2024
“Thanks for meeting with me, Detective Fulton.”
“Retired detective, Ms. Silver, and I have to say you were pretty damn persistent. Could tell right away that you weren’t going to take no for an answer.”
It was a gorgeous fall day in Golden Gate Park. Bill Fulton, formerly of the San Francisco Police Department, sat across from her at a picnic table offering a view of a grassy green meadow beside beautifully cultivated trees and gardens. Dennis hovered nearby, listening attentively as he monitored the sound levels, while avoiding eye contact with Fulton. Cops made him nervous.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Melinda waited for Dennis to give her a go-ahead signal before launching into the interview proper. The recorder rested on the table between her and Fulton. “You were the officer in charge of the initial investigation into Gillian Taylor’s disappearance?”
“That’s correct. Spring of ’86.” Fulton was a stocky black man in his sixties or seventies, with just a fringe of snowy-white hair frosting the back of his head. Unlike Bob Briggs, he was dressed casually, in a neatly pressed polo shirt and khakis. He fished a small spiral notepad from a battered file folder he’d brought with him and consulted the notes to refresh his memory. “Initial report was filed by her coworkers a few days after her last known appearance.”
“At the Cetacean Institute in Sausalito?”
“Correct. A wellness check on her apartment found no signs of struggle, nor any evidence of a hasty departure. Her suitcases were still in the closet. No clothing or personal effects appeared missing. There were dirty dishes in the sink, leftovers in the fridge, clothes in the dryer, and an upcoming dentist appointment jotted down on a calendar. We even found her passport tucked away in a drawer.” He looked up from the pad. “On the bright side, there was no indication that she had harmed herself or intended to.”
“No suicide note?” Melinda prompted.
“And no body,” he said bluntly. “Judging from the state of the dirty dishes, she hadn’t been home for a few days. Mind you, she was a grown woman, so there was no real reason to be alarmed at first; it was entirely possible that she was simply staying with someone while blowing off work. We found her address book and worked our way through it, calling every listed contact and acquaintance, but… no luck. Nobody had heard from her since Tuesday, May 6, when she stormed away from the institute after her whales were let loose.”
Melinda’s ears perked up. “I don’t suppose you still have that address book?”
“Afraid not. That was a long time ago. It’s probably gathering dust in a police warehouse by now, if it wasn’t chucked out altogether sometime in the last thirty-eight years.”
“Figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.” Melinda made a mental note to possibly try to get her hands on that address book down the road, in hopes of getting in touch with any surviving members of Gillian’s social circle. “So, you checked out her apartment and…?”
“No real leads, until her vehicle turned up abandoned.” He swiveled to point out a nearby drive running past the field. “Right over there.”
Melinda scoped it out, visualizing a 1976 light-blue Chevy pickup sitting empty along the side of the road. “Tell me about that.”
“Not much to tell. An apparently abandoned vehicle got called in, somebody ran the plates and matched it to our missing-persons case. Again, no signs of violence; the door was unlocked and her purse was found under a seat, undisturbed. We found a few prints that didn’t match up to Gillian’s, but none of them were on file. There were no matches to any known perpetrators.” He looked away from the road. “You have to remember, young lady, it’s not as though we had computerized databases back then; it wasn’t as easy to do a nationwide search on fingerprints like they can do these days. Then again, even today there are still plenty of individuals whose prints aren’t on file with law enforcement. It’s possible that we couldn’t have made a match in ’86, even with today’s integrated computer searches.”
“But there was somebody in the truck with her at some point.”
“A couple of somebodies, but that’s no proof of foul play. She could have just picked up a couple of hitchhikers at some point or given some friends a lift.”
Melinda’s spirits sagged. So far this interview was turning out to be something of a bust. Sure, she could probably get some mileage out of the way Gillian’s apartment seemed to have been abandoned so abruptly, but that wasn’t enough of a twist to power an entire episode. Fulton was mostly just telling her what she already knew, while, at most, the discovery of the truck just hinted at a depressingly bleak conclusion to Gillian’s story. She hoped to God that Gillian hadn’t just fallen victim to some random mugging or assault in the park. That would be anticlimactic as well as tragic.
No body, she reminded herself. Let’s not automatically assume the worst.
“Nothing overtly suspicious? No smoking gun?”
“Nope, for better or for worse. Always mixed feelings there; you never want to find evidence of a violent crime, but you do need clues to get to the bottom of a case.” He paused to collect his thoughts. “There was one odd thing, though, that never made it into the press or the official reports, mostly because nobody knew what, if anything, it meant.”
He eyed the recorder between them. “Can we step away from the table, just for a few yards?”
Melinda looked at Dennis, who scrutinized their mics’ wireless connections. “Not too far,” he cautioned. “Don’t want to strain the transmission.”
“Not far at all,” Fulton promised. “Just want to show you something.”
He got up from the bench and led them over to an empty stretch of grass some yards away from where Gillian’s pickup had been found decades ago. He squinted at the lawn, as though comparing it against an old memory.
