One Through the Heart

by Kirk Russell

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Wind from behind Raveneau slapped the door against the wall. Blinds rattled. An oil lamp from another age threw flickering light from a low table. Alan Siles lay motionless on the floor nearby, head resting on a small rounded pillow, arms close in along his body and legs, straight as though the position was somehow chosen.

  Raveneau pressed the mike. ‘Call paramedics and come on up.’

  His eyes were closed but his mouth open, head canted to the left, and now Raveneau saw the left hand was clenched, the right open. Raveneau felt for a pulse along his neck and didn’t find anything. He saw a glass of water and a small dark glass jar that looked as old as the oil lamp. The lid of the jar was off. Inside were small white pills. Next to the pill jar was a notebook with a strip of leather that tied it shut. He wanted to but didn’t touch it yet and just stood and tried to put it together.

  Siles was a suicide. John Royer may have killed himself, and Ike Latkos let herself get killed. He turned at the voices behind him at the footfall on the loose wood stairs, but not before taking in the small office, its one desk, the books, the dated furniture and look of disuse, and then at Siles’s hands again. How was one hand clenched, one open?

  ‘I guess he’s out on the Boundary now with her,’ Coe said as he looked at the hands. ‘I’ll bet you the clenched one is glued in that position.’

  Raveneau pointed at the hand-bound book. ‘That’ll be their story. I know the writer.’

  ‘Whose office is this?’

  ‘It’s going to turn out to be Lindsley’s.’

  Raveneau moved away and called la Rosa.

  ‘Are you sticking there?’ she asked.

  ‘For now, I am. We don’t want to lose control of what Siles left behind. And it looks to me like Lindsley was supposed to be here and head to the Boundary with him. There’s a second pillow and mat. I’ll take a photo and send it to you.’

  Coe called it the quiet end to an unlikely terror attack. After Siles’s body was removed, but before they left, word came that the fires, including the block that burned, were on their way to being controlled. No one had died or been injured, and Raveneau moved down to the lot and stood talking with an animated, upbeat, and assertive Coe.

  ‘No matter what he wrote in that book or pamphlet there isn’t anyone who’ll ever understand these guys,’ Coe said.

  ‘In some ways I do.’

  ‘What do you really understand about them? I know, Coryell, but what made them do all this? That’s what I’m talking about. Who did Siles die for? Or Royer? Or should I ask Lindsley? Where are you going now?’

  ‘To check on the fires then I’m back to Latkos’ apartment.’

  Along a block of Lyon Street where it runs into Haight nearly all of the buildings burned, as had some of the commercial buildings on Haight Street. A fire captain told him, ‘Those helicopter pilots saved us. I don’t know how they did it with the wind, but they somehow did.’

  Raveneau was standing with la Rosa when Ike Latkos’ body was removed. The computers were already gone. When they left there they got word that Lindsley was temporarily at large. His general whereabouts were known and he was on foot.

  La Rosa shook her head. ‘I had a dog named Mac who was like this. He was always figuring out how to get out of the house. I’d be gone an hour and a neighbor would call and say, “Your dog is in our backyard. Come get him.” How does Lindsley walk away from surveillance?’

  ‘They’re not that close to him. They’re tracking him electronically through the throwaway phones he thought were safe to carry. Now it’s looking like he knew that.’

  Raveneau also tried calling Hugh Neilley. He didn’t expect Hugh to answer, and when he didn’t, Raveneau called the Southern Precinct captain and was told Hugh, like others, was out looking for Lindsley. Everyone was out on the street either helping with the fires or hunting for Lindsley.

  ‘Can you try to get Neilley for me on the radio?’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘He’s got some information for me.’

  ‘I don’t think he really wants to talk to you, Inspector.’

  ‘Just do it, OK?’

  ‘I’m going to put my captain on.’

  When the captain picked up with Raveneau again, he said, ‘Neilley will call you when he’s on a break.’

