“Send them to me. You say the red Honda was there?”
“Yeah, but not any more. I’ll run the plates and let you know who it’s registered to. Beyond that I don’t know what else I can do.”
“Keep up the surveillance.”
Hy and the Tullocks looked questioningly at me when I rejoined them and sat down. “Bad news?” Jack asked.
I didn’t reply; my mind was still on Darcy. Had he been kidnapped? Then why no ransom demand? And why Darcy? Saskia had money, but by no means was she wealthy. Something else they wanted? What?
I feared for Darcy. He didn’t have the smarts to get himself out of this. Did he have the stamina? He was young, but all the drugs he’d taken had significantly impaired him.
Tullock cleared his throat. “Is there something I can get you? Water? Coffee?”
“Thanks, but no. I’m good. Where were we?”
“I was telling you about Gaby’s abortion.”
“Right. Whose baby was it?”
“Park’s, probably. My guess is that she and Park didn’t want to start a family right away. Although Gaby was raised Catholic, she didn’t go to church or confession any more.”
I’d been raised Catholic too, but I’d lapsed in my late teens because the Church’s actions and attitudes no longer made any sense to me. Over the years I’ve achieved a certain faith, one that’s centered in doing the most good for and the least harm to others. Unfortunately, putting that into practice hasn’t always worked as well as I’d’ve liked.
“This woman who called you,” I said, “has a large amount of information about Gaby’s private life. Are you sure her voice didn’t sound familiar?”
He shook his head.
“And you have no idea who trashed your office at the ranch?”
“No. I don’t have any enemies or anything much anybody’d want. And no secrets any more.” He glanced at Beth, who smiled faintly.
Secrets, I thought. Most said money was the root of all evil, but in my experience it was secrets—many of them not involving cold, hard cash.
The stupid, harmful things that people do to one another and then feel compelled to cover up. The hidden knowledge that gnaws at them. Such knowledge causes emotional and mental illness and all too often results in violence against the self or others.
Secrets, damned secrets.
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 12
Mick Savage
As Shar had told him to, he maintained surveillance on the house on Clayton Street. Past midnight the neighborhood was quiet, people returning from Saturday night activities, slotting their cars on an angle on the steep incline. Getting out of cabs. Walking uphill and calling good night to their companions. Lights flared on and winked out. Gradually a middle-of-the-night hush stole over the street.
It was threatening to steal over Mick too, when lights flashed down at the corner and the red Honda pulled into the driveway. The garage door went up and a small figure got out of the car and entered there. The car backed out and drove away.
Mick put on his helmet and fired up the Harley.
The Honda went down the hill and turned right on Oak Street, a conduit to the Central Freeway. Once there, it kept to the right and merged onto 101 South.
Daly City, Mick thought. Peninsula.
Neither. The Honda veered off onto Alemany Boulevard and into the Excelsior district, an area where a woman he’d once dated lived. The car moved with the slow traffic on Mission Street past an eclectic mix of produce stands, liquor stores, video rental shops, bodegas, check-cashing establishments, and restaurants of every imaginable type. Mick stayed a couple of vehicles back and watched the Honda make a left on Persia Avenue and, several blocks later, drive into McLaren Park.
While McLaren was second only to the Golden Gate in size, for years it had been showing wear and tear. Mick had played baseball there with Alison and some of her buddies from Merrill Lynch, and knew the territory reasonably well. Packed dirt instead of grass, untended recreational areas and playgrounds, lots of litter that often contained discarded needles used by the addicts who frequented the park after the sun fell.
Mick had to follow the Honda with his lights on dim, and he was afraid of hitting a pothole. Fortunately the Honda wasn’t going very fast and soon pulled off by an empty parking lot at the base of the Shelley Loop in the north-central area.
He eased his bike into a stand of madrone and killed the engine. An iron pole blocked the entrance to the parking lot, and the Honda idled in front of it. Hadn’t the driver known parts of the park were closed from sunset to sunrise?
