Tom Reed Thriller Series

by Rick Mofina

  He was waiting for him.

  Sydowski climbed the stairs thinking the killer knew Hooper and was waiting for him at the top of the landing. If he didn’t know him, would he still go up? Maybe he wasn’t threatening? Maybe he pulled a gun and demanded Hooper unlock the door?

  No forced entry. No struggle. Hooper let him in, and once inside, the killer disarmed him, then fired a round. It was a warning round, judging from the angle and height, fired at chest-level into the wall, to compel Hooper to do as he was told. Hoop would obey, but he would be cool, thinking, I can talk my way out of this, or get to my off-duty gun.

  “Hey, Walt.” Phibbs with Crime Scene met Sydowski and Turgeon in the kitchen. “The place is clear. We’re done with it.”

  “You’ve got something?”

  “Yes, Finn’s got it in the bedroom.”

  Maybe Hooper was ordered into his bedroom, then onto his bed. The killer was enraged, he could barely wait. Talk was useless. It was quick, he smashed his fist into Hooper’s head, or he did it to subdue or confuse him. Then he drew his gun close and fired, causing the star-patterned contact wound on Hooper’s temple. Then he set Hooper’s weapon and ID on his back.

  Mission accomplished.

  “Walt?” Turgeon repeated. “You with me?”

  “In here,” Finn called.

  “Sorry.” Sydowski followed Turgeon to Finn, who was in a white jumpsuit, into the darkened bedroom where Hooper died.

  “All right,” Finn began. “I’ll bring you up to speed. We’re done here, but we followed up on the wall here where you thought there was an attempt to clean up some blood.”

  “Yeah,” Sydowski said.

  “There was. We got samples of Hooper’s blood, his type is A-positive. Then once everything else in the room was processed, and you were done, we went to work on the wall.” Finn had prepared a jug of water, sodium perborate, sodium carbonate, and Luminol. He’d attached a small sprayer, then applied the solution to the bedroom’s ceiling, floor, and wall, including the wall that had drawn Sydowski’s attention after he’d spotted blood droplets. The process, known as chemical luminescence, would detect any blood a suspect may have wiped clean, or made invisible, to the naked eye. Once the solution contacted blood, it reacted to ultraviolet light.

  Finn asked Turgeon to close the door and Sydowski to draw the curtains. It was still overcast outside. The room went black when Finn killed the lights. He switched on a purplish blue foot-long wand of ultraviolet light and held it to the wall.

  “See, it looks like your suspect dipped a gloved finger in Hooper’s blood to do this.”

  Sydowski slipped on his glasses and an eerie glow reflected on his face.

  Scrawled in Hooper’s blood, the killer had written one word in ten-inch letters: Why?

  TWELVE

  The towers of St. Ignatius Church jutted from a hilltop some two miles south of the bay and the Golden Gate Bridge. Near Golden Gate Park, next to the University of San Francisco.

  Its classical baroque architecture was lost on the news crews, who kept a respectable distance, and the unseen police surveillance teams, who recorded everybody attending Cliff Hooper’s funeral.

  Molly Wilson and Hooper’s sister, Andrea, clasped hands as they entered the church after his casket was removed from the hearse and wheeled inside.

  It was placed in the sanctuary and bathed in the sunlight descending through the Holy Spirit depicted in the stained glass dome. The low soothing hum of the organ and the smells of incense, candles, and fresh flowers wafted over the gathering.

  Molly sat next to Andrea and her husband. Next to Molly sat Hooper’s partner, Ray Beamon.

  Given that Hooper had not died on duty, the service did not entail a full police color guard. Several hundred mourners were there. Scores of dignitaries. Among them: the chief of police, the mayor, the commissioner, justice VIPs from Sacramento, Sydowski, Turgeon, everyone from the homicide detail, along with police officers from across the bay, the state, and the country.

  Tom and Ann Reed sat with Della Thompson, Acker, Violet Stewart, Simon Lepp, and other friends from the San Francisco Star who’d come to pay their respects. Irene Pepper sat at the back along with scores of other reporters and editors from Bay Area newsrooms who knew Molly.

