Act of Deceit

Chapter 9

D onnally sat in his truck parked along the Embarcadero and watched the last of his digital photos download onto his laptop computer. In the previous two weeks he’d photographed nearly every homeless black male in San Francisco. He’d started at Golden Gate Park, then the skid-row, hotel-lined Tenderloin, and finally now along the waterfront. He’d attached them to e-mails and sent them on to Katrisha. She always responded within a couple of hours, and always in two words: “Not him.”

He was starting to think it would’ve been simpler just to put out some dog food and start calling out, “Rover. Here, Rover.”

And it pissed him off that Blaine hadn’t put much effort into finding Brown, and had stopped returning his calls even sooner than Donnally had expected. The final one, spoken with the bureaucratic authority that Donnally had learned to despise when he was at SFPD, was abrupt:

“We’ve devoted all of the resources we can to this matter. It’s time to move on.”

Donnally had always wondered why careerists like Blaine were always ready to move on when it came to others’ suffering, but displayed the mechanical compulsiveness of psychotic hamsters when it came to their tennis forehand or their putting game. Perfecting those was worth a thousand frustrating weekends, while the Anna Keenans of the world weren’t worth even one.

Donnally watched a gray-suited man walk from the Ferry Building, stop at a sidewalk news rack, drop in a couple of quarters, and pull out a newspaper. His mouth formed into a predatory grin as he skimmed the business headlines, as though he’d discovered that he’d just profited from someone else’s loss. He then turned and headed up Market Street toward the financial district. A homeless woman stared up at him from the curb, her expression saying that she had lots of better uses for his change.

The escape of Charles Brown still hadn’t hit the papers, and Donnally was sure it wouldn’t because everyone had an interest in making sure it didn’t. The Alameda County district attorney’s halfhearted, failed effort was the perfect solution to the public relations problem that was Charles Brown. Why call attention to the crack in the criminal justice system that Brown and perhaps countless other murderers had slithered through?

And Donnally couldn’t go to the press, because he knew that even a rabid dog fears the cage, and Brown would go even further underground once his name hit the Chronicle or his face appeared on the local news.

Blaine’s “It’s time to move on” had told Donnally that he was now on his own.

But every attempt to find Brown had died in failure.

SFPD patrol officers had only shrugged their shoulders when Donnally stopped them on the street.

Detectives had leaned back in their desk chairs, offering war stories as substitutes for the information they didn’t have.

All anyone possessed were vague memories of someone who sort of looked like Brown who’d been around the park years ago.

Donnally stared out at the ferry dock, wondering whether Katrisha had been right. Maybe Brown was dead, his bones long scavenged by rats in a ravine up in Marin County or down the Peninsula, with nothing but a rusting shopping cart filled with recyclable cans and bottles marking the spot.

He heard a foghorn blow, then a red and white tugboat glided into view, guiding a container ship through the swirling mist toward the Port of Oakland and leaving a black plume of diesel exhaust in its wake. He could just make out the captain standing at the controls inside the upper bridge of the rusting craft and the yellow-slickered crewman poised at the bow.

Donnally then felt his mind sweep upward and he imagined himself looking down at a nautical chart of the bay with its contours of land, depths of water, edges of coastline, tidal currents, and sunken hazards: all the details needed for navigation, except for a marked route, much less an inland passage leading to whatever bush Charles Brown was living, or had died, under.

Turning the ignition, Donnally realized that the mental map was missing something else: his point of departure. He was already at sea and wasn’t sure where he’d started from. He didn’t even feel as if he’d pushed off from solid ground, rather he’d just found himself in motion. He couldn’t even say it had been the flesh and blood of Mauricio, for the truth of his crime had acted as a solvent, somehow dissolving him, leaving only a stain behind.

And he knew that’s exactly what Mauricio would’ve called it.

Donnally checked his side mirror and pulled into traffic, the acceleration feeling for a moment like a rush of relief, for it carried with it the realization that with the death of Anna, the stain that Mauricio left had been washed away into the nothingness of the past.

But only for a moment, for he felt the vertigo of a waxing and waning tide swaying him first forward toward an unknown shore and then backward toward the depths of his own motives.