One Through the Heart (16 page)

‘I can’t go with you. I can’t go to a police station. I wouldn’t be able to talk there and I’d be afraid of one of them seeing me leave here with you.’

‘He’s not watching you.’

‘I’m not going to a police station.’

‘The Homicide Detail is an officer on the Fifth Floor. It’s not like a police station. It won’t feel like that.’

‘I’ve been in an interview room. I was questioned for forty-eight hours. I’m not going with you unless you arrest me.’

Raveneau backed off a little and as they talked more he asked Lindsley, ‘Are you willing to wear a wire?’

‘No, Ike has equipment to detect that kind of thing. She brags about it.’ Lindsley blew air out and shook his head. ‘We’re talking about someone who can get into your cellphone and turn on the microphone.’ He pointed at Raveneau. ‘That could be your phone. I’ll do whatever, but she scares me.’

‘Same as Alan scares you.’

‘All right, I’m afraid of everybody, but I’ll tell you what, I’m most afraid of law enforcement ineptitude. I don’t want to get framed in the big hurrah when Alan and the freaks go down. Then I’ll be in court shackled and listening to some serious-faced law enforcement dupe tell the jury I colluded. I can’t defend myself from that. It’ll be like standing on train tracks facing down an oncoming train. Juries are stupid and the media feeds the public the same way people throw seeds to pigeons in a park. Everyone is going to assume I’m part of whatever plot they have going.’

‘You can keep that from happening by helping us stop them.’

‘I need something formal. I need something in writing and I need a lawyer.’

‘We can work with you through your lawyer, but you’ll still have to give us everything you know and we’ll need you to keep talking with Alan Siles.’

‘They want to kill a lot of people. That’s all I really know about the plot. They think that’s the cleansing she wrote about. They don’t really understand her.’

‘How are they going to do that?’

‘I have no clue.’

‘Have dirty bombs been discussed?’

‘Yes, somehow they have access to medical waste and they are really into wind direction. Having the wind blowing the right way is something they talk about. They’ve let me hear that or Alan wants me to hear it.’

‘Do you think that’s what it is, a dirty bomb?’

‘Could be. They’ve talked dirty bombs and the last time was a couple of months ago over beer and pizza. But they weren’t specific, it’s all hypothetical, as if they are just discussing an idea. John sits silent and Ike and Alan talk and Alan tries to draw me in. I can tell you where and I remember the coffee place now, but I only want to be interviewed by you, no one else, not your partner, not anyone.’

‘There need to be other witnesses. At least one should be my partner.’

‘Then she’s going to have to come here.’

‘All right, I’ll call her and I’m going to do that outside and then I’ll come back up. You OK with that? You’ll wait here?’

‘I’ll be here.’

‘I’ll be about fifteen and then I’ll be back.’

‘I’ll be here.’

‘You’re doing the right thing.’

Raveneau walked down the stairs and called la Rosa from the asphalt lot.

‘He’s talking. You need to get here.’

A
s they waited for la Rosa, Lindsley started to hyperventilate. Raveneau was unsure if that was real anxiety or an act, but suggested they take a walk, and once outside in the sunlight Lindsley proposed getting a coffee. But that was the last thing he needed and Raveneau eased him off that and they kept walking. They were a block and a half away from Lindsley’s apartment building when la Rosa drove past. Raveneau watched her turn into the apartment lot and then called her.

‘He wants to take a drive.’

And that’s what they did. Raveneau drove through the many curves of the mountain, Lindsley in the backseat, la Rosa talking with him all the way up and about everything, the clear blue day, the beautiful if unusually hot start to the fall, the blood that seeped through the cot mattress and the obvious purpose of the restraints that held down whoever was on the cot.

‘When you were in the bomb shelter you must have seen it?’

‘We were in there with flashlights and candles. They invited me and I was only there once. I don’t like caves. I don’t like being underground, and I think Alan sees himself as a messianic figure and is a little bit insane.’

‘Did you have a flashlight?’

‘I did.’

‘You must have looked around.’

‘Sure, I shined the light around but it was hard to look away from the skulls. Alan said one of them was Ann’s.’

‘Did he show you which one?’

‘No.’

‘Did you count them?’

