3rd Degree Page 16

  “This better be good,” she said as she flipped the lock.

  “It’s good, Cindy.” I shoved the old Examiner article in front of her face. “I think I found out how Jill’s connected to the case.”

  Fifteen minutes later we were bouncing along the darkened, empty streets of the city in my Explorer, down to the Chronicle’s office on Fifth and Mission.

  “I didn’t even know Jill’s father worked out here,” Cindy said, then yawned.

  “He started here, out of law school, before he moved back to Texas. Right after Jill was born.”

  We got to her cubicle at about three A.M. The lights in the newsroom were dimmed, a couple of young stringers manning the overnight wires, caught playing video bridge.

  “Overnight efficiency audit,” Cindy said to them, straight-faced. “You guys just failed.”

  She wheeled herself in front of her screen and fired up the computer. She plugged a few search words into the Chronicle’s database: Robert Meyer. BNA. Then she slapped the ENTER key.

  Several matches popped up on the screen right away. We plowed through a lot of unrelated articles of antiwar and BNA activity in the sixties. Then we found something.

  PROSECUTOR NAMED IN DEADLY BNA RAID CASE.

  A series of articles from September 1970.

  We scrolled back from there, and bingo! FEDS, POLICE RAID BNA STRONGHOLD. FOUR DEAD IN SHOOTOUT.

  It was in the days of the sixties radicals. Constant protests over the war, SDS riots on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. We scrolled through several articles. The BNA had robbed a few banks and then a Brink’s truck. A guard, a hostage, and two cops were killed in the robbery. Two BNA members were on the FBI’s list of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

  We scrolled through whatever the Chronicle had on file. A BNA hideout was raided the night of December 6, 1969. The Feds had surrounded a house on a quiet street in Berkeley based on a tip from a CI. They came in, guns blazing.

  Five radicals in the house were killed. Among the dead were Fred Whitehouse, a leader of the group, and two women.

  There was one white kid shot dead in the raid, a student at Berkeley. From an upper-middle-class background near Sacramento. Family and friends insisted he didn’t even know how to fire a gun. Just an idealistic kid caught up protesting an immoral war.

  No one would say what he was doing in the house.

  William “Billy” Danko was his name.

  Chapter 86

  A grand jury was convened to investigate the shootings at the BNA hideout. Nasty charges were hurled left and right. The case was given to a rising prosecutor in the D.A.’s office. Robert Meyer. Jill’s father.

  The jury at the trial found no evidence of any police misconduct. Those who were killed, the police argued, were among the FBI’s most wanted, though the description seemed a stretch for Billy Danko. Federal agents paraded a cache of guns confiscated in the raid: Uzis, grenade launchers, piles of ammo. A gun was found in Fred Whitehouse’s hand—though sympathizers claimed it had been planted.

  “Okay,” Cindy said wearily, and pushed back from the screen, “where do we go from here?”

  The database referred to an article from 1971, a year later, in the Chronicle’s Sunday news magazine.

  “You got a morgue downstairs, don’t you?”

  “Yes, we do. Downstairs. A morgue.”

  It was now close to four A.M. We flicked on a light in the morgue, and there was nothing but row after row of metal shelves filled with mesh and wire bins.

  I frowned, deflated. “You know the system, Cindy?”

  “Of course I know the system,” she replied. “You come in here during normal working hours and you ask the guy sitting at the desk.”

  We split up and roamed the dark, crammed corridors. Cindy wasn’t exactly sure if the files went back that far; what we were searching for might only be on film.

  Finally I heard her shout, “I found something!”

  I wound my way through the dark rows, following the sound of her voice. When I found Cindy, she was hauling down bundled old issues of the magazine supplement in large plastic bins. They were labeled by year.

  We sat on the cold, concrete floor, side by side, barely enough light to read by.

  Still, we quickly found the article the database had referred us to. It was an expos? titled “What Really Happened to the Hope Street Five.”

