Blessed are the Meek

by Kristi Belcamino

  Dark silhouettes are in front of me, leaning over my sinking rowboat, pulling it closer to them, tying it to theirs. A shadow leans over with something shiny, and I shrink away when I see it is a knife. Suddenly, the cords binding my feet and torso are gone. Hurriedly, I stand, planting my feet in icy water up to my knees, legs shaking so much I nearly lose my balance. An arm reaches down to steady me, firmly holding my shoulder. I blink. The man in front of me on the other boat looks like Donovan. My eyes focus. He reaches his hand out to me.

  It is Donovan.

  Chapter 52

  WE SPEND MOST of the night at the police station in Todos Santos. Every time I look at Donovan, I’m astonished. “I don’t understand. You’re supposed to be in jail.”

  He keeps telling me the same thing with a big smile. “It’s all over. I’ll explain. Soon. Let’s get you taken care of first.”

  Before questioning me, the police took me to one of their houses, where they let me take a hot shower and gave me a clean pair of men’s work jeans, a soft T-­shirt, and a heavy flannel shirt. An older woman fed me this amazing albondigas soup, which has meatballs and is served with warm tortillas.

  Except when I was in the shower, Donovan hasn’t left my side.

  “How did you find me?” I whisper to him, while the woman smiles and watches me eat.

  “Conway. It’s a long story.”

  Back at the station, I slump at the table in front of me and put my head down on my arms. My limbs feel heavy, and I struggle to keep my eyelids open. Every once in a while, I drift off for a few seconds. Donovan hasn’t left my side. Every time I try to ask him how he got here, how he got out of jail, he repeats that word—­“Soon.”

  The Mexican authorities want me to go over my story several times, using a translator.

  Unlike my experience with San Francisco detectives, these cops treat me practically like a princess. One serious man with glasses takes notes while the other asks me questions. He asks me to describe Mark Emerson. I do my best. I tell him the name of Emerson’s boat: El Delfin. The man is kind and smiles at me often. I’m being treated like a victim and witness, not a suspect as I was in California. Donovan doesn’t seem surprised that Emerson was the one trying to kill me or that he’d killed everyone else.

  Finally, around 3 A.M., they let us go. Apparently, someone in the State Department called to vouch for us, and the Mexican authorities gave us permission to leave the country as long as we were available in the future if necessary. Some friend of Troutman’s, I guess.

  Donovan asks me if I want to stop back at my hotel for a few hours of sleep or head straight for the airport to catch the next flight. I can barely keep my eyes open, but I want to go home. The duffel bag I left in my hotel room is history. I don’t care if I ever see it again. I just want to go home.

  “Airport,” I manage to say, as we climb into the VW. The cops brought my car here. Surprisingly, as soon as the doors shut, I’m wide-­awake.

  “Tell me now.”

  “It was Annalisa. She went to the D.A. and told them the real story. There’s a warrant out for Mark Emerson’s arrest now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a long story. It all goes back to something that happened a long time ago,” Donovan says. “Something I was afraid to tell you. I thought if you knew, you wouldn’t want to be with me. That you would think I was a coward. But I’ve come to realize that this secret is what destroyed my first marriage. I know that we can’t get married until you know everything about me—­the good and the bad.”

  His words send a tremor of fear through me. Get married? Good and bad? What has he done?

  He pulls over to the side of the road on a turnout that overlooks the sea. A small stone bench is set near a brush area, facing the ocean, which is turning a silvery gray as the night lifts. He leads me to the bench and begins his story.

  Chapter 53

  FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, a rogue group of cops decided to team up for a more lucrative side gig to enhance their meager cop salaries—­bank robbery, Donovan says.

  “Who could better outsmart investigators than a team of cops?”

  I clasp my hand to my mouth, shaking my head. I remember the story I read on microfiche about the bank-­robbery gang. Was he one of the bank robbers? One of the rogue cops?

  “You were . . .”

