by Steven Gore
“It’s not important. But she believes Mark Hamlin was her father.”
“Mark wouldn’t have told her.”
“Let’s say he was desperate.”
Mother Two snorted. “If he was desperate, he would’ve said anything. That’s the kind of guy he was.”
“The medical examiner has tissue samples. We can still do a paternity test.”
She raised her fist, held it in front of her face, looking at it like it had somehow let her down, like it was a weapon she had failed to fire in combat. Her head fell forward and she dropped her hand to her thigh.
“My partner hated Hamlin, saw through him from day one, that’s how I ended up with the fat pig Frank on top of me day after day. I only found out after Ryvver was born that Frank was shooting blanks. Got hurt as a kid. On his bike or playing football or something.”
She looked over at Donnally.
“He just got off on the idea of screwing a lesbian, so he lied to us. I didn’t know what was wrong, but I wasn’t getting pregnant and wanted the whole thing over with, so I let Mark fuck me a couple of times. And that was it. We got Ryvver.”
“And you never told your partner?”
“No. I was afraid she’d always look at Ryvver as a kind of Rosemary’s Baby.”
“How did you find out Frank was impotent?”
Mother Two looked at Navarro. “Do I have to answer that?”
Navarro nodded.
“The asshole blackmailed sex out of me after she was born. Mark told him about me and him, and Frank used it to make me put out or he’d tell my partner. I told him to wear a condom so I wouldn’t get pregnant again, and he laughed and told me. I should’ve killed the bastard right then.”
Donnally didn’t follow that with “Instead of later?” for fear of giving her the idea of trying to protect her daughter by taking the fall.
Navarro cut in. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you would lead me to her and I could …”
“Help her get away?” Navarro said.
“Maybe. Frank deserved it.”
“What about Mark?” Donnally asked.
Her head snapped toward Donnally. “You said …”
“No. She killed him all right. Someone else moved the body out there and hung him up.”
“You son of a bitch.”
She raised her elbow to strike him.
Donnally pointed at her. “Don’t do it.” She lowered it.
“I had no choice,” Donnally said. “I needed to know the truth.”
“Now you know. And now it’s over.”
“It’s not. Reggie Hancock is missing. She was supposed to meet him in LA yesterday. Nobody has seen him since.”
Donnally described the rolling scheme, its connection to Little Bud and his suicide, and the call from Hancock to his secretary. He didn’t see any risk in telling her. If Mother Two refused to cooperate with them in finding Ryvver and getting her to surrender, Navarro would lock her up for assault so she couldn’t do anything to help her daughter.
“She never went to LA. I know. She lives on SSI and her credit card is in my name. If she’d flown or driven down there, I’d know about it. I’ve been checking her credit card and bank account online. She’d need a plane ticket or gas for the car. Like always, there’s hardly any money in there and she hasn’t taken cash out for a couple of weeks.”
“Maybe Reggie figured out he’d be next,” Donnally said, “and came up here to try to grab her on his own terms.”
“Where would she try to meet him?” Navarro asked. “Maybe someplace where Hancock wouldn’t think there was any risk.”
Mother Two closed her eyes. Donnally watched her thumbs working against her fingertips. Finally, she opened them.
“The place she knew best in San Francisco was Golden Gate Park. The California Academy of Sciences and all that. She spent a summer working as a volunteer at the Steinhart Aquarium. She even had her own key. She liked to hang out there late at night. Just her and the animals.”
Donnally imagined Ryvver tying up Hancock and feeding him to the alligators.
“She still knows lots of folks who work there. They’re very fond of her and let her do work around the place when she’s in town.”
Chapter 56
What will happen to her?” Mother Two asked.
Donnally, Navarro, and Mother Two were sitting in a surveillance van outside the California Academy of Sciences. Undercover officers dressed as homeless people were hiding in the bushes watching the front and service entrances. Two others were already inside, dressed as janitors. All had been given DMV photos of Ryvver and Reggie Hancock and descriptions of her hairstyle and likely clothing.
“That’s hard to say,” Donnally answered.
But it wasn’t.
If the mothers were willing to mortgage their house and business to hire the kind of lawyer Hamlin had been and the kind of investigator Frank Lange had been, the worst she would get was a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.
“It depends on what the psychiatrists say,” Donnally said.
“She has a history of violence as a child. We tried everything.”
Donnally squinted at her. “Violence? Your partner told me as a kid she wouldn’t pick flowers for fear of hurting the plants.”
Mother Two took in a long breath and exhaled. “The lies we tell ourselves.” She looked at Donnally. “If she was a little boy, nobody would have said anything. Catching and torturing lizards and frogs is what they do. Catch them. Lead them down the sidewalk on strings. Swing them around. Dissect them. She was just a little aggressive on the dissecting side.”
“And she was a girl.”
“And the child of lesbians. Don’t think that didn’t play a role in the school psychologist’s theories about why she was that way. This was more than twenty years ago.”
Navarro’s radio clicked, followed by a voice.
“Black male and white female walking close together south along Music Concourse Drive, near the fountain between the palm trees.”
“Check.”
That would mean the two were behind the van.
