Mission Road Page 0,46

Soledad Bridge.

No mistakes, this time.

The pretty lady would never feel a thing.

MAIA STEPPED OVER A PILE OF shattered beer bottles and worked her way toward the back of the garage.

Stuff was piled everywhere - dusty baskets of women's clothing, plastic Seventies furniture, makeup kits and ammunition boxes.

In front of a grimy window overlooking the river, a worktable was spread with photo albums and scrapbooks - the only things not covered in dust.

Maia picked up a yellow legal pad scrawled with notes. She recognized the handwriting, the same shaky script as on the note Mike Flume had given her.

For some reason, in the not-too-distant past, the old fry cook had been making a timeline of Lucia DeLeon's life. He'd arranged Lucia's scrapbooks in chronological order, even marked certain pages with Pig Stand receipts.

First stop: A South San High School yearbook from 1964. Senior "Most Likely to Succeed" Lucia DeLeon looked uncomfortable in her bouffant hairdo, black dress and pearl necklace. Despite the requisite Sixties uniform, something decidedly rebellious flickered in her eyes - a challenge. Maia imagined the men back then would've picked her out of the crowd. They would've felt intrigued or threatened. Probably both.

The next album, Ana's baby book, started only two years later. Mike Flume had noted this, too, on his legal pad: Ana born - 1966.

He'd bookmarked a photo of Lucia in her hospital bed. The new mother looked exhausted, sweaty, blue around the eyes as if she'd just been pummeled in the delivery room. An elderly couple, probably Lucia's parents, were holding the infant.

Standard childhood pictures followed: Ana with pureed yams on her face, Ana using Barbie dolls as drumsticks on her high chair tray. Ana with her first birthday cake. A family barbecue. The elderly couple again, looking frailer, holding toddler Ana up to a Christmas tree.

No pictures of Ana's father.

Maia could figure out that missing piece easily enough.

Unexpected pregnancy. The boyfriend cuts and runs. Catholic family. Abortion not an option.

Lucia's parents would've helped raise the child while Lucia completed her education, pursuing her dream of becoming a cop.

Maia looked out the filthy window at a clouded moonrise over the Pioneer Flour Mill.

What right did she have to turn coward?

She was older than Lucia DeLeon had been. Maia had money and a good career. She lived in a time when there was virtually no stigma for single mothers. Even if Tres took the news in the worst possible way, even if she told him her secret fear . . .

The memory rose up unbidden - the pale crippled body of a ten-year-old boy laid on a makeshift funeral bier, draped in the family's only white sheet. In his dead hands, a rare photograph of Maia's mother, dead since Maia's birth eight years ago. As Maia's father wept, her uncle - her only other living relative - pulled her aside. He smelled like incense and fish from the market stalls.

You'll live with me now, girl, he told her. Your father will come for you soon.

Maia never saw her father again. A month after the funeral, he refused an order from the Red Guard and was taken away for reeducation. It took her decades to realize her father had done this on purpose, as a form of suicide.

She pushed those images away, opened another album from Lucia DeLeon's life.

In this one, the time intervals between photos were longer.

There was a picture of Ana DeLeon as a young Air Force cadet, giving her mom an enthusiastic hug. Another picture at a policemen's picnic - off-duty officers clowning around for the camera, Lucia holding a pork rib like a gun to Etch Hernandez's head.

The last few pages were a montage of clippings from Lucia's police career. She'd saved both the good and the bad.

1968: A patronizing editorial about Lucia's graduating class at the academy - the first to include women trained alongside the men. The headline: Cops in Pantyhose? A photo showed Lucia and five fellow female grads, all wearing skirted matron's uniforms, looking like grim airline stewardesses.

Seven years later, a news article described Lucia's award for the medal of bravery. She'd confronted a coked-up ex-bouncer who had clobbered two officers unconscious at the Pig Stand and was holding a third officer hostage at gunpoint. Lucia drew the bouncer's attention, got him to aim his gun at her, then shot him. Her use of deadly force had been cleared by the review board. She became an instant celebrity.

1987: A brief mention of Hernandez and DeLeon as the officers who