by Dave Stanton
“Just like Terry’s,” Cody said. He stood and lit a cigarette.
“Her license was missing too?”
“They’re souvenirs for the killer.” Cody stared down the road and blew a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “He can pull them out and relive the killings, get a little thrill whenever he wants.”
I removed my beanie and ran my hand through my hair. “Leaving the purses where they could be found. Like saying, here’s some evidence, catch me if you can.”
Cody took another drag from his smoke, then flicked it out onto the road. “It’s more than that. This guy wants to be caught.”
“Why do you say that?”
“He’s making some kind of statement. But he’ll eventually need to let everyone know it’s from him.”
“That’s an interesting take.”
He blew into his hands. “Let’s go.”
I sat in the passenger seat while Cody hung a U-turn, gravel spitting and popping beneath his tires. “I need some food to settle my gut,” he said. “Maybe a Bloody Mary.”
“There’s a few joints in Minden. Take the next right.”
“Okay,” he grunted. He drove hunched over the wheel and kept squeezing his eyes open and shut. Outside, a barbwire range fence ran parallel to the road, and beyond it flatlands coated in frost stretched eastward toward a long, snow-capped escarpment along the horizon.
“I got drunk last night and drove to Carson,” Cody said. He rolled down his window and coughed and spit a wad of phlegm into the slipstream.
I started to ask him what for, then realized there could only be one reason. “The cathouses?”
“Yeah.”
“Have a good time?”
He took his eyes from the road and looked at me. “Yeah, I did.”
“Well, good.”
“Look, is it too much to ask for a drama-free piece of ass every now and then?”
“Not in my book. Turn at the stop sign.”
He rolled through the sign and stomped the gas pedal. We roared toward a cluster of buildings visible a few miles away.
“So there were two bikers sitting at the bar at one of the ranches,” Cody said, “and there’s nowhere else to sit, so I’m right next to them. I ask how they’re doing, just being friendly, and they got nothing to say to me. Who cares, right? I start talking to a few hookers, just buzzed and having a good time, then I see this black-haired girl come out of the back. She’s got this incredible body, all tits and ass and a face like Angelina Jolie. So I snag her and go back to her room. I’ll tell you, I had a rod a cat couldn’t scratch before we even got there.”
“Very proud of you,” I said.
“Thanks. Anyway, we sit on her bed and she tells me one of the bikers from the bar was just in her room, and he was a bad trip and said some ugly shit and then he couldn’t get it up and she gave him his money back just to get him out of there. She’s kind of freaked out and asks, do I mind if she takes a couple hits off a joint to calm her nerves. So I get stoned with her, and she starts telling me what he said.”
We came to a stoplight at the edge of town. I pointed at a restaurant across the street.
“She said the biker was jacked on speed and babbling a mile a minute about a stripper his best friend fronted an ounce of blow to. He said she got herself killed and now his buddy is on the hook for sixteen hundred, and his gang thinks he’s a pussy- whipped douchebag. He thinks a rival gang may have killed her for the drugs, and he says he’s gonna get to the bottom of it and fuck up whoever’s responsible.”
I stared at Cody, incredulous. The light turned green, and we rolled across the intersection and parked at the diner. “You had this conversation for real?”
“I shit you not.”
“Did you get a chance to talk to the bikers again?”
“I went out to the bar as soon as she told me, but they were gone.”
“Sounds like the biker was talking about Valerie,” I said. “There’s an ounce of coke in her purse. But whoever killed her didn’t take it. She even has a few bucks in her wallet.”
“She was carrying an ounce?”
“Yup.
We walked through the thin sunlight into the diner and sat at a booth looking out at the parking lot.
“Hmm. I thought he might have meant Terry,” Cody said. He scratched his ear and glanced at me with bloodshot eyes.
“What? Terry was dealing?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. She had coke, so anything’s possible.”
“Was she a stripper?”
“Not recently.”
“How long had you known her?”
