Act of Deceit

by Steven Gore

  “Write out an IOU. Make it out for services rendered. Due in two days.”

  Sherwyn wrote the sentence, signed below it, and handed it back to Donnally, who then shifted into drive and pulled back into the street. He took two more right turns and stopped in front of Sherwyn’s house.

  Sherwyn opened the car door and stepped out.

  Donnally lowered the passenger window as the door closed, and said to Sherwyn, “Nice doing business with you.”

  Sherwyn looked up and down the street to make sure no neighbors were outside and leaned down.

  “What makes you so sure I won’t walk inside and call the police?”

  “Because you know how tomorrow’s headline will read. ‘Priest Accuses Prominent Psychiatrist of Child Molesting, Sordid Tale of Abuse Poised to Destroy Careers.’ ”

  Donnally drove down the hill and stopped at a phone booth to call Janie.

  “How’s my alibi?”

  “You’re drinking coffee in bed and watching the news. I’ll have the recording for you to study when you get back. And twenty minutes ago you called your father from your cell phone. How’d it go with the doctor?”

  “We’ll see. He’ll be trying to get some money together. Probably not as much as he agreed to, but who’s counting?”

  Donnally traveled back using the same route he’d come. Over the north bay, down through Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge, and to the house where he had found the Taurus. He sealed up the car, stuck his gloves into his jacket pocket, then walked back to Janie’s.

  She handed him his cell phone when he stepped into the kitchen. He punched in a telephone number.

  “Ramon, this is Harlan. I found a rental car ignition key under the front steps. I thought you might be interested.”

  Navarro called twenty-four hours later as Donnally was replacing his neighbor’s shot-out window.

  “You were right, man,” Navarro said. “We located the car a few blocks away from you. It had been rented with a forged credit card. We lifted fingerprints matching the shooter in the car. And guess what? We found William Sherwyn’s all over the passenger side.”

  “Did you knock on his door yet?”

  “Yeah. It was weird. I told him I was investigating the shooting at your place and were wondering about some fingerprints we found. His face just went white. In twenty years investigating homicides, I’ve never seen anything like it. Then he started babbling and saying that you kidnapped him and forced him to touch the inside of the car. When I asked him why you would do something like that he clammed up and said he wanted to speak to a lawyer.”

  “Did you arrest him?”

  “No. He’s not going anywhere and I want to get a warrant to search his house and office. And I need to check out a few things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like whether you’ve got an alibi.”

  “Alibi? Me? Man, talk about blaming the victim.”

  Chapter 52

  Donnally didn’t bother knocking. He just pushed open the door to Lieutenant Ramon Navarro’s homicide unit office and charged inside.

  “You told me he wasn’t going anywhere,” Donnally said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just found out from a neighbor that she saw Sherwyn loading suitcases into the back of his Mercedes last night.”

  Navarro reached for the telephone and called the Berkeley Police Department. He asked the dispatcher to send officers by Sherwyn’s house and office.

  “Did the neighbor have any idea where he was going?” Navarro asked after disconnecting.

  “Not a clue. She said he travels about once a month, but never talks about it.”

  Navarro squinted up at Donnally. “And how did you happen to be talking to this neighbor?”

  “I like to keep track of people who try to kill me.” He glared down at Navarro. “And now it looks like I’m going to have to find him myself.”

  Donnally surveyed Navarro’s desk. “Will I have to break into his house to find evidence of where he went or did you get the search warrants?”

  Navarro tapped a manila folder. “I had planned to do his home and office this afternoon, but I think I’ll do them right now.” He rose from his chair and shook his head as he looked at Donnally. “Not a chance you’re coming along.”

  Donnally pulled out his cell phone and scanned through the stored numbers.

  “What are you doing?” Navarro asked.

  “A reporter for the Chronicle called the café after Brown’s competency hearing and left his number. Maybe he’d like to be there when you kick in Sherwyn’s door.”