  She wore pearl earrings and a matching necklace. A gift from Hooper. Running her fingers tenderly over the single gem on her gold chain, Molly remembered when he gave it to her. They’d gone to Golden Gate Park for an afternoon. He’d joked about wanting to give a lasting gift, like carving her initials into a tree, he kidded. But he was too law-abiding. Besides, he wanted her to have something she could keep with her at all times. So he teased her by scrounging in his pockets. “Let’s see.” He grinned at possible tokens of affection: a paper clip, gum, change, then a small jewelry box. “What’s in here?” Cliff was so sweet. Molly thought of his smile as the music trailed away. The congregation shuffled their funeral cards and the officiating priest went to the microphone at the small podium to commence the service. “Everyone who knew Hoop loved him,” he began, summarizing the life of Clifford James Hooper, a fifteen-year veteran of the department who died at age forty-one.

  “He was born and raised in Lodi, California, where he’d worked relentlessly at realizing his dream of becoming a detective. When he was a boy, he’d written in his journal: ‘I want to be a police officer so I can catch bad guys by using my brains, like Sherlock Holmes.’ ”

  Some chuckled softly. The priest smiled and went on. “After earning a degree in criminology, he joined the San Francisco Police Department, graduating with third-highest average scores. His first detail was in Ingleside where after one year on the street he was decorated with the Medal of Valor for disarming a mentally disturbed, knifewielding man who was holding his twelve-year-old daughter hostage. Both are alive and well and living good lives thanks to Cliff.”

  The priest continued highlighting Hooper’s rise within the department, ending with Homicide. Then he listed the others at the service who were going to pay tribute. Molly touched her eyes with a tissue and fidgeted with her sheet of paper on which she’d written what she was going to say. It was folded neatly into quarters. She would speak near the end. The mayor was up first and began by honoring the entire department.

  “We know that every day you start your tour, you put it on the line for us, and for that, this city is deeply grateful,” the mayor said. “We can only pray that whoever did this to a fine son of the city is brought to justice.”

  Molly gazed at the beautiful stained glass, the Corinthian columns, and wished this were all a bad dream, a horrible dream as the police chaplain followed the mayor.

  “Something evil brought us all together today,” the chaplain said. “Something wicked has pierced our hearts. But it will never defeat us. For no such act of cruelty, no attempt by darkness, shall ever succeed. We will prevail.” Hooper’s sister was next. Andrea squeezed Molly’s hand, then her husband’s before going to the podium where she reflected on how all of her life she’d looked up to her big brother. How after their parents passed away she became closer to him, her rock during the storms of her life. “Cliffie,” she said, staring at his casket, “you’ll always be my hero.”

  Molly began to quiver, wondering if she could go through with this as the chief of police went next, barely containing his anger.

  “Not many of you are aware, but I knew Hooper when I was a captain and he worked for me a few years back. He went undercover on some dangerous operations and he got the job done. And done well. He was one of the finest officers I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with.” The chief took his time so the weight of his words could be felt.

  “What happened to Hoop is an insult and an outrage to our police family,” the chief said, letting seconds pass. A few people coughed, some sniffled. “Yes, we’re all hurting, and that’s understandable. But make no mistake. This will not weaken us. Find solace and draw strength from our maxim. ‘Oro en paz, fierro en
guerra. Gold in Peace. Iron in War.’ We don’t just wear it. We don’t just carry it around. We swear by it. We live by it. And we die by it.”

  Molly watched Beamon rub his knees. He was next. She patted his hand. He went to the podium, gripping its sides as if struggling not to fall.

  A few rows back Sydowski raised his chin, tightened his arms across his chest, and absorbed every iota of Beamon’s demeanor.

  “My family moved around a lot when I was a kid. As an only child, I never knew the feeling of a large family until I joined the SFPD,” he began. “I was in Robbery before I went to Homicide a few years ago. That’s where I met Cliff.” Beamon paused.

