by Kirk Russell
‘Sure there is. He can die tomorrow and then what are you going to do? Where’s the photo?’
‘I’ve got it.’ Raveneau touched his coat pocket. ‘It’s right here. Lash kept diaries. Those are at his sister’s. She’s not cooperating with us, but she may with the FBI. They’re working with us now and if they label this a terrorist plot they can pretty well get whatever they want of Lash’s from the sister. I think that’ll happen too.’
‘And why is it you’re telling me all this?’
‘Because I need your help.’
‘What is it you think you’ll find in Lash’s diaries?’
‘I don’t know yet, but there were other grad students in and out of Lash’s house. It wasn’t just Coryell.’
‘There were plenty of them. I just don’t have any names for you. I didn’t become friends with any grad students. But they were there.’
‘The photo I’m going to show is of one of them.’
‘All right, and are you going to tell me now that Alcott and I should have been looking at him and we missed him like we missed the bomb shelter?’
‘All I know is he’s contacted me and gone out of his way to do it.’
‘There was one kid who was background in those poker games Lash set up. I got the feeling he was working on something with Lash or learning from him. He talked about writing books himself, but he and I didn’t connect.’ Hugh pulled what looked like a prescription bottle from his pocket, opened it, and took out two pills. ‘Acid reflux. Let’s see the photo, and does this person in it remember me?’
‘He does.’
‘Are you looking at him or is he helping you with Lash?’
‘I don’t know yet what he’s doing.’
‘But you want me to look at his photo.’
‘He ties to Lash. He may also tie to this threat you’re hearing about.’
‘Lash dropped me from the regulars list and cancelled the poker game as soon as his book got good reviews and was selling. I never had any close relationship with him and he sure beat us. All that time he sat there knowing about the bomb shelter and that bloody cot you found. He really did beat us and then made money writing about the department. Now he’ll give us the finger as he goes out the back door. He’s going to get away with whatever he did. You ought to give up on this one, Ben. This is one that not even you are going to bring home. You’ve felt guilty all these years, but let it go. He beat us but we’re going to outlive him, so we’ll get the last laugh.’
Raveneau didn’t say anything to that. He pulled the photo, laid it on the bar, and Hugh picked it up.
‘Brandon Lindsley wasn’t around when she disappeared. He had an alibi. We checked.’
‘He’s not in either murder file.’
‘Not everything makes it in. You’re not in there either, but when I told you Alcott wanted to question you I wasn’t kidding.’ He laid the photo down. ‘How did you find him?’
‘He found me.’
‘Lindsley approached you after the bomb shelter was found?’
‘Yes, he found me up on Mount Tam not far from where her remains were found.’
‘Then maybe you’ve got something there, and I wish I could help you, but I don’t really know anything about him. We ruled him out early.’ He paused. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have.’
TWENTY-FOUR
Raveneau brewed coffee, soft-boiled an egg, toasted two pieces of bread very dark, and then ate in the darkness out along the parapet. He poured a second cup of coffee and watched the dawn before heading into the office. On the drive in he took a call from the contractor, Ferranti, and forty minutes later Ferranti was in his car. They drove down to the Starbucks in the Letterman Center near Lucasfilm in the Presidio and carried coffees back and stood outside Raveneau’s car in the morning sunlight.
‘I like Lieutenant Neilley. It’s his nephew I don’t connect with. He’s OK when he’s working but I try to deal only with Neilley. The first two jobs they did for us were fine. They weren’t great but they got it done. This has been completely different and what I heard yesterday is bad news. One of his laborers talked to one of mine and said not all of the dump loads are going to the Resource Center.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘That not everything hauled away from the job is going where it’s supposed to. It says they’re having money problems and don’t want to pay what it costs.’
‘So where is it going?’
‘That’s why I wanted to meet. We’re required to show how the debris coming off the construction is diverted. It’s in my contract, so it’s also in Neilley’s. It’s about less going into landfill. This laborer says some of the loads got dumped down off Skyline Road, but Hugh has been giving me all his tags so somebody is lying.’
‘What do you mean this laborer says? How would he know if he’s working for you, not Hugh?’
‘He says one of Baylor’s laborers got an extra hundred bucks cash to help and the next morning Baylor fired him – told him he wasn’t needed anymore. So that guy told one of his friends to tell my laborer.’
‘Sounds like you’d better talk to the laborer who talked to your laborer.’
‘I did. That’s why I’m telling you.’
Raveneau thought over that as he drove to the Hall. He would have told la Rosa about it, but a call came from the manager of the assisted living facility where Lash was and the manager sounded shaken. She worked to keep her voice calm.
‘Albert Lash is in the hospital with symptoms of radiation poisoning. A doctor just called. She wanted to know if Albert had been any place where he was getting radiation therapy. They’re sure it’s radiation but of course we don’t do any radiation treatment here and he hasn’t gone anywhere in a month. When someone needs an X-ray or treatment requiring radiation we schedule a visit. Albert hasn’t had anything like that ever. That’s why I’m calling you.’
‘Maybe they’re making a mistake.’
