My head was ringing. I had a murder suspect loose. Shots had been fired. I didn’t know what to make of this. What to do about my father? How much did he really know? How to deal with Coombs now? With Chimera?
“You’re telling me the truth? For once? This is my case, my big, important case. I have to know the truth. Please don’t lie to me, Dad.”
“I swear,” he said, his eyes hooded with shame. “What’re you going to do?”
I glared at him. “About what? About Coombs, or us…?”
“About this whole mess. What happened tonight.”
“I don’t know.” I swallowed. “But I do know one thing…. If I can, I’m bringing Coombs in.”
Chapter 92
BY TEN THE NEXT MORNING, I had a search warrant in my hands. It granted access to Coombs’s room at the William Simon. Half a dozen of us rushed over there in two cars.
Coombs was out in the open. There were things we could nail him for: like attempted murder of a police officer and resisting arrest. I had put out an APB on him and sent a team to go over the meet house where everyone had scattered the night before.
I asked Jill to meet Jacobi and me at the William Simon. I was hoping against hope that we’d find something in Coombs’s room that would tie him to one of the murders. If we did, I wanted a warrant in motion immediately.
The same Indian desk clerk let us in the room. It was unkempt, a row of crushed beer bottles and soda cans lining the windowsill. The only furniture was a metal-frame bed with a thin mattress, and a chest of drawers with his toiletries on top, a desk, a table, and two chairs.
“What’d ya expect”—Jacobi smirked—“… a Holiday Inn?”
Several newspapers were littered about, Chronicles and Examiners. Nothing out of the ordinary. On a ledge to the side of the bed, my eyes fell on a small marksmanship trophy—a prone sharpshooter aiming a rifle with the inscription Regional 50 Meter Straight Target Champion and Frank Coombs’s name.
It made my stomach turn.
I went over to the desk. Stuck under the phone were crumpled receipts and a few numbers I didn’t recognize. I found a map of San Francisco and the surrounding areas. I yanked out the drawers of the desk. An old Yellow Pages, some take-out menus to local restaurants, an out-of-date city guide.
Nothing…
Jill looked at me. She shook her head, grimaced.
I kept searching the room. Something had to be here. Coombs was Chimera….
I kicked a desk drawer in, sending a lamp toppling to the floor. In the same frustrated fit, I grabbed hold of the mattress and angrily ripped it off the bed.
“It’s here, Jill. Something has to be.”
To my surprise, a manila envelope that had been between the mattress and the box spring fell to the floor. I picked it up and spilled the contents onto Coombs’s bed.
It wasn’t a gun or something taken from the victims… but it was a virtual history of the Chimera case. Newspaper and magazine articles, some of them going back twenty-two years to the trial, one from TIME magazine, detailing the case. One, headlined “POLICE LOBBY DEMANDS COOMBS ARREST,” had a picture of an Officers for Justice rally at City Hall Square. Scanning through it, my eye was drawn by a slashing red circle Coombs had made, highlighting a quote ascribed to a group spokesman, Patrol Sergeant Edward Chipman.
“Bing-o.” Jacobi whistled.
Continuing on, we came upon articles on the trial and copies of letters from Coombs to the POA demanding a new trial. A faded copy of the original Police Commission’s report on the incident in Bay View. There were lots of angry comments penned in the margins by Coombs. “Liar,” boldly underlined, and “Fucking coward.” A bold red bracket highlighted the testimony of Field Lieutenant Earl Mercer.
Then a series of current articles, tracing the most recent murders: Tasha Catchings, Davidson, Mercer… a blurb in the Oakland Times about Estelle Chipman with a scrawled-in comment, “A man without honor dishonors everything.”
I looked at Jill. It wasn’t perfect; it wasn’t something we could tie directly to a murder case. But it was enough to remove all doubt that we had found our man. “It’s all here,” I said. “At least we can make this stick for Chipman and Mercer.”
