One Through the Heart (18 page)

He rattled the ice in the glass as he swirled the bourbon.

‘I’m in a bad hole. I’ve fallen. The pedophile bastard of a priest where I go to church loves to say we’re all fallen. He’ll be delighted to hear this story. It’ll make his fucking day. But I have fallen and there is no way to get back from here.’

He reached quickly, pulled the gun, brought it to his right temple, held it a moment and then lowered it, though not all the way and the barrel wasn’t quite resting on the tile. The nose was up just slightly and turned a little more Raveneau’s direction. Raveneau looked at it but didn’t move yet.

‘That’s what I should do. That’s probably what I will do, but I’m going to let it all play out first. I’m in a very bad space where anything could happen, anything at all, Ben. I think you should avoid me because I feel like you’ve betrayed me. You’re circling me. You’re asking questions that suggest you think I was a drunk and a fool and Lash used me or worse I helped him. I honestly don’t know what I’m capable of right now. Why don’t you take the jewelry and leave? You’re making progress. Take the jewelry to that bitter old woman and let her rub her hard fingers over the silver and tell you how the drunk homicide inspector failed her daughter.

‘But hurry, because right behind that one is a new cold case, perhaps one that has sat fifty years. But a rag in someone’s attic with DNA on it might let you solve it. You’ll get another one before you’re done. Get out of my house because you’ve got what you came for and this is not a good place for you to be. I hope this jewelry helps you and too bad you can’t solve them all before they nail the coffin shut on your career. Too bad about that, Ben. Too bad you’re running out of time and cases. Too bad you missed that phone call from Coryell. You might have saved her life and you wouldn’t have to do all this.’

‘Let me have the gun.’

It was another twenty minutes before he did, and Raveneau called Hugh’s doctor and his ex-wife. Donna got there first and led Hugh into the front room. He heard them talking and at one point Hugh sobbed. When the doctor arrived Raveneau let him in and as the doctor went up the stairs Raveneau left. He took the rings and the necklace with him after sliding them into an evidence bag. He didn’t know how close Hugh came to pulling the trigger. He wasn’t sure yet what had really happened, but he was sure that if he stayed he’d be asking Hugh questions and there would be a better time later. This was by no means over.

R
aveneau headed to Toasts, or rather M33, to meet Celeste. Wind or not, the warm weather brought people out tonight. Margaritas were selling. So were rum drinks, and there were people at all six sidewalk tables despite gusts that lifted litter from the gutter and sent it spiraling overhead. He watched a young woman’s hair wrapped around her head by the wind.

‘I’ll be awhile,’ Celeste said. ‘At least half an hour, maybe an hour. It’s been crazy since around five o’clock.’ She plated a salad and wiped away a drip along the edge of the plate.

Raveneau saw a table clearing outside. He pointed. ‘I’ll be out there.’

He took a glass of wine out with him. He sat with his back to the wind, and if the wind were cold it wouldn’t even be worth the try. But warm fall wind was a Bay Area phenomena – the heated valley air from the dry north kept the cooler moist marine air offshore. He rode out the gusts as others gave up and went inside. He had the wine and a chance to think and then a text from Brandon Lindsley: ‘
Paranoid. Meet you later?
’

‘
You home or in the city?
’ Raveneau replied.

‘
City. Under surveillance and freaking.
’

‘
What did you expect?
’

Raveneau took another swallow and a waitress came out and put a small pizza down in front of him, explaining Celeste sent it. She asked if he wanted another glass of wine and he shook his head. He typed, ‘
Why r u paranoid?
’ When there was no answer he laid the phone on the table. As soon as he did, it lit up.

‘
The wind. Want to meet?
’

‘
Maybe.
’

Raveneau rested his phone on the table ticking through once more what they knew. They knew the caskets weren’t uncovered by the Mississippi floods until last spring, 2011. The skulls came from those caskets and were moved across the country and into the bomb shelter after the Mississippi flooding, and they knew the house was unoccupied from the time Lash moved out. Escrow closed before the flooding. The new owners’ house plans ground slowly through the approval process. Which left a window of time and it probably happened as Lindsley described, though who knows what his real role was.

