3rd Degree

Chapter 86

A GRAND JURY was convened to investigate the shootings at the BNA hideout. Nasty charges were hurled left and right. The case was given to a rising prosecutor in the D.A.'s office. Robert Meyer. Jill's father.

The jury at the trial found no evidence of any police mis-conduct. Those who were killed, the police argued, were among the FBI's most wanted, though the description seemed a stretch for Billy Danko. Federal agents paraded a cache of guns confiscated in the raid: Uzis, grenade launchers, piles of ammo. A gun was found in Fred Whitehouse's hand - though sympathizers claimed it had been planted.

“Okay,” Cindy said wearily, and pushed back from the screen, “where do we go from here?”

The database referred to an article from 1971, a year later, in the Chronicle's Sunday news magazine.

“You got a morgue downstairs, don't you?”

“Yes, we do. Downstairs. A morgue.”

It was now close to four A.M. We flicked on a light in the morgue, and there was nothing but row after row of metal shelves filled with mesh and wire bins.

I frowned, deflated. “You know the system, Cindy?”

“Of course I know the system,” she replied. “You come in here during normal working hours and you ask the guy sitting at the desk.”

We split up and roamed the dark, crammed corridors. Cindy wasn't exactly sure if the files went back that far; what we were searching for might only be on film.

Finally I heard her shout, “I found something!”

I wound my way through the dark rows, following the sound of her voice. When I found Cindy, she was hauling down bundled old issues of the magazine supplement in large plastic bins. They were labeled by year.

We sat on the cold, concrete floor, side by side, barely enough light to read by.

Still, we quickly found the article the database had referred us to. It was an expos‚ titled “What Really Happened to the Hope Street Five.”

According to the writer, the local police had fabricated the whole crime scene to get rid of the insurgents. They had been tipped off by an unnamed CI. It was a massacre, not an arrest. Supposedly the victims were sleeping in their beds.

A lot of the article was focused on the white victim in the raid, Billy Danko. The FBI had claimed he was a Weatherman and tied him to a bombing at a regional office of Raytheon, a manufacturer of weapons. The article in the Chronicle con-tradicted 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.