by Jan Burke
In the basement, the spots of blood ended at the bottom of the stairs. O’Connor began to explore, looking carefully at the walls, which were covered with cheap paneling.
“What are you looking for?” Lefebvre asked.
“This is the bootlegger’s house, remember? Somewhere along here, we might find an entrance to a passageway.”
“Why would it be hidden? I thought the locals claimed to have legitimate uses for those tunnels to the sea.”
“Most of the owners sealed them off years ago — in the early 1960s, a gang of thieves figured out that the passageways allowed easy access to and from some of the wealthiest households in Las Piernas. That and the possibility of homeless people camping in them put an end to most of the tunnels.”
“But if the entrance was used this evening, we should see signs of it, don’t you think?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they took the time to seal it up again.”
Together they knocked on the walls, listening for some sign of a hollow space behind them.
A uniformed officer came down the basement stairs and drew Lefebvre aside. Lefebvre spoke briefly with him, then the officer hurried back upstairs.
“What was that all about?” O’Connor asked.
“They’ve taken the Yeager brothers into custody.”
“Have they said anything about Max and Irene?”
“So far, no. They were apprehended at LAX. They’re being brought back here, with their car. Let’s keep looking.”
They looked beyond the finished area of the basement. O’Connor searched through the storage room, but the walls in it and the laundry room were unfinished. Lefebvre had just followed O’Connor to the laundry room — which held an old washer and dryer, a large water heater cabinet, and a fold- down ironing board — when something occurred to him.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Why would one old man need two laundry rooms?”
Lefebvre frowned. “Yes — you’re right — there’s a newer washer and dryer upstairs.” He walked over to the water heater cabinet. “And why would he need two water heaters?”
He opened the cabinet. It was empty. The back wall of the cabinet was a narrow metal door, sealed by a thick steel bar, which was held in place by three heavy padlocks. New padlocks.
Lefebvre banged the end of his flashlight on the door. “Irene! Max!” They listened, but heard no response. Lefebvre called to one of the uniformed officers and instructed him to keep tapping at the door.
“Let’s try to find the other end of it,” he said to O’Connor.
They met Haycroft on the way out. Two uniformed officers would wait for him to look for fingerprints, then work with bolt cutters to remove the locks. “I’ll have my radio with me — call me the moment you’re through that door. Oh — see if we can get someone from the beach patrol to meet us down at the bluffs.”
On the way out, he asked another uniformed officer to cross the street and walk to the railing at the top of the bluffs. “Stand directly across from the house. Use your flashlight to signal me toward your location when we’re on the beach.”
The beach patrol received the message and met them with a Jeep at the bottom of the public stairway that led from a nearby parking lot down to the beach. They drove until they saw the signal made by the officer at the top of the bluffs.
“Now what, sir?” the driver asked Lefebvre.
“Let us out. Keep your headlights on the section of the bluffs just below where that officer stands.”
O’Connor and Lefebvre hurried toward the vine-covered section of the bluffs.
“All this bougainvillea,” O’Connor said. “We’ll never see an opening through it.”
“Irene!” Lefebvre called. “Max!”
They listened. The tide was coming in, but over the pounding of the surf, O’Connor swore he heard a voice.
Lefebvre had heard it, too. “Keep calling to us!”
It was a faint sound, nearly lost in the wind. Try as he might, he could not find its source.
Suddenly, O’Connor saw a flash of white. “There!” he cried, pointing a few yards away. “Near the ground. She’s signaling us.”
“What in God’s name is that?” Lefebvre asked.
“If I’m not mistaken,” O’Connor said, “it’s her blouse.”
49
I FELT MIXED EMOTIONS AS I WATCHED THE AMBULANCE LEAVE. I WAS relieved to know Max would be getting medical attention, but I felt as if I were abandoning him, even though it was I who stayed behind.
