The Famous and the Dead

30



Ten minutes later Hood got a call from Janet Bly, with a sketchy report about a political shooting on the SDSU campus. Bly forwarded a bystander’s video to Hood’s phone. Hood peered at the chaos onscreen—screams and a rush of bodies, then two men fighting over a gun, with a third man down and bleeding. “Channel Ten should have it any minute,” said Bly. She sounded breathless. “That was a Love Thirty-two, wasn’t it?”

“I think so,” Hood heard himself say. Beth and Erin came in quietly from the living room, drawn by his tone of voice. The dogs looked at him alertly as he turned on the kitchen TV. They watched the special bulletin. Channel 10 had been covering the book fair for the six-thirty news, and doing a sidebar on Scott Freeman. What Hood saw took his breath away: a gunman spraying bullets at the representative and others. The Love 32 was easy to recognize, and when the gunman’s wig was ripped off in the fight, Hood recognized Lonnie Rovanna. His heart fell. Yorth called next, then Frank Soriana from San Diego, then the SAC in L.A., then Fredrick Lansing back in D.C., who thundered into the phone: “Was that one of your goddamned Love Thirty-twos?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The ones that got past you and disappeared in Mexico?”

“I can’t answer that yet.”

“Answer it! What the hell is going on out there with you goddamned people?”

Hood stayed by the TV with Beth and Erin. Freeman, he thought. Representative Scott Freeman. Dr. Walter Freeman, Finnegan, the Identical Men. He remembered Rovanna’s soft voice. My very deepest fear is of Dr. Freeman and his orbitoclasts.

Congressman Scott Freeman had been rushed to Sharp Medical Center with multiple gunshot wounds. He was alive, in critical condition. His wife, Patricia, had been wounded as well and was listed as serious. Freeman’s assistant, who wrestled the gunman to the stage and disarmed him, had also been shot, condition critical. Three others, all book fair attendees, had been hospitalized and were listed as stable.

“The suspect is a Caucasian male, five feet ten, one hundred seventy pounds, in his mid-twenties. He is currently in the custody of the San Diego Police . . .”

Hood walked outside into the cool Imperial County desert. The dogs bounded out ahead of him. He watched the cloud shadows move across the flanks of the Devil’s Claws and he wondered how Rovanna could have deceived him, how he could have missed the violence brewing inside the man. So much evidence: insanity, aloneness, delusions, violence, the bat, the confiscated guns. Hood had instinctively understood that Finnegan had given Rovanna something. He’d known it. He’d asked Rovanna more than once what Finnegan had offered him. Hood had thought that maybe it was only something for Rovanna to think about, something to be afraid of, or a task to do. Mike loved trading favors, tit for tat. It gave him control, a way into you. Now Hood realized that Mike had given him something much heavier. Something physical. And Rovanna had just used it on six innocent people at a book fair. Hood felt small and hapless and fooled. He had failed to listen to his own voice. He’d let it be smothered by his sympathy and sad affection for disturbed, delusional Lonnie Rovanna. “You should have listened,” he muttered. He called the dogs, and when he turned to go back inside, his phone rang again.

“Hood, this is Detective Rich Benson at San Diego PD. We met at Lonnie Rovanna’s home six days ago. That’s where I am now. We need to talk. It’s urgent.”

By the time Hood was halfway to El Cajon, Scott Freeman and his assistant had died. Patricia Freeman was stable and the three wounded bystanders were soon to be released. The suspect in custody was identified as Lonnie Dwight Rovanna.

• • •

San Diego PD had Rovanna’s house taped off and a half dozen uniformed patrolman stood in the driveway near the front porch. The mayor stood among them, arms crossed, nodding. More officers stood along the crime-scene tape that ran from the main house to the fence of the house next door, talking with the media crews and the neighbors. Hood badged a sergeant as a photographer shot him, then he stepped over the tape and walked beneath the towering sycamore tree.

Benson and the San Diego County district attorney, Lisa Alex, met Hood on the porch and escorted him inside. Hood stepped into the familiar room and saw the dusty piles of books and magazines, and the slouching plaid couch and the white chair and the low coffee table between them. A police videographer came down the hallway behind a camera and a wall of bright light and a still photographer patiently framed a shot of the plastic vodka bottle on the coffee table, then set loose the motor drive.

Benson led Hood down the short hallway and into the unused bedroom. DA Alex came in last and shut the door. Benson looked forty, freckled and red haired, with big shoulders and a paunch. Lisa Alex was tall and slender and sharp faced.

“Tell me what you know about Rovanna,” said Benson.

Hood told them about his web and social media search for Mike Finnegan, a man he suspected of being involved in illegal enterprises in both the United States and Mexico. Then about Finnegan’s surprise visit to Rovanna as Dr. Todd Stren. He told them about his own interview here in Rovanna’s home and the follow-up phone call he’d made later that night to the troubled young man. He told them what he’d found out about Rovanna’s mental health problems. He admitted that he’d seen the indicators for possible violence in Lonnie but had no legal way of detaining him.

“Tell us about that gun he used,” said Alex.

Hood told them about now-defunct Pace Arms of Orange County, the one thousand Love 32s smuggled south under ATF’s noses three years ago, then the discovery that some of the guns had been brought back into the United States and used in drug gang killings.

Lisa Alex and Rich Benson looked at each other. “Let me get this right,” said Benson. “Mike Finnegan—a bathroom-products wholesaler in L.A., who has no criminal or any other kind of record—is the connection between Rovanna, the guns, and ATF?”

“I think Finnegan gave Lonnie the gun he used.”

Again the detective and the DA exchanged looks. Benson looked long at Hood. “Rovanna told me he got it from you.”

Hood confronted their doubt with a slight shake of his head. “He hears voices. He’s delusional.”

“But you were here in his home just a few days ago,” said Lisa Alex. “And he said you two talked at some length about Iraq, and this Dr. Stren and Mike Finnegan, and he said you drank vodka.”

“Yes. He told me about the U.S. Army brigade that he never was a part of. And about the Identical Men who followed him, and the fake Jehovah’s Witnesses he attacked. I didn’t give him a gun. Don’t make me say that again.”

“Why would he say it?” asked Benson.

“Ask him,” said Hood.

“We did, and he said you have been badgering him since your days together in Iraq. That you have been inciting him to political violence for years. And, lately, specifically toward Scott Freeman.”

“He was never in Iraq. I only met Rovanna six days ago. But Lonnie was phobic about a Dr. Walter Freeman. Walter Freeman was the so-called father of the prefrontal lobotomy.”

Alex cleared her throat softly. “Mr. Hood, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Lonnie conflated the two men—the two Freemans. I didn’t stir him to violence. His terror of lobotomy did. Mike Finnegan did, and he supplied the instrument to carry it out. Lonnie thought Freeman was after him. He was fixated on the instruments and the procedure. Dr. Freeman’s first patient was named Alice Hood. So, somehow, Rovanna associated me with her. And her with Scott Freeman as Walter Freeman. So he claimed to be Scott Freeman’s protector, as a way of getting physically close to him. Delusion fed delusion. Rovanna heard voices, imagined people who were not real. I don’t think anyone knew how crazy he was. I didn’t.”

“Clear as mud,” said Lisa Alex, standing. “And unless the feds beat me to it I’m going to put Lonnie Rovanna on death row. If you supplied him that firearm, we may have a conspiracy and you may well join him on said row. If not, my office will depose you at some point and you may well find yourself on my witness list. All yours, Rich.”

Alex marched out, leaving the door open. “You’re a person of interest in this investigation,” said Benson. “You know the drill. Don’t leave California without notifying me.”