If Angels Fall

by Rick Mofina

  The Star had sent Reed, Molly Wilson, and two photographers to the park. Other staff were en route. Wilson was at the carousel with the two teenage girls who saw the kidnapper, getting their accounts just before police took them away for statements.

  Reed was having trouble hearing Fay and Jack Osborne over the TV news helicopters and satellite trucks roaring into the parking lot. Local stations were taking the story live. Shielding her eyes, Fay regarded a hovering chopper. The cradle-to-grave tribulations of a life bound to Iowa soil were written in her face, eyes, and sturdy hands. Probably attended church every Sunday, Reed figured.

  “Her mother kept saying that it was all her fault for not watching her daughter more closely,” Fay said.

  “You see anything strange in the parking lot before the mother ran up to you?”

  “No. But this man approached us after seeing her upset.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Gone. After helping the mother, he ran back to his car phone, called the police, then drove off, trying to follow the pickup truck.”

  “Did he say anything before he left?” Writing furiously, Reed stopped looking at the Osbornes.

  “He had been talking on his car phone when he saw a little girl come into the lot, and trot up to a parked pickup truck, and talk to a man who had a dog in the cab. They only talked for a few seconds, then she got in and they drove off.”

  Reed never took his eyes from his notes as he wrote. “Did he get the truck’s plate number?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What did he say this man in the pickup looked like?”

  “He said he had a beard, light-colored hair. In his forties or fifties.

  Reed froze, and stared at the Osbornes. “A beard and light hair?”

  Fay Osborne nodded. Reed’s mind spun with suspicion.

  Beard. Light hair. Like the guy who took Danny Becker. Like the born-again kook from Martin’s bereavement group. He had a beard and light hair. Right. And so did 100,000 other men in the Bay Area. Slow down. Why did he think he was a detective? Didn’t he learn from the Franklin Wallace fiasco last year?

  Reed finished with the Osbornes, went to the carousel, and took Wilson aside. “What’d you get?” he asked.

  “Great stuff.” She flipped through her notes. “Her name is Gabrielle Nunn. From the description I got from the two girls who saw her talking to a man before she went missing, I’d say he’s the same creep who grabbed Danny Becker from BART.”

  “Me, too.”

  “Gabrielle was here for a friend’s birthday party, a huge one, something like thirty kids. She’s waiting alone outside the washroom when she talks to this man in a ball cap and dark glasses. Nobody remembers the guy’s face, only that he was bearded with blondish hair.”

  “Just like Becker on BART. Ball cap and dark glasses.”

  “Gabrielle talks to the man, follows him to the lot. Her mom, Nancy Nunn, comes out minutes later. Can’t find her. The teens tell her about the man. Mom runs frantically to the lot. And get this! The whole thing may have been caught on amateur video!”

  “No way!” Reed checked to ensure no other reporters were eavesdropping. “How did you find out?”

  “I overheard a guy tell a detective that he was videotaping his kids on the carousel about the same time. He said maybe he caught the guy on tape.”

  “He give the tape to the detective?”

  “Yes. He took off before I could interview him.”

  “Good stuff. See if we can get a print from it. My guess is they’ll release it anyway.”

  “Right. You get anything?”

  Reed told her about Fay Osborne and the businessman who followed the pickup. Suddenly, Wilson remembered something and reached excitedly into her purse, pulling out a snapshot.

  “One of the mothers from the party gave me this picture of Gabrielle. Taken an hour ago. What an angel. Five years old. Her birthday is next week. Her mother was freaked over Becker’s kidnapping, and with Donner being found here, she was afraid to bring Gabrielle to the party today. Her mother made that dress. What a little angel, huh?”

  “She’s cute all right. Anybody say anything about a dog?”

  “Yeah, hold on.” Wilson handed Reed the snapshot and flipped through her notes. “Here, Jackson. Gabrielle’s cocker spaniel pup. Ran off or something from their home about a month ago.”

  “It fits.”

  “What fits?”

  “That this could’ve been premeditated. The guy took her dog, then uses it today to lure her away.”

  “Yeah, that would work.”

  “Call the desk. We should send someone to the Nunns home in the Sunset, talk to the neighbors.”

