Done for a Dime (42 page)

“I could tell.”

“I had a dream last night.” She reached for his hand, brushed the crumbling walnut from it, pressing her own hand in his palm, so he would have to look at her. “I was scared to fall asleep, afraid I’d have nightmares. And I did, but I had this dream, too. So vivid, you know? And because of that, it felt more like, I don’t know. This will sound so stupid.”

“I can handle stupid.”

“It felt like a communication.”

Toby read her expression. “My father.”

She began kneading his fingers. “The silly part, it took place in a shop, where they sell coffee and tea. All that glass and wood and the smells. Your father was working there, behind the counter, he had an apron on, and—”

Toby chuckled. “Tea?”

“Yes, I know, that part’s so obvious. Like I said, it’s silly. But the other part—there was light streaming through the window. He was bathed in it.”

Toby felt a sudden resentment but managed a smile. “You’ll see the stars a-fallin’. You’ll see forked lightnin’.”

She cocked her head, puzzled. “That’s—?”

“A spiritual. ‘In That Great Getting Up Morning.’ It refers to Judgment Day.”

She seemed bothered by his flip tone. “He seemed so happy, Toby. Please, hear me out. At the house, before we went to the club, we sat at the piano, he listened to me torture ‘Well You Needn’t,’ then told me to play what I know. And he said he knew why I was always saying I was sorry. I feel guilty for being alive. After my grandmother, then Jeremy. Now your father—”

“You talked about all of that? With my
father
?”

“Let me tell you the rest of the dream, Toby. He came out from behind the counter, took my hands, so glad to see me. It was just all so—”

“Perfect.” He was unable to suppress the sarcasm.

“It was real, Toby. It didn’t feel like a dream.”

Her voice cracked. With his thumb he wiped her cheek, expecting a tear, but her skin was dry. She was frightened.

“Maybe he forgives you.”

Trembling, she pressed her face against his ribs. Stroking her hair, kissing it, he said, “I’m glad.”

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Please.”

“I’m jealous.”

She gripped his hand. “Come upstairs. There’s a place we can lie down.”

“Nadya—”

She got up, tugged at his arm. “Please. It’s too hard, too lonely. Lie down with me. Hold me. Tell me you won’t go away, even if it’s not true. Please.”

Her eyes shamed him. He pulled her back to avoid them. “Stop. Stop.” He held her tight, stroking her back, then made her sit. She looked stricken, hands in her lap, ready for a scolding. Or a betrayal.

He reached for her hand, laced his fingers in hers. “Remember your dream. You’re forgiven. Right?”

They both heard it, the thing not said.

Murchison arrived in the courtroom in the middle of cattle call. Shackled defendants in orange jumpsuits, groggy, yawning—eager to save themselves as long as it didn’t get in the way of their boredom—filed one by one from a side door to confer briefly with their attorneys, public defenders mostly. Calling them forward, the judge heard their pleas, set bail, assigned a department to hear the case, and set the date for the preliminary hearing. After that, the lawyer sat down and the defendant vanished once again behind the telltale door.

Once cattle call had run its course, the judge ordered everyone out. He wanted to prepare the courtroom for his own morning calendar. As the lawyers filed toward the doors, Murchison rose from his seat in the back and snagged the sleeve of the assistant district attorney he’d been waiting for.

“Billy, got a minute? Something’s come up on the Baymont fires.”

Bill Reeves was a former cop out of San Francisco, night school law degree type. He was smarter than most of that breed, talked to you like a human being while deciding whether to go forward with a case or not, always bought a round for the rank and file. Murchison had worked at least a dozen major crimes with him.

In the hallway, Murchison ran down what Francis Templeton and Tina Navigato had told him about the fires and about Ralston Polhemus. It came out ragged, he had to backtrack once or twice to claim a neglected detail. Reeves cut him short.

“Murch, Murch. Let me stop you, okay? First, what you’re telling me here? I gotta be honest, it’s a little, I don’t know, untidy.”

Murchison nodded. “Been a long night.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“Jerry’s dead.”

Reeves sagged. “Ah, Jesus. I didn’t hear—”

“I was there.”

Reeves stared at him like he was nuts. “What are you doing on-duty? Murch, go home. You look like hell.”

