Night Is the Hunter (19 page)

T
he Chico Gallegos case was mangled from the start,” homicide detective Dolores Zuniga told Donnally sitting in her Salinas police department office. “I was with the sheriff's department back then and made a lateral transfer two years afterwards.” Zuniga pointed at the file on her desk. “It was already on the cold case shelf.”

“Nobody was leaning on new informants to find out who did it?”

Donnally felt his heel hitting the carpet, the pressure of time vibrating through his body, and forced it to stop.

Just as he'd pulled into a parking spot in front of the police department, he'd heard on the news that the U.S. Supreme Court had rejected Dominguez's petition. Dominguez's fate was now in the hands of a governor who needed to prove to the voters, in the words of the reporter, ones that echoed McMullin's, that he wasn't afraid to stick the needle in, and victims' groups were already demonstrating in front of the Capitol to make sure he did.

Zuniga shook her head. “There was an evidentiary gap as wide as a highway. Chico's mother was a Christian Scientist. She wasn't going to let anyone cut open Chico's body to do an autopsy. That meant even if we IDed the shooter, a defense attorney would tap-dance
on our proof regarding the cause of death. All he'd have to argue was that somebody smothered him in the hospital and we wouldn't have a pathologist who could testify otherwise.”

That didn't make sense. No one could prevent an autopsy if there was a compelling public need, and a homicide met that standard by law.

“Back up a step,” Donnally said. “How did the family—”

“While the detectives were working their way up the chain of command to force the issue, the family rolled the body onto a gurney and out of the hospital and into the back of a flatbed truck.” Zuniga smiled. “The last thing anybody saw was the bottom of his feet and a cloud of burning rubber.”

“Anybody isn't everybody. His mother told me they buried him in Mexico.”

Zuniga nodded. “That's our understanding.”

“I saw his funeral brochure in his mother's house.”

Donnally paused, letting the comment hang there long enough for Zuniga to become uncomfortable.

Zuniga finally squinted at Donnally and asked, “Why's that important?”

“The services were at a church in Obregon, Sonora, called Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe.”

She put a pretend puzzled look in her face, a way of communicating that she really didn't believe there was anything to be puzzled about.

“I still don't understand why that's important.”

Donnally stared back at her. If anyone had paid any attention to the case for the last decade, even tried to ascertain whether Rosa Gallegos had heard anything that bore on her son's murder, Zuniga would know why it was important.

Who better to have heard rumors than a woman whose brother-in-law was on
La Mesa
and whose convict husband held a job in Pelican Bay prison kitchen, at the nexus of the information flow.

Once inside Rosa's house, all a detective had to do was look around at the souvenirs and family photos and funeral brochures.

“Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe is a Catholic church,” Donnally said, “not Christian Science.”

Zuniga shrugged. “Maybe his father was a Catholic or maybe there wasn't a Christian Science church in Obregon or—”

Donnally shook his head. There was only one reason he could think of for the sleight of hand. “Or maybe Chico isn't dead.”

Zuniga grinned. “I thought you said the department made you retire because you were shot in the hip, not in the head.”

Donnally didn't smile back. He pointed at the file. “That have a photo of Chico in there?”

Zuniga opened it and spun it around toward Donnally.

He'd seen that face before.

T
here was nothing unusual in a San Francisco detective walking toward the records room at midnight. Nothing unusual in searching through old case files in an effort to use a chain of dead bodies to link the past to the present and attempt to solve a crime by connecting a present unknown to a past known. But this night was different. It was an attempt to use an unknown from the past to reveal the truth about an unknown even further in the past and thereby illuminate the present.

In that basement room were rows and rows of unknowns. Unsolved homicides and assaults and rapes and thefts to which the magic of DNA had not been applied or to which it could not be applied. Cases without witnesses or leads or ones that had been followed to dead ends, even cases detectives had recognized would go cold from the moment the still-warm victim was discovered.

It was a place of failures in which detectives had surrendered a bit of themselves, of their dignity, by handing over files to clerks and, by the act of turning away, effecting the transformation of live files into dead paper. And this night, with Donnally's and Navarro's footfalls echoing in the marble-floored hallway, then softening as they crossed the threshold onto linoleum, their heel
clacks dulled into thuds by the mass of echoless paper, seeming somewhere even beyond dead.

