Patterson, James - Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

This one was personal. The phrase rang in our ears.

But we didn't find anything. A lot of people's time wasted.

If there was a connection to August Spies in Jill's life, it wasn't in her files. Where was it? It had to be there somewhere.

Finally, we loaded the last of the files to go back to the morgue.

“Go home,” Claire said to me, exhausted herself. “Get some sleep.” She struggled up and pulled on her raincoat. She placed her hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “We'll find another way, Lindsay. We will.”

Claire was right. I needed a good night's sleep more than anything in the world, other than a warm bath. I had staked so much on this.

I checked in with the office one more time, then, for the first time I could remember, packed up to head home for some sleep. I got in the Explorer and started heading down Brannan for Potrero. I stopped at a light. I was feeling totally empty.

The light changed. I sat there. I knew inside that I wasn't going home.

I jerked a right when the light changed, and headed out on Sixteenth toward Buena Vista Park. It wasn't as if any bril-liant idea flashed into my brain.... More like a lack of any-thing else to do.

Something connected them. I was sure of that much. I just hadn't found it.

There was a single patrol guy guarding Jill's town house when I pulled up. Crime scene tape blocked the stairs to the landing.

I ID'd myself to the young officer at the door, who was probably happy for the diversion at this time of night. I stepped inside Jill's house.

Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

Chapter 84

A REALLY CREEPY FEELING came over me that this might not be something I should be doing. Walking around the home I had been to so many times, knowing Jill was dead. Seeing her things: a Burberry umbrella, Otis's food bowl, a stack of recent newspapers. I was overcome with a sense of loneliness, missing her more than ever.

I went into the kitchen. I leafed through some loose things on an old pine desk. Everything was just as she'd left it. A note to Ingrid, her housekeeper. A few bills. Jill's famil-iar handwriting. It was almost as if she were still there.

I went upstairs. I walked down the hall to Jill's study. This was where she did her work, spent a lot of her time. Jill's space.

I sat down at her desk. I smelled her scent. Jill had an old brass lamp. I flicked it on. Some letters scattered on the desk. One from her sister, Beth. Some photos: her and Steve and Otis at Moab.

What are you doing in here, Lindsay? I asked myself again. What are you hoping to find? Something signed by August Spies? Don't be a fool.

I opened one of the desk drawers. Files. Household things. Trips, airline mileage statements.

I got up and stepped over to the bookshelf. The Voyage of the Narwhal, The Corrections, stories by Eudora Welty. Jill always had good taste in books. Never knew when she found the time to read these things. But somehow she did.

I bent down and opened a cupboard under the shelf. I came upon boxes of old pictures. Trips taken, her sister's wedding. Some went back as far as her college graduation.

Look at Jill: frizzy hair, thin as a rail, but strong. They made me smile. I sat on the hardwood floor and leafed through them. God, I miss you.

I saw this old accordion-style folder, wrapped tightly by an elastic cord. I opened it. Lots of old things. What it con-tained surprised me. Letters, photos, newspaper clippings. Some report cards from when Jill was in high school. Her parents' wedding invitation.

And a file stuffed with newspaper clippings. I leafed through them. They were mostly about her father.

Her dad was a prosecutor, here and back in Texas. Jill told me he used to call her his little Second Chair. He'd died just a few months before, and it was clear how much Jill missed him. Most of the articles were on cases he had worked on or appointments he had received.

I came upon an old yellowed article. The source sur-prised me.

San Francisco Examiner. September 17, 1970.

The headline read PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE.

The Black National Army. The BNA was a radical group back in the sixties. Known for violent robberies and armed assaults.

I scanned the article. The prosecutor's name sent a chill

racing down my back. Robert Meyer. Jill's father.

Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

Chapter 85

AN HOUR LATER I was stabbing at Cindy's front doorbell. Two-thirty in the morning. I heard the locks turn, and the door slowly cracked open. Cindy was staring at me in a long Niners shirt, bleary-eyed. I had probably woken her out of her best sleep in three days.

“This better be good,” she said as she flipped the lock.

“It's good, Cindy.” I shoved the old Examiner article in front of her face. “I think I found out how Jill's connected to the case.”

Fifteen minutes later we were bouncing along the dark-ened, empty streets of the city in my Explorer, down to the Chronicle's office on Fifth and Mission.

“I didn't even know Jill's father worked out here,” Cindy said, then yawned.

“He started here, out of law school, before he moved back to Texas. Right after Jill was born.”

We got to her cubicle at about three A.M. The lights in the newsroom were dimmed, a couple of young stringers man-ning the overnight wires, caught playing video bridge.

“Overnight efficiency audit,” Cindy said to them, straight-faced. “You guys just failed.”

She wheeled herself in front of her screen and fired up the computer. She plugged a few search words into the Chronicle's database: Robert Meyer. BNA. Then she slapped the ENTER key.

Several matches popped up on the screen right away. We plowed through a lot of unrelated articles of antiwar and BNA activity in the sixties. Then we found something.

PROSECUTOR NAMED IN DEADLY BNA RAID CASE.

A series of articles from September 1970.

We scrolled back from there, and bingo! FEDS, POLICE RAID BNA STRONGHOLD. FOUR DEAD IN SHOOTOUT.

It was in the days of the sixties radicals. Constant protests over the war, SDS riots on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. We scrolled through several articles. The BNA had robbed a few banks and then a Brink's truck. A guard, a hostage, and two cops were killed in the robbery. Two BNA members were on the FBI's list of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

We scrolled through whatever the Chronicle had on file. A BNA hideout was raided the night of December 6, 1969. The Feds had surrounded a house on a quiet street in Berkeley based on a tip from a CI. They came in, guns blazing.

Five radicals in the house were killed. Among the dead were Fred Whitehouse, a leader of the group, and two women.

There was one white kid shot dead in the raid, a student at Berkeley. From an upper-middle-class background near Sacramento. Family and friends insisted he didn't even know how to fire a gun. Just an idealistic kid caught up protesting an immoral war.

No one would say what he was doing in the house.

William “Billy” Danko was his name.

Womans Murder Club 3 - 3rd Degree

Chapter 86

A GRAND JURY was convened to investigate the shootings at the BNA hideout. Nasty charges were hurled left and right. The case was given to a rising prosecutor in the D.A.'s office. Robert Meyer. Jill's father.

The jury at the trial found no evidence of any police mis-conduct. Those who were killed, the police argued, were among the FBI's most wanted, though the description seemed a stretch for Billy Danko. Federal agents paraded a cache of guns confiscated in the raid: Uzis, grenade launchers, piles of ammo. A gun was found in Fred Whitehouse's hand - though sympathizers claimed it had been planted.