by Joanne Pence
Richie nodded then faced Travis. “My security cameras couldn’t get his face. Did yours have any luck?”
“Let’s see.” Travis had a bunch of cameras in various positions. He went through several streams until he finally found one that showed more of an outline of the man’s face than most. “I can run it through facial recognition software, once I’m into the California DMV files. It’s going to take time to run, however. I’ve got to keep the breach low level so they don’t know they’ve been hacked.”
“Why don’t you give this a try first?” Rebecca said and, using her phone, showed him the APB information she’d sent out.
Travis fed the photo into his system and ran a facial scan. As she was sure it would, it matched. Connor Gray obviously liked hiding his face under hoodies as well as baseball caps.
“We’ve got to find him,” Rebecca said.
“I can do that,” Travis announced.
Rebecca faced him. “You can?”
“Since he was here, my system synced with his phone. It’s another app I’ve designed, along with the liar app you’re testing, Richie.”
“Liar app?” Rebecca repeated, looking at Richie.
He didn’t look back. “Tell me about your design, Logan.”
“Sure. It lets you sync to anyone’s phone who comes close to you or your property. You can get into their GPS system, as well as their mail and text messages.”
Rebecca was stunned. “Do you know how completely illegal that is?”
Travis shrugged. “If someone comes onto my property uninvited, he deserves to have his privacy compromised.”
She gave him a sideways glance, but didn’t argue the point. “Okay, what did you find?”
“First, let me explain that I only did this to be sure he wouldn’t come back and get near me. If he had, my phone would have signaled an alarm. But if you just want to know where he is, that’s child’s play.”
He opened another program, and soon located Connor Gray’s phone. Its signal was coming from a spot a bit past Inverness, a small town on the western side of Tomales Bay, off Marin County’s Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.
“Let’s go get him,” Rebecca said.
Richie nodded, then looked at his client. “You don’t want to come along, or do you?”
“Hell, no. I want nothing to do with him.”
“Okay, the Inspector and I will take it from here, but first one thing.” Richie faced him straight on.
Travis waited. “Yes?”
“I’m assuming you synced my phone as well as the Inspector’s to your damned system. Right now, you keep an eye on it in case we get into trouble. If we do, you call this number.” He handed Travis a card with no name, but one of Shay’s numerous cell phone numbers on it.
“Will do,” Travis said, pocketing the card.
“Good. And then, once I call and tell you that everything’s fine, you’ll have five minutes to take our phones off your system. Understand? Five minutes, or your whole set-up here turns into nothing more than metallic Tinker toys.”
Travis scoffed. “You forget, I’ve got a high-level security set up.”
“And who got it for you?” Richie asked.
Travis’s face fell and his lips formed a big “Oh.”
o0o
Richie drove across the Golden Gate Bridge to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and followed it westward. Rebecca had always loved this drive past the north side of Mount Tamalpais into a beautiful green wonderland that was filled with mostly dairies and ranch land. She had been out here a few times previously to visit a cheese factory and to go to Tomales Bay for crab and oysters.
The GPS signal Travis had set up led them past Inverness, and then onto Pierce Point Road towards the ocean.
As they passed a small dirt road, the signal began to lessen. They turned back to the dirt road and stopped. There was no way Richie’s low-riding Porsche could drive up it.
“See, I told you my SUV had its uses,” Rebecca said.
“Once in a blue moon, I’ll agree.” He slowly, carefully drove only far enough that the Porsche wouldn’t be visible from the main road. Even that short distance over rocks and ruts had made him wince.
They got out of the car to a hilly land filled with redwood trees and thick brush. Richie was amazed that he still had a cell signal. He figured it was only because a lot of computer tech people had built luxurious second homes along the ocean front, not far from here.
It was actually good that they had to walk because if driving, they probably would have missed the tire tracks that turned onto what was essentially a deer path. After about five minutes, they saw an old beige Volvo stopped up ahead of them. Rebecca took out her Glock and insisted Richie walk behind her.
“Remind me to buy bullet-proof vests to keep in my car the way you do,” Richie muttered. “One for each of us. I’m tired of getting in these situations and then having you out in front, with no protection except your gun.”
“Hopefully, I won’t need the gun,” Rebecca said, but she just wasn’t sure what she was going to find, or what Connor Gray’s reaction to seeing them would be.
No one was in or near the Volvo. They kept going, looking for any hint that Connor was still out here.
Richie was the first to notice a building on the downslope of the hill. They found a footpath through the thicket and walked down it as quietly as they could until they arrived at a weathered, barely standing, one-room shack.
They reached a window and peered inside. It was empty.
“Drop the gun!” a voice called from some distance away.
They turned. High on the hill, all but hidden by trees and high weeds, Connor Gray stood aiming a rifle at them.
Rebecca carefully lowered her weapon to the ground.
“We came here to talk to you,” Richie shouted. “We think you’re in danger.”
“In danger from you!” Connor answered.
“You’re in much worse danger than from us,” Rebecca called. “We want to help you, and to stop this.”
“Connor,” Richie said, “you know who I am, so you know I’m in danger, too. I think you know a whole lot about what’s going on. We need to help each other.”
