If Angels Fall (29 page)

“Her mother kept saying that it was all her fault for
not watching her daughter more closely,” Fay said.

“You see anything strange in the parking lot before
the mother ran up to you?”

“No. But this man approached us after seeing her
upset.”

“Where is he now?”

“Gone. After helping the mother, he ran back to his
car phone, called the police, then drove off, trying to follow the pickup truck.”

“Did he say anything before he left?” Writing
furiously, Reed stopped looking at the Osbornes.

“He had been talking on his car phone when he saw a
little girl come into the lot, and trot up to a parked pickup truck and talk to
a man who had a dog in the cab. They only talked for a few seconds, then she
got in and they drove off.”

Reed never took his eyes from his notes as he wrote.
“Did he get the truck’s plate number?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What did he say this man in the pickup looked like?”

“He said he had a beard, light-colored hair. In his
forties or fifties.

Reed froze, and stared at the Osbornes. “A beard and
light hair?”

Fay Osborne nodded. Reed’s mind spun with suspicion.

Beard. Light hair. Like the guy who took Danny Becker.
Like the born-again kook from Martin’s bereavement group. He had a beard and
light hair. Right. And so did 100,000 other men in the Bay Area. Slow down. Why
did he think he was a detective? Didn’t he learn from the Franklin Wallace
fiasco last year?

Reed finished with the Osbornes, went to the carousel,
and took Wilson aside. “What’d you get?” he asked.

“Great stuff.” She flipped through her notes. “Her
name is Gabrielle Nunn. From the description I got from the two girls who saw
her talking to a man before she went missing. I’d say he’s the same creep who
grabbed Danny Becker from BART.”

“Me, too.”

“Gabrielle was here for a friend’s birthday party, a
huge one, something like thirty kids. She’s waiting alone outside the washroom
when she talks to this man in a ball cap and dark glasses. Nobody remembers the
guy’s face, only that he was bearded with blondish hair.”

“Just like Becker on BART. Ball cap and dark glasses.”

“Gabrielle talks to the man, follows him to the lot.
Her mom, Nancy Nunn, comes out minutes later. Can’t find her. The teens tell
her about the man. Mom runs frantically to the lot. And get this! The whole
thing may have been caught on amateur video!”

“No shit?” Reed checked to ensure no other reporters
were eavesdropping. “How did you find out?”

“I overheard a guy tell a detective that he was
videotaping his kids on the carousel about the same time. He said maybe he
caught the guy on tape.”

“He give the tape to the detective?”

“Yes, he took it before I could interview him.”

“Good stuff. See if we can get a print from it. My
guess is they’ll release it anyway.”

“Right. You get anything?”

Reed told her about Fay Osborne and the businessman
who followed the pickup. Suddenly, Wilson remembered something and reached
excitedly into her purse, pulling out a snapshot.

“One of the mothers from the party gave me this
picture of Gabrielle. Taken an hour ago. What an angel. Five years old. Her
birthday is next week. Her mother was freaked over Becker’s kidnapping, and
with Donner being found here, she was afraid to bring Gabrielle to the party
today. Her mother made that dress. What a little angel, huh?”

“She’s cute all right. Anybody say anything about a
dog?”

“Yes, hold on.” Wilson handed Reed the snapshot and
flipped through her notes. “Here, Jackson, Gabrielle’s cocker spaniel pup. Ran
off or something from their home about a month ago.”

“It fits.”

“What fits?”

“That this could’ve been premeditated. The guy took
her dog, then uses it today to lure her away.”

“Yeah, that would work.”

“Call the desk. We should send someone to the Nunns
home in the Sunset, talk to the neighbors.”

“Your house is in the Sunset, Tom.”

“Yeah, but I’ve never heard of this family.”

“Excuse me!” A grim-faced SFPD officer was unreeling a
taut yellow police line around the carousel area, as other officers cleared
people from the scene. The plastic ribbon sealed off the carousel enclosure,
then stretched along the path Gabrielle had taken to the parking lot
encompassing the lot itself, protecting the entire scene.

“Shit, Tom. They usually do this for homicides.”

“Likely a grid search, in case the bad guy dropped
something.”

Drew Chapman, one of the
Star’s
photographers,
joined them, clicking off a dozen frames.

“Chappy. Where you been?” Wilson said.

“Deep in the west end. A group of suits were poking
around the scene where they found the murdered baby last year. The
Examiner
and
Merc
were there, too. Not bad for pix.”

“Cops put on the white gloves?” Reed asked.

Drew shook his head. “I don’t think they found dick.”
Drew nodded to a group of detectives nearing the area and raised a camera to
his face. “Those guys there.”

Reed recognized Rust and Ditmire, along with Turgeon
and Sydowski, walking outside the tape at the far side, stopping to talk with
the uniforms, instructing them to do something.

Drew fired off a few frames. “We overhead them say
something about a press conference at the hall later. I don’t know about you
guys, but I think it is all linked. I think we got some twisted, fucking,
serial, child-killer.”

Maybe, Reed thought, considering the names as a connection.
Danny Raphael Becker. Gabrielle Nunn.
What an angel.
Raphael. Gabrielle.
The Angel Gabrielle. Gabriel. Raphael. Angels.

In Room 400
at the Hall of Justice, a funeral mood descended upon those watching Gabrielle
Nunn’s abduction over and over again. In color, slow motion and reverse. They
saw it on the same big-screen TV the homicide dicks used to watch ball games,
Dirty
Harry
movies, and
Dragnet
reruns.

Vaughan Kreuger, a mechanic from Buffalo, was
videotaping his four-year-old twins on the carousel with their mother when
Gabrielle was taken from the playground. He volunteered his tape to a detective
at the scene. Given the circumstances, the Kruegers didn’t want it.

