Until Judgment Day (18 page)

I
MMEDIATELY AFTER ADJOURNING
the Grand Jury, Mackay set up an emergency briefing in her office with Granz, Miller, and Escalante and spent fifteen minutes filling them in on Davidson's testimony.

She summed up by saying, “We're wasting our time and resources hunting for a hired gun. I don't think these murders have anything to do with Internet gambling or embezzlement.”

“You're certain?” Miller asked.

“The only things I know that are certain are death and taxes.”

“Trite but true,” Miller said, pushing his lower lip up over his upper as he thought. “But I'm not sure you're right about the gambling connection.”

“What's your thinking?” Mackay asked him.

“Right after Duvoir stiffs a casino Davidson gets several telephone threats and tells the caller to get lost. Immediately after, Duvoir gets snuffed. Casino owners aren't choirboys and they don't take kindly to being ripped off. And Davidson didn't deny they might've been involved in the gambling mess.”

Escalante picked absently at a thumb nail as she thought. “I agree with Ms. Mackay,” she argued. “The notion that a professional contractor did the dirty work bothered me from the start, even though we didn't have any other leads at the time.”

“Contract killers are creatures of habit,” Mackay added. “A professional develops a style and sticks with it because it works. The less deviation, the less chance of getting caught. These MOs aren't remotely similar.”

“Four firearms, four murder victims, four priests, four clean getaways,” Miller said. “They sound pretty damn similar to me.”

Escalante turned to face Miller. “That's where the similarity ends.”

“Convince me.”

“Three carried handguns: one small-caliber; one a cannon; and one who-knows-what. One perp hauls the gun away and leaves the slug behind; one leaves both the gun and the slug behind alongside the victim's body; one doesn't just haul the gun away, he digs the slug out of the concrete floor and takes it too. One of the perps shoots his victim three times with a sniper rifle.”

“Just playin' devil's advocate,” Miller answered slowly. “Like you said, a pro does the job and gets out, he doesn't torture or get in the victim's face. Murder's a business, and whackin' someone by surprise or from a distance is the safest, most businesslike technique.”

Escalante sat back in her chair. “If the shooter's not a pro, who is he?”

“What makes you think it's a ‘he'?” Mackay wanted to know.

“Because you can count the known female serial killers and professional shooters on both hands and have fingers left over,” Miller told her.

“According to Bishop Davidson, Thompson was a pedophile priest,” Granz interjected, his gaze shifting around at the other three. “My gut tells me the killer's a molest victim.”

Miller stroked his neatly trimmed red beard. “Davidson said Thompson walked the straight and narrow for the past thirty years. Besides, the other priests weren't pedophiles.”

“All we know is Davidson says they didn't get any complaints about them. The Catholic Church is full of perverts.”

Miller nodded. “You got a point.”

“So we can't dismiss the possibility,” Granz insisted.

“If it
was
one of Thompson's victims, why'd he wait almost thirty years to get torqued enough to snuff Thompson's candle?”

Granz crossed one leg over the other. “Because a pedophile's victim is usually grown before he realizes how ugly and permanent the scars are. When he
does,
and finally comes to grips with who trashed his life, it doesn't matter how many years went by. He's pissed off and looking for revenge.”

“No question,” Mackay agreed. “I see it all the time in women who were raped as children or teens.”

“Well, if you're right, trackin' him down's gonna be a big job,” Miller observed. “Trails get cold after a couple of months. This one's cold enough to turn the snot on a bloodhound's nose into slimy icicles.”

“We've got to start someplace,” Granz replied, ignoring the sarcasm. “My instincts tell me that we ought to go on the assumption Thompson
was
taken out by one of his victims.”

“I doubt the Church kept a neat little list of molest victims, in case the cops decided they wanted it later.” Miller said, then asked, “How do we find Thompson's victims after all these years?”

Granz tugged his earlobe. “Ideas?”