Mick secured the bike and crept toward the Honda under cover of thick shrubbery. Some kind of plant that grew there made him feel the urge to sneeze, but he choked it back, fingers pinching his nostrils, hand over his mouth.
The car’s engine stopped its rumbling, and its lights went out. Seconds later a flash stabbed on. A tall figure skirted the iron pole and the light bobbed ahead of it.
Mick waited a moment, then followed, feeling carefully with his feet over the rough ground. It was cold, and the tall trees were eerie sentinels against the sky—just enough light pollution from the surrounding city to define their trunks and upthrust branches. Then suddenly the torch’s bobbing stopped. So did Mick.
The person with the torch was moving it around in ever-widening circles. Searching for something. The light steadied for a moment at one point, angled toward the ground, and before it moved again Mick noted landmarks: three pines formed a triangle, a tangle of vines at its foot. The light turned back his way and he ducked down.
Somebody searching for something that he couldn’t look for in daylight.
Behind him the Honda’s engine growled, and it rushed past, retracing its route along the Loop road. Impossible to get back to his bike in time to follow, so he slipped ahead through the shrubbery, branches scratching his face and hands, and shone his own light around.
Nothing but a small clearing, and its floor didn’t look as if it had been disturbed. When he stepped into it his feet sank a little; he leaned down to feel the ground. Damp, the earth easily scooped up in his hand. Had to be an underground spring here; the park was full of them.
A patch of soft, damp earth not too far from the road in a largely unused area. Given the thickness of the vegetation and lack of a trail, it was unlikely park users would stray into it.
Possible burial spot?
Sudden scrabbling in the bushes behind him. He whirled to see a large figure hurtling forward with an upraised arm. The first blow to his shoulder was glancing, scared the hell out of him. Then he felt a sharp kick on his shin, and when he bent double from the pain the assailant dove at his legs, brought him down. A heavy weight landed on him, drove the air out of his lungs; fists pummeled his face, one jarring blow after another. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Blood flowed into his eyes, blurring his vision.
A final blow, and then nothing…
Sharon McCone
It was long after midnight when Hy and I left the Kelowna house, and I was exhausted. This was one of those times when I realized that while I’d come a long way back from being locked in, I still wasn’t completely healed. The feeling of being myself, yet not myself, usually filled me with anger, but now I just wanted to cry. I leaned my head against the passenger-side window of our rental car and, face turned away from Hy, let the tears leak. I couldn’t fool him: he didn’t say anything, but he gave me a squeeze on the shoulder.
How did I get so lucky?
“I think I’m good to fly,” he said after a few minutes, “if you want to head home tonight.”
“You may be good to fly, but your copilot’s not.” On long trips, it’s wise to have somebody alert to spell you in case of a sudden attack of drowsiness.
“So we spend the night under the wing.”
“I’d like that.”
Sleeping under the wing of the plane is like camping out. Minus the fire and toasted marshmallows or s’mores, on account of the proximity o
f avgas. We could’ve spread out on the comfy fold-down seats of this jet, but the idea of cuddling in the double sleeping bag Hy always brought along was more appealing. We drove out to the plane and settled in, and in moments I was out cold.
In the early morning we flew to Sea-Tac, where we passed through customs and took on fuel. And I called Mick but only reached a message center. Puzzled, I called Rae; her phone was off. Ted was at home, though, and glad to hear from me.
“Mick’s been hurt,” he said. “Happened last night.”
“Oh God. How badly? Where is he?”
“Don’t panic—he’s okay. I talked to him a few minutes ago. He’s at UC Med Center. He was mugged in McLaren Park, of all places.”
“How serious are his injuries?”
“Scrapes, contusions, a possible concussion, which is why they want to watch him today. No broken bones, no permanent damage.”
“What the hell was he doing in McLaren Park at night?”
