by Rick Mofina
Being an old mountain cop, Thornton had a few concerns. Like how Doug hurt that hand. Said he did it chopping wood. Funny, Thornton had already poked around some. No sign of an ax. Something was going on here. Something Doug and Emily had not told them.
Well, not yet anyway, he thought, tucking his notebook in his pocket.
FIVE
Walt Sydowski’s eighty-eight-year-old father, John, played his last card, the queen of diamonds.
“Victory.”
“You are a crafty old fox,” Sydowski said in Polish, losing a round of crazy eights, their favorite game.
“Not too old to teach you a trick or two, eh?” John’s eyes twinkled, as he claimed his five bucks, folding it triumphantly.
“That’s right, Pop.” Sydowski patted his old man’s wrinkled hands. “I’ve got to check on the birds, Dad. Want to help me?”
“Sure, let’s go.”
Sydowski was enjoying having his father stay with him during these few days he was off. Sydowski lived alone in Parkside in the house where he and his wife, Basha, had raised two daughters. It got a little lonely. His old man, a retired barber, still preferred to live at Sea Breeze Villas, a seniors’ complex in Pacifica. He had his friends, his vegetable garden, and followed baseball. Sydowski liked his visits. Before their game they had homemade cream of potato soup, the way Basha used to make it. With real cream.
They went to the aviary Sydowski had built in his backyard under the oak tree, a lifetime ago it seemed. Inside, they were met by the cooing of some five dozen caged song birds. Photographs and ribbons won at bird fairs covered the paneled walls. Sydowski liked coming here to listen to the tiny birds and review cases. Like the doubleheader they cleared a few months ago. That beast almost brought him to his knees.
Sydowski was concerned about his new bred budgerigars. They offered appealing cinnamon and opaline wing markings but he noticed their droppings seemed off color and lacked consistency. Maybe if he fortified their seed mix with some calcium.
“You know, Dad, I met a nice lady a few months ago at the Seattle show.”
“Louise, from San Jose. You got the budgies from her. You told me.”
“I was thinking of asking her over for dinner.”
“You need a woman? At your age?”
“Watch it.”
Sydowski smiled at last week’s conversation on the phone, Louise asking him for coffee.
“I could come to San Francisco, Walt. Or you could come here?”
“Well, I got some cases to work on,” he said. “Can I get back to you?”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
They’d hit it off in Seattle. Louise was a budgie breeder, also widowed. Her husband, a judge, had died three years ago. Stroke. Her daughter owned a small computer-graphics company in Sacramento. Her son was a medical lawyer in Pittsburgh. Aside from her birds, she taught drama classes and was a working actor. She had done some national commercials and had been an extra in a few movies. Louise was vibrant--sixty-one going on forty-one. Gorgeous and, for some strange reason, smitten with him the moment she came up behind him on the floor of the Seattle show.
“Well where did you come from, Mr. Walt Sydowski?”
He turned to meet mischief and flirtation in the green eyes peering up at him over a coffee mug.
Sydowski had a pleasing, solid six-foot-three, two-hundred-pound build, wavy salt-and-pepper hair touching off his dark complexion and rugged smile, which glinted because of his two gold-crowned teeth. Most people were intrigued by his smile. Unless, of course, they were a suspected killer.
Louise had cast some sort of spell on him that day in Seattle. She had done some investigating, learning from other exhibitors all about Inspector Wladyslaw Sydowski of the San Francisco Homicide Detail.
They talked over lunch, about raising a family, about losing a spouse, about acting, about memories, about birds. He liked her and told her of the anguish of cases involving children.
Being with her was like being with an old friend, and in the weeks after Seattle, when they talked on the phone, Sydowski felt something warm flowing into an area of his life that had been cold and empty for so long. But why was he afraid?
“You think you are cheating on Basha after six years? Or that the girls might not approve? You want my permission to have a date?”
Sydowski stroked a fledgling with his pinky knuckle and shrugged.