‘The doctor sounded sure and I’m calling you because he had a visitor a couple of days ago.’
‘Did the visitor sign in?’
‘He signed in and we have videotape. It’s not very good but there’s eight seconds or so when he’s in the elevator and then just outside it. Some of our residents wander at night and can forget which floor is theirs, so we always watch the elevators. Albert got sick and we thought it was a virus that’s been going around.’
‘Why don’t you give me the phone number of the doctor you talked with this morning?’
Raveneau phoned the doctor as he started driving but cut that call off before it rang as another call came in, this one from Brandon Lindsley.
‘What’s up, Brandon?’
‘Some not so cool police action today.’
‘What happened?’
‘My apartment manager got in my face. Usually the only thing that gets him going is spilled laundry soap. He said a homicide inspector has been asking questions about me. What am I supposed to do with that?’
‘I’ve been making a lot of calls. You know how it is when someone suddenly appears on the side of a mountain and then feeds you a story. I’m just doing what you expect me to, at least for now. But I definitely want to know who you are, Brandon, and all about your friends.’
‘You already know who I am and what I’m about. I’m writing the book I told you about.’
‘Why don’t we take it to another level, Brandon?’
‘I’m ready for that.’
‘That’s going to mean the conversation is a little more challenging.’
‘I hear you and I am your guy, but I’ve got to ask a favor before we go any farther. I need you to call the geek who manages this apartment complex and tell him you were just fishing and that you have an unsolved case I’m trying to help you with. He needs to hear something. Maybe you want to tell him you’re looking at me as a possible suspect. If you do that, let me know so I can get a lawyer.’
‘I’ll call him. I think he left me a message yesterday anyway
. Now let me ask you something – why did you move to California?’
‘That’s the best question you’ve asked. So you’re digging. I do a lot of research myself. I know that sense of discovery when you hit on something. Who are you talking to in Chicago?’
‘People who worked the case.’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence. I made a big mistake with you.’
Raveneau talked on another few sentences before realizing Lindsley was gone. He started to call him back and stopped, decided to wait. He called the hospital and left a message for the doctor treating Lash. She returned his call a half hour later and sounded perplexed.
‘Untreated it may have killed him and could still. In his condition it’s going to be hard. He ingested a liquid with radioactive material in it. That’s not like eating an apple.’
‘Can he see visitors?’
‘He wouldn’t even know who you were, but I’ll try to keep him from dying, Inspector.’
Twenty minutes later he was at the assisted living facility crossing the foyer where a handful of residents were sitting watching a TV, or maybe not. It was hard to tell where their focus was. He watched the elevator videotape a half dozen times with the manager and agreed with her – the man was aware of the cameras and dressed to hide his identity, baggy long sleeved shirt, billed cap, head down until he left. When he stepped outside another video camera caught him by surprise, or seemed to until he took his dark glasses off and looked directly at the camera.
‘Do you recognize him?’
‘His friends call him John the Baptist. I don’t know what his true name is. He’s delivering a message of sorts and I’m not sure what to do with it yet.’
‘Arrest him!’
‘We’ll start looking for him and we will arrest him when we find him. I’ll be in touch. Thanks for making a copy of the tape.’
TWENTY-FIVE
The next morning they got a positive DNA hit on two of the skulls. Raveneau called the Missouri sheriff and once again he got the feeling that it all made sense to her, and would in Cagdill, that a California whacko pilfering caskets stole the skulls. It was a believable ending to the town’s ordeal. As he got off the phone with her, he sat with la Rosa.
‘Radiation poisoning,’ la Rosa said slowly, as if pondering a chess move.
‘Everything in his room was tested last night and they got a strong Geiger reading off a liquid prescription he takes for a stomach problem. The routine is to give him two tablespoons every night before bed, so the working theory is the visitor switched bottles. The visitor is the one Attis Martin called John the Baptist.’
‘Can we just call him John Doe?’
‘Sure. The videotape will need to be cleaned up and enhanced. Coe is on his way here and we’ll give them the tape, but you should watch it first. Coe will make us a digital copy no later than tomorrow and now that radiation is in the mix the FBI is assigning another dozen agents to it. They’re stepping in on that part and the meeting today is about how we’re going to work together.’
‘There’s a first time for everything.’
‘They’ll try to identify John in the photo but when you see the video you’ll see he’s not worried about being identified. That should worry us. I’m sure he was at Grate’s so that when the time came I could ID him.’
When Coe arrived they sat in the homicide detail kitchen where two tables pushed together and covered with a striped tablecloth provided enough room to spread everything out. Coe was bright and quick, and regardless of what he felt about local law enforcement he was always deferential. He and Raveneau had worked well together on a case last year that went to the wire and still woke Raveneau at night.
The FBI and SFPD budgets were far apart and this was never more apparent than meeting here in the kitchen with other homicide inspectors coming and going, putting sandwiches in the refrigerator or getting milk for their coffee.
