If Angels Fall (58 page)

“I don’t know, today is the anniversary. Seems he’s
geared up to it. You going to look downstairs, where he kept them?”

“Right after we talk to Bill, here.”

Bill Wright, the FBI’s IDENT team leader, sighed,
removing his gas mask, his reddened face damp with perspiration. “Well, we can
definitely put all three children in this house based on the stuff we’ve found
so far. Clothing. Hair. But the kids are gone. We’ve got nothing outside,
nothing inside. We’ve gone through the attic, X-rayed the floorboards, walls.
The last call made from this address was the one Zach Reed made to
The San
Francisco Star
newsroom. The bills for the past three months show little.
No receipts in his trash. We’re going to take the plumbing apart in case he flushed
anything. But our guy’s fled, likely with the kids. I’d say last night, judging
from the oil and coolant stains in the driveway. We’ll keep the house for as
long as we need it to gather evidence for whatever comes up.”

“Thanks, Bill.”

Sydowski pulled Rust aside. “Keller lost his kids,
late in the day, right?”

“Late afternoon, evening. The file put it between four
and nine.”

Sydowski checked his watch. “Gives us a couple of
hours, maybe.”

“Maybe.”

***

Outside, the air was electric with rumors that the
police had found bodies. Reed was with the parents of Danny Becker and
Gabrielle Nunn, who also rushed to Wintergreen, jostled through the press
gauntlet, and converged on the police command center as TV news helicopter
circled overhead. Uniformed police had taken the parents aside to a secure area
near the bus to await some official word. Their perspective allowed them to see
the bagged evidence being removed from the house. Nancy Nunn sniffled,
sharpening her focus on one clear bag. Gooseflesh rose on her trembling skin as
she recognized the flower print dress she had made for her daughter.

Paul Nunn caught his wife and struggled to quell her
choking sobs, his own voice cracking. “Is somebody going to tell us what the
hell is going on here!”

Reed saw Ann arrive and hurried to her, plucking her
from reporters, pulling her to the sanctuary for the parents as the choppers
pounded above. Ann wept. The agent who brought her left, to get some answers.

“Tom, is he dead?”

Reed tried to get his wife to focus on him. “Ann! We
don’t know anything. No one is telling us a word.” He hugged her.

“Something is happening,” Gabrielle’s father said,
“because this morning we found Jackson -- Gabrielle’s dog -- scratching at our
back door, looking pretty frightened.”

“Why the hell is it taking so long to tell us
something?” Nathan Becker demanded. “Officer, please get us someone! We deserve
to know what is going on. What have they found?”

The uniformed cop nodded, turned away and spoke into
his radio.

Reed held Ann. He was numb with helplessness. Fear.
What was he going to do if they started carrying out bodies? His son. His only
child. Only yesterday, Zach had locked his arms around him, enthralled with the
hope his mom and dad were going to move back to their house.

Daddy, you have to come and get me!

Sydowski emerged and ushered the parents away from the
chaos and toward the relative tranquility of the bus.

“All we can determine is that Keller fled with the
children.”

“Where?”

“We’re trying to determine that right now.”

“What about Half Moon Bay?”

“We’ve got people there.”

“When did Keller leave?”

“We think sometime in the night.” Sydowski then raised
his hand. “We have nothing to show they’ve been harmed, outside of being held
in a foul, scary environment.”

“But the clothes?” Nancy asked.

“He’s likely changed their appearances, to make it
difficult to find them.”

Phones were ringing inside the bus.

What were they doing to find Keller, Paul Nunn wanted
to know.

“We suspect he is going to put to sea, somewhere along
the California coast. The Coast Guard is on full alert. We’ve got every
available search plane -- ”

“Inspector?” an officer with his hand covering a phone
interrupted. “Sir, it’s the Ranger Station at Point Reyes.”

George Hay
sat at the counter of Art’s Diner in Inverness, eating a clubhouse sandwich.
The front page of
The San Francisco Star
was folded precisely beside his
plate and he read while he chewed.

He was engrossed in the multiple kidnapping case. It
was fantastic. Has to be a ball-breaker for the people on it, he figured,
reaching for a French fry. All that glory. Sure. And all that career-busting
political bullshit, too. He took a hit of coffee. Admit it though, you miss the
action, he told himself. Cases like that gave you a helluva rush. Yeah, he
missed it, like he missed not being in pain.

Damn, he winced, putting his cup down to massage his
leg.

Two years back, a carjacker’s bullet had shattered his
right thigh, leaving him with a partial pension, a bastard’s attitude, and a
permanent limp after fifteen years with the San Jose Police Department. A
succession of rent-a-cop security jobs and lost weekends sunk his marriage. To
hell with it. Allana was not the stand-by-your-man type; she was the
kick-you-in-the-teeth type. George still had trouble believing that right
before she walked out on him he was actually contemplating knocking off an
armored car for her, thinking the money would keep them together. He shook his
head. That was when a buddy got him work as a U.S. Park Ranger in Point Reyes,
the national seashore park, just north of San Francisco.

He spent his first months swallowing what bits of
pride he had left and going through the motions of his job. Gradually, he
buried the things that made him an asshole and came to appreciate the
therapeutic qualities of the park. He was even good natured about the ribbing
he got from old police friends. “Collar any perps with pic-a-nic baskets,
George?” He found a postcard-perfect cabin near Dillon Beach and was secretly
trying his hand at writing a police mystery. Instead of a drunk, he had become
a philosopher, a seaside poet. So fuck the world, old George was doing fine
with the hand that was dealt him. There, his leg felt better. He gulped the
last of his coffee and tucked a crumpled five and two ones under his plate.
“See ya, Art.”

