Night Is the Hunter (12 page)

Grassner held up his hand, the tips of his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart.

“We had about this much credibility left with Madding. Him thinking that one attorney after another was gonna show up at
his office with photos of chorizo and chickens and rib eyes on the grill and him having to go into court dismissing case after case until everybody in the indictment was back at the meat market and doing business again.”

Grassner paused and looked out toward the stage. The women were drying themselves, spreading their legs and bending over, their butts toward the men in the crowd, who were now clapping and whistling and yelling.

Finally, Grassner looked back at Donnally. “I still don't get what all this has to do with you and why you're knocking on my door now.”

“The California Supreme Court will be issuing its final decision in the Dominguez case. When exactly we don't know. They never announce in advance the day their decisions come out. But soon.”

Grassner snorted. “Sounds like a real rush to judgment. It's only been twenty years.”

Donnally ignored the crack.

“Judge McMullin is worried that he may have made some bad rulings in the case.”

Grassner flopped his hand forward in a dismissive wave.

“Nothing new there. Judges all start to worry when the needle starts inching toward the vein. Especially now because people are finally getting executed. Back then nobody believed it would actually happen.”

Donnally remembered those days. Death sentences didn't seem real, just symbolic notches on the prosecutor's belt. Prosecutors went into capital cases already pissed off, convinced they'd never be carried out because throughout their careers they'd watched state and federal appeals courts finding ways to set aside
the penalty or inject delays until the defendant died of old age or disease. He now wondered whether that had played into McMullin's unwillingness to set aside the jury's recommendation and sentence Dominguez to life without parole. Maybe he believed Dominguez would never get executed.

“Madding had no confidence Dominguez would ever take the long walk to the green room. That's part of the reason he volunteered to work for the Justice Department. He wanted to see one of his death sentences actually get carried out. And the feds don't waste time. Timothy McVeigh got the needle less than four years after he got convicted.”

“McMullin is wondering whether the right verdict might have been second-degree murder or even manslaughter.”

Grassner drained the last of his bourbon, then blew out a breath through his teeth.

“Sounds just like McMullin. He should've been a law professor instead of a judge. Thinks too much.” He glanced over at Donnally, his eyes cold, but his mouth smiling. “As I recall, that was your problem, too.”

D
riving south toward the National Archives in San Bruno on the peninsula where closed federal court files were stored, Donnally remembered what the narcotics team of Grassner and Chen had insisted everyone call them in the old days.

Chuck and Chink.

They even had business cards made up in the name of Chuck & Chink, Inc., with a drawing of a two-handled battering ram and a slogan:

The chief suspended both of them for a month after an investigative reporter on special assignment discovered one of their cards while looking into an allegation that Grassner and Chen had kicked in the door to the wrong house, thrown an eighty-five-year-old woman to the kitchen floor, and jammed the barrel of a Glock into her ear.

The newspaper editor later demoted its regular crime reporter because Grassner had given him one of the cards a year earlier and he'd failed to write a story about it, justifying the failure with
the claim that the card was neither newsworthy nor reflective of the officers' real attitudes.

Donnally had no doubt it was.

The journalist had gotten too close to them, had become too dependent on them for feeding him stories, not only about their cases, but about others, even about Donnally's shooting. And Donnally owed them a debt for their doing it for they directed the public focus away from him. Not enough to call them Chuck and Chink as they wanted, but he owed them nonetheless.

When the department was under attack from radical attorneys and the left-leaning police commissioners were speculating that somehow Donnally was at fault in his own shooting, Grassner and Chen had fed reporters incriminating story after incriminating story about the two dead gangsters, some real, some fictitious, some fantastical. One had them as secret members of a cartel-backed organization fighting to take over both the Sureños and Norteños. They even gave it a name absurd enough to lend credibility to the story:
Los Chingasos Locos,
The Crazy Pricks.

In a later story, Grassner and Chen had the two gangsters fighting over a woman they were both in love with. In the following one, the two were fighting over a man they were both in love with.

Donnally wasn't sure of their motives. He'd never noticed altruism to be among them and, while he was the beneficiary, he doubted they'd done it for his benefit.

For a couple of news cycles, they'd pushed the shoot-out as a ludicrous attempt to ambush Donnally in which the gangsters had mistakenly shot each other. They weren't bothered at all by the fact that the ballistics examination would soon disprove the tale. Donnally had found it more troubling than ironic when it
struck him that his brother had died in a real ambush while he had survived one that was entirely fictional. But instead of receiving a silver star attached to a body bag like his brother, Donnally received a retirement badge.