  ‘When is that going to be?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  In the Homicide office Raveneau called Hugh from his cell and then sat through the recording and left a message. He opened one of the two Coryell murder files and went slowly page by page, his mind moving between the files and the events of the past week. When he finished the first file he lifted it aside and opened the second. But he wasn’t looking for an answer in the files as much as in his head. He was closing on something that he could feel but not see yet.

  An hour later, Lindsley phoned a Channel Five reporter and told her he was innocent of any responsibility in all of the fires and that his mistake was trying to help SFPD and the FBI. Neither had kept their word to him and both were hunting him now to lock him up and blame him for their failure to apprehend Siles, Royer, and Latkos. He asked for the public’s help in keeping law enforcement officers from killing him.

  ‘Why would they do that?’ the reporter asked.

  Lindsley answered, ‘Because they ignored my warnings and people died. The fires, the deaths, all of this could have been prevented. I approached Homicide Inspector Benjamin Raveneau over a week ago and warned him.’

  The station put up a tape of the call on their website and tape went viral. Raveneau’s reaction was to go home and sleep for four hours on the couch. When he woke it was dark and Celeste was there. He made coffee and called Coe from his car. Coe was back in the FBI Field Office and impatient with the harassment he was getting for Lindsley out there walking around and talking to reporters.

  ‘Where is Siles’s phone?’ Raveneau asked.

  ‘It’s in the lab.’

  ‘Text Lindsley from it.’

  ‘Why? Siles is dead and Lindsley switched phones again. The phone he was using is in his apartment and he’s not going upstairs to his apartment before we talk to him. I can promise you that.’

  ‘I listened to the YouTube the TV station put up of their interview with Lindsley. He’s stressed. You can hear it, and I know he believes in the Boundary. You could let him go home. That’s where he’s going to head eventually if you don’t find him first. He’ll expect to get arrested. He believes in the Boundary. He told me it’s possible to communicate back to the living in the same way the Native Americans called to the spirits of their ancestors. He’ll either believe it’s us or Siles is still alive and we faked his death, or he’ll believe the thing we have trouble even imagining, that Siles is communicating from beyond death. I think that’s what Siles’ hands were about. It’s worth a try, and I’ll come to your office. I’ll do it.’

  ‘It’s a complete waste of time and you don’t need to come here. What do you want me to type? “Weather is perfect, wish you were here. Missed seeing you yesterday, Brandon, did you fuck me over and talk to the police?” What’s the message you want, Raveneau, and you know if this works you can quit the police and make a mint with a phone commercial where you text dead people.’

  ‘Just type, “I’m here.”’

  ‘That’s it, just those two words? That’s a missed opportunity. Shouldn’t I ask how crowded it is and whether he’s heard any scuttlebutt around the Boundary about a heaven or a hell? But, OK, you’re the boss on this. I’m typing, I’m here. Talk about anticlimactic, but OK I’ve done it and am pressing Send. I know I never caught up on my Coryell reading, but someone, namely you, should have told me you can call home from the Boundary. That’s a game changer. It takes a lot of the stress out of passing on. You still there?’

  ‘I’m here.’

  ‘The message sent. It’s probably pinging for Lindsley in his apartment right now.’

  ‘Good work. I’ll talk to you late
r.’

  Raveneau sat down at his desk, untied the leather string and opened the leather-bound book that was found with Siles. It was two hundred eighty-six pages and in the foreword its author, Brandon Lindsley, described his spiritual journey as one the country needed to make. Raveneau read the start of the first chapter then flipped though, stopping occasionally, stopping on a passage he recognized from Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, telling of a meeting in 1851 with four of the great tribes of the plains and a treaty signed at Fort Laramie with the US government that promised good faith and friendship and allowed white men to establish roads and cross Indian land. The tribes granted access but relinquished nothing, but like all the treaties before and after it didn’t stand. Gold was discovered at Pike’s Peak in 1858 and a gold rush ensued. The city of Denver rose on Indian land, and in the mountains of the Rockies mining towns.

