Courage Stolen Page 14

  “Yeah, don’t get shot.”

  “Any ideas better than that?”

  “Keep trying Trujillo.”

  I glanced at my cell phone on the bar.

  “You want another beer?” Rubia asked.

  “No thanks.”

  “You’re taking up some good bar space not drinking.”

  “I’ll give you a big tip to make up for it.”

  “For real, you’ve been here over an hour, and that’s your first beer. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, I just may need to go to work.” I held up the phone. I’d been watching the GPS app showing Forrester to be at his home in Rescue, where’d he’d been since returning from Granderson after noon. The fact Forrester appeared to be planning to blow up Nimbus Dam was troubling enough. Just as troubling was its implication regarding the Monarch extortion. Would someone who’d recently hatched a successful twenty-million-dollar scheme want to risk a terrorist attack within a couple of days? That seemed unlikely to me, further obfuscating who might be the culprit.

  Not finding the money, or any connection to it at Forrester’s house, also bothered me. After I finished searching his house, I’d scoured his property looking for a storage shed or some other place he could have hidden the money and found nothing. If the money was stored offsite, he might lead me to it, thanks to the GPS.

  Thirty minutes later, the crowd thinned. I finished the last of my beer, took a final look at my cell, and stuffed it in my pocket. Before I stepped off the barstool to leave, my phone vibrated in my pocket, signaling either a text message or movement on my GPS tracker. Sure enough, my phone showed Riley Forrester was leaving his house.

  “Hey,” I said to Rubia. “You want to kill an hour with me?”

  She was drying glasses and restacking them on a shelf at the back of the bar. She took a quick look around the room, shrugged her shoulders, and said why not. She asked Kenny to cover the bar for the next couple of hours, and then we were out the door and in my car.

  “Where we going?” she asked as I turned left off Broadway onto the ramp and merged onto Highway 50.

  “Not sure.” I handed her my phone. “Follow the little red dot for me, and tell me where it’s heading.”

  She took the phone and scanned the screen. “Who’s the red dot?”

  “Guy’s name is Riley Forrester. He’s a sociology professor at Granderson.” I proceeded to tell her everything I knew about him, up to and including the map and photos of Nimbus Dam and the three bundles of dynamite I’d found in his home earlier in the day.

  “That’s some serious shit, professor. Think he’s heading there now? To the dam?”

  “You tell me.”

  She looked back at the screen. “He might be.”

  “Then that’s where we’re going, too.” We were a little farther away from Nimbus Dam than Forrester, but he’d be driving country roads while we could eat up most of the distance by freeway. Traffic was light, so I bumped my speed to about seventy-five in hopes I might be able to beat Forrester to the dam.

  “Shouldn’t you call the cops?” Rubia asked.

  “I called the FBI this morning. Told them about Forrester, the dynamite, the drawings of the dam, and that he might be the Stone Creek Saviors.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Not much. They listened and said they’d look into it. But I didn’t get the sense they were going to drop everything and arrest him.”

  “Hell, probably have about nine miles of red tape before they’d do that.”

  I nodded. “Didn’t help I called anonymously from a pay phone.”

  “What’s a pay phone?”

  “I found one on Florin Road. Even more surprising, it actually worked.”

  “Why’d you call anonymously?”

  “For one thing, I’d have to explain how I happened to be inside Forrester’s house.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Then, they’d want to interview me. My association with Granderson would come up and open the Monarch can of worms. I don’t want to go there.”

  “Should you call the cops now?”

  “Let’s wait and see if Forrester is going to the dam and if he’s planning something tonight. If so, we call them.” I held out some hope Forrester might be going to the money, where we could get the drop on him and get it all back.

  I exited the freeway at Hazel and turned right on Gold Country Boulevard, the street leading to the parking lot for the Sacramento State University Aquatics Center. As we drove past the south end of the dam, I noticed a tall fence topped with razor wire protected it from entry. I assumed it would be as difficult to access from the north end of the dam as well. A sliver of moon bounced a tiny bit of light off the reservoir’s smooth surface. The dam stretched maybe three football fields in length, separating the reservoir from the American River, which sat about fifteen feet below the top of the dam.

  I counted fifteen cars in the parking lot, a high number given the hour. Across the lot, light shone through the windows of the second story of the large boathouse. In addition to being a recreational facility for students who wanted to rent kayaks or other self-propelled watercraft, Lake Natoma Reservoir was the home course and training center for the Sac State men and women’s rowing teams. I figured the cars belonged to team members who were attending a meeting or training in the boathouse. I was glad to see them so my car wouldn’t stand out in what could have been an empty lot.

  “Where’s Forrester now?”

  Rubia enlarged the GPS screen so she could see more detail. “Should be here any second now.”

  We watched the road leading into the parking lot, anticipating headlights.

  “Wait a sec,” she said. “He turned off. At the road before Gold Country.”

  We got out of the car and walked a couple hundred feet past the boathouse, where a finger of water separated us from what appeared to be another parking lot. Unlike ours, the lot across the water was empty. A few seconds later, a car entered and parked in a spot near the water.