  “Your house is in the Sunset, Tom.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never heard of this family.”

  “Excuse me!” A grim-faced SFPD officer was unreeling a taut yellow police line around the carousel area, as other officers cleared people from the scene. The plastic ribbon sealed off the carousel enclosure, then stretched along the path Gabrielle had taken to the parking lot encompassing the lot itself, protecting the entire scene.

  “Oh, Tom. They usually do this for homicides.”

  “Likely a grid search, in case the bad guy dropped something.”

  Drew Chapman, one of the Star’s photographers, joined them, clicking off a dozen frames.

  “Chappy. Where you been?” Wilson said.

  “Deep in the west end. A group of suits were poking around the scene where they found the murdered baby last year. The Examiner and Merc were there, too. Not bad for pix.”

  “Cops put on the white gloves?” Reed asked.

  Drew shook his head. “I don’t think they found anything.” Drew nodded to a group of detectives nearing the area and raised a camera to his face. “Those guys there.”

  Reed recognized Rust and Ditmire, along with Turgeon and Sydowski, walking outside the tape at the far side, stopping to talk with the uniforms, instructing them to do something.

  Drew fired off a few frames. “We overhead them say something about a press conference at the hall later. I don’t know about you guys, but I think it is all linked. I think we got some twisted, serial, child-killer.”

  Maybe, Reed thought, considering the names as a connection. Danny Raphael Becker. Gabrielle Nunn. What an angel. Raphael. Gabrielle. The Angel Gabrielle. Gabriel. Raphael. Angels.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  In Room 400 at the Hall of Justice, a dark mood descended upon those watching Gabrielle Nunn’s abduction over and over again. In color, slow motion and reverse. They saw it on the same big-screen TV the homicide dicks used to watch ball games, Dirty Harry movies, and Dragnet reruns.

  Vaughan Kreuger, a mechanic from Buffalo, was videotaping his four-year-old twins on the carousel with their mother when Gabrielle was taken from the playground. He volunteered his tape to a detective at the scene. Given the circumstances, the Kreugers didn’t want it.

  Nancy Nunn wept. For her, it was a perverse ballet--the horses, the rocker, the chariots carrying laughing children, safe children.

  Nancy’s husband, Paul, and her friend Wendy Sloane watched with her. Sharon Cook and Brenda Grayson, the two teens who saw Gabrielle talking to a stranger, were also there. Watching beside them was Janice Mason, a lip reader from Gold Bay Institute for the Hearing Impaired. Next to her, Beth Ferguson, the sketch artist, was making notes and outlines. Turgeon, Rust, Ditmire, Gonzales, Mikelson from General Works, Kennedy from Investigations, Chief of Inspectors Roselli, and a guy from the district attorney’s office were among the group, hoping for a break.

  Give us a lead, something. Anything.

  Kreuger and his camera were at the opposite side of the carousel from Gabrielle and the stranger. It was difficult to see anything except the strobe-like glimpses of swimming, formless color.

  “Wait! I see her!” Gabrielle’s mother pinpointed the spot on the screen. The officer operating the VCR halted the tape, reversed it in freeze-fram
e mode, one frame at a time. Thirty seconds went by. Nothing but blurry people. Two grandmothers. Then strobe-style nothingness. Dark-light-dark-light-dark-light.

  “I don’t see anything,” one detective said.

  “I saw her! She’s there!” Nancy said just as Gabrielle Nunn appeared on the screen.

  “Freeze it, Tucker!” Kennedy sat upright.

  Nancy gasped, choking on her tears, pressing her fingers to the screen. It was not a clear frame, it did not betray details of her face, mouth, or eyes, but it was Gabrielle. No question. A grainy, static-filled jerky frame of the soon-to-be six-year-old standing alone in the dress her mother had made for her birthday.

  Sydowski studied the color Polaroids of Gabrielle taken at the party. Paul Nunn helped Nancy sit down and the tape continued in slow motion. Gabrielle vanished. The camera’s angle changed, and caught her again, but she disappeared. Dark-light-dark-light-dark-light. She reappeared completely in focus as a shadow fell over her. A man. It was a man’s back. The image was jittery. A profile appeared, snowy, out of focus, void of details, but for a beard, ball cap, sunglasses.