“Right here,” he said. “There was this deep depression in the lawn, like something extremely large and heavy had been sitting there, pressing down so hard that it left this big dent in the field, at least four to six inches deep. And get this, there was a flattened metal trash can lying in the middle of the depression, and when I say flattened, I mean flattened… like a pancake. As though it had been crushed beneath a hydraulic press.”
Melinda didn’t get where he was going with this. “What are you saying, that there was another vehicle parked here around the time Gillian vanished? Like a van or mobile home?”
“More like a jumbo-sized tank, except there were no tracks or tread marks leading to or from the depression, just this big sunken spot in the ground.” He swept his gaze over the now-level green swath. “Looks like the grounds have been restored since then, no surprise.”
“A helicopter?” Melinda speculated. “Going straight up and down?”
“Doubt it. I’ve seen police copters set down in all sorts of locations. Never seen one leave a footprint like that. If it was a copter, it was bigger and heavier than any I’ve ever run across.”
“Some kind of stealth aircraft?” Dennis blurted, overcoming his usual reticence around strangers. “Landing long enough to abduct Gillian and carry her up into the sky?”
That was an explanation, Melinda supposed, although it raised more questions than it answered. How would the pilot and passengers know where Gillian was? Did they track her to the park? And why the heck would anybody want to abduct her by air anyway? Unless she flew off with them voluntarily, leaving her life behind?
Watch it, she warned herself. You’re starting to think like Dennis.
“I don’t know. That seems like a stretch, no offense.” She got back to questioning Fulton. “So, if not a copter, what do you think left that impression?”
“Hell if I know. Assuming it had to anything to do with our missing woman at all.”
Melinda added this bewildering new tidbit of information to her mental case file. Perhaps an aeronautics expert could shed some light on this latest puzzle, or would that be just an extraneous detour at this point, given the somewhat circumstantial connection to Gillian’s disappearance? A few red herrings and false trails could add some twists to a narrative, but she didn’t want Cetacean to wander too far down what was likely a blind alley for fearing of losing focus and testing her audience’s patience. This early on in the investigation it was hard to tell what was truly relevant.
Something to consider, though.
At Dennis’s insistence, they returned to the picnic table to avoid any sound-quality issues. “Moving on,” she continued, “where did your investigation go after you found the truck? Any suspects? Person of interests?”
“No actual names surfaced, although we had a few vague leads that looked, if not promising, at least like they might be promising.”
“Such as?” she asked, praying for something juicy.
“You heard about the kook who went for a swim with Gillian’s whales the day before she went AWOL? Much to her distress, reportedly.”
“No!” This was news to her; she shot a look at Dennis to make sure they were getting this. “What happened?”
Fulton grinned, pleased by her reaction. He clearly enjoyed having surprised her.
“Seems there was a disturbance at the institute that day. Gillian was conducting a tour when one of the visitors decided to take a dip with the whales in that big outdoor tank of theirs.” He flipped through his notepad. “According to an eyewitness who came forward after Gillian’s disappearance hit the news, she was quite upset about what happened.”
“I’ll bet, given how protective she was of George and Gracie.”
Melinda wondered why Briggs hadn’t mentioned this to her. Perhaps his big blow-up with Gillian the next day, which was the last time he saw her, had eclipsed that previous incident in his memory. She resolved to send Briggs a follow-up query about it.
“You talk to the guy who jumped into the tank, after Gillian went missing?”
Fulton shook his head. “We never ID’d him. From the description, he sounded like some hippy-dippy freak, wearing a white bathrobe and headband. Maybe a cult member of some kind? Apparently no harm was done, however, except possibly to Gillian’s state of mind, and no charges were pressed at the time. The soggy perp was shown the door and, as far as we know, never returned. No way of knowing whether this incident had anything to do with Gillian vanishing the following day. Could be he was just a flake or pothead wanting to ‘commune’ with the whales.”
“The timing is provocative, though,” Melinda observed. “You said something about an eyewitness?”
“Just one. A nun, believe it or not.” He double-checked his notes. “Sister Mary Michelle, of the Sisters of Saint Francis in Monterey.”
Interesting, Melinda thought. Here’s hoping she’s still around and hasn’t taken a vow of silence or whatever.
“Anything else?”
He nodded. “A waiter at a local pizza place wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but thought he remembered serving Gillian the night before she disappeared. She was a regular, of sorts, so he recognized her photo when it showed up on the nightly news. He said she was having dinner with some guy, but they left abruptly at one point, taking their pizzas with them. He got the impression that something urgent had come up.”
“Like what?”
“No idea. Just our luck, he wasn’t a particularly nosy waiter. Hadn’t really been eavesdropping on them.”
Melinda took a moment to place this hitherto-unknown pizza date in the timeline, predisappearance. This would have been after the nameless “flake” took an unauthorized swim with George and Gracie, and the evening before Gillian discovered that her whales were gone and she fought with Briggs. So whatever had happened that night had not kept her from showing up at work the next morning to say goodbye to the whales.
“Who was the guy she was having dinner with?” A crazy notion crossed her mind. “Not the same dude who jumped into the tank, I presume?”
