If Angels Fall (3 page)

“I had nothing to do with what you’re suggesting.”

Wallace slammed the door.

Reed cleared his throat and went to the next clipping:

SUNDAY SCOOL TEACHER COMMITS SUICIDE...“HE WAS INNOCENT”:
WIDOW...REPORTER BLAMED FOR TEACHER’S DEATH...WIDOW SUES S.F. STAR...TANITA’S
KILLER “IS OUT THERE”: POLICE...

Reed removed his glasses, burying his face in his hands.

The day after she buried her husband, Rona Wallace held a press
conference. It was on the same doorstep where Reed had questioned Franklin
Wallace moments before he locked himself in his daughter’s bedroom and fired
both barrels of a shotgun into his mouth.

“My husband was a decent man, and a loving father,” Rona Wallace
read from a prepared statement. “He took successful counseling for his
problems, which occurred more than a decade ago when he was clinically
depressed over the death of his mother. The San Francisco Police and the FBI
have told me today, to my face, that my husband was initially checked and
quietly cleared as a possible suspect in the death of Tanita Marie Donner. He
knew and loved that little girl.” She sniffed.

“I attribute his tragic death to the allegations raised in the
abhorrent and false reporting of
The San Francisco Star
and have begun
civil action. Thank you.”

Rona Wallace took no questions. When she finished, she asked if Tom
Reed was present. “Right here.” Reed raised his hand.

Cameras followed her as she walked to him, her reddened eyes finding
his. Without warning, she slapped his face. “You know what you are and you know
what you did.” She said, then walked away.

Reed was stunned.

Reporters pelted him with questions. He was speechless. The TV gang
loved seeing him get his comeuppance. The networks picked it up. Public
criticism from police made him a pariah. The incident ignited editorials and
columns across the country about press ethics. Reed couldn’t sleep without
drinking—he doubted everything in his life. He argued with Ann, screamed at
Zach, and was once on the brink of hitting him, squeezing his arm until he
yelped in sheer terror.

“Wake up, Reed. I brought your medicine.”

A steaming cup of coffee was set before him, the aroma mingling with
the scent of Obsession. “Anything shaking, Tommy?” Molly Wilson settled in at
her cubicle, next to his, her bracelets clinking.

“A drunk knifed by a whore.” He sipped the coffee. “Thanks.”

Wilson was hired four years ago from a small Texas daily. She had a
master’s degree in English literature. A relentless digger, she was a strong
writer. Her brunette hair was cut like Cleopatra’s, she had perfect teeth, and
always smelled good.

“Why are you here, Wilson? It’s your day off.”

She switched on her terminal, flipped open a notebook, and began
typing. “Got to finish a feature for Lana. She moved up my deadline.”

Reed grunted.

“Thanks for asking, Tom. It’s about men who kill, and the women who
love them. Hey, you’re being naughty. Can’t leave that Donner story alone.”

Reed said nothing.

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself, Tom?”

“Do what?”

“Forget the story. The police fried you because they screwed up and
needed a scapegoat. Benson suspended you because he needed a scapegoat too. It
was only a week. Everybody knows he put the entire thing on your shoulders. It
was a year ago. Forget it and move on.”

“I can’t.”

The muted clatter of the
Star’s
police scanners flared, then
faded. Reed and Wilson glanced across the newsroom at the summer intern
monitoring transmissions.

“Tom, it wasn’t your fault.”

“Yes, but if that dipshit in homicide had explained how Wallace’s
prints were on the evidence, like you begged him, you would have backed off.
You wanted more time on the Sunday School teacher stuff, but Benson was horny
for the story. They pushed hard, too. We will never know the truth, Tom.”

Wilson’s eyes were sympathetic. She resumed typing. Reed went back
to the clippings.

“Why do you have the Donner file, anyway?”

“Anniversary’s coming up. I’m going to pitch a feature.”

Wilson rolled her eyes. “You really are nuts. This rag is not going
to let you do that. They’ll pass it to a G.A., or some dink in Lifestyles.
Besides, isn’t Tanita’s mother in hiding?”

“I have an idea, but--“

The scanners grew louder.

They turned to the small office tucked way in the far corner of the
newsroom. The “torture chamber.” A glass-walled room with twenty-four scanners
monitoring hundreds of emergency frequencies in the Bay Area. The incessant
noise inspired the room’s name. Experienced listeners kept the volume low, but
when a major incident broke, the sound increased.

“Something’s happening,” Wilson said.

Simon Green, a summer intern, was monitoring the radios. His face
was taut when he stood, jotted a note, then yelled at Al: “Child abduction off
BART! Balboa Park! They’re stopping the trains!”

Booth grimaced at the newsroom. No one on, except Reed.

“Are you clear?”

Reed nodded.

“Take it. Wilson, stick around, you might get overtime.”

Across the newsroom, the weekend photo editor radioed a photographer
roaming the city to rush to the Balboa Park BART station.

Reed slipped on his jacket, grabbed one of the
Star’s
cell
phones. “I’ve got number three, call me with updates, Molly.”

“This is eerie. Balboa Park.”

Tanita Marie Donner was abducted from the Section 8 housing complex
where her teenage welfare mother lived. In Balboa Park.

Sydowski
and his
father had good seats at the Coliseum. Thirty rows up from first. But the game
lacked zeal. Entering the eighth, with the A’s up by seven over the Yankees,
was not exciting baseball.

Sydowski was stiff and hungry.

