“Then we better get our asses in gear,” Dixon said. “Catch up with you later?”
Brix nodded. “Keep me posted.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
While en route to their meet with Friedberg, Vail looked over the roster of Georges Valley AVA board members. She called three and explained she wanted to drop by to talk with them. All three declined. But the fourth agreed to sit down with her: Ian Wirth, whose home was located near downtown Napa. Vail set a tentative time for their meeting, and told him she would call him when they were thirty minutes away so he had time to leave his winery and get home in time for their arrival.
Dixon, right hand resting atop the steering wheel, pointed out the windshield with her index finger. “Meeting place is just up ahead. We’ll be there in a couple minutes.”
Vail turned another page in the file Kevin Cameron had given them. “Can’t say any of this is helpful, other than the Superior issue we covered with Crystal—which I’m not even sure was helpful at all. Problem is, a lot of this is in shorthand or some kind of abbreviation-speak Victoria devised for herself.”
“We’re not out of ammo yet,” Dixon said. “And we may get lucky. That sit-down with the other board member might lead somewhere. And maybe this detective will have something that’ll put it all into focus.” As the freeway curved, she nudged Vail on the forearm. “Look up. You’re gonna miss the view.”
“Whoa,” Vail said, leaning forward in the seat. The Golden Gate Bridge swung into sight behind, and between, the mountains that sat on both sides of the 101 freeway. “I’ve never seen it in person.”
“Just wait,” Dixon said. “Better views around the bend.”
They drove up the two-lane mountain road and saw a knot of tourists walking along a dirt and gravel path. Dixon hung a left into the turnout parking area and slid her vehicle into the remaining slot.
Inspector Friedberg was standing beside his unmarked car in a black overcoat, a cigarette in his hand, and a chocolate brown woolly pulled down over his head. “Robert Friedberg,” he said, shifting the cigarette to his left hand and offering his right.
“This is Roxxann Dixon and I’m Karen Vail.”
Friedberg returned the cigarette to his smoking hand. “Agent Rooney said you’ve never been here before.”
“Not really,” Vail said. “Not any kind of trip that counts. This was supposed to be it—a vacation.”
“Welcome to the Golden Gate. Come on, we can walk and talk, I can show you one of my favorite views in the state.” He led them down a dirt path that curved and elevated, climbing toward a soil and cement plateau that opened up to a view of the Pacific.
Vail stopped and took in the 180 degree panorama, from the brightly glinting white and gray skyscrapers of San Francisco off to the left, to the scores of small white sailboats listing in the bay, heading back after a day on the ocean. Oh—and there was a huge orange-red bridge splayed out before her. Larger than life, it seemingly grew out of an outcropping of mountain beneath her feet and spanned the bay to her right, landing somewhere on the San Francisco shore at two o’clock. A large cargo ship was passing beneath at midspan, moving slowly but steadily, leaving two parallel, relatively small wakes behind it.
From their perch, they were standing midway up the North Art Deco tower, looking down onto the roadway and the dozens of cars below.
She looked over at Friedberg, who was sucking on his cigarette. A stiff wind blew against her face. “Amazing view. I’ve never stood above a bridge and looked down on it from so high up. That color is so . . . dominating and unusual. Not quite golden, though.”
Friedberg took another long drag, then blew it out the side of his mouth. The smoke caught the wind and rode around his neck. “Golden Gate refers to the strait below us, the entrance to the bay from the Pacific. The color’s called International Orange, whatever that means. They’ve only repainted it once, since 1937. Know how long it took?” He turned to Dixon, who was standing slightly behind Vail. “You’re from around here.”
Dixon shrugged. “Haven’t the slightest.”
“Twenty-seven years.”
Vail nodded. “Job security. And a great view.”
“Now they’ve got an army of thirty-eight painters. Their whole job is touching up the bridge. It’s the salt air. Very corrosive.”
“You know a lot about the bridge,” Vail said.
“A buddy of mine is one of those thirty-eight painters.” He shook his head and laughed. “Marty says the damn thing can sway twenty-seven feet to either side on a windy day. And the roadway can drop about ten feet when fully loaded—”
“Inspector,” Vail said. “I love the view. It’s—” she turned and looked back at the expanse before them—“among the more beautiful I’ve ever seen. But the flip side to all this beauty is the killer Investigator Dixon and I are trying to find. While I’d love to sightsee and get the VIP tour, I just don’t have the time. No offense.”
Friedberg sucked hard on his cigarette. His eyes were riveted to Vail’s. He blew away the smoke, then nodded. “Fair enough. Totally understand. So let me get right to it.” He turned to face the bridge and stood there a long moment without speaking. Finally, he threw down his cigarette and ground the butt into the dirt. “Follow me.”
Friedberg picked up the squished cigarette, then trudged off, away from the bridge, up the inclined frontage to a sunken, below-ground-level concrete complex. A low-slung steel pipe fence surrounded the area, most likely to prevent a kid or careless adult from falling over the edge and landing below on the cement ground.
