Cold Fear (4 page)

FIVE

Walt Sydowski’s
eighty-eight-year-old
father, John, played his last card, the queen of diamonds.

“Victory.”

“You are a crafty old fox,” Sydowski said in Polish,
losing a round of crazy eights, their favorite game.

“Not too old to teach you a trick or two, eh?” John’s
eyes twinkled, as he claimed his five bucks, folding it triumphantly.

“That’s right, Pop.” Sydowski patted his old man’s
wrinkled hands. “I’ve got to check on the birds, Dad. Want to help me?”

“Sure, let’s go.”

Sydowski was enjoying having his father stay with him
during these few days he was off. Sydowski lived alone in Parkside in the house
where he and his wife, Basha, had raised two daughters. It got a little lonely.
His old man, a retired barber, still preferred to live at Sea Breeze Villas, a
seniors’ complex in Pacifica. He had his friends, his vegetable garden, and
followed baseball. Sydowski liked his visits. Before their game they had
homemade cream of potato soup, the way Basha used to make it. With real cream.

They went to the aviary Sydowski had built in his
backyard under the oak tree, a lifetime ago it seemed. Inside, they were met by
the cooing of some five dozen caged song birds. Photographs and ribbons won at
bird fairs covered the paneled walls. Sydowski liked coming here to listen to
the tiny birds and review cases. Like the doubleheader they cleared a few
months ago. That beast almost brought him to his knees.

Sydowski was concerned about his new bred budgerigars.
They offered appealing cinnamon and opaline wing markings but he noticed their
droppings seemed off color and lacked consistency. Maybe if he fortified their
seed mix with some calcium.

“You know, Dad, I met a nice lady a few months ago at
the Seattle show.”

“Louise, from San Jose. You got the budgies from her.
You told me.”

“I was thinking of asking her over for dinner.”

“You need a woman? At your age?”

“Watch it.”

Sydowski smiled at last week’s conversation on the
phone, Louise asking him for coffee.

“I could come to San Francisco, Walt. Or you could come
here?”

“Well, I got some cases to work on,” he said. “Can I get
back to you?”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

They’d hit it off in Seattle. Louise was a budgie
breeder, also widowed. Her husband, a judge, had died three years ago. Stroke.
Her daughter owned a small computer-graphics company in Sacramento. Her son was
a medical lawyer in Pittsburgh. Aside from her birds, she taught drama classes
and was a working actor. She had done some national commercials and had been an
extra in a few movies. Louise was vibrant--sixty-one going on forty-one.
Gorgeous and, for some strange reason, smitten with him the moment she came up
behind him on the floor of the Seattle show.

“Well where did you come from, Mr. Walt Sydowski?”

He turned to meet mischief and flirtation in the green
eyes peering up at him over a coffee mug.

Sydowski had a pleasing, solid six-foot-three,
two-hundred-pound build, wavy salt-and-pepper hair touching off his dark
complexion and rugged smile, which glinted because of his two gold-crowned
teeth. Most people were intrigued by his smile. Unless, of course, they were a
suspected killer.

Louise had cast some sort of spell on him that day in Seattle. She had done some investigating, learning from other exhibitors all about
Inspector Wladyslaw Sydowski of the San Francisco Homicide Detail.

They talked over lunch, about raising a family, about
losing a spouse, about acting, about memories, about birds. He liked her and
told her of the anguish of cases involving children.

Being with her was like being with an old friend, and in
the weeks after Seattle, when they talked on the phone, Sydowski felt something
warm flowing into an area of his life that had been cold and empty for so long.
But why was he afraid?

“You think you are cheating on Basha after six years? Or
that the girls might not approve? You want my permission to have a date?”

Sydowski stroked a fledgling with his pinky knuckle and
shrugged.

“I guess, something like that. I don’t know.”

“Your problem is you maybe want to leave the job, or
need something new in your life. Those cases with the baby and the kidnapped
kids still shake you pretty good. I see it in your face.”

Sydowski would always be haunted by the case of
two-year-old Tanita Marie Donner. Her little corpse hidden in Golden
Gate Park. For over a year, he went nuts trying to clear it. Then two other
kids were abducted, creating hysteria for the Bay Area, pressure from the
brass. The fear that all three files were connected when another child was
grabbed--the son of Tom Reed, a reporter for the
San Francisco Star
, who
was covering the story. The kidnapper, a psycho twitcher named Keller, had
planned to kill the kids.

“Yes, they were hard cases. You could be on the right
track there, Pop.”

After Keller, it took a few weeks for Sydowski to wind
down. In all his years with the SFPD, in handling nearly six hundred homicides,
he’d never seen anything like it. He hoped to hell he would never see anything
like it again. During the darkest moments of the investigation, he would sit in
the aviary with his birds and miss his wife deeply. That was his problem. The
last big cases were not his career enders. He did not want to hang up his
shield because of them. On the up side, they brought him together with his new
young partner, Inspector Linda Turgeon.

Working with her was like having a third daughter. They
got along well. Even when they argued. No, he was not ready to hang it up. He
loved the job. It kept his brain functioning. He was a homicide cop. But when
files got rough, they underscored the void of Basha’s absence. He would never stop
loving her, yet he did not want to be handcuffed to her death. This was his
dilemma. Now Louise had come into his life, maybe not to fill a void, but to
help him live past it. And she wanted to see him again. So what should he do?