“Nah. Completely different description.” Fulton’s meticulous notes proved their worth again. “According to the waiter, Gillian’s date was a, quote, ‘good-looking’ Caucasian male, roughly forty to fifty years in age, with short, curly brown hair and wearing a red, possibly maroon, jacket.” Fulton looked at her. “No white robe or headband.”
The description of Gillian’s dinner date didn’t ring any bells with Melinda, based on their preliminary survey of Gillian’s social circle. He certainly didn’t sound like Briggs, who would have surely mentioned going out to dinner with Gillian the night before he last saw her. What’s more, he would have been busy orchestrating the whales’ after-hours relocation that night.
“Since you haven’t volunteered a name yet, I’m guessing you never ID’d Gillian’s mystery date either?”
“Correct. He never came forward after the story hit the news. Mind you, that could just mean he didn’t want to be involved, or was married and didn’t want his missus to know he was stepping out on her, or that he left town before she went missing and never found out about it, or any number of other explanations for not contacting us.” He let out a weary sigh. “You’d be surprised how many people simply don’t want to talk to the police.”
Imagine that, Melinda thought. “So, another dead end?”
“Pretty much.” A sly smile lifted his lips. “But would you possibly be interested in seeing an artist’s sketch of Gillian’s dinner companion?”
“Are you kidding? Hand it over, you big tease!”
Grinning a bit like Santa Claus pulling a surprise gift from his bag, Fulton fished the item from his file folder. Protected by a clear plastic sleeve, the Xeroxed sketch depicted a handsome, clean-shaven guy who certainly looked dateable enough. The anonymous sketch artist had captured a certain wry intelligence and charm in the man’s eyes and expression. He didn’t look like a potential kidnapper or serial killer, but who could tell really? Then again, Gillian had shown up at the institute the next morning, alive and well, expecting to say goodbye to her whales, so maybe the date was just a date?
“How come I’ve never seen this sketch before, in any of the news reports or SFPD press releases at the time? Wouldn’t you have wanted to make this public to see if anybody recognized him?”
Fulton’s smiled faded. He squirmed uncomfortably on the picnic bench.
“Well, the thing is, we had nothing on him besides the fact that he’d gone out for pizza with Gillian. Not really enough to suggest that he might have something to do with her disappearance. Not to the press, at least.”
Melinda didn’t buy it. “Then why bother having a sketch done? This guy was hanging out with Gillian the night before she vanished. He might be the only person to know where her head was at that evening, or where she went to after she lost her whales. And you didn’t go all out to find him?”
“I wanted to, but—” He caught himself before finishing the sentence.
“But what? What aren’t you telling me?”
A guilty vibe radiated from the ex-cop. Sensing that he wanted to tell her, she pressed harder. “Why are we even talking if you’re going to hold out on me?”
He gestured at the recorder. “Off the record.”
“I need audio for the show,” she protested. “The whole idea is to—”
“Off the record.” He unclipped his lapel mic.
She weighed her options. She hated the idea of not getting any new revelations on audio, but whatever Fulton wanted to tell her might point her in the right direction down the road. She nodded at Dennis, who grudgingly switched off the recorder. He lingered beside her, looking just as curious as she was to find out what Fulton had to say that was so hush-hush, although Dennis seemed more than a little apprehensive as well. Melinda hoped this wasn’t triggering his paranoia, but she’d deal with that later if she had to, after she got the scoop from Fulton.
“Okay.” She took off her own mic as a gesture of good faith. “Shoot.”
Fulton took a deep breath. “Truth is, we were ordered to drop the case. Word came down from the Feds that we were to stop investigating Gillian’s disappearance—in the interests of national security.”
Melinda’s jaw dropped. She hadn’t seen that coming at all.
“What the heck?” She’d trained herself to avoid profanity to avoid dropping an F-bomb on audio. “I don’t get it. What’s a missing marine biologist have to do with national security?”
“You tell me,” Fulton said. “Trust me, I wasn’t happy about it, raised a real fuss with my superiors, but it was no use. Folks way above my pay grade made that call and I had to live with it.” He nodded at the drawing of the Pizza Date guy. “Which is why we never went public with that sketch. The Powers That Be wanted the whole investigation shut down, period.”
“Oh crap.” Dennis went pale. Predictably, he looked more alarmed than intrigued by this bombshell. “That’s not good.”
Melinda felt exactly the opposite.
“So why are you telling me this now?” she asked Fulton.
“Guilty conscience, I suppose. I never felt good about how that all went down back then. Probably why I held on to this file all these years, even after I retired from the force.” He took a deep breath and released it. “Feels good to finally get it off my chest.”
“Even off the record?”
He nodded. “You’ll forgive me for not wanting to endanger my pension… or worse.”
“Worse?” Dennis’s voice went up an octave. “What do you mean by that?”
She shushed him. “Later,” she promised before turning back to Fulton. “I appreciate you trusting us with this.”
“Not sure I’m doing you a favor, to be honest.” He eyed her soberly, coming off as slightly guilty once more. “Look, you two seem like nice young people. Maybe you’d be better off leaving this alone?”
“No way.” If anything, she was more excited than ever about digging deeper into the case. “Sounds to me like we’re on to something big.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dennis said.