“Did he make a statement about killing Anna? I didn’t see one in the court file.”
“Unintelligible. He acted like he was caught by his parents after killing the family cat. And by the time the hospital got him on his meds, the public defender was representing him so we couldn’t talk to him anymore.”
The court file had told Donnally how it ended. “Then he was found incompetent to stand trial.”
Blaine shrugged. “We fought like hell. We had an informant in the county jail telling us that Brown was faking and that he had a fantasy that Anna wanted him to come into her bedroom to have sex with her. He strangled her when she refused.”
“That would’ve made it a capital case.”
Blaine smirked. “Not in California and not in Alameda County. No way a jury here would sentence a lunatic to death. Anyway, there wasn’t any forensic evidence of an attempted rape, no semen, no vaginal bruising.”
“Maybe Brown just didn’t get very far before she started resisting.”
“That was our theory. If he’d gone to trial we probably could’ve gotten the attempted rape in through the informant, but that didn’t happen. We lost the competency hearing. Brown came back three years later with reports that he was still incompetent so he got transferred into the civil commitment system-”
“And no one ever bothered to evaluate him again.”
Blaine reddened again. “That’s the way the system works.”
“That’s the way the system doesn’t work.”
Donnally set his coffee cup on the desk, then rose and walked to the window. He looked out over Oakland, from the hills to the bay, and north toward Berkeley.
“And how many are there out there?” Donnally said without turning around. “Commit a murder, get declared incompetent, get sent off to some institution and forgotten.” He turned back toward Blaine. “What’s your guess? How many?”
Blaine swallowed hard. “I… I don’t have the slightest idea.” He reached again for his telephone and punched in two numbers. “Is he in?… I need to see him.” Blaine looked at Donnally. “You want to come with me to see the boss?”
Donnally shook his head. “Just call me when you find out where Brown is.” He then turned and walked from the office.
As he rode the elevator down, Donnally was overcome with an amorphous rage that tried to focus on Brown, then on Blaine, and then on the court system itself. Instead it locked on a thought: if only-and painted crosshairs on Mauricio’s face.
If only Mauricio hadn’t taken Anna to Berkeley, if only he hadn’t left her at New Sky, if only he’d gone back to get her… she’d still be alive.
The chain of causes and effects snapped tight.
If… only.
And Mauricio’s “I had no choice” just wasn’t good enough.
But as Donnally started down the steps of the courthouse, a wind whipped his face and ripped at the web of blame his mind had constructed.
Mauricio had been a fifteen-year-old kid who’d done the best he could, but had not only been too young to decide to take a life, but too young to take his own and his sister’s lives into his hands. And that single act had dispossessed him of his family, tormented his heart, and deprived him of the good death he deserved.
Donnally stopped on the sidewalk and stared at the lake. He tried to imagine what Anna must have looked like as Mauricio walked her past their dead father’s body and out the door and toward the highway heading north. He struggled to force his mind to compose a picture of a tiny girl with brown skin and round cheeks and black hair and dark eyes, but all that appeared was the mournful face of his own older brother, fair and angular and framed by his marine dress blue tunic and cover, who’d been killed in Vietnam when Donnally was eight years old.
And surging outward from that image came the molten terror of his childhood, of loss and helplessness in a world spun out of control.
A n hour later, Donnally’s cell phone rang as he pulled into the driveway of his ex-fiancee’s house in San Francisco.
“I need your promise you won’t go to the media with this,” Blaine said.
“With what?”
“I need to hear you say the words.”
“Okay. No press.”
“Sorry, man. Brown’s out.”
Chapter 6
The dull glaze of the owner’s eyes didn’t sharpen after Donnally spoke the name: Charles Brown.
Lumps of skin oozed from the sleeves of the flowered shift encasing her body. The smell of coffee and urine wafted past her from inside the East Oakland group home and swirled around the porch. Cigarette butts littered the concrete landing of the three-story converted house. Two vacant-eyed men with nicotine-stained fingers sat in white plastic chairs and stared at the street, oblivious to the tension building in the doorway.
Elsa Coady squinted toward the setting sun, then repeated: “Charles Brown… Charles Brown…”
“The Fresno Developmental Center sent him here six years ago.”
Her difficulty in placing the name assured Donnally that the prosecutor, busy putting together a task force to identify and hunt down all the lost defendants, hadn’t yet sent out a posse to round up Brown.
And that was fine with Donnally. He didn’t want to give Blaine a chance to screw it up again.
She shrugged her shoulders. “He’s not here. He walked away.” She glanced at the two men as if they were living repositories of the history of the house. “About five years ago.”
“Didn’t you notify anyone?”
“Who’s there to notify? If he’s the one I’m thinking of, there wasn’t nobody. He wasn’t on no probation or parole.”
“Didn’t you know he still had a homicide case pending?”
Elsa’s blotchy face darkened.
“This isn’t a jail and I’m not a jailer.” Her voice hardened as she spoke. “A roof over their heads, three meals, and their meds. That’s all we do. People want to walk away, they can walk away.”
The two sentences had a practiced feel, sounding to Donnally like she’d given that same answer many times before.
“You still have his file?”
“Sure. We have to keep that stuff. But I can’t show it to you.” A smirk emerged on her thin lips. “Confidentiality and all that.”
Donnally folded his arms across his chest, then lowered his head and looked hard into her eyes.
“Let me tell you what my concern is,” Donnally said. “In a couple of days, the press will be looking for someone to blame for Brown slipping away. It can be the court system, some weak-kneed judge, the county, the California mental health system, the Fresno Developmental Center, or it can be Elsa’s Home for Men.”
He made a show of inspecting the weathered wooden windows, the cracked and faded pink stucco, and the two men wearing grimy surplus overcoats that looked like they hadn’t been washed since summer.
“Who do you think all these folks are going to gang up on? You’re damn lucky I got here first.”
Elsa bit her cheek for a moment, and then said, “I sure hope you know what you’re doing.”
Chapter 7
D onnally separated the damp pages and hung them on a clothesline in Janie Nguyen’s unfinished basement. Some were moldy. Some were unreadable. Others were only readable against the light. It seemed to Donnally that the file, sent along with Charles Brown from the developmental center, had been stored in Elsa’s often flooded garage for the purpose of letting it dissolve into a past that no one wanted to think about.
He called it Janie’s basement even though he still owned the house and rented it to her for just enough money to cover the mortgage, taxes, and insurance. He came down every few months to make repairs, but otherwise treated the place as hers.
And not out of guilt. Or, at least, not out of guilt in an ordinary sense.
He and Janie were simply permanent features of each other’s landscapes, like California place names weighted with history: Meeting of Two Springs. Creek of Sorrows. Canyon of Hunger. They both knew they wouldn’t grow old without each other, but also not quite together.