Panther's Prey

by Lachlan Smith

  My father just listened. Next I explained about Jordan, our working together and how it led to our too-brief affair. None of this was easy, but I made myself keep talking, moving on to her rape and death, and finally, to the cops finding at the scene the gun they believed had been used to kill Russell Bell.

  Despite his claim of having kept tabs on the local news, my father hadn’t heard any of this. “You’re not saying Bo had your friend killed?”

  “No. Bo’s style’s a little more direct. If he’d done it, he’d have made sure we knew.”

  “A good point.” As he said this, my father no doubt remembered the message Bo had sent us after he’d had Santorez murdered in prison. We’d received Ricky’s ears in the mail one morning at our office, a message of ownership we’d refused to heed. The fire that followed had also been a message, equally unmistakable.

  “I’d better come home,” he said.

  “That isn’t why I called. We just thought you deserved to know.”

  “We’d already half decided. It’s just not possible to keep moving all the time. We’re drinking too much, with too little to do. Starting to feel the strain.”

  Hearing this made me think about my father’s failed marriage to my mother, whose death had sent him—wrongly—to prison. Everything in my life stemmed from that sad, grim chain of events, and neither of us could ever put it behind us.

  I realized he was still talking. “Dot’s tired of living like a fugitive, she says. She keeps reminding me I was acquitted, wasn’t I? She’s made up her mind. We’re coming back.”

  “I worry that you’re playing into their hands if you do.”

  He knew I meant the cops. But his take was different. “It wasn’t the police I was running away from. It’s Bo. He’s held the key all along. That’s what the gun means. It’s another message, letting us know he’s still running the show, just the way he always has been.”

  “I’m concerned about the police.”

  “That’s because you’ve closed your mind to certain possibilities. Bo wouldn’t have passed that gun to you if he hadn’t planned a way out. The point of the gun is to remind us all of our obligations.” He paused, then said, “After all, none of us has shed any tears over Russell Bell.”

  “So you’ve decided to go to work for Bo, after all.”

  “It’s you or me or Teddy—and we both know it’s not going to be you.”

  “How much longer will the settlement money last?”

  “Depends whether I have any income coming in.”

  “And you’re hoping that Bo Wilder will help you with that.”

  “You tell me what other kind of work there is for an ex-con, even one who’s been exonerated. Everyone in the state knows the only reason I was acquitted is Bo had Bell killed to keep him from testifying. The DA and the cops made sure the newspapers got their fill of that. What else am I supposed to do? Flip burgers?”

  I let a moment pass, then tried for a conciliatory tone. “Carly asks about you every time I’m there. It’s pretty clear she’d love having her grandpa back.”

  “There’ve been many nights when I think freedom’s not worth it if it means being away from her. These years aren’t ever going to come again.”

  We’d talked through all my prepaid minutes. “Just don’t make any hasty decisions,” I reminded him.

  “I’ll let you know what our plans are. I need to make a few contacts first, but don’t worry. Nothing I do will be traceable. One way or the other, Bo and I are going to straighten this mess out. I don’t intend for my sons to pay my debts.”

  “It won’t do us any good if you end up back in prison.”

  “You’re exactly right. That’s what I mean to tell Bo.”

  Chapter 15

  A hiatus ensued in the news cycle, but I understood it was merely temporary. I used part of this time to find out everything I could about Jacob Mauldin.

  He’d been around a long time, running Kairos out of his home base in Stockton. He’d ridden the cresting wave of the tech boom, made millions putting up housing tracts—along with the super conglomerations of retail outlets that went with them—in Cupertino and San Jose. Recently, however, with the collapse in the tech market, he’d been left holding the bag on a massive development south of Sacramento, where two hundred unsold houses stood like a ghost town. The Candlestick project and the public money that went with it were all that stood between future prosperity and bankruptcy.

