• • •
San Diego PD had Rovanna’s house taped off and a half dozen uniformed patrolman stood in the driveway near the front porch. The mayor stood among them, arms crossed, nodding. More officers stood along the crime-scene tape that ran from the main house to the fence of the house next door, talking with the media crews and the neighbors. Hood badged a sergeant as a photographer shot him, then he stepped over the tape and walked beneath the towering sycamore tree.
Benson and the San Diego County district attorney, Lisa Alex, met Hood on the porch and escorted him inside. Hood stepped into the familiar room and saw the dusty piles of books and magazines, and the slouching plaid couch and the white chair and the low coffee table between them. A police videographer came down the hallway behind a camera and a wall of bright light and a still photographer patiently framed a shot of the plastic vodka bottle on the coffee table, then set loose the motor drive.
Benson led Hood down the short hallway and into the unused bedroom. DA Alex came in last and shut the door. Benson looked forty, freckled and red haired, with big shoulders and a paunch. Lisa Alex was tall and slender and sharp faced.
“Tell me what you know about Rovanna,” said Benson.
Hood told them about his web and social media search for Mike Finnegan, a man he suspected of being involved in illegal enterprises in both the United States and Mexico. Then about Finnegan’s surprise visit to Rovanna as Dr. Todd Stren. He told them about his own interview here in Rovanna’s home and the follow-up phone call he’d made later that night to the troubled young man. He told them what he’d found out about Rovanna’s mental health problems. He admitted that he’d seen the indicators for possible violence in Lonnie but had no legal way of detaining him.
“Tell us about that gun he used,” said Alex.
Hood told them about now-defunct Pace Arms of Orange County, the one thousand Love 32s smuggled south under ATF’s noses three years ago, then the discovery that some of the guns had been brought back into the United States and used in drug gang killings.
Lisa Alex and Rich Benson looked at each other. “Let me get this right,” said Benson. “Mike Finnegan-a bathroom-products wholesaler in L.A., who has no criminal or any other kind of record-is the connection between Rovanna, the guns, and ATF?”
“I think Finnegan gave Lonnie the gun he used.”
Again the detective and the DA exchanged looks. Benson looked long at Hood. “Rovanna told me he got it from you.”
Hood confronted their doubt with a slight shake of his head. “He hears voices. He’s delusional.”
“But you were here in his home just a few days ago,” said Lisa Alex. “And he said you two talked at some length about Iraq, and this Dr. Stren and Mike Finnegan, and he said you drank vodka.”
“Yes. He told me about the U.S. Army brigade that he never was a part of. And about the Identical Men who followed him, and the fake Jehovah’s Witnesses he attacked. I didn’t give him a gun. Don’t make me say that again.”
“Why would he say it?” asked Benson.
“Ask him,” said Hood.
“We did, and he said you have been badgering him since your days together in Iraq. That you have been inciting him to political violence for years. And, lately, specifically toward Scott Freeman.”
“He was never in Iraq. I only met Rovanna six days ago. But Lonnie was phobic about a Dr. Walter Freeman. Walter Freeman was the so-called father of the prefrontal lobotomy.”
Alex cleared her throat softly. “Mr. Hood, what in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Lonnie conflated the two men-the two Freemans. I didn’t stir him to violence. His terror of lobotomy did. Mike Finnegan did, and he supplied the instrument to carry it out. Lonnie thought Freeman was after him. He was fixated on the instruments and the procedure. Dr. Freeman’s first patient was named Alice Hood. So, somehow, Rovanna associated me with her. And her with Scott Freeman as Walter Freeman. So he claimed to be Scott Freeman’s protector, as a way of getting physically close to him. Delusion fed delusion. Rovanna heard voices, imagined people who were not real. I don’t think anyone knew how crazy he was. I didn’t.”
“Clear as mud,” said Lisa Alex, standing. “And unless the feds beat me to it I’m going to put Lonnie Rovanna on death row. If you supplied him that firearm, we may have a conspiracy and you may well join him on said row. If not, my office will depose you at some point and you may well find yourself on my witness list. All yours, Rich.”
Alex marched out, leaving the door open. “You’re a person of interest in this investigation,” said Benson. “You know the drill. Don’t leave California without notifying me.”
31
Clint Wampler lay on his trailer bed in Bombay Beach, peacoat buttoned against the desert cold, head against the buckling wallpaper, watching yet another news story on the shooting of the congressman in San Diego. He thought, The federal government sucks and Freeman deserved it. The next story was of course about him and the “cold-blooded murder of Agent Reggie Cepeda.” They showed the same picture of Clint they’d been showing for seven straight days.
He answered his phone to good news.
“Clint, I have a buyer at thirty-five thousand.”
“It costs forty.”
“It’s a solid offer from a dependable client.”
“Solid shit is what I call it.” Wampler rang off and dropped the phone to the bed beside the.44 Magnum. Of course Castro called back ten minutes later.
“He wants three.”
“I ain’t got but one.”
“He can go forty on the one if you can get two more at thirty-seven five.”
“Nope. These things are hard to come by. If they’re worth thirty-seven five, then they’re worth forty. Tell him to go to hell.”
“Let me tell you something about business, Clint. You have to learn to be flexible. You have to offer up a little bit to keep your customers happy. You take care of them and they take care of you. Sometimes you take a little more and sometimes you take a little less. This is how things get done.”
Wampler did the math while Castro lectured him. “This is the deal, then: forty for one, thirty-eight each for two more. I need the money up front for the second two. I don’t get ’em on promises and you aren’t either.”
Clint hung up again and dropped the phone and went to the front door window. He cracked the curtain and looked out at the late morning. He saw the dirt patch with the derelict cars, some up on concrete blocks, some resting on their wheels or rust-eaten brakes. Not a one of them less than thirty years old, he thought. He hated this place, hated living locked down like a criminal. But this hole was hard to find and cheap. And the old lady who took his cash was so blind she made him fish out the key with the TRAILOR tag on it, though not too blind to count the money.
And near blindness was a virtue because, even though the murder of the congressman in San Diego had knocked Clint out of first place on the news, Clint was still everywhere Clint turned. For two straight days after he’d killed Cepeda, he had made the front page of all four newspapers for sale outside the Bombay Beach convenience stores. He bought some to see what they were saying about him. His picture was shown and his name bellowed out on every news show he watched on the wretched little TV in his trailer, and every radio station he could get, from Yuma to San Diego, L.A. to San Bernardino. But even with the fresher dead congressman to prey on, they were still yapping on about the fallen hero, Cepeda, and showing his official fed mug shot and a portrait from his wedding day, over and over. And of course, most of the focus was on the growing manhunt for Clint Wampler, a militia-affiliated extremist who had thus far escaped arrest. The papers and TV kept showing his worst picture, the one that made him look like some kind of rotten-toothed sixties rock star, with stupid bangs and big ears and an IQ of ten.