She thought awhile, then finally bunched her lips together and gave me a satisfied nod.
As I rebundled the file, perfunctorily leafing through the last few items, something hit my eye. My jaw stiffened.
It was a newspaper clipping from the first press conference after the Tasha Catchings murder. The photo showed Chief Mercer standing behind several microphones.
Jill noticed my changed expression. She took the clipping out of my hand. “Oh God, Lindsay…”
In the photo’s background, behind Mercer, were several people connected to the investigation. The mayor, Chief of Detectives Ryan, Gabe Carr.
Coombs had drawn a bold red circle around one face.
My face.
Chapter 93
BY THE END OF THE DAY, Frank Coombs’s description was in the hands of every cop in the city. This was personal. We all wanted to bring him down.
Coombs had no belongings, no real money, no network that we knew of. By all reckoning, we should have him soon.
I asked the girls to get together in Jill’s office after everyone else had left. When I arrived, they were cheerful and smiling, probably thinking about congratulating me. The newspapers had Coombs’s picture on the front page. He looked like a killer.
I sank down on the leather couch next to Claire.
“Something’s wrong,” she said. “I don’t think we want to hear this.”
I nodded. “I need to talk about something.”
As they listened, I described my experience of the night before. The real version. How tailing Coombs had been risky and impulsive, though I hadn’t had any real choice. How I had gotten trapped. How, when I was sure there was no hope, my father had rescued me.
“Jesus, Lindsay.” Jill’s jaw hung incredulously. “Will you please try to be more careful…?”
“I know,” I said.
Claire shook her head. “You said to me the other day, I don’t know what I would do without you, and you go off taking a risk like that. Don’t you think it works the same for us? You’re like a sister. Please stop trying to be a hero.”
“A cowboy,” Jill said.
“Cowgirl,” Cindy chimed.
“A couple of seconds either way”—I smiled—“and you guys would be out on a membership drive about now.”
They sat staring at me, somber and serious. Then a ripple of laughter snaked its way around the room. The thought of losing my girls, or them losing me, made what I had done seem all the more insane. Now it was funny.
“Thank God for Marty,” Jill exclaimed.
“Yeah, good old Marty.” I sighed. “My dad.”
Sensing my ambivalence, Jill leaned forward. “He didn’t hit anyone, did he?”
I took a breath. “Coombs. Maybe someone else.”
“Was there blood at the scene?” asked Claire.
“We’ve been over the house. It was rented to this small-time punk who’s disappeared. There was evidence of blood in the driveway.”
They stared back in silence. Then Jill said, “So how’d you leave it, Lindsay? With the department?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t. I kept my father out of it.”
“Jesus, Lindsay,” Jill shot back, “your dad may have shot someone. He stuck his nose into a police situation and fired his gun.”
I looked at her. “Jill, he saved my life. I can’t just turn him in.”
“But you’re taking a huge risk. For what? His gun is properly licensed. He was your father, and he was following you. He saved you. There’s no crime in that.”
“Truth is”—I swallowed—“I’m not sure he was following me.”
Jill shot me a hard look. She wheeled her chair closer. “You want to run that by me again?”
“I’m not sure he was following me,” I
said.
“Then why the hell was he there?” Cindy shook her head.
All their eyes fell on me.
Piece by piece, I laid out the exchange with my father in the car after the shooting. How after I confronted him, my father had admitted to being a material witness twenty years ago in Bay View. “He was there with Coombs.”
“Oh, shit,” Jill said with blank eyes. “Oh Jesus, Lindsay.”
“That’s why he came back,” I said. “All those uplifting conversations about reconnecting with his little girl. His little Buttercup. Coombs was threatening him. He came back to face him down.”
“That may be,” said Claire, reaching out for my hand, “but he was threatening him with you. He came back to protect you, too.”
Jill leaned forward, her eyes narrowed. “Lindsay, this may not be about protecting your dad from getting involved. He may have known Coombs was killing people and not come forward.”
