In a tiny bakery where I stopped for a midmorning coffee, a collage of old newspaper clippings gave another reason for the resemblance: several blocks of Crescent City had been leveled by a tsunami after the huge earthquake that devastated Alaska in 1964. The woman behind the counter, seeing me reading, struck up a conversation about it. Gesturing out the window toward the damaged area, she said, “Most of the business district was just wiped out. They rebuilt some things, but the town hasn’t ever really recovered.”
That probably went some way toward explaining why the town had welcomed the construction of the Pelican Bay State Prison, a supermax prison isolated a few miles outside town like a modern Alcatraz, tracts of forest playing the role of the San Francisco Bay as a barrier between it and effective escape.
Dan called a little before noon to say he was at the restaurant where we were meeting Mrs. Rader. His voice was a companionable, unflappable-sounding baritone, undoubtedly an asset for an investigator trying to gain the confidence of skittish witnesses. I drove over to meet him.
The Light Station restaurant was in a wooden building painted a maritime gray, near the marina. Picture windows looked out on the highway and the bay beyond it. The restaurant had two dining rooms. A lone man in slacks, collared shirt, and a windbreaker, who I guessed was Dan, was nursing a coffee in the rear one, near a big stone fireplace. He stood up when he saw me, and we introduced ourselves.
“I don’t know much about Mrs. Rader,” I said, after I’d ordered myself a Diet Coke. “How did Mike find her?”
“Scanlon told us about her. He knew her first as a guard in Soledad, and when he was sent to Pelican Bay he ran into her again there; she’d transferred and was a lieutenant in the SHU, the security housing unit, where Scanlon was being housed because of his violent history and AB connections. When he decided to drop out of the AB, she was the person he went to for help getting out. He says she’s a good cop. She’s also an expert on gangs in California prisons, testifies in court a fair amount.”
“She must be a tough cookie if she was a guard in Pelican Bay.”
“Yeah, I’ll say,” Dan agreed. “She’s picked some tough prisons to work in, between here and Soledad. I can see how she became a gang expert. Those places must be an education all by themselves.”
I was taking a drink from my Coke and watching the door out of a corner of my eye when a woman walked in. She had to be Ida Rader. She was the right age, and from her posture and the way she scoped the room, I could tell she was law enforcement. She confirmed my guess about her identity by turning and walking to our table.
We introduced ourselves and shook hands. Ida was three or four inches taller than me, which would make her about five feet four or five. Not big for a prison guard, but she had an athletic build. Her hair, which must have been blond when she was younger, was cut short and almost white. She was wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a white cable-knit sweater.
“Hope I’m not late,” she said. “My husband and I were out looking at a used truck.”
“Not at all,” Dan said.
She took a seat at the table and glanced around the room. “This isn’t a bad place,” she said. “Crescent City isn’t a restaurant town—people here don’t have the money. But the food here is pretty good. I like the petrale sole, when they have it.”
The young server brought us menus, and we ordered. Ida and Dan got pints of a local draft ale. I got another Coke. “Designated driver,” I joked, by way of excuse. I’ve come to terms with the fact that at not much over five feet tall, I don’t have the capacity to drink and work. We chatted while we waited for our food to arrive.
“How long have you been at Pelican Bay?” Dan asked.
“I’m retired now. But before that I was there for almost fifteen years. Jack—my husband—and I transferred here in 1999.”
“Was he a guard, too?”
“A supervisor. He’s retired now, too.”
“So you decided to settle here, then?”
She nodded. “Yes. We really like it up here. We bought a ranch, raise beef cattle. But what about you? You came all the way up here to talk to me about Steve Scanlon?”
It was my turn to talk. “We’re representing a guy, Howard Henley, who’s on death row because he was convicted of hiring Steve Scanlon to kill someone for him.”
“Right,” she said. “Your partner, Mr. Barry, mentioned that when he called me.”
I went on. “Scanlon told a couple of his buddies that he’d done the killing for the Aryan Brotherhood. But the DA decided he was lying to make himself out to be a big shot.”
“Really?” Ida looked surprised. “Well, he wasn’t. Lying about something like that would be a pretty dangerous thing to do. Those guys don’t like it when outsiders claim to be connected with them. Who’d he kill, by the way?”
“An ex-con named Jared Lindahl.”
“The name doesn’t ring any bells. Do you know why he was in the hat—I’m sorry, why he was marked to be killed?”
“Scanlon said he was told Lindahl had been running drugs in prison without paying the tax.”
Ida rolled her eyes. “Right. Another dangerous thing to do.”
“Yeah,” I said. “He was also robbing people in the trailer park where he was living. Some folks there said he’d taken drugs and money from our client and pistol-whipped him; that was our guy’s supposed motive for hiring Scanlon.”
Ida almost smiled. “Sounds like a public service killing to me. What’s your guy doing on the Row?”
“It’s a long story,” I said. “Among other things, he’s psychotic, and he represented himself at his trial.”
“Ah.”
Our food came at that point, and for a few minutes we concentrated on eating. Then Ida returned her attention to us and asked, “What do you need from me?”
