in my linen closet.

“How’d you get all this stuff?”

“Insurance. But that doesn’t make up for the family pictures and souvenirs and…well, most anything.”

“I got no pictures, no family either. Didn’t have a home—just a lot of places where people took me in for public money. I guess you could say I got stuff now. Not good stuff, but it’s mine. I’d hate to see it burn up like yours did.”

Gregor, I saw, was standing in the doorway behind where Zero was sitting. I knew that he was recording my conversation with the woman. He’d told me he would, as RI protocol dictated.

I said to Zero, “Tell me about your time with the Night Searchers.”

“You sure I won’t get in trouble with the cops for what I done in the past? Your guy told me I wouldn’t, but I wanna hear it from you too.”

“Whatever you say to me will remain strictly between us.”

“All right, then…you hear that they’re kind of a national organization?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I was living in Arkansas—Fayetteville. You know it?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.” A case had once taken me there.

“It’s a pretty dull town, even with the college. I was sent there to my last foster home before I came of age. The people were awful. They thought I was there to wait on them; a lot of foster families do. I took to hanging out in a park and smoking dope at night after the folks went to bed. And I met what I thought was the coolest bunch of people.”

“Night Searchers.”

“Yeah. But there they called themselves the Night Fates. Fayetteville, fates—you get it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well,” she went on, “one night the foster dad beat me up because I wouldn’t let him…you know. And I split with all the money I had saved from this part-time job they didn’t even know about. Somebody in the Night Fates had told me about this awesome group out here and gave me Grizeldy’s name and address. I caught a Greyhound, rode forever it seems, and the Griz took me in.”

“And then?”

“At first it was all fun and games. Then Griz told me I had to start earning my keep. Pulling little scams, that kind of thing. I’d done it before, didn’t mind it. If they can be scammed, people deserve what they get. It went along okay, and I got kind of important in the organization. I mean, they’d turn to me for solutions to problems and all. I’m not educated, much, but I’m logical.”

“These scams—what were they?”

“Well, this one old lady that a member was doing home care for, she had a lot of valuable stuff. The caregiver would replace it with junky things, we’d sell the real stuff, and the old lady didn’t even realize the difference. Phone scams—there were a lot of those. You get somebody’s number and some info on them, then you call up pretending to be a relative who’s in trouble and needs money. Going door-to-door and asking for donations in cash for a charity that doesn’t exist.”

“And the victims of these scams—were they mostly elderly people?”

“Of course. They’re easy to fool.”

Easy to fool.
Yes, an unfortunately high percentage of seniors are, but with outreach and educational programs, that’s changing. Personally, I think that people who prey on the elderly ought to be incarcerated until they are the ages of their victims.

“Then it got to be not so good,” Zero added.

“What went wrong?”

“They started doing these weird nighttime excursions, for no reason I could figure out. They didn’t ask me along, and I didn’t want to go anyway. But I could tell when one was about to go down, because there’d be all this excitement—lots of phone calls, people talking about costumes and note cards. They’d get real quiet around me; I guess what they were doing was really important, and they didn’t trust me ’cause I was new to the organization. So I said, ‘Fuck this’ and found a job and split.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Maybe two months. How’d you people find me?”

“You were described to me by Grizeldy as the leader of the Night Searchers. Why, do you suppose?”

“To protect the real leaders.”

“Who are…?”

“Well, the Griz. But Supercom, he’s always been top dog.”

“What’s Supercom’s real name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Jordan Turnbull?”

“Never met anybody called that.”

“Who does know?”

She shrugged. “The Griz, I guess.”

Zero didn’t seem to know that Grizeldy was dead, and I didn’t bother to enlighten her.

“Nobody else?”

“Don’t think so. The others, well, you’ve seen them. They seem really flaky, even to somebody like me.”

My back was throbbing steadily now, although less painfully. I thanked Zero for her information, then said, “Mr. Deeds will take you back home now. Let us know if you remember something else.”

She nodded and stood. “I’m sorry you’re hurting. He never should’ve done this to you.”

It took a bit for the way she’d made that last remark—as if she knew who my attacker was—to register with me. By the time it did, Zero and Gregor were out of the house and into his car. Damn, why was my mind so sluggish?

Didn’t matter. Zero wasn’t going anyplace. To ensure that, I’d ordered a twenty-four-hour guard on her house.

11:03 p.m.

“Shar, wake up. Hy’s on the phone.” Rae, who had taken over for Gregor and helped me into bed, thrust the receiver at me.

