“I don’t know. This is all theory, anyway. She hasn’t been back up here to tell us about it.”
“You have any idea where she went?”
“Nope. And she hasn’t been answering her cell phone since two days before Frank died.” She shuddered again. “I can imagine what she’s going through. She was devastated by Little Bud’s death, and she was a fragile person to begin with.” She half smiled. “How two dykes like us ended up with a daughter who wouldn’t pick flowers as a kid for fear of causing the plant pain, I’ll never know.”
Donnally reached into his pants pocket for a pen and tore off a piece of paper from his notepad. He wrote down his cell number and handed it to her.
The bell tinkled again. Mother One looked over. “Shit.”
Mother Two moved like a subatomic particle. One instant she was standing at the door, the next she was leaning over the table.
“I can tell a fucking cop when I see one.”
Her face burned with outrage and her fists were hard by her sides.
Mother Two glared down at Mother One. “Why are you talking to this guy?”
It wasn’t a question.
Then to Donnally, “What do you want from us?”
This one was a question, and he answered it.
“I’m trying to get in contact with Ryvver.”
Mother Two’s palm shot out toward him in a straight arm that stopped inches from his face.
“Not through us, you won’t.”
Chapter 45
Donnally stopped by the sheriff’s substation in Guerneville and obtained Little Bud’s true name and identifiers and the name of the San Francisco-based DEA agent who’d supervised the joint narcotics task force that had targeted him. He then drove east toward the Redwood Highway, thinking a mother bear couldn’t have protected her cub with more aggression than Scoville Mother Number Two had shielded Ryvver. Donnally had the feeling even while he was stepping back out onto the sidewalk from Mothers’ Books amp; Cafe to the sound of the tinkling bell, that she’d been doing it all her daughter’s life.
The odds were as low as the Russian River in a drought year that Ryvver had drugged and murdered her father in the planned and calculated manner in which Lange had been killed. Donnally had learned in homicide training, and his experience never contradicted it, that patricides were usually Lizzie Borden crimes of passion, not premeditated murders.
As he squared the block to get turned around to head back to San Francisco, he tried to remember the first-degree murders of parents in California. The only one he could think of was the Menendez brothers in Beverly Hills in the late 1980s. It was a case that involved a dummied-up defense, too. It rested on false allegations the father had sexually abused the boys and had emotionally abused their mother, and on a bizarre claim that the boys killed her to put her out of her misery. It also involved a defense attorney who leaned on the psychiatrist to alter his report, a move that later left her taking the Fifth twice during questioning by the judge.
Hamlin in Northern California and Reggie Hancock in Southern California didn’t have a monopoly on manipulating psych evidence-they’d just never been examined under oath.
Donnally slowed while driving over the River Road bridge. He watched a truck shoot past him, then looked down toward the sandbar that narrowed the wide water flow into a roiled chute a hundred and fifty yards downstream. It was right there more than two decades earlier, standing waist-deep, drifting salmon roe, sweeping it across the current at the end of long riffle, that his first steelhead had struck.
And in that instant, the mystery of whether there were any fish moving through that part of the river ended with a bucking rod and a pounding heart.
As he looked again at the road in front of him and accelerated, he realized his trip hadn’t served as a sandbar to narrow his case and now he wasn’t sure he was even fishing in the right river to catch the killer of Mark Hamlin, or even of Frank Lange.
He reached for his phone. Ramon Navarro answered on the second ring.
“I was just about to call you,” Navarro said.
“That mean Galen has returned to the world of the conscious?”
“No. He’s still out and we’ve got no ETA. But that’s not today’s topic. I got Judge McMullin to issue an order for a pen register and trap and trace on Ryvver’s cell phone and for cell site and GPS info so we can track her and her calls.”
“Her mother, or at least one of her mothers, said it was turned off.”
“I think she has at least two. It looks like she bought a new pay-as-you-go phone and is using it to check messages on her old one. If so, she’s still in San Francisco. All of the calls are from a cell site out in the avenues near Golden Gate Park.”
“All?”
“All.”
“That means she’s not moving around,” Donnally said. “She’s probably holed up somewhere.”
“Or maybe only going as far as the corner store.”
“Or maybe is using a phone we haven’t ID’d yet.”
Donnally noticed a service station coming up, then glanced at his fuel gauge and saw it was low. He pulled in next to the island.
“Hold on a second. I need to get some gas.”
As he was getting out, he spotted the truck that had passed him on the bridge. It had pulled off to the side of the road fifty yards away, the driver’s side mostly shielded by a freestanding metal sign in front of a cafe.
“I think somebody is following me,” Donnally said. “Hold on again. Let me try to get the plate.”
Donnally raised his phone like he was checking for a telephone number or a text message, and took a photo of the truck. He then zoomed in, targeting the front plate, and read it off to Navarro.
“Can you check that quick?”
“No problem.”
Donnally heard keystrokes in the background as he removed the gas cap, fed the nozzle into the neck of the tank, and started pumping.
“Scoville, Leslie,” Navarro said. “Goes to a 2006 Ford pickup.”
“That’s it. Mother Number Two.”
“What do you think she’s up to?”
“Maybe she thinks I have a better chance of finding her daughter than she does and wants to piggyback off me.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Navarro said. “I asked some guys in the department who hang out around Guerneville on weekends in the summer. They say she’s a pretty tough cookie who gets what she wants. I’m thinking she wants to stay close to you in case you get close to Ryvver. That way she can forearm you to give Ryvver time to get away.”
“From what? Chances are slim she killed Lange. She’s his daughter.”
“No shit?”
“None at all.” Donnally thought for a moment, then said, “I wonder if Ryvver is hiding because she knows something and doesn’t want to be questioned about it. Maybe something Lange did. The thing they argued about. Mother One told me about a guy named Little Bud who committed suicide in federal prison after he got thirty years on a marijuana beef. Robert Earl Bowling.”
Donnally watched the numbers rise on the gas pump as he listened to more of Navarro’s typing in the background-
Then a laugh.
“Guess who his lawyer was?” Navarro asked.
The laugh had already given Donnally the answer: “Mark Hamlin.”
Chapter 46
I never saw the Little Bud file,” Takiyah Jackson told Donnally when he got back to the office.
They were standing on the rug in front of Hamlin’s desk. He suspected from her outfit, a V-neck sweater and a push-up bra, that he would have a problem with her again. He felt himself in the middle of a sort of crossfire with Jackson poised next to him and a mother bear parked in her truck down the block.
It had made no sense to try to lose Mother Number Two since she could catch up with him whenever she wanted, at Hamlin’s office or at Janie’s house, which was still in his name. He also didn’t want to clue her in that he knew she was following him by making any quick moves.