Lefebvre and O’Connor had waited patiently on the beach, talking with me and relaying information I gave them about Max’s condition to the paramedics, while our rescuers worked to break in through the other end of the tunnel. They brought lights, water, and a stretcher for Max. I had my blouse back on, but I was still cold, so I was grateful for the blanket they gave me to wrap around my shoulders. Eventually someone found a way to bring me a cup of hot coffee.
I felt really bad about not being able to give much of a description of my assailants, but Lefebvre assured me that they would be caught whether I had seen them or not. I was starting to feel shaken, now that the main emergency was over and someone else was in charge, but Lefebvre’s steadiness reached me, kept me from giving in to an urge to fall apart.
Lefebvre was watching me and said, “O’Connor put a big dent in your car.”
“What?” Outrage snapped me out of fear into anger.
“For the Lord’s sake,” O’Connor said, “you’re as full as you can hold, Lefebvre. Making it sound as if I hit it with a sledgehammer.”
“I told you she’d be mad,” Lefebvre said, but by then I had seen that glint of amusement in his eye, and caught on to his game.
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
“Do you have any guesses who might have attacked you?” Lefebvre asked.
“Eric Yeager,” I said without hesitation. “I suppose his brother might have been the other one.”
He exchanged a look with O’Connor and asked me why. I told him about our encounter with Eric at the Cliffside.
O’Connor was outraged that I hadn’t told him about that. I had the pleasure of hearing Lefebvre tell him to lay off.
Lefebvre said some objects had been found near the basement entrance of the tunnel. “Including a long-handled flashlight that looks as if it was used to hit Max.”
“Like the flashlight that might have been used to hit Katy Ducane?” I asked.
Lefebvre said, “The thought has occurred to me that it might be a familiar method for Max’s attacker.”
“But they wore gloves today, right?” O’Connor said. “Probably no fingerprints on it.”
“Probably not,” I said, then remembered my own flashlight. “Wait — the batteries! They might have worn gloves today, but I’ll bet they touched the batteries in their flashlight with bare fingers!”
“That would be the natural thing to do,” Lefebvre conceded. He called to one of the men from the lab and asked him to check for fingerprints on the batteries in the flashlight used to strike Max.
“And on the one left in the buried car,” I said.
The lab man looked from me to Lefebvre.
“It’s worth a try,” Lefebvre said.
Eventually, I was told I could go home. O’Connor walked me to the Karmann Ghia.
“I’ll pay for any damage I did to your car,” he said.
“Don’t be an idiot. There is no damage, and besides, I owe you big time.”
“I’ll follow you home,” he said.
I didn’t object. In fact, I thanked him.
50
ERIC AND IAN HAD BEEN CAUGHT TRYING TO FLEE THE COUNTRY WITH large amounts of cash and false passports in their possession. That gave the police enough reason to take them into custody, and later, it helped to ensure that bail was set astronomically high. Mitch Yeager paid it, but it took him a couple of days to do it.
Lefebvre’s case against them for their assault and kidnapping of Max and me began
with fingerprints found on the batteries, but was supported by other evidence. They literally had a trunkful of it. The end of a roll of duct tape found in the trunk of the car was compared microscopically with the ends of the pieces of tape used to bind and gag us — they matched. There was blood matching Max’s blood type on gloves found in the trunk and on clothing stashed there as well. My flashlight, with my fingerprints on my new batteries, was also in the trunk of the BMW. And sensitive chemical tests showed traces of chloroform on one of Eric’s gloves.
The note about the doorbell being broken was found wadded up in their trunk. The questioned documents expert in the Las Piernas lab was also able to match the perforated edge of the note about Warren Ducane with the edges left behind in a spiral-bound notebook in the car, as well as handwriting characteristics in the printing, and the ink type in a fancy pen carried by Ian.
There was trace evidence as well — hair and fibers found in the room where we were attacked matched samples taken from Eric and Ian, and strands of our hair and fibers from our clothes were found on theirs. The photos Stephen Gerard took, and his testimony about the places and times he had seen the BMW, convinced the jury that Eric had planned my kidnapping for some time.
Together with testimony from Max and me, they were convicted.