Friedberg tossed the spent butt into a garbage pail, then led the way down a set of stairs. Directly in front of them was a twenty-foot raised circle of concrete, with an inner ring of thick, rusted bolts protruding from the surface. Off to the right, one level lower, was a central roadway that split barracks-style quarters on both sides. But the inspector headed left instead.
Vail took a step forward to get a better view of the ugly, flat-topped one-story buildings—oddly out of place against the green undulating hills of the mountain peaks behind them. “What is this place?”
“Battery Spencer,” Friedberg said. “A gun battery that was used from the 1840s till World War Two. The military considered San Francisco Bay to be the most important harbor on the west coast. So they stationed three huge rifle guns here to protect the city and the bridge from attack. Right here,” he said, motioning to the large circular platform in front of them, “was the emplacement for Gun 2.” He stepped onto the gun mount and walked ahead. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you. Over here.”
Friedberg stopped in front of a slight overhang, at a cement outcropping that contained a rectangular horizontal iron door hinged at the top.
“A fireplace?” Dixon asked.
“Actually,” Friedberg said, “I’m not sure what it was. It was a military installation, who knows what they did here. February 16, 1998, Marin County sheriff’s office got a call a little after midnight. A terrible smell at Battery Spencer. A deputy sheriff was nearby, so he took the call, even though it was outside his jurisdiction. He followed his nose, which led him here.” Friedberg grabbed the irregular bottom of the iron door with both hands and lifted it. The metal hinge squealed.
“Body dump,” Vail said.
“Body dump. Take a look.”
Dixon and Vail stepped forward and peered in. “Goes down quite a bit.”
“Wasn’t any fun getting the body out, I can tell you that much.”
“How’d you catch the case?” Dixon asked. “This isn’t SFPD jurisdiction.”
Friedberg chuckled. “Jurisdiction around here is a freaking nightmare. Need a scorecard and map to keep it straight. A hundred feet in any direction, jurisdiction could change. Basically, it goes by who owned the land before it became a national park. So where we’re standing is U.S. Park Police. They assigned a Criminal Investigative Branch detective, who ran the investigation and coordinated with the Marin County sheriff’s
office. That’s where I came in. This was a couple years before I hooked up with SFPD.” He shook his head. “Let’s just say I regretted working the case from day one. But I kept a copy of the file. I always hoped one day I’d solve it.”
Vail stepped back and Friedberg lowered the cover. “ID on the vic?”
“Betsy Ivers. Bank teller, thirty-three, single.”
“Any connection to the wine country?” Dixon asked.
“None I remember. But it’s been a while since I reviewed the file.”
“Did Agent Rooney go over the unusual things our killer does to the body?”
Friedberg clapped his hands to shake off the dirt. “I went to that FBI Profiling seminar in ’06 that your colleague did, Agent Safarik. I know what to look for. He was really good. Great freaking class. How is he?”
“Doing well,” Vail said. “He retired, but he’s got his own company, still doing profiling, expert testimony, the whole shebang.”
“Well, that’s how I knew to fill out the VICAP form. Every cop in the country should take that course.”
Friedberg led the way back toward the bridge, up the stairs and down the incline to the wood post and cable fence that prevented one from taking a header down the cliff, into the Pacific. The sun was setting and the temperature had dropped another few degrees. Head-lighted cars streamed from the city across the bridge into Marin.
Vail took a deep breath. Cold, damp, sea breeze. Smell of salt riding on the air. “Any suspects?”
“Couple people we were looking at. One was a guy who was working for a local pest control company. I liked him, but he blew out of town after we questioned him. Turns out he used a fake ID, name, address. His whole employment app was bullshit. Couldn’t find him—he vanished like water droplets in the freaking San Francisco fog. But just when we were about to start a goddamn manhunt, this other guy came on our radar. Billy Todd Lundy. Some psycho who’d been in and out of mental health institutions as a kid, went off his meds, and had all sorts of run-ins with SFPD.”
Friedberg had Vail’s attention. Mental health issues. That could fit with the severed breasts. “And what happened with Billy Todd Lundy?”
“We questioned him, there were holes in his story. He was seen around Battery Spencer a couple days before the murder, which fit with the estimated TOD. And he also lived down the block from Ivers’s apartment.”
“Violent tendencies?”
“When he was off his meds, yeah.” Friedberg pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and tapped it. Removed one, lit it. “But that’s where things got screwed up. We didn’t have enough to hold him, so we kicked him loose.” He leaned on the fence’s wood post. Took a long drag of his smoke. Nodded at the Golden Gate. “Did I tell you before about the bridge?”
Vail and Dixon shared a look. “Yeah, we went through all that. Your buddy the painter.”
“No, no,” Friedberg said, shaking his head urgently. “Its less glamorous side.”
Dixon faced him. “I don’t follow you.”