  According to the writer, the local police had fabricated the whole crime scene to get rid of the insurgents. They had been tipped off by an unnamed CI. It was a massacre, not an arrest. Supposedly the victims were sleeping in their beds.

  A lot of the article was focused on the white victim in the raid, Billy Danko. The FBI had claimed he was a Weatherman and tied him to a bombing at a regional office of Raytheon, a manufacturer of weapons. The article in the Chronicle contradicted most of the FBI’s facts about Danko, who did seem to be an innocent victim.

  It was four in the morning. I was getting frustrated, angry.

  Cindy and I seemed to fix on it at the same time.

  The court proceedings. It was brought out that the BNA and the Weathermen used code names when they contacted one another. Fred Whitehouse was Bobby Z, after a Black Panther who was gunned down. Leon Mickens was Vlad—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Joanne Crow was Sasha, a woman who had blown herself up fighting the junta in Chile.

  “You see it, Cindy?” I looked at her in the thinning light.

  The name that Billy Danko had chosen for himself was August Spies.

  Jill had shown us the way.

  Chapter 87

  The lights were blazing in Molinari’s office—the only lights on in the Hall at six A.M.

  He was on the phone when I went in. His face brightened into what I took as a worn smile, pleased but exhausted. No one was getting any sleep these days.

  “I was just trying to assure the chief of staff,” he said, signing off the phone and smiling, “that we weren’t the security equal out here of, say, Chechnya—with larger bridges. Tell me you have something, anything.”

  I pushed across the yellowed, folded article I had found in Jill’s study.

  Molinari picked up the article, PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE. He scanned it.

  “What was it you called them, Joe? Radicals from the sixties who you said are still out there, who never surfaced?”

  “White rabbits?” he said.

  “What if it wasn’t political? What if there was something else motivating them? Or maybe it’s partly political, but there’s something else?”

  “Motivating what, Lindsay?”

  I pushed across the last article, the Sunday magazine supplement, folded to the part about Billy Danko’s code name, circled in bright red: August Spies.

  “To get back in the game. To commit these murders. Maybe to get some kind of revenge. I don’t know everything yet. There’s something here, though.”

  For the next few minutes I briefed Molinari on everything that we had—right up to the prosecutor Robert Meyer, Jill’s father.

  Molinari blinked glassily. He looked at me as if I might be crazy. And it sounded crazy. Whatever I had was flying in the face of the investigation, the pronouncements of the killers, the wisdom of every law-enforcement agency in the country.

  “Just where do you want to go with this, Lindsay?” Molinari finally asked.

  “We’ve got to find out whatever we can about the people in that house. I’d start with Billy Danko. His family was from Sacramento. The FBI has files on what happened, right? Department of Justice, whatever it is. I need to know everything the Feds know.”

  Molinari shook his head slowly back and forth. I realized I was asking for a lot. He closed his eyes for a second and leaned back in his chair. When he opened them I saw the faintest outline of a smile. “I knew there was a reason I missed you, Lindsay.”

  I took that as a yes.

  “What I didn’t know”—he pushed back his chair—“was that it was due to the likely prospect we’re both goi
ng to have some time on our hands after we’re removed from our jobs.”

  “I missed you, too,” I said.

  Chapter 88

  San Francisco was in a panic the likes of which I had never seen before. The news stories never seemed to stop. Meanwhile, where the hell were we? Not close enough to the killers, I was afraid.

  My whole theory depended on finding some way to make the other victims fit in with the current murders. I was certain there was a connection.

  Bengosian was from Chicago. That seemed a long shot to tie in. But I remembered Lightower had gone to Berkeley. His CLO had told us that when we were up at Lightower’s company after he was killed.

  I placed a call to Dianne Aronoff, Mort Lightower’s sister, and caught her at home. We talked and I found out that her brother had been a member of the SDS. In ’69, his junior year at Berkeley, he had taken a leave of absence.

  Nineteen sixty-nine was the year of the Hope Street raid. Did that mean anything? It just might.

  About one o’clock, Jacobi knocked on my window. “I think we found your guy Danko’s father.”