  “I’ll explain everything,” Donovan says, not looking at me. “It’s about goddamn time you know the truth.”

  Is that my answer?

  “The plan, as I understood it, was to do it for six months and stop,” Donovan continues, looking out at the distant horizon. “That’s how most robbers blow it—­they don’t quit when they’re ahead.

  “It seemed foolproof,” he says. “But one day, things went terribly wrong, and a bank teller was taken hostage in the chaos. In the confusion, one cop slipped and used another’s name. The bank teller heard. Mark Emerson figured the only way to save their necks was to kill the hostage. He shot her, then made everyone else fire a bullet so they were all culpable,” Donovan says. “So, nobody would know who fired the fatal shot.”

  I try to remember the newspaper article I read in the archives. Did they talk about a death? No, just a hostage taken. And Will Flora was quoted in it.

  “So, all of them, each and every one, fired a shot into the body. The body was weighed down with rocks and thrown in the bay. Nobody ever found it.”

  Jesus H. Christ. “I don’t understand.” I look out at the black sky stretching above the endless ocean. I start to get up, but he grabs my arm.

  “I didn’t shoot her. I was a witness. A bystander. In the law’s eyes, maybe just as culpable.”

  I sink back onto the bench.

  Donovan peers over at me. His voice is wobbly. “I was in a car. Flora asked me to meet him there to give him a ride. His voice sounded funny. I was worried about him so I got there early. I saw the whole thing, and I didn’t tell anyone. I never told anyone. The only ­people who knew I was there were the guys on the task force. Flora told them I’d take the secret to my grave. And I guess he’s the type of guy who, when he says something, ­people believe him. And for good reason. I intended to do that—­never tell a soul—­until recently. I felt I had to—­to protect Will Flora. To protect his memory. After my father died, he was like a dad to me. He’s the reason I joined the force.”

  “I read an article about it,” I say in a monotone voice. “They quoted Flora.”

  “Yeah. He was a sucker for seeing his name in the paper. Volunteered to be the department flack while he was on the task force,” Donovan looks down. “That bit him in the ass when he was asked about the bank robbery later.”

  His voice contains a mixture of anger, frustration, and despair.

  I want to put my arms around him, but I don’t move. He keeps talking, looking out over the ocean, which stretches for as far as we can see.

  “Goddamn it! I watched a group of police officers—­my colleagues who swore to protect the innocent—­fire their weapons into someone who did nothing except be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Wasn’t she already dead from that first shot?”

  He shrugs. “Whether she was already dead is completely irrelevant. The point is that they were cops—­men who had sworn to protect and serve. They were no better than the scumbags they worked to get off the streets. They were maybe even worse—­including the man I looked up to most in the world. And I watched. I sat there and did nothing. So what does that make me?

  “I haven’t done anything about it for fifteen years. In the last few months, I realized that I couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t live with this on my conscience anymore. I told Troutman at the jail, but I couldn’t rest until I told you. I could never be the kind of man worth marrying otherwise. The guilt is destroying me. And I couldn’t tell you. I wanted so much to tell you
that day at the lake—­after we visited Father Liam—­but it wasn’t the right time. It would’ve made me feel better with the relief of having told you, but at the cost of putting you in danger. It was just too risky.”

  I feel foolish. Here I thought he was going to propose to me that day. But a tiny bit of relief fills me that he did consider telling me before today.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you for so long. I could feel my secrets coming between us.” He pauses. “Just like it did when I was married to Teresa.”

  He swallows hard. I know I should reach over and comfort him, but I’m reeling from his words. I still don’t understand how this has to do with him. I’m not ready to offer forgiveness for something I can’t even wrap my brain around yet.

  “Hold on. Explain how you came to be in the parking lot again?”

  “Will,” Donovan says. “He asked me to meet him there that night at the harbor. He never told me why. I don’t think he knew they were going to kill her. I think he had another plan, but Mark Emerson ruined it.”