Lash wasn’t there for any of that. Once again, the good professor was exonerated though somehow Lindsley was the link. It was also possible the compulsive Lash wrote something in the mythical diary. They needed those diaries, if they existed. He picked up his phone, looked at the texts from Lindsley as another came in: ‘
This is the wind.
’

‘
OK. What do we do?
’

‘
where r u?
’
Lindsley replied.

‘
Is it tonight?
’

‘
don’t know.
’

‘
think u do
,’ Raveneau sent. He waited and when there was no response laid his phone down on the table again and picked up the wine. He ate a bite of pizza and his phone buzzed.

‘
meet me now?
’

Raveneau followed his gut. He didn’t respond. Not long after he got a call from Coe.

‘We’ve been texting,’ Raveneau said. ‘He wants me to come get him and go drinking. I could do that. Are you on him?’

‘We’re all over him and we’re reading your messages. He’s back in his apartment with the lights off, but he’s at the window every few minutes. I guess he doesn’t know about our thermal gadgetry.’

‘I don’t either, and what don’t you wiretap?’

‘Good question. I think we’ve got it all covered now.’

‘He’s talking wind and radiation and wind dispersal but I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, just that it is. He’s guessing. Not too many years ago he was a grad student in history and now he might be wrapped up in something that could put him behind bars for the rest of his life and he is scared.

‘So maybe an FBI team ought to grill him tonight rather than me drink with him. Go upstairs, knock hard on his door and make it feel like it’s now or never for him. He warned about wind. The wind has arrived and that’s enough reason to question him. I’ll meet you there.’

‘I’ll call you back.’

Raveneau ate the pizza and when Celeste came out they moved inside and took a table in the corner. The crowd thinned. They talked and ate and then Coe called. They were already on the way to the San Francisco Field Office with Lindsley in the back seat, one FBI vehicle in front, one behind.

‘It probably felt like a rendition to him,’ Coe said. ‘He jumped about five feet when we came in. We took him out like a suspect.’

‘What did he say?’

‘The first thing he did was ask, “What’s happened?”’

The interrogation went on for four hours and it wasn’t harsh but it was frank. Outside the gusts in the hills now topped forty and Mt. Tamalpais and Mt. Diablo were recording wind speeds in excess of sixty miles an hour over their summits. In the city the gusts rattled the light poles and shook the electric lines of the street cars.

Lindsley, he was a bright guy, and they showed him cases where informants cooperated and helped prevent something from happening, and how much better it went for them later. Leave it to the Feds; they even had a graph that showed how much better you did if you cooperated. He was asked what will Alan Siles say about you? Will he say you tried to manipulate us at the point you got scared? How will you answer that? Will all three of them swear you were part of the plot?

As each half hour passed, an FBI interrogator noted it and said, ‘Nothing has happened yet. You can still do this.’

But Lindsley didn’t give up anything. He stayed right where he was in the text messages to Raveneau and pitched the same message he had before, that he came forward because he was worried. When Raveneau got home it was after midnight and the wind rattled metal awnings out over the street. The gusts shook the sliding glass door on to the deck and blew over one of the potted lemons. He slept three or four hours and thought it was sirens that woke him or his phone, but it was neither. It was the wind. He walked out on to the wooden walkway and crossed the smooth roofing to the parapet, his heart loud in his chest as he smelled smoke, and not the smoke of a building burning but dry grass and oak.

Of course there had been warnings for weeks of fire danger, as there always were this time of year, especially as the anniversary of the Oakland Hills fire of 1991 grew closer. He scanned the hills across the bay. He didn’t see any fires. Yet the smell was strong and the wind came from the north-east and Raveneau didn’t have a good view in that direction. He checked the time. 04:10. He tried the Internet then TV and radio and called the Southern Precinct. The first squib showed online at just about the same time the Southern Precinct called back.

‘Inspector?’

‘I’m here.’

‘We have a report of a fire on Mount Tamalpais. Check that, we have a report that Mount Tamalpais is on fire on both the west and east sides. That’s all we know right now.’