  He and Cappy had started with the phone book, then matched up the address with a local high school. Danko’s father was still in Sacramento. Same address as they had lived in back in 1969. A man had answered when Cappy called. Hung up as soon as the inspectors had brought up Billy Danko’s name.

  “There’s an FBI office down there.” Jacobi shrugged. “Or?”

  “Here”—I jumped up, flipping him the keys to the Explorer—“you drive.”

  Chapter 89

  It was about two hours on Highway 80 any way you cut it to Sacramento, and we kept the Explorer at a steady seventy-five over the Bay Bridge. An hour and fifty minutes later we pulled up in front of a slightly run-down fifties-style ranch. We needed a win here, needed it badly.

  The house was large but neglected, a slope of faded lawn and a fenced-in lot in back. Danko’s father was a doctor, I recalled. Thirty years ago, this might’ve been one of the nicest houses on the block.

  I took off my sunglasses and knocked on the front door. It took a while for someone to answer, and I was feeling impatient, to say the least.

  Finally an old man opened and peered out at us. I could see his nose and sharp, pointed chin—a resemblance to the picture of Billy Danko in the Chronicle magazine.

  “You the idiots who called on the phone?” He stood there, regarding us warily. “Of course you are.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer,” I said. “And this is Homicide Inspector Warren Jacobi. Do you mind if we come in?”

  “I mind,” he said, but he swung the screen door open anyway. “I’ve got nothing to say to the police if it concerns my son, other than accepting their full apology for his murder.”

  He led us back through musty, paint-chipped halls into a small den. It didn’t seem that anyone else was living with him.

  “We were hoping to ask you just a few questions regarding your son,” Jacobi said.

  “Ask.” Danko sank himself into a patchwork couch. “Better time to ask questions was thirty years ago. William was a good boy, a great boy. We raised him to think for himself, and he did, made choices of conscience—the right ones, it was proven out later. Losing that boy cost me everything I had. My wife …” He nodded toward a black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged woman. “Everything.”

  “We’re sorry for what happened.” I sat on the edge of a badly stained armchair. “No one’s here to cause you more distress. I’m sure you’re familiar with what’s been going on in San Francisco recently. A lot of people have died there.”

  Danko shook his head. “Thirty years later, and you still won’t let him rest in peace.”

  I glanced at Jacobi. This was going to be a tough go. I started in talking about Jill, how we had found the connection between her father and the raid on the Hope Street house. Then how one of the other victims, Lightower, also had a connection to Berkeley and the student revolts.

  “Don’t mean to tell you your job, Inspectors”—Carl Danko smiled—“but that sounds like a lot of crazy suppositions to me.”

  “Your son had a code name,” I said, “August Spies. August Spies is the name that’s being used by the people who are doing these killings.”

  Carl Danko snorted derisively and reached for a pipe. He seemed to find all of this humorous.

  “Do you know anyone who might be involved?” I pressed. “One of Billy’s friends? Maybe someone’s been in touch with you lately?”

  “Whoever is doing it, God bless him.” Carl Danko cleaned out his pipe. “Truth is, you’ve wasted your time coming out here. I can’t help you a lick. And if I could …I hope somehow you can understand why I might not be so disposed to help the San Francisco Police. Now please leave my house.”

  Jacobi and I stood up. I took a step toward the door, praying for some kind of epiphany before I got there. I stopped at the picture of his wife. Then I noticed a photo next to hers.

  It was a family shot.

  Something caused me to focus on the faces.

  There was another son in the photo.

  Younger. Maybe sixteen. A spitting image of his mother.

  The four of them smiling, not a care on what seemed a pleas

  ant, sunny day in the distant past. “You have another son.” I turned back to Danko. “Charles …” He shrugged. I picked up the photo. “Maybe we should talk to him. He

  might know something.” “Doubt it.” Danko stared at me. “He’s dead, too.”

