by Todd Borg
I’d seen some of the paintings in person, like the giant canvas hanging in the Oakland Museum.
Grand as Hill’s work was in real life, the book in my lap was still special. I missed Street, but Hill worked his magic on my eyes, Miles and Trane worked on my ears, the heat of the woodstove played on my skin, Spot’s head was on my knee, and the Oakstone cab worked from the inside out.
Unfortunately, my book had no images of miners, Chinese or otherwise. I could only imagine the life of Gan Sun and the legacy that he left his great, great granddaughter Grace, a legacy that probably resulted in her murder.
THIRTEEN
In the morning, I sat down and composed an email to Grace’s possible biological daughter.
Dear Arianna,
Please forgive this intrusion into your life. I got your name from someone who knows about adoption websites. She determined that you are the birth daughter of Grace Sun and that you were likely in contact with her prior to her death. If this is not the case, please accept my apologies and disregard this note.
If you are Grace’s daughter, I’m writing to let you know that my name is Owen McKenna, and I was one of the homicide inspectors who worked on Grace’s case. I’m sorry to bring up such an upsetting event, but I thought that you would want to know that we may have found her killer.
A man whose DNA matches the DNA found on Grace is currently in jail awaiting trial.
Please write back to me to confirm that you are the daughter of Grace and you have received this email.
Sincerely,
Owen McKenna
I sent the email and considered what its impact would be. Upset and discomfort and rage, mixed, I hoped, with some small relief. I had no assurance that the woman would write back. Nor did I even know if her email address was current. But if it was, I was one step closer to the closure Street talked about. After Grace’s daughter Arianna, Grace’s cousin Melody would be the last step.
My cellphone rang two cups of coffee later.
“Hello?”
“Just got an unusual email,” a voice said. Male, slight Mexican accent.
“Diamond,” I said. “Tell me.”
“The email is from a Gmail account, and the subject says Adopted Daughter. I’ll read it.
“Dear Sergeant Martinez,
“I’m hoping that you won’t attempt to betray my trust and trace this email. I am responding to an email from a Mr. Owen McKenna. I looked online at some newspaper articles and found out that he’s a friend of yours. I have reason to mistrust emails. His account could have been hacked. So instead of responding to a potentially fake email, I’m writing you as a security measure. A hacker can approach me under disguise, but a hacker wouldn’t be able to guess who I might approach. I’m sorry if this seems paranoid, but believe me, I have reason to be paranoid.
“Therefore, may I please ask you to call Mr. McKenna and verify if in fact it was he who wrote me? Because he was involved in Grace Sun’s murder case, and because he has apparently been asking questions about me, I worry that he may be being followed or monitored without knowing it. The man who is after me has sent me emails before, and he might try to gain access to Mr. McKenna’s computer and his email, thinking I would then respond.
“If Mr. McKenna sent the email, please tell him that yes, I am Grace Sun’s daughter. Meeting her was the best and the worst thing that ever happened to me. She was wonderful to me in a way that no one has ever been. But then she was murdered. Meeting her nearly destroyed my life.
“After Grace died, a man – I don’t know who he is – called me about something he wanted that belonged to Grace. When I didn’t respond, he found out where I lived and tried to kill me. I barely escaped and have been on the run ever since. I’ve been in hiding for three years. I rented an apartment under an assumed name and began paying my bills with cash. My life sort of went back to normal, and I began to think that maybe I wasn’t marked anymore.
“But then Mr. McKenna wrote. Now I worry that something bad is going to start all over again.
“In his email, Mr. McKenna wrote that he has caught the killer of my birthmother Grace. I am pleased and relieved about that. I know that my attacker was somehow connected to Grace because he called me right after Grace was murdered. But I’ve no particular reason to think that the person McKenna caught – that Grace’s killer – is the same man who tried to kill me.
“Sorry for sounding mistrustful, but I’m petrified all over again. You can email me, but please don’t try to find me. Please. I beg you.
“The email is signed ‘Anna,’” Diamond said.
“Can you write a quick email response? Obviously it is better to have it come from you.”
“Sure. I’m at my desk. What do you want to say?”
“Dear Anna, This is Owen McKenna. I’m speaking to Sergeant Diamond Martinez over the phone, and he is writing down my words to you.
“I’m sorry you are living a nightmare, and I don’t want to add to your stress. Please consider calling me. If you like...”
“Whoa, slow down,” Diamond said. “I ain’t a secretary used to dictation.”
“Sorry.” I continued at a slower pace. “If you like, you can set up your phone to have a blocked number so it can’t be seen by anyone receiving your call. Maybe your phone line is already that way. Otherwise, communicating through Diamond is a good idea.
“In the meantime, can you tell me anything about the attacker? Can you give me a description of what he looked like? Do you have any ideas about his identity? There may be a chance we can catch him without you having to reveal your whereabouts. Signed Owen.”
“That’s it?” Diamond said.
“You think it’s okay?” I asked.
“Ain’t Samuel Richardson, but I guess it gets the job done.”
