“Oh my Lord. Is that why Giggs was killed?”
“Answer the question,” Harry demanded. His voice did not contain Biehn’s righteous indignation. It couldn’t, because he could not wrap his brain around the crime he was investigating. He recoiled from it. But his sense of justice would not let it be.
“I didn’t!” Collins said quietly but urgently. “I mean, I haven’t. Not in years.” He shuddered. “It was such a sin. I should never have; it was Frank; almost always Frank.”
The cup fell from Collins’s hand, staining the couch and the rug with coffee. Collins put his head in his good hand and let out one long, strangled sob, his body convulsing.
One wouldn’t know it from looking at Dean Schrock, but he had a long memory. It stretched farther back than Altamont, farther back than the heyday of the Hell’s Angels. It stretched back to the days when his father lost his farmland in the Owens Valley, way north of Los Angeles. The Owens Valley farmers wanted nothing from Los Angeles. Most of them had never even been there. But Los Angeles wanted something from Owens Valley.
Water.
Eighty years earlier, Los Angeles had all but won the California Water Wars and stolen the water from the Owens River, draining the Owens Lake dry and turning a fertile inland valley into a desert. Farms were ravaged. Spirits crushed. Families torn apart.
The farmers, poor in political power but rich in defiance, had fought back as best they could. Owens Valley in the 1920s witnessed numerous acts of sabotage against the aqueducts built to drain their water for Los Angeles taps. In the late fifties and early sixties, Dean had grown up on the desiccated remains of the family farm, listening to his dad tell stories of his grandfather using a pick to punch holes in the pipes when he couldn’t get his hands on dynamite.
That was when his father wasn’t drunk and miserable, just miserable. Later, when the father drank too much to tolerate, and Dean got too old to take it, he beat up his old man and headed north on a stolen motorbike.
The beating he gave his father never satisfied him. It made him sorry for the old man. Dean always thought that, if he ever decided to raise some real hell, he’d do it to Los Angeles. And he’d do it for Owens Valley.
Which was why Jack found himself riding Smithies’s impounded Harley, hurtling toward Castaic Lake with Dean’s Hell’s Angels all around him. Castaic was a man-made lake, a reservoir that served as the end point of the California Aqueduct. Basically, it was an enormous storage tank for most of the water Los Angelenos drank.
And Dean was going to blow it up.
“Not just Castaic Dam,” Dean told him when they pulled over to get gas for some of the bikes. “Most of that water comes from Northern California. Stolen, too, I guess. No, my personal target is the pumping station at Sylmar. That’s where the Owens water comes from. But hell, these days the water that ruined Owens is barely a drop down in the city. So I want to hurt them more. I figure I’ll blow up both. That’s why I needed the extra shit.” He hefted the bag Jack had brought to him.
They kicked their bikes into gear and rode north on the steadily rising Interstate 5 for a few miles before arriving at Castaic Lake. Jack had never visited the area, so he could do nothing but follow as Dean took an off-ramp that curved away heading toward a vast dark area to the east of the interstate. The road led to small collection of buildings.
There was a gate, and floodlights, but the bikers didn’t seem bothered by them at all. One of the gang hopped off his bike and lifted a pair of bolt cutters off the back, walked boldly up to the gate, and snapped off the thick chain locking the gate closed. The sign on the gate read castaic dam — state water program reservoir — access restricted. The biker pushed open the gate and Dean’s gang rolled in.
Jack felt a fist close hard around his heart as he realized just how easily terrorists could wreak havoc on vital locations inside the United States.
It might have been the longest fifteen minutes of Harry Driscoll’s life. It was certainly the most horrific. For that time period, he had become Father Collins’s confessor, listening as the priest unburdened himself of many, many years of sins. And those sins were many: lust, gluttony, avarice, selfishness. But all his sins, in whatever form, were always, always visited upon children.
What horrified Driscoll most was the tender terms in which Collins spoke of the kids he had abused and sodomized. They were his lambs, his own flock, his tender charges. When Driscoll mentioned Aaron Biehn’s name, Collins’s face softened and his eyes drifted off nostalgically.
Harry resisted the urge to slap him.
“Oh God,” Collins cried softly as he finished describing his many acts, and those of Father Giggs. “God, forgive me for what I’ve done. I’ve been terrible.”
Harry stood up. His voice was hoarse. He’d spent a twenty-year career digging at the underbelly of the city, rooting out the bad things that grew there. He decided he’d never seen a more horrible or pathetic creature than this. “I don’t know if God forgives people like you,” he rasped. “I sure as hell don’t. And I hope the judge doesn’t, either. Get up.”
Collins seemed to know he was beaten. He stood meekly. Harry grabbed the priest’s good arm firmly and walked him out the door into the chilly morning air.
“Am I being arrested?” Collins said, as naive as ever. Harry wondered if he was mentally deficient. “I… I have a presentation to give for the Pope.”
“You’re going to miss it,” the detective replied. He opened the car door and guided Driscoll into the backseat. Harry couldn’t handcuff the wrist on the priest’s bad arm, so he hooked one ring around Collins’s good right wrist and the other to his left ankle.
He closed the door and hurried around to driver’s side, jumped in, and drove off toward Parker Center.
He was too disturbed by the images in his head to see the car ease away from the curb behind him.
At least there was a night watchman, Jack thought ironically. Of course, he hadn’t done much except sputter and wheeze as Dean strode up to him, beat him senseless, and then tossed him into a storage shed.
Beyond the buildings they could see the enormous bulk of Castaic Dam, not much more than a giant earthworks thrown across a ravine. Below it, a shallow gorge ran down toward Santa Clarita and, below that, to the main suburbs of Los Angeles.
“That’s a whole lotta water behind there,” said one of the bikers. “That flood the city?”
“Nah,” said another. This was the tubby biker who’d put Jack down in the dirt earlier. “Too far to travel. It’ll get Santa Clarita real wet, prob’ly, and mess up a lot of shit in the San Fernando Valley.”
Dean nodded. “Yeah. I’m not trying to flood the city. I’m just taking away its water.”
Jack understood enough about Los Angeles history to know what that dam meant. Los Angeles was built mostly on desert, and relied on the massive California Aqueduct to bring in most of its drinking water from the north. Castaic was the storage tank for all that water. Wreck Castaic, and millions of acre-feet of water just drained into the dust.
“Let’s go,” Dean said.
It was the tubby biker, whose name was Barny, who seemed to know what he was doing. He directed several of the bikers as they broke out packets of plastic explosives — some of which, Jack guessed, were the plastic explosives Farrigian had sold to them instead of the Islamists — and began telling them how to lay it along strategic points of the dam. The dam itself was nothing like Jack expected. He’d visited large dams before, and they usually looked like giant medieval castles. Castaic, however, was little more than a dirt dike reinforced with rocks and other debris to prevent erosion. It was, however, tall at over four hundred feet, and there was a huge amount of water behind it.
“You gonna help, or what?” Barny challenged. Jack realized that he had hesitated while the others were hiking out along the foot of the dam.
“Yeah,” Jack replied. “I plan on helping a lot.”
12. THE FOLLOWING TAKES PLACE BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 5 A.M. AND 6 A.M. PACIFIC STANDARD TIME
