The Ancient Rain Page 2

  Money, privilege—all a ruse.

  Owens drove up University heading toward the bridge. The gray sedan still lingered. Then a police cruiser pulled up from out of nowhere, it seemed, and rode Owens’s bumper. Perhaps it was just coincidence, a cop working the morning traffic, pushy the way cops can be, but Owens didn’t think so.

  He had the impulse to pull over, to call their bluff. Or, instead, to yank the wheel and punch it down a backstreet.

  Years ago, maybe he would have played such a game, but he had his kids with him now.

  “When’s Mom going to be back?”

  “She’ll call tonight.”

  “Can I call her now? On your cell?”

  “Your mom’s in court this morning. You know she is. I don’t think she’ll be picking up. She doesn’t bring a phone into the courtroom.”

  “Can I call and leave her a message?”

  He could feel his daughter, Kate, reading him, watching the way he moved. She saw his nervousness, and she glanced, too, at the cruiser behind. She was a precocious girl, more practical than her brother, and less temperamental—and a demon for the facts. She had been online these last few days, reading about the case, and he had not yet had the chance to reassure her.

  People lied, he wanted to say. They distorted things to serve their purposes.

  “Not now, honey,” he said. “Now wouldn’t be a good time to make a call.”

  All this time, Owens had one eye on the rearview. The light at Sixth turned yellow as he hit the intersection. He went on through and the cruiser followed. Two more squad cars waited at the foot of University, and they maneuvered behind him as he hit the ramp. The trailing car dropped off, swinging sidelong across the intersection. He was certain now of what was coming. That last maneuver had been designed to keep the civilian traffic from following.

  At the top of the ramp, he spotted a couple of cruisers ahead, swung sideways, blocking his way.

  He pulled to a stop.

  The troopers waited on the other side of their cars, rifles propped over the hoods of their government issue Crown Victorias. Overdoing it, as usual, treating him like he was public enemy number one. Closer by, an officer with a semiautomatic stood on the other side of the guardrail, about ten feet away.

  “Dad!”

  His daughter’s eyes opened wider, frightened. His son seemed absorbed in his Game Boy, still clicking, though with more rapidity. Owens kept his hands on the wheel. “Don’t worry,” he said. “These are people I work with. This is a work thing, that’s all.”

  An absurd thing to say, maybe—but there was a certain sense to it. He worked all day with criminals and police and attorneys and judges. So maybe it was true: This was just a work thing. Outside, behind them, a voice boomed over a patrol-car megaphone, telling Owens to get out of the car.

  “He has a gun,” said Zeke. The boy still hadn’t looked up, and it wasn’t clear if he referred to the video game or the man behind the guardrail.

  Outside the car, behind them, the voice repeated its instructions.

  Zeke twitched then, bending deeper over the game. Owens saw something flicker in the face of the man with the semiautomatic.

  Owens got out of the car.

  He stood with his hands extended in front of him. He stood there for what seemed like a very long time. He stood there with the guns pointed at him, and his kids fidgeting in the car. After a while, the two plainclothes emerged from the gray sedan: first, a square-shaped man in his midthirties; then the other, a Chinese woman, older, dressed all in blue.

  Behind them he noticed a third man, watching with his hands on his hips. This one he recognized: Leonard Blackwell.

  The man’s hair had gone silver, a thick mien that gave him a dignified look, but Blackwell was an aggressive son of a bitch, Owens knew, a prosecuting attorney with a background in investigation who’d worked his way up out of the field. The man swaggered toward him like a cop in a movie who’d finally gotten his man.

  “What’s this about?”

  “Took your time getting out of the car, didn’t you?” said Blackwell.

  “My kids, you’re scaring the hell out of them.”

  “I want you to come over here with me. I want your ass over the hood of the car.”

  They marched him over to one of the cruisers. What happened next happened quickly. Owens heard the troopers behind him, moving in around his car—he caught a glimpse of his kids, of his daughter’s face—before one of the troopers grabbed him from behind and pushed him spread-eagle over the cruiser. The cop pushed his face into the trunk and held him that way.