  There were also quotes from generals, soldiers, settlers, Congressmen, and chiefs of tribes. Near the end of Lindsley’s book he found an entry with a notation saying it was written by a ‘Mrs Z. A. Parker, at that time a teacher on the Pine Ridge reservation, writing of a Ghost dance observed by her on White Clay creek on June 20, 1890.’ In smaller letters he read: ‘Segment of Parker’s account quoted in James Mooney’s book The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee.’ In detail Parker described ‘the ghost shirt or dress’ the women wore and the ghost shirt the men wore.

  A line caught Raveneau’s eye as he read the description of what the women wore, a ‘dress cut like their ordinary dress, a loose robe with handkerchief, with moon, stars, birds, etc, interspersed with real feathers, painted on the waists and sleeves. While dancing they wound their shawls about their waists, letting them fall to within three inches of the ground, the fringe at the bottom. In the hair, near the crown, a feather was tied. I noticed an absence of bead ornaments, and, as I knew their vanity and fondness for them, wondered why it was. Upon making inquiries I found they discarded everything they could that was made by white men.’

  That was at Pine Ridge in 1890 six months before Wounded Knee and Raveneau flipped to the last page. No surprise that again it was Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee that Lindlsey mimicked. Though Dee Brown’s book was attacked by academic historians who viewed it as pop history, it sold millions. It was the very thing Lindsley aspired to and that Lash earned his wealth with.

  The book was also written from the viewpoint of the Native American and touched the unseen thing Ann Coryell wrote about. On the last page of Brown’s book was a quote from Black Elk forty-two years after the massacre at Wounded Knee. The quote was taken from Black Elk Speaks, a collaboration between John Neihardt and Black Elk in 1932. It read,

  ‘I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.’

  Raveneau shut Lindsley’s book. He waited. Then a text came. The text could be Neilley. It could la Rosa or his lieutenant or Celeste, but it had to be Lindsley. It read: ‘where are u?’

  He wrote back, ‘Let’s meet.’

  ‘tonight. late. will call u.’

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Raveneau called Ferranti the general contractor five times in quick succession, hanging up each time it rolled to voicemail. On the fifth try Ferranti picked up.

  ‘Tell me again, what was Hugh Neilley’s price for the demolition on the house?’

  ‘About twenty thousand.’

  ‘More than twenty thousand dollars or less?’

  ‘Less.’

  ‘What was the next highest bidder’s price and how many bids did you get?’

  ‘Three bids and I don’t remember the numbers. I see a lot of bids. I’d have to check, but does it really matter?’

  ‘It does and we can meet at your office if you need to look them up.’

  ‘I can tell you roughly. One was fifteen thousand higher and the other was double Hugh’s.’

  ‘Double?’

  ‘People shoot from the hip. Sometimes they just throw a number at it and hope they get the job.’

  ‘Did you tell Hugh he was too low?’

  ‘I don’t know if I did. I think I just asked him if he had everything covered. He said he was good.’

  ‘OK. Now I’ve a different question and I’ve asked this one before. How did you find out Hugh’s nephew was dumping off the side of the road?’

  ‘One of his laborers told one of mine—’

  ‘My partner talked to all the laborers and Hugh never took them on any dump runs. When they got in the truck with him at the end of the day he dropped them close to where they live.’ Raveneau let a beat go by. He gave him a chance to deny it. When he didn’t Raveneau said, ‘I’m going to give you a free pass on that and let’s try the question again. How did you figure it out?’

  Now there was a long silence.

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to you. I’m about the murder investigation.’

  ‘I always go to my jobs early in the morning. That’s when I walk them without having to answer any questions. Hugh’s nephew was always there in the early morning before anything was open. He’d be sitting in his truck drinking coffee and one morning he was there with an empty truck though I knew he’d left too late the day before to get to one of the transfer stations. So I knew he got rid of the load somewhere and I started keeping track. I mean, it could have been legit. He could have dropped it on another job and someone else picked it up from there, but no one likes to move stuff twice so I knew it probably wasn’t that. I had one carpenter on the job and I had him start writing down the time of day Matt left with the truck. The next time it happened I followed him.’

