The Burning

Chapter 20

Pleasant Valley State Prison lies off Interstate 5 in the Central Valley. The drive from the East Bay takes two and a half to three hours. My mother made it often, pressuring me to accompany her and occasionally succeeding.

Luke was always grateful to see me, but our conversations went nowhere. He had no life to speak of and I shared little of mine. Soon I stopped going altogether. Only as his sentence began drawing to a close did remorse rear up. On my final visit I brought Amy along. Our second date.

I thought about that as I left the hospital and set out for my meeting with Assistant Warden Gluck. How clumsy of me to ask her. How generous of her to accept.

I joined a caravan of big rigs shuttling along the spine of the state, through limitless tracts of dark fertile soil birthing avocados, almonds, citrus, garlic, grapes; crook-backed farmworkers in caps and facecloths, one hundred seventy miles of mounting dread.

I never made it.

I GOT AS far as Gilroy. The sky had eased to a matte brown and the temperature had rebounded forty degrees. At the 152 cloverleaf my fuel light came on. I exited for the first gas station. While I dipped my credit card, Evelyn Girgis called. She and James Okafor had pulled the security footage from outside Bay Area Therapetutics HQ.

“I need to warn you, the quality’s not great.”

“I’ll take whatever I can get. Thank you so much.”

I started the pump and headed into the convenience store to escape the heat, holing up by the refrigerator case.

The clip was about three and a half minutes long, time- and date-stamped the morning of May 11. There was no sound, and her caveat had led me to expect something grainy and stilted, but the image was vivid and in full color, bowed at the edges by a fish-eye lens. I saw the sidewalk in front of the building, the street, the storefronts opposite.

At 07:42:21 my brother arrived and swiped in.

At 07:42:58 a white single-cab truck nosed into the upper right corner of the frame and parked across the street. Glare bleached the interior. The angle rendered the tag illegible and made it impossible to tell if the bed had a tonneau cover.

At 07:43:40, Luke reemerged, having forgotten his lunch. He stopped short and stared briefly at the truck before walking offscreen to the left. The driver’s-side window went down and then a shape leaned into the open window frame, aiming a small object. A cameraphone.

I hit PAUSE.

Shadow split the man’s face. He was wearing dark glasses. Zooming in scrubbed away his features. But I could tell that he was white.

With a beard.

I studied the screen for a few minutes but could not identify him. I pressed PLAY.

At 7:44:51, the man in the truck retracted his arm.

Fifteen seconds later Luke returned carrying an insulated bag, his expression tense. He went inside.

I waited for the truck to drive away.

It didn’t.

The truck’s passenger door opened.

A second man got out.

He let a car go past, then stepped haltingly off the curb. The fish-eye caused him to distend monstrously, so that he seemed to be forcing his way through the tissue of time and space.

He took a step toward the building.

White. Clean-shaven. And young; there was an ungainliness in his carriage, a body gotten too big, too fast; a ship with no one at the helm. His thighs were like grain sacks. If he had more growing to do, his full size would be terrifying.

He took another step.

I hunched closer to the screen, as if I could meet him halfway.

The driver’s arm shot out and began waving to get his attention. The clean-shaven man stopped and turned to look at the driver. The driver pointed to the building, and then they both stared toward the security camera.

They’d spotted it.

The clean-shaven man backed away. He stepped onto the curb and got into the truck.

The driver put his window up.

At 07:46:08, they drove off. The clip ended.

I watched it twice, three times, six. Slowing the playback, pausing, rewinding, trying frame by frame to squeeze out a good look at the tag, at either man, a tickle forming at the back of my brain.

The second man. The one without a beard.

I’d seen him. Some version of him.

My teeth ground.

The memory was there, I couldn’t retrieve it.

“Mister? You okay?”

The convenience store clerk eyed me from behind Plexi. I’d been standing in the same spot, by the energy drinks, for half an hour. I was going to be late for Assistant Warden Gluck.

I texted my gratitude to Evelyn Girgis and James Okafor and jogged to my car.

My phone rang as I was merging onto the freeway. The caller was a Berkeley cop named Nate Schickman, another former collaborator.

“Hey,” I said. “I’m on the road. Can I call you a little later?”

“Where are you?”

“Gilroy.”

“Shit. How soon can you get back here?”

He sounded nothing like his regular, equable self.

“Where’s here?”

“Highland Hospital,” he said. “Somebody shot Billy Watts.”

Ninety minutes later I pulled into the hospital lot.

I knew as much as Schickman had told me over the phone. That morning, around seven thirty, Billy Watts left the house to go to work. His wife, Rashida, was in the kitchen, cutting fruit for the boys’ lunches. Through the window she saw Billy pause by his car to fiddle with his cell.

He looked up abruptly.

A series of loud claps and he crumpled on the sidewalk.

I ran for the ER. The automatic doors parted on babel, children pawing at infected ears and groaning men massaging their hairy breasts while on the television Judge Judy dispensed tough love.

