If Angels Fall

by Rick Mofina

“What I’m wondering is if there is a chance police shot the wrong guy in the Donner case. That maybe there’s a connection to Edward Keller and the unsolved abductions?”

  “The Donner case is still under investigation,” San Francisco’s police chief interjected. “We have nothing linking it with the kidnappings of Danny Becker, Gabrielle Nunn, and Zach Reed.”

  “Have you ruled out the possibility of a connection?”

  “Our focus is on the children, who we believe are still alive and being confined somewhere by Edward Keller.”

  “That’s right,” the FBI agent in charge of the San Francisco office added. “I think we’re getting off track. Now, we have something to show you. If you’ll just watch the monitors.”

  He signaled to begin. Clear security video from the Berkeley hobby store rolled, showing Keller approaching Zach and leaving the store with him. It silenced the conference for half a minute.

  “We’ve made copies to distribute and we’ve enhanced the suspect’s face in still photos. We have a news release detailing the facts of the case. I want to reiterate the enormity of the investigation and that the reward for information leading to an arrest in this case now stands at $300,000.”

  Reed worked his way out of the room while the conference continued. But he wasn’t free. With reporters in tow, he tried to find Ann. He caught up with her outside in the Hall of Justice parking lot as she was getting into a car with the FBI agent. Three camera crews were on her.

  “Ann!” Reed called.

  Reporters were shouting, jogging after Reed as he ran to Ann. He turned to them. “I just want a private word with my wife, so give us a break. Can you do that, please?”

  “Come on,” the agent said to the reporters, “back off!”

  Reed slid into the backseat with Ann and rolled up the windows.

  “Tom, I just want to go home to wait at my mother’s house.”

  “Ann, I--please--”

  “I have nothing to say to you right now, and it’s best we leave it that way. I have no time for you. Every fiber of my being is focused on my son.”

  “Our son, Ann. Our son.”

  “He’s my son, he’s your story.”

  Reed absorbed the blow.

  “Ann, I swear, I’ll bring him ba--”

  “Get out of the car, I want to go.”

  “Ann.”

  “Get out, now!”

  In the Hall of Justice, four floors up in the small waiting area of the Homicide Detail, San Francisco cabbie Willie Hampton was holding up his cap, watching live coverage of the news conference on the little TV at the desk of Homicide Detail’s secretary.

  “Like I said, I don’t know if that’s the dude on the TV there,” he repeated. “I just got back from Hawaii and seen this tragedy all over the news. Sorrowful thing.”

  Willie hung his head and shook it.

  “I’m catchin’ up on the news an’ somethin’ specific catches me ’bout that little Danny, the boy got stolen from BART at Balboa. Something’s ticklin’ my memory sayin’ ‘Willie, you got to check this here,’ see. So I get my calendar, check my ride sheet for that day. Sure enough I was workin’ around Balboa Park when that boy got taken.”

  Willie leaned forward, dropping his voice: “Between you an’ me, my last fare was a curbside, off the books, right ’fore I left on my vacation.” His tone rose back to normal conversation. “Picked up a dude carryin’ a kid near Balboa same time they say Danny got taken. Somethin’ strange ’bout the man. The kid was a girl, maybe five, but I recollect her hair looked kinda phony, like a wig maybe. I dropped them at Logan and Good, near Wintergreen. Somethin’ funny ’bout it all. Somethin’ not right. That’s all I’m sayin’, see.”

  Willie examined his cap for a moment.

  “Miss, how much longer you figure ’fore someone talks to me?”

  Turgeon took notes as Willie Hampton told her and Sydowski about his strange fare to Wintergreen. This was it, the real thing. Sydowski felt it in his gut as Willie recounted how he got lost on the dead-end street, turned around to find his way out, then saw his fare walking with the child over his shoulder before entering the broken-down house. When Willie finished his story, Sydowski had one question.

  “Can you take us to this house now, Mr. Hampton?”

  “Well, yes, sir. I think I can.”