  I thought of trying to contact the man, but guessed he wouldn’t speak to me. In any case, I knew for a fact he had a lawyer—Tom Benton. Ethical rules prohibited me from contacting Mauldin directly, meaning that to get to him, I had to go through Benton. I wasn’t yet ready to make that approach however. First I needed to know more.

  Meanwhile, the police continued to maintain that Rodriguez was guilty and unofficially leaked that my overnight detention had been for an unrelated violation. Rodriguez remained in custody, no follow-up stories from Stone appeared, and it might have seemed safe to assume the idea of a predator stalking the young women of San Francisco had faded into the background unease of city life. However, on the first Friday in October an event occurred that seemed to bring the Panther into every dark stairwell from Balboa Park to the Sunset.

  A woman was raped. She’d just entered her apartment in the Mission District when she was grabbed from behind. After her assailant was finished, he required her to shower, took her bedding, and left her bound in the bath. Though roped hand to foot, she was able, eventually, to free her hands and call 911. He was a large white or Hispanic man, matching the description Fitzpatrick and his other victims had provided. It was the crime Jordan and I had been looking for when we first theorized the existence of the Panther, an attack for which Rodriguez, in jail ever since Jordan’s death, had an unshakable alibi.

  Inevitably, the media visited old crime scenes and interviewed the detectives who’d investigated all the unsolved rapes they could dig up. They also got accounts from as many victims as they could convince to talk, seeking to reexamine the evidence under the theory that all had been attacked by the same unknown man. The effect was to create the sensation that somewhere out there, a predator was lurking, a definite personality, nebulous but real.

  Not surprisingly, the official reticence had the effect of fanning the publicity into a whirlwind. After three days of this I received a flustered call from Rachel Stone. “My source tells me this most recent vic is definitely making it up. I’d only been making a theoretical case. Now it’s taken on a life of its own. It wasn’t supposed to, is the problem.”

  “You’re a reporter. You know how it works once you put something out there. Just ask Rodriguez.”

  She cut to the chase. “Remember how we talked about the three possible scenarios? I’m working on the third one now. The last article in the promised series of three. You care to tell me if it’s true what I’ve heard about you and Jordan having a disagreement the night she was murdered, that she asked you to leave?”

  “You’ve got your source. Talk to him.”

  She seemed impatient with her own questions. “I also hear you gave a genetic sample, and your sperm was found at the scene. So, I have to ask you. Was your face the last one Jordan saw?”

  I didn’t have to play along. “No match with Rodriguez?”

  She grudgingly acknowledged her sources had told her there was still no physical evidence definitively tying Rodriguez to the scene. Officially, he remained the only suspect.

  “Were any other DNA samples recovered?”

  “Know one thing reporters and lawyers have in common? We’re the ones who ask the questions. I called you, remember? That makes it my turf.” She paused before again relenting. “Rodriguez’s lawyer would probably have the complete test results. But he’s not talking to anyone from the press. Still, there’s the chance he might talk to you.”

  I hadn’t had any contact with Rodriguez’s new lawyer—first, because of Gabriela’s warning, and, second, becaus
e I knew Ripley wouldn’t tell me anything. Though I believed Rodriguez was possibly innocent, I didn’t want to give his lawyer any ammunition to defend him until I knew for sure. This made Stone my best source of information.

  I confirmed her information about me, then tried to change the subject and earn some quid pro quo. “I remember you telling me you were old friends with Tom Benton. Talked to him lately?”

  Stone wasn’t finished yet. “Is it true that you’d confessed to Jordan that you and your family were behind the murder of Russell Bell? That she’d offered to get rid of the murder weapon for you? And that it was found in her apartment after her death?”

  I made no answer. There was nothing I could say. The silence deepened, but I couldn’t bring myself to end the call.

  “I’ll note your denial in my story,” Stone finally said. “Check it out later today.”

