The only mercy is that the end, when it came, would have been instantaneous. Like hitting a switch. No pain, no fear. Just the eternal dark.
27
I walked all the way to the Powell Street BART station before I found a working payphone. There was no directory, so I had to dial the operator to get the number for A-Star Appliance on Mission Street. With that in hand, I called the shop and spoke to Elijah’s uncle, who told me Elijah was out. That was no surprise, since Elijah was sitting in the back of a van on Baker Street, watching Claire Gravesend’s house on my dime. The uncle eventually agreed to give me Elijah’s cell phone number.
Elijah answered on the first ring.
“Yeah?”
“It’s Crowe.”
“Every time you call, it’s a different number.”
“Things have been complicated,” I said. “Any trouble at the house?”
“Dude came to the door about six this morning and rang the bell. Nothing happened, and then he walked off. There was a car waiting at the bottom of the hill. He got in and they took off.”
“You follow him?”
“No, man, because he just rang the bell. If I’d followed him, I would’ve left the house sitting empty. And he hadn’t really done anything.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good call. What’d he look like?”
“White guy. Six foot tall. Buzz-cut hair.”
“Blond?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re still in the van?”
“Yeah.”
“New plan, double the pay. Can you come pick me up at Eighth and Market, at noon?”
“Do I bring in the drone or leave it sitting?”
“Bring it in.”
I hung up and descended farther underground. I took the train from Powell to Civic Center. I needed to learn about air traffic control. Surely there were people tracking every object in the sky, and keeping records. I just needed to know who and where, but since I didn’t have a phone, I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way. I reemerged from the station and entered the library. Half an hour later, I had it: Elijah and I needed to go to Rancho Cordova, outside of Sacramento. And somewhere along the way, I needed to cook up a decent cover story. Something plausible enough to get me through the door of a locked federal facility, and so compelling that the people inside would have to help me. I didn’t have time for bureaucratic bullshit. I needed help, and it had to arrive the minute I got there.
At one minute past twelve o’clock, a battered A-Star Appliance van coasted to a stop in front of me, and I got in. I glanced in the back. There was a sleeping bag, a pair of video monitors, a set of headphones connected to a handheld directional mike, and a cooler.
“Got any food in the icebox?”
“Just Red Bull.”
“When we get out of the city, let’s hit a drive-through.”
He looked me over. If the sight of me gave him any second thoughts about his involvement, he didn’t voice them.
“You sure you can eat?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Where we going?”
“NorCal TRACON,” I said. “Rancho Cordova, outside Sacramento.”
“Rancho Cordova—where the junkyards are. What’s a track’em?”
“TRACON. Radar. Air traffic control for most of Northern California.”
“This is about the girl who jumped? Or are we on a different case?”
I told him everything. I was going to need his help from there on, so it was only fair to deal him in and let him decide how much further he wanted to go. The story took longer than what I’d told Juliette, because now I had more facts to deal with. The NTSB’s report on the damage to the Wraith, and the high-heeled shoe I’d spotted from the roof of the Refugio.
By the time I got to the end, we were past Oakland and Richmond and heading into Vacaville on Interstate 80. Elijah was contemplating what I’d told him. He nodded, one dip of his chin. He’d been on stakeout duty long enough that he’d grown the beginnings of a goatee.
“The air traffic control place makes sense.”
“You think?”
“She had to come from a plane,” Elijah said. “Your friend Chang had a good idea, but he didn’t know about the shoe on the roof.”
“Someone saw her in Mendocino at two or three in the morning. He didn’t know that, either.”
Without lifting his right hand from the wheel, Elijah pointed at a cluster of fast food joints built around an upcoming overpass.
“How about it?”
“Looks good.”
While we were in the drive-through line, I borrowed Elijah’s phone and tried calling Olivia Gravesend. I had three misdials before I got the number right.
“Gravesend residence.”
“Mr. Richards,” I said. “This is Crowe.”
“A new day, a new phone. We haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“I like to keep moving,” I said. “Can you put Mrs. Gravesend on?”
“A moment.”
“Sure.”
Elijah elbowed me and I looked up. We were at the pay window. A young woman was leaning out, looking at Elijah but speaking to someone else in her headset. I handed Elijah a twenty.
“Crowe?”
“Good afternoon,” I said. “Sorry it’s been a while.”
“You’ve had difficulties?”
“Yes and no.”
“Start with the difficulties.”
“My apartment’s been broken into, my office has been tossed. I’ve lost my car, my wallet, my computer, and my phone,” I said. I’d also lost her dead daughter’s twin sister, but I wasn’t ready to get into that. “Someone tried to crack my skull, and took a couple shots at me. I had to call my ex-wife at three in the morning and borrow her money to buy clothes that weren’t covered in blood.”
“All right,” Olivia said. “I take it you’re getting somewhere.”
