Tom Reed Thriller Series

by Rick Mofina

  Cooter popped the last bit of his burger into his mouth and shrugged. Layne got up from her desk and began pacing.

  “This story is far from over. It can only get better. Reed’s not going to let up until he finds his wife,” Layne said. “We can’t afford to miss his next step, whatever it is. We have to be there.”

  Cooter sucked the remainder of his soda from his plastic cup, thinking.

  “How are we going to do that, Cooter? He doesn’t want to cooperate. He doesn’t want us near him. The police don’t want us near him. There has to be a way for us to do this.”

  Cooter wiped his face, then burped.

  “There is, Tia.”

  FIFTY-ONE

  Molly Wilson nearly fell, stepping from the shower in her apartment at the edge of Russian Hill near North Beach. Her home phone and her cell phone were ringing. Wrapping herself in a towel, she hurried to her living room.

  It could be the paper, but she prayed it was one of her police sources.

  Wilson had to know what the hell was going on with the investigation and Tom Reed. Earlier that day, she’d seen him at the garage in Excelsior. But Sydowski had refused to tell her much, so she called every cop she knew. She went to her home phone on the table at a bay window and grabbed it.

  “Hi, just hold on.”

  Her bag with her cell phone was on a chair next to the table. She pulled it out, pressed the talk button.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing. Missed the call. Damn! She felt water drip down her back from her damp hair as she went to the other phone.

  “Sorry, hello.”

  “Molly, it’s Todd at the paper, sorry to bother you at home.”

  “What is it?”

  “A caller, some woman, wants to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “She didn’t say. She just wanted to talk to you.” Wilson was running late to meet a police friend from the lab.

  “Put her to my voice mail.”

  “Tried that, she wants to talk to you.”

  “Take a message, Todd, I’m running late.”

  “She won’t leave any information. She insists on talking to you. I’ve got her on another line. Can I transfer her to you?”

  “Don’t give out my home number.”

  “I won’t, can I transfer her?”

  Wilson glanced at her watch.

  “Yes.”

  “Here we go.”

  San Francisco’s lights twinkled. Wilson could see the Golden Gate.

  The line clicked.

  “Hello,” a woman said.

  “Hi, this is Molly Wilson.”

  “You’re the reporter at the San Francisco Star who sits right beside Tom Reed?” Her voice was rough, husky but sober and coherent. Mid-thirties.

  “Yes. But I’m running late.”

  “I’ve got a message for you.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It’s actually a message for Tom Reed.”

  “Look, I don’t have time for this. Why are you calling me?”

  “You sit beside him, right? That’s what your office told me, right?”

  “I sit beside him.”

  “Then police aren’t running a tap on your line.”

  The caller had Wilson’s full attention. “Who are you?”

  “No police.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You got to swear no police, or I won’t give you the information and Reed will never know.”

  “Never know what?” Wilson grabbed her bag. Where’s the tape recorder?

  “You protect sources?”

  “We protect sources. What’s the information?”

  “If police are involved there’s no information.”

  “Damn it! What’s the information?” Wilson managed to find a notebook and pen. “We get a lot of crank calls. What’re you talking about?” She couldn’t find her cassette recorder but began scrolling through the function menu on her telephone answering machine. “Could you wait a minute? I was on my way out and you got me tangled up here.”

  “I’m calling from a stolen cell phone, the call went first to your sports department then transferred to news, then you.”

  Wilson found record conversation, activated the key, and a bright red indicator light began flashing.

  “What sort of information do you have?”

  “The kind that has to be delivered in person to Tom Reed, so he knows where it’s coming from. But no police.”

  “Yes. No police. Just Reed.”

  “It’s got to be very soon. Take down these instructions.” Wilson took notes and read them back, wondering if this was a ransom call, a crank, or the real thing.

  “Look, you have to tell me, so I can tell him. Is this about Ann Reed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she all right? Where is she? Is she hurt? Are you with her?”