  “Nose down.”

  He hoped his children could not see him. He imagined the pair of them, noses pressed up against the glass, watching while the big cop cranked back their father’s arms and snapped on the cuffs.

  “You thought this would never happen, didn’t you?” said Blackwell.

  “No,” Owens said.

  It didn’t come out the way he meant.

  “Never in a million years, you thought,” said one of the others.

  “No.”

  What Owens meant to say was, No, he had not imagined himself immune. He had in fact thought the opposite. Because he knew how the government could be. He had seen the feds go after people years after the fact. Just as they were coming after him now. He had feared this eventuality—while standing in line at the movie theater, in bed with his wife, in so many random moments. He feared not just for himself, but for his kids, his family. There’d been calls sometimes, cranks. Threats.

  “Never in ten million, you thought, but here you are.”

  It wasn’t Blackwell talking, but the other one, the younger plainclothes. The voice had the same self-righteousness to it. A fury underneath. Owens didn’t quite understand. From Blackwell, maybe. From someone who had been in the force at the time, associated with the case, this anger might make sense, but from the square-headed cop, too young to remember …

  He supposed he should understand. He had been young once, full of fury. He had thought there existed a particular enemy you could identify. That you could pin down and destroy. And there were times, he had to admit, that he still felt that way.

  This young cop … Blackwell … all these troopers … if the tables had been turned …

  “Déjà vu, huh?” Blackwell said. “Do you ever think of her, that woman bleeding to death? Do you ever see her goddamn face?”

  He heard a noise behind him. He heard his son yelp, maybe. And his daughter cry out. It was hard to tell. There was a traffic chopper overhead, gulls swarming. He strained to look at the kids but the cop pushed his face down into the hood.

  Oh, Kate. Oh, Zeke.

  He lay over the hood with his ass in the air while the cop patted him down, knife-handing between his legs, emptying his pockets. They took everything—his wallet, his cell.

  When they let him up, he saw his kids had been taken from the car. They were being led down the ramp toward a cruiser below, patrolmen walking on either side and another following behind. Maybe his daughter had let out a cry, maybe his son had tried to pull away—but they seemed subdued enough now. His daughter glanced backward, but his son held the hand of one of the troopers.

  Blackwell meanwhile rummaged the family sedan, pulling papers from the glove, a game disk from the door pocket, a tube of lipstick. The Chinese officer, the woman, stood next to Owens. Owens asked her name and she told him.

  “I’d like to call someone,” Owens said. “My wife is out of town, I’d like to make arrangements for the kids.”

  Leanora Chin was plainclothes, but the way she dressed, she might just as well have been in uniform. She wore blue, dark navy—a skirt the color of midnight and a blouse just as dark. Her hair was black, with streaks of white, and her eyes were gray. Though she dressed like a fed, she did not carry herself like one. She had the bearing of someone who’d been on the force a while.

  “Their mother is out of town,” he repeated. “I need to contact s
omeone to pick them up from school.” What he said next, he wanted to sound confident, but his voice cracked almost shamefully. “It will be unfortunate, you do the wrong thing with the kids. My lawyer…”

  The woman bowed her head, and it occurred to him that they had known his wife was out of town, and they had chosen this time deliberately, because he would be with the kids, vulnerable, unable to run. And they could get a jump on the pretrial press.

  Blackwell returned.

  “Let me make a call.”

  “Why would we do that?” asked Blackwell.

  “My boy has a medication issue.”

  “You can call after you’ve been booked. Put him inside.”

  The cops did as they were told, but from inside the cage Owens could see Chin and Blackwell conferring. Owens could see by the way they stood that there was a jurisdictional issue of some sort—there always was with cops—and it was clear Blackwell called the shots. He had been an investigative attorney in the feds’ criminal division back then. Blackwell basically ran the office now, if you didn’t count the appointed guy from Washington. It was unusual, maybe, an office man out on the arrest, but back then he had been made to look like a fool. Given all this, Leanora Chin must have said something persuasive—raising the specter of the press, maybe—because in a little while the troopers pulled him back out of the car, then rearranged the cuffs, so that he stood bound with his hands in front. The woman handed him his cell.

