One Through the Heart (28 page)

‘You didn’t call her?’

‘When did she tell you this?’

‘This morning.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Lying?’ Hugh was silent and Raveneau was ready for him to hang up. ‘Lash is talking to us. He knows Alan Siles and called to warn us. You played poker with Lindsley at Lash’s when he was working on the book about San Francisco officers. Lash says Siles was there too. You’ve seen his face. Are you sure you don’t remember him? Lash says he started research on that book well before Coryell disappeared and that Siles worked for him. He came up with the backyard barbecues and the poker games as a way to meet SFPD officers and get their stories in a casual way. You may have seen him at one of those get-togethers. If Lash is telling the truth both Siles and Lindsley were at those.’

‘Something is wrong with you. There were three homicide inspectors, three out of the sixteen we had at the Detail at the time, who were at those poker games. Don’t you think with these fires and the Feds manic to find these guys that someone would have come forward and said, hey, I remember that guy from Lash’s parties? No one has done that. Why wouldn’t they? I think you’re fishing again. You’re trying to get to me.’

‘I want to meet with you.’

‘We played cards once a week and not everybody made it every time but Professor Lash got what he needed. He wanted stories about what it felt like to be a career cop inside the department. There’s no secret in any of that, and I didn’t meet any of these firebugs. I knew Lindsley because he was like a butler to Lash. Are you implying I know this Siles and I’m not coming forward? If so, fuck you.’

Hugh hung up and Raveneau called Lindsley. An hour later he picked him up at a bus stop and bought him lunch in the Presidio.

‘Lash’s lawyer contacted us and we’ve been talking to him about a deal for Lash. His version contradicts yours.’

‘Of course it does.’

Raveneau held up a hand. ‘I hear you but he says he’s only going to live another four months and he wants to leave with a clear conscience.’

‘Thanks for the sandwich, but get real, Inspector. Would I lead you to something that I hid that’s going to implicate me?’

‘Maybe it’s going to implicate Siles. Lash wanted to talk about Siles and you, and the three of you, and says you and Siles both did research for him and knew each other. He says you socialized together all the time.’

‘Not true.’

‘It’s his word against yours. He says you all sat around drinking bourbon and talked about a spiritual cleansing. This was after Coryell was dead. The conversation ran toward shocking society and changing the collective unconscious. A spiritual cleansing in San Francisco that meant sacrificing significant numbers of people was to start with fires and then continue with other acts of violence. Lash has written you right into a lead role dead center.’

‘Everything I told you about Siles was true.’

‘Your problem is Lash says you were at meetings where setting wildfires was discussed as a means to an end by Siles, you and him. He thought of it as a philosophical exercise and had forgotten about it until he saw Siles’ face on TV. He wants to trade testimony for immunity for all things for six months. He’s already got one foot out the back door and he’d like to go out a hero. Here’s my best advice to you: save yourself, and do it now while you still can. After our next interview with Lash, I don’t think the offer to you will stand anymore. Either you beat him to it or he takes you down.’

‘I didn’t have anything to do with the fires and it’s not illegal to talk about ideas, at least not yet. I get that it’s headed that way.’

‘We’re going to talk to Lash again this afternoon and this time we’ll be taping him.’

‘Go for it, and I’m done helping you. I’m lawyering up.’ He stared at Raveneau. ‘Did you ever see the movie where the guy is in the stone cell with the walls that keep closing in on him and just a little at a time? He goes to sleep at night and in the morning the walls are a little closer together. He starts marking the floor to make sure he’s not crazy, and he’s right – they’re moving a tiny bit every day. He figures out how many days it’s going to take before he gets crushed. That’s where I’m at and that’s after leading you to what may be the murder weapon. It’s as if there’s nothing I can do. The walls just keep closing in. I’m surrounded. I feel like the man in the movie.’

‘It’s not working,’ Raveneau said. ‘It’s not going to go down the way you want.’

Lindsley laughed. He held up his phone so Raveneau could read the screen. ‘Something is,’ he said, then explained. ‘If there’s any news with Albert Lash’s name in it I get an alert. Looks like the professor made the news.’ He laughed again, a giddy lightness in it. ‘Check this out. What’s this do to your investigation?’

