[Tom Reed and Walt Sydowski 01.0] If Angels Fall

by Rick Mofina

  “Could be,” Gonzales said.

  “What about Shook’s friend, Perry William Kindhart?” Nick Roselli, Chief of Inspectors, asked. “Have we leaned on him, Walt?”

  “We’ve leaned hard. He’s got a lawyer now. We’ve got nothing on him. No leverage. He’s under surveillance.”

  “What about the taped confessions, Florence Schafer and the priest, people at the shelter, Shook’s past?” Roselli said.

  “Nothing substantial beyond what we’ve already got.”

  “What about Shook’s place in the Tenderloin?” Gonzales said.

  Sydowski, Turgeon, Ditmire, Rust, and several others from the task force had scoured Shook’s room overnight and into the early morning hours.

  “More pictures of Shook with Tanita,” Rust said. “A diary detailing his desires. He mentions Wallace, taunting the police with confessions, and he wrote that whoever took Becker and Nunn was making it hard for him to ‘go hunting.’ At this point, it looks like Donner and the recent abductions are unrelated.”

  “What about Kindhart?” Roselli said. “Is he mentioned?”

  “In passing,” Sydowski said. “Other than the camera link to Donner, we got nothing that puts him with any of the cases.”

  “Claire”--Gonzales turned to Inspector Claire Ward, the expert on cults--“you went to Shook’s place. Anything there to suggest a cult connection?”

  “Other than the fact we maybe have a minimum of three people involved in the abductions, absolutely nothing.”

  Kennedy loosened his tie. “So what have we got on Mr. B-Positive? We’ve got a blurry video of him stalking Gabrielle Nunn in Golden Gate. We have a composite, but it is still too vague. What else we got?”

  “We know he stalked Gabrielle and took her dog, which he used later to lure her away,” Turgeon said.

  “Right, and we’ve got a partial plate on the truck, an old Ford with a California tag beginning with “B” or “8”, something like that.”

  “And there’s the meat tray found near the yard.” Ditmire added.

  “How’s Rad Zwicker doing in Records with that pool based on the partial?” Roselli wanted to know. “Anything that ties Shook to the truck or any vehicle?”

  “Nothing yet.” Gonzales flipped through his reports. “We don’t have a specific year on the truck. We do have the first three characters on the tag: ‘B75.’ That gives us a pool, of what? Something over a thousand. They’re being checked individually.”

  Sydowski had an idea. “Did we check parking tickets for all Ford pickups with the partial at Golden Gate the day Gabrielle was taken?”

  Gonzales nodded. “Zwicker did that, through traffic. Zip, Walt.”

  Turgeon thought of something else. “Did we check for tickets for all pickups with that partial in and around the Nunn home in the Sunset prior to her abduction, say for the past six months? Because if he was stalking her, he would have spent time in her neighborhood.”

  “I don’t think we did it specifically with that partial tag, Linda. Hang on.” Gonzales reached for a phone and punched Zwicker’s extension, and ordered the check done immediately, then hung up. “He’ll get back to us,” he said.

  Roselli rolled up his sleeves. “We could try running down names of all Caucasian males with B-positive blood between thirty and sixty years old in mental institutions and Bay Area hospitals. We could do the same with recent releases from county, state, and federal jails. Garrett and Malloy, you take that.” Notes were made.

  Using the bar code from the meat wrapper, Inspector Marty Baker came up with a list of eighty stores where the meat could have been purchased. He narrowed the purchase time line to four days prior to the dog snatching.

  Kennedy liked that lead. “Work up a hot info sheet. We’ll get uniforms and anyone we can spare to canvas the stores and the ’hoods.”

  Gonzales turned to Inspectors Gord Mikelson and Hal Zolm from General Works. After Shook died, they went to the parents of Danny Becker and Gabrielle Nunn to assure them no concrete evidence had surfaced suggesting Danny and Gabrielle had been harmed, that police suspected Shook was involved in the abductions only because he claimed he was. It was not unusual for people like Shook to make such claims. The task force was working to verify their validity.

  “How did it go, Gord?”

  “Not good.”