“Who’s Richardson?”
“You and this Anna writing letters back and forth remind me of Richardson, an eighteenth century English dude who wrote epistolary novels. I should add your phone number and hit send?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Done,” Diamond said. “What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know. She certainly sounds terrified. Of course, it could be that she is a drama queen and is exaggerating the circumstances or imagining it altogether. But she sounds sincere. And what would be the motivation to make this up? If she really is on the run and in hiding, that is a huge reaction to her fear. So whoever has scared her was very effective. No one should have to live in a state of terror.”
“I wonder why she didn’t call the cops,” Diamond said. “Makes you think it’s because her story doesn’t hold water. But there could be another reason.”
“If she calls, I’ll ask.”
“Let’s hope that Thomas Watson is Anna’s attacker in addition to being Grace’s killer,” Diamond said. “Or maybe Nick the Knife or his partner was her attacker. If so, she’d possibly be in the clear.”
“Yeah. Both Watson and Nick O’Connell are connected to Grace.”
Diamond stopped talking because my phone beeped in our ears.
“Hold on, I’ve got incoming,“ I said. I looked at my phone readout. It said private. “Maybe this is our answer. I’ll call you back.”
“Later,” Diamond said and hung up.
FOURTEEN
I pressed my answer button and said, “Owen McKenna.”
“Okay, Mr. McKenna, we’ll give this a try,” a woman’s shaky voice said. “This is Anna Quinn.” The tremor in her voice was so strong, it sounded as if she’d start crying at any moment. She made a hiccup sound, and her breath caught. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be upset. But what happened three years ago was so frightening, it turned my life upside down. I can’t bear the thought that I’m going to be dragged back to that.”
“I’m sorry about the circumstances, Anna,” I said. “But it’s good you called. I don’t want to give you false hopes, but maybe I can help you with this stalker. Not long after Grace’s murder, I left the poli
ce department. But I’m still in law enforcement, working as a private investigator in Tahoe.”
“Oh, God, if I could know I was rid of him forever! If I could get my life back! Can you do this? Can you find him without talking to me in person?”
“Maybe. I would need you to tell me everything possible about the circumstances.”
“Okay. Where should I start?”
“Do you have any idea who this man is?” I asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“You’ve never seen him before?”
“No,” she said.
“He didn’t say anything or do anything to suggest his identity?”
“No.”
“Was there any indication of why he was after you?”
“Yes. I got a phone call before he attacked me. Right after Grace’s murder.”
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“It was the day after she died. This man with a ragged voice called and left a message saying he wanted a journal that Grace gave me.”
“What was in the journal?”
“That’s just it. She never gave me a journal. Let me back up and say that several different times, Grace gave me gifts. It started the first day I met her. I’d contacted her by email, and she wrote back. We had quite an intense email relationship. Then we met at the de Young Museum. That day she gave me a photograph of herself and her grandfather, Ming Sun. My great grandfather. The photo had been taken years before when Grace was in her teens. She wanted me to get a sense of my heritage.
“A couple of days later, we met at a coffee shop. That time she gave me a ring that was made by Ming Sun. She said it meant a lot to her and she wanted me to have it. Another day, we went to the library where she showed me some books about the Gold Rush. There was a mention in there of a Gan Sun. Gan was Ming’s grandfather. Which made him my grandfather three greats removed. Grace said that she had something he’d made, and that one day she would give it to me. So in the ten times or so that we met before she died, she gave me lots of gifts. Little things, mostly. Things with sentimental value.
“The last time I saw Grace was the same day she died. I visited her in the morning, and we made plans to have dinner the next night. She had decided to give me the thing that Gan Sun had made. She would only say that it was very valuable and that she would tell me about it at dinner.
“Then she was murdered, and shortly afterward I got the message on my voicemail from the man who wanted a journal. He said it belonged to him, and he would pay me a five hundred dollar reward for giving it back to him. He told me to meet him in front of the Transamerica Pyramid the next day at noon to give him the journal and collect my reward.
“But I didn’t go, partly because I didn’t know anything about a journal, and partly because I was frightened. Something about his voice scared me. The next time he called, I was home and answered the phone. He told me that I was very bad for not meeting him and that he was only giving me one more chance. I got the sense that if I disobeyed him, something bad would happen to me. It was terrifying!”
“It was smart not to go,” I said. “Did you tell the police about him or about seeing Grace the morning she was killed? I don’t remember talking to you.”
“No, I didn’t tell anyone. Grace’s murder had me so off-balance. If I told the cops about the gifts and about visiting her the same day she was killed, I knew I’d be pulled into a huge entanglement of legal stuff, depositions and court appearances and related stuff. Maybe that was stupid. But I knew that none of it had anything to do with me. As far as Grace knew, I didn’t even exist until a few weeks before. Same with the police. So I knew that if I went on not existing, it wouldn’t make any difference.”