Eric and Ian Yeager were each sentenced to twenty-five years in prison.
Max, O’Connor, and I went drinking with the boys from the newsroom. The events in the Baer mansion seemed to have moved my status on the staff from that of outsider to team member — they closed ranks when they heard that one of their own had been attacked. That didn’t stop several of them from asking me, from time to time, to take my blouse off and demonstrate how I had signaled for help, but their regard for me seemed to outlast the joke.
The Express had covered the story from one angle or another for almost a year by the time the Yeager brothers were sentenced, and nearly everyone on the news staff had worked on some related story. Time to celebrate.
The victory was bittersweet, though, because that was the Yeager brothers’ second trial.
The first one, for the murders of the Ducanes, ended in a mistrial, with a hung jury. Although Lefebvre was clearly a genius at interrogation, the confessions obtained were ruled as inadmissible in pretrial — the Yeager brothers’ lawyers claimed their clients were not properly Mirandized when taken into custody in Los Angeles. If there had been no other evidence, I suppose I would have understood the holdout juror’s reluctance, but there was plenty of other proof of their guilt.
Among the treasures found in Eric’s trunk, sewn into the lining of his suitcase, were seventy-nine diamonds. Diamonds that matched exactly the cut and style and size of those missing from the Vanderveer necklace. Also in the trunk was the lighter Jack had given Katy, monogrammed with her initial.
Eric claimed that he and Ian had found these items while scuba diving. The fact that the lighter worked and showed no sign of having been exposed to sea water was something he could not explain.
Ian swore that he knew nothing about any of these items. Lefebvre didn’t immediately challenge this. Instead he asked, “You like reading James Bond books?”
“Yes,” Ian said warily, apparently puzzled by the abrupt change of subject.
“I wondered. Maybe you liked the writer’s name. You know — Ian Fleming, Ian Yeager.”
“No, that’s not it. I just like them.”
“I thought you might. Is that why you’ve hung on to that old Walther PPK of yours? What caliber is that? A 7.65 millimeter, isn’t it? James Bond’s gun. Your gun.”
“You found…” But Ian’s voice trailed off.
“You look surprised,” Lefebvre said. “But you know, we look in all kinds of places when we have a search warrant, so it’s a little hard to hide things from us. That business of taping the gun to the toilet tank lid — that’s an old one.”
Silence.
“You probably won’t be surprised,” Lefebvre said, “if I tell you that the bullets that killed Katy and Todd Ducane were 7.65 millimeter. I’ll bet the rifling patterns and all those other little things we check when we match a weapon to a bullet just might tell an interesting story.”
But Ian was surprised. “That fuckwad Eric killed them with my gun!” he said, and immediately provided an alibi for himself: he couldn’t have been in the Buick — he had been invited to join Thelma and Barrett on the Sea Dreamer, and helplessly watched as they were swept overboard by a rogue wave.
“While you, on the other hand, could use your scuba tanks to breathe.”
“Yes! No!”
It was only a matter of time before Ian admitted that he and Eric had been involved in the murders of all four Ducanes. Asked whose plan it was, he claimed that Eric had been the mastermind.
“Why would Eric want to kill the Ducanes?”
“They always looked down on us, that’s why.”
“Why spare Warren, then?”
Ian’s voice took on a quality of recital as he answered. “If you kill your enemy, he’s dead. He’s not feeling another thing. But if you kill the people he loves and hide the bodies — you kidnap them and never let them be found — then you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead, if he’ll ever see them again. He starts to think about what might be happening to them. That way, your enemy suffers all his life. Nothing you could do to him is worse than that. Nothing.”
Like Lefebvre, I was certain Ian’s confession was a mixture of truth and lies, but those few minutes were the most disturbing. Ian had spoken with utter sincerity, as if this was his religious creed, rather than a declaration of his depravity.
Ian claimed complete ignorance about other events of that evening in 1958 — the attack on Jack Corrigan, the kidnapping of the infant Max Ducane, the murder of Rose Hannon. His denials were convincing, and no further interrogation shook Ian from this position, or made the slightest change in his avowal that Eric had planned the murders of the Ducanes.