  Stone’s first story had depicted Jordan as a young attorney whose idealistic impulses had overshot her judgment with tragic results. Her second had spun out the portrait of the bogeyman we’d conjured together, turning a critical eye on the SFPD. Her third, imminent now, was the piece she’d been building toward all along.

  Maybe I’d given her the idea—or maybe I’d just picked up on where her thoughts were already going—but what appeared online that night was nothing less than a full-scale assault on the criminal defense profession, offering me as exhibit A.

  She didn’t accuse me—not of Jordan’s murder. Instead, she’d stumbled on a more sensational prize—my family’s probable involvement in the murder of Russell Bell. The presence of the murder weapon raised the question of a possible connection between Russell Bell’s death and Jordan’s. My denial of any such connection was the first sentence of her story, and it had the effect of tainting all that followed.

  I thought about our conversation. I’d gotten the feeling someone had been whispering in her ear all along—someone besides me. Benton, maybe. After all, Jordan had known Rachel through him. Maybe he’d worked at planting the idea I was the killer. Before I could approach him, however, I needed to know more about Kairos and the Candlestick project. Given the increasingly tight spot I was finding myself in, it was important I judge for myself what kinds of people I was dealing with.

  I decided to contact a former client, Walter Hayes, who worked for the city and preached on the weekends. Hayes, who’d lived all his life in Bayview-Hunters Point, had become something of a community activist, a go-to information source for any reporter covering this part of town. Though he’d initially supported the Candlestick development, Hayes had become a vocal opponent, and in a recent news article had been quoted as labeling the project a scheme to drive up property values and squeeze out his constituency.

  I called his cell phone and reached the man himself. When he heard I wanted to talk about Kairos, he seemed almost eager to meet me. “Not downtown, though,” he said. “You want to understand where I’m coming from, you got to see where I come from. And that’s Double Rock. Meet me at the entrance to the Alice Griffith homes at four PM.”

  On a peninsula strung from San Francisco’s extreme southeastern edge, isolated from the rest of the city by geography and the freeways, Bayview-Hunters Point was the city’s poorest and most African American district. I knew it as the focus of stop-and-frisk policing tactics and zero-tolerance prosecution, a hotbed of poverty and poor health. Double Rock was the unofficial name for the neighborhood between Third Street to the west and Candlestick Park to the south. A gated road was the only access point for the sprawling Alice Griffith public housing development, a collection of two-story townhouses separated by barren lots occupied by broken-down cars, strewn with trash and broken glass. On weekend nights, dealers manned the gate, taking orders from the parade of cars off the freeway. I was reminded of my visits to my father at San Quentin. A sign spelled WELCOME TO ALICE GRIFFITH, but the message seemed perverse.

  Hayes told me to leave my bike and promised a kid twenty bucks to watch our rides until we returned. What first struck my eye as we walked in was the blackened, melted ruins of a playground behind a waist-high fence. Hayes gave a slow shake of his head.

  Not many people were around—and those who were seemed to have little to do other than watch us with hostile mistrust.

  “It may not look like much, but we’ve got an active neighborhood center, a Boys and Girls Club, even a community garden. Underneath all the drugs and violence, these are good people trying to live their lives.”

  His sales pitch might have been more effective if the stark reality of the landscape hadn’t intruded on every word.

  “In six months, Kairos will knock it all down. When the bulldozers move in, everyone who’s still here gets to relocate, according to the terms of the deal, right alongside yuppies paying six or seven hundred thou. Public housing’s supposed to be integrated with market rate. But anyone who’s evicted before then, or leaves on their own, tough luck.”

  As far as I knew, just about everyone agreed that Alice Griffith needed to come down. “You make that sound like a bad deal.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. These people deserve homes that aren’t filled with mold. They need safe neighborhoods and an end to the open-air drug market. I don’t doubt the bulldozers will show up on time. But what is there to make me think the developers intend to keep their promise to relocate these people according to plan?”

  “What makes you believe they won’t?”