‘Count the skulls? No, I didn’t count them.’

‘You must have seen the cot.’

‘They took me there to make me part of what they were doing. That’s what it was about, OK? Alan was either bringing me on board or testing and taunting me. He knew I wouldn’t go to the police.’

‘How could he know that?’

Raveneau heard the quieter softer turn in la Rosa’s voice and he was right there with her. How could Alan Siles know, or why was he unafraid of Lindsley tipping the police anonymously? Lindsley needed a good explanation for that.

‘He told me construction was going to start and the bomb shelter would get found and then we could all watch Lash squirm. That was one thing we shared, for sure. I don’t know what Lash did to make Alan hate him. I’ve never asked, but I’ve understood. I felt the same way and I was thinking about Ann and it seemed like the cleanest way for the police to come to it would be if it got discovered by the builder. I agreed with Alan. It was going to get found and the police would go straight to Lash, and I guess I also didn’t want to have anything to do with the police, like I was saying earlier.’

‘Did you find the stacked skulls disturbing?’

She was asking,
didn’t you find the skulls and the chance Ann Coryell’s skull was here and the bloodstained cot too disturbing to ignore?

‘It was terrible. It was very bad but he said construction was starting within a month and it did. If it hadn’t I would have called you. I would have done it.’

‘Of course, and you’re telling us you knew about the skulls in the bomb shelter about five weeks ago, but you don’t know how many were in there.’

‘We stayed about ten minutes. It was night and we went back out through the Presidio. We walked through the trees down to the road and then to the car.’ Lindsley said the next thing to Raveneau. ‘That’s the same car you saw outside Grate’s Place.’

‘The Chevy Malibu,’ Raveneau said. ‘OK, got it.’

La Rosa asked, ‘What were the candles for?’

‘They were probably for me and for nothing. They brought those candles in that night and I doubt any of them have been back. I’m sure they haven’t. The skulls were meant to get found and they were.’

‘Give us a date.’

‘OK, I’ve got to pull out my phone and look at the calendar. It’s bizarre I can’t just rattle off the date.’

He fumbled with his phone and maybe with his story as Raveneau piloted them out the ridge road, the ocean below and off to their left, the grass on the mountain’s flanks dry, golden, and brittle after months without rain. The road undulated and he took it slowly and he kept quiet, listening as la Rosa worked her way forward and back with Lindsley. They followed the ridge out and were close now to where he and Lindsley stood and talked near the Pantoll Trail. Raveneau eased off to the right side of the road as they reached the junction. He and la Rosa lowered their windows and there was just enough of a breeze and it was cooler with the redwoods. He left the car running.

‘I have a question,’ Raveneau said.

‘You won’t like the answer.’

‘Do you want to hear the question first?’

‘You want to know how I knew where her remains were and I could tell you I was up here like some other people who were just curious about the police activity after a body was found. I was up here, but that’s not how I knew about the body. I didn’t know it was her, but I knew there were remains of a woman up on the mountain and he told me where.’

‘Who told you?’

‘A guy named Bob Taney I buy dope from. I smoke. He deals with a guy who grows really good stuff and he told me some teenagers he knows and sells to were looking for a place to party and they walked down the slope and found the remains. They went back there several times and didn’t tell anybody and it was Taney who tipped the police when one of the guys told him. That was three months after they first found her, or something close to that. If you check you’ll find the first call was an anonymous tip from an unknown male who never came forward.’

Raveneau already knew that was true. ‘Can you get Taney to talk to me?’

‘I can try.’

‘We’re not interested in the dope dealing. If I can I’d like to get to the kids who first found her.’

‘He’s not going to want to give you their names.’

‘Probably not, but I’d like to talk to him today if I can. Are you willing to call him?’

‘Right now?’

‘No, go on, so far Taney has told you about a woman’s remains up on the mountain. But it’s a big mountain.’

‘The kids gave him pretty good directions and he gave them to me. Ever since she disappeared anytime I read about an unknown woman’s body getting found I wondered if it was Ann. This was in my backyard so when Taney called the police he let me know and I went up there that day and there was just a park ranger walking around. The next day there were dogs. That’s when they found her.’

‘You saw it.’

