The headline screamed: LOST BREEDING POPULATION OF CALIFORNIA CONDORS FOUND!
Tom swore softly and skimmed the article before he tossed the paper onto the table. It was USA Today, which meant everything was aimed at an eighth-grade level of comprehension; that also meant it was fairly succinct.
“North of Death Valley,” he said. “Just over the state line in Nevada, not far from Beatty. Jesus Christ, ten of them identified!”
Tully took the paper out of his hands. “Yeah, the Rolfes don’t do things by halves, eh?”
“Bet this was Adrienne in person,” Tom said, an edge of bitterness in his voice—bitterness tinged with respect. “Smart, quick and decisive. And I’ll bet you these are genetically related to the one I got in LA. And that they show some signs of modern life, like a lead pellet or two in the gizzard, but not much and not all of them. What an amazing coincidence.”
“Yeah, and the fact that they’re all adults will be put down to a lack of breeding success,” Tully said. “What else could it be?”
“That’s what we’re supposed to prove,” Tom said grimly. “Let’s get back to work.”
Every flat surface in his apartment—including the kitchen table and the counters—was piled thick with hardcopy; the walls of the living room were covered in printouts from the disk and from files they’d accessed via his computer. Most police work was done this way, in offices—it was only when you had the framework that you could use shoe leather and start talking to people.
“OK, Kemosabe, we’ve got another problem,” Tully said an hour later, speaking around the pencil gripped in his teeth.
Tom sipped lukewarm weak coffee—he still brewed it the way they did in North Dakota, made so you could drink endless cups through a winter’s night—and looked up from an article on the history of Rolfe Mining and Minerals.
“Great. Another problem. That’ll make six hundred and thirty-two,” he said. “Lay on.”
“The more we keep looking, the more money we find,” his partner said. “It’s not just gold; it’s everything else they’ve been shipping out: silver, diamonds, you name it—there’s that seagoing diamond-dredging stuff and marine diesels they bought back in the sixties; give you odds they’ve been working coastal deposits all over the world, picking the richest pockets, laundering through those mines in Africa they own here and now. And all the proceeds out at compound interest. We’ve got better than sixty years of compound interest working here, and it looks like they invested it carefully, good solid annual profits on all the holdings they bought. Something like”—he paused to consult a list—“thirty to forty billion in assets, all up. Assuming we’re estimating the stuff held offshore accurately. It could be twice that, easy, or maybe more.”
“Yah, you betcha, they’re filthy rich,” Tom said, moodily scraping the last of the fried rice out of a carton with a spoon.
“You’re doing that aw-shucks farm-boy thing again, Tom,” Tully said wearily. “Money that big gets cozy with politicians. It has to. Which means—”
“Which means any case against them has to be solid-gold plated,” Tom said.
“It means we have to get a signed confession and solid evidence, and even that may not get us a warrant to look at their facilities,” Tully said. “They can laugh any accusation of crazy stuff off—and even if it were conventional crime, no way any state agency would touch this, not with the contributions these guys have been making to both parties—and to half a dozen good causes, too. That’ll bring all of them down on anyone who tries to upset the applecart. Did you see how much they spent on that new library and the hospital in Oakland?”
“Yeah, I did,” Tom admitted. “But that tells me something too.” His long thick fingers—strangler’s hands, his ex-wife had said during a quarrel—sorted papers. “Look at the patterns. Lots of good-cause PR greasing all over, but these guys have been subsidizing Oakland pretty heavy since the early fifties. Donations elsewhere, yeah, but an early and heavy concentration there.”
“And there’s that big warehouse complex,” Tully said, closing his eyes and chewing on the pencil. “I think I see the drift of your thoughts, Kemosabe.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’ve got a hunch. Let’s hit those land-registry files, if they ever came up. Damn the registry for still using dial-up modems, anyway—why not runners with letters in cleft sticks?”
The files had finally come up. What followed was work, eye straining and mind numbing. Not to mention butt numbing, he thought. But there it is at last.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “Get the old map.”
Tully handed him the map of Oakland, this one dated from the late 1940s. “All right. There’s the house; run-down neighborhood then, but residential. Owner…” Tom blinked in astonishment. “Samuel Yasujiru?”
“Our esteemed boss’s grandfather,” Tully pointed out. “His until they got sent to the camps—most of those people sold up for cents on the dollar. The compensation later was money, not restitution of title. OK, let’s take it from there. Sold to one George McSwain, resident in San Jose. Let’s look him up…. Yeah, primary residence stays San Jose until he sells this Oakland house in May of 1946 to—aha!—one John Rolfe.”
“Must have been a rental property during the war and right afterward,” Tom said, riffling through more maps of Oakland through the next decade. “License to print money, from what I’ve heard, especially when rent control came off. Right, sale in May of ’forty-six—that’s a very good price, in ’forty-six dollars. Cash, too, no rollover on the mortgage. Then over the next year, every other property in the area changes hands. Some to Rolfe; some to these other names—Colletta, O’Brien, Pearlmutter, Fitzmorton, Filmer, Latimer—then they all transfer to Rolfe Mining and Minerals. All outright buys, all cash transactions. Then it gets rezoned in ’forty-eight, and they put up the warehouses over the next couple of years… railway siding… that’s it!”
They looked at the irregular-edged green lozenge in west Oakland, not too far from the water. On an impulse, he checked the original shoreline before reclamation; the complex would be closer to the shore there, with a thick fringe of tule swamp and mudflats.
“That’s where this all started,” Tom said, sitting back. “Sometime in 1946.”
“And by the money and attention they’ve spent on it, it’s where it’s going on to this day,” Tully said with satisfaction. “Nothing else they’ve got looks like this; the rest is all paper and data and financial apart from the mining operations offshore. I’d lay five-to-one odds this is their sole and solitary way of getting”—he made a waving gesture—“over there.”
The little man was chewing a toothpick, a habit he’d picked up when he quit smoking, along with chewing gum. Now he went over to the keyboard of Tom’s computer, tapped in a series of rapid commands, then prodded the frayed end at the screen.
“And ain’t it another amazing coincidence that there aren’t any Web cams there, or pictures of it on any of the Oakland sites?” he said. “And none of the local police surveillance cams are close. Despite Oakland having a net thick as anywhere outside New York and DC.”
“Just some warehouses,” Tom said with a gaunt smile. “Why bother?”
Especially if strong hints get dropped from very civic-minded businesses that the city really had better places to spend redevelopment money, he thought.