“If I had a nickel for every time—”

“I’m serious. Go home.”

“Billy, I’m okay. Fine. This guy, his story. He wants immunity on his parole beef.”

“No doubt. But if he’s the only guy who can tell this story, he’s out of luck. He needs a corroborating witness. A credible one. He’s a convicted felon.”

“What about the bit with Polhemus?”

“He’s a wank, what can I tell you? He’s on a Bratcher slate, which means he’s tied in with Wally Glenn and Bob Craugh and just about every other redevelopment whore around here. They’ve been wanting to sink their teeth into that hill for ages. So? Now they’ve got their chance, they’re a little greedy about it. The commission on the bond float alone on a redevelopment deal that big’ll have brokers and lawyers on their knees for a piece. Polhemus, what he did, it’s tasteless, he’s got bad timing. Not a crime.” He reached out for Murchison’s shoulder, squeezed. “You need some sleep.”

Murchison averted his eyes. “Easier said than done.”

“Try.” Reeves, a big man, broad and hard, spoke with a strangely gentle concern. “One more thing? Way I’m hearing it, nobody in our office is gonna move on those fires till every agency involved gets its ducks in a row. The last thing, absolute last thing, we want is a bunch of cases heading into jury rooms with different fact patterns. That’d be a disaster. For everybody. So nobody’s going to grant your guy immunity unless every other prosecutor involved signs off on it. That means federal
and
state. Okay?” He patted Murchison’s shoulder. “Now go home.”

24

F
erry crossed the Rio San Miguel before noon and entered the Valle de San Quintín. Extinct volcanoes encircled the flatlands under a bright coastal sun, with the Sierra San Miguel to the east, Isla San Martin offshore. Hundreds of tottering shacks lined the road—fashioned of scrap wood and tin, with lashings of chicken wire. Indians from Oaxaca and Chiapas flocked here to work the vegetable farms that thrived among the irrigation canals fanning across the plain.

Soon he passed between the lines of stucco and clapboard stores along Mexico 1 that comprised San Quintín itself. One of the town’s curiosities was its Internet café—not as colorful as the
cholo’s
storefront he’d visited in Tijuana, just strange for its location here, on the final edge of civilization before the Baja wilderness.

He pulled in and parked, ignoring the two khaki-clad infantrymen from the Sixty-seventh Battalion loitering with
minutas
at an ice wagon. Ferry felt no threat, despite the carbines slung from their shoulders. American law enforcement didn’t trust the Mexican military enough to ally them in a manhunt, not on such short notice. He withdrew his laptop from the trunk of the dust-caked Caprice and headed up the café’s wood plank stairs.

Inside, an overhead fan spun lazily over a scuffed wood floor. The proprietor, a light-skinned Mexicana of matronly girth, breathed deep from a cactus blossom, eyeing Ferry as he took a seat, plugged in his laptop, and logged on.

Even an arrogant pirate like Bratcher deserves a second chance, he thought, checking his trust account. As expected, though, it still showed no activity. All right then, Ferry thought. Have it your way. He E-mailed the Pennington executive with whom he did business, provided his confirmation code, and ordered all funds be transferred into a new account in conformance with the trust documents on file with the bank. In keeping with past practice, he then sent a second message, repeating the request, using a second confidential code.

Last, he checked news reports of the fire. Unlike the radio accounts, here the names of some of those killed and injured were provided. A fleeting discomfort trickled up from somewhere, then he reminded himself it wasn’t his fault. I don’t dream these things up, he thought. I just do what I’m paid to do. There’s hardly fault in doing it well.

How many years had the city put off repairs of the sewers and storm drains, upgrades to the hydrants? How many years had they scotched the street work that would have made simple an effective evacuation and firefight? And there were reports of collateral “opportunity” fires, people torching their own places once they saw the hill go up. You can hardly blame me for that, he thought. Part of the rage people would be lathering themselves in would be solely to disguise their own guilt. The virtuous always scream loudest. They’re the most dishonest.

Glancing down the list of the dead, he came upon the name of Detective Gerald Stluka. It stopped him. He wondered if he read right. Checking again, he saw it was true, and logged off. He was still musing on how unforseen that was, how useful it might prove, as he settled up with the ample Mexicana, trying not to stare at her cleavage.