“I think I am going to ask Louise out. What do you
think, Pop?”

“You keep asking
me
. She is not my girlfriend.”
John inched his hand into a cage and let a Fife perch on his forefinger.

“You think it is appropriate after six years?”

“You’re the cop. Is it against the law?”

The phone in the aviary rang. Sydowski got it on the
second ring. It was his boss, Lieutenant Leo Gonzales.

“Walt, I’m sending Linda over to take you to the
airport.”

Sydowski was taken aback. It was his day off. Was this a
joke?

“No, Leo. You say, ‘Hello, Walt, how are you?’ Then I
say, ‘I’m fine, Leo, and how are you?’”

Sydowski could hear Leo placing his hand over his
mouthpiece, talking to people at the Homicide Detail. Tension leaking through.

“…you tell them”-- Leo was talking to someone else at
his end--“that we are cooperating fully and quickly. Tell them that. Walt? You
still there?”

“What is it?”

“I got to send you to Montana right now.”

“Montana? What the --”

“You’ve been requested to assist the FBI on a breaking
case.”

“Requested by whom?”

“The feebees. Asked for our best guy and you got to be
there now.”

“Now?” Sydowski looked at his dad.

“Linda will take you to the airport and give you a file.
Someone with the Bureau will pick you up in Kalispell.”

“What the hell is going on in Montana, Leo?”

“Missing girl. Ten years old. From San Francisco. In a
national park.”

Sydowski’s stomach clenched and his heartburn from the
potato soup flared. The price for not holding the onions.

A missing kid.

“Why do they need me in Montana? This is unusual. It’s
an FBI case in Montana. They just don’t do this. What’s going on?”

“Kid’s hiking in Glacier National Park, with Mommy and
Daddy. Wanders off. Lost. Dad hikes back to report her missing.”

“Find a body? Any evidence of a crime?”

“No, but Dad’s got a hurt hand.”

“Pretty weak, Leo. Come on. What’s the family history?”

“The feebs asked us to run the old man through our
system and we got a hit. A few days before they left for their trip, we were
called to their house by a neighbor.”

“Charges?”

“None.”

“What are the details of the call?”

“Domestic assault complaint. Neighbor says the dad was
shouting, threatening violence. Linda’s going through the old report, making
calls, putting it together with stuff the FBI sent us in a file for you. Seems
the father got in a bar fight quite a few years back in Chicago. Did three days
for that. The guys got a temper.”

“This requires me to rush to Montana? The FBI has people
there and here. What, they lose the numbers?”

“It is out of our hands.”

“Sounds like somebody’s pumped to build a case where
maybe none exists. I’m going to pass, Leo. I’ve got plans and--”

“You are going to the mountains, Inspector.”

“How’s that?”

“Walt, you have no say. Unless you are retiring today?”

“What is the deal on this, Leo? What’s going on here?”

“Rangers and feebees got a very bad smell on this thing
the instant it broke.” Walt heard Leo shuffling papers. “The strategy is to
quietly
pull out all the stops now in the event it turns into a homicide. Remember that
case not too long ago in Yellowstone? It prompted the rangers and FBI to go
hard at the outset. Then there was that old mess in Colorado, a missing turns
into kidnapping turns into homicide?”

“So?”

“And the South Carolina case. Mom screams on the
networks that a stranger took her two kids, when it turns out she killed them?”

“So? The rangers and FBI can handle their own cases.
When we catch one, we don’t wet our pants, call for help to come hold our
hand.”

“I suspect big political buttons were pushed here. The
park is federal jurisdiction. It is the state’s tourist jewel. The Montana governor has pull. He calls Washington, who calls Sacramento, who calls our
employer, who calls us, and now I’m calling you. They want this settled fast.
No mistakes. Whatever the hell happened in the mountains they want it cleared
fast, solid and by the book. Preferably with a happy ending. No weekly TV panel
discussions with experts pointing out the screw-ups.”

Sydowski cursed under his breath and shook his head.

“Anybody think it may be a matter of a child missing in
the woods?”

“It is your sworn duty as an officer assisting in this
file to help the team determine if that is the case. Accomplish that, Inspector
Sydowski, and your duty will have been done. Then you can go fishing.”

“You know, Leo, you are a sycophantic boot-licking
toady.”

“You will be assisting a Special Agent Frank Zander. I
think he’s coming in from D.C. A brass-balled mother who could build a case
against the pope for Jimmy Hoffa. You are supposed to challenge him to make the
case solid.”

“If I see a bear, I’ll cuff it, then bring it back and
feed him your asshole.”

“I knew you would see things my way, dear. Pack
flannel.”

“Up yours.” Sydowski slammed down the phone.

His father said, “I take it that was not Louise?”

The call meant Sydowski’s old man had to go home to Pacifica, so he called a cab for him, then phoned a friend in his bird club who lived a few
doors down the street. The friend had a key to Sydowski’s aviary and agreed to
tend to his birds while he was away. Within twenty minutes, both men had
finished packing when Linda arrived in an unmarked Chevy Caprice. Sydowski was
upstairs. His old man let her in.

“Hi there. I’m Linda Turgeon, Walt’s partner.” She
removed her sunglasses. Her brunette hair had been recently cut in a jaw-length
bob. She was wearing a tailored lavender suit and looked very nice.