Eric denied everything — until he listened to a few minutes of Ian’s confession. He then told of taking the younger Ducanes hostage, forcing Todd to drive while he sat in the back with Katy and the dog. As they went up the drive toward the farm, Eric had been bitten by Katy’s dog on his gun arm, and he had clubbed the dog with his flashlight. That had so upset Katy, she had attacked him. During the ensuing struggle in the backseat, Todd lost control of the car and crashed the Buick into a tree. Eric had clubbed Katy as well then, and shot Todd as he sat dazed after hitting his head on the windshield. Griffin Baer had already prepared a burial place for the Buick, so Eric hadn’t worried much about the crash.
Eric shot Katy just to make sure she was dead. He placed the bodies in the trunk. He wasn’t supposed to take anything from them, but the diamond necklace was too big a temptation. He grabbed hold of it and it broke.
He could see Baer on his way over with a tractor, ready to tow the car to the pit. Eric rushed to pocket as many of the diamonds as he could before Baer reached him.
“Why not kill Baer to keep him quiet?”
“I knew Griff wouldn’t talk. He was a friend of my father. Of my grandfather. You think I would kill an old family friend?”
Lefebvre was silent for a long moment, then said, “Thelma Ducane was a friend of your uncle Mitch, and so was her husband.”
“This has nothing to do with my uncle Mitch.”
“What is it he’s promised you?” Lefebvre asked.
“Not a thing.”
“I’m supposed to believe it’s a coincidence that all of this took place on the same night that the Ducane heir was kidnapped?”
“I don’t care if you believe it or not. That’s the way it happened. I know nothing about any kidnapping.”
“Why was Warren Ducane spared?”
“You ought to ask him. Have you found him yet? Besides, if you really want to hurt your enemy, you don’t just kill him. That’s quick. He doesn’t suffer at all. You want to make your enemy suffer, you kill the pe
ople he loves and hide the bodies — you make him wonder if they’re alive or dead. Nothing is worse than that.”
O’Connor was convinced the Yeager catechism was a direct quote from their uncle Mitch. While I didn’t doubt it, there was simply no way to prove it, or to prove that Eric and Ian had any connection to the disappearance of Max Ducane or Jack’s beating or even the death of Gus Ronden.
Mitch Yeager had been present at the trials, publicly playing the role of the shocked and saddened uncle who couldn’t believe that these “boys” would do such terrible things.
The D.A. at the time was not as skilled as his opponents. The prosecutor told Lefebvre and Arden that he was concerned about the age of the cases, lack of witnesses, and the little physical evidence that tied Eric and Ian to the murders. Under public pressure he decided to prosecute the cases, but he sought the death penalty — which had only been reinstated in California the previous year.
Lefebvre later told me that he didn’t think the D.A. did a good job of screening the jury. Post-trial interviews revealed that the possibility of a death sentence had weighed strongly with the most reluctant juror. After five days of deliberation, the jury informed the judge that it was hopelessly deadlocked, and the judge declared a mistrial.
Ian and Eric weren’t free — there was still the problem of the little house-warming party they had thrown for Max and me. Rather than pursue a second murder trial, the D.A. brought them up on the assault and kidnapping charges — not even attempted murder, which was arguable.
But the safe bet paid off, and the D.A. won that case. I was relieved to know the Yeager brothers wouldn’t be free, but it didn’t seem right that they were going to jail for hitting Max and locking us in a tunnel for a few hours rather than for taking four — or more — lives.
In the months before the trial, Max and I figured out that dating would ruin a perfectly good friendship. By then, the friendship meant too much to us to risk that. He recovered from his injuries and went back to New Hampshire to pursue his MBA at Tuck. He came back to Las Piernas often, though — he hired some friends from Dartmouth to help him start a company that would develop applications of GPS technology, and based the company in Las Piernas, where he planned to live after graduation.