  “That’s him,” Rubia said, pointing at the GPS screen.

  I got out my binoculars. I hadn’t noticed any mounting on Forrester’s car earlier in the day, but he now had a kayak strapped to its top. He wore black clothing. As he unstrapped the vessel, a second figure—also in black—exited the passenger side of the car and helped.

  Once they rolled the kayak from the roof, the two of them jogged with it towards the water, Forrester in front, the second figure in back. Their movements were so synchronized and efficient, I suspected they’d done this before. Neither of them wore a backpack or carried any other objects I could see.

  “You thinking of calling the cops?”

  “No. I think it’s a practice run,” I said. “I don’t see any signs of the explosives. If I call the police now, the most it would do is scare them off. Then they’d come back again. Let’s just see what they’re up to.”

  A few seconds later, the kayak glided across the water, the slice of moon providing enough light for us to observe their progress. The kayak headed northwest towards the far end of the dam, where the hydroelectric generating equipment had been built. I’d done a little research on the dam earlier in the day, learning it was part of the Central Valley Project, built by the federal government in 1955 for flood control, electrical generation, and recreation in the lake created by the dam. When the water from the lake passed through two turbines within the dam, generating power, it plunged into the American River, which flowed through Sacramento and merged with the Sacramento River. I doubted blowing up the Nimbus Dam would flood Sacramento, but it would cause considerable havoc and be a significant coup for the Stone Creek Saviors.

  “What’s your big plan now, professor?”

  “We have time to get closer to them. Let’s walk down the bike trail over to their parking lot and hide closer to Forrester’s car.”

  We walked around the other side of the boathouse and found the bike trail. Once we reached the parking l
ot, we went to the water’s edge. From there I could see the two men as they reached the dam. A few seconds later, a flashlight beam lit the inside of one of the cave-like water inlets underneath the electrical transmission tower at the far end of the wide dam.

  “My guess is they’re confirming where to put the dynamite,” I said.

  “When d’you think they’ll do it for real? With the dynamite?”

  I looked up at the moon and asked Rubia to hand me my phone. Within a minute, I had learned the next day would be a new moon, a night when it wouldn’t be visible from earth, the darkest night of the month.

  “They’re going to do it tomorrow,” I said.

  “What you going to do about that?”

  “I’ve got to stop them. Just not sure how yet.”

  We moved behind a stand of trees and thick underbrush no more than fifteen feet from Forrester’s car. It was peaceful out there in the dark by the lake, a nice contrast to all I’d been through the previous few days. The night was refreshingly cool, the kind of evening where your cheeks turned red and your soul felt invigorated. Before I let myself get too transcendental, I reminded myself we were observing two probable felons practicing their plan to blow up federal property.

  “Have you found out anything more about the Golden Dragons?” I asked.

  “Still waiting on my guy in LA.”

  “Ask him if he knows anything more about this Wu Wing guy who owns the Camaro. And his sidekick, Bo. He was younger and smaller.”

  “Still can’t believe you Training Day’d those two.”

  “Yeah.” I held up a hand to quiet her. “Hold on, I see them at the shoreline.”

  It had taken a long time for them to complete their reconnaissance and row back towards their car. Returning to shore, the two men were as efficient as they’d been during their departure from car to dam, jogging in unison with the boat between them. Without a word, they placed the kayak upside down on top of the car and secured it. I could make out Forrester’s face framed with a black beanie and turtleneck. The other man’s back was to me.

  “What’s your watch say?” the man asked.

  “Twenty-two minutes,” Forrester said.

  “That’s good, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Seth, it is. Let’s go.”

  Moments later they got in the car and drove off.

  Seth. Seth Seeger. The snotty student who’d turned his nose up at the beer I’d bought him. The president of Students Saving Our Planet, S-SOP. And now, it appeared, co-conspirator in a plot to blow up a dam.

  twenty-six

  First thing in the morning, I tried Benzer’s cell and office phones yet again. Then I drove to his apartment and office, finding both locked and dark. Either he’d gone to ground or the Golden Dragons had gotten to him. I left yet another voice message for Lieutenant Trujillo asking him if he had followed up on my initial call and paid a visit to my friends Wu and Bo. If not, Benzer might never be found, at least not alive. I’d not heard anything in the news about Sac PD arresting them or any updates on Chan’s murder. Everything pointed to the Asian gangsters as the killers. But something about Forrester still bugged me, the bloody “SCS” scrawled on Chan’s wall still vivid in my mind.

  Under threatening skies I parked two blocks off campus, keeping an eye out for Granderson security as I approached the school. At nine forty in the morning, I entered the Social Science Building, where Riley Forrester was teaching an “Introduction to Sociology” class. I peered in through the vertical sliver of window on a door at the back of the room. About thirty students filled about a third of a theatre-style lecture hall. Ten minutes remained in the class period, so I eased open the door and took a seat in the back.

  Forrester stood at a lectern maybe forty feet away. The seats sloped down from back to front, so the professor stood where the rest of the students and I looked down on him. If he noticed me, he gave no sign of it.

