“I’m almost done, Lonnie.”
“Okay.”
He walked into the second bedroom. He smelled the unwashed sheets, cut with a popular antiperspirant. There were posters of baseball players and beautiful actresses tacked crookedly to the walls. A bookcase rested along one wall, its bottom shelf fallen at one end, the volumes slouching precariously but still contained. He read some titles. Then more. Half were paperback thrillers. But of the sixty or so volumes, the other half were accounts of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hood had many of the titles in his own library.
Rovanna stood in the doorway with the bat over his shoulder, his hands low on the handle.
“I’m not a threat to you,” said Hood softly.
“It’s time to go, though.”
“I really want to thank you for what you did. Mike Finnegan can be imposing and sometimes downright scary. You did well with him. He didn’t crack you. You did the right thing when you called me.”
“Good-bye, then.”
“Did you serve?”
Rovanna colored deeply and Hood saw his hands relax around the handle of the bat. “What makes you think I didn’t?”
“You got your battalions mixed up.”
“Easy, if you experience the level of fire that I did.”
“No, Lonnie. Very hard to forget your own battalion, whether you go through heavy fire or not. I see your books here. You read a lot. You strike me more as a student than a soldier.” Rovanna looked down for a long moment, then shrugged.
“I don’t care that you weren’t in Iraq, Lonnie. It doesn’t matter one bit to me. You don’t need to be a soldier to be brave. I was there and I’m not one ounce more brave than you.”
“It’s just too bad I’m crazy.”
“Yes, it is. I’ll be walking out now, Lonnie. Careful with that thing.”
Rovanna backed into the hallway, and when Hood came to him, he offered his hand and Rovanna let go of the bat to shake it. His grip was strong and damp.
“If you remember something, call me,” said Hood. “If Stren calls or comes again, call me immediately. He’s evil, Lonnie. He will hurt you.”
“I sensed that.”
“If you want to just talk, call me. Really. I mean it. I always have time to talk. I like baseball.”
“I have prayed and have never been answered. Not once.”
“I’ve never been answered, either. I think that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
“There’s supposed to be more in this life.”
“More what?”
“More good.”
Hood clasped Rovanna on the shoulder, then walked past him into the living room and out the door.
• • •
The San Diego Superior Court clerks were getting ready to close for the day, but Hood badged his way through to the chambers of the Honorable Fritz Johnson. Johnson was an older man with brisk gray hair and prying eyes and mounted game birds everywhere: turkey, pheasant, quail, chukar, band-tailed pigeons. “We’ve never worked with a Dr. Stren. I assign the psychiatrists from Sorrento Valley Medical and he’s not one of them. Why?”
Hood briefed the judge on an apparently troubled young El Cajon man, Lonnie Rovanna, who claimed to have been visited by Dr. Stren, with regard to his Firearms Rights Restoration form.
“No,” said Johnson. “Rovanna’s doctor is Darnell, not Stren. There is no Stren at Sorrento, unless he’s brand-new. At any rate, he wouldn’t have seen Rovanna without my knowing it.”
“Rovanna claimed to have seen combat in Iraq. And says he’s being treated at the naval hospital.”
Johnson shook his head. “Those are delusions.”
“I thought so.”
“I guess if you’re ATF, you’re interested in his guns.”
“I’m more interested in the doctor that doesn’t exist.” Hood took one of his Mike Finnegan photo albums from a side pocket of his suit coat. Each album contained six images of Mike, four-by-six inches, housed in clear protective plastic. He handed it to Judge Johnson, who flipped through it quickly and chuckled.
“He was a janitor here for a while last year. Did a good job and didn’t steal one thing. I haven’t seen him in months. Never asked his name. We talked bird hunting, among other things. He used to run his family’s vineyard up in Napa Valley, or so he said. There were valley quail and mourning dove to be shot. I remember he knew the Latin for all these birds. Odd, for a janitor. Is this him? Stren? Yes? Well, kind of odd he’d show up as a bogus psychiatrist. If you want to know more about him, talk to Kim out front. She’ll know who we contract for janitorial.”
Kim gave him a contact and number for La Jolla Custodial. On his way home Hood called and got right through. He talked to one of the managers, then sent him his clearest Finnegan photo over the phone. A moment later the manager called back to say he’d never seen or hired such a man.
9
That evening and part of the night Hood sat at the desk in his wine cellar, using his Justice Department-issued laptop to flesh out Lonnie Dwight Rovanna. Hood was privy to the fine and various databases to which U.S. Marshals have access. It took just a few minutes to find Rovanna’s basic biography: He was born in Los Angeles to an aerospace test engineer and a high school counselor. His Stanford-Binet IQ was 126. He was now twenty-nine years old. He had grown up in Orange County, California, attended public school until age sixteen, then. .
Then it was as if Lonnie Rovanna had fallen off the edge of the world for ten years, only to resurface three years ago in El Cajon. And during that decade, Hood could find no prison time, no military service, no credit agency records, no filings with the IRS. The gap smelled institutional. He poured a bourbon and called an old friend in Sacramento who owed him one good favor. It was a long conversation. By the end of it, Hood was reading Lonnie Rovanna’s state mental hospital records on the laptop screen.
At sixteen, Rovanna had suffered his first psychotic episode, which lasted three weeks. Neither parent had a history of mental illness. His original diagnosis had been brief psychotic disorder, but less than two months later he again reported delusions and hallucinations, and exhibited disorganized speech and behavior. After two years in a private hospital, psychotherapy, and antipsychotic medications, Rovanna’s diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia, paranoid type with a delusional disorder, grandiose type. He was admitted to a San Diego-area state hospital at age eighteen and remained there for eight years. Medications and treatment had had positive effects, according to two of three doctors. Three years ago, when changes in California law enabled him to get a monthly check and qualify for state-assisted housing, Rovanna had found the rental in El Cajon.
None of which had shown up on his background check when Rovanna purchased a semiautomatic nine-millimeter handgun shortly after leaving the state hospital. Hood knew that the biggest problem with the mental health component of background checks was that nobody cooperated-state agencies shielded mental health records from one another and from county and federal agencies, including the FBI; not all branches of the military fully disclosed the mental health histories of their soldiers to state or other federal agencies, either, and some didn’t disclose any at all. Not even government background checkers had friends in every state capital. It was no surprise to Hood that Lonnie Rovanna had illegally purchased four semiautomatic assault-style rifles and eight handguns in the last three years-people like him sometimes fell through the cracks.
Hood exited the state health records and went back to a California law-enforcement-only site that had links to DMV. Rovanna had purchased and registered a used Ford Focus one year ago.
Hood called him. “I just wanted to thank you again for letting me know about Finnegan.”
“He’s not a good man, Mr. Hood.”
Hood heard a TV in the background, then the rattle of ice in a plastic cup and liquid being slurped. He sipped his own drink and commented on mankind’s nearly universal addiction to alcohol. Rovanna chuckled and said he’d had his first drink at twelve and instantly recognized a lifetime companion. By fourteen he was shoplifting the stuff and selectively pinching from his parents’ prescription sleeping pills. Hood told Rovanna that he hadn’t missed much by not fighting in Iraq. The insurgents were ruthless against the Americans and their own people, he said. He told Rovanna about some of the investigations he did. And about playing tennis in Baghdad inside the Green Zone, where he helped organize a tennis league of soldiers and local Iraqis-they even had an Olympic hopeful, but he’d been assassinated for cooperating with the Americans. Rovanna asked intelligent questions and listened patiently for the answers.