  Chapter 90

  Back in the Explorer, I called in to Cappy. “I want you to run the background on a Charles Danko. Born in Sacramento, 1953–54. Possibly deceased. That’s the best I have. And go back as far as you have to go. If this guy’s dead, I want to see the death certificate to prove it.”

  “I’ll get on it,” Cappy said. “Meanwhile, I got one for you. George Bengosian, Lieutenant. You were right, he did get a pre-med degree from the University of Chicago. But that was after he transferred there from Berkeley. Bengosian was there in ’sixty-nine.”

  “Thanks, Cappy. Great work. Keep it up.”

  So now we had three—Jill, Lightower, and Bengosian—who were tied to the murderous police raid on Hope Street. And the code name August Spies linked to Billy Danko.

  I didn’t know what to do with it yet. As Danko said, it was all a bunch of suppositions.

  While Jacobi drove back to the city, I finally dozed for a bit. It was my first solid sleep in three days. We got back to the Hall about six. “In case you were wondering,” Jacobi said, “you snore.”

  “Purr,” I corrected. “I purr.”

  Before heading back to my office, I wanted to check on Molinari. I ran upstairs and squeezed myself into his office. A meeting was in progress. What was this?

  Chief Tracchio was sitting at his desk. So was Tom Roach from the FBI. And Strickland, who was in charge of the G-8 advance security.

  “Lightower was there,” I announced, barely able to hold back my excitement. “At Berkeley—at the time of the BNA raid. George Bengosian was, too. They were all there.”

  “I know,” Molinari said.

  Chapter 91

  It only took me a second. “You found the FBI file on the BNA?”

  “Better,” Molinari said. “We found one of the FBI agents who was in charge of the raid on Hope Street.

  “William Danko was a card-carrying member of the Weathermen. You can be sure of it. He was sighted casing the site of the regional offices of Grumman, which were bombed in September of 1969. His code name, August Spies, was picked up in monitored phone traffic of known Weathermen lines. The kid was no innocent, Lindsay. He was involved in murder.”

  Molinari pushed forward a yellow legal pad filled with his handwriting. “The FBI had begun following him about three months before the raid. There were a couple of others involved out of the Berkeley cell. The FBI was able to turn one of them, use him as a CI. It’s amazing how the threat of twenty-five
years in a federal prison puts a crimp in a promising medical career.”

  “Bengosian!” I said. A rush surged through my veins. I felt validated.

  Molinari nodded. “They turned Bengosian, Lindsay. That’s how they got to the house on Hope Street that night. Bengosian betrayed his friends. You were right—and there’s more.”

  “Lightower,” I said expectantly.

  “He was Danko’s roommate,” Molinari replied. “The school cracked down on students active in the SDS. Maybe Lightower decided it was time for a semester abroad.

  “And one of the FBI agents who led the raid, who went inside the house that morning, he got promoted. Spent his twenty years in the Bureau, retired right here in San Francisco. His name was Frank T. Seymour. Name ring a bell?”

  Yeah, it rang a bell, but it didn’t fill me with exhilaration. Just a sickening feeling.

  Frank T. Seymour was one of the people killed in the blast at the Rincon Center.

  Chapter 92

  It was night now and Michelle liked the night. She could watch the Simpsons, reruns of Friends. Laugh a bit, like before everything had started, like when she was a kid in Eau Claire.

  They’d had to ditch the Oakland apartment where they had lived for the past six months. Now they’d moved into Julia’s house in the Berkeley flats.

  And they couldn’t go out much anymore. The situation was too tight. Sometimes on TV she saw a photograph of Mal, except the news reports called him Stephen Hardaway. Robert had moved in, too. It was the four of them now. And maybe Charles Danko would show up soon, too. Supposedly, he had the final plans, the endgame, which Mal promised would blow everybody’s mind. It was huge.

  Michelle turned off the TV and went downstairs. Mal was hunched over the wires, tinkering with the new device, the latest bomb. There was a plan, he said, how they were gonna get this baby inside. Just being in the same place with the damn thing freaked her out.