  “Marx belonged to a radical group of scholars known as the Hegelians, named after the philosopher George Hegel from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.” Forrester lectured without use of accompanying slides, glancing at his notes as he spoke. “Over time, Marx broke away from this dialectic philosophy and concluded alienation from society comes from material conditions, not from thought, as the Hegelians theorized. Marx advocated changing the conditions of society to reduce alienation by the populace. He predicted the revolutions by the working class that occurred in nineteenth century Europe.”

  At least five students had nodded off at this point of the lecture. Two others on the other side of the room were engaged in a hushed conversation.

  “His ideas were considered radical at the time, and he was forced to move from city to city all over Europe,” Forrester continued. “So you see, just as it is today, progressive thinkers are considered dangerous. They, and their ideas, are seen as radical, but in the end, it is radical thinkers—and more importantly, radical doers—who move society forward.”

  A young woman in the center of the lecture hall raised her hand, and Forrester pointed at her.

  “Are you saying the revolutionaries and terrorists are what make a society better?”

  “That’s precisely what I’m saying.”

  The statement caused a buzz in the room, even two of the sleeping students awoke and tuned in. “What if the aims of the terrorists are to tear down society?” a young man two rows in front of me asked.

  “Define ‘tear down,’” the professor said, making air quotes with his fingers.

  “To destroy property,” the student shot back. “To kill innocent people.”

  “I maintain there is no such thing as ‘innocent people.’” Again with the air quotes. “There are those who perpetuate the ills of society actively and those who do so passively by not paying attention to the evils their society promotes.”

  The student started to reply, then stopped himself and shook his head.

  “Any other questions?” Forrester asked, more of a challenge than a request for more inquiries. When no one raised a hand, he took off his glasses and looked around the classroom. “Next time, we’ll pick up with Marx and his view of capitalism. Make sure you read chapter nine before the next class.”

  I remained seated in the back as the students gathered their notebooks and stuck them into their backpacks. Several of them paused to check their cell phones for text messages. Two female students approached Forrester after class and engaged him in short conversations. When the second young woman finished her conversation with the professor, she walked up the aisle past me and out the back door.

  Forrester was stuffing his lecture notes into a briefcase. “May I ask what you’re doing here?” He didn’t bother to look up at me.

  “Learning about Karl Marx.”

  “Buy a book and read about him. This class is for students only. Not old farts like you.”

  “Old fart? I admit to being in the summer of my life. But an old fart? I’m insulted. Besides, I’m a former college professor myself. I’d think you could extend me at least a modicum of professional courtesy.” I gave him a sweet smile.

  He finished with his briefcase and strode up the aisle towards me, stopping as he reached the end of the row where I sat. He set his briefcase on a desktop, though he kept his hand on its handle.

  “Believe me,” he said, pointing a finger at me. “I am being courteous. You wouldn’t like what discourteous looks like.”

  “For a sociology professor you have a tough time relating to others. Maybe you should consider a new line of work. You were pretty good with that pitchfork the other day. A more agrarian line of work might suit you better.”

  “I asked you why you’re here.”

  “So you did.” I stood up from the desk and looked at him a few seconds before continuing. “I don’t even know where to start. But let’s try this. Tell me where you put the twenty million dollars you stole.”

  He looked at me impassively, unmoved by what I’d said. “Twenty million
. You think I’d be standing in a lecture hall at nine in the morning dispensing information to a bunch of over-privileged nineteen-year-olds if I had twenty million dollars?”

  “What about the psychic rewards of the profession?”

  “Psychic rewards. That’s good. No, really, what are you talking about? Twenty million dollars.”

  “I can see you’re not going to tell me anything about the money, so let’s move the conversation along.”

  “Let’s.”

  “I asked you about Thomas Chan last time, and you walked away. What I want to know is why an eco-terrorist group like the Stone Creek Saviors would want to kill a young business man.”

  “How the hell would I know?” Chan’s name brought no discernable reaction to Forrester’s demeanor.

  “You’re a scholar with considerable research interest in environmental activism. I would think you’d have some idea why the Saviors took credit for killing Chan.”

  “What makes you think they took credit for killing him?”

  It occurred to me the police hadn’t released details from the Chan murder scene, including the “SCS” written in blood on his wall. “Let’s say they did, for the sake of argument.”

  “It’s a ludicrous argument. I’m not going to speculate on something that’s patently untrue.”

  “Would it surprise you to know Chan told me he’d received threatening messages from someone saying they were the Saviors? They didn’t like him doing business with companies over in China because they’re among the biggest polluters on the planet.”

  “If he was doing business with the Chinese, then no, it wouldn’t surprise me an environmental group would be upset with him. Doesn’t mean they’d kill him.”

  I looked for signs of nerves as he spoke, anything that might reveal if he was lying or not. In my two encounters with the man, I’d become convinced he was a liar, a practiced and accomplished one. I wouldn’t be able to trip him up with wordplay or verbal bullying. As much as I disagreed with his ideology of violent methods justifying social ends, I had to say Forrester was a man steadfast in his beliefs.

  “You’d better not go through with your plan to blow up Nimbus Dam.”