She continued, “The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that the guy who wanted the journal was dangerous. So I gathered my few things in a bag and left the apartment. I didn’t tell my roommate where I was going. I just apologized, paid her my share of the rent for an extra month, and said that I hoped she could find another roommate soon. I stayed in a couple of motels at first, then eventually got a room at an old-fashioned boarding house. I used a fake name and paid cash for rent. I run a website design business. As long as I have a computer, I can work from anywhere.”
“How were you able to leave your apartment and all of your things so fast? Most of us would need weeks to prepare for a move, especially if we were moving to a life on the road and had to get rid of everything.”
“It’s a long story,” Anna said. “For twelve years, my partner was a woman named Tara Sperri. We met at USC and moved in together. We had many good years. But you know how even the best relationships can run down. We were both so focused on our careers. Tara is an attorney working as a public defender for Alameda County. I started out as an elementary teacher in Fremont, and then quit to begin my website design business.
“When Tara and I finally decided to call it quits, we had a huge garage sale, then sold our house. I wanted to be rid of all of my material things and get down to nothing more than the few things I take on the road when I travel. A change of clothes. My notebook computer. It was a way to make a clean break and start over.
“I found a woman who was renting the extra bedroom in her apartment, so I had shelter. But I was devastated. I lay there every night, sleepless, thinking that my life had come to nothing. Tara was gone. I had no home. My adoptive parents had been gone for some time, so I had no family. That was when I decided to look up my biological mother. It was breaking up with Tara that led me to Grace.
“When I met Grace, it was like coming home again. A connection that was more than what I had with my friends. I never dreamed it was the beginning of a nightmare.”
“In the intervening three years, you’ve still never spoken to the police about Grace’s murder or about the attacker?” I said.
“No,” she said.
I wanted to give Anna the lecture about how reluctant witnesses were one of the biggest problems that cops have fighting crime. But I didn’t want to risk this tenuous connection with Grace Sun’s biological daughter and the information she might have.
“Didn’t it occur to you that the caller may have been Grace’s killer?” I asked.
“Yes. But I was still afraid to tell the police.” She was silent a long moment.
“When I was in college,” Anna finally said, “Tara and I had a best friend named Mandy Melane. In our junior year, Mandy broke up with her boyfriend. He started stalking her. So she went to the police and got a restraining order. She was so afraid of him that she moved out of her dorm and back into her parents’ house in Torrance. It didn’t make any difference. Her ex-boyfriend murdered her a week later. Her ex-boyfriend was several years older than her, and he had two friends who were cops. At the time, we wondered if that’s how he found out where she was living.”
Anna was panting.
I didn’t know what to say.
“I thought I’d lost my attacker,” she said. “But somehow he got the information about my new place.”
“What happened?”
“He broke into my room in the middle of the night. I’d locked the door to my bedroom, but my housemates had left the front door of the house unlocked. He broke the lock on my bedroom door. He came in holding a fancy knife, and he did this rotating thing with it to terrify me. Then he threw it at me.”
“You escaped?”
“Yes. I had worried about this psycho coming after me for over a month. In the short time I knew Grace, she probably told me three different times that you can best confront your fears by making a plan for any eventuality. It was like she was psychic, like she knew something might happen to me. I learned so much from her! Anyway, she made such a point about being prepared!
“So I made an escape plan in case my stalker ever found out where I was living and broke in. I always slept wearing shorts and T-shirt and moccasins, and I kept my little purse next to the bed. I had a bag of things in the trunk of my car. My spare car key was on my bracel
et, which I never take off, even in the shower. And I put a heavy book inside a pillowcase and knotted the end. I kept it on my bed.
“When he came into the room and twirled his knife, I was so terrified, I wanted to scream. But I did what I had practiced and threw the pillowcase with the book at him. He threw the knife at me. But I was already rolling out of bed and grabbing my purse as the knife stuck in the headboard where my head had been. I don’t even know if the book hit him. But it gave me an extra second or two. I lifted the window and dove out onto the fire escape. I shut it behind me and slid the bolt I’d installed on the outside of the window. I got away in my car.
“It was the scariest thing I’ve ever experienced. I only survived because I practiced my plan many times.”
“Was the room light enough to see what this guy looked like?” I asked.
“No, but I couldn’t have anyway, because he wore a ski mask. My only clue that might help you is that when he reached to pull his knife from its sheath, his sleeve rose up and I saw a tattoo on his wrist. It was made of squiggly blue lines, but I couldn’t tell what it said. I was so traumatized. I get shaky-scared when I think of it now, three years later.”
“Have you ever heard of someone named Nick O’Connell?” I asked.
“No. Why?” she said. Then, “Wait, I did hear that name. Not Nick. But O’Connell. Let me think. It was Grace who mentioned the name. Something she learned about grandpa Gan Sun. It was in the book on the Gold Rush. There was something called the Mulligan War. Some land dispute back in the nineteenth century. The name O’Connell was somehow connected, but I forget how.”
“Do you remember any of the details?”
“No. Just that she mentioned the name.”
“What book was it in? Can you remember the title or the author?”
“No. I never even looked at the front of the book.”
“What about where it was shelved? Could you find the area in the library?”
