If Angels Fall (53 page)

Wailing. Yelping. Screaming.

It wasn’t real. Couldn’t be real. It was a terrifying
drug-fueled dream. Reed was numb. Detached. Alone in the shop, watching
everything unfold. Detectives talking to him as models of World War II fighters
strafed them from above.

“Mr. reed, anything you can remember about Keller that
might...”

His mouth wouldn’t work. What were his lines? What was
he supposed to say? My little boy. My son. My only child has been taken. What
was he supposed to do? Faces in his face. Dead serious. Faces at the shop
window. Police cars. Flashing lights. A crowd gathering. A TV news camera, no,
two -- three. Coffee-breathed detectives who wore strong cologne clasping his
shoulder.

“Mr. Reed, Tom, we need your help....”

Zach needs me. My boy. I did this. Zach. Keller, his
hand on Zach’s shoulder.

Sirens. Wailing. Yelping. Screaming.

Sirens -- the score of his profession. The chorus
cueing his entrance upon a stranger’s tragedy. And it was always a stranger, it
always happened to other people. It never touched him. Oh, it grazed him in the
early days. But he grew skilled in his craft. He knew the bridges into their
pain, knew his way over the crevasses that would consume you if you failed in
your mission, knew how to cradle their suffering long enough to serve himself.

The city shares your grief. Now is the time to say
the things that need to be said, by way of tribute.

And in virtually every case, they would struggle to
help. Stunned by their loss, they would recite an inarticulate requiem for
their son, daughter, father, mother, husband, wife, sister, brother, or friend.
Some would scrawl tearstained notes, or show him the rooms of the dead, their
accomplishments, their dreams, their disappointments, the last things they
touched.

And would you be able to provide the paper with a
picture?

Dutifully, they would flip through family albums,
rummage through shoe boxes, yearbooks, wallets, purses, reach to the mantel for
photos. Drinking in each image before placing it tenderly in his trusted hands.
But there were times a relative would see him for what he truly believed he
was. They knew.

Oh, the years-off-the-street, J-school profs and
burned-out hacks could pound their breasts about the unassailable duty of a
democratic free press, safeguarding the people’s right to know, ensuring no one
dies anonymously and secretly on American streets. But that constitutional crap
turned to dust when you met bereavement face-to-face, took it by the hand, and
persuaded it to expose itself. You steeled your soul with the armor of a
champion. The sympathetic, respectful reporter. Democracy’s champion. But at
the bottom of your frightened heart, you realized what you were: a driver ant,
leading the column to the carrion, overcoming and devouring the mourners who
open their door to you, those too pained to flee.

And before he left, they would usually thank him.

That was the joke of it. They would thank him. For
caring.

He was shoved, prodded, and paid to succeed at this,
and they thanked him. For caring.

Don’t thank me. I can’t care. I can’t.

But he would smile, professionally understanding, all
the while fearing he might never find the bridge back, for his ears rang with
tormented voices chanting:

Wait until it happens to you. Wait until this happens
to you.

Now it had.

He was paying the price for the sum of all his
actions. This was his day of reckoning. The toll was his son.

Zachary, forgive me.

“ -- Where is he? You let me go!”

It was Ann. Pender struggling to hold her, failing.
She ran to Reed. He opened his arms to take her. A horsewhip crack of her hand
across his face.

“Bastard!”

Reed saw stars and Franklin Wallace’s widow, her
accusations resurrected with Ann’s voice. It was his fault.

“You bastard!”

Pender must have told her everything. “Ann, please.”
His face burned. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand and I blame you! You had to get close,
had to keep digging for the sake of a story! Well, you’ve got a good one now,
don’t you? You used my son for it!”

“Mrs. Reed.” Pender and another uniformed officer
subdued her.

Sirens. Screaming. Ann screaming.

“Come with us, Mrs. Reed.” Pender took her to a back
room.

Reed turned away, meeting the rheumy eyes of George
Dempsey, who was pretending he hadn’t seen what he had seen, along with the
police people in the shop. Dempsey was showing a detective the U.S.S.
Kitty
Hawk
, the one Zach had held less than an hour ago.

The last thing he touched.

Suddenly the model fighters suspended from the ceiling
began trembling, the shop windows vibrating. Quake? No. A chopper was circling.
Reed overheard someone say they had a partial description of the suspect’s van
from a clerk at the bakery nearby. The pounding intensified when the door
opened. Merle Rust and a posse of FBI agents arrived, flashing ID’s, assuming
command, from Berkeley PD, going to Dempsey’s video. Sydowski, Turgeon, and a
few others dicks from the task force were with them. Sydowski put his large,
warm hand on Reed’s shoulder, just like Reed’s old man used to do whenever Reed
lost a little league game.

“Hang in there, Tom. We’re going to need your help.”

Reed swallowed, then told them. “It’s Edward Keller.
It’s been him all along. I met him for a story” -- Sydowski and Turgeon tried
to interrupt him, but he continued -- “his three children drowned. He’s a
religious psychotic -- thinks he can resurrect them. I was secretly researching
him. My paper found out before I was finished and fired me. Keller asked if I
had a son. I never suspected. I -- I -- I think he’s going to drown ... the
Farallons where he lost his kids!”

“Tom, Tom, Tom!” Linda Turgeon’s compassionate eyes
offered comfort. “We know it’s Keller.”