Escalante sat up in her chair and crossed her ankles. “Thompson's victims had to attend Saint Sebastian High School while he taught there, from sixty-eight to seventy-four. We get the school's enrollment records for those years.”

“You think they still exist?” Miller said.

“They might.”

“I'll issue a subpoena duces tecum for school documents including historical enrollment records,” Mackay said.

Miller looked at Granz. “You grew up in San Diego, what high school did you go to?”

Granz uncrossed his legs and stretched them stiffly out in front of him as if he had just awakened from a deep sleep, but his eyelids fluttered rapidly and he stared out the window without answering.

“I can see the light's on in the house but doesn't look like anybody's home,” Miller said. “You listenin', boss?”

“I—I—yeah, I was thinking. What'd you say?”

“What high school did you go to?”

“I graduated from Mira Mesa High School, class of seventy-three.”

“How big was Saint Sebastian in those days?”

“Big—maybe four thousand students, why?”

Miller puckered his lips and exhaled slow and loud. “In seven years that's twenty-eight thousand middle-aged men we gotta locate.”

“Not if we narrow it down by concentrating on the men who live in or near Santa Rita County,” Escalante told him.

“What if Saint Sebastian's old enrollment records have been tossed?”

“Bank records,” Mackay said. “There should be a pattern of checks to individuals at about the time the Diocese cut its deal to pay off the victims' parents. I'll add them to the subpoena.”

Miller shook his head. “Banks don't keep records that long and it's unlikely the Church did, either. Even if they did, let's hope Saint Sebastian doesn't have the same auditor as Enron, because if they do, when we drop the subpoena on the desk we'll have to rummage through the shredder.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Mackay asked.

“Nope.” Miller stood up and straightened his suit coat. “I better gas my car up, swing by my house, grab some clothes and make tracks for sunny San Diego.”

“Stop here on your way. I'll complete the subpoena and leave it with my secretary for you to pick up.” Mackay looked at her husband and raised her eyebrows in a silent question. He nodded and held up two fingers.

“If we're going to head off another murder, we've got to act fast,” she told Escalante. “Go with Lieutenant Miller. Two investigators get more accomplished, and faster than one.”

Escalante stood. “Exactly what I was thinking.”

When Escalante and Miller left, Granz asked, “You suppose Miller and Escalante will rent one motel room or two in San Diego?”

“I hope one. My budget can't handle much more.”

Mackay glanced at her watch. “I've got just enough time to make my appointment with Doctor Burton.”

“What are you seeing her about?”

“She's my OB-GYN. I'm pregnant, remember?”

“I meant was there anything specific?”

“No, Babe, I just saw Singh yesterday. But since he refused to keep me as a patient, I need to make sure Diedre will keep me on, even without Singh's consultation.”

T
HURSDAY
N
IGHT
, J
ANUARY
9
S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA

“
Y
OU SHOULD HAVE TURNED
left, back there on Martin Luther King Freeway.” Escalante alternated between studying the rumpled AAA map and peering through the rain-streaked windshield watching road signs.

“That's the way to Lemon Grove.” He continued south on the San Diego Freeway.

“And the direction of Saint Sebastian High School.”

“No point going there now, Doña, it's almost eight o'clock. School's closed for the night.”

“I know, but if we want to be close to the school tomorrow morning we're too far south. Whoops, now you passed the Seventeenth Street exit.”

“So?”

“I spotted a couple of decent-looking motels.”

“I don't want a decent-looking motel.”

“We have to stay someplace.”

“No foolin'?”

The VW's headlights slashed through the dark slanted rain and when they lit up the
HWY
75
WEST
sign, he eased into the right lane and veered off.

“You're lost,” she teased.

“Nope.”

He merged onto the Coronado Bay Bridge and accelerated to seventy miles per hour to keep up with the late beach-bound traffic.

“Men are never lost, they're
temporarily displaced
.”

“Very funny!”

“I don't want your machismo to suffer when you stop at a gas station to ask directions.”

“I know where I'm going.”

