If Angels Fall

by Rick Mofina

  If only he had spent more time with his children.

  No, he had been chosen. He was the enlightened one who would demonstrate God’s wonder. That was why he joined the university group. Not to obtain help, but to bestow it upon those in pain.

  Keller rocked.

  Maps, charts, diagrams, enlarged photographs, calendars, news clippings, and notes covered the living room walls from floor to ceiling. More papers, charts, maps, journals, and binders overflowing with notes were piled on the large computer table near the far wall.

  He focused on one picture--the fading snapshot of his three dead children: Pierce, Alisha, and Joshua. Laughing, wearing colorful cone-shaped hats, a half-eaten chocolate cake before them. It was Alisha’s sixth birthday. Three weeks before they drowned.

  They never found the bodies.

  Do not be deceived by their false identities.

  Remember the will of the Creator.

  The Will of the Creator.

  It shone in Reverend Theodore Keller’s eyes the night he watched his rural California church burn to the ground.

  “It is the will of the Creator, Edward,” his father said to him as the wood crackled and the flames devoured the cross atop the steeple. Edward was ten years old and took pleasure in his father’s tears. No one would ever know that it was Edward who set the fire by igniting Bibles in the pulpit, an act inspired by the whippings he endured at the hands of his father in the name of God.

  “Spare the rod and spoil the child!” the Reverend thundered after Edward committed sins as heinous as spilling his milk at the supper table, or failing to wash away a trace of dirt from his hands before inspection. “Edward, fetch the rod.” His father would command him to get the viperlike leather strap hanging from a nail inside the study near the painting of Golgotha. Edward would tremble. He had long ago forsaken pleading for mercy. Begging was a sign of weakness, a failing to be expunged with more lashes. “Honor thy father and thy mother!” his father would yell and Edward would dutifully drop his pants, exposing his buttocks. The Reverend would twist him over his knee, raise the strap high over his head, bringing it down so swiftly it hummed slicing through the air before thwacking across Edward’s scarred and tender flesh. The Reverend would grunt savagely, spittle flying from his mouth as he delivered each blow. Edward would bite down on a spoon to keep from screaming. His mother would hurry to another room and pray. It always ended with his father dropping a Bible on Edward’s bleeding rear end, ordering him to memorize another chapter by morning. Some days, he literally limped to school, his ears ringing with the thwack! thwack! of the strap.

  “You are but a lamb,” the Reverend bellowed the night before the fire. He was beating Edward for a crease he had found in his freshly made bed. “You are a burnt offering, a sacrifice I will not withhold from my God! I will not refuse to place you on the altar!”

  That night in bed, Edward writhed with fear and pain, reading the Bible. He was jolted with the realization that his father’s love for his church superseded everything. Even his son’s life. The crack of the strap and the Reverend’s words echoed in Edward’s mind. I will not refuse to place you on the altar!

  That’s when God first spoke to Edward. Cleanse your father of his piety. Save him with the fire of purification. The cracking of the strap. The crackling of the fire. Punishment for the son. Punishment for the father.

  “Whoever committed this desecration shall be damned all the days of his life.” Keller’s father fell to his knees, sobbing as his church burned, brightly, gloriously.

  Deliver us from evil. Edward grinned, flames painting his face.

  Keller rocked and remembered his children.

  He could hear them. Crying.

  Keller rocked. Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak. Was there time to see it again? Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

  Keller left the chair and lifted an ancient Kodak movie projector from the closet, setting it on the big table. He returned to the closet for a cardboard box of aluminum film canisters, rummaging through it until finding one marked: “Josh at Three.” He threaded the film, aimed the projector at the bare wall and started the movie. The dog watched, tilting his head.