  Half an hour later, Sydowski, Turgeon, and Willie Hampton sat in an unmarked police car, a few doors down the street from Edward Keller’s house.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  Dispatches about the break in the case sizzled on police scanners. Reporters who covered that morning’s new conference scurried to Wintergreen. Local TV interrupted network shows with live reports from the curb. The house and entire yard were sealed. Identification experts from the FBI and SFPD, clad in white hairnets, surgeon’s gloves, and coveralls--“moon-walking suits”-- dissected the scene. The feds took the inside and the city team took the garage and yard. An FBI chopper equipped with Forward Looking Infrared able to trace body heat, even that of corpses, hovered overhead. The city guys covered every square foot of Keller’s yard, using a probe and vapor detector, which picks up the presence of body gases from decomposition. Military camouflage canopies were erected over the area to hamper news helicopters from broadcasting the excavation of bodies, should the task force find any.

  The scene inside the house was chilling. Nothing could have prepared Sydowski for it as he suited up with Rust to go in.

  “Never seen anything like this,” an FBI agent mumbled to them as they entered. Huge surveillance photos of the children were plastered on the living room walls, which bled with quotations from the Scriptures. A claw of colored wires sprouted from the kitchen wall where the phone had been. It was a violent testament to the menace, thought Sydowski, deducing how Keller must have smashed it when Zach called for help. The solitary rocking chair before the TV underscored Keller’s insanity. Rust went to the worktable and thumbed through Keller’s journals, reading the criteria he used to select the children: angel names, ages matching his dead kids at the time of their drownings. How he sought them through birth notices, traced their families through public records, studied, and stalked them. IDENT detectives were going through his computer.

  Sydowski took the stairs to the basement room.

  As he stepped off the last step to Keller’s basement, Sydowski was assaulted by the stench of excrement, urine, and garbage, and pulled up his surgical mask. The children were gone, yet he braced himself for whatever awaited him in the room. Two FBI IDENT experts were working there, breathing through gas masks. They nodded to Sydowski as he entered, watching him take in the scene, the knee-deep garbage of half-eaten fast food and wrappers, the soiled mattresses, the rats, the barred, papered window, and the bloodstained baseball bat.

  “It’s not human blood, Walt,” one of the IDENT guys said, his voice muffled from under his mask.

  Sydowski nodded, blinking quickly. It was Golden Gate Park all over again--the rain, Tanita Marie Donner in the garbage bag, the stink, the maggots, flies, the gaping slash across her doll’s neck, nearly decapitating her. Her snow-white skin, her tiny body on the slab, her beautiful eyes imploring him, beseeching him, reaching into him. All these years on the job. All the stiffs. It was supposed to get easier. Why wasn’t it getting easier? Were three more child corpses waiting for him somewhere? Was that the way it was going to play out? His stomach was seething, his heartburn erupting. Give us a break here. We’re so close to this guy. Sydowski gritted his teeth. So close.

  He returned upstairs to confer with Rust in the living room. A grim atmosphere permeated the house. Everyone was working quietly, cataloging evidence, bagging and hauling it into a van which would deliver it to a plane waiting to fly it to the state forensic lab in Sacramento. Few investigators spoke. Those who did used low, respectful tones. Rust was still studying Keller’s maps and binders, amidst the clutter. “Are we too late, Walt?”

  “I don’t know, today is the anniversary.
Seems he’s geared up to it. You going to look downstairs, where he kept them?”

  “Right after we talk to Bill, here.”

  Bill Wright, the FBI’s IDENT team leader, sighed, removing his gas mask, his reddened face damp with perspiration. “Well, we can definitely put all three children in this house based on the stuff we’ve found so far. Clothing. Hair. But the kids are gone. We’ve got nothing outside, nothing inside. We’ve gone through the attic, X-rayed the floorboards, walls. The last call made from this address was the one Zach Reed made to The San Francisco Star newsroom. The bills for the past three months show little. No receipts in his trash. We’re going to take the plumbing apart in case he flushed anything. But our guy’s fled, likely with the kids. I’d say last night, judging from the oil and coolant stains in the driveway. We’ll keep the house for as long as we need it to gather evidence for whatever comes up.”

  “Thanks, Bill.”

  Sydowski pulled Rust aside. “Keller lost his kids late in the day, right?”

  “Late afternoon, evening. The file put it between four and nine.”

  Sydowski checked his watch. “Gives us a couple of hours, maybe.”

  “Maybe.”