To their right as they crossed the bridge, Coronado's lights sprouted like flowers out of the black ocean, against a twinkling backdrop of bobbing navigation buoys, slow-moving Navy warships and civilian freighters, runway lights of North Island Naval Air Station and beyond that, Lindbergh Field.

Escalante stuck the map in the door pocket, reclined the leather seat, brushed the hair off her forehead, leaned her head against the restraint, and gazed out the passenger window.

He watched from the corner of his eye. “Beautiful.”

“It sure is.”

“I meant you.”

She didn't answer for several seconds. “I wish we could stay near the beach.”

“We are.” He followed Orange Avenue to the water's edge, pulled into the Hotel del Coronado's main entrance, and shut off the engine.

“We don't have reservations.”

He walked around the car and opened her door. “I made reservations when I went home to pick up my clothes.”

The bellman loaded their two small bags onto a cart, and they followed him into the lobby.

“How many rooms did you reserve?” she asked.

“How many would
you
have reserved?”

“One.”

“Then we'd better release the second.” He didn't wait for her to ask. “I didn't want to presume.”

“That was sweet.” She pointed at the Babcock and Storey Bar off the lobby. “Let's check in to our room, have a glass of wine in that lounge, then find a restaurant.”

They ate dinner at the Sheerwater, overlooking the Pacific. The rain had stopped, and a full moon shone brightly through ragged gaps in the cloud cover. The ocean had turned in to a boiling black cauldron crowned by whitecaps whose tips the wind ripped off and blew away like luminescent wisps of smoke.

They spotted the silhouette of a sleek Navy ship steaming toward the horizon, churning up a frothy green wake behind her fantail.

Escalante took a bite of broiled swordfish and pointed. “Is that a submarine like you were on?”

He chuckled. “No, subs're stealthy. It would've submerged at the three-mile marker so you wouldn't see it.”

“What kind of ship is that?”

“Missile cruiser—a nuke.”

“Nuke?”

“Nuclear-powered.”

After dinner, they lingered over coffee and dessert, then strolled through the Victorian building and grounds, then went to their room. For the second time in three days they made love under a stream of hot water in the shower.

F
RIDAY
M
ORNING
, J
ANUARY
10
S
AN
D
IEGO
, C
ALIFORNIA

A
FTER AN EARLY BREAKFAST
at the Palm Court, Miller and Escalante checked out of the hotel and drove to Saint Sebastian High School, which sprawled over several acres of prime real estate east of Balboa Park.

An overweight woman rose from her desk and waddled to the front counter of the old, ornate administration office. In her midsixties with hennared beehived hair and a sour round face, her drab pea-green dress draped over her rotund body like an army tent.

Miller checked the embossed nameplate on her cluttered desk that identified her as Mrs. Beverly Grundy, Executive Assistant.

Miller flashed a smile. “Good morning, Mrs. Grundy. We'd like to speak with the school principal.”

“Are you parents?”

Miller glanced at Escalante. “Not yet.”

They presented their IDs. Grundy held the photo cases at arm's length next to their faces, inspected them, and handed them back. “I guess this is you.”

“I hope so,” Miller said. “Like I said, we'd like to see your principal.”

“What about?”

“Is he here?”

“Certainly, we open at eight o'clock.” She sniffed. “I'm his right hand person.”

“I'm sure you're indispensable.”

“Wait over there,” she ordered, pointing at a row of old wood chairs that looked like instruments of torture for recalcitrant students. “I'll see if he's busy.” She tossed them a dirty look and disappeared through a burnished oak door with a rectangular frosted-glass window, slamming it hard enough to rattle the glass on which gold-leaf letters spelled out:

M
ONSIGNOR
A
LOYSIUS
X
AVIER
W
ILLOUGHBY
, P
H
.D. P
RINCIPAL

“What's her problem?” Miller whispered to Escalante.

“You challenged her authority and status.”

“String me up with a dirty rope.”

Momentarily, Grundy returned. “Follow me.”

