Dynamite Road Page 7

  “Oh, he knew something. He did a good trade in black market art; he was a real collector. Plus he ran women, guns, coke. He was just a middleman for anything coming this way. He must’ve been very good at it too: He lived in a mansion, practically, over in Presidio Terrace.”

  “Foof. Nice part of town. I guess we’re in the wrong business.”

  “No fooling,” said Sissy with her sweet laugh.

  “I remember the feds got him on something once. Counterfeiting, was it?”

  “Yeah, they traced some funny money to him. He did a year.”

  “Okay,” said Weiss. “So our young friend Harry Ridder was Moncrieff’s gardener. And…?”

  Sissy’s narrow shoulders rose and fell under her cardigan. “And nothing. Nothing I can find out about Ridder anyway. No one seemed to notice him at all except to say the garden always looked nice. The only mention of him I can find is in the coroner’s report: He was present at the house when Moncrieff died.”

  “He died at home?”

  “Yeah, liver disease.”

  “AIDS?”

  “I don’t think so. If it was, they kept it out of the report.”

  Weiss mused on that a second, rocking in his chair. “Who else was there at the time he died?”

  “His attorney, Peter Crouch.”

  “Sure, I know Crouchy. A good old-fashioned lowlife mouthpiece. I heard he closed shop a while back, scuttled off to some retirement cabin someplace.”

  “Yeah, I tried to find him. No one’s heard from him in months. No one seems to care much either.”

  “That’s Crouchy,” said Weiss. “No one would. Okay. So Moncrieff died in bed attended by his lawyer and his gardener. Anyone else? No one named Whip by any chance.”

  “No, no Whip. Just a woman the coroner described as ‘Moncrieff’s live-in caregiver.’”

  “You mean like a nurse?”

  “Not professional, not an RN, not as far as anyone knows anyway.”

  “She have a name?”

  “Julie Wyant. Which is pretty much all anyone seems to know about her.”

  Weiss remembered the words written in the toolshed where Harry Ridder had killed himself: Julie Angel. He repeated the name aloud, “Julie Wyant. So where is she now?”

  “Well, that’s the thing,” said Sissy Truitt. “She’s gone too.”

  Weiss lifted one big hand. “Gone? As in…?”

  “As in gone. As in dead,” said Sissy softly. “A suicide, it looks like. About three months ago, they found her car abandoned in the Vista Point parking lot. Cops figure she walked out onto the bridge and threw herself off. No one’s seen her since.”

  Sixteen

  Alone, Weiss sat swiveling slightly in his chair. Staring absently at the skyline through the high-arched windows. Shadowman.

  He thought it over. Tried to get it straight in his mind. The way it shook out so far was this:

  Bernie Hirschorn—the murderous crime lord who owned most of the city of Driscoll—was paying one his pilots, Chris Wannamaker, to take mysterious flights into the middle of nowhere and back. Wannamaker’s wife, Kathleen, was worried about what her husband had gotten himself into so she’d been eavesdropping on the two of them. She told Bishop that they were planning some sort of large operation scheduled to go off soon. She had heard them mention the names Harry Ridder and Whip.

  Okay. Ridder was a gardener for a criminal named Moncrieff. He’d been there when Moncrieff died. Now he was dead too. He’d blown his brains out in a toolshed, gibbering with fear. Another person who’d been present at Moncrieff’s death—a woman named Julie Wyant—also seemed to have killed herself. And another—Moncrieff’s lawyer, Peter Crouch—was missing, or at least making himself scarce.

  So the obvious questions: Was there any connection between the disappearances and Moncrieff’s death or was it just a coincidence? And was there any connection between Moncrieff and Hirschorn and Chris Wannamaker and their mysterious flights into the woods?

  Weiss breathed deeply, gazed blankly, swiveled slightly. Shadowman. His instinct, that cop instinct, told him it was all one picture. He just couldn’t fit it together yet. He didn’t have enough of the pieces.

  Which led him to think about the other name: Whip. Now there was a lead for you. What the hell was he supposed to do with that?