Staring at the highway ahead as it wound through the hills south of San Francisco, Donnally wondered whether he'd made a mistake in talking to Grassner or Chen, or both, or in mentioning McMullin's name to Grassner. He hadn't forgotten about Grassner's connection to the reporter, but he hadn't worked out how it could come back to hurt the judge until too late.

Donnally thought of a private investigator who once was a detective in the department about whom it was said that he was always aware of what he was thinking, that his mind never idled or drifted unobserved. But Donnally knew he'd never be that man. His mind didn't work that way. Even worse, sometimes his own thoughts came back to him feeling like a déjà vu experience, something seen or felt in a dream that had now become real.

Donnally now realized he'd risked embarrassing McMullin with a news story that would expose the judge's doubts about a pending execution and, if the historical unwillingness of governors to commute death sentences held true, was unstoppable.

The public, especially in a city like San Francisco, enjoyed the sport of second-guessing judges but wouldn't accept a judge second-guessing himself. That would strip McMullin of the protection of his robe and subject all the decisions he'd made throughout his career to psychological analysis, maybe even expose to the world what Donnally had discovered on the banks of the Smith River, that there was a man behind the man, or perhaps, within the man, and this had imparted a double intent
and a double meaning to everything the judge had done since the Dominguez trial.

Donnally buried his concern over the risks he'd taken with the hope that his trip to the archives would get him closer to what McMullin needed to know. And that wasn't just whether the Rojo shooting was a hit or a stunt gone wrong, but whether the judge was fair to himself in fearing his whole career had been a fraud. And despite the feeling he was navigating a maze through the lens of a kaleidoscope, Donnally understood the case and McMullin's sense of himself were linked not only in the judge's mind, but in fact.

One thing that remained certain in this anarchy of uncertainty was that the murder was part of a complex set of events that was meaningful only in a context Donnally still didn't understand, and that Grassner didn't fully remember, or had chosen not to disclose. And he hoped this context could be discovered in the Leo Ryan Federal Building, the concrete bunker housing the archives, that was coming into view.

The letters over the entrance to the campuslike facility reminded him that San Francisco was a city of too much context, and too much of it tragic. Congressman Ryan had been murdered by the city's Jim Jones and his People's Temple followers in Jonestown, Guyana, in the 1970s.

And being in San Bruno reminded Donnally that Aasim, the leader of another cult, the Muslim Nation, was probably sitting right now at his kitchen table a mile or two away drinking his coffee and plotting how to terrorize the Hispanics into moving out of Hunters Point.

Walking from his car to the building and looking up at Ryan's name and remembering the Nation members encaging him and
Navarro in front the Rojo apartment, Donnally wished more than ever that he was up in Mount Shasta serving breakfasts in the café. For he felt less like he was engaging in an investigation and more like he was suffering an immersion, as though the floor of the kaleidoscopic maze was made of quicksand.

At the same time, entering the building, getting out from under the Leo Ryan sign, felt to Donnally like an escape from confusion and speculation into the safety of a library and the quiet comfort of fact.

Donnally displayed his ID and the records request form he'd e-mailed over. The clerk walked down a long hallway and returned rolling a cart. On it were stacked the dockets for the federal indictments targeting Hispanic narcotics traffickers from the two years bracketing the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. and bracketing the attempted murder of Israel Dominguez ten years later. There were only six cases, but at least fifteen, two-inch-thick volumes each.

That is, at least fifteen public volumes.

He knew there were more of them containing filings by the prosecution and the defense that had been made under seal: informant cooperation agreements and discovery motions that included information or allegations that one side or another didn't want disclosed to the public, even notes the judges may have taken for their own use during the case.

As Donnally took a chair in the reading room, he found himself wondering whether there existed a record of McMullin's thinking at the time of the Dominguez trial. And he realized that it would be wise to test the judge's memory to make sure nothing he had said to him had been distorted by anxiety or depression brought on by the oncoming execution or by an impaired mind.

He called McMullin. “Did you take notes during the trial?”

Not all judges did, preferring that the official transcript be the only record.

After a moment of silence, McMullin said, “Not likely. My practice was only to take notes in complex civil cases. I'll ask my clerk to check. I'll call you back if she finds any.”