  The line went dead.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Molly Wilson’s bracelets jingled as she tore the page from her notebook and approached one of the officers outside Tom Reed’s house.

  “So?” The cop read the note, indicating other reporters milling nearby. “They all want to see Reed privately. He ain’t talkin’.”

  “He’ll talk to me, Molly Wilson from the Star.”

  “The Star, where Reed works?”

  “I don’t want to tie up his phone. But you guys won’t let anyone on his property. So would you please send my note in quietly?”

  He considered her request for a moment.

  “I need to stretch my legs. Give me your card.” The old cop heaved himself out of his Crown Victoria.

  Fifteen minutes later, no one noticed Wilson break from the press pack to wait at the rear yard gate where the officer said Tom would meet her. He came out of his house alone. They sat on the small bench under a tree. She didn’t waste a second.

  “Tom, I got a call. It came to the paper. They put it to my home.”

  “About Ann?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she alive? Where is she? Do they want money?”

  “Hold on, let me—”

  “How long ago did you get the call?”

  “About twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.”

  “Half an hour! Molly, why didn’t you call me or—”

  “It was a woman. She said she’d give up information on the condition you didn’t tell the police. That’s why she called my line. She wants to meet. I couldn’t call you without the FBI hearing. I came straight to you to let you decide. Could be a nut. Could be real. I recorded what I could. There’s not much. Listen.”

  After Wilson played the few seconds of instructions Reed said, “Is your car here?”

  “Down the street”

  “I’ll tell everybody in the house that I have to check something in the newsroom. Park at the next block intersection and wait for me.”

  The caller wanted to meet across the bay in Oakland. Reed’s stomach knotted as they crossed the Bay Bridge and he searched the night for answers.

  “So what happened at the garage, Tom?”

  “You want to know as a reporter, or as a friend?”

  “What? God. As a friend, Tom. God, what’s happening here? I came to you with this. I told no one about this. For God’s sake. It’s me, Molly. I sit beside you at the paper and confide my heart to you.”

  Reed rubbed his stubble, apologized, then told her what happened to him when he chased his own lead on Carrie Dawn Addison to Caesar. Wilson shook her head in disbelief.

  “Then I slug it out with Sydowski, who tells me I’m getting too close, that I should stay out of the way. He promises to keep me posted. Then right after that, I find out about the garage. Not from him, but from Tia Layne.”

  “That tabloid woman who stole the report?”

  “I’m going out of my mind, Molly. I’ve got to find her. No matter what, I’ve got to end this.”

  The meeting was at a basement bar in a renovated warehouse near the waterfront a few blocks
from Jack London Square. Its steps creaked. Its walls evoked the planks and beams of a ship. They found a booth, ordered mineral water, and waited. To Reed, the tattooed, goateed customers suggested parolees.

  “You get anything from the drug dealer?” Wilson said. Reed told her everything Caesar told him.

  “But he never gave you names?”

  “No, but it all happened at Folsom. Sydowski figures they’ll get a hit from latents in the garage.”

  “But they haven’t found anything yet?”

  “Still waiting.”

  “How are you holding up, Tom, really?”

  “Hoping and praying, Molly. All I want to—I don’t know.”

  Reed checked the time on his cell phone. Thirty minutes past the appointed hour and nothing. Wilson checked her phone to make sure it was working and the battery was strong.

  Ninety minutes after the specified meet time, Wilson said, “This is cruel.” Then they left.

  Walking to Wilson’s car, Reed gazed across the bay at San Francisco’s lights. He was defeated. His hand shook when he touched the door handle. He was losing it.

  “Tom Reed?”

  A woman stepped from a darkened doorway. White, mid-thirties. Black jeans, black leather waist-cut jacket. Hands in the pockets. Big hoop earrings, short bleached hair.

  “I had to be sure you didn’t bring the cops.” She had the face of a woman who’d had a hard life and her tone carried an air of genuine fear.