‘The whole mountain?’

‘Yes, sir, that’s what it says.’

R
aveneau once sat in on an interview of an arsonist arrested after setting fire to five dilapidated houses in San Francisco over a period of three months. In one a homeless man squatting on the third floor died. The arsonist, a thirty-eight-year-old assistant manager at a tech facility named Steve Lahore, apologized for the death. He was aware from news reports that a man died in the second fire he lit. But that didn’t stop him from setting more. All that stopped him was getting caught.

When confronted with possible murder charges, he was more interested in talking about how he planned the burns so that even a three-minute-response fire department wouldn’t get there in time. He was proud of his work and forthcoming with details but what Raveneau remembered most vividly was how he rhapsodized about the 1929 fire on Mt. Tamalpais and how wooded and thick with underbrush the mountain was now. He fidgeted in his seat as he described the fuel load, the underbrush and trees that had thickened in the eighty years since that burn.

The right conditions brought out the arson bugs. They got them anxious and excited when the wind rose in the dry part of the year. Raveneau couldn’t help but think about Lahore as he heard the Tam fire was spreading very rapidly and already arced over the whole mountain. He hurried back in, showered, and dressed.

A half hour later the burn smell was stronger. He scrolled his cell and found the phone number of a Petaluma fire captain, reasoning that he wasn’t waking anybody up. They would call everyone in. He punched in the number but didn’t hit Call yet, held his finger there for a moment before pressing the phone to his ear. First thing he heard was a big engine working hard.

‘Steve, it’s Ben Raveneau.’

‘Ben, hi, you’re calling about the fire?’

‘Yeah, what’s going on?’

‘There’s a fire line that reaches from Highway One all the way up over the mountain and down to Lake Alpine, and we’re rolling there. That’s about all I know other than it started an hour and fifteen minutes ago and all at once.’

‘I’m heading your way.’

‘No, you’re not, you’d be out of your mind to, and why would you? Winds are gusting to sixty at the summit. They’re thirty-five miles an hour down at the base. This fire is exploding. The whole mountain is going. There’s evacuation under way in Mill Valley and you wouldn’t even be able to get here, and why would you want to?’

‘We’re working on something that might tie to this.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘There’s a possible tie and the timing coincides with a threat made. Look, I’m heading your direction, but I’ll stay out of the way.’

Raveneau crossed the Golden Gate after picking up la Rosa. They had Coe on speakerphone as they looked at the orange halo over the mountain and tendrils of fire curling and rising fifty, a hundred feet into the air and twisting and leaping in the roaring wind. It was like a scene out of a volcano erupting or a nightmare of the end of the world. He had never seen anything like it and the idea of firefighters battling seemed absurd. Even in the pre-dawn darkness you could tell how fast it was moving, funneling up through steep ravines and dry oak and pine. On the open flanks a line of orange flame danced across the long slopes of dry grass and brush.

A fine white ash fell on the windshield and the air filled with sirens as they exited and made their way toward Mill Valley. Across the road a long line of headlights came toward them and Coe reported that the highway patrol was getting ready to close 101 due to ash and smoke. Coe was off the freeway now trying to work his way around that, having left his house in Novato ten minutes ago.

‘There’s a police roadblock ahead,’ la Rosa said quietly and Raveneau nodded and continued to talk with Coe.

‘You know what their orders are,’ la Rosa said. ‘This is a full-on evacuation.’

It was, and Raveneau kept Coe on the phone in case they needed his help. The police line was at Redwood High School and a uniform officer held a hand up for them to stop and then waved them forward signaling for them to turn into the high school. La Rosa lowered her window but it was clear the officer did not want to talk.

‘The surveillance team is still on location,’ Coe said, ‘but they can’t vouch for where Lindsley is. He could be in his apartment still. The police are using loudspeakers to tell people to leave immediately and the smoke is thickening and they’re not certain he’s still there.’

‘We’ll go up to the apartment.’

‘They say embers are falling and at least one small fire started on a roof not far from where our team is. At some point we’ll have to pull them.’