  Navarro waved off the threat. “Give me a break. How’s it going to look if we allow you in there when Sherwyn’s already accused you of manufacturing evidence?”

  “How about you let me look through the stuff once you get it back here tonight?”

  “Why? Chain of evidence. That’s why.”

  “I won’t touch anything. You turn the pages.”

  “What pages?” Navarro inspected Donnally’s face. “What do you know that I don’t know?”

  “Nothing. Phone records, that’s all I meant.”

  Navarro squinted up at Donnally. “Like maybe you want to compare them to some you already have?”

  “Man, you’ve become a suspicious son of gun in the last few years. I just want to see if there are any leads to where he might have gone.”

  Navarro held his gaze, then shrugged. “Have it your way.”

  Donnally pointed at Navarro’s phone. “You may want to check with ICE to find out whether Sherwyn left the country.”

  Navarro glanced toward the hallway. “You see your nameplate hanging on an office out there with the rank of captain etched into it?”

  Donnally smiled and shrugged. “Just a thought. I’ll be here this evening when you get back.”

  Chapter 53

  “Sherwyn will be watching for me,” Donnally had told Janie the day after he examined the evidence Ramon Navarro had seized, “not a Vietnamese woman.”

  And she’d said, “You’re not that different from your father.”

  “I’m not asking you to play the part of a prostitute.”

  She laughed. “Only because William Sherwyn isn’t interested in girls.”

  It was then that Donnally reached into his jacket pocket and removed two plane tickets to Cancun.

  “Let’s go get him.”

  “How? Where do we start when we get there?”

  “With a trail of telephone calls.”

  Flying in, Donnally remembered the two Cancuns he’d observed when he made a trip down with other rookies the day after they graduated from the police academy. Despite having grown up a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, he hadn’t been a beach kid, had never stood on a surfboard, never sat around a bonfire, nor passed out drunk on the sand.

  He’d gone along to Cancun not because he wanted to, but because solidarity required it, and what he found was fragmentation: separating him and his friends, the beach from the town, and the rowdy Americans from the better selves they’d left back home.

  Rising at dawn the next day and leaving his hungover friends still asleep, he’d caught a cab in front of their hotel, one of a dozen in the artificial district imposed on a sand spit along the Caribbean. The ride from the Zona Hotelera took him to Centro, the core of an expanding city that seemed to be wearing itself out as it grew.

  He found it crowded with migrants who’d come to service the tourists. They lived in shacks built of cinder-block walls and corrugated aluminum roofs, and shopped in small markets after their bus rides home from work. He’d recognized their faces and their manner: They were the same as those who populated East LA, who suffered divided hearts and ate beans and rice and sent most of their earnings home.

  The Cancun that he and Janie met when they flew in was a city the size of San Francisco, with the mercados of old replaced by big block Sears and Wal-Mart stores that he had been able to recognize from the air.


  The one-story barrios had been replaced by stucco apartment blocks.

  The beach was now covered with bunkerlike resorts.

  And now Porsche and Cadillac dealerships had pushed aside the used car lots that once provided the hand-me-down vehicles for immigrants’ dream rides into prosperity.

  “Dónde está el orphanage de las Arenas del Blanco?” Where is the White Sands Orphanage?

  Janie did a double take as Donnally spoke to the fifteen-year-old Indian-looking boy selling flowers from a bucket on a corner near their downtown Cancun hotel.

  William Sherwyn’s telephone records showed regular calls to the orphanage and his credit card statements revealed monthly week-long visits to Cancun.

  Donnally had been unable to find a listing for White Sands in the local directory, so they had walked around town for a couple of hours searching for a streetwise kid to help them out.

  After watching the teenager make sale after sale by tuning his pitch to his customers’ vibrations of greed or guilt or sympathy, Donnally decided that he matched the profile.

  “I didn’t know your high school Spanish was that good,” Janie said.