He held his phone up so Raveneau could read the screen.

‘Author Lash Dead of Heart Attack.’

W
hen Coe called Raveneau he was quietly upbeat, yet at the same time uncomfortable with misleading the media. It would come back to haunt him. But Lindsley did swallow the hook and that’s what mattered. Lindsley gloated over Lash’s death and Lash was now hidden away on an upper floor of the hospital cooperating with the FBI.

‘All things considered, he’s doing OK,’ Coe said. ‘I saw him an hour ago. He’s hooked up to everything they own but they say his heart has very little damage and they’re questioning whether it really was a heart attack. May have been a reaction to the drugs he usually takes and whatever treatment he’s had for the radiation poisoning. He called his sister and she’s turned over those notebooks to us, and yeah I know you want copies. That’s being done. I’ll get them to you tomorrow.

‘There’s something else, Ben. We got a tip we’re acting on and you may want to be there. A hiker saw a man along the shoreline at Crystal Springs Reservoir that he thought might be Alan Siles. He was dressed in running clothes, a baseball cap and sunglasses. We have Siles sightings every five minutes now and I’m sure you’re getting them too, but this is credible enough to where we’re checking it out early tomorrow morning. We need daylight for this lead. The individual that called this in tried to follow the man and the man made it hard for him. He picked up his speed and jogged away. When our tipster first saw him he was down by the water, right down at the edge of the reservoir leaning over looking at something in the water. He was holding a small device in his right hand.’

‘Holding his cellphone?’

‘No, and it gets more interesting. Our hiker watched him get into a late model Toyota, possibly a Camry, with tinted windows, gray colored. They got a partial plate and then went back and located where he had been along the shoreline. They found the spot because they found some sort of transponder. He sent us photos he took and left the transponder or whatever it is in place. We didn’t talk with the individual who reported it until about an hour ago, but we’re going down very early to check it out. You’ve been talking city water supply—’

‘I’ll meet you there.’

At dawn Raveneau exited 280 forty-five minutes south of San Francisco. He wasn’t far from the Pulgas Water Temple and remembered his way to the intersection of Edgewood and the other road. He found a place to park, killed his lights, and got out. The Feds were here already and they hadn’t waited on him. He wouldn’t have waited either. He found the trail following the water district’s fence, avoiding poison oak as he worked his way along.

The water of the reservoir reflected the sunrise and was crimson and Raveneau turned in his head the idea of poisoning the water. It was the damming of the Hetch Hetchy that brought water from the Sierras and allowed San Francisco to grow and fulfill the dream of western expansion. The Pulgas Temple that marked the place where the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct terminated one hundred sixty miles from its source was close by.

He studied the hole in the chain-link fence. After 9/11 the water district was more careful about allowing public access, but with the acreage of a watershed how could you stop anybody? It would take an army posted and on guard every day all day. But if poisoning the water was the goal it wouldn’t be the storage water they’d want to empty radioactive material into. They would want water already in the distribution system, and that was harder to do.

Raveneau found Coe, and the citizen who had reported it was there and still getting thanked every few minutes. No one knew what the transponder was for other than sending a signal marking its location, but you would have thought this guy had brought home a gold medal from the Olympics.

Raveneau left Coe and drove north with a map of the pipe distribution system the Bay Area Water Supply and Conservation Agency emailed him. He stopped at the last major distribution point and studied the layout of the plant, walking the perimeter before continuing on to the Hall.

Now he was with la Rosa crossing Seventh to get to Café Roma where she would order a double cappuccino and a croissant and Raveneau a medium coffee with an inch of milk foam on top. It was a ritual and a way to get out and talk things through, often bouncing from one idea to the next. It had worked for them before. La Rosa usually took point, asking the questions, as she did now.

‘So what do you think about both things?’

‘The water threat and Hugh?’

‘Yes, but first the water.’