  “One call,” she said.

  Owens flipped through the phone. His wife was in court, and he did not know how long before she would pick up a message. The same was true of Jensen. He considered his wife’s sister, but she was an hysteric, and his brother, and the mothers of his kids’ friends. But none of them would have the savvy to pull his kids out of the system.

  There also among the names he found Dante Mancuso down at Cicero Investigations.

  Mancuso had been to his house once. He had met the kids. Owens did not know him too well, it was true—a sad-eyed ex-cop like a thousand other sad-eyed ex-cops. With his own badgered history, and that impossibly long nose. But Mancuso would know how to get in touch with his wife, and with Jensen. More importantly, though, Owens had worked with him and knew how Mancuso was. Once a notion got hold of him, he had a hard time letting it go.

  FOUR

  Later that day, Dante found himself on the steps of the Burton Federal Building, on the wrong side of a concrete barrier. It was a low barrier, and he could see over it into the secured area, where the press had started to gather and a young man worked at setting up a microphone. Dante did not have press credentials, and so stood with some women from Code Pink, an antiwar group whose members wore pink T-shirts and black tights.

  Earlier, the women had been gathered at the other side of the plaza, where the passing traffic could see their signs: NO BLOOD FOR OIL. NO WAR IN THE MIDEAST. They had been drawn across the square by the television cameras. There were some street people mixed in, yelling stuff just for the fun of it.

  The cops were edgy.

  It was the kind of job that made you edgy even under normal circumstances. With all the security measures, and the lack of personnel, everyone was working double shift. The public was full of fear, and the cops crankier than usual.

  Anthrax in the post office. Poison gas at the Opera House. A terrorist lurking at the Golden Gate Bridge.

  The anthrax turned out to be laundry detergent, the poison gas was a woman applying hairspray, and the terrorist was a park employee sneaking a cigarette.

  Still, it all had to be investigated, and events like this, a simple press conference, once mundane, required a small army.

  * * *

  Dante himself had spent the morning down at the central jail.

  At the end of it, he’d learned the feds were keeping Owens under wraps until they could announce the arrest at a press conference. They wanted to make a show for the cameras.

  So Dante had come down here to the Burton Building—a tallish, nondescript building, steel girders and blue glass, with a windy, anonymous plaza out front. The vehicle barricades had been put in a few months back to protect the entryway, and now a small group emerged from that entry, gathering in the secured area near a makeshift podium. Dante felt a twinge. He had made the walk from those glass doors to the podium once upon a time, when he’d been on the force, a young man on the cusp. It had not been so long ago, really. There were some new faces but some old ones as well, people with whom he was not on the best of terms. A phalanx of go-getters, in uniform and out. Leonard Blackwell stood at the center, and nearby, off to the side, was Leanora Chin, all in blue, hands crossed at the wrist.

  In their midst, a thin, blonde woman—toward whom they were all being quite solicitous, as if she had been injured in some way—wavered from one foot to the other, leaning raillike into the wind. Accompanying the woman, standing close to her, was an older man, out of place with the others, whom Dante recognized despite the fact it had been many years.

  Guy Sorrentino, from the neighborhood.

  Sorrentino had been with the SFPD at one time, too, and like Dante he did investigative work now. He was some twenty years Dante’s senior, but their tenure at the department had overlapped. A long time back, when Sorrentino was a young man and Dante just a boy, he had worked a couple summers for Dante’s father down at the Mancuso warehouse.

  What Sorrentino was doing here, Dante had no idea. He behaved toward the younger woman in a fatherly way, a hand on her forearm.