Donnally disconnected, plugged in Janie's laptop, and opened the first volume. It covered an investigation into the transportation of cocaine and heroin from Mexico, up through the Central Valley and then to middlemen in San Jose and San Francisco.

The affidavit in support of the wiretap application began with a listing of the targets and with an outline of the crimes of which they were suspected. Then it moved on to a genealogy of Hispanic drug trafficking, starting from the founding of the Nuestra Familia during the 1960s to protect Northern California Hispanics in prison and later the formation of its out-of-prison arm, the Norteños.

As Donnally read through the affidavits, he typed out lists of events and names as he went, looking for crossovers with the Rojo Sr. murder.

Oscar Benaga and Junior had both been targets of a couple of the wiretaps, but Junior had been taken out of the mix by a five-year prison sentence for mayhem and Benaga seemed to have found a way to insulate himself from the day-to-day operations of the gang, graduating from street captain to consigliore, adviser to senior members of the gang.

Donnally wondered what Benaga had done or what talent he had that had advanced him in the organization, in addition to his skill in concealing his crimes.

The calls involving Benaga reported in the affidavits had less
to do with past crimes and future conspiracies and more to do with matters of loyalty and fidelity to the gang constitution and the supreme power structure. There were even some bizarre calls from Benaga to underlings displaying an amateur's knowledge of the Aztec culture and language the wire room agents had tried to interpret as code.

Eagles as heroin.

Cactus as cocaine.

The ruler Itzcoatl as the drug source.

Each affidavit described the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. as a threshold moment, not just in the Sureños' attempt to insert themselves between the cartels in Mexico and the street dealers in San Francisco, but in the war between the Norteños and Sureños and the Sureños' attempt to move the north-south territorial dividing line up from Bakersfield in the Central Valley to Highway 80 running between San Francisco and Sacramento.

And each affidavit repeated that the Sureño given the job of eliminating Edgar Senior had been Israel Dominguez—El Búho, the owl, the night hunter—a young, aggressive gangster trying to shoot his way to the top.

D
onnally felt his mind lose focus as he read through the fifth affidavit. The boilerplate paragraphs the agents had copied and pasted from one to the other over the years made it like a landscape that was so familiar parts of it became invisible. It wasn't a problem of not seeing the forest for the trees, it was a problem of seeing the same trees over and over again.

But he couldn't skip even a sentence. He didn't know whether the pattern might break and a new fact or allegation slipped in.

Even the gang's genealogy became repetitious. The same names. The same crimes. The same methods.

The list of informants had grown from Informant A through Informant C in the first affidavit to Informant A through Informant W in the one he was reading, the investigations building on each other as members were caught dirty and agreed to cooperate in exchange for lesser sentences.

And after the informants were identified by the gang and murdered and there was no further need to protect them, their names were revealed.

Informants A, C, D, H, and M left the gang as Junior had said everyone did. Blood out. Murdered on orders from the generals
in Ad Seg in Pelican Bay State Prison. A, C, and H were killed because earlier affidavits had revealed enough about their criminal history and background that their identity became obvious to members of the gang, and D and M were killed because they were the only ones present in all the places and at all the times the affidavit had described.

The fifth affidavit brought Donnally to the year before he had been shot and Benaga had ordered the attack on Israel Dominguez on death row.

Donnally fought against assuming a connection between them, but he nonetheless read the affidavit with a dual agenda, half looking for clues that would illuminate the murder of Edgar Rojo Sr. and half looking for clues to why the shoot-out between the Norteño and Sureño happened just as he was walking in to meet the potential informant.

Then a thought. Donnally wondered whether the taqueria owner was one of the lettered informants in the racketeering affidavits and wondered whether this had been the reason he'd agreed to the meeting to discuss the terms under which he would identify the shooter in the case Donnally was investigating.

It would've just been a variation on a theme, not a new tune, and maybe he was hoping to get rewards from two different pockets, from SFPD and from the FBI, doubling his money for doing the same job.

Until this moment, Donnally's theories had been limited to only three possibilities.

That he'd walked into the middle of an attempted Sureño hit on a Norteño or a Norteño on a Sureño.

That he'd stepped in the path of the Norteño or the Sureño
on his way inside the restaurant to take out a fellow member, the taqueria owner, who the gang believed had turned snitch.

That he'd walked by chance in between a Norteño and a Sureño who'd both posted up on the same block, both obligated to try to take out the other for the sake of what they called respect.

Donnally leaned back in his chair and stared up at the high fluorescent-lit ceiling.

