Mother Two looked at Navarro. “Do I have to answer that?”
Navarro nodded.
“The asshole blackmailed sex out of me after she was born. Mark told him about me and him, and Frank used it to make me put out or he’d tell my partner. I told him to wear a condom so I wouldn’t get pregnant again, and he laughed and told me. I should’ve killed the bastard right then.”
Donnally didn’t follow that with “Instead of later?” for fear of giving her the idea of trying to protect her daughter by taking the fall.
Navarro cut in. “Where is she now?”
“I don’t know. I was hoping you would lead me to her and I could. .”
“Help her get away?” Navarro said.
“Maybe. Frank deserved it.”
“What about Mark?” Donnally asked.
Her head snapped toward Donnally. “You said. .”
“No. She killed him all right. Someone else moved the body out there and hung him up.”
“You son of a bitch.”
She raised her elbow to strike him.
Donnally pointed at her. “Don’t do it.” She lowered it.
“I had no choice,” Donnally said. “I needed to know the truth.”
“Now you know. And now it’s over.”
“It’s not. Reggie Hancock is missing. She was supposed to meet him in LA yesterday. Nobody has seen him since.”
Donnally described the rolling scheme, its connection to Little Bud and his suicide, and the call from Hancock to his secretary. He didn’t see any risk in telling her. If Mother Two refused to cooperate with them in finding Ryvver and getting her to surrender, Navarro would lock her up for assault so she couldn’t do anything to help her daughter.
“She never went to LA. I know. She lives on SSI and her credit card is in my name. If she’d flown or driven down there, I’d know about it. I’ve been checking her credit card and bank account online. She’d need a plane ticket or gas for the car. Like always, there’s hardly any money in there and she hasn’t taken cash out for a couple of weeks.”
“Maybe Reggie figured out he’d be next,” Donnally said, “and came up here to try to grab her on his own terms.”
“Where would she try to meet him?” Navarro asked. “Maybe someplace where Hancock wouldn’t think there was any risk.”
Mother Two closed her eyes. Donnally watched her thumbs working against her fingertips. Finally, she opened them.
“The place she knew best in San Francisco was Golden Gate Park. The California Academy of Sciences and all that. She spent a summer working as a volunteer at the Steinhart Aquarium. She even had her own key. She liked to hang out there late at night. Just her and the animals.”
Donnally imagined Ryvver tying up Hancock and feeding him to the alligators.
“She still knows lots of folks who work there. They’re very fond of her and let her do work around the place when she’s in town.”
Chapter 56
What will happen to her?” Mother Two asked.
Donnally, Navarro, and Mother Two were sitting in a surveillance van outside the California Academy of Sciences. Undercover officers dressed as homeless people were hiding in the bushes watching the front and service entrances. Two others were already inside, dressed as janitors. All had been given DMV photos of Ryvver and Reggie Hancock and descriptions of her hairstyle and likely clothing.
“That’s hard to say,” Donnally answered.
But it wasn’t.
If the mothers were willing to mortgage their house and business to hire the kind of lawyer Hamlin had been and the kind of investigator Frank Lange had been, the worst she would get was a not-guilty-by-reason-of-insanity verdict.
“It depends on what the psychiatrists say,” Donnally said.
“She has a history of violence as a child. We tried everything.”
Donnally squinted at her. “Violence? Your partner told me as a kid she wouldn’t pick flowers for fear of hurting the plants.”
Mother Two took in a long breath and exhaled. “The lies we tell ourselves.” She looked at Donnally. “If she was a little boy, nobody would have said anything. Catching and torturing lizards and frogs is what they do. Catch them. Lead them down the sidewalk on strings. Swing them around. Dissect them. She was just a little aggressive on the dissecting side.”
“And she was a girl.”
“And the child of lesbians. Don’t think that didn’t play a role in the school psychologist’s theories about why she was that way. This was more than twenty years ago.”
Navarro’s radio clicked, followed by a voice.
“Black male and white female walking close together south along Music Concourse Drive, near the fountain between the palm trees.”
“Check.”
That would mean the two were behind the van.
Mother Two leaned toward the rear and her body tensed like a sprinter.
Donnally grabbed her arm. “Take it easy.”
Navarro turned on the monitor and directed the video camera in the top vent toward the back.
“Cancel that. He’s too tall. She’s too heavy. . and they just separated.”
“Check.”
Mother Two settled back, her eyes moving, seeming to be searching for the trailing end of her last thought.
Finally, she sighed and looked at Navarro. “You know how it was back in those days. You’re old enough. I know you called people up in Guerneville to check up on me. They told me. And they told me you’re queer. What do you think those same shrinks would’ve said about you?”
“I know what they said about me.” Navarro gave her a hard look, like he was fighting off an invasion that had started at his professional life and had now moved into his private life, then his face softened and he said, “They said I could be cured.”
Another click. A different radio voice.
“I just spotted a Toyota Corolla. Dark. Like hers. Two-door heading up South Drive. Two people inside. Can’t make the plate yet.”
“Check.”
“Got the plate. Wrong one.”
“Switch to another channel,” Navarro said, “and run it for lost or stolen.”
The voice came back a minute later. “The plate is clear and matches the car. It’s not hers.”
“Check.”
Donnally thought of Frank Lange. He understood the reason and the mechanism, Ryvver drugging him, then searching his files for proof of the rolling scheme that took the life of Little Bud, then setting his house aflame.
“Did Ryvver have access to Rohypnol?” Donnally asked.
“A generic form. She was prescribed flunitrazepam for insomnia, but it had the reverse effect on her. Made her agitated and aggressive. She went off on my partner the day after Little Bud died. Hitting and scratching. Only after we threw her out did we do some research and figure out it might’ve been the drug.”
Mother Two sighed again.
“You’d think that after all these years, and all the psych drugs she’s been given, that we would’ve checked first.”
She looked at Donnally, her eyes seemed to deepen, then went dead, and she looked away.
He knew she’d just hit on the foundation of her daughter’s insanity defense: The drugs made her do it.
And he had no doubt that for the right price she’d be able to buy a lawyer like Hamlin and one of his hireling shrinks to sell it to a jury.
Chapter 57
Three A.M. and Donnally was still staring at his bedroom ceiling and listening to pounding raindrops that had ridden the squalls up from the Pacific three blocks away and then swept down onto the neighborhood. He was hoping his phone would ring with the news that Hancock had been saved from Ryvver and Ryvver had been saved from herself.
His job as special master was over. He’d sat in the van for two hours feeling his court-appointed identity dissolve and watching himself return to who he was before Judge McMullin had signed the order.
Mark Hamlin’s death was solely a law enforcement issue. There was no privilege left to protect, and he and the judge had agreed he should back away. The arrest would be clean, and any admissions Ryvver made would be unimpeachable in court.