‘I did.’ Neither Raveneau nor la Rosa said anything and Lindsley spoke again, saying, ‘You ask for dates a lot, Inspector Raveneau. You should write today’s date down. This is the day I told you Attis Martin’s real name is Alan Siles and it’s the same day I told you he’s gone. All three of them are gone.’

‘What do you mean they are gone?’ Raveneau asked.

‘Emails, cellphones, all the connections, chat room aliases, all those have gone dead. Whatever computers they were using before they’re not using now and I’ve heard Ike talk. They won’t touch a single electronic anything that they’ve used before. They’ve switched completely to the throwaway cellphones and I’ll bet they never use one more than once. It’s happening.’

‘What is?’ la Rosa asked.

‘The day Alan talked about. It’s about disruption, confusion, fear, and death on a scale big enough to provoke change. I’ll give you an example and when you catch Alan Siles he can give you the year and the date. He knows all the names of the US officers in charge.

‘This happened in the Powder River Basin. Federal troops rode into a Sioux village of two hundred teepees and slaughtered everyone they could catch and burned the village. Not necessarily an unusual event, just what they did that week. It was ahead of winter but not by much and they destroyed the pemmican and any other stored food they could find. That way anyone they missed, the winter might get. Alan researched plenty of those sorts of events. He was very interested in how the tribes responded to what they were largely powerless to stop.

‘In this case it was the Sioux tribe and the soldiers were there because the Sioux had stolen horses and ponies and killed settlers squatting on their land. This was before the treaties got modified again and the land that was Sioux land got even smaller. The Sioux knew as the soldiers entered the village that it wouldn’t stop. Alan wants people here to feel that powerlessness. You heard him, Inspector Raveneau. You heard what he reads into Coryell’s writing. He’s righteous. That’s what you’re up against, a righteous man, and it’s about making people see themselves and the past differently. People think because it happened so long ago that’s it’s gone. He’s going to show them it’s not gone, it’s not forgotten.’

Raveneau drove slowly down the narrow Fairfax-Bolinas Road toward Lake Alpine and then to Fairfax, and la Rosa picked up the questioning again.

‘Brandon, help me out here,’ she said. ‘What can three people do to kill a large number of people? Are we talking about multiple dirty bombs? We’ve got a wind that’s supposed to come up hard; is that the weather change he’s looking for, for the spread clouds from dirty bombs?’

Lindsley ignored her and said to Raveneau, ‘I almost talked to you the night we met at Grate’s Place. I actually followed you when we left there. When I went around the corner I ran to my car and then raced back and found you. I tried to follow you home but I lost you or maybe you noticed me. Is that what happened?’

Lindsley glanced in the rear view mirror and caught his grin.

‘Why San Francisco?’ la Rosa asked, and this time Lindsley answered her.

‘Symbolic edge of America’s western expansion and the Gold Rush growth of San Francisco symbolic of the greed and plundering that characterized the age. We wrote the history but the truth remains.’

‘You’re quoting Coryell with that last line,’ Raveneau said.

‘Right on, Inspector, you’re the man, and that’s why Alan wants you on the big stage with him. Don’t forget he told you that you’re the witness. You’re the one who will later explain it all.’

‘And where are you?’

‘They’ve left me behind. I had my chance and I didn’t take it. Now I’m betraying them and I’m with you. I’m one hundred percent with you but I’ve got to convince you and that’s not going to be easy. Where are we going next?’

‘To the FBI office in San Francisco.’

‘Really?’

‘Got to.’

‘I thought we weren’t going to do that.’

‘We’ll be there with you.’

‘That disappoints me.’

That’s where Lindsley went quiet. That’s where things turned. Later, Raveneau would think a lot about that.

C
oe asked Lindsley if he was willing to take a polygraph, what the Feds now called a PDD or psychological detection of deception test, and Lindsley buried a smirk and said, ‘Why not?’ So now early in the interview they were eliciting control questions from him to use in the test.

Raveneau doubted anyone in the room really believed in a PDD other than as a tool for interrogation, yet he watched Lindsley closely as they put the cuff on and the questions started. Raveneau had his own theory that he didn’t share with Coe until they were outside and looking for someplace cool to sit and have a sandwich.