  Weiss was generally known as one of the best locate men the city had ever had, one of the best, it was said, in the country. He seemed somehow to get into the minds of the missing, to follow their trails by instinct. Track-downs that would take the cops a month of phone calls Weiss sometimes pulled off in an hour. I’d seen it happen. But even he, who could find anyone, would have a hard time finding a guy with only the name of Whip. On the other hand, if there was a connection to Moncrieff, the cops might know something….

  He swiveled away from the windows, faced the desk. Cast a sad eye on the telephone there. Still he hesitated. Swiveling, gazing, thinking.

  He was worried about Ray—his client, Ray Grambling. Ray was terrified Hirschorn would find out he was having him investigated. He claimed Hirschorn would have him killed if he got wind of it. Have him killed, then kill his wife, his children, his parents, cousins, distant acquaintances…Ray was plenty frightened of Hirschorn.

  But Weiss still had some friends on the force, and one good friend, his former partner, Ketchum. Ketchum could be trusted to listen to his story and go deaf and dumb in all the right places. Weiss thought he could tell Ketchum at least some of this without risking his client’s life.

  Finally now, he reached for the phone. And as he did, the phone rang. He picked it up. Spoke to our receptionist, Amy, “Yeah?”

  “Inspector Ketchum calling for you,” Amy told him.

  Weiss was only mildly surprised. This happened to him and Ketchum a lot. “Yeah,” he said. “Put him on.” Then he said, “Ketch?”

  “Hey.”

  “I was just about to call you.”

  “Well, see, that’s how good a cop I am. I knew that.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “You know a guy named Wally Spender?” Ketchum asked.

  For a moment, Weiss didn’t. He’d been so immersed in the other case, he couldn’t place Spender’s name at all. Then he could: the Mousey Guy. The Case of the Spanish Virgin.

  “Yeah. Wally Spender. Sure. I know him,” he said.

  “Well, you better come over and see him.”

  “Why? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “No, he’s in some kind of alley off Mission Street,” Ketchum said. “Somebody stabbed him to death.”

  Part Two

  Julie Angel

  Seventeen

  North Wilderness State Prison is a security housing unit, a “Super-Max” lockup in the language of the trade. Its buildings stand in desolate isolation on 250 acres of nowhere. There are miles of mountainous forest on three sides. On the fourth side, there’s a screen of trees and then rocky cliffs battered by the roaring sea.

  Alone in its clearing, the prison is surrounded by three perimeter fences. Two are electrified, all are motion sensitive. All are under continuous video surveillance. The tops are lined with razor wire, the bottoms are sunk five feet deep into the earth to prevent tunneling. The entire expanse is covered with crisscrossing wires to keep out helicopters.

  Three hundred and seventy guards patrol the place, inside and out. They are an elite corps, chosen from among corrections officers with at least five years’ experience, at least two in maximum security. Once chosen, they undergo four extra months of training in weaponry, security, tactics, even psychology. The best marksmen are stationed in the guard towers, which are set every seven hundred yards around the perimeter. These towers contain small armories of shotguns, sniper rifles, pepper gas launchers and M-16-type assault weapons. There are four larger armories sunk underground. These store everything from truncheons to Stinger-style missile launchers to a couple of genuine M-1 Abrams tanks.

  The prison was built onl
y a few years ago at a cost to the state of around 200 million dollars. Its purpose is to house the worst of the worst of the state’s inmate population, men too violent to be with other violent men. Basically, if you’re so bloodthirsty you’re unfit to share space with the gang members, drug enforcers, career killers and Mexican mafiosi passing their lives at Pelican Bay, you are shipped off to North Wilderness SHU.

  In order to determine which convicts should go to this prison and which to others, the state has developed a point system. If you’re a criminal with one to eighteen points, for instance, you’re sent to a minimum security or Level 1 facility, a farm or a “prison without walls” like the California Institution for Men. With eighteen to twenty-seven points, you’ve made it to the fence-enclosed dormitories at Level 2. With twenty-eight to fifty-one points, you’re at Level 3 in a cell secured by armed guards. After that, you’re in maximum security, Level 4—a “soft four” to begin with. But if you cause trouble there…well then, my friend, kiss your sweet ass good-bye because you are headed for North Wilderness SHU.