“Yes, I am. I’ll fill you in face to face. What I need right now is a favor.”
“What favor?”
“You’ve got to throw your weight around.”
“And do what?”
“Do you know anyone at the Federal Aviation Administration?”
“No.”
“What about Homeland Security?”
“Why don’t you tell me what you need and I’ll tell you what I can give?”
“I need to get inside an air traffic control facility.”
There was silence, but it didn’t last long.
“Let me call a friend,” Olivia said. “Go ahead and tell me what you need from her—I’ve got a pen.”
“We’re going to NorCal TRACON. Someone’s got to let me through the front gate and give me radar data that covers the city last week. I need the tracks and altitudes, and the time stamps, and I need them to lay it over a city map.”
“And?”
“We’re coming in an A-Star Appliance van—”
“We?”
“I’m with my colleague, Elijah,” I said. “We’ll be there in about an hour.”
“Then let me make my call,” she said. “If there’s a problem, I’ll call you back.”
“Wait a minute, Mrs. Gravesend.”
“Yes?”
“You don’t have to tell me your friend’s name,” I said. “Just tell me she isn’t in the FBI, the SFPD, or the mayor’s office. And that she isn’t anyone I know.”
The list of people I didn’t trust was getting pretty long, but I thought that basically covered it.
“I assume if you knew this person you’d have called her yourself.”
She hung up. I set Elijah’s phone on the dashboard so I’d see the screen light up if she called back. But it was dark for the next hour, and then we were in Rancho Cordova.
The radar facility was on open ground across from a marsh, wedged between Mather Field’s runways and a sprawling mess of auto wreckers and outdoor shooting ranges. Elijah stopped at the security booth and rolled down his window.
; The guard stood up and stepped out of his little booth.
“Mr. Crowe?”
“That’s me.”
“The director’s waiting for you,” he said. “You drive in, straight up to the front. You can park in the VIP space and he’ll come out and meet you.”
“Okay.”
“Clip these on.”
He passed a pair of laminated visitor badges through the window, then reached inside the booth and punched the button to open the gate. Elijah put his window up and rolled through.
“Lady must have some good friends,” he said.
“She spends her money well.”
“Place looks like Fort Knox.”
I nodded toward the front of the building. A man in a navy suit stood next to the glass entryway. He lifted his hand to greet us. Elijah parked and killed the engine.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We got out of the van, and then the director of NorCal TRACON was shaking our hands. He paused, but only for a second, when he saw my bandaged face. Then he pushed on, shaking my hand with both of his.
“Mr. Crowe?” he said. “A pleasure. I’m Warren Reese. Let’s go to my office. I can get you anything you need from my terminal. I was told you need tracking data from last week?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Thanks.”
He led us into the facility. We skipped the metal detectors and went through a marble and concrete lobby, and then he brought us into the heart of the building: a huge circular room, with workstations laid out like the spokes of a wheel. It looked like Mission Control in Houston, except that the people in here were guiding every plane in Northern California that wasn’t inside an airport tower’s zone of control. We went across the room and up a flight of metal stairs to a glassed-in office that overlooked the floor below.
He motioned for us to sit in the chairs that faced his desk, and then he sat down and pulled his keyboard toward him.
“I’m looking for a small plane that went over San Francisco on Tuesday morning. Sometime between two and four thirty.”
“Easy,” he said. “Not a lot of air traffic then.”
“It probably would’ve been coming out of the north.”
“Narrows it even more.”
His fingers began to move on the keyboard. I couldn’t see the screens, just their reflection in his glasses. He sorted through files and archived radar tracks for about a minute, and then he turned one of the screens toward us.
“This is a helicopter,” he said. “You can see its track here—it took off north of Mendocino. Must’ve been a private field, because there’s no airport there. It came south, over Marin and just west of the Golden Gate, and entered San Francisco city limits at three forty-nine a.m.—that’s what you’re looking for?”
“Can you zoom in on that?” I asked. “So I can see where it went, over the city?”
“Sure.”
He toggled his mouse and zoomed in on the radar track. The underlying map didn’t have streets, but I knew the lay of the land well enough. The helicopter had come in just west of the Presidio. It would have flown directly above China Beach, over the Richmond District, and then Golden Gate Park. But before it reached Mount Sutro, it took a sharp turn to the northeast. It did a few tight circles, then wandered across the Lower Haight and Hayes Valley. It straightened out over the Tenderloin, and then headed south again.
“What happened here?” I asked, pointing at the screen.
Reese shrugged and pushed up his glasses.
“Maybe the pilot spilled hot coffee on his pants.”
“Maybe so,” I said. “Can you tell his altitude?”
“Where?”
“Here,” I said, touching the screen where the radar track crossed the Tenderloin.
He clicked on the track there and a box popped up.
“Two thousand feet. Going ninety knots.”
I looked at the screen.
“Is that his registration number?”
