A man walking his dog along Huntington witnessed it from a quarter of a mile away. He testified later that he could see thick rolls of yellow-brown smoke pour out of the shooting ports of the armored cars, followed by the scene of armed guards throwing open the rear doors onto the street. The police investigation said that canisters of tear gas hidden within the bags of cash were triggered by remote control. The guards rolled in agony on the pavement, the gas now so thick in the air that the witness couldn’t see much else. What he heard, though, was the sound of engines roaring, squealing tires, and a moment later, the sharp crack of gunshots. The speculation was that the robbers had been parked in the lot of the H.N.& Francis C. Berger Foundation building on the other side of the intersection, and that two cars (of unknown description) converged on the armored vehicles. The robbers were armed and probably wore gas masks, or they couldn’t have entered the smoking vehicles to remove the cash bags or kill Steve Nichols, the driver of the second car.
The only witness to the crime, the dog walker, had turned his back to run and couldn’t see the cars tear away, or say whether they escaped west to L.A. or east to San Bernadino on the freeway.
No vehicles were ever recovered that could be tied to the robbery, since no reliable description of the cars was ever made.
Because of the placement of the tear gas bombs, the counting room staff was immediately isolated and questioned. The police determined that several of the employees were involved, and a witness came forth to name names. Despite protestations of innocence by the counting room employees, three people were convicted and imprisoned. The head cashier, a woman named Anita, dubbed by the evening newscasts as “Anita of Santa Anita,” was sentenced first.
Villatoro met Steve Nichols’s widow six months after the robbery. She was young, pretty, with a toddler, and eight months pregnant at the time. Nichols had worked two jobs to be able to afford the small home in Tustin. His death had brought her a little life insurance money, but that would soon be gone. So would the house. She had pleaded with Villatoro to help her, and he could do nothing. As he left the house that day and skirted the FOR SALE sign in the yard, he had made another promise to himself. He would find the man who had killed her husband.
But no one ever came forth with the names of the men in the two cars who had taken the money, killed Steve Nichols, and escaped. Those imprisoned either refused, or, as Villatoro now suspected, did not know the identities of those men. And no one had come forward to shed any light on who they were.
DESPITE THE HOUR, Villatoro pulled the telephone to the edge of the nightstand. Even though it was the weekend, he called his former partner, Celeste, and left a message on her cell phone.
“Celeste, I’m sorry about the time and the day, but will you please go into the office on Sunday and pull all of the Santa Anita files? I need you to go through them to see if you can find the name Newkirk.” He spelled it out. “I don’t know his first name, although I suspect he was a police officer with the LAPD. It may be in our formal reports, or it may be written on a piece of scratch paper, or in the margin on something. I don’t know for sure. I wish I could remember. But the name is familiar, somehow.”
He paused. “If you find it, call me immediately. And whether you reach me or not, cross-reference that name to everything in the case. The investigation, the trial, the after-trial. Anything and everything. I realize what I’m asking you for is beyond what I should, now that I’ve retired. You don’t have to help me, and there are no hard feelings if you don’t. But I don’t know where else to turn, and I want to solve this. I know you do, too.”
He paused again. “Thank you, Celeste.”
Why, he wondered, was the name familiar? What was it about that chance encounter in the sheriff’s office that gnawed at him? Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was just the fact that Newkirk was the first person he had met so far in North Idaho who looked at him suspiciously. Sure, others looked at him because he didn’t fit, and he didn’t. But Newkirk had eyed him coldly, assessed him. Newkirk stood back and hadn’t offered his hand, as if discouraging any more familiarity.
And he was the first person Villatoro had met who, after initial pleasantries, had not asked, “So, how do you like it here?”
A knock on the door startled him. Villatoro rolled off the bed, used his palms to flatten the wrinkles on his shirt, and tucked his shirttails into his trousers. There was no peephole, so he opened the door a crack.
It was the receptionist from the front desk with a bucket of ice.
“Hello,” he said. “I didn’t order any ice.”