  Donnally glanced over at her and smiled. “Just because I don’t say ‘Chee-lay’ for Chile?”

  “Something like that.”

  The boy held out his small palm and said in English, “Two dollars and I show you.”

  Donnally reached into his pants pocket for his wallet. “How about five and you just tell me?”

  He pointed at Donnally’s green John Deere cap. “And the hat.”

  Donnally took it off and handed it to him, along with the money. “You’re a helluva negotiator …”

  “Eduardo, but you call me Lalo.”

  Lalo looked up at Janie. “No women allowed inside.”

  “In Arenas del Blanco?”

  “No women. Not even maids.”

  Janie looked at Donnally. “So much for that plan.”

  “How do you know?” Donnally asked Lalo.

  The teenager reddened.

  “The man who runs it, Señor William, took me there once, like he does with all the boys who work on the street.”

  Lalo gestured with his chin toward a sixty-year-old Anglo in slacks and a loose shirt soliciting a boy at the corner.

  “Like that man. He promised me money, but I ran away.”

  Lalo glanced around to make sure none of the tourists walking by was paying attention, then made a circle with his thumb and finger and poked the forefinger of his opposite hand through it.

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Are there many who do?”

  Lalo shrugged. “La vida es dura.” Life is hard. “Y los hombres malos aprovechar de los muchachos.” And evil men take advantage of boys.

  “Who knows about this?” Donnally asked.

  Lalo’s eyebrow went up again. “Suspechar o estar seguro?” Only suspects or really knows?

  “Someone who really knows.”

  “There is a lady.”

  “Maybe you can take us to her.”

  Lalo held up his bucket of flowers. “My boss says I have to sell all these.”

  Donnally withdrew his wallet and opened it. Lalo thumbed through the bills and pulled out two twenties.

  “Gracias, señor.”

  Chapter 54

  Corazon Camacho stood next to an armed guard inside the wrought-iron gate of the high-walled women’s refuge on the eastern edge of Cancun, two blocks from the White Sands Orphanage. Her gray hair, pulled back tight against her head, reflected the stark Caribbean sun like burnished steel. Her sorrowful eyes surveyed Donnally, Janie, and Lalo on the other side. Donnally was wearing a hooded sweatshirt to conceal his face should Sherwyn happen to drive by behind them.

  A soccer ball rolled to a stop next to her, but the young girls who’d been playing on the dirt patch behind her didn’t approach them to retrieve it. The children seemed to Donnally like abused puppies that felt safe only when caged and out of reach.

  “I already have one defamation lawsuit against me for naming the names of the predators and the people who protect them,” Corazon said to Donnally. “I’m not sure I want to risk another.”

  Corazon’s eyes moved from Donnally toward the distant rooftops as though she was scanning for snipers.

  “At least I wasn’t murdered like the reporter who wrote the story, and the twenty other journalists killed for writing about other sex traffickers.”

  She then looked down at Lalo and pointed at a bus stop across the plaza behind them.

  “Espera allí, por favor,” she said to him. Please wait over there.

  Lalo peered up at Donnally like a child who was left unchosen after the sides in a schoolyard game had been picked.

  “We’ll come get you when we’re done,” Donnally told him.

  Lalo nodded and walked away.

  “I think we know what goes on over at White Sands,” Donnally said. “I’m just after the man who runs it.”

  “Señor William.”

  “Yes. Señor William.”

  “Is he at White Sands now?” Corazon asked.

  “I believe he’s in Mexico, and a number of calls were made from a cell phone in the United States to White Sands during the last week.” Donnally pointed his thumb over his shoulder toward Lalo. “We drove by the place, then sent the kid back to take a look, but he couldn’t spot Señor William.”

  “You won’t get any help from the police in finding out,” Corazon said. “Not even if you hold an Interpol warrant in your hand. It is them that protects him and those who back him.”

  “I know all about that.”

  “How?”

  “You ever heard of a cop named Gregorio Cruz?”