I met her eyes. “These past weeks, having him back in my life, it was like, all of a sudden I could put aside the things he had done, the hurt he caused, and he was just a person, who made some mistakes but who was funny and needing, and who seemed happy to be with me. When I was little, I dreamed of something like this happening, my dad coming back.”
“Don’t give up on him yet,” Claire said.
Cindy asked, “So if you don’t think your father came back for you, Lindsay, what is he protecting?”
“I don’t know.” I looked around the room, my eyes stopping at every face. “That’s the big question.”
Jill got up, went over to the credenza behind her desk, and hoisted up a large cardboard box file. On the front was marked, “Case File 237654A. State of California vs. Francis C. Coombs.”
“I don’t know either,” she said, patting it. “But I’ll bet the answer’s somewhere in here.”
Chapter 94
AS SOON AS SHE GOT TO WORK the next morning, Jill opened the case file and waded in. She told her secretary to hold all calls and canceled what only yesterday had seemed an urgent meeting on another murder case she’d been working on.
With a mug of coffee on her desk and her DKNY suit jacket slung over her chair, Jill lifted out the first heavy folder. The massive trial record—pages and pages of testimony, motions, and judicial rulings. In the end, it would be better that she didn’t find anything. That Marty Boxer ended up being a father who had come back to protect his kid. But the prosecutor in her wasn’t convinced.
She groaned and started reading the file.
The trial had taken nine days. It took the rest of the morning for her to go through it. She sifted through the pretrial hearings, jury selection, the opening statements. Coombs’s previous record was brought out. Numerous citations for mishandling situations on the street where blacks were involved. Coombs was known for off-color jokes and pejorative remarks. Then came a painstaking re-creation of the night in question. Coombs and his partner, Stan Dragula, on patrol in Bay View. They encounter a schoolyard basketball game. Coombs spots Gerald Sikes. Sikes is basically a good kid, the prosecution conveys. Stays in school, is in the band; one blemish when he had been rounded up two months before in a sweep of the projects looking for pushers.
Jill read on.
As Coombs busts up the game, he starts taunting Sikes. The scene gets ugly. Two more patrol cars arrive. Sikes shouts something at Coombs, then he takes off. Coombs follows. Jill studied several hand-drawn diagrams illustrating the scene. After the crowd is subdued, two other cops give chase. Patrol Officer Tom Fallone is the first to arrive. Gerald Sikes is already dead.
The trial and notes ran over three hundred pages… thirty-seven witnesses. A real mess. It made Jill wish she’d been the prosecuting attorney. But nowhere was there anything implicating Marty Boxer.
If he was there that night, he was never called.
By noon, Jill had made her way through the depositions of witnesses. The murder of Sikes had taken place in a service alley between Buildings A and B in the projects. Residents claimed to have heard the scuffle and the boy’s cries for help. Just reading the depositions turned Jill’s stomach. Coombs was Chimera; he had to be.
She was tired and discouraged. She’d spent half a day plowing through the file. She had almost gotten to the end when she found something odd.
A man who claimed he’d witnessed the murder from a fourth-story window. Kenneth Charles.
Charles was a teenager himself. He had a juvie record. Reckless mischief, possession. He had every reason, the police said, to create trouble.
And no one else backed up what Charles said he saw.
As she read through the deposition, a throbbing built in Jill’s head. Finally, it was sharp, stabbing. She buzzed her secretary. “April, I need you to get me a police personnel file. An old one. From twenty years ago.”
“Give me the name. I’m on it.”
“Marty Boxer,” Jill replied.
Chapter 95
A CHILLY BAY BREEZE sliced through the night as Jill huddled on the wharf outside the BART terminal station.
It was after six. Men in blue uniforms, still wearing their short-billed caps, came out of the yard, their shift over. Jill searched the exiting group for a face. He may have been a juvie with a police record twenty years before, but he had straightened his life out. He’d been decorated in the service, married, and for the past twelve years worked as a motorman with BART. It had taken April only a few hours to track him down.