“Following somebody in a red Honda. He’s pretty vague on the details. A couple who were looking for a place to get it on found him crawling along the Shelley Loop and called an ambulance.”
The red Honda he’d been tailing earlier last evening. “Did he say anything about Darcy?”
“No.”
“What about his assailant?”
“Mick describes him as big and heavy. From the photos I’ve seen in the files, I gather Darcy’s tall and skinny.”
“Couldn’t have been him anyway. He’s not violent.”
“Mick was concerned about his bike, so Neal and I are about to go to the park to look for it.”
“Well, Hy and I will be on our way home soon. I’ll check with you later.”
“Saskia, it’s not very good news,” I said as I watched Hy talking with one of the linemen at the gas pumps.
“I didn’t expect good news. Tell me.”
That was what I loved about my birth mother: she, like Elwood, accepted—no, wanted—the truth, bad as it might be. Unlike Ma who—God love her—would have wailed and cried and eventually had to be sedated.
“Apparently Darcy’s been holed up, alone or with somebody, in a basement apartment in the Haight-Ashbury district. We found the place, but by then he was gone. Later last night Mick was assaulted after tailing a suspect in McLaren Park. It’s pretty rough territory, even in daylight, but I’ve a feeling this was no ordinary mugging. Nothing of Mick’s—bike, watch, wallet, phone—was taken.”
“Darcy—could he have been the one who attacked Mick?”
“There’s no evidence of that.”
Saskia sighed. “Sharon, I appreciate what you and Hy are doing. I know you’re not… fond of Darcy.”
“Neither of us really knows him.”
“No one does.” A touch of bitterness in her tone. “He was such a normal, happy little boy and adolescent, but even then I sensed something different about him.” She paused, and I could hear her sucking in her breath. “You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you.”
“Try me.”
“Thomas Blackhawk was not Darcy’s father. I was pregnant by another man when I met Thomas.”
Oh, Lord! For a moment I felt light-headed and had to brace myself on the iron fence that separated the general aviation terminal from the field. Ever since Pa died and posthumously led me to the circumstances of my parentage, I’d been barraged with one mind-numbing secret after another.
Surprise: you’re adopted! Hello: you’ve a father in Montana! Welcome: your mother, half sister, and half brother live in Boise!
And now someone else figured into the equation.
I wasn’t sure how many more revelations about family matters I could endure.
“Did Thomas know?”
“Yes, I told him, but it didn’t make any difference. He always regarded Darcy as his son.”
“And the real father?”
“Martin DesChamps.”
One of the prominent leaders of the American Indian Movement in the 1980s. He’d been found shot to death in an alley in Denver, roughly eight months before Darcy was born. The case had never been closed.
I asked, “Do you suppose that Darcy’s disappearance has something to do with AIM?”
“No, I’d have told you before this if I did. AIM is a prominent force in this country; I’ve devoted my life to representing them and their causes. But Martin DesChamps does not reflect the movement as it is today: he was mentally unstable, as many charismatic leaders are. He strayed from the path he’d set out on and destroyed himself in the process.”
“But he was murdered—”
“A drug deal gone bad. I’ve seen the police reports. Some people, when their goals and dreams take a long time to realize, just give in to their worst impulses. I’m afraid Darcy inherited more of his father’s genes than mine.”
“Does Darcy know who his father was?”
“No. Thomas and I hoped that nurture would triumph over nature. That hope has taken a long time to die, as more and more of his father’s craziness came out in him.”
“There’s no way he could’ve found out about his father being Martin DesChamps?”
“I don’t see how. Other people might’ve suspected, Robin among them, but Thomas and I were the only ones who knew for sure.” She paused. “I’ve really messed up, haven’t I? Giving you up for adoption, lying to Robin and Darcy all their lives.”
“You had your reasons. We’re a family now.”
I saw Hy signaling that he’d finished preflighting. “Got to go, Mom. I’ll be in touch.”
It was the first time I’d called Saskia Mom.