  Outside, the air was electric with rumors that the police had found bodies. Reed was with the parents of Danny Becker and Gabrielle Nunn, who also rushed to Wintergreen, jostled through the press gauntlet, and converged on the police command center as TV news helicopters circled overhead. Uniformed police had taken the parents aside to a secure area near the bus to await some official word. Their perspective allowed them to see the bagged evidence being removed from the house. Nancy Nunn sniffled, sharpening her focus on one clear bag. Gooseflesh rose on her trembling skin as she recognized the flower print dress she had made for her daughter.

  Paul Nunn caught his wife and struggled to quell her choking sobs, his own voice cracking. “Is somebody going to tell us what the hell is going on here!”

  Reed saw Ann arrive and hurried to her, plucking her from reporters, pulling her to the sanctuary for the parents as the choppers pounded above. Ann wept. The agent who brought her left to get some answers.

  “Tom, is he dead?”

  Reed tried to get his wife to focus on him. “Ann! We don’t know anything. No one is telling us a word.” He hugged her.

  “Something is happening,” Gabrielle’s father said, “because this morning we found Jackson--Gabrielle’s dog--scratching at our back door, looking pretty frightened.”

  “Why the hell is it taking so long to tell us something?” Nathan Becker demanded. “Officer, please get us someone! We deserve to know what is going on. What have they found?”

  The uniformed cop nodded, turned away and spoke into his radio.

  Reed held Ann. He was numb with helplessness. Fear. What was he going to do if they started carrying out bodies? His son. His only child. Only yesterday, Zach had locked his arms around him, enthralled with the hope his mom and dad were going to move back to their house.

  Daddy, you have to come and get me!

  Sydowski emerged and ushered the parents away from the chaos and toward the relative tranquility of the bus.

  “All we can determine is that Keller fled with the children.”

  “Where?”

  “We’re trying to determine that right now.”

  “What about Half Moon Bay?”

  “We’ve got people there.”

  “When did Keller leave?”

  “We think sometime in the night.” Sydowski then raised his hand. “We have nothing to show they’ve been harmed, outside of being held in a foul, scary environment.”

  “But the clothes?” Nancy asked.

  “He’s likely changed their appearances, to make it difficult to find them.”

  Phones were ringing inside the bus.

  What were they doing to find Keller, Paul Nunn wanted to know.

  “We suspect he is going to put to sea, somewhere along the California coast. The Coast Guard is on full alert. We’ve got every available search plane--”

  “Inspector?” an officer with his hand covering a phone interrupted. “Sir, it’s the Ranger Station at Point Reyes.”

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  George Hay sat at the counter of Art’s Diner in Inverness, eating a clubhouse sandwich. The front page of The San Francisco Star was folded precisely beside his plate and he read while he chewed.

  He was engrossed in the multiple kidnapping case. It was fantastic. Had to be a tough one for the people on it, he figured, reaching for a French fry. All that glory. Sure. And all that career-busting political nonsense, too. He took a hit of coffee. Admit it though, you miss the action, he told himself. Cases like that gave you a crazy rush. Yeah, he missed it, like he missed not being in pain.

  He winced, putting his cup down to massage his leg.

  Two years back, a carjacker’s bullet had shattered his right thigh, leaving him with a partial pension, a bad attitude, and a permanent limp after fifteen years with the San Jose Police Department. A succession of rent-a-cop security jobs and lost weekends sunk his marriage. Oh, well. Allana was not the stand-by-your-man type; she was the kick-you-in-the-teeth type. George still had trouble believing that right before she walked out on him he was actually contemplating knocking off an armored car for her, thinking the money would keep them together. He shook his head. That was when a buddy got him work as a U.S. Park Ranger in Point Reyes, the national seashore park, just north of San Francisco.

  He spent his first months swallowing what bits of pride he had left and going through the motions of his job. Gradually, he buried the things that made him a jerk and came to appreciate the therapeutic qualities of the park. He was even good natured about the ribbing he got from old police friends. “Collar any perps with pic-a-nic baskets, George?” He found a postcard-perfect cabin near Dillon Beach and was secretly trying his hand at writing a police mystery. Instead of a drunk, he had become a philosopher, a seaside poet. So screw the world, old George was doing fine with the hand that was dealt him. There, his leg felt better. He gulped the last of his coffee and tucked a crumpled five and two ones under his plate. “See ya, Art.”