Mother Two leaned toward the rear and her body tensed like a sprinter.
Donnally grabbed her arm. “Take it easy.”
Navarro turned on the monitor and directed the video camera in the top vent toward the back.
“Cancel that. He’s too tall. She’s too heavy … and they just separated.”
“Check.”
Mother Two settled back, her eyes moving, seeming to be searching for the trailing end of her last thought.
Finally, she sighed and looked at Navarro. “You know how it was back in those days. You’re old enough. I know you called people up in Guerneville to check up on me. They told me. And they told me you’re queer. What do you think those same shrinks would’ve said about you?”
“I know what they said about me.” Navarro gave her a hard look, like he was fighting off an invasion that had started at his professional life and had now moved into his private life, then his face softened and he said, “They said I could be cured.”
Another click. A different radio voice.
“I just spotted a Toyota Corolla. Dark. Like hers. Two-door heading up South Drive. Two people inside. Can’t make the plate yet.”
“Check.”
“Got the plate. Wrong one.”
“Switch to another channel,” Navarro said, “and run it for lost or stolen.”
The voice came back a minute later. “The plate is clear and matches the car. It’s not hers.”
“Check.”
Donnally thought of Frank Lange. He understood the reason and the mechanism, Ryvver drugging him, then searching his files for proof of the rolling scheme that took the life of Little Bud, then setting his house aflame.
“Did Ryvver have access to Rohypnol?” Donnally asked.
“A generic form. She was prescribed flunitrazepam for insomnia, but it had the rev
erse effect on her. Made her agitated and aggressive. She went off on my partner the day after Little Bud died. Hitting and scratching. Only after we threw her out did we do some research and figure out it might’ve been the drug.”
Mother Two sighed again.
“You’d think that after all these years, and all the psych drugs she’s been given, that we would’ve checked first.”
She looked at Donnally, her eyes seemed to deepen, then went dead, and she looked away.
He knew she’d just hit on the foundation of her daughter’s insanity defense: The drugs made her do it.
And he had no doubt that for the right price she’d be able to buy a lawyer like Hamlin and one of his hireling shrinks to sell it to a jury.
Chapter 57
Three A.M. and Donnally was still staring at his bedroom ceiling and listening to pounding raindrops that had ridden the squalls up from the Pacific three blocks away and then swept down onto the neighborhood. He was hoping his phone would ring with the news that Hancock had been saved from Ryvver and Ryvver had been saved from herself.
His job as special master was over. He’d sat in the van for two hours feeling his court-appointed identity dissolve and watching himself return to who he was before Judge McMullin had signed the order.
Mark Hamlin’s death was solely a law enforcement issue. There was no privilege left to protect, and he and the judge had agreed he should back away. The arrest would be clean, and any admissions Ryvver made would be unimpeachable in court.
And he had realized he was now twice done with San Francisco, each time a decade apart, each time having broken free of the city’s vortex of crime and corruption.
Even now, he felt his stomach tighten with guilt when he thought of his pushing Janie out onto an ethical tightrope, pressuring her to extract information from Jackson. That they succeeded in the end wasn’t justification enough.
Listening to the crash of distant thunder and watching the ceiling strobe with faint lightning, he wondered whether he could convince Janie to move north with him to Mount Shasta and to take a job in the nearby VA clinic. Maybe that way they could narrow the circumference of their lives and free themselves from the kinds of contingencies that had pulled them into Hamlin’s.
Donnally felt a wrenching contraction of the world toward the California Academy of Sciences, then its expansion into the infinity of unknowing. He might be done fugitive hunting, but the fugitive hunter’s nightmare wasn’t done with him.
He thought about Ryvver’s two mothers, now together in the surveillance van praying she’d show up, and then about the girl murdered by Hamlin’s stalker client and his nouveau riche parents humiliated by the prosecution of their son, wanting to get it over with. Keep him off death row, but on the shelf for life. Make him old news as fast as possible and make the world forget.
His mind jumped back.
Humiliated.
Donnally sat up. Janie looked over. She, too, was still awake. He said the word aloud.
“You may be right,” Janie said. “And she now knows how to do it.”
They were in the car in three minutes and pulled into the Fort Point parking lot twelve minutes later. He’d called Navarro on the way. Donnally told Janie what his route up to the lighthouse would be, then left her to meet Navarro. He wanted to make sure Navarro or another officer didn’t shoot him by mistake in the darkness.
Donnally’s eyes adjusted slowly to the shadows under the bridge and his ears took in nothing but the gusts shuddering through the Golden Gate and the raindrops exploding on the water-sheeted pavement and the waves crashing onto the rocks below.
As he ran toward the fort he looked up at the dark lighthouse, backlit by city lights reflecting off the low clouds, a mass of black on top of a skeleton of angled steel.
And the bridge high and behind it, another skeleton, another black mass, headlights and halogens illuminating the surface like a sunset.
The two structures looked like dinosaurs. Mother and child.