  Now, how many points you get depends on a number of different things. Gang affiliations count against you. So do prior convictions, sex crimes and a dishonorable discharge from the military. You also get points for being young—under twenty-six—unmarried, uneducated or unemployed. But, of course, your initial points—and often the most points—depend on your sentence. For every year you’re sentenced to prison, you get three points to a maximum of forty-nine. Those sentenced to life get the whole forty-nine points automatically.

  The man called Ben Fry got his forty-nine points for the murder of Penny Morgan, just as he had planned. In a plea bargain that spared him the death penalty, he confessed to the crime and was sentenced to life without parole. He was then shipped to the reception center at San Quentin. There, a team of “correctional counselors” reviewed his life history and assigned him his points. His record—containing periods of gang activity and previous incarcerations for battery, violent rape, and attempted murder—had been carefully manufactured to ensure Level 4 incarceration. His points were toted up and, just four weeks after Penny’s murder was committed, he was assigned—as he knew he would be—to Pelican Bay.

  He had a bad moment when he first reached this prison on the wild coast just south of Oregon: the first strip search. He’d known it was going to happen, of course. His planning for this, like all his planning, was analytical and meticulous. He knew that the North Wilderness authorities used to x-ray new arrivals, but that they’d been forced to abandon the practice because of health concerns. All the same, they could still take an X ray with a doctor’s order, and he’d secreted the capsule in his inner thigh to avoid the usual thorax, abdomen and pelvis scan used to find drugs and weapons inside the body.

  But a body search—especially that first thorough body search given to the new men—that was dangerous. The scar on his leg was small, mostly healed, completely grown over. You had to press very hard on the spot to feel the pocket of pus that had formed around the capsule inside. Still, there was a moment, that one bad moment, right before the guards led him into the processing room, when his imagination ran ahead of him and fear flashed through his mind. What if they saw the scar, felt the abscess? What if they got suspicious? What if they found the capsule?

  Because the thing was: The man called Ben Fry had committed over a hundred murders in his life, but this was the first time he had ever been in prison. And so far, he didn’t like it. In fact, it surprised him how much he didn’t like it, how much it got to him. The confinement, the constant noise, the constant humiliation of taking orders from other men, of presenting your balls and exposing your asshole to them for the “nuts and butts” searches—all that irritated him, but it was not the real problem. The real problem was the time. The empty time. Even in these few weeks it had begun to unnerve him. The vast minutes, the hours—unbelievable, endless. Each hour like a flat plain going on and on and on with no vanishing point; a flat, unlimited plain somehow contained within four walls. You sat and you stared at the plain of the hour, and when you closed your eyes you found you were still staring at it, and when you tried to read, there it was, just beyond the page, the words fading until you were staring at it again. So in the end, that’s all you did, second after second after second. You stared at the endless plain of hours. There just wasn’t anything else you could do.

  The man called Ben Fry’s mind was like a shark: It had to move to breathe. He had to be planning every moment, analyzing the logistics of an operation every moment or else…Or else other thoughts came to him. Not just thoughts; images, emotions, memories—they rose up in him, rose out of his belly into his throat, threatened to choke him, suffocate him. His head became filled with a kind of silent noise, a high, steady sirenlike sound that he couldn’t hear but which he knew by the way it made his skin feel too tight and his blood feel as if it were boiling. Whenever he stopped analyzing, the images came. And the noise. And the face. That one face. That one laughing face.

  He worked hard to make it all stop. He would imagine his tower. He would climb up into his tower, and look down on the cruel, laughing world from his cool distance. Like a coroner, say, looking coolly down at a maggoty corpse.

  But how long could the tower hold? That was what worried him. Time was so vast here, the plain of every hour was so immense, that he sometimes feared the tower would simply crumble. Already there were hints of it. In the past, for instance, he’d always slept like the dead, but here, he was beginning to have bad dreams. He dreamed about that face, those cruel eyes, those red lips laughing at him in the dark. He dreamed about fire and woke up terrified that he was about to burn.

