The Ancient Rain Read online

  When she came to again, she twisted painfully on the ground, clawing at the dirt. She was delirious and uttered a stream of obscenities.

  “Fuck me … no … I can’t see…”

  She started to shiver, and Annette came now with the cloth from the picnic table. There were sirens in the distance. He did his best to cool her burns with the water, and at the same time keep her out of shock, keeping her warm under the cloth.

  “No,” she moaned. “My eyes…”

  * * *

  When the paramedics arrived, they started working on Marilyn even before they had her on the stretcher. They hooked her to an intravenous and put on an oxygen mask. The paramedics were young and lithe and had the ability to keep their voices calm, offhanded, in a way that was both reassuring and detached. They covered her eyes with a thin gauze and then loaded her into the ambulance.

  Dante stood alone on the sidewalk. He had made a mistake bringing her here.

  He felt now the ache and rawness in his own lungs, the effects of the smoke, and felt, too, the rawness on his cheeks, the blistering on his forearms and thighs where he had brushed against the flames. Standing there on the street, he looked back at the house—at the bamboo hedge, at the sidewalk, the alley of garages that led out to a busier street below.

  An incendiary device. Loaded with gasoline and hurled through the window.

  Who?

  Likely the perpetrators were gone. But sometimes, if you moved quickly, you got lucky …

  One of the paramedics took him by the arm.

  “Your turn,” said the paramedic.

  “No.”

  Something happened then.

  On account of the smoke inhalation. Or his mind just let go. Either way, the next thing he knew he was lying in the darkness, in the ambulance, Marilyn moaning beside him.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said.

  Then it was dark again, and in that darkness the paramedic slipped an oxygen mask over his face.

  * * *

  Sometime after midnight, Leanora Chin showed up at the hospital. The last time Dante had seen her had been at the Federal Building, the day Owens was arrested. She wore dark blue, same as before, the same outfit, it seemed, with her black hair gathered in the back. She had come to Mercy, as far as Dante could tell, to see if the medical report would offer any insights as to the cause of the explosion. She talked to the emergency staff for a while and then came to find Dante. He had been treated and sat now in the waiting room. Chin, he learned, had already been out to General, where Owens was being held for observation. Marilyn, though, had been brought here, to Mercy, on account of the burn unit.

  “Where were you at the time of the explosion?”

  “Marilyn went inside, to retrieve a sweater. Then the cocktail came through the window.”

  “Cocktail? Why do you say it’s a cocktail?”

  Chin’s voice was flat, devoid of innuendo, but there was suspicion underneath, he knew. There was always suspicion underneath.

  “There were grease splatters on her clothes,” Dante said. “Hot grease and tar. And I could smell the gasoline.”

  “How about the people in the backyard?”

  “What about them?”

  “Who were they?”

  Dante told Chin as many names as he could remember. He watched her write the names down. She did so slowly. Likely she had gotten these names already, or most of them, and was just writing them down to crosscheck. Still, the cop dwelled over the names. Asked him a little bit about each. Went back over the incident again, wanting to know if Dante had seen anyone on the street. If any of the guests had come and gone. If anyone had been there before, maybe … someone … Dante realized the implication. The people at the scene, you always had to consider them. He would do the same.

  “No. They were all in the backyard.”

  “There was a man earlier, who came with Annette Ricci and her boyfriend. He brought in the tamales.”

  Dante shook his head. “He was gone before I came.”

  “Were any of these people in the drug trade?”

  “What are you trying to say here?”

  Chin put her pen down.

  “The Oakland investigators, they told me they had a case like this, last year—some kind of drug dispute. So the dealers put a cocktail through the window. Little girl burned to death. These kinds of things, they happen in Oakland.”

  “I don’t think this incident was drug inspired,” Dante said. “This isn’t that kind of crowd.”

  Chin held any expression from her face.

  “Sometimes they get the wrong house.”

  It was a dumb idea. Likely Chin knew that—she was not dumb herself—and suddenly Dante had a sinking feeling about the direction of the investigation. He knew how the people upstairs didn’t like Owens and how things rolled down from the top. So he told Chin about the threats against the kids and did his best to connect the dots: to suggest that someone had come after the Owens family but had gotten Marilyn instead. “This case, there’s also a political dimension.”

  “That aspect of it…” Chin paused then. Something in her manner, it reminded him of how cops lined up together. “You work for them, don’t you? You’re working for Owens?”

  “What’s that have to do with it?”

  Chin said nothing.

  “That’s my fiancée who was burned.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chin said. “But—”

  “But what?”

  Chin looked him in the eyes. Dante understood the implication. She didn’t say anything, but Dante understood. It’s too bad, but what were you doing working for these people, anyway? What were you doing bringing your fiancée to this kind of gathering? What did you expect?