I received multiple sets of wrong instructions before finding my way to a swampy third-floor conference room crowded with people, all but one of them cops. The table had been scooted against the wall and loaded with cheap sustenance: oily pink bakery boxes and boxed coffee. The chief of Berkeley police was on hand, attended by several Berkeley uniforms and Nate Schickman in a black BPD polo shirt. Oakland PD occupied a circle of their own. The crime had occurred on their territory, outside Billy Watts’s house, a meticulously restored Craftsman east of Dimond Park.

Billy and I weren’t close friends, but we liked each other, and our families occasionally socialized. Rashida was a dietitian. Their younger son was around Charlotte’s age. They’d bought their house in a state of disrepair and done much of the work themselves. The first time they had us over for dinner, Billy showed me built-ins he and Rashida had refinished by hand, rooms they’d repainted together, tomatoes run riot in their garden.

I saw her now, in the corner of the conference room. Willowy, with high cheekbones and beaded cornrows. Bloody sweatpants and bloody sneakers. She was folded over in a faded gray chair, her face a silvery map of grief, one of three people forming a bubble of privacy. The other two were a white male detective I didn’t know and a Black female detective I did.

Delilah Nwodo was an ace I’d worked with, friend to both Billy and me. She was talking in hushed tones, holding Rashida’s hands while Rashida rocked silently.

Schickman detached from the Berkeley group to greet me.

“You look like shit,” he murmured.

I asked for an update.

He skated a hand over his crew cut. “Still in surgery.”

Rashida let out a low keen.

Nwodo rubbed her back, acknowledging me with a shallow nod.

I thanked Schickman and went to get coffee. Another thing he’d told me over the phone was that Delilah Nwodo had examined Billy Watts’s cellphone and noted our failed attempts to communicate since Monday morning. At the moment of the shooting, Watts had been keying my name into his contacts. She wanted to ask me about it.

I wanted to talk to her, too. I’d spent the ninety minutes from Gilroy assembling my own theory about Billy Watts and the case that had brought us together.

A buried infant, a blanket full of bones.

“Thanks for getting here so quickly,” Nwodo said.

“Thanks for calling me.”

We’d stepped into the hall to talk. The other detective introduced himself as Ryan Hanlon and offered a grinding handshake.

“Who’s taking care of the boys?” I asked.

“Grandma,” Hanlon said.

“Rashida ran outside when she heard the shots,” Nwodo said. “They followed her out and saw him bleeding on the lawn.”

“Fuck,” I said. “Anyone get a look at the shooter?”

“Not a good one.”

“There was a driver, too, but she didn’t see him at all,” Hanlon said.

“Wild guess,” I said. “White pickup truck, single cab. Tonneau cover over the bed.”

Hanlon stared. He was a young guy, pug-nosed, with pale cheeks lit up by rosacea.

Nwodo folded her arms. “Go ahead.”

I left a lot out. Told them about Luke going missing and showed the footage from his work, but said nothing about Rory Vandervelde’s murder, the Camaro, the gun in a gas station restroom.

Hanlon frowned. “I don’t see what it’s got to do with Watts.”

“A while back, Delilah, you remember we dug up a body in People’s Park.”

“The baby,” Nwodo said.

“That’s the one. The DNA came back a paternal match to this neo-Nazi, Fritz Dormer, doing a life bid up in San Quentin. He refused to cover burial costs, so I found his sons. There’s three of them, also white power types, living on a compound way out in the middle of nowhere. Wives, kids, dogs, everyone piled into trailers. I go to them, ‘This individual is your biological brother, no one else is gonna give him a proper burial.’ They showed me out at gunpoint. Next thing I know, a brick with a swastika on it comes through my window.”

She nodded. “Billy told me he was looking into it for you.”

“He did. He paid them a visit and put them on notice.”

“That doesn’t seem like a reason to shoot him,” Hanlon said.

“Maybe not to you, but these people aren’t normal. Daddy’s in for a hate crime. He beat a Black man to death for smoking on the sidewalk. A Black cop comes onto their turf and dresses them down? I think that’s plenty of reason.”

Hanlon chewed his cheek. “When was this?”

“Two years, give or take.”

“They’re acting up now?”

“Hang on, there’s more. I had several run-ins with them after that. Fast-forward a few months. A couple of the brothers get into an argument, and one of them, Dale, ends up shooting the other, Gunnar. Our office gets the call about the body. I know the location, so I volunteer to take it. Gunnar was a big guy, two fifty, two sixty. Dale used a shotgun on him at close range. It’s a horror show. My partner and I had to squeegee him into the bag. I look over, and one of the kids is standing in the doorway to the trailer, watching us with a look on his face.”

I moved the video slider to show the clean-shaven man’s face. “That’s him. The kid.”

“Hold up,” Hanlon said. “I’m not following you. Who are we talking about?”

