by Kirk Russell
“Here’s something I remember,” she said. “His shoulders are really square. It’s not like a big confirming thing, but I notice shoulders a lot. He’s sort of ‘military square posture.’ Do you know what I mean?”
I turned the laptop for Lorimar and asked him, “What do you think?”
What Lorimar thought was what I thought: the military will do that to you.
The FBI agent she identified had been a naval officer for five years.
“The hoodie he was wearing was thin,” she said. “I could tell when he ran toward them what his build was like. He’s in good shape but not stiff, not a chunk of muscle like a weightlifter, more like fast, quick, and strong. Like I told you before. He closed the gap fast.”
She gave me a shy smile and said, “I’m embarrassed and humiliated. I don’t know why it all came back so slowly.”
“We’re just glad it did,” Lorimar said.
The naval officer turned FBI agent worked out of the Las Vegas field office. He was a good guy and would be happy to hear about his shoulders, but nothing Clark had said would help solve the murders.
“There was much more light when he stood in front of me at the restaurant window. That’s where my memory jumped around most. But I have him now, and really it’s because of his eyes. He looked at me for a second before he turned and ran.”
Lorimar shifted a little, and I willed him to stop. We weren’t going to drop it on her that she had gotten the wrong man, but I could tell Lorimar wanted to. I also got a strong feeling she’d just mixed in something true, which was spooky.
The shooter had looked into her eyes. She said it with particular force, yet she had just picked an FBI agent as the shooter. Was she trying to communicate something else?
“He didn’t look to see if they were dead. He turned away as the second cop was collapsing, looked at me, and then hurried down the right side of the lot. I couldn’t tell anything about the car that picked him up. Nothing has changed there.
“His nose is right. I remembered a mole on his right cheek, but he doesn’t have one. I thought he had a bigger mouth. I’m positive it’s him.” She smiled and added, “I’m the one with the big mouth.”
I could almost hear Decca gag. Lorimar leaned in and said, “If you had to put a percentage on how certain you are it’s him, what would that percentage be?”
“I’m actually one hundred percent sure.”
25
That same afternoon, Mara called from the Vegas office and said, “I’ve got bad news. Your house was broken into and vandalized last night. A neighbor across the street heard banging and what she thought was gunfire. She called her son who’s a Vegas police officer.”
I knew her son but couldn’t remember a burglary on the street as long as I’d lived there. With the power outages it made sense burglars would adapt fast, but burglars aren’t vandals. In a quiet voice he continued.
“I sent two agents by half an hour ago. They say it’s a mess. The back patio slider was pried out. Your kitchen cabinets are in the pool. Inside, it looks like someone walked through with a sword and fought a battle with your furnishings. The agents didn’t see a burglar alarm. Do you have one?”
“No.”
“You may want to rethink that,” Mara said.
“Thanks, Ted. I’ll do that.”
“Do you know a handyman or someone who can put up some plywood? If you don’t, I’ve got a guy. And you’re cleared to come home. We’re treating this as possibly work related.”
“I can’t come home,” I said. “I’m flying to Sacramento tonight to meet up with the Butte County sheriff early tomorrow. Did you get my message about that?”
“I did. I’m just saying you can reschedule.”
“Not really, not for this.”
I’d left him a message as to where I was going but not the purpose, in part because I was still skeptical of the quality of Sheriff Callan’s lead.
“Is anyone else staying at your house?”
“Julia moved to Long Beach, so no.”
“What about your girlfriend?”
“She has a house. I’ve got an old carpenter friend. I’ll give him a call,” I said.
“Give him my number and call your insurance agent.”
This was the Mara everyone liked. He could be selfless and generous and ever the problem solver.
“Has anything like this ever happened before?” Mara asked.
“No.”
“Anyone ever threaten you?”
“Sure, but most of those have promised to come kill me, so they’d make sure I was home first.”
“You can joke about this?”
“Not really.”