Connor didn’t reply.
Rebecca spoke. “I believe you had no idea a homeless man was sleeping inside when you set the fire at Easy Street.”
“I didn’t set anything!” Connor cried.
“I saw you there. Also at Big Caesar’s, and at Kyoto Dreams. Look, I haven’t given you your Miranda rights, so nothing you say can be held against you anyway, right? Talk to me.”
Gray said nothing for a while. He lifted his chin. “If I tell you what I know, can you get me immunity for the fire? I never meant to hurt anyone.”
“I can try.”
His mouth downturned. “What good does that do me?”
“More good than if I don’t try.”
“Kick the gun away,” he shouted. “Far away.”
She did.
He came down the hill, taking care not to slip on the steep silty soil. Up close, he looked terrible. She could see that he’d hardly slept, and had the sunken face of a man who hadn’t eaten well and was near the end of his rope. He lowered his rifle slightly, his hand still near the trigger.
Rebecca tried her best to sound comforting. “You have nothing to fear from us. We’re on your side. Why don’t we go somewhere—into town, maybe—and talk about what happened.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Connor said, his grip tightening as he lifted the rifle a bit higher.
“Okay. It’s okay,” Rebecca said. “Tell you what, why don’t we all just sit down here, and you can fill us in on what happened.” With that, she and Richie sat on the ground and waited.
Connor studied them a moment, and then did the same. After a minute or so of silence, Connor began his story.
“I was given the magazine assignment by Liv Wong. I’d written for her before, and she liked my style. It was supposed to be just a
humorous piece about six hot bachelors who had businesses in San Francisco. But as soon as I began to look into them, I learned that none of them were what they appeared to be.”
“Why not?” Rebecca asked.
“They all had problems—either with money, or their love lives, or business partners, or they were simply unhappy despite an image of being all about fun and fame.”
“In other words, we were all normal guys,” Richie said, disgust etching the lines along the sides of his mouth.
Connor looked nervously at Richie. “I followed simple investigative reporting procedure. I talked to the people I saw hanging around the bachelors at their places of business and their homes.”
“Spying on us,” Richie said.
Connor sighed. “Sorry. Most of it was pretty dull stuff, to tell the truth. I didn’t think I had anything special and was going to write an article just the way it was conceived—light, fun, maybe a little risqué—but I stumbled across something strange at Kyoto Dreams.”
Rebecca nodded in encouragement for him to continue.
“I went to the restaurant several times,” Connor said. “Some beautiful and nice waitresses worked there, and I met one who seemed to enjoy talking to me. I had one of those little rooms where I sat on the floor on a grass mat—tatami, I guess. A sliding door made from that white Japanese paper would be kept shut as I ate. After I met the talkative waitress, the next two times I went there, I asked for her by name. Maybe she felt sorry for me dining all alone, and I’d usually order the cheapest thing on the menu, but she’d come in, sit a little while with me and pour my sake, and we’d talk a bit. From her, I learned that Tanaka had a fiancée in Japan. I had already seen him with a number of different women. Some even came to the restaurant at closing time to wait for him. They’d go out nightclubbing from there. He was definitely a party guy.”
Richie folded his arms and scowled.
At the fierce look, Connor’s hands tightened on the rifle stock. “Anyway, I discovered that Tanaka often left before closing time, and went out the back door. Since I was going broke eating at Kyoto Dreams, I decided to hang out in the alley and follow Tanaka from there. But I soon noticed some strange goings on. Like clockwork, a white van with no lettering on it would arrive at nine o’clock, and a small exchange would be made. It didn’t look like food.
“After watching this three nights in a row, I followed the van. It went to a house in the Mission district—on Twenty-ninth Street. I soon switched from watching the restaurant to watching the house. It had plenty of goings and comings, but nobody lived there. It was some sort of drop-off location.”
“For what?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t know. Drugs, most likely. That area is notorious for them.”
Richie glanced at her and nodded. They had a good idea exactly which house Connor had stumbled across.
“As I watched the van,” Connor continued, “I saw that it started its route around seven in the evening. One night, I followed it from the Mission district house. It wasn’t easy, and a couple of times I lost it. But on the third try, I tracked it to the alley behind Easy Street Clothiers. Again, there was a strange exchange, but this time, a bunch of boxes were brought inside the store. It actually looked like it might be a legitimate delivery. The white van got there at seven-thirty; the store had closed at seven. Everyone seemed to have gone home but Diego Bosque.
“I watched Easy Street’s back alley a few more nights. The van always showed up at precisely seven-thirty. Sometimes it would leave off boxes, other times, the only exchange was something small. And always, Diego Bosque would be the one to close up the store.”
“Interesting,” Rebecca murmured.
“I also knew Bosque was a frequent visitor to Kyoto Dreams,” Connor said. “I would have liked to believe it was strictly for the food, but somehow, that didn’t seem to be the case. I also tried to interview Kyoto Dreams employees about the receipt and shipment of goods late at night, but no one would talk to me. I knew something slippery was going on there, probably with some very dangerous people.