  “Simple economics, man. Why bring down everyone’s property values when it’s so much simpler just to rebuild the ghetto with a smaller footprint, build an old-school high-rise and thereby create more room for the really valuable real estate?”

  I waited for him to explain. Instead, he shifted directions. “You must have noticed the press this place has been getting lately. About a dozen shootings in the last three weeks alone. Eight dead, including that four-year-old kid shot through his bedroom wall. People outside the projects are starting to wonder how this integrated housing idea is going to work. Are middle-class white people going to have to live in a war zone?”

  “What’s it got to do with Kairos?”

  He had a ready answer. “Simple. They’re behind it. With the SFPD’s blessing, Kairos’s private security force started patrolling Double Rock and the other projects six months ago. The idea was to run an aggressive campaign of arrests and evictions, make sure the worst aspects of Alice Griffith aren’t relocated to the new projects. What’s happened, though, from what my people tell me, is these ex-military types are turning the projects, after dark, into a kind of free-fire zone. And, of course, the dealers and gangbangers shoot back.”

  My first reaction was to doubt that such brutality could take place in this most liberal-minded of cities.

  “But why would anyone want to provoke more violence?”

  “To influence public opinion. What else? The tide’s already starting to turn. You may have noticed, the press never misses a chance to piss on Double Rock. Once the clamor reaches a critical level, the city will allow Kairos to reduce the number of affordable housing units mixed in with the market-rate properties—maybe all the way to zero.

  “You see, the beauty of ‘market rate’ is context. If you’re selling condos in a building where every other unit is Section 8, the market’s going to set the price at a certain level. If you’re catering entirely to young urban professionals, on the other hand, the market will set a very different price.”

  Again expressing skepticism, I wondered aloud why none of this had come out in Cho’s lawsuit.

  “Some of it did,” Hayes answered. “The phantom payroll, for instance. That money’s going to pay these security guys. Has to be. Ex-military doesn’t come cheap, and you couldn’t justify the expense on the face of the contract. But if Cho’s company were awarded the contract, it’d be the same. Probably worse, because the gangsters would have been pushing their own dope on these corners instead of simply killing off the competition.”

  We stood surv
eying the bleak landscape as I pondered what he intended me to do with this information. A trio of young men had appeared in a patch of dirt in front of one of the nearby townhouses. Hayes turned, and we started back toward the entrance.

  “People need to know what’s going on,” Hayes said, getting to the point. “Lately I’ve sat in a lot of meetings where rich white people from downtown talked about what’s best for the city, but no one’s down here asking what’s best for Double Rock. As long as that’s the case, people are never going to trust that the city has their best interests at heart.”

  “If what you’re telling me about these security patrols is true, it’s a real scandal. Before it can reach that level, however, we’re going to need proof. Witnesses who are willing to talk.”

  “A defense lawyer like yourself ought to know better. Ain’t no witnesses in Alice Griffith.”

  “Not even for something like this? Get me a cell phone video. I have connections at the newspaper. My boss is on good terms with the DA.”

  I held back from mentioning my suspicion that the senseless violence he’d described might be connected somehow with Jordan’s death.

  As if sensing my concealed self-interest, Hayes now—for the first time—alluded to my recent troubles. “From what I hear, your connections aren’t doing you much good lately. But maybe you could pass the word to some of your attorney friends at the PD’s office.”

  I agreed to do as he’d asked, telling myself there was nothing personal in his rebuff. We shook hands, and I climbed on my bike and rode home.

  Chapter 16

  I phoned Benton’s office. To my surprise, his secretary forwarded the call to his cell, apparently according to his instructions. He immediately answered, saying that if I wanted to talk, I should be at the Sausalito sailing docks in half an hour. He’d been planning to go out single-handed this afternoon, but the gusting winds were more than he cared to handle alone. He’d resigned himself to an afternoon of dock work, but if I could listen and follow directions maybe the day wasn’t lost after all.