  “Do you know where my wife is?”

  “No, it’s not like that.”

  “Do you want money, are you a messenger?”

  “Listen—”

  “Please take your hands out of your pockets so I can see them,” Reed said.

  Wilson took stock of the area. Gulls shrieked above. The horn of a tug moaned in the distance.

  “You visited my boyfriend in Folsom a few months back and wrote about him. You said his crimes were due to his drug problems. That helped him at his hearing. He heard about your wife and wants to help you, so he sent me to give you information to your face, then take your reaction back to him.”

  Reed remembered.

  “Donnie Ray Ball. The county homicide cop who robbed banks in the East Bay.”

  She nodded.

  “What’s your name?” Reed said.

  “Angela.”

  “What does Donnie know?”

  “None of it can get back to him, that’s why he has to be vague and, believe me, I don’t know nothing, okay?” Angela’s voice wavered. She was shaking. He exchanged glances with Wilson. This was the real thing.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Donnie says if his information works out, you’ve got to remember that he did this good thing for you. That you owe him.”

  Reed thought about it.

  “If it works out, I’ll remember that he helped. If it works out.”

  “He said there were three of them. They all did time in Folsom, that’s how they knew each other. He caught wind of it in C Yard. More new information came to him through the grapevine after the cop got shot and your wife taken. It’s big news, you know—”

  “Angela, who are the men? I want their names.”

  She swallowed.

  “You know the dead one, Driscoll.”

  “Everyone does. Come on.”

  “Donnie couldn’t give you the names but said I could only tell you where to look for one of them.”

  “Jesus, Angela.” Reed stepped toward her. “Are you going to help me, god dammit? What are their names and where did they go?”

  Angela shook her head, swallowed.

  “Donnie said he thinks they never planned to take her, that it just happened she was there, that it wasn’t part of their plan.”

  “Is he involved in this?”

  “No.”

  “Then tell me, where is my wife?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know? That’s it. What the hell are you trying to pull?”

  “Wait, no, you’ve got to listen.”

  “What are their names? Where did they go?” Reed was shouting.

  “Tom.” Wilson grabbed his arm.

  “All I know,” Angela whispered, “and all Donnie said, and I swear to God this is the truth, I’m so sorry, but all he said was you had to look back at some old news stories.”

  “Old stories? Which stories? I wrote hundreds and hundreds.”

  “Stories from way back, about guys thinking they got away with murder.”

  “What?”

  “Donnie said the guy behind the robbery is in your stories.

  “He’s in my stories?”

  “Donnie says you met him.”

  Reed’s intestines contracted. I met him.

  “Oh Christ,” Wilson said, drawing their attention to the SUV half a block down the street. “I think somebody’s watching us.”

  Reed saw a glint of glass at a passenger window. Binoculars? What was going on? He turned back to Angela. She was gone.

  FIFTY-THREE

  Make the unseen seen. That was the personal code of Officer Nancy Chang, an SFPD fingerprint expert.

  Since the robbery homicide, Chang’s life was lived in nineteen-hour days, at the Hall, the lab at Hunter’s Point, and the crime scenes. She rose at daybreak to join other forensic techs in the pursuit of clear prints that would identify the suspects. The case wouldn’t yield anything. Nothing from the jewelry store, the van, or August’s patrol car. They dusted and scoped everywhere and everything—the shell casings, the spent rounds, the grenades—but nothing was usable. Same story for the FBI and the San Bernardino County and the guys in Arizona. Nothing.

  Chang reached for her coffee mug, a personalized birthday gift from her friends at the ME’s office. She loved the enlarged thumbprint logo, over the words Leave some for me.

  After striking out at Addison’s apartment, it had started to look as if these suspects were going to beat them. They were either very smart or very lucky. But luck is like time. Sooner or later it runs out for everyone, Chang figured as she sipped coffee and resumed wrapping up her work on the new impressions investigators found at Jed Caverly’s garage.