This time Dan answered. “Scanlon said we should talk to you.”
“Really?”
“He said he debriefed to you and told you about the Lindahl killing. Also that you knew a lot about the Aryan Brotherhood and what was going on around that time. And he said you were a good cop and treated him fair—he wanted me to pass that along to you.”
For a second her careful expression appeared to lighten a little. “I tried to treat everyone fairly,” she said. “Poor Steve. He didn’t start out so bad. I always felt sorry he got involved with the gang stuff.”
“Sounds like you met him a while ago,” Dan said. “Can you tell us something about him, what he was like?”
“Yeah. Back in Soledad, in the nineties. I remember him because he was younger than most of the guys on my tier. He was maybe nineteen or twenty. He was desperate to belong, to be in with the big guys.”
“And I guess the big guys among the white inmates were the Aryan Brotherhood?”
“Yeah. AB, Nazi Low Riders. Steve was willing to do any errand, whatever it took to be accepted. He wasn’t someone likely to rise high in a gang; he wasn’t that bright, and his temper was a bit of a liability. We kept an eye on him because you could tell he was the kind of kid likely to get into trouble.”
“Did you talk with him much?”
“Not a lot. As a guard, you don’t let any of the guys get too close. But enough to get a sense of what was going on with him and whether to be concerned for his safety.
“He did get stabbed in the yard, I do remember that. I wasn’t around when it happened, but apparently he mouthed off at someone who took offense. After that, he really threw his lot in with the AB, because he felt he needed the protection.”
“So he became kind of a foot soldier for them?” Dan asked.
“Yeah.”
“He told us,” Dan said, “that before he paroled, he was instructed to take out Lindahl, because he was paroling to Taft County, and Lindahl was there, too; and that after he was paroled he got a sort of reminder letter from the guy who made the order. Does that seem like something that could happen?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s not uncommon for the AB
to order hits on someone outside from in the prison. They’re usually ordered and approved by people fairly high up in the hierarchy, but the gang has all kinds of ways of communicating back and forth between the prisons.”
“The name of the man who sent the letter was Cal McGaw. Was he in Soledad with Scanlon?”
“Not that I know of. I don’t recall the name. But Scanlon was transferred to Folsom, and there were a lot of AB there. He may have met McGaw there. There’s a lot of communication among inmates, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable that this McGaw would know that Steve was about to parole to an area near Lindahl. But unless McGaw was a full AB member, he’d probably have been just a conduit for an order from someone higher up than he was.”
“Scanlon mentioned someone named Corker. Does that name ring any bells?” Dan asked.
“Oh, yes. That was Bensinger, Walt or William, I’m not sure of his first name. He was called Corker because he supposedly made his bones in a stabbing in Corcoran.”
“According to Steve, he was the source of the order about Lindahl.”
“That’s interesting,” Ida said. “He was high enough in rank to do that. Do you have the letter?”
“Unfortunately, no. Steve said it was in his car when he was arrested, and he never saw it again.”
“Pity. It might tell you something. Or maybe not; those letters are often in code.”
“So Scanlon may be telling the truth about the order and where it came from.”
“It could be. If that’s what he said, I’d be inclined to believe him.”
“Any particular reason why?”
“A couple. First, Steve was pretty straight up—not perfect, but basically someone you could credit when he told you something. That was one of his better qualities. And second, it’s dangerous to go around saying the AB ordered you to take someone out when they didn’t. Saying something like that is likely to make you a target.”
“So you think of him as pretty honest, someone you could trust.”
Ida gave a short laugh. “I don’t know that you can say that about any of those guys. No, I wouldn’t trust them.”
“I take your point,” Dan said.
“I mean that a lot of inmates are pretty manipulative—little games going all the time. With Steve, it was more ‘what you see is what you get.’”
“Did you know Steve in Pelican Bay?” Dan asked.
“Not well. I was a lieutenant in the Security Housing Unit, the SHU.” She pronounced it “shoe.” “At first Steve was in general population. I guess he must have been there because of the killing you’re talking about. But then he got convicted for attempted escape and assaulting a guard and went to the SHU for that and for being a validated AB member. It’s where they put the most dangerous guys and the real hardcore gang members. I talked to him when he first arrived there, but I don’t recall having any contact with him until he asked to see me to debrief.”
“Steve wasn’t hardcore, though, was he?”
“Not in the sense of being anyone with any power. He never got anywhere in the AB beyond being a low-level associate. No, he was in the SHU more because of the escape attempt and assault. Stabbed a guard in the neck and almost killed him. And, as I said, he was a validated AB associate.”
“Steve said something about that incident,” Dan said.
“It was a big deal up here, needless to say. They tried him here, and he got a life sentence for that on top of whatever term he had before.”
“He knows he’s never getting out of prison,” Dan said.
“Yeah,” Ida agreed. “Waste of a life.”
Dan nodded agreement and moved on. “How did he come to debrief? He tried to tell us about it, but in all honesty he’s not good at stringing two thoughts together.”
