The Dangerous Hour (v5) (epub) Read online

  Duels and challenges.

  Defined: Combat with deadly weapons, fought between two or more persons, by private agreement.

  Punishment when death ensues: state prison for two, three, or four years.

  Dueling beyond State: Every person who leaves this State with intent to evade any provisions of this chapter, and to commit any act out of the State, which would be punishable by such provisions if committed within this State, is punishable in the same manner as he would have been in case such act had been committed within this State.

  I’d seen Troy Winslip’s killer twice—in the murky light of a sleazy National City bar, some miles north of the Mexican border, and in a San Diego courtroom, where I’d testified against him. Reynaldo Dominguez, street name Renny D. An evil, sadistic drug distributor who controlled much of the traffic in the San Diego area. He’d been given the maximum sentence, and I’d given him little more thought.

  Until now, when I remembered how his thin upper lip had curled and his dark, soulless eyes had stared me down as he was led from that courtroom.

  Reynaldo Dominguez.

  Renny D.

  R. D.?

  The man in the composite sketches Daphne had put together superficially resembled him, but there were significant differences. While the facial features were razor sharp, more indio than Mexican, Dominguez had no broken nose or scar on his forehead. He’d worn his black hair shoulder-length and pulled back in a tail, and half his left index finger was missing. He’d had no spider tattoo on his neck, but both forearms were entwined by sleek serpents.

  But noses can be broken, foreheads scarred, tattoos acquired, hair cut. This afternoon I was meeting Patrick Neilan—a man who claimed to possess excellent powers of observation—at Daphne’s studio. Maybe then I’d know more.

  I studied the image on the oversize monitor. The sharp facial features were right, but the rest wasn’t close enough to make a positive identification.

  “You recognize him?” Patrick asked me.

  “Can you describe the tattoos on his arms?”

  “Better yet, I can draw them.” He picked up a scratch pad and pencil from Daphne’s desk and began sketching in swift, short strokes. When he held it out to me, I saw what could have been bulgy coils of rope. No sleek serpents. Unless . . .

  “How tall is R. D.?”

  “Six-two or -three.”

  “And his weight?”

  “Around one-eighty, but he looks heavier. I’d guess he’s into bodybuilding.”

  Then the sleek serpents could have been distorted by changes in the underlying muscle structure of his arms.

  “One other thing,” Patrick added. “Part of his left index finger is missing, down to the second knuckle.”

  “You are a good observer!” To Daphne I said, “Can you print this and then work with me for a while?”

  “Sure.” She hit the icon. “You want to make some alterations?”

  “Yes. The hair—try shoulder-length.”

  “Like this?”

  “No, pulled back straight and tight, bound at the nape of his neck.”

  “This way?”

  “Yes. Now the scar on the forehead—remove it. Also the spider tattoo.”

  Both vanished, and my excitement intensified.

  “His nose—make it straight and sharp but still slightly hooked.”

  “Give me a minute; that’s a little more difficult.”

  She tried several options.

  “How’s that?”

  “Great. Now, can you make him curl his lip?”

  “Right or left side?”

  “. . . Right. And finally, can you make his eyes hard and kind of flat?”

  Daphne did her magic, enlarged the image, and the malevolent face of Reynaldo Dominguez dominated the screen. Although it was only computer-generated, it radiated the same rage and hatred Dominguez had directed at me in that courtroom years before.

  Got you, you bastard.

  “Sharon McCone,” Gary Viner of the San Diego PD homicide detail said. “It’s been a long time. You still turning cartwheels?”

  It was an old joke between us; Gary, a high school friend of my brother Joey, had been secretly enamored of me—and my lace-trimmed bikini panties—when I was a cheerleader.

  “Better than ever.”

  “And I suppose you’ve still got that high-flying boyfriend.”

  “Sure do.”