  As with the Addison apartment, Chang first made a set of elimination prints of everyone who might have been inside that garage, starting with Jed Caverly. One team of techs worked on Ann Reed’s Jetta. Nothing. Then they got busy on every item in the garage, including the trash where they found fast-food wrappers, take-out cups, cigarette butts, and empty beer cans. The trash yielded dead Driscoll’s prints again.

  And something new.

  Unidentified latents on the beer cans.

  The techs had dusted the cans, photographed the prints with an old reliable CU-5, before collecting them with lifting tape. What they had was a good clear set of impressions from the right hand. After Chang studied the arches, whorls, and loops, they confirmed what she’d suspected. Nothing fit with the elimination set from the garage, or any of the other scenes. She double, then triple-checked.

  Definitely a new player.

  Chang locked on to the five fingerprints she had of the new sample. Starting with the right thumb, which in a standard ten-card is number one, she carefully coded its characteristics, then those of the other fingers. Then she scanned the prints and entered all the information into her computer. Now she could submit it to the SFPD’s automated fingerprint-identification systems, AFIS, for a rapid search through massive local, state, and nationwide data banks for a match.

  And here we go. Chang typed a few commands on her keyboard, sighed, and reached for her mug. Her computer hummed as it processed her data for a list of possible matches to study.

  After fifteen seconds, it came back with two hits from the SFPD’s local data bank. That’s a start, she thought. It would take about ten minutes before she got results from the California Identification System, Cal-ID, a computerized file holding the fingerprints of some eight million people, which was operated by California’s justice d
epartment in Sacramento.

  It would take longer before her submission was searched through the regional information sharing systems, like the western states network and the FBI’s mother of all data banks, the IAFIS, which stored nearly seven hundred million impressions from law enforcement agencies across the country.

  Chang went to the coffee room to start a fresh pot of coffee and heat up the mushroom soup she’d brought from home; then she returned to her computer. The search was done. It offered her a list of seven possibles that closely matched her unidentified submission.

  Now we're talking.

  Chang set out to make a visual point-by-point comparison between the garage print and the seven on the list. Seven. Lucky number seven. Chang’s pulse increased. This was when she was at her best, zeroing in on the critical minutiae points, like the trail of ridges near the tip of the number-two finger. Dissimilarities there. That eliminated the first two candidates right off. We have some lovely parting gifts. On the next set, she enlarged the samples even more to visually count the number of ridges on the number-three finger. Distinct differences emerged. Thanks for playing. That took care of all of the others.

  All but one.

  Chang’s eyes narrowed as she compared her submission with the computer’s remaining suggested match. All the minutiae points matched. The branching of the ridges matched. Her breathing quickened as she began counting up the clear points of comparison where the two samples matched. Some courts required ten to fifteen clear point matches. She had twenty-three and was still counting, knowing that one divergent point instantly eliminated a print. By the time she’d compared the left-slanting patterns from the last finger, Chang had thirty-five clear points of comparison and was thinking ahead about testifying in court.

  This is a match. I do so swear. So help me God.

  Finally she matched the scales of the prints, then used her computer program to superimpose one over the other, the way one would trace a picture. She swallowed, clenched her fist, and touched it to her desktop.

  A perfect match. Yes.

  Chang then confirmed the identification number of her new subject, and submitted a query into a number of data banks. One of them, the California Law Enforcement Telecommunication System, CLETS, a network run by the justice department’s Hawkins Data Center. Chang’s query ran through an array of systems, including the FBI’s National Crime Information Center, California’s department of motor vehicles, the state justice department. It also accessed the various systems of California’s department of corrections, including the Parole Law Enforcement Automated Data System, LEADS, and the Automated Criminal History System. The submission could verify parolee history, offender identification, arrest records, convictions, holds, and commitments for other law enforcement agencies, even create all points bulletins and drop warrants.