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Brady went over to Catton, asked him questions starting with “What is your name?”
Our prisoner had taken the right to remain silent to heart. He said, “Lawyer,” and then he didn’t say another word.
CHAPTER 93
BROOKS’S BOOKS WAS an active crime scene inside and out.
Spectators gathered across Gough Street asking questions, taking photos, getting in the way. A satellite truck arrived from one of the big three networks. Damn it. Local press showed up, too.
Inspectors Michaels and Wang drove Catton back to the Hall to be booked. At the same time, Catton’s gray sedan was on a flatbed truck speeding out to the crime lab. A CSI mobile edged through the crowd and set up on Gough. They snaked electric cords from the van to the store and set up klieg lights in both the main room and warehouse. Until San Francisco PG&E turned on the power, CSI would have no shortage of light.
The store was filled with police and crime scene techs who couldn’t work until other law enforcement cleared out. We couldn’t leave yet. I was overwhelmed by my own near-death experience and still focused on Cindy. I desperately wanted to find her alive.
Brady was senior officer and with his okay, Alvarez, Conklin, and I began pulling bookshelves away from the walls in a frantic hunt for an access point to the building next door or hidey hole where Catton could have stashed Cindy.
Lieutenant Chris Martin stood near me in the wreck of the former bookstore and spoke into his vest mic saying, “The hostage has not been located. We need Holmes and Crispo.”
Who?
A white van pulled up in front of the plate glass window at the front of the store. Martin opened the doors and we heard excited barking as two canines and their handler exited the van. Holmes and Crispo, both German Shepherds, were trained search and rescue dogs. They ran into the store, eyes bright, muzzles lowered, pulling along Sergeant Betsy Park. The handler for SWAT’s K-9 division was a white-haired woman in her sixties, wiry, strong. She gave sharp one-word commands and unclipped their leads. The K-9s immediately went to work sniffing out corners, cabinets, and cartons, before going into the warehouse.
Cappy arrived. He found Conklin and as requested, handed Rich a sky-blue cardigan that Cindy had left in his car. Rich handed it off to the canine handler, who called the dogs and gave them a good sniff of the sweater.
While the search and rescue dogs looked for a living, breathing person, I took a seat at the long service desk at the rear of the main floor and began to snoop.
If Catton had been bunking here or even just dropping by, he might well have left some artifacts for us. I opened the center drawer and aside from some pushpins and Post-it notes, it was empty. Next, I went to the left-hand pedestal ofthe old desk. There were two drawers of empty file folders and three-ring binders filled with book invoices. I opened the file drawer in the right-hand pedestal and found sandwich bags of men’s toiletries.
I opened the last drawer in the desk with low expectations, but there was one intriguing item in that last drawer. It was a leather-bound journal, a diary. The title was “Blackout. Last Night in Helmand Province,” by Bryan Catton.
I nervously flipped through pages of heavy-grade paper that had a handmade feel, scanning for names that I may have known. Finding none, I flipped the book open toward the end. If Catton had kept this journal up-to-date, there was a chance that he’d recorded what he’d done with Cindy.
But the journal didn’t end with Cindy. She wasn’t even mentioned. The date on the last entry was three years prior to Blackout’s appearance in our lives. A huge disappointment, yet, when I started to read the final pages of the journal, I couldn’t stop.
CHAPTER 94
IN THE DIARY, Catton wrote that he was in country, a door gunner inside a helicopter on an enemy suppression mission in Helmand Province.
The sky was hidden by dense cloud cover, what he thought of as a blackout. He was wearing a headset and night goggles, listening to the pilot when he saw muzzle flare coming from the ground below them. The situation went ballistic, he wrote.
I had to stop reading.
There was a loud commotion from Holmes and Crispo. I didn’t know which was which, but the one with the black muzzle and matching saddle was barking at me from my left side. The other was yelping at my feet, digging at the wooden floorboards under the chair behind the desk.
I stashed the journal in the drawer.
My mind was half in a helicopter in Afghanistan, half shrinking from two large K-9s who saw me as an obstacle. I like dogs, love them, but my supply of adrenaline was depleted and I didn’t know what to do.
I looked up when Betsy Park, the dog handler for SWAT’s K-9 division, called my name. She stood with me and two powerful sets of jaws.
“Sergeant Boxer. They’re harmless,” she said. “Stand up slowly and step away from the desk. And don’t bark at them.”
I laughed nervously and did as I was told. I met Conklin’s eyes, and when I was away from the desk, he grabbed my arm and pulled me to him. “You okay?”
“What just happened?”
“The sniffer dogs got a hit. You were sitting on it.”
I stood with him against empty bookshelves as uniformed officers moved the chair and then the desk, which wasn’t as heavy as it looked. There were wheels under the pedestals and Lieutenant Martin directed that the desk be pivoted on the left rear corner. Once the desk was moved, I saw something odd where the chair had been. It was a yard square of crosscut boards, a pair of inverted hinges, and a cut-out handhold opposite those hinges.