They paused after they stepped inside the room, silent and funereal, except for the
swoosh-clunk
of a copier in a side office.

Navarro led Donnally past three rows of eight-foot-high shelves on his way to where the Felix Heredia homicide file was stored, then turned right, down toward the end, the numbered file tabs leading them on a descending trail into the past. Navarro slowed and reached up and walked his fingers along the files, then stopped. He backtracked a foot, advanced two feet, then shook his head and looked at Donnally.

“It's gone,” Navarro said. “The damn thing is gone.”

Donnally didn't bother asking Navarro if he was certain. He knew he was.

The noises from the adjoining office ceased at the sound of their voices, and then a crash of metal—a trashcan ricocheting or a chair overturning—and a bang of a swinging door bouncing off a wall.

Someone in flight.

Donnally pointed toward the copy room, and as Navarro ran that direction, he headed back the way they'd come. He spotted the back of a heavyset male dressed in a bulky gray sweatshirt and jeans with a cap and a hood pulled over his head running down the shadowed night-lit hallway toward the stairs, a thick file gripped like a football in his hand. Donnally chased after him, swinging around the turns, taking two, sometimes three steps at a time, his damaged hip stabbing at him.

The first-floor alarm exploded into the quiet night as the man bashed open the security door.

Wanting to make sure he wouldn't lose the file even if he lost
the thief, Donnally dove through the exit and swung at the man's arm, knocking the file to the pavement, then he pushed himself to his feet and pursued him through the police parking lot, around the building, past the McDonald's restaurant across the alley, and into the street. A screaming ambulance and patrol car blocked Donnally, and by the time they'd passed, the thief had disappeared down a side street lined with bail bond offices.

When Donnally returned to recover the file, he found Navarro collecting the scattered pages. Helping him were two uniformed officers.

The alarm had been silenced.

“You get a look at him?” Navarro asked.

Donnally shook his head. “And there won't be prints. He was wearing latex gloves.”

“It wasn't the copier we heard, it was the shredder.” Navarro looked at the two officers. “Why don't you guys take off, I'll handle it. Anybody asks, just say someone bumped into the door by mistake and set off the alarm.”

The two nodded and walked back inside.

“Are you going to do a report?” Donnally asked.

“I'll have to write something up and take it to the assistant deputy chief, but I'll try to be a little vague until we figure out what's going on.”

Navarro stared out at the parking lot. A troubled and questioning expression came over his face, as though he had gone looking for his keys in a drawer and found one belonging to a car he no longer owned.

“Something doesn't feel right in all this,” Navarro said. “Whoever grabbed this file had ten years to get rid of it. Why suddenly now? And what if it has nothing to do with Dominguez? What if
it's just bait laid out for you, knowing you'd go after it because it was connected with you getting shot?”

What if . . .

Donnally followed Navarro's eyes into the empty night.

What if . . .

“You mean my anonymous caller is trying to get us sidelined into trying to solve the wrong homicide?”

N
avarro and Donnally laid the loose pages of the Heredia case on two library-sized tables to put them back in order and to try to determine what was missing.

Navarro first collected what remained of the investigative log and handed it to Donnally.

“Why don't you skim through these, while I look through the reports.”

Donnally sat down, ordered the pages by date, then flipped to the end to confirm what he had been led to believe.

The last entries read:

That was preceded by handwritten, bullet-pointed notes from a telephone conversation with then-deputy D.A. Harvey Madding in which the prosecutor said that because the informant wasn't a percipient witness to the shooting of Heredia and none of the witnesses had IDed Chico in the photo lineup, and because
Chico hadn't incriminated himself when he was interviewed, no indictment would be sought.

Donnally returned to the beginning of the log, Day One, 1:00
A.M.

The next page of the log contained summaries of witness statements. Both described a Hispanic male walking up to the victim saying, “What's up?” in English, followed by an exchange in Spanish, then the male pulling out a large revolver from under his leather jacket and firing. The victim then collapsing back into the bar doorway.

“Here's something,” Navarro said. “A debriefing of an informant about twelve hours after the shooting. It says that they went to his place of business—”

“A body shop?”

“How'd you know?”

“Just a guess.”

Navarro half smiled. “Yeah, right.”

“Keep reading, you'll see.”

