Half Moon Bay: A Novel (Clay Edison Book 3)

The remaining leadership of the Defenders of the Park and the University of California issued a joint statement. They had agreed upon an expert to conduct the archaeological site survey: Professor Iliana Marquez Rosales, of the Department of Anthropology, University of Washington.

Getting to that point had required several rounds of heated negotiation.

The Defenders accused UC of stalling.

The UC replied that the Defenders bore responsibility for any delay, having rejected two qualified candidates on grounds of race and gender.

The Defenders replied that those concerns were far from irrelevant. An individual linked to the existing power structure could only perpetuate the overweening privilege that had enabled the theft of the land in the first place.

Judge Feeley stepped in, threatening to fine both parties unless they worked it out.

Professor Marquez Rosales it was, then. BA from UCLA. MA from Oxford. PhD from Harvard. A Rhodes Scholar. A Guggenheim Fellow. Fieldwork in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru. She’d published a monograph on the intergenerational effects of wide-scale violence, which felt apt, given the local mood.

In an interview with Berkeleyside, she shared that her team had begun amassing historical maps and documents referring to the park or its environs, collating these materials with modern aerial photography and US Geological Survey data. In order to work freely, she had asked UC and the Defenders to assist in clearing the area of debris and furniture. She expected the excavation to start in July and last three to four weeks, during which time park access would be restricted. It was critical to maintaining the integrity of her findings, even if it meant that, unfortunately, the Joan Baez tribute would have to be postponed.

Everyone went berserk.

Flyers appeared on telephone poles. The bulldozers were coming. This time they wouldn’t leave. The site survey was a sham—a Trojan horse to oust The People and undo the rebuilding process. The Defenders of the Park were a fifth column, holding ties not just to UC but to the larger system of oppression.

Meanwhile, citing a lack of jurisdiction, a federal court declined to rule on the injunction filed by Chloe Bellara’s breakaway group, the People’s Park Alliance. On her Instagram, Bellara uploaded an image of a lit Molotov cocktail. The post got three hundred likes and more than a thousand comments ranging from celebratory GIFs to death threats.

Two days later, in an astonishing coincidence, the UC Berkeley Subcommittee on Academic Standing suspended Bellara’s graduate student status for failure to complete required coursework.

New flyers appeared, calling for riots.

Notice went out to UCPD, BPD, and the Sheriff’s, placing active-duty personnel in a state of emergency readiness.

Billy Watts called me at work. “There’s something you need to see.”

—

FOR THE LAST month, he’d been looking into the knife attack that had taken place near the People’s Park bathrooms. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Holly Hayes, the on-again, off-again girlfriend of a forty-one-year-old parkie and small-time drug dealer named Malcolm Zane. For the most part Zane sold weed but he was also known to stock the occasional tab of Ecstasy or ketamine.

On the day of the stabbing, Zane and Hayes were hanging out, minding their own business. Hayes went inside to pee. Three men approached from the basketball courts, where they’d been removing rubble. They told Zane it was one thing to smoke, another to deal openly. Attracting the cops caused trouble for everyone. The future of the park hung in the balance. They demanded that Zane vacate the premises.

Zane had no intention of going anywhere. He’d been doing his thing, in peace, since the three of them were still shitting in their pants. Besides, wasn’t any cops around. Chill out.

One of the men, a twenty-four-year-old white elementary school teacher named Jeremy Darby, bent down and grabbed the sleeve of Zane’s jacket. Later Darby would state that he had done so in self-defense, in response to Zane reaching for his pocket and out of concern that Zane might be armed. Zane would state that he had made no such movement, and that Darby was for real trying to rob him, in broad fucking daylight.

A scuffle ensued. Zane escaped across Haste, where Darby caught up to him on the sidewalk, and, along with a second man, Oliver Ackermann (white, twenty-five years old, aspiring DJ), began removing Zane’s jacket to get at the drugs and/or weapons.

Holly Hayes came out of the bathroom. She ran at Darby and Ackermann, screaming at them to let Zane go. Before she could intervene, the third man caught her in a bear hug in the middle of the street. Hayes and the man struggled. She bit him on the shoulder, worked an arm free, and began clawing at the man’s eyes and mouth.

By now, the BPD patrol officer stationed at the corner of Bowditch and Dwight had been alerted to the disturbance and was rushing over the lumpy grass. He arrived in time to witness the unidentified man slash Holly Hayes with a knife, twice on the forearm and once more from chin to temple, a sinuous line traversing her left cheek. The man threw her to the ground and fled west on Haste, turning north on Telegraph, at which point the officer lost his visual. He elected not to pursue. He was too busy breaking up the fight between Zane and Darby and Ackermann while also attempting to tend to a shrieking, bloody Holly Hayes.

Jeremy Darby claimed that he did not know the identity of the third man. He’d never met the guy in his life before that day. He, Darby, wasn’t in charge. He’d come to the park in response to a tweet.

Oliver Ackermann refused to answer questions. His apparent lack of gainful employment did not prevent him from promptly retaining Palo Alto’s top criminal defense attorney.

The woman spearheading the cleanup effort at the court was named Lucinda Eagle Feather. It was she who had put out the call for volunteers. She told Billy Watts she wasn’t personally acquainted with everyone who showed up. She didn’t ask for names. All she cared about was whether they could lift chunks of concrete.

She adamantly denied sending the men over to confront Malcolm Zane.