“Who comes to mind, Grale?”
“Julia’s ex-boyfriend, Nick Knowles, but he has a lot of reasons not to be within a thousand miles of there.”
When our call ended I called a carpenter friend, Dan Jenkins, who had a one-man handyman business. Dan said he’d pick up plywood and deal with the slider today. I texted him Mara’s number, and Mara went by in the afternoon and helped him carry plywood into the backyard. Then he videotaped the damage and sent it to me.
I watched the video on my laptop with Jace after I arrived at the Sacramento field office near twilight. The damage was systematic and depressing. In the living room, the leather couch I’d bought last year was slashed, as were the chairs and shades. So was a desert painting I’d bought from a woman known as Nora the Dawn Artist in Ocotillo Wells. I don’t know much about art, but that painting always moved me. It saddened me more than most of the other damage to see that canvas cut open.
Spray-painted graffiti was in symbols and signature marks unfamiliar to me. Mara said it smelled as if an acid was splattered on the hardwood floors and mattresses. Bedding and clothes jerked out of the closet were urinated on. When the kitchen cabinets were pried off the walls, glasses and dishes had slid onto the floor and shattered.
“Home, sweet home,” I said and froze the video on a photo of my parents and me, the three of us along a lakeshore on one of the family summer trips.
“Could it be an old girlfriend?” Jace asked.
I smiled, but little was left untouched. Systematic, unabashed, and unconcerned about noise, real anger, I thought. Tile counters and the porcelain toilet tanks were shattered, holes punched in walls with a mallet or small sledgehammer. Something with a five-pound head that could be wielded fast and hard. Clothes in dresser drawers were coated in motor oil. Mara had videotaped it all.
“Mara is thorough as a videographer,” Jace said. “Do you have any known enemies, anyone that’s alluded to getting even?”
“No, everyone loves me. I’m going to give Mara a quick call before we get on with things here.”
Mara answered right away and said, “Did you watch the video?”
“Just did. There’s a photo with my parents and me that was shot at.”
“Oh, that’s what the photo was. It’s damaged enough that I couldn’t tell. The gunshots took out each head. There were .22 shell casings on the other side of the room. I’m surprised they left them there. I’m not saying they shot from there and hit three small heads in a photograph. If they did, that’s one damn good shooter. I collected them to see if we can pull DNA, though from the smears it looks like the shooter wore gloves. I’m sorry, Grale.”
“Let me know on the DNA.”
I doubted there would be any. Heat usually burns DNA off a shell casing. But was it a statement? Was the shooting done from across the room and the casings left where they fell? It was just possible.
I had to compartmentalize it and put it aside. Jace and I ate a couple of dry sandwiches as we talked, then conferenced in with Manfred, the data tech at FBI headquarters I’d worked with the past nine months.
Last fall I was on the grid task force, and we’d started to see shooting attacks on cell towers that differed from typical vandalism. That’s when I struck up a conversation with Manfred about how to map the attacks and the charac
teristics of them. Our task force focused on western states, and there the cell-tower shootings were very spread out. You could read them as two guys with their rifles and couple of six-packs of beer practicing for deer season, except they were hitting receivers and transceivers with surprising accuracy and purpose.
By March this year they’d intensified and were beginning to show more pattern, and Manfred was including more data. In March he’d done a run for us on California, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. He was the only person I knew who sounded excited when we talked about the electrical pathways, 66 and 15. He was three hours ahead of us into the night yet sounded ready to go at it. In California he’d modeled correlations between cell-tower attacks and nearby subsequent attacks on the electrical grid. He and I were on the same hunt for a pattern.
That night I sent Mara’s videos to my insurance guy. He wouldn’t like them. He was thirty-five and just hitting his stride. His haircut was that of a rock star. He drove a low-slung BMW and was a friendly and exuberant guy, but this was a messy claim.