  “Did they all know you were there?”

  He nods, his lips pressed tightly together.

  “Is that why Emerson framed you for murder?” I ask.

  “Part of the reason.”

  I’m dead tired, but it is starting to add up. Will Flora. Jim Mueller. Tim Conway. Carl Brooke. Mark Emerson. They were all on that special task force fighting pornography. And they became rogue cops.

  “Why? Why would they do such a thing? Those bank robberies?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Donovan says. “Will Flora never told me, other than saying he was trying to get enough money for a good lawyer so he could fight for custody of his kids.”

  Shortly after the teller’s death, Will Flora, racked by guilt, blew his brains out in a Porta Potty, Donovan says. “He was trying to be considerate.” His suicide note on the door outside warned ­people not to come in and asked them to call police. It further directed the company to simply throw away the whole contraption instead of sending someone to clean up his mess. Flora put a provision in his will naming the Porta Potty company as a beneficiary and stipulating that the money pay for the cost of disposing and replacing the Porta Potty.

  “That’s the kind of guy he was,” Donovan says.

  Brooke? “He was hooked on coke. The rest of them? I don’t know why they did it. But Mark Emerson? Because he likes it? I don’t know. Troutman and I have been trying to track him down for the past three weeks. We knew he was the answer to all of this.”

  “Wait. That was before your arrest. You knew it was him?”

  “We suspected it. We think he killed Mueller and made it look like a suicide. We’re having that body exhumed. We were looking for Conway and Carl Brooke to warn them. Unfortunately, Emerson decided to kill Brooke to frame me. Probably thought he was killing two birds with one stone, getting rid of two more ­people who knew the truth. Tim Conway and I were onto him. Tim had a plan.”

  Donovan rakes his hand through his hair. In the chaos, I’d forgotten that he’d just lost a friend, too.

  “Why now? Why would he go after everyone now? After all this time?”

  “Because Annalisa blackmailed him.”

  Good God, that woman again. But I knew she was tied to all this. I just didn’t know how.

  Donovan explains.

  Apparently, at the time, Donovan was so torn up by what he saw the other cops do that he took a week’s vacation, went on a bender, and briefly got back together with Annalisa. He confessed everything he had seen to her and made her swear to keep it secret. Of course, as soon as vacation was over, and the alcohol haze lifted, he remembered how he didn’t even like Annalisa and broke it off.

  She began dating Mark Emerson.

  “She told me later that it was to make me jealous. But it didn’t work,” Donovan says.

  A few months ago, Donovan says, Annalisa apparently saw the end coming with Sebastian. She knew he was going to dump her, write her out of his will, and leave her destitute. In an effort to get some money to strike out on her own and maintain her lifestyle, she looked up Carl Brooke. She knew he’d be the one most likely to cave and give her the information she needed about the bank-­teller murder.

  When Annalisa got in touch with Brooke, he was living in a residential hotel with a stack of boxes for a bed and was working as a security guard in Chinatown. Carl Brooke had gotten off coke but paid the price for his role in the bank robberies and murder. He never got over shooting the teller. He was reluctant to fire the bullet and only did so when Emerson held the gun to his head.

  He told Annalisa he was living in squalor to punish himself for what had happened. That he didn’t deserve to live, but the only reason he didn’t kill himself was so he suffered, like the bank teller’s children were suffering.

  He was not a good candidate for blackmail but was easy to seduce, Donovan says. Annalisa got him drunk enough to tell the story, naming names, and got it all on tape. Then she found Mark Emerson.

  “Why him?”

  “Somehow, she found out he was loaded. Had taken his share of the bank-­robbery money and got in cahoots with some other crooks with ties to the Colombians.”

  Drug money.

  “How loaded?”

  “Let’s just say he flew his own plane down here to Mexico.”

  “Holy smokes.”