  “That’s him!” Sharon Cook, one of the teens, pointed at the TV.

  “Definitely!” Brenda Grayson said.

  The Nunns could not identify the man trapped by Kreuger’s video camera for one second of real time. The stranger had something in his right hand and was showing it to Gabrielle before he was cut out of the frame. A postcard, or picture. Miraculously Gabrielle’s face focused as she tilted her head, accepted the picture, and spoke.

  “Jackson! Where is he?” Janice Mason from the institute read Gabrielle’s lips, just as the tape ended.

  Sydowski saw the veins in Paul Nunn’s reddened neck pulsing. He exploded. “He stole the dog for this! Planned it! Sonofabitch! I’ll kill him!” Nunn buried his face in his large hands.

  Earlier, Paul Nunn told the detectives he suspected Gabrielle’s pup was stolen from their backyard a month ago because he found the gate open and bits of raw hamburger in the pen. Now, more evidence mocked them from the big screen. They were hustling an IDENT unit to comb the Nunn’s yard, Sydowski thought as Officer Tucker cued up the best frame of the kidnapper for Beth Ferguson to sketch. Sydowski caught her attention. She gave her head a subtle negative shake that told him she had few attributes from the footage for composite. Sydowski knew it. So did the others. A fuzzy rear to near profile of a baseball cap, dark glasses, and a beard wasn’t much to work with. But it was something, and if anyone could extract more physical detail about the guy from the teens, Beth could.

  Sydowski turned to his copy of the telex from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, apologizing for the delay getting a file and photo of the one possible suspect from the Canadian prison system. His name was Virgil Shook, which fit with the “Verge” reference from Kindhart. Shook had the right kind of tattoos in the right spots. But they didn’t have his file, sheet, or pictures yet. They had absolutely nothing on Shook. It was a national holiday in Canada and the Mounties were having computer problems. Rust was urged to use the FBI and State Department’s pull and call the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa for action.

  Sydowski studied the grainy contours of Gabrielle’s abductor on the TV screen, weighing and measuring every dancing photoelectron composing his image. His heartburn flared; fear and anger raged in the pit of his stomach. Was he now closer to the thing he had been hunting, the thing that had scarred him? The tape clicked and whirred. The stranger with Gabrielle was just a man. Flesh and blood. Fallible. Conquerable. The suspect’s ghostly image on the video was a solid break, but it came at a high price. He looked upon Gabrielle Nunn’s mother and father being escorted away with the teens to help Beth with a composite.

  “We’ve got a lot of work to do and no time to do it.” Leo Gonzales told the detectives at the table. Alerts had gone out statewide, a grid-search of the playground at Golden Gate was underway, and exhaustive background checks with the Nunns, Beckers, and Angela Donner to find a common thread, anything that might link the families. And they’d go back to them on Virgil Shook, once they had his file. Until then, absolutely nothing was to be made public about Shook. Not yet. He might run. But they would find him. The FBI would dissect his crimes and compare them with the San Francisco cases. They would find his friends, climb his family tree, lean hard on Kindhart. Phone taps, mail monitoring, and surveillance for the Nunn home, canvass their Sunset neighborhood--they knew the drill. They would hold a news conference, release the blurry footage, details of the kidnapping, and make a public appeal for help.

  “You all know what’s at stake here. Do whatever it takes,” Gonzales vowed to the group.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?

  Nancy Nunn was overwhelmed. Where was Gabrielle? What was he doing to her? Oh, God. Please watch over her.

  All my fault. It’s all my fault. Why wasn’t I watching her? What was he going to do to her? Oh, God, would she ever see her again? Golden Gate Park. That’s where they found the baby girl last year. Murdered. Oh, God. The accusing eyes of the carousel horses.

  I’m okay Mom, I’m just waiting at the door.

  The man was a Caucasian, late forties to mid-fifties. He had a full beard, bushy blondish hair, medium build, about 170-190 pounds, six feet to six feet, two inches tall, Beth Ferguson estimated as she worked in a nose, ears, and mouth that might match those of the man the teens had seen. He wore a long-sleeve shirt; the girls couldn’t see any tattoos. They kept repeating, reciting details. Nancy and Paul sat with them, studying the sketch, struggling to remember if they had ever encountered the man who took Gabrielle. Nancy prayed.