  “My bad luck.” His tone sobered. “Listen, I was real sorry to hear about Joey. He hadn’t been in touch in a lot of years, but maybe if I’d made the effort—”

  “Oh, Gary, nobody heard from him, and nobody could’ve helped, even if they had made the effort.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah, I do. For a time there I beat myself up for not trying to save him, but now I realize that people who push everybody away can’t be dragged back. They need to want to save themselves. Joey didn’t.”

  Gary was silent. Then he asked, “You calling from down here?”

  “No, San Francisco. D’you remember the Reynaldo Dominguez case?”

  “Drug dealer you helped us nail with that antiquated section of the CPC? I sure do.”

  “Dominguez got the maximum sentence, and there was a sentence for dealing on top of it. He’s out now, probably on parole. Could you find out who his P.O. is, get a current address?”

  “Why? You think he’s going to give you trouble?”

  “He may already have.” I explained briefly.

  “The son of a bitch! Let me get in touch with the Department of Corrections. Call you back in, say, fifteen minutes.”

  I thanked him and broke the connection. Went to my armchair and watched the fog hover over the placid gray water while I remembered Gary and Joey in their teenaged years.

  The two of them with their heads together under the hoods of the various clunker cars they’d owned. Joey pelting Gary with empty beer cans from the tree house that my father had built us kids in the finger canyon behind our house. Their hangdog expressions when the cops delivered them to our door minutes after they’d draped a curmudgeonly neighbor’s trees with toilet paper. Their freshly scrubbed faces and wide grins as they’d pinned corsages to their dates’ dresses before their senior prom—fingers straying dangerously close to the girls’ breasts in spite of the prying lens of my father’s Instamatic.

  I was smiling at the memories. Smiling at something that had to do with Joey.

  I was healing.

  The phone buzzed. Gary on line one.

  “Okay, about Dominguez,” he said. “He was a model prisoner at the Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, became something of a jailhouse lawyer.”

  “Studying up on the penal code so he wouldn’t get caught the next time?”

  “Maybe, but he also became well versed in the civil codes, advised other inmates on their divorces and so forth.”

  “And while he was at it, he probably stumbled across the Business and Professions Code, Sections seventy-five twelve to seventy-five seventy-three.”

  “Which is?”

  “The Private Investigator Act. A study of it would tell him everything he needed to know about how to bring me down. So when was he paroled?”

  “Last fall, October. Six months later he disappeared. Walked away from the janitorial job DOC had set him up in, and hasn’t been seen since. If you’ve got information as to his whereabouts—”

  “I don’t. He’s vanished again. Gary, will you do me another favor? A friend of mine on the SFPD has put in a request for information from your narcotics detail, but it hasn’t come through yet. Would you expedite it?”

  “Sure, what do you need?”

  “Anything they’ve got on four people: Alex Aguilar, Johnny Duarte, Scott Wagner, and Dan Jeffers. Specifically, a connection with Dominguez.”

  “Spell the names, and give me the approximate dates you’re looking at.”

  I did, and he said he’d get back to me before close of business.

  I
buzzed Ted and asked him to call a mandatory staff meeting for four o’clock, then, after a moment’s consideration, phoned Patrick Neilan and asked him if he’d like to attend. As far as I was concerned, Neilan, with his business degree and keen powers of observation, was a natural for the position as one of Charlotte’s assistants, and I wanted them to meet, as well as see how he interacted with the rest of the staff. When he accepted my invitation, he couldn’t conceal his excitement.

  Next I called Marguerite Hayley and Glenn Solomon. After I’d explained the situation to Hayley, she said she would meet with the people at BSIS and, as she phrased it, “thoroughly confuse them with the facts—which, you must admit, are confusing.” Glenn told me he planned to sit down with the deputy D.A. who was to prosecute Julia and apprise him of the new developments. “I suspect they may want to back-burner the case until they see what else shakes out of the trees.”

  “I suppose I should inform the SFPD and DOC that Dominguez has been seen in the city.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt, but I doubt they’ll be of much help to you. The Department’s on overload, and DOC isn’t in much better shape. They both have bigger game to hunt than a so-called model prisoner who broke parole.”