I told myself most of what was in the house was just stuff and didn’t matter. Get the kitchen put back together. Get the house cleaned and operable. Redo the floors you were going to redo anyway, paint, put in new locks, and install two cameras. That’s the way I’d deal with it for now, all the while knowing I was ignoring the violation of privacy and the statement made by whoever did it.
Later that night in a small hotel in Oroville, darker thoughts seeped in. Call them visions of retribution. Well before dawn I made coffee. I checked messages and e-mail, and scanned the headlines before driving to meet Callan. At Palo Verde, the Army Corps had joined the fight to keep the cooling towers functional. “Exodus from Phoenix” was a New York Times headline. Accompanying the article was a photo of a long ribbon of headlights weaving through the desert. In an odd way it was rather beautiful.
26
Las Plumas National Forest, California, April 29th
Callan’s throat was so bad he could barely talk as we crossed a scree field in the early cold air. When we rested he was still quiet but pointed out where we were headed, the base of a granite escarpment across the slope.
“From there we’ll have a view into the first canyon,” he said. “A little further on we’ll be able to see into all three.”
I nodded and asked, “Are you feeling any better?”
He didn’t answer at first and stared at where we were headed next.
“I saw a doctor, well, two of them yesterday. It didn’t go well. It’s not good, Grale.”
I dreaded what was coming. I’ve heard that anxiety-laden yet withdrawn tone enough in life to know what it often presages. I always feel sorrow at the shocked and quiet voices of those sharing this very personal sad news.
“It’s advanced metastatic disease,” he said. “That’s what they called it. It’s cancer. I told Mary last night.”
“Mary is your wife?” I asked.
“For almost fifty years. She didn’t understand me coming out here today. She broke down.”
“What about kids?”
“A son and a daughter. My daughter lives in the East and only talks to me on holidays. I was a hard father. They want to do more tests the day after tomorrow.”
“What are you doing out here, John?”
“I’m doing what I do. It’s the best thing I can think of. They’re going to try radiation and chemo, and if the tumors shrink enough they’ll operate. Of course, you can hear as they talk they know I’m gone.” He looked at me and said, “Let’s start walking again.” When we started he said, “I don’t really know what else to do.”
“No matter how it works out, be sure you make time to talk things through with your daughter.”
“I should. I really should. She has said some hard things to me. I was young. I didn’t know how to deal with the stress of being a cop and took it home.”
“That was then,” I said. “Talk to her.”
“I haven’t crossed this face in forty-one years,” he said. “See that stand of pines sagging up there under that little rock overhang? That’s where we’ll get a view into all three canyons. They each have streams that feed the creek running through the valley.”
“What do I tell the pilot?” I asked.
“Tell him an hour and a half because I have you slowing me down.” He attempted a smile then said, “I will talk to her.”
“Is she as stubborn as you?”
“Worse. Your spotter-plane pilot will need to fly by as slow as possible. When I was young I was up here all the time with my brother, Jeff. We did everything together. He got killed in Nam in the Mekong delta.” After a beat he added, “Another wasted war.”
“And you didn’t come back here after that?” I asked.
“I tried, but it was different. It changed.”
An hour and a half later we looked down into the canyons. I talked with the pilot, who was at horizon in a Cessna closing in. I could hear the faint thrum of the plane’s engine, but it took me a moment to find him in the sky. Callan had binoculars up and was scouring the canyon from the shade of the pine stand. He spotted a bear bag hanging in a tree.
“It looks like somebody is camping in the first canyon, and it’s a big bear bag,” he said. “If a bear sees that, he won’t stop thinking about it the rest of his life. I don’t see anybody down there. Let’s go check it out.”
We walked and slid down scree to the tree line, then followed a small stream flowing into the canyon. Anyone looking up at the rock would have spotted us. Callan must have heard me think that because he said, “Don’t worry about it. We’re tree surveyors.”
I untied the rope and lowered the bear bag. It was waterproof and tough as the hide of a rhino, but I could feel hard objects inside and should have known right there I wasn’t feeling food bags. I opened it slowly with Callan watching.