“One of the Dormer brothers’ sons. Gunnar’s, probably, from the size of him. He was sixteen or seventeen back then. So we’re talking eighteen, nineteen, twenty now.”

“You’re positive,” Nwodo said.

“I couldn’t place him at first, because he’s grown up, a lot. It clicked when Schickman told me about Billy.”

“Who’s the second guy?” Nwodo said. “The driver.”

“The kid has an identical twin.”

A smile played around Hanlon’s mouth. “Like The Shining.”

Nwodo stayed poker-faced. “You believe they blame you and Billy for what happened to their father.”

“It’s how they’ve been raised,” I said. “Rage and blame, making some other group of people responsible for all the shit in your life. On top of that, they’re young males, angry, isolated. Their dad’s dead, their uncle killed him.”

“Two brothers,” Nwodo said.

“Right. Exactly. Me and Luke. Eye for an eye. It’s how you think at that age, everything’s symbolic. Look, even at the time, something about this kid felt wrong. He’s watching me mop up his father’s guts and he’s got on this crazy, fucked-up grin. I thought he might try to kill me right then and there.”

“He didn’t,” Hanlon said.

“He will. They will. They’re orchestrating something.”

“Orchestrating,” he said, as if learning a new word.

“Luke’s been gone since Sunday,” Nwodo said. “That’s four days they’ve had to move on you. Why wait? Why wait to shoot Billy?”

“Maybe they got held up, or they haven’t had the opportunity. Whatever it is, I think Billy knew something was up. You saw yourself how many times he’s called me.”

“Is there another reason he might’ve been trying to get in touch with you?”

“I can’t think of one.”

Nwodo nodded thoughtfully. “I want to show Rashida the video.”

She took my phone into the conference room.

Hanlon arched his back. “Cool story, bro.”

“It’s more than that, it’s true.”

“Mm.”

“The truck’s the same.”

“It’s a white truck.”

I did not respond.

Monitors beeped, high-pressure toilets bellowed.

Nwodo returned. “It might be the guy she saw. She’s not sure. She’s upset, I’m not going to make her keep watching it.”

She gave back my phone. “If Billy knew he was being followed, he didn’t tell her. I asked Schickman, the rest of the Berkeley guys, too. Nobody heard a word about it.”

No surprise. Luke hadn’t told Andrea. I hadn’t told Amy.

All three of us practicing the same soothing self-deception.

It’d turn out to be nothing.

No call for panic.

“You haven’t noticed anyone following you, either,” Nwodo said.

“No. I haven’t been looking, though.”

Hanlon smirked and took out his cell.

“Okay,” Nwodo said. “Let’s start by gathering some intel on the Dormers.”

“Lieutenant.” Hanlon’s hand dropped to his side. The screen showed Instagram. “Really?”

“Call the uniforms,” she said to him. “Find out what they picked up on canvass.”

With a glance at me, he walked off.

“Thank you,” I said to Nwodo.

“Don’t thank me yet. Nothing’s happening till I have more information. That pans out, I’ll drive out there and see what’s up.”

“Fine. Great. I need to go home first and get my gear. I can meet you—”

“Uh-uh,” she said. “If I go — that’s if — you’re not coming.”

“Delilah—”

“You’ve done your part. I’ll take it from here.”

“I’ve been there, I know the layout.”

“Clay. Forget it. It’s out of the question.”

“These fuckers are dangerous. You can’t just roll up on them. You need a tac team.”

“More reason for you to stay away. They really are that dangerous, I don’t want you going home, either. Find someplace to camp out.”

“And do what?”

“Get yourself safe and stay that way.”

She was right. I was an interested party, running on fumes, a liability to myself and others.

I said, “At least let me draw you a map.”

She handed me her notebook.

“The entrance is hard to see,” I said, sketching. “There’s a barbed-wire fence. Look for a double post. That’s the gate. Six trailers, half a mile back from the road.”

She looked it over. “This is good. Thank you. Now go find a place to crash.”

“Can I talk to Rashida?”

“Depends on what you’re going to say.”

“I just want to give her some support.”

“Fine, but no questions. She’s been through enough.”

I started into the conference room. Nwodo touched me on the arm. Her gaze, usually sharp, was warm, searching, sisterly. “When was the last time you got some sleep?”

“I’ll get some now.”

“Will you?”

“I got nothing else to do.”

“I want to believe you,” she said. “But I’ve known you too long.”

I heard myself making a weird sound, felt my lips crack. I realized I was laughing.

Rashida Watts fell against me. Her shirt was stiff with dried blood. I could feel her heart through her ribs. “It’s nice of you to come.”

“I’m so sorry, Rashida.”

“Thank you.” She released me. “How’s Amy?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“Send her my love, will you? And Charlotte? How’s she doing? She’s so smart.”

“Great.”

“We need to get everyone together.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeves. “We need to do that soon.”