The waitress came, and Cody ordered bacon and eggs and potatoes and toast and a double vodka tonic. I got an omelet and a Coke.
“We went out, what, four or five times.”
“So, she could have been dealing.”
“I suppose. But I never saw any sign of it. It’s not like her cell was ringing off the hook or she was running around making deliveries.”
“Why did you think he meant Terry, then?”
“The hooker told me the biker had the same tattoo as the ponytailed guy ogling Terry at the craps table. Double Bs, Blood Bastards.”
I stared at the scratched surface of the table. “The same as the biker at the strip joint in Sacramento.”
“Huh?”
“Valerie worked at a strip joint called The Suave. I went there, and a biker wearing Blood Bastards colors quizzed me about her.”
“Really? Describe him.”
“A shade under six feet. Fortyish. Shaved head, long goatee.”
“Huh. Might have been one of the guys at the bar.”
The waitresses brought our drinks and Cody took a long guzzle. “Jesus, that’s strong.”
“It’s noon somewhere.”
“Goddamn right it is.” He took another swig and rattled the ice cubes and drained the last drops.
“Did the hooker mention the name of the rival gang?”
“I asked her,” Cody said. “The biker didn’t get that deep into it.”
I wiped at the wet ring my soft drink had left on the table and folded the damp napkin in a neat triangle. “Two victims, both holding drugs, both potentially involved with the Blood Bastards, and both fraternizing with Nick Galanis.”
The color had returned to Cody’s face. His green eyes cleared and he smiled.
“I think Galanis is probably involved in things he shouldn’t be,” he said.
“That would be a hard point to argue,” I replied.
• • •
We finished eating, and I made a phone call. Then, instead of driving back over Kingsbury, I told Cody to drive north to Reno.
“Who’s this guy you want to see?”
“An old friend of my father’s named Albert Bigelow. Teaches sociology at the university in Reno.”
“He’s the one who used to ride with the Hells Angels?”
“Yeah, about thirty years ago. The old man offered him a plea bargain on a murder rap, probably saved him twenty years, in return for a promise to quit the gang.”
“A district attorney would never get away with that today.”
“The old man was quirky that way. He’d find a way to break the rules if he thought it served justice. Occasionally guys caught a break, but most of the time, he prosecuted the hell out of them.”
Cody didn’t respond, and we drove in silence for a while. My father had died when I was barely a teenager, ambushed outside his San Jose office by a paroled killer with a vendetta and a shotgun. A great orator and a fierce presence in the courtroom, Richard Reno was loved by cops and despised and feared by the criminal community. Eventually one of his enemies—a convicted rapist and murderer who never should have been released—caught up with him.
Outside his job, I remembered my dad as a zany and easygoing parent, rarely strict or heavy-handed, more interested in good times and nutty humor and the occasional off-color remark, much to my mother’s conster
nation. He never took his work home with him, as if he realized every day with his family might be his last.
Earlier in my career, after a series of shootings resulted in the death of a handful of criminals, a court appointed headshrink claimed I was subconsciously seeking revenge for my father’s murder. I never gave that analysis much credence. Then again, I don’t have much tolerance for violent criminals, particularly those who, in their amoral quests, destroy lives and families with no more remorse than most people assign to throwing out yesterday’s newspaper.
“Bigelow reformed himself, I take it?” Cody said.
“And then some. He earned a PhD at Berkeley, and his dissertation on biker culture was published by a commercial house. Pretty interesting stuff.”
“Yeah, but how can he help us?”
“He spends a lot of time tracking biker gangs, especially those in the western U.S. Had you ever heard of the Blood Bastards before?”
“No.”
“I’ll guarantee you he has.”
We drove up 395, shadowed on the left by the snow covered eastern flank of the Sierras. To our right lay the Great Basin Desert of Nevada, the sparse landscape barb-wired and marked by occasional barns, livestock pens, and feed silos. In fifteen minutes, we reached the outskirts of Carson City and passed a mile of hotels and strip malls before turning onto the newly built freeway. It allowed us to bypass the bulk of the commercial thoroughfare and the crumbling casinos in Carson’s dreary downtown. We made time and reached the University of Nevada campus a little after noon.