A short, stocky black man in a black leather cap and a 49ers windbreaker waved good-bye to a few coworkers and made his way over to her. He eyed her warily. “Office manager said you were waiting for me? Why’s that?”
“Kenneth Charles?” Jill asked.
The man nodded.
Jill introduced herself and handed him her card. Charles’s eyes widened. “I don’t mind saying, it’s been a long time since anyone at the Hall of so-called Justice took an interest in me.”
“Not you, Mr. Charles,” Jill answered, trying to set him at ease. “This is about something you might have witnessed a long time ago. You mind if we talk?”
Charles shrugged. “You mind walking? My car’s over here.” He motioned her through a chain-link gate to a parking lot on the wharf.
“We’ve been digging through some old cases,” Jill explained. “I came across a deposition you had given. The case against Frank Coombs.”
At the sound of the name, Charles came to a stop.
“I read your deposition,” Jill went on. “What you said you saw. I’d like to hear about it.”
Kenneth Charles shook his head in dismay. “No one believed anything I said back then. They wouldn’t let me come to trial. Called me a punk. Why you interested now?”
“You were a kid with a rap sheet who’d been in the system twice,” Jill answered honestly.
“All that’s true,” Kenneth Charles said, “but I saw what I saw. Anyway, there’s a lot of water under the bridge since then. I’m twelve years toward my pension. If I read right, a man served twenty years for what he did that night.”
Jill met his eyes. “I guess I want to make sure the right man did spend twenty years for that night. Look, this case hasn’t been reopened. I’m not making any arrests. But I’d like the truth. Please, Mr. Charles.”
Charles took her through it. How he was watching TV and smoking weed, how he’d heard scuffling outside his window, shouting, then a few muffled cries. How when he looked out, there was this kid, being choked.
Then, as Jill listened, everything changed. She took in a sharp breath.
“There were two men in uniform. Two cops holding Gerald Sikes down,” Charles told her.
“Why didn’t you do something?” Jill asked.
“You have to see it like it was back then. Then, you wore blue, you were God. I was just this punk, right?”
Jill looked deeply into his eyes. “You remember this second cop?”
“I thought you said you weren’t making any arrests.” r />
“I’m not. This is something personal. If I showed you a picture, you think you could pick him out?”
They resumed walking and arrived at a shiny new Toyota. Jill opened her briefcase, took out the picture. She held it out for him. “Is this the policeman you saw, Mr. Charles?”
He stared at the photo for a long moment. Then he said, “That’s the man I saw.”
Chapter 96
I SPENT THAT WHOLE DAY at the Hall, on the phone with the field or at a grid map of the city, overseeing the manhunt for Frank Coombs.
We placed a watch on several of his known acquaintances and places where we thought he might run, including Tom Keating’s. I did a trace on the yellow Bonneville that had picked Coombs up and ran the phone numbers found on his desk. No help there. By four, the guy who had rented the house in South San Francisco had turned himself in—insisting it was the first time he had met Coombs.
Coombs had no money, no belongings. No known manner of transport. Every cop in the city had his likeness. So where the hell was he?
Where was Chimera? And what would he do next?
I was still at my desk at seven-thirty when Jill walked in. She was only a few days out of the hospital. She had on a brown wrap raincoat, with a Coach briefcase slung over her shoulder. “What’re you still doing here?” I shook my head. “Go home and rest.”
“You got a minute?” she asked.
“Sure, pull up a chair. Afraid I don’t have a beer to offer.”
“Don’t worry.” She smiled, opening her bag and removing two Sam Adamses. “I brought my own.” She tilted one toward me.
“What the hell.” I sighed. We had no trace on Coombs, and it was clear in Jill’s face that something was bothering her. I figured it was Steve, already humping some new deal, leaving her alone again.