Then a moment of unease. The same narcotics cops he'd relied on in exploring what happened to him, including Grassner and Chen, were also working in those federal investigations. They would've known the identities of the lettered informants and would've known whether the taqueria owner he'd been on his way to meet was one of them.

Even more, some of those informants might have disclosed, if not to Donnally, at least to Grassner and Chen, the real background to the shooting.

But both Grassner and Chen had written it off as coincidence, to chance, to just an OK Corral shoot-out on Mission Street in San Francisco. But it had been crooks against crooks, not cops against robbers, except for the cop caught in the cross fire.

Donnally had accepted this explanation as it related to him since most of the street homicides he'd investigated arose out of chance and circumstance—gangsters and drug dealers bumping shoulders in the mall or at a concert or a car show—but he knew even as he lay in the hospital that the parents of the couple killed by the Norteño's and Sureño's wild shots would never be able to accept that kind of explanation.

For them, chance was an irrational moment, not the end event of a chain of causes and effects understandable, but not yet understood,
that had led to their children slumped over a sidewalk table and bleeding out onto wedding magazines.

As soon as he learned to get around on crutches and was able to drive, he had visited both sets of parents.

At first, the solace Donnally had offered them had been met with suspicion.

Had it been Donnally's bullets that had gone astray and killed their children?

Why should they believe that the San Francisco crime lab and a police administration, terrified of potential parents' lawsuits, hadn't switched the slugs or mangled them to disguise the gun barrel that had rifled them.

Why should they believe that the internal affairs reconstruction of the event wasn't anything more than an attempt to deceive them and the lawyers who were soliciting them as plaintiffs in a suit against Donnally and the department?

Unlike the patrol officer who'd rolled up on Donnally and Junior outside of the Cliff House and mentioned the training video, Donnally knew the real reason for the reenactment. It had been created to assure the parents that Donnally hadn't killed their children.

The department had made a hero out of Donnally in order to defend him, to show that it all couldn't have happened any other way.

Except Donnally knew it could have.

As his father would say, inevitability was a fact of fiction, not a fact of life. In the real world, everything could have been otherwise.

What if he'd been more alert?

Looked first to the left, instead of the right?

Caught the motion of the Norteño reaching behind his back instead of the Sureño ducking toward the trash can?

If he had, he could have yelled a warning that might've saved the young couple.

Driving away from the home where they met, he knew that for the parents, chance—bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time—wasn't an acceptable explanation for death. It was an evasion, and he'd felt it then and felt it now as he looked at the affidavits lined up on the cart next to him.

Coincidence and chance were, for survivors, like walking on a trampoline, the earth seeming to give beneath their feet as they tried to follow a path of cause and effect back to solid ground.

For cops, coincidence itself was the solid ground, but if and only if—like a high-wire walker ignoring the hundred-foot drop—they didn't think about it too much.

How many crimes had he solved because he'd once been assigned a similar case, or because he'd remembered the nickname of a victim he'd met years earlier when he was a patrol officer that later gave him a lead to a killer, or a building he remembered only because he'd run through it chasing a suspect a month before?

If it weren't for these kinds of coincidences, many crimes would've been left unsolved, perhaps been unsolvable.

Except cops called it experience or street knowledge, not coincidence.

That was another thing his father had said. Coincidence in fiction was merely a device. For Donnally, in real life, it was everything.

For his father, life was a series of if-onlys. If only Donnally's older brother hadn't seen the press conference in which his father
lied about the Buddhist massacre. If only he had enlisted in the navy instead of the army and served on the sea instead of land. If only he hadn't been ordered up to Hue. If only he hadn't been sent to the village where the executions took place. If only he hadn't been able to find a survivor willing to tell him the truth.

The other name for all those if-onlys was regret, and maybe Alzheimer's would be his father's escape from the prison formed by them.

Donnally rubbed his eyes, gone dry as he stared into the what-might-have-been past and what-soon-might-be future, then moved on to the next affidavit.

In this one, the genealogy and history were compressed. It began after the death of Edgar Rojo Sr. and after the war between the Norteños and Sureños had broken out. It was as though a new generation had taken over the Norteños and Edgar Rojo Sr., long dead in body, was finally dead to the underworld.

Junior had been wrong. His father hadn't died for a cause. He'd died a pointless death and the gang that had sworn never to forget had forgotten.

An hour later, Donnally turned to a sixth affidavit. The attempted death row murder of Israel Dominguez didn't even warrant a footnote.