  “The parents believe their children are dead and they blame us for not keeping Shook alive to get information.”

  Gonzales nodded. He had no quarrel with the families’ right to be outraged.

  The meeting stretched into a two-hour affair.

  “We should check every death – criminal, accidental, or natural, involving children of the same age and gender as Danny and Gabrielle,” Sydowski said. “Call Sacramento and do it through vital statistics.”

  “How far back?”

  Sydowski did some quick math. “Twenty years, say.”

  “Do you know how many you’re talking about for the entire state?” Ditmire said.

  “Narrow it to the Bay Area. If he’s taking kids from here, the tragedy likely happened here,” Sydowski said.

  “Could check with mental hospitals, private clinics, and psychiatric associations for any cases that might fit with what we’ve got here,” Rust said, tapping his canister of chewing tobacco on his chin.

  Kennedy wanted the streets sifted for anything on new kiddie porn operations in the west. Rust pledged the FBI’s help on that front.

  Roselli and Kennedy decided on releasing a short press statement saying they believe Virgil Lee Shook was responsible for the murder of Tanita Marie Donner, but they had nothing to confirm he is linked to the Becker-Nunn kidnappings, only that vigorous investigations by the task force are ongoing. It would go out at three that afternoon.

  The meeting was ending when the phone rang for Gonzales. Gonzales said nothing, took notes, then slammed the phone down with a grin.

  “We got a hit on a 1978 Ford pickup tagged for parking near a hydrant three blocks from the Nunn home in the Sunset. It was one week before the dog vanished. Brilliant work, Turgeon! The old Son of Sam parking ticket probe. Who would’ve guessed?”

  Kennedy looked at the address Gonzales had taken for the pickup. “Let’s move on this now!”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Sitting on Grandma’s front porch steps, Zach Reed could hear his mom on the phone to his grandmother. She was worked up, big time.

  “I refuse to accept him treating us like this--Mom--no.” Grandma was working at the university. “I am not taking any more of this!”

  Hearing his mom talk this way hurt. Everything was breaking, spoiling his dream of living together again in their home.

  “Mom, I’ve given him a lifetime of chances--No! He was supposed to pick us up this morning at the airport. He wasn’t there. No sign of him. Not a word. I know it’s a little thing but it always starts with the little things!”

  His mother listened, then said: “I checked with the airline message center, our hotel in Chicago, and his place. Absolutely no word from him. This is how he treats us! This is how committed he is!”

  Zach hated this. Just chill, Mom, he pleaded silently from the steps, driving his chin into his forearms which rested on his knees. He stared at his sneakers, new Vans, Tempers. He had tried to calm Mom down at the airport, where she sat steaming for an hour. Maybe Dad was on a story because of the missing kids?

  “I don’t care, Zach,” she hissed as they waited on an airport bench. “That’s not the point. The point is he is supposed to be here! A promise is a promise! That was how you measured a person’s worth, by the number of promises they broke,” she said, blowing her nose into a tissue.

  A few hours earlier on the plane, everything was great. Mom was happy, telling him the surprise: Dad was picking them up at the airport. Maybe they would have lunch, talk about being together again, maybe drive by their house. Man, it was heaven. Soon he would be back with Jeff and Gordie, catch up on things.

  But it
all fell apart when they came down at San Francisco International. No trace of Dad. Mom had him paged. Three times.

  Now, sitting on Grandma’s porch, with everything breaking into a million pieces, he didn’t know what to do. He fished for his father’s business card from his rear pocket. It read: TOM REED, STAFF WRITER, THE SAN FRANCISCO STAR, and bore an address, fax number, and his direct extension. It was a cherished possession. One Zach carried everywhere. He studied the blue lettering, stroking the embossed characters, as if the card were a talisman that could summon his dad.

  Zach hated this separation cooling off crap. He hoped his friends were wrong about your folks never getting back together once they split. Please be wrong. He looked hopefully up and down the street. Traffic was light. All he saw was some doof by a white van a few doors down. Was he staring at him? Zach wasn’t sure. The guy was checking the air pressure on the tires.

  The rumbling of a broken muffler cued him to his father’s old green monster stopping in front of the house.