“Hey, old man,” he said in Polish. “I’m going to get something to
eat. You want anything?”

“Sure, sure. Popcorn,” his father said.

Sydowski patted his father’s knee and headed for the concession
stand. Sydowski had not wanted to come to the game. He accepted tickets because
his boss insisted. Sydowski’s old man loved seeing the A’s at the Coliseum, but
would never ask to be taken because he figured the job kept his son busy.

Standing in line, Sydowski reminisced about the old days. Whenever
Boston played the A’s, he would drive across the Bay Bridge to Oakland to pay
homage to Carl Michael Yastrzemski, a three-time American league batting
champion. Yaz took his third title by posting .301, in an era where pitchers
destroyed batting averages.

That was perseverance.

That was 1968. The year Oakland got the A’s and the San Francisco
Police Department got Wladyslaw Sydowski.

Had it been that long?

“You know you can take your pension any time, Walt,” his boss,
Lieutenant Leo Gonzales, often reminded him.

Sydowski couldn’t. Not yet. What would he do?

His wife, Basha, had died of Parkinson’s six years ago. The girls
were grown, had their own children, and had moved away. He had John, his
eighty-seven-year-old father, to look after. His old man was something. A
Polish potato farmer and barber he had kept his family alive in a work camp
during the war by cutting hair for Nazi officers. Sydowski’s old man taught him
how to listen, how to read people. Now John lived happily alone at Sea Breeze
Villas in Pacifica, tending a vegetable garden, following the A’s. He refused
to move in with Sydowski, who lived by himself in the Parkside house where he
and his wife had raised their daughters and where he now raised champion
canaries.

“Sir? That’s four dollars.”

Sydowski smiled, showing two gold-crowned teeth as he dug out some
cash. The teenage girl smiled back. At six-foot-three, with a solid
two-hundred-pound frame, dark complexion, and wavy salt-and-pepper hair,
Sydowski was a handsome man.

He knew the hotdog would take a toll on his chronic heartburn, but
what the hell? He smothered it with mustard, relish and onions as the old
questions surfaced. What would he do if he retired? He was a cop. A homicide
inspector. It was his life. To some, he was one of the SFPD’s best; to others
he was “the arrogant Polack cocksucker.” While he was traditionally assigned to
break in new detectives, he maintained the detail’s highest clearance rate.
Senior clicks told rookies Inspector Sydowski knew killers because he was one.

It was near the end of the war, Sydowski was what? Eight or nine?
His family was working on a farm in southeastern Germany when he came up on a
drunken Nazi soldier raping his twelve-year-old sister behind a barn. Sydowski
grabbed the soldier’s Luger and held it to the sweating man’s temple, forcing
him to kneel and beg for his life. Then he pulled the trigger, scattering
master race brain matter against the pigsty.

That was another life. Sydowski had erased the memory of it, or
thought he had. Somehow the rage he felt then, rage he thought he would never
again experience, had returned when he was given the case of a two-year-old
girl. The worst part of the job was always the murders of babies. Looking down
at their tiny bodies, knowing they never had a chance, that this world had
failed them, and it was his job to avenge their deaths. Remembering how he
would go home brokenhearted, kiss Basha and the girls, and tell them it was
another routine day.

Over the years he had managed to remain detached from his cases, enough
so that he could do the job. Although he won most, he accepted losing some. He
had no choice. He couldn’t solve them all. But the abduction and murder of
Tanita Donner was different. It was a year ago. He was the primary and he
couldn’t close it. At one stage, he felt he was close. Now he had nothing. The
thing refused to be solved and it ate him up. Leo had suggested he let fresh
eyes go over it, that he concentrate on other files for a time. That didn’t
last. He had given a piece of his soul to the Donner case. How could he forget
about that baby for one goddamned second?

It was raining when he arrived in Golden Gate Park with a rookie and
looked into the bag. He remembered the familiar foul smell, the flies and
maggots, how she was so white, the gash across her tiny neck, and how
her
eyes, those beautiful little eyes, were open and staring at him. Into him.
Feeling something break inside, making him ache at that very moment to hold her
to his chest, in front of all the cops, reporters, and rubberneckers, all
standing there.

Sydowski had crossed the emotional line with Tanita’s file. At the
morgue, seeing her doll-size corpse, then taking Tanita’s teenage welfare
mother and grandfather from their Balboa apartment to identify her. How he
caught the mother after she collapsed upon seeing her baby, hearing a groan
from the grandfather, who covered his face with his hands. He was dying of
cancer and had already lost his legs. Remembering how his wheelchair was held
together by coat hangers, how the mother let her crumpled snapshot of Tanita
fall to the floor and started screaming, and how Sydowski looked to the
ceiling.

He knew he would never give up on this one, never let it go. He had
touched Tanita’s coffin at her funeral, vowing to find her killer.

“Here you go, Pop.” Sydowski handed a bag of popcorn to his old man,
then took a couple of bites from his dog and tried getting back into the game.
But he’d lost his concentration.

At the outset, the department had put half the detail on Donner. It
was a green light. The FBI assigned a couple of humps to inflict its
jurisdiction. The senior agent was Merle Rust, a soft-spoken, twenty-year fed
with a three-inch scar on his chin from a bullet that grazed him during a
shootout with The Order near Seattle in 1984. Rust was as fond of chewing
tobacco as he was of his young partner, Special Agent Lonnie Ditmire, a
by-the-book grad straight from the academy cookie cutter. He had an
all-American smile and believed all municipal police were bush.