Coe held a white coffee mug in his right hand as he wrote notes with his left. His image conjured something out of the past for Raveneau, an archeologist in desert shade at the end of a long day, an early-twentieth-century cartographer before the advent of radar, Coe in a white shirt with the sleeves neatly folded back almost to his elbows, his gun tucked in at the small of his back, suit coat draped over the adjacent chair, ramrod straight, and like himself slowly getting locked into a former era.
‘What have you learned about Attis Martin and Ike Latkos?’ Raveneau asked.
‘We got a strange call about her.’
‘What kind of call?’
‘A back-off call, meaning she may have helped an agency somewhere along the line, and with her talents it must have been cyber help. I don’t think the agency was the CIA and I’m sure I’ll be hearing more soon and I didn’t tell you two any of this. We’re not having much luck yet with Attis Martin, but I’ll get you a list today of what we’ve come up with. It’s understood you’re pursuing the murder investigation, but we need some ground rules on the rest of this.’
‘Everyone at the table at Grate’s Place is inside our investigation,’ Raveneau said, and they hashed out all of it now. Fed and SFPD surveillance would coordinate on tracking Lindsley’s movements, but Raveneau would do the talking with him. The FBI would handle the Lash radiation poisoning and find where the radioactive isotopes came from.
Coe leaned forward. ‘Albert Lash contacted us in 2005 about a man named John Algiers. Here’s a photo.’ He turned it so they both could see it and tapped it. ‘That’s him. He attended one of Lash’s book tour events and later contacted Lash through his website. Lash notified us and kept up communication with him for over a year and a half. They had an ongoing conversation about mass killings and how they happened. He was very interested in talking about genocide and Lash’s theory, or what you say was actually Coryell’s theory. He kept up a correspondence with Lash from various places in the world and bounced his ideas for mass extermination off of Professor Lash, including dispersal methods for radiological weapons, though the highly radioactive material he was writing about he was unlikely ever to acquire.
‘Algiers wrote to him in spurts, sometimes three and four times a day for two weeks and then nothing for a month. His understanding of physics was well beyond what Lash knew so we brought in a physicist to help us understand the letters, same with biochemistry. At some point he got frustrated with Lash and in his final communications denounced him as an intellectual fraud and his books as those of a print whore. We have a profile, we’ve made guesses, and I can copy you that. Lash’s publisher still maintains the website. There was a communication that very likely was from him about a year ago. It was an aggressively personal threat to Lash.’
‘All right, so he’s a possible too.’
‘I don’t know what he is, but you need to know about him. From word usage and references we put his age at late forties and we believe he has worked or is working as a scientist and is wealthy.’
‘That can’t be a long list.’
‘It’s not and we have a good idea who he might be and I don’t think he’s in any way a fit here, but he connects to Lash.’
They moved on to Lash’s sister and the documents stored at her condominium.
‘We’re not having much luck getting to those diaries,’ Raveneau said. ‘She might respond to the FBI better than she does us, but I doubt it. She’s protecting her brother and believes we abused him last time. It’s going to take a better warrant than we can write from our end, but you’ve got the terror angle. Maybe the FBI can wrap terror around his diaries.’
‘You have such an inspiring way of putting that, Ben.’
‘Thank you.’
‘How seriously is the Bureau taking this particular mass killing threat?’
‘You were right last year, so my ASAC is sitting quiet. Otherwise, we’d need a lot more to go on than we have now, and frankly, there’s skepticism about the capability of the gentlemen you met. But the new cure-all prescription they wrote for Professor Lash does g
ive them some street cred. Bottom line is temporarily there are more agents but we’ll need some results very soon.’
‘Where are you at on Lash’s hot drink?’
‘We’re working through a list of possible sources and doing that with more than just our field office.’
‘Berge?’
‘We agree with you that the Delaware company making the rent payments is a shell. A Bank of America account was opened over a year ago in the company name and one deposit was made with enough money to cover the lease for a year. It was all done by mail. There’s no video, no record, but we’re still digging. I don’t think we’re going to get anything more from the property manager. What’s her name again?’
‘Lisa Berge.’
‘That’s right. I don’t think she’s got anymore to tell us, and that’s about it. Thanks for the coffee, you two. Let’s talk later this afternoon. Don’t take any free drinks from strangers.’
TWENTY-SIX
‘Hey, it’s me, Missouri, and if you’ve talked to your medical examiner you already know what I’m going to tell you.’
‘I haven’t, so tell me,’ Raveneau said.
‘Four more of the skulls match. You may get me re-elected county sheriff.’
She laughed and her laugh made him smile, but what he heard in her voice was relief and he felt the same. Now at least a piece of the puzzle was figured out.
‘But that’s not the only reason I’m calling. I’ve got a new witness, a young woman who has come forward with a story about how she and her boyfriend were there and saw the skulls taken.’
‘Why did she wait so long?’
‘Afraid of what her mother might do and I don’t blame her. I grew up with her mother. She was out there with her boyfriend. He was about to deploy to Afghanistan.’
‘Is that where he is now?’
‘He is but I know how to get a hold of him and she’s here and still worried about how others will react, so I’ve made a deal with her. We keep her identity secret. Are you OK with that?’
‘I’m fine with it.’