  * * *

  When the phone rang, Dante was in a deep grog. Cicero, calling from somewhere in the Mediterranean, farther east. Past the Aegean now, off the coast of Cyprus, and in Dante’s imagination he saw the narrow straits, the sheer cliffs, the islands where the giant seabirds hulked on the shore under the moon, as if Cicero were calling from someplace back in time.

  “Dante?”

  Dante suspected Cicero knew everything, as he always seemed to: that he had been in touch with the office, with his numerous sources. Dante himself had been back and forth to the hospital. He’d slept little. He’d broken away once to visit Shale Street—walking the scene, knocking on doors—but had been chased away by the Oakland police.

  On the news, there were contradictory reports. One of these said a neighbor had seen a man lurking outside the house just before the bombing. A Latino in a red shirt.

  Meanwhile, the stars were out in Cicero’s faraway world. Out there in the cell-phone darkness. Off a black coast. The waters stretched out forever, ink black under the moon. Somewhere in that blackness was the Jake Cicero he had known—the leather-skinned man with the white hair and the white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows.

  Dante missed Cicero.

  “How’s Marilyn?”

  “In pain.”

  “Can’t they give her something?”

  “A lot of it’s nerve damage,” Dante said. “The drugs don’t do a lot of good. Then there’s the surgery.”

  “Already?”

  “This morning. There’s more scheduled.”

  These days, they started the grafting process early with the theory that early grafting promoted healing. Marilyn had a combination of second- and third-degree burns, and there would likely be some scarring. She suffered from smoke inhalation, but the thing that concerned the doctors most were her eyes. The fire had singed the lids, and the cornea was damaged. And some of the deeper ocular mechanisms as well.

  “The Oakland police are swamped. To them, everything’s a drug case. And the feds … the way the cops feel about Owens, I don’t know if any investigation…”

  “Dante?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what I am going to say.”

  He did know. It was a cardinal rule. When somethin
g like this happened to someone close to you, you didn’t go after it yourself. Chances were, you’d fuck it up. “I talked to Moe Jensen,” said Cicero. “Walter Sprague, the financier, he’ll cover Marilyn’s medical. As for the bombing, that part of the investigation—they’ve offered one of his people.”

  “His people?”

  “A man like that, Sprague, he has people. Also, the financial aspect, if there’s a money trail—if someone paid for this—Sprague’s people know that world better than we do.”

  “They’re throwing us off?”

  “What they want you to do—us—hasn’t changed. Go through the discovery material, everything the prosecution presented at the indictment, the witness list, all that. And stay with Sorrentino. Figure out what he and Elise Younger have been doing. The bombing, that part, leave it to the others.”

  Dante didn’t say anything. It seemed Sprague was paying not just for Owens’s defense, but for Marilyn’s recovery, and, he supposed, for the retainer that kept him on the case.

  “There’s something else,” Cicero said.

  “What?”

  “Owens, his place is ruined. He’s got his family in a hotel.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s media outside. And the hotel is pretty upset about it.”

  Dante knew about this. He’d talked with Jill Owens on the phone and had seen the circus on the news.

  “Your place down on Fresno?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s still empty? I know it’s a lot to ask … but it would just be for a little bit. There aren’t too many other places for them to go right now.”

  Dante thought about the empty house, with the restaurant booth in the living room and his father’s furniture in the basement and the keepsake box he’d left on the mantle beside the empty bottle of wine. He thought of his mother going nuts in the attic and his father dying in the bed upstairs and the creaking in the stairs every time the house shifted. Part of him blamed Owens for what had occurred, but he remembered, too, the kids and their ashen faces. Also, if he wanted to know what had happened on Shale Street, it might be wise to hold Owens close.

  “Sure,” Dante said. “They can stay.”

  “You’re a good man,” said Cicero.

  “A prince,” said Dante.

  FIFTEEN

  The next afternoon Lieutenant Leanora Chin went out to Shale Street to walk the crime scene. As usual, she was in blue. Middle-aged blue. Steel blue. Gun metal blue tucked into a straight skirt that hit, uniform-style, just below the knees. Fifty years old, twenty-three of them on the force. Again with her hair tied back, black hair streaked with iron. It gave her a severe look—except for her eyes. They were gray eyes, not warm exactly, no one would say that. There was in fact a certain coldness there, an analytical sweep—but there was an intelligence as well, and it was this intelligence that animated her face and kept the severity at bay. This, and the understanding, inherent in the way she held herself, that intelligence itself was not the final factor in anything.

  At this point, the case was still under the jurisdiction of the Oakland police. So far they were viewing it as a local crime, but if it connected to the Owens case then SF Homeland would get involved. Logically speaking.

  Of course, there was no saying that logic would have anything to do with it. That was always true when it came to jurisdictional issues, but even more so lately, Chin knew. She had spent most of her career in Homicide, then been transferred over to Special Investigations, to work in the Gang Unit. But then 9/11 came along, and everything shifted.

  She was under Homeland now, a local unit, recently created, carved out of SFPD and federalized for the sake of national security. At first glance little had changed except the lettering on the door. Only the organizational lines were not clear, or the funding. Mandates changed daily. Fact was, SI wasn’t an investigation unit anymore. It was an escort service for visiting dignitaries.