“His N-number, yeah. The tail number.”
“Can you look that up and see who owns it?”
“Easy.”
He began to tap at the keyboard again, working on a screen I couldn’t see. Beside me, Elijah had taken a pen from his pocket. He opened his wallet and found a receipt, then handed both the pen and the paper to me. I wrote down the registration number and looked up when the director spoke.
“Creekside Management, LLC.”
“Goddamn it.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Nothing—it’s another dead end.”
“I could pull the eighty-fifty they filed with the FAA,” the man said.
“Say that again?”
“The eighty-fifty—you can’t register an aircraft in the U.S. unless you meet certain residency requirements. And you need to certify that, so there’d be a signature.”
“You can get that?”
“Easy,” he said. “But not from this desk. Would you mind waiting here?”
“Sure.”
He got up and left the office, fast-walking down the metal stairs. Elijah and I went to the windows and watched him cross the control room floor and disappear down a broad hallway.
“Dude’s working it,” Elijah said. “Really wants to impress you.”
“Or whoever called him and put him on the spot.”
We watched the big tracking screens at the center of the room. Planes cutting paths all over the northern half of the state, lining up and coming in to San Francisco, to Oakland and Beale Air Force Base.
Then the director was jog-walking back down the hall, a folded piece of paper in his right hand. He came up the stairs and opened the door.
“I don’t know if this helps or not,” he said. “They had their attorney do the certification. So it’s his signature on the document.”
“Who?”
He held the paper out to me.
“Some guy named Jim Gardner.”
28
I should say a word or two about Jim Gardner. I’d met him in my first year of law school, at an on-campus interview at Boalt Hall, in Berkeley. I was a green interviewee then, with a borrowed suit, a broken wristwatch, and a negative net worth, and when I looked at Jim I saw power. I didn’t think much about where it came from. All that mattered to me was that he had it. Not how he’d acquired it or how he sustained it over the years. Only that he had it, and that in time, if I impressed him, he might pass some of it over to me.
In his bones, Jim is a trial attorney. Which is to say, he operates in the moment, and his natural element is the courtroom floor. He’s reflexive, not contemplative. But he knows his limitations. He hires squads of associates to write his briefs. A dozen paralegals shepherd his evidence toward trial. His secretary plans his day, down to what he orders for lunch and what route his driver takes to go home.
While his area of expertise is trial work, over the years he’s put together a team with other skills. One of those specialties is tax work, and it’s that practice that’s allowed him to build a client list that boasts every mogul, magnate, titan, and rock star north of Tijuana. And more than a handful south of it. His team of lawyers digs in to and then restructures their clients’ finances. They build nonprofits and sham charities, and figure out ways to move money offshore and back. He has a reputation for looking the other way, for leaving certain questions unasked. He lets his results be his advertisements, and word of his achievements spreads easily within the rarefied circle of his target clientele. All of which meant that when I saw Jim Gardner’s name on the Form 8050 aircraft registration, I didn’t exactly hyperventilate and faint.
Jim’s business is servicing rich people. In the last twenty-four hours, it had become clear that the man behind Claire Gravesend’s death was as wealthy as a man could be. If he was behind the company I’d found in the land records, he owned a chunk of Northern California the size of San Francisco. He had a chauffeured car and a twin-turbine helicopter. If George was right, he had enough draw to make a top scientist in So
uth Korea fall off the face of the earth. A phone call from him and the SFPD dropped a case. I didn’t know who he was or what his intentions were.
But I knew the man who could point the way.
I dialed from the road while Elijah drove us back to San Francisco. I knew I was taking a risk, of course. Rosemary Townsend had been Jim’s secretary her entire adult life. Loyalty was her first instinct, but discretion was her second. I had to fall on the right side of the line or Jim would know I was coming for him. Surprise would be the better option. Jim didn’t want to talk to me, and would have a particular objection to the questions I wanted to ask. He had more enemies than all of his clients put together. As a consequence, he was careful. His life was set within rings of security, the final bit of which was a California concealed carry permit and a .40 automatic that he brought everywhere but court.
The phone was still buzzing. Rosemary must have been behind Jim’s desk, updating his calendar by hand. She answered on the seventh ring.
“Mr. Gardner’s office.”
“Rosie—how are you?”
“Lee?”
“The same,” I said. “Is Jim in?”
“Yes, but he’s in a meeting.”
Of course he was. He lived in meetings because he didn’t like to talk on the phone and he didn’t like to write emails. Rosemary spent most of her day lining up a stacked series of audiences. Jim and a client. Jim and a witness. Jim and a disbarred attorney who’d become a private investigator.
“Do you know when he’s going to be home?” I asked. “He wanted me to swing by and show him my file on Natasha, but I forget when.”
“I didn’t see that on his calendar.”
“I’ve been working on something for him—I guess it’s more of a personal project. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything about her.”
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