Monsignor Willoughby was about the same age as his assistant but was her antithesis in every other way: short, thin, and bald, with wire-rimmed eyeglasses that rode low on his nose, a warm smile, and sparkling green eyes. He rose from his chair behind an oak desk that had been polished over the years to a whiskey-colored sheen that matched the door.

He shook their hands and motioned to his chairs. “Welcome to Saint Sebastian. Please sit.”

The office was small but comfortable with deeply cushioned chairs and a small matching sofa surrounded by walls lined with leather-bound books, diplomas, awards, and dozens of photos of the Monsignor with his teachers and students. In every photo he was smiling, as were his companions.

Escalante took in the surroundings with quiet appreciation. “This doesn't look like the principal's office where I went to school.”

“A Catholic school?” Willoughby asked.

“Yes, Father.”

“Some parochial schools take discipline to extremes. I try to make my students feel welcome when they visit me, no matter the reason. In my experience, kindness works better than intimidation.”

He clasped his hands on the desk. “Mrs. Grundy said you're police officers.”

“We are,” Miller said. “I'm afraid I insulted her. If so, I apologize, it wasn't intentional.”

Willoughby flipped his hand as if to shoo away a mosquito. “She's an institution. I was transferred here in seventy-five and she predates me by several years. I'd be lost without her, though. How may I help you?”

Escalante handed him the subpoena duces tecum. He read it and looked up, frowning. “If I knew exactly why you need these records, maybe I could save you some time.”

“All I can say is we're conducting murder investigations. Does the high school maintain its own financial and accounting records, or are they centralized at the Diocese?”

“We maintain financial-transaction records here, but I'm afraid thirty-year-old bank records are out of the question. We keep them for six years in case the IRS audits one of our benefactor's charitable contributions. After that we destroy them.”

“We were afraid of that. Are student records for those years available?”

He pinched his nose together with his right thumb and forefinger, pushed his glasses up, and thought for a few seconds. “In a manner of speaking, but I doubt you'll be able to find what you need.”

“Why not?”

“I'll show you.” He rose and motioned for Miller and Granz to follow. Halfway down a wide corridor flanked by teachers' offices, he unlocked an ancient padlock, flipped on a light switch, and swung open two massive doors. Old unoiled hinges protested loudly, and the pungent odor of mildewed paper, stale damp air, and decaying insect carcasses floated up.

Willoughby crinkled his nose and led them down two flights of rickety stairs before turning on more lights. They stood at the entrance of what looked more like a medieval castle's dungeon than a repository of academic records.

About 150 feet square, the archives had a 30-foot-high ceiling with massive beams that supported the floor above. Old-fashioned wire-caged incandescent light fixtures hung from the beams, but their feeble yellow light barely reached the room's walls, which were defined by the old building's outer foundation.

Thousands of old, sagging, built-in wooden shelves around the perimeter were propped up in spots by rotting 2-by-4s and stuffed with moldy, cobwebbed cardboard boxes. Dozens of empty, rusty bug-fogger cans littered the waterlogged cement floor.

“We have a serious black widow spider problem,” Willoughby explained.

Floor-to-ceiling metal shelving units crisscrossed the room's interior, creating shadowy dark tunnels barely wide enough for a person to pass through.

Willoughby waved his hand in a sweeping gesture. “This is our record-storage room. It's a bit disorganized, but contains individual student records all the way from the inception of the school in nineteen-twenty-two until fifteen years ago when we built a new storage facility across campus.”

Miller tried to do some mental math, but failed and told Escalante, “I'm not good at math without a calculator.”

“Sixty-five years plus,” she said.

Somewhere nearby they heard a pack of rats squeal angrily at the disturbance, and scurry off. Escalante shuddered and took an involuntary step closer to Miller.

He leaned over and whispered, “Don't look to me for protection, I was gonna hide behind you.”

“How many student records are in here?” she asked.

“More than a hundred thousand,” Willoughby told her. “One student per file, about three dozen files per box—almost three thousand boxes.”