Ida smiled again. “Yeah, that would be Steve. Give me a minute here.” She waved the server over, and we ordered coffees all round. When she left, Ida went on. “Steve was in the SHU, and as you can figure, he had no friends there. Guards didn’t like him, and the gang higher-ups were very unhappy with him because he had brought a lot of heat on the gang. There was a big crackdown after the incident, and a lot of guys who’d just been doing their time were validated as gang members and sent to the SHU. From what I was hearing, they more or less wrote him off as too much of a loose cannon.
“But they did give him one last chance: some kid was celled with him who had gotten on the wrong side of the powers that be by failing in some assignment, and Steve was supposed to take care of him. Steve apparently came to believe that the kid didn’t really deserve to be killed—like I said, he has his good qualities—and he tried interceding on his cellie’s behalf with… I think it was Ransom and Perry, who were running the tier at the time. He thought he’d succeeded because nothing happened, and eventually his cellie transferred out. The guy who replaced him, Bill Jennings, was another AB associate Steve knew and trusted. But then after they’d been together for a couple of months, Jennings jumped Steve in his sleep and tried to cut his throat.”
“Jeez, was he hurt badly?”
“Yeah. I remember for a while it was up in the air whether Steve was going to live. He had several stab wounds and lost a lot of blood, and he got a pretty nasty infection from whatever it was Jennings used to stab him with. Jennings flushed the weapon, so no one really knew.”
“He has permanent nerve damage in one arm and hand, he says, from defending himself.”
“Not surprising,” Ida said. “Anyway, he asked to see me while he was in the infirmary, and I went over there. That’s when he said he wanted to debrief and get transferred somewhere else. He was really done with the gang—shocked, actually, that they went after him. I wasn’t in that debriefing program; I was just a tier lieutenant. But I told him I’d tell the right people and what he needed to do to start with, which was write a detailed autobiographical statement of everything he’d done with and for the gang, and everything he knew about them. He called for me again a couple days later and handed me this long, handwritten document. I read it and then passed it along to the investigators, and I guess they took it from there.”
“Did Steve mention the Lindahl killing in the debriefing document?”
“I don’t know; I didn’t read it closely. But when he talked to me in the infirmary, one of the things he was upset about was that he’d done a hit for the AB in Wheaton, and this was the thanks he got. I guess that’s the one you’re asking about.”
“Did he say anything about another motive for the hit?”
“No, not at all.”
“And I guess he never mentioned Howard Henley.”
“Not that I recall. I never heard the name before Mr. Barry called.”
“Do you know if the prison still has the debriefing document?”
“I’m sure they do, in their file on Scanlon. But if you want it, you’ll have to subpoena it. It’s a confidential record, and I wouldn’t be allowed to give you details about it, even if I remembered what was in it.”
Dan looked down at some notes. “Do you know the names Scotty Maclendon or Mack Gentry?” I hadn’t heard the names before, but I didn’t interrupt.
“Yeah. They were both in Pelican Bay when I was there, and presumably when Steve was, too. Gentry’s dead; he was killed by an AB associate in some kind of power struggle. I don’t know whether Maclendon is still at Pelican Bay or not.”
She glanced at her wristwatch. “I’m going to have to get home soon. Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?” She gestured to the server and told her we needed our checks.
“I guess one last question,” I said. “Mike talked with you, I think, about testifying at the evidentiary hearing in our case as an expert on the Aryan Brotherhood in the state prison system. Is that something you can do for us?”
“Yes. I’ve testified in that role before. I can send you a CV, if you’d like.”
“That would be great,” I answered. “And we’ll probably also ask you about your experience with Steve, if t
hat’s all right.”
“Sure.”
The check came, and she reached into her purse and put thirty dollars on the table. “Oh, that’s okay,” Dan said. “We’ll take care of it.”
“Let me do this,” Ida said. “I testified in a trial not too long ago where one of the attorneys made a huge deal about the other buying lunch for a witness.”
We stood and shook hands with her, and she walked briskly out the door.
“Not bad,” Dan said, as we waited for the server to bring back his credit card. “She’ll make a good witness.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Mike will be happy.”
I started for home right after lunch, hoping to catch as much daylight for the trip as possible. The restaurant had an espresso machine, and before leaving town I picked up a triple latte and a double chocolate cupcake the size of my fist. It was going to be a long ride through the big woods to the next cup.
13
I prepared a response to the attorney general’s discovery motion for Mike to file, and had settled back into my hermit routine, planting my tomatoes, watching my beet plants sprout, and looking forward with lively expectation to a trip to the women’s death row to see the client in a case I’d just agreed to work on, when Mike called.
“Well, the Wheaton court has assigned a referee to conduct the hearing, and he wants us in court next month.”
“They’ve appointed one already?”
“Yeah, a local judge. Looks like your name isn’t on the proof of service; we’ll have to sort that out with them. Anyway, his name is Raymond Brackett. I did a little research on him, and he seems to have been a prosecutor and then a defense attorney, but that’s all I know, except that he works fast. He’s set a hearing on our discovery motion.”
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