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.