He drove south toward Lázaro Cárdenas, then turned west on a gravel road just beyond the Benito Juárez military camp. About seven miles in, just past Monte de Kenton, he followed a still smaller road, this one of rutted dirt, forking left toward the fishing village of Pedregal. Soon he was parked at the tidal flats at the north end of the Bahía Falsa, not far from the airstrip that brought the fishermen here from up north.

He reached into his duffel, pulled out a satellite phone, figuring he was too far from any transmission towers to make a cell phone usable. He dialed the Rio Mirada police department, and once the operator connected he asked for the voice mail of Detective Dennis Murchison. Soon he was listening to Murchison’s outgoing message, then came the beep.

Ferry found himself curiously unable to speak for a second. Collecting himself, he began: “This message will serve as my full confession.”

By midday, the war of words had commenced.

The chief, squaring himself before a battery of microphones and television cameras—flanked by Peterson on one side, Gladden, the CDF’s arson man, on the other, an ATF agent standing in the wings—read from a brief prepared statement.

“‘The investigation to this point indicates that all but a handful of the fires last night in Rio Mirada were the direct result of a sabotage plot against a local subprime lender named Frontline Financial. The fires were caused by a number of sophisticated incendiary devices planted in empty foreclosure properties and gasoline released from a tanker trunk that the perpetrators had hoped to hijack, then explode outside a local Frontline branch office. The principal saboteur, Manuel Turpin, was found dead at the scene of the failed hijacking. He was a convicted felony arsonist with suspected involvement in a number of incendiary fires in Northern California. He also had known ties to radical environmental groups, and the investigation is continuing, particularly concerning the possible involvement of one or more accomplices with similar ties.’”

In the question and answer period that followed, one of the reporters asked if the incendiary devices used were similar to others employed by radical greens. Gladden, showing a little initiative, stepped up to the microphone before either the chief or Peterson could stop him.

“No,” he admitted. “And they don’t match the kind of devices described in the bomb-making manual the ELF posted on its Web site, either. We’ve seen these before mainly in arson fires believed to have been related to organized crime.”

Peterson stepped forward. “You shouldn’t read too much into that.” He reclaimed the microphone, nudging Gladden aside. “The use of increasingly sophisticated methods is no more surprising than the increased level of violence and harm. Terrorism escalates. It’s what it’s meant to do.”

The denials came almost instantly. An organic grocer in Boulder, Colorado, who disavowed membership in the ELF or any of the targeted organizations but who admitted serving as an ad hoc spokesman, rendered a statement on their behalf, which he claimed he’d received anonymously over the Internet.

“‘The Baymont fires,’” he read, “‘did not and could not have been the result of any effort by environmental direct action advocates or their allies. The parties responsible for the fires made no attempt to educate the public concerning the damage being caused by the targeted bank, and no effort was made to protect human life. These are two core requirements of all direct action.

“‘Furthermore, as was seen in the attempt to frame Earth First activists Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney in 1990, and as revealed in the resulting civil trial this past year—a trial which resulted in a multimillion-dollar judgment against the FBI and Oakland police—these law enforcement agencies, along with private security forces working on behalf of corporations and others, are willing to fabricate evidence, lie under oath in support of illegal search warrant affidavits, and even stage violent acts themselves in their attempt to discredit the entire environmental movement. Such tactics are increasing—in one year alone, over one hundred intentional acts of violence or harassment were perpetrated not by, but against, environmentalists.’”

At his desk, the recriminations and disavowals Murchison suffered were more personal in nature. Trying to make headway through paperwork, he kept seeing Stluka, eyes howling with pain, shoving his bloody side arm into Murchison’s hand. Worse than the image was the wretched sick feeling, the pit of his stomach dropping out and his throat clamping shut in a gag reflex. Like he was still kneeling there. Like time meant nothing. Right now was back then, forever.

His mother tried to contact him, but he refused to have the call patched through. He did not much see the point of speaking with her. When Willy had died, he’d attempted, just once, to feel her out, see if solace might be offered. She’d stared at him with a cold bewilderment. “It’s not all about you,” she’d said.