Robert Meyer.
Jill’s father.
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 connected to the case.”
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 manning the overnight wires, caught playing video bridge.
“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.