Kill Signal, page 1
part #1 of Marko Bell Series
Kill Signal
Zoran Basich
For Marina, Luka and Domenic
Copyright © 2019 by Zoran Basich
All rights reserved
Chapter 1
Devil’s Slide, Half Moon Bay, California
SFPD Homicide Inspector Marko Bell cupped his hand over the phone to hear in the rowdy bar.
“Who is this again?”
“Sergeant Holly Gibbs. Half Moon Bay Police. We met a couple months ago at that conference?”
“Right, okay. What can I do for you?”
“A car went off the road at Devil’s Slide. Lincoln Town Car. It’s down on the rocks about two hundred feet down. We’ve got the rescue teams out here.”
Bell could barely hear her. He was three beers in at the Bus Stop in the Marin District with his partner, Walter Roark, who was tipping back his fourth bourbon neat and casting a skeptical eye toward Marko. Catching a case was the last thing they wanted.
“Why are you calling me?”
“Government plates,” Sgt. Gibbs said. “The vehicle is registered to the City and County of San Francisco. I just thought you should know. Courtesy call.”
Marko thanked her and hung up. He told Walter what Holly Gibbs said.
Walter laughed and gestured to the bartender for another. “Not my jurisdiction. You want another one?”
Marko weighed his options for the next few hours. He knew he wouldn’t sleep anytime soon. He imagined that ride down the coast, the view of the whitecaps in the moonlight. It reminded him of the Fourth of July two years ago. Almost to the day.
He downed the last of his beer and grabbed his keys. “I’m going to check it out.”
Walter swore, drained his bourbon and hustled after him.
It was after 2 a.m. by the time Marko was flashing his SFPD badge to the Half Moon Bay cop manning the perimeter of the crash scene and waiting for him to lift the police tape.
Fire Department cranes loomed over the cliff and lowered the men in harnesses. The rescue personnel, lit by the flashing strobe lights of a dozen police cruisers and emergency vehicles, stepped gingerly off the shoulder of Highway 1 and disappeared over the edge.
The fog blowing through the pass shone red and blue from cop strobes.
Marko flashed on the memory: He and Donna had gone to Half Moon Bay with sparklers and a bottle of wine and watched the sky light up.
“Waste of time,” Walter said.
“Give it a rest.”
Marko drove through the tape and ignored the quizzical stare of the Half Moon Bay officer, who wasn’t used to seeing S.F. homicide down this way.
Walter turned, mock-indignant. He had slicked-back hair and a widow’s peak that accentuated his long nose and bristly mustache. From certain angles, Marko thought, his partner looked like a seal.
“I can’t express an opinion?”
“I’ve been listening to your opinions for two years,” Marko said, pulling the car onto the shoulder. Both lanes were shut down and cars were starting to U-turn it back up Highway 1. This was going to take a while. “Sometimes you can have an opinion and keep it to yourself. Try it sometime.”
“Here’s an opinion,” Walter said, missing Marko’s point as usual. “We’re homicide inspectors, whose job is to investigate San Francisco homicides. Yet here we are, twenty miles outside of town, at the scene of a car accident. Which, when you think about it, doesn’t make a lot of sense. Especially at two in the goddamn morning.”
“Two-fifteen,” Marko said.
He maneuvered his car to a spot near the main hive of activity. The winding coastal road had guardrails along virtually its entire length, except for a 20-foot gap where the rescue team was doing its work. Maybe the state’s highway repair budget ran low and this was an okay spot to leave unguarded. It was a straight stretch of road.
The only way to go through the gap was to make a hard right, which was illogical.
A petite woman wearing a rain slicker with “Half Moon Bay PD” written in neon yellow letters waved and walked toward them.
“Inspector Bell,” she said. “Thanks for coming out.”
He met Holly Gibbs at a law enforcement convention a few months before and they had exchanged cards. She was full of questions about the SFPD. When she called with the news of the accident, it struck Marko as a gesture an ambitious cop would make. Finding a reason to follow up on a professional contact. Doing a favor that might pay off down the line.
There might have been something more personal there, too. He’d felt a vibe from her at the convention, saw her glancing at his wedding ring while they chatted. He had started to explain he was no longer married, then stopped himself. It was too heavy for small talk.
“Sergeant Gibbs, this is my partner, Walter Roark.”
“Congratulations, Sergeant,” Walter said. “Not often a cop gets to unload a case.”
“Hey, that’s not what I…”
“Ignore my partner,” Marko said, glaring at Walter. “He’s got a personality defect.” He turned to Gibbs. “How many in the car?”
“Just the driver. White male, in his forties by the looks of it. We haven’t gotten into the car. It’s wedged between rocks and partly submerged.”
“Any witnesses?”
“Twenty-two-year-old woman from Rockaway Beach, driving up to the city to meet friends,” Gibbs said. She was speaking briskly, happy to show off her work and to put Walter’s aggressive foray behind her. “She was over there,” she said, pointing across the pass to a stretch of winding road about 500 feet away. “She saw two cars driving side-by-side. Then one set of headlights goes over the cliff. The other one continues on and drives past her at a high rate of speed. Unfortunately, she didn’t get a good look at the car.”