“I guess, something like that. I don’t know.”
“Your problem is you maybe want to leave the job, or need something new in your life. Those cases with the baby and the kidnapped kids still shake you pretty good. I see it in your face.”
Sydowski would always be haunted by the case of two-year-old Tanita Marie Donner. Her little corpse hidden in Golden Gate Park. For over a year, he went nuts trying to clear it. Then two other kids were abducted, creating hysteria for the Bay Area, pressure from the brass. The fear that all three files were connected when another child was grabbed--the son of Tom Reed, a reporter for the San Francisco Star, who was covering the story. The kidnapper, a psycho twitcher named Keller, had planned to kill the kids.
“Yes, they were hard cases. You could be on the right track there, Pop.”
After Keller, it took a few weeks for Sydowski to wind down. In all his years with the SFPD, in handling nearly six hundred homicides, he’d never seen anything like it. He hoped to hell he would never see anything like it again. During the darkest moments of the investigation, he would sit in the aviary with his birds and miss his wife deeply. That was his problem. The last big cases were not his career enders. He did not want to hang up his shield because of them. On the up side, they brought him together with his new young partner, Inspector Linda Turgeon.
Working with her was like having a third daughter. They got along well. Even when they argued. No, he was not ready to hang it up. He loved the job. It kept his brain functioning. He was a homicide cop. But when files got rough, they underscored the void of Basha’s absence. He would never stop loving her, yet he did not want to be handcuffed to her death. This was his dilemma. Now Louise had come into his life, maybe not to fill a void, but to help him live past it. And she wanted to see him again. So what should he do?
“I think I am going to ask Louise out. What do you think, Pop?”
“You keep asking me. She is not my girlfriend.” John inched his hand into a cage and let a Fife perch on his forefinger.
“You think it is appropriate after six years?”
“You’re the cop. Is it against the law?”
The phone in the aviary rang. Sydowski got it on the second ring. It was his boss, Lieutenant Leo Gonzales.
“Walt, I’m sending Linda over to take you to the airport.”
Sydowski was taken aback. It was his day off. Was this a joke?
“No, Leo. You say, ‘Hello, Walt, how are you?’ Then I say, ‘I’m fine, Leo, and how are you?’”
Sydowski could hear Leo placing his hand over his mouthpiece, talking to people at the Homicide Detail. Tension leaking through.
“…you tell them”-- Leo was talking to someone else at his end--“that we are cooperating fully and quickly. Tell them that. Walt? You still there?”
“What is it?”
“I got to send you to Montana right now.”
“Montana? What the --”
“You’ve been requested to assist the FBI on a breaking case.”
“Requested by whom?”
“The feebees. Asked for our best guy and you got to be there now.”
“Now?” Sydowski looked at his dad.
“Linda will take you to the airport and give you a file. Someone with the Bureau will pick you up in Kalispell.”
“What the hell is going on in Montana, Leo?”
“Missing girl. Ten years old. From San Francisco. In a national park.”
Sydowski’s stomach clenched and his heartburn from the potato soup flared. The price for not holding the onions.
A missi
ng kid.
“Why do they need me in Montana? This is unusual. It’s an FBI case in Montana. They just don’t do this. What’s going on?”
“Kid’s hiking in Glacier National Park, with Mommy and Daddy. Wanders off. Lost. Dad hikes back to report her missing.”
“Find a body? Any evidence of a crime?”
“No, but Dad’s got a hurt hand.”
“Pretty weak, Leo. Come on. What’s the family history?”
“The feebs asked us to run the old man through our system and we got a hit. A few days before they left for their trip, we were called to their house by a neighbor.”
“Charges?”
“None.”
“What are the details of the call?”
“Domestic assault complaint. Neighbor says the dad was shouting, threatening violence. Linda’s going through the old report, making calls, putting it together with stuff the FBI sent us in a file for you. Seems the father got in a bar fight quite a few years back in Chicago. Did three days for that. The guys got a temper.”
