BODIES FOUND IN HUNTERS POINT
Thomas Peele
Chronicle Staff Writer Two unidentified men were found bludgeoned to death in an abandoned Hunters Point warehouse on Sunday night. The bodies were discovered by a homeless man looking for a place to sleep. Police reported that it appears the men were beaten to death after being tortured, and they suspect the homicides were the result of a drug deal gone bad. Sergeant Pete Peterson said the hands of both men had been cut off, most likely in an attempt to prevent their identification by fingerprints.
“What’s this?” Janie said, her soft footsteps coming to a stop on the carpet behind him.
“I’m just tying up some loose ends that Sonny left me with. It doesn’t all seem quite real yet.”
“That’s the problem with history.”
“The tragedy is real,” Donnally said, staring at the monitor, “it’s just not anchored to anything.” He thought for a moment. “If Mauricio was still alive, it would be different.”
“I know,” she said, squeezing his shoulder, “and he would’ve been proud of her. Charles told me that Anna helped out lots of people. Food, medicine, advice. Some would come right to her door once a week, like clockwork. She’d give them boxed lunches or, for the ones she trusted, money to buy things for themselves.”
He looked up at her. “Like clockwork?”
Janie nodded. “My phrase, but his idea.”
“Did he say who?”
She shook her head, then sat down next to the desk.
“He told me she even borrowed money to pay for all the charity.” She smiled. “He said she took out a ‘mortuary.’ It took most of the session to figure out why he picked that word. It turned out that the bank she went to was next to a funeral home and what she got was a mortgage.”
Donnally raised his eyebrows as he looked over at Janie. It sounded less like charity and more like guilt.
“It seemed a little excessive to me, too,” Janie said.
“When are you seeing him again?”
She glanced at her watch. “Ten o’clock.”
B y noon Donnally was sitting before a different monitor, this one at the Alameda County Recorder’s Office, and paging through scans of Anna Keenan’s loan records. He became more and more puzzled as he looked through the documents. Between the day her mother signed the house over to her in 1980 and when she was murdered, she’d refinanced three times.
He wondered whether she’d discovered the violent origin of the money that went into buying the house and had decided to turn evil to good by giving it away.
Then why not just sell the house and give the money back to the armored car company?
The answer again arrived in Sonny’s words. “There’d be too much to explain.”
And with her remaining in the house, Artie and Robert would believe their money was still invested there.
Is that why they killed her? Because they found out she’d given their money away? And because they wanted to get past her to Trudy so she could make good their loss?
Donnally leaned back in his chair and stared up at the tiled ceiling.
But then strangling her? Kneeling over her on her bed and strangling her?
It didn’t make sense. Not with his years investigating homicides. A knife at her throat, yes. A gun at her temple, yes. But strangling? Not very likely. And by hand? Even less likely. Strangling hands were a weapon of passion, not calculation.
Donnally found that his eyes had lost focus. He blinked, then logged off the computer.
It just didn’t make sense.
D onnally’s cell phone rang as he drove across the Bay Bridge. It was Janie.
“Charles said that one of the two regulars she gave money to was named Art or Artie. Does that name mean anything to you?”
Chapter 37
D onnally flashed his badge for just the second time in his ten years of retirement. He couldn’t tell whether he felt like a priest of lapsed faith giving Communion or an actor playing a part that just happened to reveal his true self.
The cellular company’s security chief in San Francisco bought Donnally’s lie that he was investigating the theft of his cell phone. His raised eyebrow and slanted grin revealed his conclusion-by-fantasy that the thief was a woman who’d run out on Donnally.
The chief handed him off to a clerk who walked him to a windowless office and printed out a list of the cell sites that had picked up Donnally’s calls as Sonny drove him from Trudy’s cabin back to Berkeley. Donnally got the clerk talking about everything but the report he was printing out so he wouldn’t notice that all the calls from the cell phone were to the same landline and only a second in length, and wouldn’t then ask whose number it was.
The electronic trail dissolved into the coastal range northeast of Fort Bragg. The clerk displayed a topographical map on the screen that showed a road heading north from the highway, and pointed out that for the first half hour, the signal had alternated back and forth on the border between two cell sites. The sites covered a little more than five square miles. Donnally was grateful that Trudy had chosen a hideaway in the hill country. Unlike the flatlands where cell sites can be twenty miles apart, antennas in the mountains are stationed close together so reception isn’t lost in the canyons.
Two hours of inspecting satellite maps on Janie’s computer narrowed his search down to three probable locations, each composed of a cabin and two outbuildings laid out in the form of a triangle within a clearing. He plotted a course from one to the other, starting at Fort Bragg along the coast and ending at the east end of the highway bisecting Mendocino County.
Each route would take him far to the north of his targets, then down fire roads to within hiking distance, and each would require camping overnight in the forest.
None of the routes was one he would’ve taken during pot-growing season, when the hills were patrolled by armed guards, patches were booby-trapped, and the earth was damp enough for the anonymous burial of an intruder.
T he first two days were a washout.
Even as he hiked up toward the ridge-top trail above the dormant marijuana fields, he suspected that he was a victim of wishful thinking that made him choose the easiest first.
And a moment after setting up his spotting scope on the outside walkway of an abandoned fire lookout, he discovered he was right: The outbuilding was too large, the barn was too small, and the cabin was just one story.
Only with that failure did he feel the aches in his muscles and hip, and the bruises on his legs and arms inflicted by shrubs and tree branches as he had bushwhacked the deer trails.
The search for the second site took him down a forest service road into a canyon about four miles north of the highway and deep into marijuana country.
He climbed out of his truck and inspected the dirt to make sure there were no fresh footprints or tire tracks, then hoisted on his pack and began a cross-country trek that would begin with a hike up eleven hundred feet in two miles, then almost down to sea level two thousand feet below over the next eight miles, and back up again.
A handheld GPS kept him on track as he hiked the growers’ trails through the pines and oaks. He stepped over rows of macheted trunks of harvested plants and over hundreds of sections of black plastic piping, the drip systems veining the hillsides, waiting to be fed in the spring and summer by water trucks like Trudy’s.
At 9 A.M. on the second day he crested the final ridge and looked for a place to spot on the property. He found a rock outcropping shaded by a mature oak and set up his scope. He held his breath as he turned the focus ring, then a moment of relief: Bear’s red truck emerged against the brown and green background of the clearing.