2nd Chance (20 page)

“Officers for justice,” I said. “They’re still around.”

My father nodded. Tensions were strong. The
OFJ
threatened to strike. Eventually, there was pressure from the city, too. Whatever it was, Coombs felt he was handed over, hung out to dry.”

It started coming clear to me. Coombs felt he had been railroaded by the black lobby of the department. He had chewed on his hatred in prison. Now twenty years later, he was back on the streets of San Francisco.

“Maybe, another time, this kind of thing might’ve been swept under the rug,” I said. “But not then. The
OFJ
nailed him.”

Suddenly, a sickening realization wormed into my brain. “Earl Mercer was involved, wasn’t he?”

My father nodded his head. “Mercer was Coombs’s lieutenant.”

T
HE
NEXT
MORNING
, the case against Frank Coombs, which only a day ago had seemed flimsy, was bursting at the seams. I was pumped.

First thing, Jacobi rapped at my door. “One for your side, Lieutenant. Coombs is looking better and better.”

“How so? You make any progress with Coombs’s PO?”

“You might say He’s gone, Lindsay. According to the PO, Coombs split from this transient hotel down on Eddy. No forwarding address, hasn’t checked in, hasn’t contacted his ex-wife.”

I was disappointed that Coombs was missing, but it was also a good sign. I told Jacobi to keep looking.

A few minutes later, Madeline Akers called from San Quentin.

“I think I’ve got what you want,” she announced. I couldn’t believe she was responding so soon.

“Over the past year, Coombs was paired with four different cell mates. Two of them have been paroled, but I spoke with the other two myself. One of them told me to stuff it, but the other, this guy Toracetti… I almost didn’t even have to tell him what I was looking for. He said the minute he heard on the news about Davidson and Mercer, he knew it was Coombs. Coombs told him he was going to blow the whole thing wide open again.”

I thanked Maddie profusely.
Tasha, Mercer, Davidson
… It was starting to fit together.

But how did Estelle Chipman fit in?

A force took hold of me. I went outside and dug through the case files. It had been weeks since I’d looked at them.

I found it buried at the bottom. The personnel file I’d called up from Records:
Edward C. Chipman
.

In his thirty unremarkable years on the force, only one thing stood out.

He had been his district’s representative to the
OFJ
…
the Officers for justice.

It was time to put this on the record. I buzzed Chief Tracchio. His secretary, Helen, who had been Mercer’s, said he was in a closed-door meeting. I told her I was coming up.

I grabbed the Coombs file and headed up the stairs to five. I had to share this. I barreled into the chief’s office.

Then I stopped, speechless.

To my shock, seated around the conference table were Tracchio, Special Agents Ruddy and Hull of the
FBI
, the press flack Carr, and Chief of Detectives Ryan.

I hadn’t been invited to the latest task force meeting.

“T
HIS
IS
BULLSHIT
,” I said. “It’s total crap. What is this – some kind of a men’s club?”

Tracchio, Ruddy and Hull from the
FBI
, Carr, Ryan. Five boys seated around the table – minus me, the woman.

The acting chief stood up. His face was red. “Lindsay we were about to call you up.”

I knew what this meant. What was going on. Tracchio was going to shift control on the case. My case. He and Ryan were going to hand it over to the
FBI
.

“We’re at a critical moment in this case,” Tracchio said.

“You’re damn right,” I cut him off. I swept my gaze over the group.
“I know who it is.”

Suddenly, all eyes turned my way. The boys were silent. It was as if the lights had been cranked up, and my skin prickled as if it had been cauterized.

I leveled my eyes back on Tracchio. “You want me to lay it out for you? Or do you want me to leave?”

Seemingly dumbfounded, he pulled out a chair for me.

I didn’t sit. I stood. Then I took them through everything, and I enjoyed it. How I had been skeptical at first, but then it began to fit. Chimera, Pelican Bay… Coombs’s grudge against the police force. At the sound of Coombs’s name, the departmental people’s eyes grew wide. I linked the victims, Coombs’s qualification as a marksman, how only a marksman could have made those shots.

When I finished, there was silence again. They just stared. I wanted to pump my arm in victory.

