Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (2 page)

 

Chapter 3

T
HE WAVES ARE
gently lapping against the body lying on the banks of Roe Island in Suisun Bay. It's not the first time a dead body has been found near the entrance to the Delta, a waterway that stretches inland near Sacramento. Giant spotlights shine down on the sandy bank, covered in driftwood and seaweed. As darkness falls, shadows grow longer and anyone outside the circle of light is hard to see. I stand in the dark with a cluster of other reporters gathered on this tiny island, watching and waiting, shifting from foot to foot.

My stomach growls as I think about the leftover linguine with lobster sauce dinner waiting for me at home. I'm still uneasy about how I reacted at Ocean Beach. Aren't mothers supposed to have superhuman strength when their kids are in danger? My greatest fear is something bad happening to my daughter. But today, when I thought she was in danger, instead of springing to her rescue, I was frozen with fear. Another thing to bring up with my therapist next week. I've been seeing Marsha for seven years. I've made progress, but I'm still dealing with my sister's death and the knowledge that I've killed two men. The deaths were ruled self-­defense. But in the darkest of night, my conscience whispers that no matter how it's dressed up, I'm a killer.

Now that I'm a mom, I wonder what this means for my daughter. How am I supposed to teach her right and wrong without sounding like a Class A hypocrite? What happens when she is old enough to find out what I have done?

Tonight, on this tiny island, I push down those worries and shift from Italian Mama into crime reporter mode. I'm peering through binoculars as I stand way back from the crime-­scene tape. The dead woman has long blond hair. She seems thin in soggy jeans and a dirty white fisherman's sweater. One shoe is still on, a white Converse tennis shoe. She's sopping wet, but she's not bloated and discolored like a floater. If she'd been in the water, it hadn't been for long.

Donovan is crouched beside her, eyes narrowed.

“Wish they'd turn her over so I could see her face,” the cameraman from Channel 5 says beside me. He hoists his heavy camera onto his shoulder for a second and then decides to put it back on its heavy-­duty tripod.

“Not me,” I say.

I ended up hitching a ride to the island with the Channel 5 news crew in a boat they rented. Donovan was escorted front and center in the sheriff's launch that ferried all the cops to the island, a half mile offshore. He waved and winked as I sat on the dock with the rest of the media. I was not amused.

I called my close friend and favorite photographer at our paper, Chris Lopez, on the drive in, but he was shooting a Giants game and said not to wait for him. He'd figure out his own ride onto the island.

Now, all the reporters huddle behind the crime-­scene tape, trying to warm our cold hands while we wait for some official to come talk to us. All the TV camera guys have jockeyed for pole position and are lined up in a row facing the sandy bank.

I absentmindedly adjust my press pass, on a lanyard around my neck, identifies me as a reporter with the
Bay Herald
. In the distance, the fog parts, revealing the massive shapes of several dozen ships anchored in the middle of the water. They stand sentry against the remaining traces of light on the horizon. I point my binoculars toward the fleet.

Nicknamed both the “Phantom Fleet” and the “Mothball Fleet,” the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet is a ship graveyard that is home to dozens of U.S. Navy warships that are decommissioned or inactive and some old merchant ships, probably about seventy-­five altogether.

A shiver trips down my spine as I look at the looming carcasses of once-­great warships. I'm sure they must all be haunted by the souls of all the dead sailors who once lived there.

“Ever gone out there, Giovanni?” the cameraman asks, seeing where I'm looking.

“What? How?”

“They did a media tour back in 1990 for some big anniversary of one of the ships. Got to see inside. Trippy. Some of the cabins still have books and beds, perfectly preserved from the 1970s. It was like a ghost ship. I could almost hear eerie music filtering around and the cannons blasting.”

I knew it.

“Must've been before my time at the paper,” I say, returning my gaze to the beach behind the crime-­scene tape. “Wish I would've been able to go.”

He readjusts the tripod his heavy camera rests on and fiddles with some cables as he talks. “You could launch a rubber dinghy at the slough in between Coast Guard patrols. They are usually every half hour. See the station over there? They are supposed to guard the ship against squatters. You have to pull your boat up on the ship or you're busted.”

“You did that?”

He chuckles and adjusts the focus on the camera lens he has pointing toward the dead body on the beach. “Nah, not me. I'm not that dumb. But I grew up in Benicia. This was our backyard. A kid I knew snuck onboard in high school. Claimed it was a cool place to party. There used to be more than three hundred ships here then, so it was easier to get away with. Plus it was before nine-­eleven. There was only one old beat-­up patrol boat, and the dude was probably drunk half the time anyway. You've got to go a few rows in, though, or they could see you from the Coast Guard station.”