  A fat man, wrapped in a grease-stained white apron, peeked through the kitchen’s serving window, waving as he left.

  George clamped a toothpick between his teeth and inhaled the salt air, limping to his U.S. Park Service Jeep Cherokee. A Coast Guard spotter plane roared in the distance as he climbed into the Jeep, grabbed his Motorola mike, and checked in with park headquarters in Bear Valley, seven miles away.

  “Forty-two here, Dell. Got anything? Over.”

  “Pretty quiet, George, except for…just a sec...”

  That was Dell, always misplacing something. George pried a piece of bacon from between his teeth. Three hours left in his shift, then four days off. While Dell searched, George flipped through the papers on his clipboard: faxes, alerts, and bulletins. Routine stuff about amendments to laws, and regs dealing with the park, and the Gulf of the Farallons, overlooks from Sonora and Marin counties, Coast Guard notices. Usual crap. Ah, there it was. The stuff from the FBI on the Keller kidnappings. George read it again, awestruck by the magnitude. Details on the boat, the trailer, the vehicles, background on Edward Keller, the children, that reporter. Helluva case. Bet Keller took them to Half Moon Bay, where he took his own kids twenty years ago. He heard they had heavy surveillance going down there, Coast Guard, FBI, the state boys.

  “You still there, George?”

  “Ten-four, Dell.”

  “Okay. Lou at the Valente place called. Saw some trespassing headlights late last night. Must’ve been kids partying on the property again. Wants you to check it out when you can.

  “The spot down by the old cow path to the beach?”

  “That’s it.”

  “On my way. Ten-four.”

  Overnight and through the morning, the park was cloaked in chilly fog. By mid-afternoon it had yielded to the sun and a sparkling clear day. G
eorge hummed to himself driving from Inverness, on Tomales Bay on the north side, to the Sir Francis Drake Highway, meandering west across the sixty-five-thousand acre park. He loved, no, he revered the Point, its majestic, craggy terrain, its Bishop pine and Douglas fir forests, the estuaries slicing into its sloping green valleys where dairy cattle grazed; the mist-shrouded beaches and jagged shorelines, glistening today with sea spray as sea lions basked in the sun. And the place had wild weather, simultaneously throwing up hot California sunshine, cold fog, and damp, pounding winds all within a few miles, manifesting the mood of the peninsula. It sat on the San Andreas Fault, rendering the rocky shelves of her coastal waters a ships’ graveyard. But beyond the beautiful treachery was the celestial Pacific and eternal hope. That’s what it did for him. The Point was a living, breathing deity. Who would ever have guessed? He had become a tree-hugger! Admit it. He laughed out loud. Laughed until his leg hurt.

  The Jeep curled past Schooner Bay, Drakes Estero, and the sea. George passed the overgrown ruins of the ancient mission church. He once read of plans to rebuild it years ago. Wonder what happened? About a mile before Creamery Bay, he left the highway for Valente’s property. It stretched in a near perfect two-mile square between the road and the Point’s north beach. He kicked the Jeep into four-wheel-drive, bumping his way down a tractor trail that meandered to a small lagoon at a valley bottom. The path was long abandoned, but now and then local kids trespassed, usually in ATV’s, to party. Looked like it happened again. George spotted fresh tire tracks at the valley bottom. Seemed strange. They were deep, mud-churning troughs, going to the shore, then disappearing into the tall dense brush. But no tracks led out. No vehicles were in the area. Nothing. George stopped.

  “What the hell is this?”

  He cranked the emergency brake, killed his engine, and got out to investigate, pulling on his rubber rain poncho because much of the brush here thrived with poison oak and thorns. Slipping on work gloves, he followed the tire impressions into the thicket, using his baton to slap aside branches. Suddenly, he froze. Something chrome reflected the sun. He moved to it. Looked like the ball of a trailer hitch. It was! George chopped his way deeper, coming upon a tarp, barely concealing a late model van. A rental by the looks of it. Who would take time to hide this stuff? he asked, as the answer, rolling on a wave of knowing, crashed down on him.