‘I think the water is a bluff and they don’t have a way of making it happen. My guess is John Royer got a hold of a little bit of nuclear waste from the medical equipment maker he worked for. He knew the combinations. He was cleared. He was able to get in and out and all this about him having trouble getting a lead-lined vessel is nonsense. It’s not hard. You can buy them online. He got enough to poison Lash and there was some left over and that’s what he swallowed.

‘But enough waste to poison a city water supply, I doubt it, though that doesn’t mean that’s not what they have in mind. They may well. Throwing radioactive waste into the water supply is similar to setting the fires. I doubt the fires were started to kill people. They were more about creating panic and fear and leaving a mark, and radioactive water would get a pretty good reaction, especially if some got sick before the cause was discovered.’

‘It would shut the city down.’

Raveneau agreed and she asked, ‘Are you saying Royer drank his own brew?’

‘I’m guessing yes.’

‘Does Lindsley have access to the radioactive material?’

‘No.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s using Siles, and Siles is very aware. I think Lindsley is close to giving us Siles, but he’s also afraid Siles might come for him or has enough dirt on him to take him down with him.’

‘Siles will be apprehended in the next twenty-four hours.’

‘You’re on, I’ll take that bet. I think they planned ahead and did it well. That’s why we can’t find them. I also think they’re taking a page from the jihadis. They’ve decided to give up their lives. It’s a suicide pact, but that doesn’t say everybody is on-board with it. Maybe Royer was or maybe he was helped along after he committed to placing the incendiary devices. Maybe Siles wanted to eliminate the risk of him confessing later. My guess is Royer drank his own brew and missed a little with his timing.’ Raveneau paused before throwing his idea at her. ‘It’s Latkos who’s making me think it’s a suicide pact.’

‘Why?’

‘Coe told me she did do cyber work for an unnamed agency and in a loose way they protect her. But she also has enemies. His sources back up the idea she ripped off Russian mob money and then got the hell out of Berlin. That was before the sex reassignment operation. That’s when she was still male. Lindsley told me the gender change wasn’t anything Latkos wanted to do. It was about hiding and staying alive.’

‘I don’t believe that. No one switches sex because they’re being hunted.’

‘That’s why it might be true. No one does it. So maybe it would work. It’s a lot different than cross dressing. At any rate her face has gone national so it’s gone international and she let that happen. If there’s someone out there seriously looking for her, they’ll put it together.’

Raveneau held the door of Café Roma for her but she hesitated.

‘I’ve got one last question before we go in,’ la Rosa said, and Raveneau let the door fall shut. He stepped back from the entrance and she asked, ‘Are the Feds being straight with us?’

Raveneau let a gust of wind blow through before answering, ‘Not completely.’

‘That’s what I think too. So what do we do about it?’

‘Nothing.’

‘I want to get in Coe’s face.’

‘It’s coming from above him.’

‘I don’t care where it’s coming from. He’s the one standing in our office talking about sharing everything. If radioactive material gets in the water system it’s never going to be the same here. We need everything they have.’ Her voice got louder. ‘This is home. This is ours. Some goofus sitting in FBI headquarters back east can’t know what that means. We need to know everything.’

She glared at Raveneau. Then her eyes softened and as the wind gusted again, she pulled open the door to Café Roma and they went in. There, she said quietly, ‘We live here. We have everything at stake. We need everything they have.’

I
n the late afternoon a dry north-east wind rose. Gusts straightened flags and rattled the dry leaves of the plane trees along the sidewalk in front of the Hall of Justice. Forecasters predicted strong winds that would peak in the next twenty-four to thirty-six hours and not reach the strength of those that drove the fires. That did little to reassure people. Two of the three suspected arsonists were still at large.

In San Francisco winds of twenty-five to thirty miles an hour were predicted, and as Raveneau walked to his car the wind felt that strong already. He drove toward a meeting with Lash at the hospital. When he got there Lash was sitting up and wearing a device around his neck that was studded with tiny microphones. The microphones Bluetoothed to the computer on a chair in the corner and anything he said ran through software trained to his speech patterns. Fragments became words. Words sentences. The software program corrected, completed, and amplified. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. As Lash exhaled his answers in a whisper his voice came out of two speakers alongside the computer. His voice sounded normal and that was strange.