3rd Degree

Chapter 85

An hour later I was stabbing at Cindy’s front doorbell. Two-thirty in the morning. I heard the locks turn, and the door slowly cracked open. Cindy was staring at me in a long Niners shirt, bleary-eyed. I had probably woken her out of her best sleep in three days.

“This better be good,” she said as she flipped the lock.

“It’s good, Cindy.” I shoved the old Examiner article in front of her face. “I think I found out how Jill’s co

Fifteen minutes later we were bouncing along the darkened, empty streets of the city in my Explorer, down to the Chronicle’s office on Fifth and Mission.

“I didn’t even know Jill’s father worked out here,” Cindy said, then yawned.

“He started here, out of law school, before he moved back to Texas. Right after Jill was born.”

We got to her cubicle at about three A.M. The lights in the newsroom were dimmed, a couple of young stringers ma

“Overnight efficiency audit,” Cindy said to them, straight-faced. “You guys just failed.”

She wheeled herself in front of her screen and fired up the computer. She plugged a few search words into the Chronicle’s database: Robert Meyer. BNA. Then she slapped the ENTER key.

Several matches popped up on the screen right away. We plowed through a lot of unrelated articles of antiwar and BNA activity in the sixties. Then we found something.

PROSECUTOR NAMED IN DEADLY BNA RAID CASE.

A series of articles from September 1970.

We scrolled back from there, and bingo! FEDS, POLICE RAID BNA STRONGHOLD. FOUR DEAD IN SHOOTOUT.

It was in the days of the sixties radicals. Constant protests over the war, SDS riots on Sproul Plaza in Berkeley. We scrolled through several articles. The BNA had robbed a few banks and then a Brink’s truck. A guard, a hostage, and two cops were killed in the robbery. Two BNA members were on the FBI’s list of Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.

We scrolled through whatever the Chronicle had on file. A BNA hideout was raided the night of December 6, 1969. The Feds had surrounded a house on a quiet street in Berkeley based on a tip from a CI. They came in, guns blazing.

Five radicals in the house were killed. Among the dead were Fred Whitehouse, a leader of the group, and two women.

There was one white kid shot dead in the raid, a student at Berkeley. From an upper-middle-class background near Sacramento. Family and friends insisted he didn’t even know how to fire a gun. Just an idealistic kid caught up protesting an immoral war.

No one would say what he was doing in the house.

William “Billy” Danko was his name.

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 misconduct. 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 u

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 contradicted most of the FBI’s facts about Danko, who did seem to be an i

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 gu

“You see it, Cindy?” I looked at her in the thi

The name that Billy Danko had chosen for himself was August Spies.

Jill had shown us the way.

Chapter 87

The lights were blazing in Molinari’s office—the only lights on in the Hall at six A.M.

He was on the phone when I went in. His face brightened into what I took as a worn smile, pleased but exhausted. No one was getting any sleep these days.

“I was just trying to assure the chief of staff,” he said, signing off the phone and smiling, “that we weren’t the security equal out here of, say, Chechnya—with larger bridges. Tell me you have something, anything.”

I pushed across the yellowed, folded article I had found in Jill’s study.

Molinari picked up the article, PROSECUTOR NAMED IN BNA BOMBING CASE. He sca

“What was it you called them, Joe? Radicals from the sixties who you said are still out there, who never surfaced?”

“White rabbits?” he said.

“What if it wasn’t political? What if there was something else motivating them? Or maybe it’s partly political, but there’s something else?”

“Motivating what, Lindsay?”

I pushed across the last article, the Sunday magazine supplement, folded to the part about Billy Danko’s code name, circled in bright red: August Spies.

“To get back in the game. To commit these murders. Maybe to get some kind of revenge. I don’t know everything yet. There’s something here, though.”

For the next few minutes I briefed Molinari on everything that we had—right up to the prosecutor Robert Meyer, Jill’s father.

Molinari blinked glassily. He looked at me as if I might be crazy. And it sounded crazy. Whatever I had was flying in the face of the investigation, the pronouncements of the killers, the wisdom of every law-enforcement agency in the country.

“Just where do you want to go with this, Lindsay?” Molinari finally asked.

“We’ve got to find out whatever we can about the people in that house. I’d start with Billy Danko. His family was from Sacramento. The FBI has files on what happened, right? Department of Justice, whatever it is. I need to know everything the Feds know.”