  “Mom! It’s Dad!”

  Zach catapulted to the driver’s door, and gripped the handle.

  “Hey, son!”

  “Dad, Chicago was a blast! We went up in the Sears Tower and I got to go in the cockpit on the flight home! Are we gonna drive by our house? Are we gonna have lunch? And look, Mom got me new Vans, Tempers!” Zach opened the door for his dad.

  “Hold on there, sport.” Reed climbed out of the car.

  Zach threw his arms around his father, his smile melting when he smelled a familiar evil odor. Zach stepped back, noticing his dad’s reddened eyes, his whiskers, and the lines carved into his face.

  “Guess you been working pretty hard on the big kidnapper story, that’s why you missed us at the airport, huh?”

  Reed looked into his son’s eyes for a long moment.

  “Something like that, Zach.”

  “Well, Mom’s pretty mad at you.”

  “She has every right to be.”

  Reed saw Ann’s silhouette in the doorway, put his hand on his son’s shoulder. As they went inside, Zach saw the white van drive off.

  In the house, Zach did as his mother told him and went upstairs to his room and closed the door. Loud enough for his parents to hear. Then he quietly opened it, lay on the floor and listened.

  “Where the hell were you, Tom?”

  “Ann, I don’t blame you for--”

  “You promised us you would be there.”

  “I know, but something came up on the kidnappings, I--”

  How many times had he hurt her by starting with “but something came up.” Her face reddened under her tousled hair, her brown eyes narrowed. She had removed her shoes, her silk blouse had come slightly untucked from her skirt. Jesus, she was going to explode on him.

  “You look terrible and you reek,” she said.

  “It’s complicated. I can expla--”

  “Were you with Molly Wilson, a last fling?”

  “What? I don’t believe this!”

  “You’ve been drinking again.”

  “I never told you I quit. I never lied.”

  “That’s right. You were always honest about your priorities.” Her eyes burned with contempt. She thrust her face into her hands, collapsing on the sofa. “Tom, I can’t take this anymore. I won’t take this anymore.” Her voice sank to a whisper. “You told me you had changed, but you lied. Nothing’s changed.”

  That wasn’t true. He wanted to tell her, but all he could manage was: “Ann, I love you and Zach with all my heart.”

  “Stop it!” She spat, pounding her fists on her knees. “Your words are cheap. They’re for sale any day of the week to anyone with fifty cents! But one thing you can’t do with them is hold a family together!”

  Ann stood, grabbing a copy of the morning’s Star from the coffee table, the one with Virgil Shook’s shooting splashed on the front. “It can’t be done see!” She ripped up the paper tearing Shook on the stretcher in half, tossing the pieces aside. “You can’t hold anything together with paper.”

  Ann sat again, her face in her hands.

  He was stunned.

  She had reduced him to nothing.

  A zero.

  Everything he had struggled to be, the thing by which he defined himself, was demolished. His eyes went around the room, noticing their unpacked bags as he ingested the truth. Ann despised him not so much for his trespasses, but truly for what he was. He searched in vain for an answer. He wanted to tell her he had been fired, tell her everything. How he was haunted by the accusing eyes of a dead man’s little girl. How he was falling and needed to hang on to something. Someone. But he didn’t know what to say, how to begin.

  “Okay,” he said softly. “Okay. I understand.”

  He turned and left.

  Watching from his bedroom window, Zach saw his father’s car disappear down the street, the Comet’s grumbling muffler underscoring that promises had been broken. Tears rolled down Zach’s face.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Dust and pebbles pelted acting Calaveras County Sheriff Greg Brader as he watched the four helicopters descend one after the other, his shirt flapping angrily against his back.

  It was supposed to be his day off. He was painting his garage at his home in San Andreas when his wife had called him to the phone. It was his dispatcher: The SFPD and FBI were flying out immediately because of a possible county connection to the kidnapping case in the Bay Area. Brader had less than an hour to prepare.