  An intense white square burned on the wall, darkening and streaking as the leader flowed over the lens. A little boy’s face appears, slightly out of focus. The camera pulls back. The boy is sitting on the floor of an elegant home. The Golden Gate bridge is visible through a bay window. The boy is handsome, dressed in a white shirt, vest, bow tie, and dark pants. His face is fervent with expectation. Two older children, a boy and a girl, are next to him, smiling. The little boy sits before a large gift-wrapped package. The camera tightens on a card that reads “To Josh, Love, Daddy. P.S. Sorry I couldn’t be home. I’ll make it next time, PROMISE!” The camera retreats. A woman’s hand comes into view, motioning to the boy. He stands and excitedly tears away the paper to get at the treasure it hides. A flowing white mane emerges. Then a saddle. The boy’s eyes widen. It’s a white rocking horse. He leaps upon it and begins rocking. The other children touch it. Tears sting Keller’s eyes.

  That day in his home office. Josh toddled in while Keller was on the phone, closing some long-forgotten deal. Josh, arms open, Daddy, Daddy. I love my daddy. Grabbing at Keller while he was in the middle of crucial negotiations. Josh’s arms struggling to hug him. Not now. I am busy. Get out of my office. Josh’s arms struggling to hold him. Josh crying, his arms cold from the water. Hang on to Daddy. Josh slipping from his neck, vanishing into the black water. Get out of my office. You never gave yourself to them. They only wanted you. And it would have cost you nothing.

  But you paid with everything to learn that, didn’t you?

  The camera shakes, the picture blurs. The boy rocks and waves.

  Tears stream down Keller’s face. He cannot stop them.

  He reduces the projector’s speed to slow motion.

  Joshua, his youngest child, smiles at the camera. He is a good little boy. His hair has been neatly brushed by his mother. He blinks shyly. So vulnerable. Innocent. Frame by frame the camera clicks until Keller’s tears blur the picture.

  Suddenly Joshua steps from the wall!

  Keller’s jaw drops.

  A resplendent aura of ever-changing color emanates from his tiny figure as he stands in the brilliant light of the projector. The features of his face undulate ethereally, and Keller sniffs and squints as he tries to comprehend the apparition.

  “Joshua? Oh, Josh. It is you! You have come!”

  Keller slips from the rocking chair to his knees.

  “Praise Him! Praise Him!”

  Tears flow down his face. He opens his arms and inches closer to the child. It is a sign! A divine sign! His reward!

  “Praise God!” Keller’s voice breaks with joy.

  The film clicks faster, then slaps wildly in the take-up reel as the movie ends, trapping the squinting child in the fierce glare of the projector’s light.

  “I want to go home,” Danny Becker pleads weakly, his chin wrinkles, and he begins sobbing. “I want my mommy and daddy.”

  Keller stretches out his arms and tilts his head to heaven.

  “Praise Jesus. Praise Jesus! Praise Him and all the angels!”

  The cocker spaniel barks.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Four men with droopy eyes glowered at Sydowski and Turgeon from the computer screen. Each was a Caucasian in his late forties. Dark rumpled hair. They could have been brothers.

  “Best composites I could get.” Beth Ferguson’s concentration was glued to the screen.

  She was the police artist who helped develop the SFPD’s computerized image-enhancing system for missing children, criminals, and suspects. She kept her auburn hair in a beehive, popular at the time of her wedding. Partial to Beechnut gum, she snapped it absentmindedly. Turgeon loved her earrings, tiny silver handcuffs.

  Beth’s office was cluttered with computers, monitors, and sketches. She could remove the face-tight masks of some suspects photogr
aphed by security cameras. Her success rate at producing likenesses was eighty-six percent. Enlarged, facially aged pictures of JFK and Elvis adorned one wall.

  “Now, without beards.” Beth tapped her keyboard, making the four men clean shaven. Their heads rotated. Beth swiveled to another computer, hit some commands, and the screen showed each man’s full-body composite, with her estimates of height, weight, body type, hair, and eye color.

  “I put him at six feet even, 160 to 180 pounds, medium build, dark hair and dark eyes.”

  Beth yawned. She had put in several seventeen-hour shifts drafting sketches from witness descriptions until she saw the suspect in her dreams. And, as she had done a thousand times over the past year, she reviewed the fuzzy Polaroid of little Tanita Marie Donner, alive and naked, held by a man wearing a black hood and black gloves. It took every degree of clinical coolness Beth could muster to extract details from the fragment of tattoo visible on the man’s forearm. All she could glean was a bit of flame. She was frustrated by the hood. Too loose fitting. Had the man been wearing a tight-fitting ski mask, she could have produced vital facial attributes. This morning, when she felt she had done all she could, she called Sydowski and Turgeon.