  ‘And then you reported it and came up with the story about one of their laborers telling your laborer.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a lie.’

  ‘Did you report the illegal dumping to the police?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess so.’

  ‘Were both loads there?’

  ‘Yes, and maybe more.’

  ‘Did he do it again?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why did you do the thing about the fraudulent tags? Why didn’t you confront him?’

  ‘You want the truth?’

  ‘Sure, why not?’

  ‘The truth is I didn’t want to get into it with Hugh. I thought he would freak out.’

  ‘OK, here’s the last thing, I need to know exactly where that load got dumped.’

  ‘The county people know where it is. I showed them the area. I didn’t have the exact area because I couldn’t get too close, but they found it. It’s not like it was that hard.’

  ‘Good because I’m going to want you to show me. What are you doing right now?’

  ‘Really? They cleaned it up. There’s not going to be anything to see.’

  ‘There’ll be something and I can’t wait for the county.’

  ‘But what’s the point?’

  ‘I can’t tell you right now.’

  Raveneau met him forty minutes later and they drove the winding road into the hills in Ferranti’s new Ford pickup, which was like a rolling office. It had everything a contractor could want except good gas mileage, and he was driving Raveneau who wasn’t a prospect or client or a way to make any money. Ferranti found the general area on the second try but it didn’t make any sense that Baylor upended the dump load off this main road, so they tried a side road and then a dirt driveway to a site where it looked like a house was started and then abandoned. They backtracked from there and found it, and it clicked for Ferranti once he saw the site. He remembered watching Baylor turn on to the dirt road. There were white-painted pieces of stucco from Lash’
s house way down the slope and a few chunks of broken concrete they probably figured weren’t worth moving.

  ‘I want to be sure,’ Raveneau said, and got out and half slid, half walked down the steep slope as Ferranti watched. Raveneau brought back a piece of stucco about the size of his hand. It was cement gray on one side and white-painted with a sand texture on the other face. Wire mesh lath poked through and he held on to it with the wire lath as he scrambled back up.

  ‘Is that house color? Does this look right?’

  ‘It’s definitely it.’

  ‘Half the time people say definitely to me they change their minds later. How certain are you?’

  ‘I’m certain.’

  ‘OK, drop me back at my car.’

  He called la Rosa first and walked through his idea with her. When she couldn’t pick it apart he called Coe figuring the Feds were still in as long as Lindsley was a person of interest. Coe pushed back a little, asking, ‘Why don’t you use your own K-Nine unit?’

  ‘We will but it’s a big area and we’ll need help.’

  ‘How again does this connect to Brandon Lindsley?’

  ‘I didn’t say it did. I said it might.’

  ‘I’ll have to call you back.’

  That was the Fed way and that was good enough for Raveneau. Coe was in. Coe would get approval and they could get dogs out there tomorrow.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Raveneau struggled with the idea then sat with his commander and talked with him before calling the Special Operations Unit and asking for surveillance on Hugh Neilley. It was difficult to do and depressing. That night he got a call from the two officer team tracking Hugh. Hugh left his house half an hour ago and now was in San Francisco in China Basin close to where Raveneau lived.

  ‘He’s headed toward you, Inspector. What’s this about?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  A few minutes later one of the undercover officers reported that Hugh had slowed not far from where Raveneau lived, but did not stop and drove past. He skirted the water in China Basin, passing the ball park and continuing along the Embarcadero past the Ferry Building and on to Bay Street and beyond Fisherman’s Wharf before doubling back to North Beach, parking down the street from a bar and walking. He probably just wanted to talk to me, Raveneau thought. He felt a strong sense of relief, a feeling like a wave passing through his chest.