“This requires me to rush to Montana? The FBI has people there and here. What, they lose the numbers?”
“It is out of our hands.”
“Sounds like somebody’s pumped to build a case where maybe none exists. I’m going to pass, Leo. I’ve got plans and--”
“You are going to the mountains, Inspector.”
“How’s that?”
“Walt, you have no say. Unless you are retiring today?”
“What is the deal on this, Leo? What’s going on here?”
“Rangers and feebees got a very bad smell on this thing the instant it broke.” Walt heard Leo shuffling papers. “The strategy is to quietly pull out all the stops now in the event it turns into a homicide. Remember that case not too long ago in Yellowstone? It prompted the rangers and FBI to go hard at the outset. Then there was that old mess in Colorado, a missing turns into kidnapping turns into homicide?”
“So?”
“And the South Carolina case. Mom screams on the networks that a stranger took her two kids, when it turns out she killed them?”
“So? The rangers and FBI can handle their own cases. When we catch one, we don’t wet our pants, call for help to come hold our hand.”
“I suspect big political buttons were pushed here. The park is federal jurisdiction. It is the state’s tourist jewel. The Montana governor has pull. He calls Washington, who calls Sacramento, who calls our employer, who calls us, and now I’m calling you. They want this settled fast. No mistakes. Whatever the hell happened in the mountains they want it cleared fast, solid and by the book. Preferably with a happy ending. No weekly TV panel discussions with experts pointing out the screw-ups.”
Sydowski cursed under his breath and shook his head.
“Anybody think it may be a matter of a child missing in the woods?”
“It is your sworn duty as an officer assisting in this file to help the team determine if that is the case. Accomplish that, Inspector Sydowski, and your duty will have been done. Then you can go fishing.”
“You know, Leo, you are a sycophantic boot-licking toady.”
“You will be assisting a Special Agent Frank Zander. I think he’s coming in from D.C. A brass-balled mother who could build a case against the pope for Jimmy Hoffa. You are supposed to challenge him to make the case solid.”
“If I see a bear, I’ll cuff it, then bring it back and feed him your asshole.”
“I knew you would see things my way, dear. Pack flannel.”
“Up yours.” Sydowski slammed down the phone.
His father said, “I take it that was not Louise?”
The call meant Sydowski’s old man had to go home to Pacifica, so he called a cab for him, then phoned a friend in his bird club who lived a few doors down the street. The friend had a key to Sydowski’s aviary and agreed to tend to his birds while he was away. Within twenty minutes, both men had finished packing when Linda arrived in an unmarked Chevy Caprice. Sydowski was upstairs. His old man let her in.
“Hi there. I’m Linda Turgeon, Walt’s partner.” She removed her sunglasses. Her brunette hair had been recently cut in a jaw-length bob. She was wearing a tailored lavender suit and looked very nice.
“I am his wise father, John.” He was wearing his Giants’ ball cap and a frayed navy sweater over a plaid shirt. “You look cute--like my granddaughters.”
Linda blushed. “Thank you, John. Walt told me you were not shy.” She was a little puzzled, noticing the old man’s hat, his bag by his feet. “Are you accompanying him on this trip?”
“No, he is going home, Linda,” Sydowski came down the stairs. “Grab your bag, Pop. Cab’s here.”
“My son is grumpy. He called his boss a toad because this new case is interfering with his new romance.”
Linda’s surprised eyes widened and she shot a pretty smile at Sydowski, who began shuffling him to the street. “Let’s go, old man.”
Sydowski got his father into the cab and on his way to Pacifica. He locked the house and dropped with an angry sigh into the front passenger seat of the Caprice. Turgeon had them on 101 in good time.
Walt stared at San Francisco’s skyline rolling by the Golden Gate in the distance, the majestic spires of the Bay Bridge.
“Do you believe this case, Linda?”