  “Before I go any further,” she said, “I’ve got bad news and worse news.”

  “Worst news first,” Sydowski said.

  “I can’t compare the Donner suspect in the Polaroid with the suspect in Danny Becker’s kidnapping. I’ve tried everything, Walt. Whether these two creeps are the same guy or not is anybody’s guess.”

  “What’s the bad news?” Turgeon said.

  “Because of so many different perspectives and descriptions of Danny Becker’s abductor, my composite is weak. Thirty percent accuracy tops. Watch. I’ll take the most common characteristics of these fellows and give you your suspect, or fifty percent of him.”

  Beth typed a command, the four faces were instantly replaced on the computer screen by one. A saggy-eyed, grim-faced Caucasian with arching eyebrows in his late forties and bearded. He was a man either haunted by remorse or devoid of it, Sydowski thought.

  “Did you also take ten years off of this guy for us?” he said.

  Beth sighed. “I did. Wasn’t easy. Took two days. I’d rate it at thirty-five to forty percent. Here goes.” Her keyboard clicked.

  “Why make the guy ten years younger?” Turgeon asked.

  “That’s when Franklin Wallace was doing his time in Virginia.”

  Slowly, from top to bottom, the display terminal gave birth to a new image of the suspect. His face had fewer lines, was less heavy set. His eyes, while droopy, were somewhat more buoyant and his hair was thicker. Beth split the screen and presented two pictures of the younger suspect, one showing him bearded, and one showing him clean shaven. The printer hummed, offering crisp, perfect color pictures of both composites. “There you go.”

  The gold in Sydowski’s teeth shined as he gathered copies of Beth’s work into a file. “I owe you, Beautiful.”

  “Just close these cases, Walt.”

  Waiting for the elevator at the Hall of Justice, Turgeon studied Beth’s color computer pictures. “So this is our guy?”

  “One of them anyway.”

  “Tanita Donner’s killer, or have we got two different suspects?”

  “Don’t know, Linda.”

  “We going to call a press conference? Splash the composite?”

  “Nope.”

  “No?” Turgeon closed the folder.

  “Beth only rated it thirty percent. We’d be bogged down chasing hundreds of useless leads. We’ll try a few other things.”

  “You want me to send the younger composite to Virginia prison authorities?” They stepped onto the elevator.

  “First, we’ll see Rad.”

  Rad Zwicker was a skinny, hyperactive bachelor who worshiped computers and lived alone with his mother near the Castro. He was not only sensitive, he was the master analyst of the SFPD’s computerized records. His department at the hall continually droned from the sound of huge, new, powerful data storage banks. Give him a morsel of information and he would stun you with what he could pull out. Rad annoyed many cops because he rode a perpetual caffeine high and was overeager, but he was lightning fast and brilliant, virtues the SFPD did not overstock, Sydowski thought, putting Beth’s fresh composites into Rad’s hands.

  “You guys want a coffee, just made a fresh batch?” Rad pushed back his glasses and burrowed into the file.

  “No thanks,” Turgeon said.

  “I’m fine, Rad,” Sydowski said.

  “Super! Let’s get going!” Rad plopped himself before a terminal and entered Beth’s calculations. He then sipped coffee from a gargantuan mug, darted to another computer, fed each of Beth’s composites into it, then entered various commands. The fans to cool the computers whirred. Rad turned and smiled.

  “Be ready in a few moments.”

  One of the computers beeped. Rad turned, telling his guests to pull up chairs beside him.

  “Super! Now, here’s what I’m doing. I’ve entered Beth’s physical description of our target, with tolerances, into the California Department of Motor Vehicles drivers’ and registration records data bank. I’ve narrowed the search to the greater Bay Area, eliminating race, sex, age, etc. That being said, I would estimate a potential suspect pool of two hundred thousand. Now if we had a suspect vehicle, it would narrow the search considerably.”

