Marriage records confirmed that Susyn’s maiden name was Davis. Birth records gave me Susyn’s place of birth, a small town in northern California, and her parents’ names. That led me to siblings, including one named James and one named Alan. Interesting. DMV told me what kind of car she drove and gave her Sacramento address. Checking back through previous addresses, I found the same one her ex-husband still maintained. James Davis drove a BMW and also had an address in Garberville. I checked a map. It was five blocks from Susyn’s ex-husband’s house. Alan Davis drove a Jeep Cherokee and lived in Redway, a little town just outside Garberville.

I put in a call to Ed Wilkes. He was staying in a guest room at the Cabral house with its own phone extension. I caught him getting ready for bed.

“Ed, did Interpol run a check of fingerprints on Jim Davis with the FBI?”

“Yeah, didn’t I tell you?”

“No.”

“There was nothing special in his criminal record. A DUI, a couple of arrests for possession of marijuana, and a number of unsuccessful tries at catching him for pot growing. Just your typical back woods cowboy growing a little weed in his back yard.”

“Address?”

He gave me the same address in Garberville, and I told him about my findings.

“Now isn’t that interesting? A family business of some sort? I wonder what?”

“I’m beginning to get a picture.”

“Me, too. I’ll run Alan Davis by the bureau tomorrow. Call me if you get anything else, but wait till morning, OK?”

How does the old song go? You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind – and you don’t go hiking in Mendicino county in October. Not if you value your life. You just might stumble into someone’s pot plantation at harvest time and get your head blown off. Marijuana is California’s biggest cash crop, and most of the back-to-the-land hippies of the seventies that got the ball rolling have been run out by others who have no aversion to violence.

Maybe. And maybe the Davis clan all live in Garberville for the scenery. But that wasn’t likely. It would be good to see if they had any land there, outside the town. It might be rented under informal agreements or they might be squatting on government land, but if they owned land it would be in the records.

It took a while, but when the printout came through I had a list of seventeen properties owned by Alice Johnson, Susyn Johnson, Alice Davis, Susyn Davis, Jim Davis, Alan Davis, and William Johnson. There were no Fletchers. Apparently that was just an alias. None were owned by Adrian Brock or any reasonably close variation on that name. I got out a map of Mendicino county.The properties were all small. The largest was ten acres. They were scattered all over the county and all were well away from centers of populations, and well away from main roads.

Interesting, indeed. more tomorrow