The rush of relief I felt cleared my head almost instantly. I’d been asleep for I didn’t know how long—having taken half a pain pill. I grabbed the phone and uttered a somewhat fuzzy, “My God, Ripinsky, I thought I’d never hear your voice again.”

“Deeds told me you’ve had a rough time. How do you feel?”

“Not bad, now. How and where are you?”

“I’m fine. At JFK, waiting for a direct flight to SFO.”

I let my breath out explosively. “Thank God!”

He laughed. “This marriage goes on much longer, and you’ll revert to Catholicism.”

“Well, I might start believing in hope and peace and brotherly and sisterly love and—”

“Are you stoned?”

“…Sort of. Pain pills.”

“Then lie there and enjoy it. I’ll see you in about seven hours. Love you.”

He broke the connection.

“Love you,” I said, and switched the phone off. Then I lay there and enjoyed my painless, dreamy state. And it was sometime during it that I had a sudden memory jog.

8:40 a.m.

Y
esterday was the ides of March. Once again, we’re safe.”

I pushed up instantly, wincing at the pain in my lower back, and stared at Hy’s smiling face.

“You know how to scare a woman, Ripinsky!”

“You’re not scared.” He kicked off his shoes and flopped down next to me.

“All’s well?” I asked.

“All’s well. A bunch of rebel assholes kidnapped the CEO of an American corporation with offices in São Paulo, Brazil. He’s now at home, and they’re in the slammer, or whatever they call it down there. Tricky business—that’s why I was out of touch so long.”

“And you’re home too.” I threw an arm across his chest and snuggled in by him.

“Home, and dead tired. How’s the back?”

“Still achy, but on the mend. Rae’s been keeping me immobile with an arsenal of chemical wonders.”

“Rae. Oh, yeah, I just kicked her out of the house.”

“You
what
?”

“I’m in charge now. She needs her sleep too.”

“Ripinsky, this case—”

“Sssh.”

“Even with all the pills—or maybe because of them—I’ve made a connection—”

“Sssh.”

His breathing slowed and lapsed into the rhythm that I knew meant deep sleep. Well, why not? I closed my eyes and slept too.

3:30 p.m.

Cheese-and-mushroom omelets. Heaps of bacon. Crispy hash browns.

Thank God I’d married a man who could cook!

Of course, Hy had had to learn; his first wife, Julie Spaulding, had been an invalid—MS—and confined to a wheelchair for the better part of their marriage. Not that she’d let it stop her: she was an environmental activist who had headed organizations such as the Friends of Tufa Lake, and led marches and protests for other ecological causes. As she’d once told Hy, “People are not inclined to attack a gimp in a wheelchair for being a ‘tree-hugger.’” A strong, dedicated woman, Julie. I would have liked her.

I dug into the late brunch like a bear after hibernation. Hy did the same. As we ate, I filled him in on everything that had gone down during his absence. “And you know what?” I finished. “Last night, in my drugged state, I remembered something.”

“What?”

“That’s the trouble. I don’t remember now.”

“Drug-induced hallucination. You sure you haven’t been chomping on some magic mushrooms?”

“Ripinsky, I haven’t done that since—well, since too long ago to mention.”

He was looking thoughtful. “Sometimes details get lodged in our subconscious until it coughs them up.”

“Now you’re equating my memory with a hair ball.” The latter statement was punctuated by Jessie, walking by on her way to the food bowl.

But he was serious. “You don’t have any recollection of this…revelation?”

I closed my eyes, thought hard. “No.”

“Let’s see if we can’t get it out of wherever it’s stuck.”

5:10 p.m.

I was lying on the couch again, responding to Hy’s soft questioning, when a name came to me.

“Jordan Turnbull.”

“Who’s that?”

“A name from Glenn’s files on the Givenses. Glenn called him ‘an HH.’ That mean anything to you?”

“HH? No, not offhand.”

“Glenn said Jay had told him about Turnbull contacting him and suggested Jay deal with it personally. There was no number for Turnbull in the phone directories for the Bay Area; he’s not Google-able either.”

“And?”

“And that’s it. I was going to ask Glenn about Turnbull, but I think he’s ducking my calls. Mick said Derek would look into it. He couldn’t have gotten far, or I’d’ve heard by now.”

“Could Turnbull be this Supercom that Zero mentioned?”

“Maybe.”

“Better put Mick on that too.”

“His plate for tonight is full up. He’s going out on another mysterious excursion with the Searchers.”

Hy frowned. “Are you sure they aren’t suspicious of him?”

“He says not. I tried to talk him out of going, but he wouldn’t listen. Stubborn, like everybody else in my family.”

“Including you. How confident are you of his judgment in the field?”