  God, please help me. Please don’t harm her. She’s just a little girl, an innocent little girl. We should be looking for her. My child has been abducted. Why didn’t the world stand still? Why wasn’t everyone looking for her? I have to find her.

  Nancy bolted to the hall, where she was stopped by the throng of detectives leaving the conference room, running square into one of them. He was calm, compassionate. She felt his large, strong hands steady her shoulders gently. He smelled of a trace of Old Spice. Nancy’s father wore Old Spice. The hall fell silent except for Nancy’s sobbing as she looked up at the detective, her voice breaking.

  “Bring her home to me. Please bring her home to me.”

  Sydowski’s blue eyes watered with understanding. He knew her suffering--he would carry it with him as a crusader carries an amulet. It was his solemn promise. She read it in his face, the face of a good man. He embodied her hope. Her only hope.

  “I promise you, Mrs. Nunn, we will do everything we can on this earth to find Gabrielle.”

  Tears rolled down Nancy’s face as her husband took her in his arms, comforting her. “If he asks for money, we will pay it.” Paul Nunn said. “Whatever he asks for. We’ll sell the house.”

  Sydowski nodded.

  Two other detectives ushered the Nunns away for more questioning before taking them home.

  Turgeon and Sydowski said nothing in the elevator or during the walk to the car. Nothing anyone could say would be worth a damn. They were alone with their thoughts and the case. Turgeon started the Caprice, had slipped the transmission into reverse when Gord Mikelson ran up to them.

  “CHP just locked onto a truck, could be our guy.”

  “What?”

  “Bearded man driving a battered pickup with a girl about six or seven wearing a dress. They have a dog in the cab. Near the Presidio, northbound towards the bridge. CHP’s bird has got him and Marin County’s rolling. The guy hasn’t made us yet!”

  “Punch it, Linda!” Sydowski switched on the police radio.

  The Chevy roared, leaving fifty feet of smoldering rubber at the hall, emergency lights wigwagging and siren screaming.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  San Francisco’s skyscrapers and the surging whitecaps of the Bay wheeled slowly under the California Highway Patrol chopper approaching the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge near
the Presidio.

  It had been assisting the San Francisco police in the abduction investigation, hovering over Golden Gate Park, the Sunset, and Richmond districts. It had returned to its Oakland base to refuel when its radio crackled. An off-duty CHP patrol car spotted a pickup matching the description in the Nunn kidnapping, northbound on 101 near the Palace of Fine Arts. The chopper lifted off within forty-five seconds of the call.

  The suspect truck was a Ford, the driver Caucasian, bearded. Passenger was a girl, five to eight years old, her head barely visible from the rear. A small dog was in the cab. The cruiser couldn’t get closer for the truck’s tag without being noticed.

  Traffic on 101 near the Golden Gate looked like a set of toy cars from the air. The CHP’s chopper was nearly invisible, lingering a quarter mile or so south. The spotter locked onto the pickup through high-powered binoculars. The truck was now on the bridge.

  Police radios sizzled with dispatches as cars from several jurisdictions headed to the area. No stop would be made on the bridge. Too risky. It would happen at the viewpoint exit on the north side. The suspect was considered dangerous and possibly armed.

  They would hold him for the SFPD.

  Weaving through traffic on the Golden Gate, Turgeon and Sydowski monitored the takedown on their radio.

  “Yeah, we’ve got him,” huffed a CHP officer. “No problem here. No weapons.”

  Turgeon and Sydowski arrived minutes after the arrest, with Turgeon blasting the siren, jolting slow-moving rubberneckers out of their way. Half a dozen officers were at the scene, four cruisers with front doors open, emergency lights pulsating, surrounded the pickup, radio calls competing with the chopper above.

  An officer was talking to a man in the backseat of one car. In the front of another car an officer talked with a little girl, while a blond dog panted in the rear seat behind the cage. Motorists slowed to gawk. A few tourists nearby watched with worried, puzzled faces as officers searched the interior of the pickup’s cab. Sydowski clipped his shield to his jacket and groaned. Also watching were TV news crews and newspaper photographers. Reporters were talking to people, taking notes.