A fat man, wrapped in a grease-stained white apron,
peeked through the kitchen’s serving window, waving as he left.

George clamped a toothpick between his teeth and
inhaled the salt air, limping to his U.S. Park Service Jeep Cherokee. A Coast
Guard spotter plane roared in the distance as he climbed into the Jeep, grabbed
his Motorola mike, and checked in with park headquarters in Bear Valley, seven
miles away.

“Forty-two here, Dell. Got anything? Over.”

“Pretty quiet, George, except for -- Just a sec...”

That was Dell, always misplacing something. George
pried a piece of bacon from between his teeth. Three hours left in his shift,
then four days off. While Dell searched, George flipped through the papers on
his clipboard: faxes, alerts, and bulletins. Routine stuff about amendments to
laws, and regs dealing with the park, and the Gulf of the Farallons, overlooks
from Sonora and Marin counties, Coast Guard notices. Usual crap. Ah, there it
was. The stuff from the FBI on the Keller kidnappings. George read it again,
awestruck by the magnitude. Details on the boat, the trailer, the vehicles,
background on Edward Keller, the children, that reporter. Helluva case. Bet
Keller took them to Half Moon Bay, where he took his own kids twenty years ago.
He heard they had heavy surveillance going down there, Coast Guard, FBI, the
state boys.

“You still there, George?”

“Ten-four, Dell.”

“Okay. Lou at the Valente place called. Saw some
trespassing headlights late last night. Must’ve been kids partying on the
property again. Wants you to check it out when you can.

“The spot down by the old cow path to the beach?”

“That’s it.”

“On my way. Ten-four.”

Overnight and through the morning, the park was
cloaked in chilly fog. By mid-afternoon it had yielded to the sun and a
sparkling clear day. George hummed to himself driving from Inverness, on
Tomales Bay on the north side, to the Sir Francis Drake Highway, meandering
west across the sixty-five-thousand acre park. He loved, no, he revered the
Point, its majestic, craggy terrain, it’s Bishop pine and Douglas fir forests,
the estuaries slicing into its sloping green valleys where dairy cattle grazed;
the mist-shrouded beaches and jagged shorelines, glistening today with sea
spray as sea lions basked in the sun. And the place had wild weather,
simultaneously throwing up hot California sunshine, cold fog, and damp,
pounding winds all within a few miles, manifesting the mood of the peninsula.
It sat on the San Andreas Fault, rendering the rocky shelves of her coastal
waters a ships’ graveyard. But beyond the beautiful treachery was the celestial
Pacific and eternal hope. That’s what it did for him. The Point was a living,
breathing deity. Damn. He had become a tree-hugger! Admit it. He laughed out
loud. Laughed until his goddamn leg hurt.

The Jeep curled past Schooner Bay, Drakes Estero, and
the sea. George passed the overgrown ruins of the ancient mission church. He
once read of plans to rebuild it years ago. Wonder what happened? About a mile
before Creamery Bay, he left the highway for Valente’s property. It stretched
in a near perfect two-mile square between the road and the Point’s north beach.
He kicked the Jeep into four-wheel-drive, bumping his way down a tractor trail
that meandered to a small lagoon at a valley bottom. The path was long
abandoned, but now and then local kids trespassed, usually in ATV’s, to party.
Looked like it happened again. George spotted fresh tire tracks at the valley
bottom. Seemed strange. They were deep, mud-churning troughs, going to the
shore, then disappearing into the tall dense brush. But no tracks led out. No
vehicles were in the area. Nothing. George stopped.

“What the hell is this?”

He cranked the emergency brake, killed his engine, and
got out to investigate, pulling on his rubber rain poncho because much of the
brush here thrived with poison oak and thorns. Slipping on work gloves, he
followed the tire impressions into the thicket, using his baton to slap aside
branches. Suddenly, he froze. Something chrome reflected the sun. He moved to
it. Looked like the ball of a trailer hitch. It was! George chopped his way
deeper, coming up on a tarp, barely concealing a late model van. A rental by
the looks of it. Who would take time to hide this stuff? he asked as the
answer, rolling on a wave of knowing, crashed down on him.

The van was unlocked. Frantically, George scoured
inside. Nothing. He jotted down the tag, struggled to get through the brush
again, finding a manufacturer’s plate for the trailer, jotting down its number.
This was it. He knew it. Nettles snagged him as he fought his way back to his
Jeep, snapped through the pages on his clipboard, and checked the trailer. This
was it! This was the goddamn trailer! George looked up and down the shore.
“Where’s the boat?”

No trace of a boat. He stared at the ocean. Keller put
to sea here. He launched here. George pounded the wheel. That was right,
everyone would be sitting on Half Moon Bay. From here, around the westernmost
point at the lighthouse, it was only twenty miles to the Farallon Islands. Was
he too late? Didn’t Lou see the headlights last night? George snatched the
radio mike.

“Dell, it’s George! I’ve got something here! You’re
going to have to make some fast phone calls!”

The radio hissed with silence.

“Goddamnit, Dell! Are you there? For Christ’s sake!”