The campus was larger than I remembered, and we drove around for a few minutes before Cody jerked to a stop and I asked a student to point us toward the social sciences building. We parked and walked down a sidewalk bordered by dry grass and leafless trees, past a couple large brick buildings, until we saw a smaller, single story structure. We went through the glass doors and down a scuffed white hallway that eventually brought us to the professor’s office. I knocked and peered in the window at the man behind the desk. He looked up and motioned for us to come in.
Dr. Albert Bigelow was stout and thick as an ox, still an intimidating physical presence in his sixties. His face was meaty, his eyelids weighted, his bushy Fu Manchu mustache gray as raw iron. Hair of the same color, straight and full, fell over his forehead as if he were a much younger man. He removed his reading glasses and smiled with his eyes.
“What’s it been, Dan, a couple years?”
“About that. Albert, this is Cody Gibbons.”
“Oh? The name sounds familiar.” He fit his glasses back on his broad nose and we sat while he typed on his keyboard. “Ah. Ex-San Jose PD. You worked for Russ Landers.” Bigelow looked up over his glasses.
“Landers fired me,” Cody said. “Do you know him?”
“Not personally, but I know of him.”
“He was a real asshole.”
Bigelow’s eyes crinkled in humor. “That’s what I’ve heard.” He turned to me. “Dan, what can I do for you?”
Since getting his doctorate in criminology, Albert Bigelow had published three books on organized crime. The first was on the Russian mob, the next on Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, and for his third he chose a subject near, if not dear, to him: biker gangs. He had connections with cops as well as a loose network of crooks, all with whom he traded information. Over the years, he had compiled an ever-growing database of gang activities and members.
“Are you familiar with the Blood Bastards?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, fingers typing away. “Based in Sacramento. What are those scoundrels up to?”
“Two women were found strangled near Lake Tahoe. Both on coke, and one was dealing. I think one, or maybe both, is involved with the gang.”
“Murder, drugs, bikers. As American as mom, baseball, and apple pie.” Bigelow typed like a pro, his beefy fingers deft and quick, then he hit a final key and his printer whirred and clicked and began feeding pages.
“Now, what else can you share?” he said.
I gave him Valerie and Terry’s names, and described the Blood Bastard I’d spoken to at the Sacramento strip joint, and the dude we’d seen on the casino video. Cody added a brief accounting of what he’d heard at the cathouse. Bigelow typed it into his database as we spoke.
“Here’s a bonus for you, Albert,” I said. “I had a run in with another group of bikers, unrelated to Blood Bastards. Three members of a gang calling themselves War Dogs stirred up some shit at a bar in South Lake Tahoe. They were all arrested and charged with felonies by South Lake PD.”
“War Dogs? They operate out of Stockton, I believe.” He typed some more, then studied his screen. “They’re not exactly unrelated to the Blood Bastards.”
“What? How so?”
“Jake Massie is the War Dog’s head honcho. He used to belong to Blood Bastards, but in 2008 he had a falling out with his brother Virgil, the top dog in Blood Bastards. After that, Jake founded War Dogs.”
“Good to know,” I grunted.
“I’m printing you what I have on both gangs.”
“Thanks.”
“You have any more I can add to my files?”
“Here’s one,” I said. “A guy named Mike Zayas. Runs the Suave Gentlemen’s Club in Sac. Possibly affiliated with Blood Bastards, likely involved in drugs and prostitution.”
Albert typed some more, then said, “I’ve got nothing on him.”
“I’ll let you know what else I find out.”
“Please do. My database is like a starving dog, always hungry.”
I thanked him, and we left his office and drove off the campus. I sat in the passenger seat, half a dozen pages clutched in my hand.