“…Pretty confident.”

“Well, he better be careful.”

“He’s stopping by beforehand. I’ll warn him. And ask him to remind Derek to keep checking on Jordan Turnbull. And I’ll also badger Glenn about him.”

“Good. When?”

“Right now.”

Hy handed me my cell.

And, once again, Glenn wasn’t available.

“He’s ducking you all right,” Hy said.

“Then I’ll just go hunt him down and wrench the truth out of him—” I started to get off the couch, in spite of a protesting twinge in my back.

Hy held me down. “You’re not going anywhere yet.”

“Oh, yes I am.” I struggled out of his grasp. “Don’t try to stop me.”

He sighed. “All right. But at least wait for Mick’s input and give him his instructions. Meantime, you and I can keep kicking around what we know.”

6:55 p.m.

Mick had interesting news: he’d canvassed the building in the Avenues where Jay Givens leased an apartment and found out from one of the tenants that the “witchy woman” who lived there was named Opal Carson. She was a chemist working for Personal Solutions, a lab that developed cosmetics, in the East Bay city of Emeryville.

“I’ve turned Derek loose on her,” he said, “and he’s to call you with any results.”

“Good work. What about this Turnbull character? Did Derek find anything on him?”

“I guess not.”

“Check this out too.” I held out the note I’d pocketed while planting clues with Brother Timothy.

He read it. “
Where the Wild Things Are
. It’s a children’s book by Maurice Sendak. I remember it from when I was a kid. It was made into a movie a few years ago.”

“What location could this be referring to? And I don’t mean the park or the zoo or anywhere else so obvious.”

“Hell, it could be my house right now. Alison’s adopted two stray cats, and we’re not even unpacked yet.”

“Think.”

“Wild things. This is a city. The Tenderloin?”

“Uh-uh. Those people there aren’t wild, so much as drugged out and half dead.”

“Lands End?”

“Possibly. But a lot of pedestrians and cyclists go there, even at night.”

Mick considered. “You know, there was a lot of attention focused on Mount Sutro Forest when UCSF wanted to thin out the eucalypti and old-growth pines old Adolph Sutro planted there. And now there’s some dispute about more development.”

The forest, one of the last dreams of the city’s most flamboyant millionaires and Mayor Adolph Sutro, covers nearly eighty acres and is mainly composed of huge blue gum eucalyptus, many of them dying. These nonnative trees, imported from Australia, are shallow-rooted and brittle, falling frequently and suddenly in high winds, and therefore dangerous. UC, which owns three-quarters of the forest, had proposed to drastically thin them, as well as remove many of the other nonnative plants that grow on the high hill. The only creatures you were likely to find on Mount Sutro were great horned owls, raccoons, skunks, possums, and feral cats.

“It’s pretty wild up there,” Hy said.

I sat up. “Let’s check it out.”

“Are you crazy? It’s a dark night. And you’re not fit to—”

“We’re going to check it out.” I lifted myself off the couch without even a twinge this time. “Darkness doesn’t matter—I have a night scope and an infrared camera. And you.” I looked him in the eye. “You’ll help me.”

The doubt on his face vanished, was replaced with determination. “Yeah, I’ll help you. Haven’t we always helped each other?”

9:10 p.m.

“This is a ridiculous idea, you know,” Hy said.

“I’ve done ridiculous before, and it’s turned out all right.” I ignored the strain on my back as I forged on up the forest trail.

The ground was steep and rocky, edged with low vegetation and blackberry vines that scratched at my ankles. As the trail steepened, I had to stop now and then to rest. To one side the lights of the city and East Bay glistened; to the other, fog billowed in from the Gate and would soon envelop us. Some people liken the odor of eucalypti to cat piss, but to me it’s exotic, reminding me of worlds I’ve never seen. To say nothing of its clearing my clogged sinuses.

“Why in hell did Adolph Sutro even
want
this place?” Hy grumbled.

“Because he wanted every place in the city. Did you know that at one time he owned ten percent of the land here?”

“He must’ve been nuts.”

“Of course he was—look at Cliff House, or Sutro Baths, or Sutro Heights. Cliff House burned down twice; the seven bathing pools succumbed to high operating and maintenance costs and are now lying in ruins; all that’s left on Sutro Heights is a decrepit parapet overlooking the sea.”

“McCone, I didn’t know you were such a student of local history.”

“All history is fascinating. As you’ve told me, we don’t know where we are now until we know what’s come before.”

We kept forging ahead.

Hy asked, “Do you have any idea where this clue is hidden?”

“Not exactly. But a pattern to their placement has occurred to me.”

“What?”