Billy Watts assumed everyone was lying to him. But Darby and Ackermann were no longer talking, and neither were the rest of the volunteers. Watts had neither cause to arrest Lucinda Eagle Feather nor means to exert pressure on her. From Zane and Hayes he had obtained a cursory description of the suspect: white or Hispanic male, mid-twenties; medium build; brown hair. Jeans and work boots, black hoodie, gray T-shirt.

No knife, no CCTV footage, no DNA retrievable from the victim’s fingernails.

Holly Hayes received seventy-three stitches.

Billy Watts began trawling social media in search of people discussing the attack—the modern-day equivalent of a guy bragging at the bar, except that on the internet new bars opened and closed every ten seconds, and the patrons wore masks, and spoke in false voices, and turned to vapor the instant you struck up a conversation. Watts conceded it was a Hail Mary. He’d checked and rechecked the usual sites and had yet to make any headway.

“I did find that, though,” he said.

“That” was a link to a popular image board, just emailed by Watts. I clicked it open.

The image in question had been posted on April 3. It was slightly grainier than you’d expect from a cameraphone, suggesting a still lifted from a video.

I was its subject.

I had just reached down and hauled a gimpy Kelly Dormer to his feet, causing him to pitch forward and me to grab at his shirt. A subtle tilt of the camera created the impression that I was pulling him close, taking him into my arms like a wounded fellow soldier. My neck badge swung free. Kelly’s torn sleeve revealed the swastika inked on his shoulder. By chance or by design, the tattoo lay at the picture’s focal point, a lurid magnet to the eye.

His forehead rested on my shoulder. His lips were pursed.

As for me, I’d shifted to avoid a head-butt, displaying my own face in three-quarter profile. Eyes scrunched, because—if memory served—Kelly didn’t smell too great.

You could also interpret my expression as one of concern. You could, if you wanted, impute to our positioning something like intimacy: an air kiss gone wrong.

That’s what the internet had done.

The original poster had captioned the photo proof berkeley pd loves nazis.

A spirited discussion—in words, in memes—followed about what punishment I deserved for my embrace of hate, starting with job loss and growing more extreme.

Hitler’s head, Photoshopped onto my body.

My head, Photoshopped onto Hitler’s body.

Me, but with a neat little toothbrush mustache.

The most industrious individual had flipped me around and done some creative splicing, so that Kelly Dormer appeared to be penetrating me from behind. I had to applaud the attention to detail: the shading of my naked legs, the silvery line of drool swinging from Kelly’s puckered mouth.

“This is insane,” I said.

Watts said, “Keep reading.”

It was a lengthy thread. The photo had been up for weeks.

A post by user Shitlord5546 upped the ante.

somebody please dox this fascist pos

I scrolled on, my throat dry.

Four posts later, there it was.

My name. Amy’s name.

Our home address.

It’s hard, so hard, to hide these days.

Watts was talking. I couldn’t understand him. My head had filled up with steel wool, a numb effervescence spreading through my skull and scalp, out to the ends of each hair, down my spine and along my extremities. The squad room spun beneath the drill of fluorescents; from ten feet and a thousand miles away came the machine-gun stutter of Rex Jurow typing in his cubicle, Moffett’s suffering desk chair emitting a plaintive keen.

“Clay. You there?”

I said nothing.

“Take a couple of deep breaths,” Watts said. “Nice and slow…Good. That’s real good. Give me two more.”

My fingers throbbed around the phone. My collar lay cold and damp.

The poster was Anonymous.

They’d put our street address, but left off the unit number for the guest cottage.

Poor Maryanne.

“Clay.”

“I’m here.”

“Are you okay?”

“Not really.”

Watts didn’t know who Anonymous was or how they’d found me. Possibly they’d been in attendance the night of the community panel at Zellerbach, when I introduced myself to a capacity crowd. Clips from the meeting had been uploaded to various sites. Or it was someone I’d interacted with directly, such as Chloe Bellara.

He’d contacted the site moderators, asking them to remove the thread. He didn’t expect them to comply. Better I should have a lawyer write a letter.

“This is so fucked up,” I said.

“I’m sorry, but I’m going to say it to you again. Don’t do anything rash.”

“Do what? How can I do anything when I don’t know who they are?”

“I’m asking you not to turn up the temperature any. I’m not done with this, okay? I’ll keep looking, both for these motherfuckers and for the guy who cut the girl. Top of my list.”

While I appreciated Watts’s commitment, I knew—we both did—that it was a lost cause. No one had explicitly called for harm against me. Shitlord5546 had asked a question. Anonymous had delivered, putting the information out and letting human nature run its course. The chance of identifying either of them was remote. If by some miracle we did, they’d claim they were kidding. There for the lulz. Why so serious?

I kept scrolling. Someone else had doxed Kelly Dormer, listing the address of the brothers’ compound, naming all three, and linking to their podcast.

“Anyone throw a brick at them?”

“Their website was down as of last week,” Watts said.

“Silver lining,” I said.

I began aggressively scrolling back up, channeling my agitation into that tiny constricted movement. “The hell am I gonna tell my wife?”

“Do you have to tell her anything?” Watts said.

“It’s still up there.”

“Nobody’s added to the thread in a month. You’re old news.”

I came to the original photo. My badge, sparkling in the sun. The tattoo, like a beacon.

proof berkeley pd loves nazis

“What pisses me off is it’s so dishonest,” I said. “You know? It’s such a deliberate misread. I don’t even work for BPD.”

“It appears that their crack team of fact-checkers dropped the ball.”

“Nazis? How does that make any sense? Amy’s half-Jewish.”

Billy Watts roared with laughter.

“Lemme guess,” he said. “Some of your best friends are black.”