She crept up behind him. “Mal, you want something to eat? I can fix you something.”
“You can see I'm working, Michelle.” More of a snap than a reply. He was soldering a red wire into a wooden table leg that she knew encased the blasting cap.
She put a hand on his shoulder. “I need to talk with you, Mal. I think I want to leave.”
Mal stiffened up from the bomb. He pulled the lenses off his head, wiped the sweaty hair off of his face.
“You're going to leave?” Mal said, nodding in her face, as if he found this amusing. “And you're going where? Hop on a bus and go home? Back to Geewhizconsin? Enroll in Gee-whizconsin junior college, after blowing up a couple of kids in the big city?”
Tears started in Michelle's eyes. Telltale signs of weakness, she knew. Dreaded sentimentality.
“Stop it, Mal.”
“You're a wanted killer, honey. The cute little nanny who blew up her kids. Did that slip your mind?”
Suddenly she saw it clearly. Lots of things. That even if they did this job, this last one, Mal would never go away with her. When she closed her eyes at night she could see the Lightower kids. Sitting around at breakfast. Getting dressed for school. She knew she had done terrible things. No matter how much she wished otherwise, Mal was right, there was nowhere for her to go. She was the murderous au pair. She always would be.
“Now come on,” Mal said, suddenly gentler. “As long as you're here, you can help me, baby. I need that pretty finger of yours. On that wire. You remember, nothing to worry about.”
He held up the phone. “No juice, no boost, right? We're gonna be heroes, Michelle. We're gonna save the world from the bad guys. They're never ever going to forget us.”
Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree
Chapter 93
ONE A.M., but who could sleep?
Molinari came into the squad room. I was watching the wires with Paul Chin. He looked at me and sighed. “Charles Danko.”
He tossed a green folder on the desk across from me. It was marked PRIVILEGED INFORMATION, FBI. “They had to go deep in the cold files to find him.”
I felt my blood rush. My skin prickled. Did this mean we were close to finding him?
“He went to the University of Michigan,” Molinari said. “Arrested twice for disorderly conduct and inciting to riot. Picked up in New York in 1973 for illegal possession of rearms. A town house he lived in there just blew up one afternoon. Here one minute, gone the next.”
“Sure sounds like our boy.”
“He was being sought in connection with a bombing of the Pentagon in 1972. An expert in explosives. After that town house blew in New York, he disappeared. No one knew whether he was in the country or out. Charles Danko's simply been missing for thirty years. No one's even chasing him.”
“A white rabbit,” I said.
He laid out an old rap sheet dated 1974 and a faxed black-and-white FBI wanted poster. On it was a slightly older ver-sion of the boyish face I had seen in the family photo at the Danko house.
“There's our man,” Molinari said. “Now how the hell do we find him?”
Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree
Chapter 94
“LIEUTENANT!” I heard a loud knocking on my glass.
I bolted up. My watch read 6:30 A.M. I must have dozed off waiting for Molinari to report with more news on Danko.
Paul Chin was at my door. “Lieutenant, you better get on line three. Now...”
“Danko?” I blinked myself awake.
“Better. We got a woman from Wisconsin who thinks her daughter is tied up with Stephen Hardaway. I think she knows where she is!”
In the seconds it took to knock the sleep out of my brain, Chin went back to his desk and got a backup recording going. I picked up the phone.
“Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer,” I cleared my throat and said.
The woman started in as if she had left off in mid-sentence with Chin, her voice upset, maybe not too educated. Midwestern.
“I always told her something with this smart-ass guy didn't add up. She said he was so brilliant. Brilliant, my ass... She always wanted to do good, my Michelle. She was easy to take advantage of. I said, `Just go to the state school. You can be anything you want.'”
“Your daughter's name is Michelle?” I picked up a pen. “Ms....?”
“Fontieul. That's right, Michelle Fontieul.”
I scribbled down the name. “Why don't you just tell me what you know?”
“I seen him, you know,” the woman recounted. "That fel-low on TV. The one everybody's looking for. My Michelle's hooked up with him.
“Course his name wasn't Stephen then. What'd she call him on the phone? Malcolm? Mal. They drove through here heading out west. I think he was from Portland or Washing-ton. He got her into this `protesting' thing. I didn't even understand half of what it meant. I tried to warn her.”
“You're sure this was the same man you saw on TV?” I pressed.
“I'm sure. Course, his hair's different now. And he didn't have no beard. I knew -”
I interrupted. “When was the last time you spoke to your daughter, Ms. Fontieul?”
“I don't know, maybe three months. She always called. She'd never leave her numbers. This last time, though, she sounded a little strange. She said she was really doing some good for once. She comes out and tells me that I raised her well. That she loved me. I was thinking, maybe she'd got her-self knocked up is all.”
All this matched. What we knew about Hardaway and the description we'd gotten from the owner of the KGB Bar. “Do you have any way to contact your daughter? An address?”
“I had some address, I think it was maybe a friend's. I got this P.O. box. Michelle said I could always send something there if I needed to. Box three-three-three-eight. Care of Mail Boxes, Etc., on Broad Street, Oakland, California.”
I glanced at Chin, both of us scribbling at the same time. The place wouldn't open up for a couple of hours. We'd have to get the FBI out to her in Wisconsin. Get a photo of her daughter. In the meantime, I asked if she would describe her to me.
“Blond. Blue eyes.” The woman hesitated. “Michelle was always pretty, I'll grant her that. I don't know if I'm doing the right thing. She's just a kid, Lieutenant.”
I thanked her for coming forward. And I told her I'd make sure her daughter was treated fairly, if she was mixed up in this, which I had no doubt she was.
“I'm going to put you on with another officer,” I told her, “but before I do, I need to ask you one more thing.” A thought had crept into my head, going back to that first day. “Did your daughter have any breathing ailments?”
“Why, yes,” she said, pausing, “she always did have asthma, Lieutenant. Been carrying around a puffer since she was ten years old.”
I looked at Chin through the glass. “I think we just found Wendy Raymore.”
Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree
Chapter 95
CINDY THOMAS headed into work on the Market Street bus, same as every morning, but that day with the gnawing premonition that something was going to break soon. One way or the other. August Spies had promised as much.
The BART was crowded this morning, standing room only. It took two stops for her even to find a seat. She took out her Chronicle as she did every morning and scanned page one. A shot of Mayor Fiske, flanked by Deputy Director Molinari and Tracchio. The G-8 meetings were still a go. Her story, on the possible link to Billy Danko, was the right-hand column above the fold.
A girl with cropped, dyed red hair in overalls and a cro-cheted sweater moved close by. Cindy looked up; something about her struck her as familiar. The girl had three earrings in her left ear and a barrette in the shape of a sixties peace symbol in her hair. Pretty, in a waiflike way.