  Annalisa isn’t stupid. Before she went to Emerson, she gave her attorney a copy of the recording, along with explicit instructions to take it to authorities if anything bad happened to her.” Donovan looks over at me. “Or if anything happened to me.”

  I nod. “Once, when she was drunk, she said something about protecting you.”

  “A few weeks ago, she came to me and told me she thought someone was after her. At first, I didn’t believe her. Then her boyfriend, Sebastian Laurent, turned up dead. I still wasn’t sure it had anything to do with her. When Adam Grant was killed, I realized someone was sending her a message. The problem was, she wouldn’t tell me why. That’s one reason I kept meeting with her, hoping she would tell me the truth. At the time, I had no idea it had anything to do with me.”

  “Why didn’t she just marry the mayor? I heard he needed a wife before his presidential nomination anyway. He’d have kept her in the furs and sports cars she wanted. Plus, I think she really cared about him.” I sneak a glance at Donovan to see if he reacts to my saying Annalisa cared about Adam Grant.

  He nods. “I’m sure that’s what she would’ve wanted. But Grant’s family already had his White House wife lined up. Letty Ravencroft.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding?” Letty Ravencroft was the beautiful daughter of the House Democratic Leader. “That would’ve sealed the presidential election for sure. Totally playing both sides. The moderate candidate. Who could resist?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, is she in on it with Emerson?”

  “That day you saw Annalisa at the jail, she broke down and told me she had done a horrible thing. But she still wouldn’t tell me what was going on. Then, yesterday, she called Troutman, and he met her and her attorney at the D.A.’s office, where she confessed to blackmailing Mark Emerson. She knew she had gotten in over her head. She just didn’t know how dangerous he is. She didn’t know he’d been obsessed with her for years. He killed Laurent and Grant as warnings to her, but also to eliminate any competition. He kept showing up everywhere she went, intimidating her into silence.”

  I remember how scared Annalisa was at the Napa house, as if she’d seen a ghost. It was because Emerson had shown up at her party. And she couldn’t tell Adam Grant that. She couldn’t explain that she had blackmailed somebody.

  “As soon as she told the DA her story,” Donovan continues, “the ball started rolling, and they released me a few hours later.”

  “Thank God.” I’m quiet for a minute thinking a
bout what Donovan has told me. “You knew those murders were connected didn’t you? Is that why you pocketed that badge?”

  He stares out at the sea and nods. “I knew it was a message for me. He was warning me that he was coming after me.”

  “Why didn’t Emerson kill you, like the others?”

  “He knows that some things are worse than death,” Donovan says, quietly. “He knows how much I love you. That was his revenge.”

  “Why did he single you out, though? I don’t get it.”

  “Annalisa,” Donovan says. “He’s always been in love with her and always been jealous of me. Hated me on sight when I joined the force. Will Flora had been his mentor and partner, but I think Flora knew something was off with Emerson and asked to take me on when I was a recruit. Then he dumped Emerson.

  “He hated me for that. He started dating Annalisa just to get back at me, but then he fell for her—­hard. Cops went to his place yesterday to arrest him. He had an entire room dedicated to her. Pictures of her with other ­people cut out. He had one picture made into a life-­size poster. Pretty sick stuff.”

  “He’s obsessed,” I said. “We need to warn her.”

  “Done deal. She’s agreed to be a witness so SFPD called her and told her to go stay with her family in Modesto for the next few days.”

  “You’d think they’d charge her with blackmail? Or something for putting us through this hell.”

  “Looks like they’re more interested in what she has to say about Emerson.”

  My mind is spinning from his story. But there is still so much I don’t understand.

  “How did you find me down here? Did Father Liam or Lopez call you?”

  He nods. “But they didn’t know exactly where you were headed. But Conway did. He came back from La Paz. Didn’t like hearing some woman calling herself my girlfriend was looking for him. Sounded fishy, so he shot me an e-­mail. I’d just gotten out of jail. When I heard you were down here, I booked the next flight and told Conway to go find you and look out for you until I got here.”