I study the dead woman's body through my binoculars again. I can't figure it out. She's not bloated and gruesome-­looking like a drowning. She looks like she's resting from a swim. How did she wash up on this forgotten little island?

“Who found her?” I ask. A fisherman, most likely, since the channel nearby is a popular fishing spot. But even then, what were the odds someone spotted her on this shore?

“Tipster,” the cameraman says.

I'm glad I decided to stand near this guy. He's obviously got some good insider information from a source. Crime scenes can be like happy hours. While reporters wait for an official to give us details, we gossip about off-­the-­record info we've heard. But never with the competing newspaper, only with the TV ­people, and never anything that is truly a scoop. I eye Andy Black, from the
San Francisco Tribune
. It looks like he's trying to charm information from the well-­endowed Channel 4 reporter. Like always, he looks like a hair-­and-­makeup crew on a movie set just finished touching him up. Guess that's what you look like when you work for the biggest paper in town. I cringe thinking I ever found his preppy good looks attractive.

“What else did you hear?” I ask.

“Doesn't your cop husband give you the skinny?” the cameraman asks, squinting at me sideways.

“He's not my husband.” I'm glad the dark hides the heat flaring across my cheeks.

“Well, then your baby daddy or whatever you call him?”

I'm opening my mouth to answer when the crowd clears and Rosarito Police Sergeant Beverly Anne Fazio heads our way in her navy blue police uniform, her sleek auburn bob ruffled by the wind. She sees me and offers a quick smile before growing serious and professional.

All the reporters stop talking and cluster around her. She stands so the orange skies of the Martinez refineries lit up in the dark are behind her, puffy clouds of refinery smoke billowing out at regular intervals.

“At eighteen hundred hours we received word that a body had been found at Preston Point on Roe Island,” she says. “The Coast Guard and Solano County sheriff's water patrol units deployed boats to investigate. Upon arriving, officers found the deceased body of a woman in her twenties. The medical examiner's office will confirm identity and determine cause of death.”

The island is in Solano County, but it still doesn't explain why Rosarito PD and Donovan, aka
my baby daddy,
were called out. I'm grumbling inside about the cameraman calling him that.

I know I'm extra sensitive because my entire Italian-­American family is mortified I had a child out of wedlock, but I'm not getting married simply because they want me to. We keep talking about tying the knot, but who has time? With Donovan's schedule as a murder cop and my erratic schedule as a crime reporter, lately we're lucky if we're able to do what we did tonight—­have a few hours with just the three of us together. Who says we need a piece of paper to prove it anyway? Oh yeah—­according to my family, that would be the pope.

As soon as Beverly Anne finishes speaking, several reporters shoot questions at her all at once.

“How long has she been dead?”

“Is there any sign she drowned?”

“Are you investigating it as a homicide?”

Beverly Anne holds up her hand. “Come on, guys, you know the drill. Just because we're on a deserted island doesn't mean you should forget your manners. Okay, Mary Jo, you first. You asked whether it's a homicide. Right now, we are investigating it as a suspicious death.”

More reporters throw questions out. Andy Black and I hang back, waiting, as we usually do, for the TV reporters to take a breath. I scoot as far away from him as possible.

At that moment, a small boat careens in near the shore where giant spotlights are set up to illuminate the crime scene. The cops use their hands to shield their eyes, squinting toward the noise. The boat's waves lap the shore, making the body bob where it rests at the edge of the water.

The cops scowl and shout at the boater. In the shadows of the boat, a figure holding a camera snaps off pictures. The engine on the small boat starts up again, and a familiar cackle drifts across the water. In the commotion, the press conference is forgotten. Who would have the balls to come in at the murder scene from the water? Lopez. He lives and breathes the crime beat. He's never without a small earbud headphone trailing down to the police scanner clipped to his belt.

Lopez was with me the night I hunted down and killed Jack Dean Johnson at the former Fort Ord military base after he kidnapped my niece. At the time I also thought he'd killed my sister.

As soon as everyone settles down, Beverly Anne turns back to us, and Black speaks up. He's so nonchalant that you wouldn't suspect what a lying snake he becomes just to get a story.

“Is it true that a tipster called in the body?” he asks.

Beverly Anne purses her red lips together for a second, thinking, and then decides it's okay to answer. “Yes.”