“What’s your best guess?”
Holly Gibbs paused, as though in her collection of facts she hadn’t yet developed a working theory. “Maybe one guy getting impatient and wanting to pass the other guy. Other guy gets spooked and veers off the road.”
Marko looked across the pass. A single lane in each direction, one switchback after another, blind corners every few seconds. He tried to imagine a driver getting spooked by a reckless jerk roaring past him. Veering off sharply enough to go through the opening in the guardrail.
Marko couldn’t imagine it. Not even on a misty, wet night.
“Sounds like a fine hypothesis to me, Sergeant,” Walter said. “Case closed. Come on, Marko, let’s get out of here.”
Walter wanted no part of this. Complaining came as naturally as breathing to him, but there was something about this particular case, the Lincoln Town car and the rocks and the city registration, that was making him antsy.
Marko filed it away for later.
The heavy mist kept falling, nearly rain. Technicians and cops ambled back and forth among the vehicles, some of them drinking coffee from thermoses and chatting in groups of two and three. Marko knew any chance of analyzing tire treads in the dirt and gravel had been destroyed.
“Did the witness say it looked like that? One car passing the other and spooking the guy?”
Gibbs looked in her damp notebook. “I wasn’t even going to mention this, but she said it looked like the one car was, quote, maybe running the other one off the road or something, unquote.” She looked from Marko to Walter and paused, as though the shaky testimony of her witness had cast her own police work in a poor light in the eyes of the big-city cops. “But she wasn’t sure and it seemed kind of flimsy, to me anyway.”
“Any evidence of physical contact between the cars?”
“Nothing on the roadway. And judging by the damage to the vehicle down there, it might be tough.”
Gibbs’ radio crackled. “Got an I.D., Sergeant,” said the voice on the other end, the sound of surf coming in loud over the radio. “Roland Solorzano of Half Moon Bay. DOB December 10, 1960.”
Marko and Walter looked at each other.
“You know him?” Gibbs said.
Marko nodded. “He’s the personal driver for the mayor of San Francisco. He used to be a cop.”
“So that’s something,” Gibbs said. “Maybe I didn’t bring you all the way down here for nothing.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
Gibbs smiled.
Walter groaned.
“We can play it a few different ways,” Gibbs said. She’d quickly gotten used to ignoring Walter. “Probably not enough for a homicide investigation at this point. But I’d be happy to share any evidence we collect from the car.”
“I’d appreciate that. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to ask around. Talk to his family, at least.”
“Not our job, Marko,” Walter said, lighting a cigarette a few feet away.
“That sounds just fine,” Gibbs said. She looked at Marko’s left hand again, a quick involuntary glance. “Let me know if you need anything.”
She was pulled away for interviews with a couple of local newspaper reporters who had arrived on the scene.
“Glad you dragged me down here for some inter-departmental flirting,” Walter said, once she was far enough away.
“Shut up, Walter.”
“And by the way, two sets of headlights, my ass. Roland got drunk and veered off the cliff, end of story.”
It would have been a reasonable hypothesis had Marko not seen the straightness of that stretch of road and understood the sudden and aggressive action it would have required to leave it. Plus, Roland Solorzano was just a few miles from home, driving on a road he knew well. And he drove for a living.
It didn’t compute.
Walter knew all that, too. It bothered Marko that his partner wasn’t on the same page. But it no longer surprised him.
“You’re probably right,” Marko said. “But while we’re waiting for Toxicology to come back, we might as well talk to Roland’s family.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“You’re off the clock, Walter. You do you.”
“What, and miss watching you turn a single-car drunk driving fatality into a homicide investigation?”
“I’m not investigating anything.”
“Then what the hell are you doing?”
Marko was wired. He knew getting into bed would be no use. He’d toss and turn for a couple of hours and finally give up. For a long time he’d been surviving on an hour of sleep here and there, usually in his car in the dead spaces between tracking down witnesses or staking out a suspect’s apartment. Sleep offered no salve for Marko Bell, going on two years now.
“Just killing time, partner.”
“Great. Good for you. Meanwhile, I’m stuck without a ride back to the city.”
Marko pulled his keys out of his pocket and held them out. “I’ll get a ride from one of the locals. Take my car. See you in the morning.”
Walter stared at the keys, then stubbed out his cigarette in the gravel.
“You’ve lost your mind,” he said, shaking his head. “Let’s go.”
Marko got Roland Solorzano’s address from Holly Gibbs, who told him she’d notified Solorzano’s wife. The Solorzanos had two sons who’d moved out some years before, so she was alone now.
Marko and Walter got in the car and headed down Highway One, into the seaside village of Half Moon Bay.
Chapter 2
They parked outside a small one-story home three blocks from the highway in the wide flatlands between the ocean and Montara mountain. Lights were on in the house.
They got out of the car and Marko knocked on the aluminum screen door. He heard a sniffling sound get louder, until he saw a woman through the screen whose eyes were red from crying.