  On account of the wind and the rustling of the crowd, Dante could not catch her name as she took the podium. She was in her late thirties, with a haircut that was not fashionable, at least not in San Francisco, the hair too high off the head, the blond a bit too much from the bottle. Not unattractive, but with a rawness about her that suggested the regions beyond the city, past the suburbs, where the land was flat and the sunlight caked with dust.

  “I have just heard news I have been waiting a long time to hear. I talked to the U.S. Attorney’s office here in San Francisco, to Mr. Blackwell … Twenty-seven years ago, in 1975, my mother was murdered during a bank robbery. She was shot down, while I waited in the car. I saw the ones responsible,” she said. “I saw them leaving the bank. But I was young, and for reasons I have never understood, no arrests were made. Until today.”

  The woman was Elise Younger, Dante realized, the daughter of the woman who had been shot to death in the robbery out on Judah.

  She’d seen the gang through the windshield of her mother’s car: four of them in the parking lot—according to her story; and possibly a fifth, a female lookout sitting on a bench at the corner. One of the men had stripped off his mask as he came out of the bank. With the help of a police sketch artist, she’d identified that man as Bill Owens. But she’d been barely eleven years old, and there’d been other, contradictory evidence.

  Elise’s story—her long struggle to bring the case to court—had been in the papers off and on. She had been portrayed variously over the years: as an innocent victim, a person obsessed with justice; as a woman who had lost touch with reality, casting stones haphazardly, looking for someone to blame. Whose view of what happened was no more reliable now than it had been then. Even those law officials who sympathized—who remembered the case—had grown weary of her. On more than one occasion she had criticized the judges and lawyers, the prosecutors and politicians.

  Some of these same people stood behind her on the podium now.

  “My mother—” She hesitated. “My mother was just going to the bank—to cash her overtime check. My father had finally just gotten a job, too, our lives were turning for the good, and we were going to have a celebration. But all that changed, in one awful instant…”

  The woman was not a professional orator, but she had an earnestness that was hard to resist. Still, there seemed something strained, a modulation not quite under control. When Elise Younger left the microphone, she appeared to buckle for an instant, her knees weakening
, or maybe just her heel giving way, catching on the concrete. Sorrentino was quick to take her arm, and as he did so, Dante saw the disdainful glances of Blackwell and his assistant. Sorrentino did not have the grace of the others on the stage. He was a working-class guy under it all, with a jacket that wouldn’t button and a misshapen hat. And the way he hurried to Elise Younger, there was something a little too hungry there.

  Guy Sorrentino was in his sixties, a small man, thick through the shoulders. An ex-cop. He’d lived in the Beach in the old days, but had been pushed off the force. Or had pushed himself.

  Truth was, Sorrentino’s son had died during the First Gulf War, in the early nineties, and things had fallen apart for him after that.

  So what was he doing here with Elise Younger?

  At this point Blackwell himself took the podium. He did what prosecutors always do, avoiding the particulars of the case—or pretending to—so as not to jeopardize the trial, but at the same time letting the public know his people were on duty, getting results. Seeking publicity while not seeking. Getting the jump on the defense. “We can’t talk specifically about this case, about any of the details, because we do not have the slightest intention to try this case in public. I will just say the simple fact, and that is: Earlier this morning, Bill Owens was served with a warrant for his arrest by officers Leanora Chin and Steve White.”

  Chin stood at his side, and everyone knew why. They wanted the Asian face in the camera.

  The police were happy to oblige.

  “But I would like to take this opportunity to make one thing clear. Law enforcement in San Francisco, together with federal officers and Homeland Security, are all committed to bringing terrorists to justice. No matter when the crime happened, no matter if the perpetrators walk among us, or on foreign soil. Decades might go by, but we will continue to be vigilant. We will find you.”

  * * *

  In a little while, they opened it up to the press, and it was the usual dance, with reporters pressing for details, and the police having little to offer. It was the kind of conversation he’d heard so many times it was like a voice in his head. Why now? Are there more arrests coming? How can you reconstruct this, after almost thirty years? As the questioning wore on, the Code Pink people began to wander away, back to their signs at the other end of the plaza.