  Corazon clenched her teeth at the sound of the name. A thin dust devil spun upward from the dirt ten yards behind her.

  “The worst. Him and his twin brother, Jago. Snakes. Both snakes.”

  “They like molesting boys, too?”

  “No.” She glanced over her shoulder at the girls now collected together in the middle of the yard, huddled like ducklings in a storm. “Not boys.”

  Corazon gestured to the guard to unlock the gate.

  Donnally followed Janie inside, then reached down and rolled the ball back to the girls. One came forward to intercept it, giving Donnally a hesitant smile as she gathered it into her arms.

  Corazon led them across the playground toward the converted hacienda, then upstairs to her second-story office, her open window overlooking the yard and the city beyond.

  Against the background of the laughs and squeals of the restarted soccer match, Corazon described Sherwyn’s founding of White Sands ten years earlier, his contributions to local charities, his socializing with the head of the local child welfare agency, his payoffs to the police and the prosecutor, and his luring of boys with gifts of money and drugs and video games.

  “Do the boys ever escape?” Janie asked.

  “That’s the wrong word,” Corazon said. “They come and go as they wish. Since Señor William has all of the connections, the city itself is their prison. There is no escape.”

  “How does he pay for it all?” Donnally asked.

  Corazon shrugged. “I don’t know. He’s not an alcahuete—”

  Janie looked over at Donnally.

  “A pimp,” he said.

  “Men travel down from the States and pay the boys directly. I assume they also contribute to the cost of running the place.” She smirked. “Maybe they even take charitable tax deductions back home.” She thought for a moment. “There were rumors years ago that there was a very powerful man behind it all in the States, the one who bought the property that houses White Sands, but I’ve heard nothing of him for many years.” She shook her head, her lips pursed. “Since then it’s become like a timeshare for predators.”

  Corazon picked up the telephone and ordered coffee from the kitchen.

  “And there’ve been no investigations?” Donnally asked.
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  “A year ago I made taped interviews with a couple of the boys and gave the transcripts to the newspaper. But Señor William’s lawyer and the police paid or threatened the boys into recanting. That’s why I was arrested for defamation.” She smiled at Donnally’s puzzled expression. “It’s a criminal matter down here, not a civil one like in the States. The law was passed to protect drug dealers from exposure in the press. Even worse, they charged me in Chiapas because the prison sentences there are longer. I’m facing nine years.”

  Donnally doubted that Sherwyn would’ve sounded as matter-of-fact as Corazon about nearly a decade in custody, but Sherwyn also knew that it was something he’d never face, at least in Mexico.

  “If there was a way to do it without exposing yourself to jail time, would you help us put together some evidence that we could use to get Sherwyn indicted in the States? It’s a federal crime to travel outside of the U.S. to engage in sex with minors. And the U.S. extradites in these cases.”

  Corazon thought for a moment, then said. “I’ll need to know more about what you plan to do and whether you can really do it.”

  Donnally reached for his cell phone to call someone who could pitch the idea to the United States Attorney in San Francisco.

  “This is Harlan—”

  “Stop.” Perkins’s voice was edgy, almost to the point of panic. “Don’t say anything else. I’ve been ordered not to talk to you anymore. We’ve been retained on behalf of William Sherwyn.”

  Donnally pushed himself to his feet and walked toward the office door. He waited until he was in the hallway before he said, “You can’t represent that asshole.”

  “Not me, someone else in the firm. A name partner. Al Barton. He’s practically dancing and shadowboxing in his office. The statute of limitations has long run on criminal charges for molesting Melvin and it’s too late to file a civil suit.”

  “If Sherwyn has no exposure, then what does he need Barton for?”

  Rattling cups and saucers caught Donnally’s attention. A girl holding a tray stood feet away, mouth gaping, staring at his face, which he realized had darkened with rage. He turned away and walked to the end of the hallway, then glanced back and saw her flee into the office.