She looked up and smiled conspiratorially. “We could put some in a glass, and pour some bourbon over it, and we’d have a cocktail.”
He could feel his face flush. Even though he was blocking the door, he could see her look into the room, making sure he was alone.
“You seem like a very nice man,” she said.
“A nice married man,” he said.
She laughed huskily. “I’m not asking you to get a divorce. I just thought you might want to have a drink with me. I just finished my shift.”
He didn’t know what to say. She was so open, and so bold. And she wasn’t as unattractive as his first impression of her had been, now that she was off duty.
She read his face, and smiled. “Some other time, eh?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
“You know where I am,” she said, handing him the bucket. He watched her walk down the hallway. Nice walk, he thought. He found himself wondering what she had looked like twenty years before. She paused at the end of the hall, looked back at him over her shoulder, and winked. He waved with a flutter of his fingers and shut the door.
He carried the ice bucket into his room and placed it absently on the desk, his mind spinning.
After pacing back and forth, he made a decision: He would sleep in the other double bed tonight. Maybe it wouldn’t be as lumpy.
He lay in the dark, flustered, but a little excited. It had been years since a woman …
Clicking on the bed lamp, he addressed the photo of his wife and daughter. “Sorry, Donna. Don’t worry,” he said, before turning the light off.
Real sleep was still hours away.
Saturday, 10:23 P.M.
NEWKIRK WAS in the backseat of Singer’s white Escalade, looking between the heads of Singer and Gonzalez at the sweep of headlights in the trees. They were on a well-graded dirt road, climbing a series of S-turns in the timber, en route to Gonzalez’s home. Singer suddenly tapped the brakes to let a doe and fawn run across the road, and Newkirk lurched forward, grasping at the front seat for support.
“Didn’t see her,” Singer said. “Sorry, Newkirk.”
Gonzalez said, “I saw her eyes reflect back, but it was too late to say anything. Why don’t they just cross the road when they hear you coming? They wait until you’re right on top of them to decide to run. Fucking deer.”
“There’s a lot of them,” Singer said.
After a beat, Gonzalez said, “You notice how every animal has different-colored eyes when light hits them? Deer are green. I seen a coyote up here, and his eyes were blue. Rabbits are yellow. I seen some orange eyes a couple of nights ago up here on my road, but I still don’t know what the animal was.”
“Badger,” Newkirk said. “My boys and I spotlighted a badger once, and his eyes were orange.”
“Fucking badger,” Gonzalez said.
GONZALEZ LIVED on a hilltop, in a home that perched over a cliff and afforded a vast, breathtaking view of a dark forest valley and the moonlit mountains eighty miles away. From the deck, Newkirk could see a kidney-shaped lake far below that mirrored the stars and moon. Like all of them, Gonzalez lived in a home that would have been unattainable ten years before, something beyond their dreams. The house alone would have cost 7 or 8 million in L.A., and that didn’t include the eighty acres that went with it.
Singer stepped out through the open sliding glass door and handed Newkirk a beer as he joined him
at the rail.
“You know the name of that lake?” Newkirk asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“There are so many lakes up here. I’ve tried to learn their names.”
“Gonzo’s Lake,” Singer said. “We can call it that.”
Newkirk took a sip of the beer. It bothered him, once again, that Singer and Gonzalez had no real interest about where they lived.
“You know what the deal is when we go downstairs,” Singer said. “You and I don’t talk. No matter what happens or what’s said, we don’t talk. We don’t want him to know how many of us there are, or who we are. We don’t want him to hear our voices again, or he’ll put things together.”
“And Gonzo is okay with that?”
“Sure he is.”
Newkirk took a deep breath, looked away.
“Yes,” Singer said, acknowledging Newkirk’s concern, “we’re taking a calculated risk here. We’re using Boyd to create a plausible diversion that will pull the search teams out of the woods. We need to get them out before they find something, and we need to change the story from missing kids to finding Tom Boyd. With the sheriff’s office and community attention on Boyd, the odds go way down that the Taylor kids will be found by law enforcement and put into protective custody—or be interviewed on network TV, for Christ’s sake. And if the focus is on Boyd, we can use the time we just bought on doing good police work to locate those kids. Just good, solid, professional police work, meaning chasing up every lead, interviewing every possible witness, using our training. It always works, Newkirk, it always works. This way, we’ll find them before some idiot deputy does.”