“It’s the most prevalent place in the country to commit suicide. Over twelve hundred a year. And those are just the ones we know about. Because of the dense fog we get here, and, well, times when no one’d see a jumper, like at night, some cops think the number’s much higher.” He pointed at the bridge. “Someone supposedly hooked up motion-detecting cameras that recorded the jumpers. Confirmed the theory that the rate was worse than we thought. Kind of morbid, don’t you think?”
“Inspector,” Dixon said. “The point?”
“Two days after we kicked Lundy, he jumped. Right there, by the north tower.”
“Any chance he survived?” Vail asked.
“Who knows? I think a couple people have lived to talk about it over the years. But let’s say the odds are against it. It’s a two hundred-fifty-foot drop. He’d be going eighty-five miles an hour when he hit the water.” Friedberg took another long puff, then held up his cigarette and examined it. “At least this kills me slowly.”
Vail thought about that a moment, then said, “Yeah, I guess that’s something.”
THIRTY-NINE
John Wayne Mayfield finished “work” early—when Dixon and Vail headed out of town, he felt the risk of following them was too high. If one of them had taken note of his vehicle behind theirs in Napa, and the same vehicle happened to still be following theirs on the highway, thirty or more miles later, the chances of them dismissing it as a coincidence plummeted to unreasonable levels.
So when Dixon and Vail headed out of Napa, entered Vallejo and then Highway 37, Mayfield turned around and headed home. Now, as he settled down in front of his computer, a glass of fine ’02 Cakebread Cellars Cabernet by his side, he had thinking to do—and tasks to complete before he planned his most high profile murders. There was considerable risk involved and there would be no turning back. He could still stop right here and come away clean. With what?
No, as he thought about it, there really was no turning back . . . even if he never killed again—which was just not going to happen.
He sat in front of the keyboard, staring at the screen. Took a sip of wine and let it linger on his tongue, savoring the complex Cabernet borne from Rutherford’s exceptional soil and climate. He swallowed, then woke from his reverie. His task called to him, and though fraught with risk, it required his attention.
Everything had been leading up to this. He had no choice. He had to do it. He wanted to do it.
But wait.
As he sat there, an idea began to form. Perhaps there was another way. He’d give it one more shot, put forth one last effort, before he chose what he considered the “nuclear option.” He thought it through, examining it from all angles, role-playing how it would go down once he contacted the cops.
This might just work—at considerably less risk. He’d take precautions, give them what they wanted . . . so long as he got what he wanted. It was a trade. Equitable. Fair. Just a reasonable business offer.
If he was going to do this, he had to do it right. He made a phone call to gather the particulars, then checked the wall clock. He had barely an hour before this copy was due. Not much time. And he didn’t want to screw up, not this late in the game. Even if this was the path of lesser risk, if he wasn’t careful it could end in disaster. He took a deep breath to calm his thoughts.
Then he opened a new document and started typing.
FORTY
Dixon and Vail had left Robert Friedberg with a copy of his file in hand. They were headed back to
Napa and their appointment with Ian Wirth. At the time prompt from Dixon, Vail had called and given the man the promised thirty-minutes’ notice.
As they pulled into the circular drive of Wirth’s three-story brown brick and stone-faced home, Vail tucked Victoria Cameron’s file beneath the seat and pulled down the sun visor mirror to straighten her hair. The wind at Battery Spencer had done a job on it.
“Why didn’t you tell me my hair looked like I just came out of a wind tunnel?”
Dixon shoved the car into park and turned to Vail. “I was driving. It’s dark. I didn’t notice.” She pulled down her own visor and combed her hair into place. “How come you didn’t tell me mine was a mess?”
Vail looked at her. “Guess we’re even.”
They popped open their doors and strode up the walk. “I’m starving,” Vail said. She pulled her BlackBerry and texted Robby about meeting for a late—very late—dinner.
Dixon rang the bell. Within seconds, the large walnut door swung open.
“Good timing. Just got in a couple minutes ago.” He extended a hand. “Ian Wirth. Come on in.”
Wirth was a shade over six feet with small clear-rimmed glasses and a full head of close-cropped light brown hair. He turned and led the way along the dark wood floor into a paneled library. There was an ornate mahogany desk at the far end of the rectangular room and a smaller matching meeting table nearest the door. He motioned them to pristine glove leather seats. A pitcher of wat
er and a pot of hot coffee sat in the middle of the counter behind them.
“Java?” Wirth asked.
“Sure,” Dixon said. She eyed the freshly brewed coffee and said, “I thought you just got home.”
“I called my housekeeper and had her take care of it before she left.”
While Wirth poured the cups, Vail noticed a large, framed sepia photo hanging behind the desk. “Grandfather?” Vail asked.
Wirth swung his head around, then turned back, a smile broadening his face. “Great grandfather. Józef Wirth. That photo was taken in Bialystok, Poland, sometime around 1725. My grandmother told me that the genealogist who worked on our family history discovered that there were seven families that migrated in a group from Poland in the 1800s. There were others who decided to stay, and they were eventually swept up in the Nazi roundup in 1938. I’ve got a whole book if you want—”
Crush (Karen Vail Series) Page 30
