in the Chronicle contradicted most of the FBI’s facts about Danko, who did seem to be an innocent victim.
It was four in the morning. I was getting frustrated, angry.
Cindy and I seemed to fix on it at the same time.
The court proceedings. It was brought out that the BNA and the Weathermen used code names when they contacted one another. Fred Whitehouse was Bobby Z, after a Black Panther who was gunned down. Leon Mickens was Vlad—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Joanne Crow was Sasha, a woman who had blown herself up fighting the junta in Chile.
“You see it, Cindy?” I looked at her in the thinning light.
The name that Billy Danko had chosen for himself was August Spies.
Jill had shown us the way.
Chapter 87
The lights were blazing in Molinari’s office—the only lights on in the Hall at six A.M.
He was on the phone when I went in. His face brightened into what I took as a worn smile, pleased but exhausted. No one was getting any sleep these days.
“I was just trying to assure the chief of staff,” he said, signing off the phone and smiling, “that we weren’t the security equal out here of, say, Chechnya—with larger bridges. Tell me you have something, anything.”
I pushed across the yellowed, folded article I had found in Jill’s study.
Molinari picked up the article, PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE. He scanned it.
“What was it you called them, Joe? Radicals from the sixties who you said are still out there, who never surfaced?”
“White rabbits?” he said.
“What if it wasn’t political? What if there was something else motivating them? Or maybe it’s partly political, but there’s something else?”
“Motivating what, Lindsay?”
I pushed across the last article, the Sunday magazine supplement, folded to the part about Billy Danko’s code name, circled in bright red: August Spies.
“To get back in the game. To commit these murders. Maybe to get some kind of revenge. I don’t know everything yet. There’s something here, though.”
For the next few minutes I briefed Molinari on everything that we had—right up to the prosecutor Robert Meyer, Jill’s father.
Molinari blinked glassily. He looked at me as if I might be crazy. And it sounded crazy. Whatever I had was flying in the face of the investigation, the pronouncements of the killers, the wisdom of every law-enforcement agency in the country.
“Just where do you want to go with this, Lindsay?” Molinari finally asked.
“We’ve got to find out whatever we can about the people in that house. I’d start with Billy Danko. His family was from Sacramento. The FBI has files on what happened, right? Department of Justice, whatever it is. I need to know everything the Feds know.”
Molinari shook his head slowly back and forth. I realized I was asking for a lot. He closed his eyes for a second and leaned back in his chair. When he opened them I saw the faintest outline of a smile. “I knew there was a reason I missed you, Lindsay.”
I took that as a yes.
“What I didn’t know”—he pushed back his chair—“was that it was due to the likely prospect we’re both going to have some time on our hands after we’re removed from our jobs.”
“I missed you, too,” I said.
Chapter 88
San Francisco was in a panic the likes of which I had never seen before. The news stories never seemed to stop. Meanwhile, where the hell were we? Not close enough to the killers, I was afraid.
My whole theory depended on finding some way to make the other victims fit in with the current murders. I was certain there was a connection.
Bengosian was from Chicago. That seemed a long shot to tie in. But I remembered Lightower had gone to Berkeley. His CLO had told us that when we were up at Lightower’s company after he was killed.
I placed a call to Dianne Aronoff, Mort Lightower’s sister, and caught her at home. We talked and I found out that her brother had been a member of the SDS. In ’69, his junior year at Berkeley, he had taken a leave of absence.
Nineteen sixty-nine was the year of the Hope Street raid. Did that mean anything? It just might.
About one o’clock, Jacobi knocked on my window. “I think we found your guy Danko’s father.”
He and Cappy had started with the phone book, then matched up the address with a local high school. Danko’s father was still in Sacramento. Same address as they had lived in back in 1969. A man had answered when Cappy called. Hung up as soon as the inspectors had brought up Billy Danko’s name.
“There’s an FBI office down there.” Jacobi shrugged. “Or?”
“Here”—I jumped up, flipping him the keys to the Explorer—“you drive.”
Chapter 89
It was about two hours on Highway 80 any way you cut it to Sacramento, and we kept the Explorer at a steady seventy-five over the Bay Bridge. An hour and fifty minutes later we pulled up in front of a slightly run-down fifties-style ranch. We needed a win here, needed it badly.
The house was large but neglected, a slope of faded lawn and a fenced-in lot in back. Danko’s father was a doctor, I recalled. Thirty years ago, this might’ve been one of the nicest houses on the block.
I took off my sunglasses and knocked on the front door. It took a while for someone to answer, and I was feeling impatient, to say the least.
Finally an old man opened and peered out at us. I could see his nose and sharp, pointed chin—a resemblance to the picture of Billy Danko in the Chronicle magazine.
“You the idiots who called on the phone?” He stood there, regarding us warily. “Of course you are.”
“I’m Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer,” I said. “And this is Homicide Inspector Warren Jacobi. Do you mind if we come in?”
“I mind,” he said, but he swung the screen door open anyway. “I’ve got nothing to say to the police if it concerns my son, other than accepting their full apology for his murder.”
He led us back through musty, paint-chipped halls into a small den. It didn’t seem that anyone else was living with him.
“We were hoping to ask you just a few questions regarding your son,” Jacobi said.
“Ask.” Danko sank himself into a patchwork couch. “Better time to ask questions was thirty years ago. William was a good boy, a great boy. We raised him to think for himself, and he did, made choices of conscience— the right ones, it was proven out later. Losing that boy cost me everything I had. My wife …” He nodded toward a black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged woman. “Everything.”
“We’re sorry for what happened.” I sat on the edge of a badly stained armchair. “No one’s here to cause you more distress. I’m sure you’re familiar with what’s been going on in San Francisco recently. A lot of people have died there.”