  So although his dull features and his slumped figure betrayed no emotion when the body search was over, inwardly he sagged with relief. The capsule had not been discovered. Everything was going to work out exactly as planned—just like always—just as it always did.

  The man called Ben Fry went to his cell at Pelican Bay calmly. He knew now it was going to be all right. He knew he would soon be free.

  The guards who escorted the man called Ben Fry smiled at one another as the cell’s door slid shut. The man called Ben Fry heard them snickering as they walked away. Mildly puzzled by this, he turned to face his cellmate. Then he understood. His cellmate was grinning at him. Lying on the upper bunk. Holding a comic book but looking at the new arrival. And grinning a predator’s grin.

  The cellmate’s name was Rip. He stood six-foot-five and weighed 260 pounds, most of it muscle. On the outside, he had kept himself busy murdering rival motorcyclists, beating them to death, usually with a tire iron or his fists. But in here, whether because there were fewer motorcyclists to murder or just fewer tire irons, he found he had more leisure in which to pursue other hobbies. One of these hobbies was creating weapons. Over the past two weeks, for instance, Rip had been making a shank—a lethal knifelike object. He had done this by rolling up a newspaper and smearing it with his own excrement. When the excrement dried, he would sharpen the point of the object by rubbing it against the concrete walls. Then he would repeat the process. After fourteen days, the thing was razor-sharp and hard as iron. Rip kept it hidden in a space behind the toilet until he could use it to assist him in another of his hobbies: rape. Rip was what was called a booty bandit. He enjoyed raping and brutalizing his fellow inmates until he had transformed them into punks, sex slaves. Then, when they were punks, he could either collect them—or trade them with his friends for such luxuries as cigarettes and extra food.

  Rip took one look at the flabby-looking white man who’d just been assigned to share his cell and grinned because he felt he had just been handed a fresh punk for his collection.

  Which was ironic actually—because the man called Ben Fry took one look at Rip and felt he had just been handed his ticket out of here.

  The two men’s cross-purposes resolved themselves in the watches of their first night together. Lying on the bottom bunk pretending to be asleep, t
he man called Ben Fry opened his eyes to find Rip standing over him. Still grinning. And brandishing his homemade shank.

  “There’s gonna be shit on my dick tonight, dude, or blood on my shank,” Rip grumbled. “You choose.”

  The man called Ben Fry chose. By the time the guards reached his cell, the gigantic Rip, covered in both shit and blood, was lying comatose on the floor.

  After three weeks in “the bucket,”—solitary confinement—the man called Ben Fry was shipped out of Pelican Bay—exactly as he had planned—and reassigned to North Wilderness SHU.

  By now, it was June. Just about the time Jim Bishop first came roaring into Driscoll. The man called Ben Fry was brought to his new home at North Wilderness and given a cell alone. The cell was eight feet by ten feet. It had a window to the outside but it didn’t open and was too high on the wall to give him any kind of a view. It also had a concrete bunk, and a sink and toilet of stainless steel. The sink and toilet were computer controlled. The toilet, for instance, was generally set to flush three times a day. That prevented inmates from flushing it at will in order to speak to each other through the pipes. The door was run by computer too. It could only be opened by the officer in the unit control booth. The door was made of wire mesh so it was hard to throw things through it. It was hard to see through it into the gallery. It was also hard to call through it to the nearby cells because echoes distorted the sound too much. The man called Ben Fry spent almost twenty-three hours in this cell every day. He rarely saw or spoke to another human being.

  The cell was part of a pod. Each pod had two tiers of four cells each. Six of these pods were arranged in a semicircle around a control booth enclosed behind Lexan windows. The control booth officer had a clear view into the pod galleries. He had four video monitors with alternating views of the cells. He had another monitor with alternating views of the pods’ exercise yards. All this the man called Ben Fry knew, having learned the architectural plans and engineering designs of the place by heart.