Miller whistled softly. “There any sort of indexing system?”

Willoughby shook his head.

“They grouped by year?”

Willoughby shook his head. “I'm afraid not.”

“Alphabetically?”

Willoughby shook his head. “Sorry.”

“I give up—is there
any
system or logic to the way they're filed?”

“No. We keep them upstairs for five years after a student graduates, then transfer them to the archives. Like I said, now they go to a new unit, but this wasn't a user-friendly work environment—when a class's records came to these archives, they were shoved into whatever space was available, and may have been moved about since.”

“The years aren't kept together?” Escalante asked hopefully. “If they were, once we found a box for one year we're interested in, the others would be close-by.”

Willoughby shook his head again. “Sorry, there's no rhyme or reason to where they end up.”

“Is there a master list of enrolled students by year or any other logical grouping?”

“I wish there were, but no. The State Education Code calls those ‘directories.' We keep them during the academic year, for use by college and military recruiters or others who might need a listing of graduating seniors. By law, the amount of information the directories can contain, and that can be divulged, is limited. After students graduate, that year's directory is useless. State law doesn't require us to keep them, so we don't.”

“So, what do these records contain?”

“Grades, attendance history, test results, disciplinary actions, et cetera.”

Miller looked at Willoughby. “What we're looking for, Father, is a way to locate the names and addresses of students enrolled at Saint Sebastian from nineteen-sixty-eight to seventy-four. We don't care about their grades or any of that stuff. Can you think of any way we can do that using the records here in the archives?”

Willoughby pursed his lips. “The only way would be to read every file in every box.”

“That'd take a team of investigators several weeks.”

“Months,” Willoughby corrected. “And you still might not find them.”

“Why not?”

“In eighty-five, heavy rains flooded this room and saturated everything within two feet from the floor. Those files were hauled to the dump. The files that weren't totally ruined are the ones you see here.”

“And smell,” Miller said.

“Unfortunately. It takes me weeks to purge my system of mold and mildew spores after I come down here.” Willoughby sneezed three times in rapid succession.

Miller did, too, and so did Escalante.

“This is a dead end,” he told her. “Let's get back to Santa Rita where we might do some good without ruining our health.”

 

Miller headed his car north on I-805. Miramar Naval Air Station was sliding by the right side of the car and four F/A-18 Hornets were taxiing toward the runway when Escalante punched Miller's arm.

“Huh?”

“Turn around and go back to the school.”

“What for?”

“I know how to get the information we're after.”

“So do I, but I don't want to breathe mold spores or wear a gas mask and fight off basement rats for two months.”

“If I'm right, it'll only take five minutes. Turn around.”

He flipped a U at Highway 274. “You gonna share your revolutionary investigative strategy with me?”

“Patience.”

•   •   •

“You're back already?” Willoughby asked. “Did you forget something?

“Do you have old yearbooks for the sixties and seventies?”

“Sure.”

“There's one published each year, with names and pictures of all the students, right?”

Willoughby's face broke into a grin. “Very clever. Follow me to the school library.”

They were arranged on a dusty shelf in a room behind the library's office, along with hundreds of out-of-date textbooks. “Take them—we keep the excess copies that aren't sold—I've got dozens.”

 

They were passing Miramar NAS again when Miller said, “That was good thinking. It would've never occurred to me. You're a natural investigator.”

He strummed his fingers on the steering wheel in time to imaginary music as he thought. “We concentrate on football players. Fifty guys per team for seven years is three-fifty. Allowing for boys who played several years, it's no more than a couple hundred.”

“I thought there were eleven players on a football team.”

“Eleven on the field at once, but there are different positions and substitutes. If we run those two hundred players through DMV for Santa Rita, San Benito, Monterey, and Santa Clara County residents, we'll prune it to a dozen or two.”

“Manageable,” Escalante agreed, then added, “Speaking of teams—we make a good one.”

“Not good, great.” He watched her for a reaction.

“If you don't keep your eyes on the road you'll kill us both.”