  “What we’ll do is call in volunteer criminology students and cadets from the academy to help us sift through the pool. Here, I’ll show you what we’ll do. I start with our first guy here.”

  Rad pulled up on a large video screen the driver’s license picture of an Oakland man whose age and physical description fit Beth’s composite. Rad punched a command and Beth’s composite of the suspect appeared in matching scale and perspective beside the Oakland man. Rad then superimposed the suspect’s photo over the Oakland man.

  “Not even close,” Turgeon said.

  “Before we get started in this needle-in-a-haystack grunt work--do we have fingerprints?” Rad asked.

  “No, just the tattoo fragment,” Sydowski said. “But we could be dealing with two separate suspects.”

  “Yes, I remember. We’ll do what we did last year, run everything through NCIC and VICAP. We struck out then. Now, we have a physical description to possibly tie it to. And, for what it’s worth, we’ll sift through the dreaded California sex crimes registry again. And I’ll rattle the Bay Area data banks.”

  “Anything you can do, Rad.”

  He ran the description through the state and federal prison systems, and the Western States Information Network. Last year, early in the Donner case, Rad had Virginia’s prison records checked for the time Franklin Wallace was an inmate to see if any of his old prison buddies were with him at the time of the baby’s murder. “Let’s try it again now that Beth’s done a Dorian Gray for us.”

  “Dorian Gray?” Turgeon whispered to Sydowski.

  “Computer-aged picture,” he answered.

  Rad’s fingers danced over his keyboard as he entered the data bank for the federal prison system in Virginia for the years Franklin Wallace served his time. The screen showed a list of 621 male inmates Wallace could have met there. The list included social security numbers, birthdates, and file numbers from the National Crime Information Center’s computers. Rad sensed Sydowski’s skepticism.

  “Walter, please bear in mind that data are fluid and a lot of new information has likely been entered since we last did this.”

  Sydowski bore it in mind.

  “Although it is tempting to go with descriptions, let’s go with circumstance first in narrowing our search,” Rad said.

  “Molesters tend to stick together on the inside.” Turgeon said.

  “That’s right. So how many of our first number were doing time for sex crimes against children?” Rad worked the keyboard.

  The list was reduced to fifty-four.

  “Remov
e the number who were in jail when Tanita Marie Donner was taken.” Sydowski said.

  The list shrank to eighteen.

  “How many were alive at the time of the Donner case?” Sydowski asked. Rad nodded and worked the keyboard.

  The list was reduced to fourteen.

  “Let’s go to identifiers now,” Rad said. “I’ll narrow that list to Caucasians.”

  The computer beeped and the number now was eleven.

  “How many at that time had tattoos on their right arm?” Sydowski said.

  Rad prompted the computer and it answered nine.

  Four tattoos had the names of women, three men had Harleys on their biceps, one had a screaming eagle, and one had a death’s head. Not one had flames on their forearms.

  “Dammit,” Sydowski muttered.

  “Tattoos can be removed Inspector,” Turgeon said.

  “It’s only our first run, Walter, and it was quick and definitely unscientific.” Rad was reaching to switch the computer off.

  “Wait!” Turgeon said, startling the two men. A few clerks nearby looked up. “We forgot another aspect.”

  “There are thousands of possible equations to try,” Rad said.

  “I know. But we went through this looking for somebody to fit our suspect’s description. My reading of the file is that two people were involved in Tanita Marie Donner’s kidnapping and murder.”

  “Right. We used that last year without a description,” Rad said.

  “Many of these cases are partner crimes,” Sydowski said.

  “We know someone took the pictures in the Donner case, maybe there were other, peripheral partners?” Turgeon said. “Try this: how many of our suspects who were Virginia skinners with Franklin Wallace were living in the Bay Area at the time of the Donner abduction and murder?”

  “Sure.” Rad pounded in the command.

  Turgeon bit her bottom lip and waited.

  The computer beeped. Zero.

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  Sydowski grunted, and checked his watch. Maybe they should pass Beth’s composites to Rust and Ditmire and let the FBI play with them.

  “Wait, one more thing.” Turgeon had not given up. “How many of the Virginia cons are now living in the Bay Area?”