My turn. The question I've been waiting to ask.

She sees my hand.

“Gabriella?”

“Do you have any way of tracing calls that come into your tip line?”

“I'm not at liberty to release that information,” she says, shooting me a warning look. Beverly Anne and I have hung out at department picnics and are friends, but she's not going to play favorites. She's a real cop.

Plus, she's sharp. She knows my question was geared to find out if the tipster had called the Rosarito Police Department or a different cop shop. She just confirmed it. I've been wracking my brains trying to figure out why Donovan and the Rosarito Police Department are on this homicide if it's on some island in the Suisun Bay. Rosarito is around the peninsula from here. The closest Solano County city is Benicia. Both Benicia and Solano County investigators are here, but why is Rosarito involved?
Unless the tipster called their tip line
.

 

Chapter 4

A
FTER THE PRESS
conference ends, the TV crews hang around, waiting to go live on the ten o'clock news. I head for the east side of the island, waiting a few seconds until I see that Andy Black is deep in conversation with the Channel 4 reporter before I slip behind some brush. It won't take long for him to talk her into going back to his place. I know. I also know that he's ruthless and will sleep with anyone for a scoop.

Stickers and small branches tear at my bare legs as I tromp through the bushes. A small strip of beach lies between the shrubs and the water, so I make my way toward that, keeping to the sand bordering the water. The farther I get from the murder scene and the big spotlights, the darker it gets and the louder the crickets become. I unearth my small flashlight from my bag. The island can't be that big. I figure I will round it and meet up with someone at the south side, where I can hitch a ride back to the dock.

To the west, the fog has rolled in, erasing the orange skies of the Martinez refineries and the looming ships of the Phantom Fleet like they never existed. I pick my way along the shore, not sure what I'm looking for. Maybe the woman's handbag or something else that belongs to her has washed up nearby.

My focus is on the wet sand near the shore, so when my flashlight reveals deep footprints embedded in the sand, I know they are fresh. There are two sets of prints, coming and going. I follow them back toward the crime scene until they dead-­end at a tall bank of tangled branches. What I see there makes me draw back.

Branches are broken in one spot, revealing a perfect glimpse of the detectives working on the crime scene more than thirty feet away. Someone was here. Watching. An icy chill races down my spine. I look behind me but see nothing. The fog has crept onto the island now and is making its way toward me. Without thinking, I shine my flashlight down on the receding footprints and follow them. I'm short of breath, and my heart is pounding when I round a corner and see something move.

In the fog, about ten feet away, a figure in a thick jacket and baseball cap pushes a small rubber boat away from the shore. His hat is pulled low over his face so I can't see his features. Before he leaps into the boat, the man turns, his arm swooping in a big arc as he tosses something onto the shore behind him. Then the fog swallows him and the boat into its midst.

My shout brings Donovan and several other cops running. It takes them nearly a minute to get to me since they have to take the same path I did inland and around the big thorny brush near the shore.

“A man took off in a boat right here. He threw this at me,” I say when they finally arrive, pointing to the sand. “He was watching you guys through the bushes.”

I spend the next ten minutes telling Donovan's partner, Finn, what I saw. Finn, balding, soft-­spoken, and as tall and thin as a poplar, takes careful notes.

As soon as I'm done, the media is booted off the island. The TV reporters grumble. The entire island is now considered a crime scene. I watch as they bag the small white plastic square he threw at me. I don't say that I saw what it was. Before the police responded to my shout, I shined my light on it and memorized what it said.

All the journalists are crammed on one boat this time. The cops aren't messing around. They want us gone yesterday.

Somehow, Black worms his way over to where I sit in the small boat, trying not to get motion sick as the boat lurches and bucks in the waves.

“Nice going, Giovanni, ruined the live shot for the TV folks,” Black says with a smirk. “What'd you see out there anyway?”

I shake my head and look away, glad the wind blows my hair across my face so he won't see me flushing red with anger and embarrassment. Black got the best of me once a long time ago. Never again.

The man in the boat had thrown a college ID from the University of California, Santa Cruz onto the sand. Agnes Clark. Twenty-­two years old. Although I have no way of knowing for sure, my gut tells me it belongs to the dead woman on the beach. In the ID photo, the woman's blond hair is sleek, her smile brilliant, her eyes twinkling with mischief. With life. A friend. Daughter. Maybe sister. Dead now. The figure on the boat had wanted me to see it—­had thrown it right at me. But why?