“Given what we went through recently, are you kidding?”
“What could they possibly have that warrants this kind of reaction?”
“You had something better to do? You got a life now?”
“You got a file for me?”
“You’re sitting on it. So who’s your new honey?”
Sydowski grunted, fishing for the file.
“Never mind. How did your reunion date go with your ex-fiancé architect?” He glanced superficially at papers on Doug Baker.
“Had animal monkey sex on his dining room table.”
“Never invite me for dinner.” Sydowski could not find his glasses. He’d read Baker’s file on the plane.
“We just talked, Walt. We’re going to take it one step at a time.”
“Still thinking about making babies?”
“Thinking about a lot of things, Dad.”
“Let’s talk about work now, please?”
“Your plane tickets are waiting at the counter. We’re on this together. I am working local checks here with the FBI. It’s their show, Walt. They’re rushing, putting things together. Moving really fast.”
“What is your sense of it at this stage?”
“They told me zero. We do not know all of their holdback. It’s either a straight up missing kid case…or a mystery.”
“Well, we have this.” Sydowski held up the file.
Linda nodded. Dead serious. “I’ll be interested in your opinion on everything. Got a few pages there, including theories from Montana already.”
“Based on the information we know, she’s been lost in the woods, what, about twenty-four, thirty hours?”
“Yup.”
“And this is a remote region of Glacier National Park?”
“One of the most remote areas of the U.S.”
“Find out if the family is the avid, outdoors type. Or if this was an impulse trip. Like why there and why now. What was going on in their lives.”
“There’s the old cop I know. Welcome back.”
Once his jet leveled off, Sydowski slipped on his bifocals and read every word in the file. Twice. The faxed copy of Pike Thornton’s fresh notes had currency with Sydowski. He had met him several weeks ago at a detectives’ conference in Kansas City. They led a panel discussion on “The Intangibles of Investigation,” the virtue of heeding gut instincts.
Thornton believed Doug was hiding something about how he injured his hand, that the Bakers were not forthcoming, that there seemed to be much more beneath the surface. Doug’s hand wound was disturbing. Said he did it with an ax, which seemed to be missing along with the kid. Sydowski went over the recent complaint San Fra
ncisco police had on the family. A neighbor reported that Doug Baker had threatened to assault his wife and daughter in their backyard. Dispatch sent a car to the house. There was tension but no assault. Mother said it was a misunderstanding. That was it.
Sydowski closed the file folder. There were lots of troubling points about this case. His heartburn flared; he chewed on a Tums as his jet banked north toward the Rocky Mountains.
SIX
“They found her head near Dallas,” the cop on the phone was telling Tom Reed, a crime reporter with the San Francisco Star.
Reed drew a small circle in his notebook, placing it in Texas on his rough map of the country. Other, tiny pieces of a stick person were scattered throughout the southern United States.
“The head near Dallas.” Reed looked at the newsroom clock. His vacation started in a few hours. He was flying to Chicago in a few days. His wife’s sister was getting married.
“Hey Reed, you with me, all-star?” Inspector Harry Lance from the SFPD Homicide Detail resumed his discourse on dismemberment cases.
“Yeah, Harry. Head near Dallas, a leg near Tulsa, a leg near Nashville, an arm near Wheeling, an arm near Savannah and the rest in Louisville.”
“So who gets jurisdiction, Mr. Celebrity?”
Would it ever end? Reed shook his head. For some inexplicable reason ever since the Keller case, just about every detective, reporter or armchair critic Reed met, seemed obligated to mess with him.
You were an asshole getting so close to that story. Ever think of that?
After the Keller case, the national press portrayed Reed as some sort of hero whose “relentless investigation” helped find Keller. But Reed knew the truth. He had lived it. He had told everyone how stupid he was. How un-heroic he was, how lucky he was, extending his concern to the other families involved. That is what Reed told every interviewer. But that was not what they wanted to hear: Tell us about your “relentless investigation”.