“By now, I’ll admit that watching the van, the two businesses, and wanting to know what was going on, had become an obsession. I also saw, every day, soon after the restaurant opened, its manager would walk to a small business. Everything was written in Japanese, so I couldn’t even tell what it was. One day, I said what the hell and walked in and asked if it was a Japanese travel agency. The one man in the office said no, that it was a bank. All I can tell you is it had damn few customers.”
“Did you get its name?” Rebecca asked.
“No. I couldn’t read anything, and the man’s English wasn’t the best. But I did some research and learned that the Yakuza, the ‘Japanese mafia,’ are involved with a number of such small ‘personal’ banks and other white collar institutions. I was pretty sure I’d just stumbled across one such business. I also learned the Yakuza are attempting to move many of their operations to places outside Japan. To do it, they formed front companies.” Connor paused a moment, looking from Rebecca to Richie, and then said, “I believe both Kyoto Dreams and Easy Street Clothiers are two such companies.”
“Damn,” Richie muttered.
“Everything I saw told me this story is about a whole lot more than a male version of ‘Sex in the City.’ I was really excited about it, frankly, and decided to put hints in my article that something big is going on.”
“Hold it, hold it,” Richie interrupted. “You stumble across something that might be the Yakuza and you decide to jab at it? Are you friggin’ crazy? Why not just go to the cops?”
“I wanted to build enough interest that people would want to know a whole lot more. Crime, sex, drugs—they sell,” Connor said. “And I would be the guy with the information. I could turn it into a book, you know, True Crime. And once I had that, I could shop it to Hollywood.”
“You are crazy,” Richie said, his mouth wrinkled in disgust.
“But not crazy enough to investigate them directly. I hoped others would do it. But I also knew that a story in the San Francisco Beat would have no following unless something were done that would put it under the nose of every journalist in the city and beyond.” He swallowed hard. “I decided a good way to get that attention would be to light a small fire at each place of business. Not a big fire, but just enough of one to get someone to put two and two together … and come up with six, as in the six bachelors.”
“You piece of shit!” Richie bellowed. “One of those places was mine!”
Rebecca gave him a quick glare. “Go on,” she said to Connor.
Connor turned paler and shakier, and tried not to look at Richie as he did as Rebecca asked.
“Of course, I wanted the attention to be with Kyoto Dreams and Easy Street. With things like this, it’s the first few that get noticed. Others are just collateral damage.”
“Collateral …? I’m going to kill him, Rebecca,” Richie muttered.
“The first fire I lit was the Easy Street Clothiers storeroom. It was easy to reach and the store was popular with the right people. I didn’t want to go to Kyoto Dreams next—that would be too obvious. So, I debated which place should be second. The hotel had all kinds of security because of their clientele, Logan Travis’ home was a fortress, and although the tour boat company was usually locked up at night and easy pickings, it had scheduled a huge private party. When I learned Big Caesar’s was closed on Monday night, it was no contest. I torched it.”
Rebecca’s hand clamped down hard on Richie’s arm before he had a chance to react. He gave her such a hard look, she actually found it a bit unnerving.
“The next morning, I reached Kyoto Dreams a little after six,” Connor continued. “I expected it to be completely empty, but as I was approaching the alley, a black car turned into it. I hurried towards the alley to see where the car was going, and why it was there so early. I hid where I could see into the alleyway, but I was pretty sure no one could see me. The black car stopped by the
restaurant. A man got out, and put a black bag in the dumpster, then got back into the car and drove off.”
“What kind of car?” Richie asked.
“I don’t know. It was still dark at that time in the morning, and the car was black. It looked like a good-size sedan.”
“So then what did you do?” Rebecca asked.
“As soon as the car left, I looked in the dumpster. I’d brought gloves for the arson, and used them as I opened the bag. When I saw what was in it, I started to run out of the alley. But as I did, I saw a car at the entrance. I don’t know if it was the same one or not. All I know is I ran in the opposite direction. The car turned into the alley and sped towards me. Near the corner, a small, neighborhood grocery had its back door propped open, probably airing the place out as it started business. I ran inside, through the store, and out the front door. I kept running down streets, through alleys. I also kept seeing dark cars turning in my direction. I have no idea if I was being paranoid—with good reason—or if someone was after me. All I know is, I was scared.”
“With good reason, as you said,” Rebecca told him.
Connor nodded. “I thought so. I also thought that it would be easy—if whoever tossed the head had connections to Kyoto Dreams—for them to find out who I was since I’d used credit cards to pay for my meals. It made me afraid to go home.”
“You didn’t think to report finding the head to the police?”
“The front page of the Chronicle told about a man dying in the Easy Street fire—and also mentioned the Big Caesar’s fire, plus the connection to the Beat article. And I was responsible for the death of the man in the first fire. So now, not only was a murderer after me, but the police as well. I had no idea what to do. My plan for publicity was working—but it gave anyone who was looking for me my name.
“I took a room in a hotel, but it cost money and I had little. A couple of days of this went by, and then I decided to go to Richie. I had gotten hints from people who talked to him that he knew how to make things go away, to fix problems, and I definitely had a problem I needed fixed.”