“What if a citizen finds them?” Newkirk asked.
“We’ve set it up so we’re the first responders,” Singer said. “We’ll get there first. Then we’ll deal with it.”
“But Boyd …”
“Don’t worry,” Singer said. “We’ll keep him alive. We might need him again.”
Newkirk felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air.
THEY WENT down the stairs into the basement, Gonzalez in front of them, clomping loudly. Newkirk followed Singer down, replicating Singer’s gentle steps. The man in the basement would probably sense there was more than one of them, but he wouldn’t know how many for sure. As he followed, Newkirk heard his stomach gurgle. The dread he felt grew stronger. So did the odor. Urine, feces, sweat, fear.
At the landing, Singer turned and made a face at Newkirk, then drew a handkerchief out and tied it over his nose and mouth. Newkirk didn’t have a cloth, so he raised his arm and pressed his face into his sleeve.
Gonzalez snapped on a light, a bare bulb in a fixture attached to the upper floor joists. The basement was unfinished except for a framed-out spare bedroom and bathroom on the north wall. The floor was bare concrete.
Tom Boyd shouted, “Who’s there?” His voice was muffled because of the cloth sack tied over his head. Burn marks from a Taser stun gun, like snakebites, could be seen just under the collar of Boyd’s light brown uniform shirt. Newkirk was glad he couldn’t see the man’s face.
“Remember me?” Gonzalez said in a fake voice. Newkirk recognized it as what Gonzalez called his “whitey-white” voice, the one he’d used to mock supervisors and politicos back on the force. Gonzo was a great mimic, master of eight or nine dialects. He used to read departmental memos in the locker room in that whitey-white, just-returned-from-a-weekend-in-the-Hamptons voice, and always got big laughs. But it was horrible now, Newkirk thought.
“You probably thought I had forgotten about you down here, Mr. UPS man. But I was busy all day.”
“I know who you are,” Boyd said. “You’re those cops.”
Singer and Newkirk exchanged glances.
Boyd was in a stout straight-backed wooden chair. His hands had been triple Flex-cuffed behind his back, to assure that the heavily muscled man couldn’t break free. His thick torso was tied to the chair with tight bands of climbing rope, his bare ankles Flex-cuffed to the chair legs. Newkirk could see where the cuffs dug deeply into Boyd’s skin. The seat of the chair and the inside of Boyd’s dark UPS uniform shorts were sodden where he’d been forced to foul himself. For some reason, Gonzalez had removed Boyd’s shoes. When Newkirk saw why, he almost retched.
Gonzalez had glued Boyd’s feet to the floor with construction adhesive.
“Jesus, man, I gotta open a window,” Gonzalez said. “You really stink up a party.”
“Please,” Boyd pleaded, his head slumping forward. “I don’t know what you think I did. I don’t know why you’re doing this to me….”
As Gonzalez opened casement windows, Newkirk looked everywhere but at Tom Boyd. He would never need to look again, he thought. The image was seared into him.
There was a workbench attached to the basement wall. On the bench were a video camera bag, Boyd’s shoes, a half-empty box of department Flex-cuffs, and an open toolbox. Newkirk could see the glue gun Gonzalez had used to attach Boyd’s feet to the floor.
“We’re going to start where we left off early this morning,” Gonzalez said, taking a stool from the workbench and moving it near Boyd. He perched on the stool so he was above the man. “You know those kids pretty well. I want to know where they would go if they were trying to hide. Where would they run?”
A sob came from inside the cloth sack. “I told you I don’t know … I don’t know. If I knew, I’d tell you. I thought they’d run to their mother’s house, I told you that. I don’t know of any relatives around, I don’t know their friends. I never fucking paid any attention to them, you know?”