“The informant told them he heard Chico was at a house with an unknown male earlier on the evening of the shooting. They were drinking and decided that a Sureño had to fall for a shooting two weeks earlier in which a Norteño was killed.” He glanced over at Donnally. “Must be yours.”

Navarro continued skimming. “They decided Chico Gallegos should do it.”

“It wasn't an unknown male who was drinking at the house,” Donnally said, then reached into his jacket and pulled out folded copies of the FBI 302s and DEA 6s reporting the debriefing of informant SSF-94-X1112. He located the paragraph dealing with the Heredia murder and handed it to Navarro.

“This is from a debriefing of Oscar Benaga. There were three people at the house before the shooter left, not just two.”

Navarro read the paragraph. “It says that Edgar Rojo Junior was also there when the decision was made to kill Heredia.”

“Now look at the first page and see the date.”

Navarro flipped back a few pages, then looked up. “This debriefing is eight hours after the shooting. Not twelve hours. And not at the garage, but at the U.S. Attorney's Office.”

“And who was present?”

“A couple of DEA agents . . . and Benaga's handler, Jimmie Chen.” Navarro paused, staring at the page. “And that means
Chen knew about Junior being there and knew Junior saw who left to go hunt down Heredia and knew it wasn't Chico.”

Donnally nodded. “How much you want to bet Junior's name doesn't show up anywhere in the homicide log?”

“What are you saying?”

“You know exactly what I'm saying. Three men were in the house. Chico Gallegos, Rojo Junior, and Oscar Benaga. The problem was that Chen would burn Benaga as an informant if they filed against Chico for the murder.”

“Because Chico and Junior would figure out it had to have been Benaga who'd snitched them off.”

“Exactly. And Chen used the four-hour gap to come up with a way to tell the story to hide Benaga's presence and conceal that he was an informant. Instead of telling the story as a percipient witness, he told it as secondhand, as hearsay.”

Navarro leaned back in his chair, gazed up toward the ceiling, and closed his eyes. He exhaled and looked over at Donnally.

“Jeez. They let Chico walk on a homicide to protect an informant.”

Donnally shook his head. “They let a murderer walk to protect their drug investigations.”

“Same thing.”

“Nope. The murderer was their informant.”

Navarro sat up. “What?”

“Think about the sequence.”

The meaning of what Donnally was saying was beginning to emerge out of the mechanics. It pulled him to his feet and got him pacing.

“I killed the Norteño, but instead of blaming me, the Norteños blamed the Sureños, that's who the war was against.”

Donnally remembered Junior's analogy. He was just driving the car; it was the Sureño who pushed the Norteño in front of it. He stopped and turned toward Navarro.

“Benaga does the hit on Heredia himself. Right afterwards, Benaga discovers that Chico wants out of the Norteños, maybe, as his mother said, because he saw how senseless all the killing was.”

“Then Benaga gets permission from
La Mesa
to take out Chico. Blood in, blood out.”

“Norteños are sent down to kill Chico and Benaga tells the police it was the Sureños.”

“It comes full circle. The whole time Benaga was Chen's informant.”

Navarro stared at Donnally. “That means it had to be Chen who tried to destroy the file tonight so we wouldn't find out.”

Donnally nodded. “He matches the height and weight of the guy I chased—” Then his mind caught, and he felt his muscles tense. An image of Mount Sutro came to him, the distant hill standing like a grave marker. Then a rising rage, not at Chen, but at himself for not having realized it sooner.

“Call dispatch. Send units up to the area on Mount Sutro where Manny Washington killed himself. Chen saw what I was doing as the same thing the press did to Washington.”

Navarro cast Donnally a puzzled look.

“Chen told me he wasn't going to end up like Washington after he got accused of concealing evidence. But that's exactly how he plans to end up. As soon as this file hit the pavement tonight he realized we'd find out that's exactly what he did.”

As Navarro reached for his cell phone, Donnally thought back on his visit to Chen's house in the foothills below Lake Shasta.
The truck with local dealer license plate frames and the sedan parked in the driveway.

“He is probably driving either a dark blue Ford step-side with a soft tonneau cover or an older Impala, maroon or burgundy.”

Donnally held up his palm.

“But don't let it go out on a regular channel that the media monitors. If it breaks in the news that Chen is on the run, Benaga will take off for Mexico.”