  “But he’s somewhere out there, and—”

  “Nobody at SFPD or DOC is going to make much of an effort to locate him.”

  “Then who is?”

  “Who do you think, my friend? Who do you think?”

  When I entered the conference room, Charlotte and Patrick Neilan were chatting while nursing diet Cokes. He must have just told her a joke, because she threw her head back and exclaimed, “Oh, my gawd!” in the Texas accent that only surfaced when she was caught off guard. Mick glanced up from where he and Derek were going over a complicated-looking diagram, and frowned, then went back to tracing a line with his pencil. Craig lounged at the oak table, cross-trainers propped on its edge, while Ted paused in setting out bowls of pretzels to glare disapprovingly at him. Julia sat alone, slumped in her chair, staring down at her clasped hands.

  I went over to her. “Good news. There’s been a break in the case, and Glenn thinks he can get the D.A.’s office to back-burner their case against you.”

  She nodded listlessly, gave me a weak smile. “That’s good.”

  Didn’t she even want to know what the new evidence was? “Jules, you really look down. What’s wrong?”

  She shrugged.

  “Okay,” I said, “later on let’s go down to Miranda’s. I’ll buy you a beer, and we’ll talk.”

  “If you like.”

  “I like.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Hang in there.”

  Before the meeting began, I taped both the past and present-day composites of Reynaldo Dominguez to the chalkboard. Then I introduced Patrick to the staff and explained the latest developments. “Apparently,” I concluded, “it’s up to us to locate Dominguez. The area we have to cover isn’t a large one; he’s somewhere in the Bay Area, more likely the city.”

  Charlotte asked, “Why d’you say that?”

  “Because this is a guy who’s hell-bent on revenge. He’s not going to miss out on watching us crumble. He was at Aguilar’s building as recently as Friday night, and I’m betting he’s not far from there now.” I turned to Craig. “I want you to go down to San Luis Obispo. Talk to the warden at the Men’s Colony. Find out who Dominguez was close to while he was there. Interview them or, if they’ve been released, get their present addresses and track them down. The same with the places he was living and working while on parole. We need to know if anybody in this area may be sheltering him.”

  “I’ll fly down tonight.”

  “Good. Charlotte, you’re to work the financial angle. Credit cards, bank accounts. He’s got to be getting money from somewhere. Coordinate with Mick, who will do background research on other friends and family. Derek, Craig’s been working on locating that Dan Jeffers. Get the file from him and take over. And Julia, you and Patrick know the Mission better than any of us. The two of you will work with me. We’re going to search every inch of the district for places where Dominguez may be hiding.”

  Julia nodded dutifully, but a wide smile spread across Patrick’s freckled face.

  “Welcome to McCone Investigations,” I told him.

  Gary Viner didn’t get back to me till after nine o’clock. I’d spent the time since the staff meeting going over a detailed map of the Mission district with Julia and Patrick. We divided it into sectors and color-coded them: red for more affluent areas, where Dominguez’s appearance would draw attention; yellow for those where he might go unnoticed; green for those where he’d fit right in. We discussed specific places within this “natural habitat” area that he might be frequenting, and decided to target them first.

  After Patrick left for his security job, I suggested to Julia that we have dinner, and she volunteered to walk down to Miranda’s and get us a table while I put in a call to Gary. I’d just picked up the receiver when the other line rang.

  “Sorry it took so long to get back to you,” Gary said. “Big narcotics bust here late this afternoon, and I had a hard time reaching anybody on that detail. But here’s your information: we’ve got nothing on Alex Aguilar. He’s that up-and-coming Hispanic on your board of supervisors that the papers have been profiling, right?”

  “One and the same.”

  “Well, if there’s a connection to Dominguez, it’s buried deep. John Duarte, on the other hand, worked for Renny for years, but Narcotics never could gather enough evidence to charge him. When you helped us nail Dominguez, Duarte disappeared. Nobody looked very hard for him; he wasn’t one of the hierarchy.”