  “He’d already put in quite a few years in Homicide when he got me for a partner. But he was cool with that. He was patient. He was my mentor and maybe sometimes we didn’t see eye to eye--” He stopped to rub his right hand across his lip, and Sydowski tightened his focus on Beamon’s scraped knuckles. “But he taught me, watched over me. He was my brother and I loved him.”

  Turgeon touched the corners of her eyes. Sydowski shifted in his seat, thinking long and hard, reassured by the fact the police surveillance team was capturing video and audio of everyone inside and outside the church.

  Molly took a deep breath, squeezed her piece of folded paper, then patted Beamon’s shoulder as she rose to take her place at the podium.

  She unfolded her sheet, its crisp crackling echoing. Then she cleared her throat to assure herself that she’d have the strength to push words through her mouth. “Just read your words. Read aloud, slowly and clearly,” the priest had advised her before the service on how to get through it.

  “Cliff was a kind, gentle man who always worried about the children who got caught up in some of his cases. He wanted to have his own family one day and I know he would have made a terrific dad.”

  Molly kept her eyes on her sheet because she was too nervous to raise them and look into all of the faces before her. She could feel their anguish, their suffering, their loss, and their rage.

  “I know Cliff loved police work and thought the world of all of you.” Molly lifted her head to the congregation, cast a sweeping gaze over them, before seeing something that made her heart stop.

  A man who had been standing at the rear of the church, listening as the others eulogized Hooper, was now taking slow steps up the aisle toward her, his face coming into view until Molly recognized him. She was stunned. He found a pew with an empty seat. He settled into it and looked at her.

  Oh my God! This can’t be!

  Transfixed for a moment, Molly struggled with her composure before she finished reading her words. Afterward, the priest gestured to Beamon to assist her back to her seat. Everyone at the service had assumed she’d been overwhelmed by grief. No one knew the truth.

  Molly had just been visited by a ghost.

  THIRTEEN

  Warm breezes fingered along the waterways that laced the heart of the San Joaquin Valley to the small country cemetery near Lodi where San Francisco Police Homicide Inspector Clifford Hooper was buried.

  There was no marker. His headstone was not yet finished. Dying flowers blanketed the dark earth of his grave. It had been a few days since mourners stood to watch his casket being lowered into the ground. Then returned to their lives and private fears.

  Only Bleeder was here today. Alone in the silence, broken by the panicked chirp of a small bird in high-speed flight, as if fleeing the fact that a murderer stood among the dead.

  Bleeder had come to pay his final respects. And as the sun dropped beyond the Pacific, casting twilight over the valley and the Sierra Nevadas, one question burned in his mind.

  Why hadn’t Molly acknowledged what he’d done?

  Hidden in the shadows at the edge of the cherry orchard bordering the burial ground, he reached down for a long stalk of grass, placed it in his mouth, and chewed on his situation.

  Molly must know. Deep in her heart she had to know. So why hadn’t she signaled to him that he was getting through to her? It’d been days since he’d removed Hooper. Why was she ignoring him? He repeated the question during the drive back to San Francisco.

  The road rushed under him, time blurred, and memory pulled him back through his life. His father was a career officer in the military, a job that pinballed his family across the country. As an only child, Bleeder grew up associating the smell of cardboard moving boxes with the sting of being the new kid at school, the perpetual target of humiliation by hometown boys.

  He grew accustomed to his loneliness.

  When he reached his teens, he found the adventurous girls were drawn to the mystique of the new guy. Their boredom led to the occasional sweaty embrace at slow dances on Friday nights in the gym. But nothing beyond that. That is, until he met Amy Tucker, a goddess from another world.

  She was a local beauty, a contender for homecoming queen who shocked him at one dance when she appeared before him, her eyes hinting at danger, like embers that had swirled from a distant fire.

  “You’re real cute,” Amy had said, taking his hand, peeling him from the wall for a few dances. The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” floated in the air and he held her so close he could feel her heart beating against his chest. They were bathed in light streaking from the mirror ball. She smiled, then kissed his cheek, then his mouth. Her lips tasted like cherry candy. She parted them and her tongue found his. Later that night they made love under the empty stadium bleachers. Amy was his first. She blew away his loneliness and his soul came to life.

