If Angels Fall (46 page)

“I understand.”

“Thank you for working so hard. I know you really
cared. I just hope with all my heart you find the other children. Alive.”

Sydowski swallowed hard and closed his eyes. Would
there be two more deaths? Two more funerals with little coffins? He needed a
lead. Something. Anything. Sydowski’s pager bleated.

Clamping his teeth on his unlit cigar, Lieutenant Leo
Gonzales grunted angrily, seating himself with the detectives at the table in
Room 400 at the hall. By the grave way he was rearranging the fresh pages in
his hands. It was a safe bet something was fucked. Badly. This was the first
status meeting of the Yellow Ribbon Task Force since Virgil Lee Shook was
pronounced dead at San Francisco General sixteen hours ago. Papers and reports
went round the table. The cork and chalk boards bearing maps, notes, and photos
of Tanita, Danny, and Gabrielle, Shook, the suspect’s composite, and a blurry
still of him from the home video, were again wheeled to one end of the room.

“Listen up. It’s just like we figured. No way is this
over. We’ve got the serology tests. From the saliva on the envelopes of the
intercepted letters to the families, we got an O-positive blood type. From the
semen in Tanita Donner’s homicide, we got an O-positive. Shook is O-positive.
And we got one of Shook’s latent’s on the knife used in Donner. We put the lab
stuff, along Shook’s identification through his tattoos, the Polaroids, his
taped confession, and we’ve got him for Donner, with Franklin Wallace as
accomplice. DNA will nail it.”

“What’s the problem?” Lonnie Ditmire wondered.

Gonzales halted the question with his hand. “Let me
finish.” He shuffled his papers. “The blood-typing tests on Gabrielle Nunn’s
severed braids found in the Sunset were redone. We just got the results.
Gabrielle is A-positive. Shook, O-positive. The problem is, the blood on her
hair is B-positive, a male Caucasian.”

“Just like we feared, we’ve still got another player
out there,” Turgeon said.

“Exactly.” Gonzales dropped the pages, as the impact
sank in.

“Could we have some kind of pedophile ring going
here?” asked Bill Kennedy, Deputy Chief of Investigations.

“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 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 ago.”

“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.

“Son-of-a-bitch! 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. Son of a fucking bitch!”

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

Sitting on Grandma’s
front porch steps, Zach Reed could hear his mom on the phone to his
grandmother. She was pissed, 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 forearm 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.