Gonzalez turned and looked at Singer, then shrugged.
Singer nodded. Newkirk wondered what the exchange signified.
He had seen worse. There was a house in Santa Monica the police had used for a while. They called it “Justice Ranch.” Newkirk had been there on several occasions. Justice Ranch was a last resort, used to elicit information from scumbags when every legal avenue had been used or blocked. It wasn’t a place to get confessions that could be used in court, because neither the cops nor the victims wanted to go to court. It was a house of torture, the place where Gonzalez often performed the “guilty smile.” Newkirk became acquainted with both when a judge released a child rapist on a procedural technicality three days before another missing boy was reported. The rapist was picked up in an unmarked car and taken to the Justice Ranch. Gonzo had been there waiting for him. He called himself the Head Wrangler, but instead of tack he had a toolbox. No one ever heard from the rapist again. Then the Feds came in and shut it down.
But that was different, Newkirk thought. He had always been confident that the suspects taken into that house were guilty, even if the cops couldn’t get enough proof for a conviction in court. And if the suspects weren’t guilty of that particular crime, they were guilty of others. No doubt about it. But this was a whole other deal. Tom Boyd was just a local yahoo. It made him sick.
“Look, I’ll be straight with you,” Gonzalez said, leaving his stool for the workbench. “I kind of believe you don’t know where those kids went. I kind of believe it. But I’m not a hundred percent. I need to be a hundred percent to reach my comfort level.”
Newkirk tried not to listen to Boyd, who was begging. Crying and begging at the same time. Saying all the same things, over and over. Offering to do anything, pay anything.
“Anything?” Gonzalez asked, pausing. “Would you bite your own penis off, for example?”
Newkirk winced.
Boyd croaked, “Just about anything.”
“Ah, that’s different. I said I needed a hundred percent. You’re not giving me that.”
Boyd moaned and thrashed his head back and forth. “What do you want? What is it you fucking want?”
Gonzalez walked across the concrete and rattled through the tool box. He removed a pair of needle-nosed pliers. “I need one hundred percent compliance.”
“To do what?”
Gonzalez glanced over at Singer
, and Singer raised his eyebrows, as if saying, This is going to be easy.
“I want you to confess.”
“WHAT?”
“I want you to confess that you took those kids and killed them because you were pissed off at their mother, and your brain was fucked up with steroids at the time.”
Boyd moaned again, and the moan turned into a sob.
“You can say it was an accident,” Gonzalez said, raising his whitey-white voice. “That you didn’t intend to hurt them at all. You sort of blacked out, and when you came to they were dead.”
“I can’t …”
“Oh yes, you can, Mr. UPS man.”
“You’ll kill me after I say it.”
“No,” Gonzalez said, shaking his head. “That’s not going to happen if you confess, but it sure as hell will if you don’t. If you cooperate with me, Mr. UPS man, I’ll put you in the back of a car and you’ll be driven to Las Vegas, where you can start a whole new life. That’s the place to start over, Las Vegas, where dreams can come true. I’m not going to give you money, or a new name, nothing. You’re on your own. A guy like you, with all those muscles, should be able to find a job pretty easy. They like muscle down there. Big muscles and little lizard brains look good on a résumé in Vegas. And you can’t ever come back here, you understand?”
Boyd was silent.
Even though Newkirk knew Gonzalez was lying, it had been a convincing performance. Newkirk again looked away, afraid he would get sick.
“I can’t confess to that,” Boyd said.
Gonzalez sighed theatrically. Then he snapped the pliers together in the air a few times, clack-clack-clack, and bent down to Tom Boyd’s naked feet, saying, “How many toenails does a guy really need?”
Newkirk didn’t care if Singer saw him close his eyes and cover his ears with his hands to drown out the scream.
JIM HEARNE sat straight up in bed, his eyes wide open, his breath shallow. He could feel his heart racing in his chest, something that always scared him. His father had died at age thirty-eight from a heart attack that came out of nowhere.