  He bought her flowers. They held hands between classes. But he missed the warning signs, the stares and stifled giggles in their wake at school, until the afternoon he walked home alone through the field by the train tracks. Then it all became crystalline.

  Kyle Chambers and his friend Rowley Deet were waiting. They were big farm boys who were defensive tackles on the football team. Kyle and Amy had been going steady for two years ...

  “... before you showed up.” Kyle jabbed his forefinger in Bleeder’s chest. “What the hell do you think you’re doing with Amy, huh?” The insides of Kyle’s forearms were scarred from a late summer of hoisting hay bales onto a conveyor. “She’s my girl, shit-head.”

  “No, she’s with me.”

  “She used you and you know it.”

  Used? Jesus. He didn’t want to hear that. But the giggles. The stares. The way Amy always grabbed his hand on cue when Kyle was near. No. She wouldn’t use him like that. It couldn’t be true.

  “Stay the hell away from her.” Kyle’s forefinger jabbed him again.

  “Don’t do that,” Bleeder said.

  “Oh yeah?” Kyle stepped closer. His breath smelled of beer.

  “You heard him,” Rowley said, his muscles stretching the tanned skin of his upper arms. “Stay away from Amy.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Say that again?” Kyle laughed. Rowley, too.

  Bleeder didn’t care. Used. Jesus. Why? He just didn’t care.

  “Go to hell, Kyle, and take dick-brain with you.”

  Bleeder blocked Kyle’s first punch, slowed his second, but Rowley doubled him with a pile driver to his gut, so powerful it winded him and he puked. Then Kyle dropped him with a direct hit to the head. Bleeder fell to his knees in a starry stupor, unsure whose boot plowed into his kidney, not feeling the flurry of head blows that sent him to the rock-hard earth of the worn path. He writhed in liquidy islands of undigested ham, lettuce, Swiss cheese, and peanut butter cookies from the lunch his mother had made him. His face was wet with blood, snot, and drool.

  “Got it now, shit-head?” Kyle stood over him. “She used you to piss me off.”

  “Look at him. He sure is a bleeder,” Rowley said.

  Kyle chuckled. “Hey, bleeder, you learned your lesson?”

  Bleeder.

  He didn’t speak. He didn’t cry. He rolled onto his back and through the bloody web of his humiliation blinked at the sky, staying that way long after Kyle and Rowley wa
lked away, long after the echoes of their laughter faded. He drifted in and out of consciousness as the stars emerged.

  “She used you to piss me off.”

  Lying there, he heard a distant hammering against the sky, then felt the earth tremor. She used you. An approaching maelstrom of steel-on-steel grew with a trumpet that emerged into the scream of the sixty-car freight train that thundered by him, pounding into the night, leaving him in silence with nothing. Except the truth.

  She used you.

  He heard it over and over as his ears rang. His brain throbbed. He smelled something electric in the air. His head pounded. He tasted copper on his tongue. Something bad was happening. His skull hummed and he gripped his head until a surreal calmness fell over him. Then Bleeder spoke to him for the first time in a voice as clear as if a new person were standing before him. But he was inside. In his head.

  Don’t worry, sport. It’s not over. I’ll take care of it.

  Who was that?

  He prodded his head before scrambling to his feet, navigating the dark to his house, where he crawled into bed and scared his mother to death. They said he fell into a coma state, or something, that lasted for just over three days. After he got out of the hospital, he’d refused to tell his mother, his father, the doctors, the school people, not even the sheriff’s deputy with the squeaky leather holster, what had happened.

  “I don’t know what happened. I never saw them.”

  Amy never called him. None of the kids called him. When he went back to school the chess club boys said the white bandage on his head made him look like a Civil War soldier home from battle. Amy ignored him. Acted like she didn’t even know him as she walked to classes with Kyle, his big farm boy arm around her. Once Kyle made a show of snarling over his shoulder, “You following us, Bleeder?”