Nancy Nunn wept. For her, it was a perverse ballet—the
horses, the rocker, the chariots carrying laughing children, safe children.

Nancy’s husband, Paul, and her friend Wendy Sloane
watched with her. Sharon Cook and Brenda Grayson, the two teens who saw
Gabrielle talking to a stranger, were also there. Watching beside them was
Janice Mason, a lip reader from Gold Bay Institute for the Hearing Impaired.
Next to her, Beth Ferguson, the sketch artist, was making notes and outlines.
Turgeon, Rust, Ditmire, Gonzales, Mikelson from General Works, Kennedy from
Investigations, Chief of Inspectors Roselli, and a guy from the district
attorney’s office were among the group, hoping for a break.

Give us a lead, something. Anything.

Kreuger and his camera were at the opposite side of
the carousel from Gabrielle and the stranger. It was difficult to see anything
except the strobe-like glimpses of swimming, formless color.

“Wait! I see her!” Gabrielle’s mother pinpointed the
spot on the screen. The officer operating the VCR halted the tape, reversed it
in freeze-frame mode, one frame at a time. Thirty seconds went by. Nothing but
blurry people. Two grandmothers. Then strobe-style nothingness.
Dark-light-dark-light-dark-light.

“I don’t see anything,” one detective said.

“I saw her! She’s there!” Nancy said just as Gabrielle
Nunn appeared on the screen.

“Freeze it, Tucker!” Kennedy sat upright.

Nancy gasped, choking on her tears, pressing her
fingers to the screen. It was not a clear frame, it did not betray details of
her face, mouth, or eyes, but it was Gabrielle. No question. A grainy, static-filled
jerky frame of the soon-to-be six-year-old standing alone in the dress her
mother had made for her birthday.

Sydowski studied the color Polaroids of Gabrielle
taken at the party. Paul Nunn helped Nancy sit down and the tape continued in
slow motion. Gabrielle vanished. The camera’s angle changed, and caught her
again, but she disappeared. Dark-light-dark-light-dark-light. She reappeared
completely in focus as a shadow fell over her. A man. It was a man’s back. The
image was jittery. A profile appeared, snowy, out of focus, void of details,
but for a beard, ball cap, sunglasses.

“That’s him!” Sharon Cook, one of the teens, pointed
at the TV.

“Definitely!” Brenda Grayson said.

The Nunns could not identify the man trapped by
Kreuger’s video camera for one second of real time. The stranger had something
in his right hand and was showing it to Gabrielle before he was cut out of the
frame. A postcard, or picture. Miraculously Gabrielle’s face focused as she
tilted her head, accepted the picture, and spoke.

“Jackson! Where is he?” Janice Mason from the
institute read Gabrielle’s lips, just as the tape ended.

Sydowski saw the veins in Paul Nunn’s reddened neck
pulsing. He exploded. “He stole the dog for this! Planned it! Sonofabitch! I’ll
kill him!” Nunn buried his face in his large hands.

Earlier, Paul Nunn told the detectives he suspected
Gabrielle’s pup was stolen from their backyard a month ago because he found the
gate open and bits of raw hamburger in the pen. Now, more evidence mocked them
from the big screen. They were hustling an IDENT unit to comb the Nunn’s yard.
Sydowski thought as Officer Tucker cued up the best frame of the kidnapper for
Beth Ferguson to sketch. Sydowski caught her attention. She gave her head a
subtle negative shake that told him she had few attributes from the footage for
composite. Sydowski knew it. So did the others. A fuzzy rear to near profile of
a baseball cap, dark glasses, and a beard wasn’t much to work with. But it was
something, and if anyone could extract more physical detail about the guy from
the teens, Beth could.

Sydowski turned to his copy of the telex from the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, apologizing for the delay getting a file and
photo of the one possible suspect from the Canadian prison system. His name was
Virgil Shook, which fit with the “Verge” reference from Kindhart. Shook had the
right kind of tattoos in the right spots. But they didn’t have his file, sheet,
or pictures yet. They had absolutely nothing on Shook. It was a national
holiday in Canada and the Mounties were having computer problems. Rust was
urged to use the FBI and State Department’s pull and call the U.S. Embassy in
Ottawa for action.

Sydowski studied the grainy contours of Gabrielle’s
abductor on the TV screen, weighing and measuring every dancing photoelectron composing
his image. His heartburn flared; fear and anger raged in the pit of his
stomach. Was he now closer to the thing he had been hunting, the thing that had
scarred him? The tape clicked and whirred. The stranger with Gabrielle was just
a man. Flesh and blood. Fallible. Conquerable. The suspect’s ghostly image on
the video was a solid break, but it came at a high price. He looked upon
Gabrielle Nunn’s mother and father being escorted away with the teens to help
Beth with a composite.

“We’ve got a shitload of work to do and no time to do
it.” Leo Gonzales told the detectives at the table. Alerts had gone out
statewide, a grid-search of the playground at Golden Gate was underway, and
exhaustive background checks with the Nunns, Beckers, and Angela Donner to find
a common thread, anything that might link the families. And they’d go back to
them on Vigil Shook, once they had his damn file. Until then, absolutely
nothing was to be made public about Shook. Not yet. He might run. But they
would find him. The FBI would dissect his crimes and compare them with the San
Francisco cases. They would find his friends, climb his family tree, lean hard
on Kindhart. Phone taps, mail monitoring, and surveillance for the Nunn home,
canvass their Sunset neighborhood—they knew the drill. They would hold a news
conference, release the blurry footage, details of the kidnapping, and make a
public appeal for help.