He said, “Aw, shit,” and lifted his binoculars as I pulled out rocks. He called out, “Camera,” and I looked up and saw a black plastic camera with a short antenna mounted high in a fir tree. For a moment I toyed with the idea the bear bag full of rocks and the camera trained on it were a grad student’s black-bear thesis project. But that didn’t fit. Their camera would be a bulky, boxy, ancient unit that weighed ten pounds. It would record but not transmit. This camera looked cutting-edge.
No doubt it had recorded us. Callan, who’d been county sheriff for twentysome-odd years, wouldn’t be hard to identify. Neither would I if they did much of an Internet search.
“What would you do right now if you were them?” Callan asked.
“Leave fast and never return.”
“Me too. We’ll follow this stream down to the creek, to the main trail. That’s our best move. If they know we’re here they aren’t going to waste time.”
“Where’s your nephew?” I asked.
“I told him stay away today, though taking instruction isn’t his strong suit.”
The spotter-plane pilot checked in. “I’ve got a man and possibly a woman breaking camp two canyons over, a half mile from you. They’re in a hurry. One checked us out with glasses. One more thing, they’ve got a big dog.”
We radioed the officers out on the road, then picked up a trail leading down to the main creek. At the creek’s edge, Callan said, “We wade up to those rocks and hide behind them. It’s shallow here and quicker than picking our way through the trees.”
I didn’t see that but followed him into the water then out and behind the rock outcrop. It was no more than a hundred yards upstream. As we got out and behind the rocks, he was coughing. He fumbled for medicine in the small backpack he carried. When he caught his breath, he didn’t give me a chance to ask how he was doing.
He said, “My brother and I all but lived out here. Dad was the meanest son of a bitch ever born. We ate the same berries as the bears. Home was the wild. Here was safer.”
The dog came first. Rottweiler. Big and trotting, stiff-legged, tan and brown, supple in sunlight. Behind th
e dog fifty steps or so came a young man moving fast. He could be the alleged husband in LA but hard to say. Dark haired. Olive skinned. I zoomed and took photos and video before he passed out of view. Then Callan tapped my arm, meaning don’t move, don’t breathe.
The dog had paused. Rottweiler hearing was better than that of many breeds, making them popular with police. It looked across the water in our direction for what felt like a full minute, then moved on.
Ten minutes later, when no one else had appeared, Callan asked, “What do you want to do?”
“Wait a little longer.”
Twenty minutes passed. Callan was restless but deferred to me, and soon a young woman appeared. She was without a pack and running though carrying a rifle. She wore a knit cap and moved quietly as I took photos.
“That’s her,” I said. “That’s her, and she cut her hair short but not off. And she didn’t dye it. I’ll be damned. That’s definitely her, and we need her alive. Make certain they know that out at the road. How long to reach the road if we go back out behind them?”
“An hour, maybe less,” Callan said and, still watching her, added, “This is not her first time moving down a trail with a rifle.”
We let her disappear, then Callan radioed a deputy as I listened.
“A man and a woman are hiking out with a dog. When they passed us, half a mile separated them. The male is leading with a dog, a big Rottweiler. We’re going to follow the woman, and so you know, this is not her first time moving down a trail with a rifle.”
“Copy that, chief.”
“There’s more. The woman is the suspect in the LA bombings, the Blond Bomber. She’s wearing a dark-blue T-shirt, jeans, and a knit cap. He’s in shorts, a gray T-shirt, and blue Nike running shoes. We do not want a gun battle. We want them alive. Repeat that.”
The deputy did as I thought about our next best move. If she was bringing up the rear hanging that far back, she was watching for anyone following. We didn’t want to walk into her gun sights, so I asked Callan if he knew another way to get us out.
“It’ll be slower,” Callan said, “but you’re right. Let’s go. We cross the creek, and I’ll take us out another way.”
