3rd Degree (Women's Murder Club 3)

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 exposé 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 unnamed CI. It was a massacre, not an arrest. Supposedly the victims were sleeping in their beds.

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 innocent victim.

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 gunned down. Leon Mickens was Vlad—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Joanne Crow was Sasha, a woman who had blown herself up fighting the junta in Chile.

“You see it, Cindy?” I looked at her in the thinning light.

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 scanned it.

“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.