Agent Ruddy cleared his throat. “So far, I haven’t heard a thing that links Coombs directly to any of the crime scenes.

“Give me another day or two and you will,” I said. “Coombs is the killer.”

Hull, Ruddy’s broad-shouldered partner, shrugged optimistically toward the chief. “You want us to follow this up?”

I couldn’t believe it. This was my case. My breakthrough.
Homicide’s.
Our people had been murdered.

Tracchio seemed to mull it over. He pursed his thick lips as if he were sucking a last drop through a straw. Then he shook his head at the
FBI
man.

“That won’t be necessary, Special Agent. This has always been a city case. We’ll see it through with city personnel.”

O
NLY
ONE
THING
was standing in the way now. We had to find Frank Coombs.

Coombs’s prison file mentioned a wife, Ingrid, who had divorced him while he was in prison and remarried. It was a long shot. The PO said he hadn’t been in touch. But long shots were coming in right now.

“C’mon, Warren.” I nudged Jacobi. “You’re coming with me. It’ll be like old times.”

“Aww ain’t that sweet.”

Ingrid Thiasson lived on a pleasant middle-class street off of Laguna.

We parked across the street, went up, and rang the bell.

No one answered. We didn’t know if Coombs’s wife worked, and there was no car in the driveway.

Just as we were about to head back, an old-model Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway.

Ingrid Thiasson looked about fifty with stringy brown hair; she wore a plain, shapeless blue dress under a heavy gray sweater. She climbed out of the car and opened the rear hatch to unload groceries.

An old cop’s wife, she ID’d us the minute we walked up. “What do you people want with me?” she asked.

“A few minutes. We’re trying to locate your ex-husband.”

“You got nerve coming around here.” She scowled, hoisting two bags in her arms.

“We’re just checking all the possibilities,” Jacobi said.

She snapped back, “Like I told his parole officer, I haven’t heard a word from him since he got out.”

“He hasn’t been to see you?”

“Once, when he got out. He came by to pick up some personal stuff he thought I had held for him. I told him I threw it all out.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked.

“Useless letters, newspaper articles on the trial. Probably the old guns he kept around. Frank was always into guns. Stuff only a man with nothing to show for his life would find value in.”

Jacobi nodded. “So what’d he do then?”

“What’d he do?” Ingrid Thiasson snorted. “He left without a word about what life had been like for us for the past twenty years. Without a word about me or his son. You believe that?”

“And you have no idea where we could contact him?”

“None. That man was poison. I found someone who’s treated me with respect. Who’s been a father to my boy. I don’t want to see Frank Coombs again.”

I asked, “You have any idea if he might be in touch with your son?”

“No way. I always kept them apart. My son doesn’t have any links to his father. And don’t go buzzing around him. He’s in college at Stanford.”

I stepped forward. “Anyone who might know where he is, Ms. Thiasson, it would be a help to us. This is a murder case.”

I saw the slightest sign of hesitation. “I’ve lived a good life for twenty years. We’re a family now. I don’t want anyone knowing this came from me.”

I nodded. I felt the blood rushing to my head.

“Frank kept up with Tom Keating. Even when he was locked away. Anyone knows where he is, it’d be him.”

Tom Keating.
I knew the name.

He was a retired cop.

L
ESS
THAN
AN
HOUR
LATER
, Jacobi and I pulled up in front of condo 3A at the Blakesly Residential Community down the coast in Half Moon Bay.

Keating’s name had stuck in my mind from when I was a kid. He’d been a regular at the Alibi after the nine-to-four shift, where many afternoons I’d been hoisted up on a bar stool by my father. In my mind, Keating had a ruddy complexion and a shock of prematurely white hair.
God, I thought, that was almost thirty years ago.

We knocked on the door of Keating’s modest slatted-wood condo. A trim, pleasant-looking woman with gray hair answered.

“Mrs. Keating? I’m Lieutenant Lindsay Boxer of the San Francisco Homicide detail. This is Inspector Jacobi. Is your husband at home?”

“
Homicide…?”
she said, surprised.

“Just an old case,” I said with a smile.