“Let’s get back to Tahoe,” Cody said. “It’s been more than 48 hours since Terry was killed. We need to check if anybody saw anything.”
“Take 80 through Truckee. It’s faster.”
Cody turned onto the interstate and hit the gas, his tires humming on the course pavement. We left the city limits and sped across the high desert flats, reeling in the miles of westbound highway. I took the time to read the entirety of what Albert Bigelow had provided.
The Blood Bastards gang had formed about ten years ago. The membership was originally made up of disenfranchised Hells Angels and Mongrols. Ex-Mongrol Virgil Massie had founded the clan and was still in charge. Their riders were a mix of Mexican and whites, fifty strong, and their primary revenue source was drugs, mostly methamphetamine, but they also brought cocaine in from south of the border. On various occasions over the years, they’d had scrapes with the Hells Angels and Mongrols, who viewed the Blood Bastards as defectors. But Sacramento was a considerable distance from the Mongrol stronghold in Southern California, and was also outside the Hell’s Angel’s primary stomping grounds in the San Francisco Bay Area, so the conflicts had lessened over time.
But it was not geography alone that allowed the Blood Bastards to survive. In their skirmishes with the other gangs, the Blood Bastards let it be known they would make no concession and grant no quarter to their enemies. If death or imprisonment was the result, so be it. Realizing they had more to lose than gain in an all-out war, their larger adversaries focused their energies elsewhere.
Not long after the gang was formed, Jake Massie, younger brother to Virgil, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon for stabbing a Hell’s Angel. He served five years at San Quentin, and during his incarceration, he joined the Aryan Brotherhood. When he was released, he came back to Sacramento, tattooed with swastikas and dual lightning bolts and carrying a copy of Mein Kampf. Jake made no attempt to hide he’d become a hardcore racist, and he tried to convince Virgil to purge the Blood Bastards of all but whites. Soon afterward, Jake narrowly averted an attempt on his life. He fled south to Stockton at that point.
The War Dogs were reported only fifteen strong, barely large enough to be considered a motorcycle gang. In truth, not all their members even owned bikes. They seemed to be a hybrid organization, part sk
inheads and part bikers, brought together by criminal interests and their belief in white supremacy. Apparently Jake Massie had brought from the Blood Bastards his meth cooking expertise, because the War Dogs were big into labs.
The pages also contained a list of names and criminal records and an accounting of arrests and incidents. I glanced through them and reread the page on Jake Massie, which was one of the few that included a mug shot. His face stared back at me, his eyes barely visible under his knotted brow.
I drew in my breath and called Candi on her cell.
“Hi, there.”
“Everything okay, Candi?”
“Sure. I’m having lunch over at the pizza place near the school. Why?”
“Nothing. I’m just calling to say hello.”
“Well, hello to you.”
We hung up as Cody steered into a series of sweeping turns near where the desert transitioned to forest, right past the California state line. Barren hills glazed with ice became steep pine-covered ridges covered in white, the snow piled high along the roadside. Fortunately the weather was clear, because we were in an area where the Highway Patrol commonly slowed traffic to a crawl if any snow was falling.
I glanced at Cody. I’d not yet told him of my encounter with Jake Massie. I turned my eyes back to the passing scenery. It was not my habit to withhold information from him, but in this case, I was hesitant. The problem was, Cody would view any threat against me as a personal threat against himself.
Nonetheless: “The guy Bigelow mentioned, Jake Massie.”
“The leader of The War Dogs, right?” Cody held the wheel tight into a turn.
“Yeah. He came by Zeke’s last night to talk to me.”
Cody stared at me. “What about?”
“Watch the road, would you? I told you about the War Dogs coming into Zeke’s and getting hauled off to jail. Apparently Massie’s not too happy about my role.”
“And?”
“He wants me to pay him thirty grand to right the situation.”
He barked a short laugh. “You tell him to fuck off?”
“Yeah. He said if I don’t pay, the Aryan Brotherhood will get involved.”