Marko pictured her getting a call in the middle of the night informing her that her husband was dead. He wondered what their last conversation had been like. After Donna died, he had played their final conversation over in his mind thousands of times, until a day came that he realized he wasn’t sure if he was remembering the conversation itself or memories of it. He wondered if Roland Solorzano’s wife would remember the last conversation she had with her husband before he pancaked on the rocks.
She poured them coffee without asking. Janice Solorzano was in her 40s and attractive, with short hair cut in a modern style. On the refrigerator Marko saw chipped magnets holding up photos of young boys wearing soccer and baseball uniforms, and more-recent pictures of grown men and their wives holding babies. Marko and Walter offered their condolences.
Marko said he knew it was a tough time but that they had a few questions. She nodded.
“Did your husband have anyone that might have wished to do him harm?” Marko asked. “Any enemies, people he was arguing with?”
“No. Nothing like that,” she said. “Roland was a good man.” She began to cry again.
“Did he have any gambling debts?”
“No, of course not,” she said, looking at him with a flash of anger behind her grief. “What are you suggesting?”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Solorzano,” Marko said. “We’ll try to get through this as quickly as possible. Were there any recent altercations your husband was involved in, with a neighbor maybe? Anything he told you about?”
“No. Nothing like that,” she said. “Did you say you were homicide inspectors? What does that mean? Why are you asking these questions?”
“Just routine. Did he ever get into altercations while driving?”
“Altercations?”
“Did he tend to flip people off in traffic? Get into road-rage situations?”
“No, Roland was very calm when he drove. He was a professional driver, you know. He drove Mayor Frank Flanagan, up in the city. That was his job, after he quit the force.”
“Yes, we know that. Did he mention any problems at work?”
Janice Solorzano began running her hands through her short blonde hair. Marko heard waves crashing down the street and smelled the dank saltiness of the ocean waft in through the kitchen window. It smelled like the Adriatic Sea, a pre-dawn coastal smell that he recognized from his youth.
Walter was getting up, ready to leave, ready to shut it down.
Janice Solorzano shook her head and stared down at the table. “It’s probably nothing. I mean, it’s ridiculous.”
Marko stared at Walter until he sat back down. He waited for Janice Solorzano to go on.
“I totally forgot until just now, when you asked about his job. He had been talking to some men. I didn’t like the idea but Roland was angry about his boss. He said people needed to know that the mayor wasn’t a good man. I don’t really want you to repeat that to anyone.”
“Which men had he been talking to?”
“I don’t know their names. Roland said one of them was a campaign manager, I think. And the other one … God, what was that term he used? A dirt digger? Can that be right? He said they wanted information about the mayor.”
“Do you know what kind of information Roland was giving them?”
“He didn’t want to say. I told him he should be careful.”
“Why was Roland angry at the mayor?”
“He thought Frank was out to fire him.”
“Why would Mayor Flanagan fire your husband?”
“Roland just had that feeling.”
They left Janice Solorzano alone and got back in the car. “Dirt on Flanagan,” Marko said to Walter. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Maurice Weathersby and Rafe Strauss,” Walter said, looking out the window.
Weathersby was an up-and-coming political consultant who was running the campaign of Frank Flanagan’s opponent in the mayor’s race. Strauss was an ex-cop in charge of opposition research for Maurice.
Which was a nice way of saying he was a political operative who turned over rocks looking for sleaze.
“Still think Roland just missed a turn?”
Walter’s voice dripped with scorn at the suggestion of foul play.
“Give me a break. Even if Roland was shoveling some dirt to a political hack, that’s par for the course. This town, that’s not enough to raise an eyebrow, let alone get someone killed.”
“Depends what the dirt is, I guess,” Marko said as he pulled onto Highway 1.
Marko knew Walter was right. Political betrayals were as common in San Francisco as the fog, and they didn’t usually lead to homicides. But crazy things happened. In the late ‘70s a nutjob walked into City Hall and murdered the mayor and a gay city supervisor because they squeezed him out of a $9,000-a-year job on the Board of Supervisors. Tensions ran hot, sometimes in ways that were hard to figure.
“What, you want to talk to Maurice now? This is ridiculous, Marko.”
“Yeah. I think I’ll talk to Maurice. You do whatever you want to do.”
Something in the way Marko gripped the steering wheel and spat out the words caused Walter to stare at him for an extra beat.
“You having those childhood flashbacks again?”
In a moment of bad judgement two years ago, Marko had confided in Walter, his then-new partner. He had needed a friend and thought Walter might be one. He regretted it now, hating how weak it made him seem to confess that sometimes the visions from Croatia in 1991 played like a loop in his head.
“They’re not flashbacks.”
“What are they then?”
“They’re none of your fucking business.”
A wall had formed between them. It started around the time of Donna’s murder, in the La Traviata cafe massacre in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood two years before. The killings became a scandal when it was revealed that a dirty cop was taking bribes from the Vietnamese gangster convicted of the crime.
There were rumors. Walter used to be partners with the dirty cop. Some conclusions were drawn. Maybe it was just cops talking to kill time. There was no actual evidence that Walter knew about it or could have prevented it.