Now soaked through his clothes, he made his way around the south end, not using his flashlight for fear of giving away his presence. He slowed, searching for the door through which Camacho had carried Hamlin’s corpse, feeling along the brick wall. His shoe hit something hard, he pitched forward, then caught himself, one hand on the ground, the other braced against brick, his hip once again torn with pain. He looked up as lightning shot across the sky and lit up a man-sized frame of metal ten feet away. He crept over to it and then reached past the edge, encountering the nothingness of the open door. He slid his hand down, and his fingers touched the hasp holes no longer filled by the padlock.
Ryvver had broken in for a second time.
With the premeditation required to trap Hancock and to again buy rope and a bolt cutter, Donnally didn’t see Ryvver—whoever her lawyer was and whatever medication she’d taken—obtaining a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity.
There was no madness in her method.
Another burst of lightning bounced off the brick wall and the metal door. He ducked as something swung at him. It thunked against the doorjamb. He rushed the moving shadow behind it, hitting it low and taking the flailing body down. He heard a ringing of metal hitting concrete. He expected to hear Ryvver’s scream; instead it was Jackson swearing and pounding on his back.
“Let me go, you motherfucker. Let me go.”
Donnally got her into a headlock, his arms under hers and his hand braced against her neck.
“It’s me,” Donnally said.
Jackson stopped struggling.
“Why’d you take a swing at me?”
“I thought you were a security guard or a cop.”
Donnally released her and pushed himself up onto his knee.
“Is she inside?” Donnally asked.
He could now make out Jackson in the darkness.
“Her and Reggie. I guessed they’d be here.”
“Why didn’t you call somebody, clue us in?”
“Because I didn’t want some trigger-happy idiot to shoot her.”
“Like me?”
“Take it any way you want. And I didn’t want her to panic and kill him.” She pointed toward the courtyard. “I was just about to go up when I heard you trip and fall, so I came back.”
Donnally stood and reached down to help her up.
“Show me.”
Jackson led him down a short hallway toward an opening into the courtyard. He scanned the three stories of arched walls, looking scalloped in the night. He stayed in the shadows as he squinted up toward the lighthouse. He spotted movement, but not on the ocean side where Hamlin had been left hanging from the walkway with his feet scraping the fort’s roof, but on the bay side facing them, above an eighty-foot drop to the floor on which Donnally was standing.
A male voice called out from above, fighting the wind and rain.
“Please, don’t. Please.”
Then louder.
“Please, I’m begging you.”
Jackson moved forward as if to cut across the courtyard. He grabbed her and jerked her back, and then stepped near the curve of the arch and looked up. Now he could make out two figures standing along the lighthouse railing. Neither was moving.
He whispered to Jackson that they should make their way around the perimeter, then up the stairs he’d told Janie he’d use.
Donnally turned back and led her through the vaulted rampart, their footfalls masked by the brick around him and by the rain and wind swirling around the lighthouse. They worked their way along two sides of the courtyard, then stopped at the base of the circular stairway.
Donnally turned back toward Jackson. “When we get to the roof, try to get to the opposite side of the lighthouse and get her attention. Keep her looking your way. Don’t react to anything I do.”
Jackson grabbed his arm. He felt her quivering with wet and cold and fear. “You’re not gonna …”
“No. I won’t shoot her.”
He headed up the steps,
Jackson behind him.
Once on the roof, they held back in the shadows. He waited for a lightning burst, then made a curving motion with his hand, indicating the route he wanted Jackson to take, and signaled her to go ahead.
He watched her sneak across the roof and past the crisscrossing metal supports of the tower. He waited until she called out, “Ryvver … Ryvver … It’s me …” then he crept along the roof edge.
Hancock started yelling again, now begging. “Please. Please. Help me.”
Donnally looked up. Hancock was standing on a ledge, outside the walkway, a noose around his neck, hands bound. The other end of the rope was tied to the railing. Ryvver stood behind him, her hand gripping the knot at the back of his head.
Ryvver screamed down at Jackson. “You’re as evil as the rest of them.”
“He had nothing to do with Little Bud,” Jackson yelled back. “Nothing. It was all Mark and Frank.”
“You’re lying.”
Donnally reached the foot of the lighthouse, then took off his belt, held it in his teeth, and monkey-barred his way up under the wrought-iron stairs and around the walkway until he was just under Hancock. He could see the tips of Hancock’s shoes overhanging the ledge and could see his legs trembling in the wet and cold.
Donnally locked his hand around Hancock’s ankle. He felt the man’s body jerk in surprise, then shudder in fear. Donnally patted his leg to calm him, then released his grip and pulled himself up farther until he could see Ryvver. She was still holding the rope, but was looking away and down toward Jackson. He slipped the belt behind Hancock’s legs just above his knees and around the rail post behind him, then cinched the buckle closed.
Hancock sighed.
Donnally heard it.
Ryvver heard it.
She looked at Hancock, then down.
Lightning flared. Then again. Almost strobing, illuminating her pale face consumed by shock and fury.
Donnally was now illuminated, confronting her like a living nightmare. As thunder vibrated the lighthouse, rain tattooed his face and eyes as he grabbed the railing to pull himself up.
Ryvver shoved Hancock. He rocked forward, against the belt tying him to the railing. He screamed. A rising wail. But it held, and he straightened up.