Darcy Blackhawk
Dark, like it’s supposed to be when you’re dead.
Cold too. On his back on what felt like concrete. Hands and feet bound. Hands behind him, digging into his spine.
He wiggled around, tried rolling onto his left side. Fell back. Stinging tears flooded his eyes and he lay there, feeling them dribble down his cheeks and into the stubble on his chin. Some of them flowed into his ears and he shook his head back and forth to dislodge them.
He tried to think. Where had he been? Where was he now?
It was a blank, except now he remembered being with Lady Laura.
“I’ve just got this one thing to do, Darcy, and then I’ll meet you at the Palace…. We’ll go someplace nice, like Big Sur.”
He thought he might’ve been to Big Sur once: tall trees, cliffs, ocean roar. But that sliver of memory faded fast and left him sad.
Lady Laura, his only friend, and now she was dead. One thing he knew: he hadn’t killed her. At first he’d thought he had, but now—in one of those moments his shrinks called “lucid”—he knew she’d been dead when the brown girl had taken him in that taxi to the Palace. What was it the shrinks called taking on guilt for things you didn’t do? He couldn’t remember.
The tears came faster.
Not supposed to cry. Men never cry.
Who’d told him that? Not Dad. Darcy had seen him cry a few times himself. Mom and Robbie also cried: they said it was natural. So who had said men never cry?
Oh yeah, somebody in one of the jails he’d been in. They’d beat the shit out of him.
Jail—that must be where he was now. In jail, in a single cell because they thought he was crazy. In jail where he belonged. But what the hell had he done?
Stolen some waiter’s tip off a table at a sidewalk café, he remembered doing that. But nobody’d noticed and the money went as fast as it came. He’d been so hungry….
He should’ve been hungry now, but his stomach was giving him pains and he felt like he was puffing up.
He used every ounce of strength he had to roll back and forth and finally ended up on his left side. Normally he would’ve used his hands as a pillow, but they were tied behind him. Why? Cops had never tied his hands before.
Noisy here, he thought before he went under. Droning and whining like in a factory. Noisy…
And dark, like it’s
supposed to be when you’re dead.
Sharon McCone
During the flight from Sea-Tac to Oakland, which seemed to take forever, Hy and I discussed what might have happened to Darcy.
“From Mick’s description,” I said, “that basement apartment where Darcy was staying is pretty squalid. Of course, somebody who’d been living under a bridge might consider it the lap of luxury.”
“More likely he wasn’t staying there voluntarily.”
“You mean he was imprisoned. By the young woman he’s been seen with?”
“Possible.”
“But why?”
“Could be a kidnapping?”
“Then how come no ransom demand?”
“Money isn’t always the primary motivation. A lot of the cases RI deals with are attempts to gain power, or to force a powerful person into doing what they want.”
“The only powerful person connected with Darcy is Saskia. I suppose somebody might want to influence the outcome of one of her pending court cases.”
“What’s she been working on lately?”
“Nothing terribly exciting, from what she’s told me. Actually, she’s on a bit of a hiatus, lecturing, writing, and making TV appearances. And even so, you’d think she would’ve heard something from them by now.”
We fell silent and after a time I reviewed my conversation with Jack Tullock. The Gaby DeLucci connection kept coming back to videotapes.
Tapes that Gaby had sent the other Musketeers to get from Drew’s house. Tapes that Drew had claimed never existed. Other tapes that someone had ransacked at Drew’s house the night before he killed himself. Maybe whoever had gone through his house had found the incriminating ones and threatened to expose him, made monetary demands. Drew would have known that once blackmail begins, it never ends.
Was that another possible reason for his suicide?
Yes, when you considered that Drew’s life was very close to ruin. Rumors about his sexual exploitation of Gaby had made the rounds of certain circles for years. His profile on the FreeToHarm site wouldn’t go unnoticed by the media and the general populace much longer. Probably the person who had posted the profile was also the blackmailer.
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