  “Wonder how he managed to weigh in as a major distributor up here.”

  “Good connections or financing, I suppose. Guys like him, they always land on their feet.”

  “Until they land at the bottom of a cliff.”

  “. . . Right. There’s nothing on the third name you gave me, Scott Wagner, but Dan Jeffers—what a loser. Penny-ante dealer, always getting hauled in, did six months here, six months there. Finally left town in ’ninety-five.”

  “Would he have known Dominguez? Or Duarte?”

  “Probably. Guys like Jeffers, they’re hangers-on, gofers. If either Duarte or Renny had a use for him, he’d’ve known them.”

  Gary and I chatted a few moments longer, and I promised to call him when I was next in San Diego, but I doubted I’d do so. The memories of Joey he’d evoked earlier had been pleasant enough, but there were others lurking in the backs of both our minds that were bound to be painful; I didn’t care to entertain them, and I sensed Gary felt the same.

  The fog outside the window was thick now, and night had fallen. Julia would be waiting for me at Miranda’s, hungry but too polite to go ahead and order. I straightened the papers on my desk, grabbed a heavier sweater than the one I’d worn that morning, and tugged it over my head as I stepped out on the catwalk. Lights burned in the space Mick and Derek shared, and also in Charlotte’s office. As I passed Ted’s door, I saw him hunched over his keyboard.

  When this situation was wrapped up, I would treat my staff to one hell of a celebration.

  The wind that hit me when I stepped out onto the sidewalk was chilly. Summer in San Francisco. Pity the tourists from warmer climes who arrive with only shorts and tropical-weight clothing, thinking the city is like Southern California.

  Feature films and television have created a patently false image of our state: L.A.-style congestion, high-rise cities. Rich people’s palaces, endless suburban sprawl. Sand beaches sprinkled with surfers and bikini-clad babes, vineyards where nobody works particularly hard. Completely ignoring the wild northern coastline; the nearly inaccessible mountains; the deserts, both mile-high and below sea level; the wide agricultural valleys, where people do work hard, and often for little reward; the small towns that are reminiscent of every small town in this country’s heartland.

  And then, of course, there’s the fruits-and-nuts image:
Yes, we’re all weird, if not downright crazy. Sybaritic, immoral, and—probably—murderous. Set foot in the state and next thing you know, you’ll be as wacko as the rest of us.

  Well, maybe that isn’t such a bad scenario. Keeps the riffraff out.

  I turned south on the Embarcadero, pulling up the sweater’s hood and stuffing my hands into its pockets. A tugboat’s horn bleated out on the bay—a lonely sound. I hadn’t heard from Hy all day, and I wondered if he was staying over in La Jolla. It would be a nice surprise if I went home and found him asleep in my bed—

  A sound intruded, made me pause near a chain-link fence that stretched between Piers 28 and 36, where the intervening structures had been demolished. Faint, but attention-getting.

  It came again. A whimper.

  Something hurt. An animal?

  A moan.

  Not something. Someone.

  I peered into the shadows. Called, “Hello?”

  No response.

  I took out my small flashlight, shone it around.

  A figure lay crumpled against the fence. A figure in jeans and a leather bomber jacket. Like the jacket Julia had bought at a thrift shop for only ten dollars last month. She’d had it on today—

  “Jesus!”

  I rushed over, knelt down. Touched her neck, taking care not to move her.

  Weak pulse. Her head flopped onto my extended arm. Her hot breath seared my cheek.

  “Jules, it’s Sharon. I’m here.”

  No response.

  I fumbled in my bag for my phone. Damn it, why was the thing always hiding at the bottom when I needed it?

  Julia whimpered again.

  “I’m here. You’ll be okay.” I speed-dialed 911.

  Her hand moved, caught my wrist, dropped away, but not before I saw that it was smeared with blood. Shot or stabbed.

  “Nine-one-one,” the emergency operator’s voice said.

  “Stabbing or shooting. Embarcadero, south of Pier Twenty-eight. Code three.”