“The clues are never too far from where you park your car, and usually in a protected place.”

“So? Aren’t there other entrances than the one we took?”

“Yes. But the ones to the part of the forest UCSF owns aren’t open to the public. We came in through the city-owned access point.”

“Illegally, after hours.”

“True.”

We were both silent for a time. Then a frisson moved along my spine that had nothing to do with my earlier injury, and I shivered.

I said, “I swear I just felt Ishi’s spirit.”

Ishi was the last of the Yahi Indians—a Stone Age tribe. One day in 1911, he walked out of the hills near Mount Lassen and joined the twentieth century. The UC system took him in, and he lived the remaining five years of his life on Parnassus Heights, where he cooperated with UCSF doctors and researchers. It is said he frequently visited Sutro Forest, perhaps because it reminded him of the millennia-old home he’d left behind.

Hy said, “I always thought the old man was scamming everybody.”

“Maybe so. I like to think otherwise.”

“McCone, you’re turning into a romantic.”

I stopped abruptly, and he banged into me. “Over there,” I said.

“Where?”

“To the right, between those two big trees.”

“I see it. A park shelter…”

“Perfect spot for a clue.”

I’d guessed right: the clue was there—an envelope like the others tucked barely out of sight on the covered bench that overlooked the city lights. Hy held the flashlight while I opened it.

The city lights shine here.

“Great,” I said. “City lights’re all over the place.”

Hy was silent.

“What?” I asked.

“Twin Peaks? Looking down on all the lights?”

“Too obvious.”

“Other prominent viewing places?”

“Nob Hill? Coit Tower? Bernal Heights? There’re hundreds of those. Wait a minute—City Lights Bookstore?”

He thought that over. “You may have something there.”

10:32 p.m.

City Lights Bookstore, on Columbus Avenue in North Beach—and ironically only a stone’s throw from where I’d had the incident with Grizeldy’s car—is a local landmark and a national literary icon. It began as the country’s first all-paperback store and evolved into a venue for poets and writers of the Beat Generation. It is jam-packed with some of the best American, English, and small-press books in print. And it is open until midnight.

Tonight its windows were blurred by incoming fog, but presented a colorful arrangement of newly minted offerings. Hy and I bypassed them and paused inside the store.

“Where’re we supposed to look?” he asked.

“Good question.”

But one that was easily answered. I went over to the checkout desk, asked if there was a message for an “n.s.”—the others had been marked this way. The clerk riffled through a stack of papers and handed me an envelope like the others we’d found.

Outside, in the light from the windows, I opened it. It contained a piece of paper with an address on it: Twenty-Third Avenue in the Sunset district. I recognized it as the home Grizeldy had inherited.

I said, “Why would they send a team to a member’s own place?”

“She was the one who designed the hunt and provided the prize?”

“That doesn’t sound right.” I thought back, remembered Grizeldy saying, as she urged me to go on without her when she had the asthma attack,
That prize is important to me
.

“She knew what the prize was,” I said, “but not where it was hidden.”

11:19 p.m.

Grizeldy’s block, between Moraga and Noriega Streets, was fogbound and dark. The house was your standard stucco two-story, with the main living space on the top floor, an entry and garage on the first. Its windows were covered with blinds, and there wasn’t even a security spot or solar light to show the way.

Hy said after we got out of the car, “Okay, now that we’re about to become involved in breaking and entering—”

“What do you mean? I have keys.” I jingled them lightly.

“How’d you manage—?”

“I took them from her car when she had her attack the night before she died. I hung on to them, figuring I’d give them to her lawyer or whoever ended up handling her estate.”

We moved slowly toward the house and around it, checking for junction boxes that would indicate a burglar alarm. None. Finally we went up the front stairs, and I tried to insert one of the keys. It wouldn’t go in. Neither would the second. The third did, and the knob turned. We slipped inside, and Hy closed and locked the door behind us.

“Flashlights?” he asked.

“Till we familiarize ourselves and cover the windows. Then it won’t matter: I don’t suppose she was friendly enough with her neighbors for them to take note of her comings and goings. And an obituary won’t have appeared yet.”

The house had probably been built by Henry Doelger, a San Francisco architect whose cookie-cutter, post–World War II homes had proliferated on what used to be sand dunes in the southern reaches of the city. It had the standard layout: bedroom in front, living room, bath, spare bedroom, kitchen, and large all-purpose room—probably an add-on—behind. The front bedroom and living room were empty. The second bedroom and bath and kitchen were furnished sparingly, the back room not at all. Grizeldy had apparently lived only in the kitchen, smaller bedroom, and bathroom.