  While some small town cops may have gotten jittery at the prospect of a profile case popping up in their yard, Brader was cool. Before coming to the county eight years ago, he had put in twelve years with the LAPD, six of them in Homicide. Without changing his torn jeans and stained T-shirt, he kissed his wife and got in his marked Suburban. He made calls over the radio and cellular while driving directly to West Point, a sleepy village forty minutes away.

  Brader and his two deputies cordoned off the ball diamond and its parking lot, turning it into a landing zone for the San Francisco FBI’s new McDonnell Douglas 450-NOTAR and larger Huey, which carried the FBI’s SWAT team. Sydowski, Turgeon, and a handful of others from the task force landed next to two CHP choppers.

  Special Agent Merle Rust and SFPD Inspector Walt Sydowski were the contact people, along with FBI SWAT team Leader Langford Shaw. Brader introduced himself, shouting over the noise of the rotor blades.

  “You fellas best ride with me. My guys will bring the others.” As requested, he had obtained a school bus for the SWAT team and its equipment. Other task force members rode with Brader’s deputies as they roared off in a convoy of three police cars and the bus.

  “We’ll be there in under twenty minutes,” Brader said after making a radio call to his deputies at the property. “I’ve had two people sitting back on the house since you called.”

  “What have you got?” Rust asked.

  “As you know, the pickup is currently registered to a Warren Urlich. He’s a sixty-eight-year-old recluse, a pensioner. Makes extra cash fixing cars and trucks; sells them, too. Neighbors say he never talks to anybody and he’s got so many vehicles on his property, they never know when he’s home.”

  “What about the kids?”

  “Like I told you when you were flying out, Urlich’s nearest neighbor thinks she saw two kids on the place that maybe arrived recently. A little boy and girl. She was only sure they weren’t living there before.”

  Rust and Sydowski exchanged glances.

  Stands of pine, cedar, and sequoias blurred by the Suburban as it ate up the paved ribbon snaking through the Sierras of Cavaleras County. This was where prospectors flocked during the gold rush in 1849. It was home to Twain’s celebrated jumping frog, clear lakes, streams, tranquility, and people who wanted to be left alone.

  Cars and pickups in various stages of disrepair, junk, a yapping dog on a long chain, and ramshackle outbuildings dotted Warren Urlich’s land, a three-acre hilly site with an abundance of trees.

&
nbsp; The FBI SWAT team set up a perimeter around the rickety house, while the county deputies and some task force members formed an outer perimeter. Brader’s Suburban and the bus, which was the command post, were virtually out of sight about one hundred yards from the house.

  From the hood of Brader’s truck, Sydowski glimpsed a broken toilet and a pit bull with a bloodied rabbit carcass in its jaws, as he swept the property with Brader’s binoculars. He chewed a Tums tablet--his second since they landed--and steadied himself for the worst. He feared another deadly shootout like the one with Shook. He prayed for the children to be alive, but if they were in this hole, they were ninety-nine percent for sure dead.

  He passed the binoculars to Turgeon. She rolled the focus wheel slightly, bit her lip, then handed the glasses to Brader.

  Sydowski studied her protectively for a moment.

  Inside the bus, SWAT Team Leader Langford Shaw made radio checks with his people. Everybody was in position. Fred Wheeler, the unit’s hostage negotiator, called the house over the FBI’s satellite phone.

  Someone answered.

  “Mr. Warren Urlich?”

  “Yup.”

  “Mr. Urlich, this is Fred Wheeler. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’d like to talk to you, sir. We have heavily armed people positioned around your home and would like you to please walk slowly out the front door with your hands in the air now.”

  Wheeler was answered with silence.

  “Mr. Urlich, Warren?”

  Nothing.

  “Did you hear me, sir?”

  “I heard you, I just don’t believe you. This a joke?”

  “We’ll sound a police siren now.”

  Wheeler nodded to Shaw, who signaled Brader and the Suburban’s siren yelped.

  “What do you want to talk about?”

  “We’ll discuss everything when you come out.”

  As Urlich and Wheeler talked, SWAT team members tightened on the house, peeking inside windows with miniature dental mirrors. A girl of about seven or eight was playing with a doll near the back door. In a heartbeat, an agent grabbed her, clasping his hand over her mouth, removing her to the outer perimeter.