A voice called from inside, “Helen, I can’t find the damned clicker anywhere.”

“Just a minute, Tom. He’s in the back,” she said as she motioned us into the house.

We walked through the sparsely decorated house and into a sun room overlooking a small patio. There were several framed police photos on the wall. Keating was as I remembered him, just thirty years older. Gaunt, white hair thinning, but with that same ruddy complexion.

He sat watching an afternoon news show with the stock market tape streaming by. I realized he was sitting in a wheelchair.

Helen Keating introduced us, then, finding the clicker, put the TV volume down. Keating seemed pleased to have visitors from the force.

“I don’t get to many functions since my legs went. Arthritis, they tell me. Brought on by a bullet to lumbar four. Can’t play golf anymore.” He chuckled. “But I can still watch the old pension grow.”

I saw him studying my face. “You’re Marty Boxer’s little girl, aren’t you?”

I smiled. “The Alibi… A couple of five-oh-ones, right, Tom?” A 5-0-1 was the call for backup, and how they used to call a favorite drink, an Irish whiskey with a beer chaser.

“I heard you were quite the big shot these days.” Keating nodded with a toothy smile. “So, what brings you two honchos down to talk to an old street cop?”

“Frank Coombs,” I said.

Keating’s features suddenly turned hard. “What about Frank?”

“We’re trying to find him, Tom. I was told you might know where he is.”

“Why don’t you call his parole officer? That wouldn’t be me.”

“He’s split, Tom. Four weeks now. Quit his job.”

“So they got Homicide following up on parole offenders now?”

I held Keating’s eyes. “What do you say Tom?”

“What makes you think I’d have any idea?” He glanced toward his legs. “Old times are old times.”

“I heard you guys kept in touch. It’s important.”

“Well, you’re wasting your time here, Lieutenant,” he said, suddenly turning formal.

I knew he was lying. “When was the last time you spoke with Coombs?”

“Maybe just after he got out. Could be once or twice since then. He needed some help to get on his feet. I may have lent him a hand.”

“And where was he staying,” Jacobi cut in, “while you were lending him this hand?”

Keating shook his head. “Some hotel down on Eddy or O’Farrell. Wasn’t the St. Francis,” he said.

“And you haven’t spoken with him since?” My eyes flicked toward Helen Keating.

“What do you want with the man, anyway?” Keating snapped. “He’s paid his time. Why don’t you just leave him alone?”

“It would be easier this way, Tom,” I said. “If you’d just talk to us.”

Keating pursed his dry lips, trying to size up where his loyalties fell.

“You put in thirty years, didn’t you?” Jacobi said.

“Twenty-four.” He patted his leg. “Got it cut short at the end.”

“Twenty-four good years. It’d be a shame to dishonor it in any way by not cooperating now….”

He shot back, “You want to know who was a goddamn expert in
lack of cooperation?
Frank Coombs. Man was only doing his job and all those bastards, supposedly his friends, looked the other way. Maybe that’s the way you do things now with your community action meetings and your sensitivity training. But then we had to get the bad guys off the streets. With the means that we had.”

“Tom.” His wife raised her voice. “Frank Coombs killed a boy. These people, they’re your friends. They want to speak with him. I don’t know how far you have to take this duty-and-loyalty thing. Your duty’s here.”

Keating glared at her harshly. “Yeah, sure, my duty’s here.” He picked up the TV clicker and turned back to me. “Stay here all day if you like; I don’t have the slightest idea where Frank Coombs is.”

He turned up the volume on his TV.

“F
UCK
HIM
,” Jacobi said as we left the house. “Old-school asshole.”

“We’re halfway down the peninsula already.” I said to him. “You want to drive down to Stanford? See Frankie’s kid?”

“What the hell.” He shrugged. “I can use the education.”

We hooked back onto 280 and made it to Palo Alto in half an hour.

As we pulled onto the campus drive – the tall palms lining the road, the stately ocher buildings with their red roofs, the Hoover Tower majestically rising over the Main Quad – I felt the spell of being part of campus life. Every one of these kids was special and talented. I even felt some pride that Coombs’s son, despite his rough beginnings, had made it here.