  And her Gang Unit was in shambles.

  A year ago, they’d had a half-dozen agents out tracing gang activities in the San Francisco ports. They were on other duty now. The new byword was “terror.” Domestic terror. Sleeper cells. People with agendas, hidden among us, waiting for the word from abroad. The leads came from hotlines, from disgruntled employees, public servants with a bug up their ass. To put it mildly, the leads rarely panned out. “Never” was more like it. But you couldn’t say that. You had to pursue.

  An Iraqi grocer. A college professor with relatives in Iran. An evangelical minister sending money to a church in Basra.

  You had to bring these potentials in for questioning, so people could see you were doing your job. And once you brought them in, you had to be careful about letting them go. Because if you made a mistake …

  So the tendency was to hold them forever, evidence or no.

  Meanwhile, there was pressure to turn back the clock—to go after people who had slipped away in more lenient times.

  Owens.

  It was an old file, a grudge file, minded all these years by Leonard Blackwell and given to her at the last minute because they wanted a local face on the investigation. But Blackwell was still running the show. Since 9/11, in the organizational vacuum, his presence crossed departmental boundaries.

  Not that she thought Owens was an illegitimate target necessarily.

  But even if Owens was guilty, it wasn’t supposed to come to this: a Molotov cocktail tossed through the window while the family gathered with friends, raising money for the defense.

  * * *

  The Oakland cops had secured the area. They had done well enough, she supposed. The firefighters had stomped all over the place, of course, and there were a million footprints, trampled bushes, broken glass, debris everywhere. They had managed to secure the scene by nightfall yesterday evening, putting up the yellow tape and posting a cop car out front—though the cop had been called away because of a robbery down on Fruitvale, and the scene had been untended half the night.

  That could be a problem later, if they needed to take evidence to trial.

  Meanwhile the Oakland police had pulled in the usual suspects, guys out on arson charges, drug freaks, and fire junkies. They’d pulled in as well a half-dozen Latinos in red shirts, based on a neighbor’s description—including a gardener who had been working across the street earlier that morning.

  The guy had been playing soccer when they arrested him, but he was illegal, and Immigration had him now. There’d been another Latino at the scene apparently, at the time of the party—a friend of Ricci’s and her boyfriend, from the Tamale House—but the preliminary description did not match. Either way, so far, Oakland had not tracked him down.

  Chin walked the scene. The forensics team had arrived, working the perimeters now that the ashes had cooled. It was clear they didn’t want her around. She’d gotten the same response earlier when she’d called downtown with an offer to coordinate resources. They did not like that she had been out to the hospital the evening before, mucking around in their investigation.

  Today when she returned to the office, there was a call from Blackwell.

  “You were out at the scene.”

  “Yes.”

  “I want you to put out a statement for the press,” he said. “Tell them San Francisco Homeland stands ready to support the Oakland Police. But at this time there is no evidence of any national security threat. Rather, this is a criminal matter, under investigation by the Oakland Police. I’ve talked to the Bureau, and they are putting out a similar statement, saying the FBI will assist as needed.”

  “Jensen says his client was targeted.”

  “The defense is going to say a lot of things. The best thing to do with this kind of nonsense is to ignore it.”

  Chin understood his logic but did not necessarily agree. Back in the seventies, the case had gotten tangled in side issues, baited by the defense and a media cross fire that had forced the investigation inward, the agencies turning one upon the other. No doubt, Blackwell did not
want to see that happen again. Still …

  “We have some profile sheets, known firebugs—”

  Blackwell cut her off.

  “Leave it to Oakland,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  Owens was restless. It was early evening, two days later, and he and his family were trying to get settled in the house on Fresno Street. His restlessness was natural enough, he supposed—given all that had happened. At the moment, the kids were upstairs. Owens and his wife sat in the living room, in the vinyl restaurant booth Dante’s previous tenants had left behind.

  “Dante’s on his way,” he said.

  “What does he want?”

  “The case—he has some questions.”

  “What does Moe say?” She looked at him with concern. “Is it wise to keep Dante on? I mean…”

  “It would be less wise to throw him off.”

  “Is he eating with us?”

  “We’re going out to someplace in the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I just wish we could get the hell out.”

  Jill was on edge, the kids disoriented. The kids wanted their backyard, their things. Not this claustrophobic row house on an alley of row houses tilting haphazardly on the hill, laundry hanging out the windows in back, all over the fire escapes, and Chinese music till all hours of the night.

  Meanwhile the police had set up surveillance.

  For the family’s protection, they had said. The real reason, though, was because Jensen had pitched a fit in the media, accusing the prosecution of fostering a climate of retribution. It was good theater, maybe—designed to gain public sympathy—but Owens did not enjoy the scrutiny.

  “I feel trapped,” said Jill. “I feel like I am under house arrest.”