“We found out this morning. I called you,” Sydowski
said. “We need you to help us get him.”

“Martin! Dr. Kate Martin, did you try -- ”

Sydowski nodded. “She told us everything she knew.
Tom, what did you find out? Addresses? Relatives? Anything?”

“Okay,” Rust said from the counter where the FBI and
SFPD people huddled around the video monitor. “It’s ready.”

Reed watched the videotape again. Then FBI Special
Agent Rust turned to him. “You’re certain that man is Edward Keller?”

“Yes,” Reed said. “All the information I have on him
is at the paper. Keller lost his kids near the Farallons and made pilgrimages
there from Half Moon Bay with a guy named Reimer.”

“The Coast Guard’s been alerted. They’re watching the
islands. We’ve got a team going to Half Moon Bay now and local people there
have been alerted,” Sydowski said. “Let’s go, Tom. Merle, we’re going to the
Star
news department.

“Okay, first, Tom, give us all the addresses Zach knows,
so we can put people there in case he escapes or tries to call.”

Their home in the Sunset, his room in Sea Park, Jeff
and Gordie’s houses, Ann’s mother’s on Fulton, Rust wrote it down.

“Let’s get going, Tom.” Sydowski took his arm.

“I have to talk to Ann.”

Dempsey’s back room was a moldy storage closet. Boxes
of ancient model cars, planes, and ships teetered near the ceiling. There was a
coffee-stained sink, a hot plate, a small table, and a door to a toilet. The
air reeked of cardboard, cigarettes, and loneliness. Ann sat at the table
across from Pender staring at pictures of Zach.

“Ann,” Reed said.

She did not acknowledge him. The floor creaked when he
squatted down and took her unresponsive hand.

“Ann, I have to go with the police. I have information
that could help us find Zach. It’s at the paper. Ann?”

She was not there.

Watching her and Reed, Pender said, “Crisis people are
coming.”

“Ann, I’ll bring him home, I swear. I swear to you.”

Reed tried to hug her, but it was awkward. She did not
react until he started to leave. She lunged from her chair at him, crushing his
neck in her arms, filling him with pain, love, and courage.

***

Sydowski and Turgeon shielded Reed from the tangle of
reporters and photographers waiting outside the hobby shop. He recognized some
of them and instinctively stopped. Sydowski pushed him into the backseat of an
unmarked Caprice. Familiar voices hurled questions.

“C’mon Reed, just give us something!”

“Tom, please just make a statement.”

“Is it really your son? Give us a break.”

One guy smacked the car in frustration. Reed imagined
him returning to the newsroom, telling editors, as he himself had done many
times, “I couldn’t get anything good -- the father wouldn’t talk to us.”
Cameras pressed against the glass, their eyes probing, invading.

Wait until it happens to you.

Turgeon drove. The dash-mounted cherry blazed, and she
gave a few blasts of the siren, inching through crowd. The Chevy parted
traffic, gliding, speeding through Berkeley, Oakland. All the while, Sydowski
and Turgeon said nothing, allowing Reed his privacy, never once capitalizing on
the chance to ask him how it felt to be in the spotlight. They were above that.

Sydowski broke the silence as they sailed through the
tolls of the Bay Bridge to San Francisco.

“Tom, I don’t think we have much time to find Keller.
Tomorrow’s the anniversary of his children drownings. If he’s going to do
anything, I think he’ll do it then.”

Reed looked at the Bay, remembering the time Zach was
a year and a half old and toddled into his study where he was working. His
tiny, determined hands grabbed and tugged at him as he scaled his way to his
father’s lap, where he went to sleep, sucking his bottle. How Reed leaned back
in his chair, savoring his warmth, his sweet smell, and vowed to keep him safe
from all the bad things in this world.

Zach Reed’s
heart hammered in his chest as he ascended from sleep to consciousness, racing
through a mental systems check. It was all coming back to him, bubbling to the
surface.

He was not dreaming. He was waking to the nightmare.

He was kidnapped.

His mouth tasted salty. Kidnapped by some religious
creep who talked about God. And this dungeon stunk big time. Oh boy, he was in
deep trouble. Mom and Dad were going to kill him because he ran away, because
he got sucked in by a weirdo. He had to get himself out of this mess because
Dad was going to kick his butt.

Squeak-creak.

What was that? Sounds of a TV somewhere. Where was he?
He was lying on a bed. He opened his eyes. Two faces swam into focus, jolting
him alert. Kids.

These kids were familiar for some very bad reason.
Zach heard the rocking noise above them.

Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Who are you?” the girl asked.

Zach went numb, like the time he was five and saw
little Luke Petric get run over by an eighteen-wheeler, mowed down like a rag
doll, and all Zach could do was stand there screaming, his scalp tingling like
as if he’d been electrocuted.

The kidnapped kids, the ones everybody was looking
for: Danny and Gabrielle.

Squeak-creak. Squeak-creak.

That was him! Above them. The man who took them was
upstairs. What was going to happen? It was getting hard to breathe. Something
inside was overwhelming him, on the verge of breaking. Hang on. Calm down. Take
slow breaths. Just be cool. He wanted to cry for his parents.

He was only nine.

But he was the biggest kid in this place.

The boy and girl looked different from their happy,
smiling pictures. Zach wanted to cry, but Danny and Gabrielle were looking at
him. Like he was supposed to save them or something.