2nd Chance (19 page)

“Jesus, Claire… ” was all I could manage, my eyes hot and moist. I melted into Edmund, resting my head on his shoulder, and gave him my warmest, most grateful hug. Then I threw my arms all over Claire.

“Go easy on the
TLC
, honey” She winced, jerking her neck. Then she managed a smile. “I always told you one day these fat cells would come in handy. It takes a helluva shot to reach anything vital in me.”

I was still squeezing her. “Do you have any idea how lucky you are?”

“
Yeah.”
She exhaled. I could see it in her eyes. “Believe me, I know.”

The bullet had only grazed her. The ER doctor had cleaned the wound, bandaged it, and was releasing her without even keeping her overnight. Another inch, and we wouldn’t have been talking now.

Claire reached out for Edmund’s and Willie’s hands and smiled. “My men did okay, didn’t they? Both of them. Edmund’s car scared the sniper away.”

Edmund grimaced. “I should’ve chased that bastard myself. If I’d caught him… ”

“Down, tiger.” Claire smiled. “Let Lindsay be the heat. You stay a drummer. I always told you,” she said, squeezing his hand, “Rachmaninoff might be in his head, but when it comes to his heart, the man’s all Doggy Dogg.”

Almost at once, the reality of what had almost happened seemed to overwhelm him. Edmund’s bravado melted away. He sat down, just leaned against Claire for a while, and as he tried to speak, put a hand over his eyes. Claire held his hand without speaking.

A little more than an hour later, after going through the story with the Burlingame Police, we walked the grounds outside her house.

“It was him, wasn’t it, Claire? It was Chimera.” She nodded her head,
yes.

“He’s a real cold sonofabitch, Lindsay. I heard him say, “Lean a little to the left, Doe.’ Then he started firing.”

Local cops and the San Mateo County sheriff’s office were still scrambling all over the house and yard. I had already called Clapper to come down and lend a hand.

Claire said, “Why
me
, Lindsay?”

“I don’t know, Claire. You’re black. You work in law enforcement. I don’t understand it myself. Why would he change his pattern?”

“We’re talking calm and deliberate, Lindsay. It was like he was toying with me. He made it sound…
personal
.”

I thought I saw something I had never seen in her before.
Fear.
Who could blame her? “Maybe you should take some time off, Claire,” I told her. “Stay out of sight.”

“You think I’m gonna let him push me under a rock? That’s not a possibility, Lindsay. No way I let him win.”

I gave her a gentle hug. “You’re okay?”

“I’m okay. He had his chance. Now I want mine.”

I
FINALLY
DRAGGED
MYSELF
back to my apartment at sometime after two in the morning.

The events of the long, horrible day – Jill losing her child, Claire’s terrifying ordeal – flipped by like some old-time nightmare film sequence. The man I was tracking had almost killed my best friend. Why Claire? What could it mean? Part of me felt responsible, dirtied by the crime.

My body ached. I wanted to sleep; I needed to wash away the day. Suddenly, the door to the guest bedroom opened, and my father shuffled out. In the madness of the day, I had almost forgotten he was here.

He was wearing a long white T-shirt and boxers with a seashell pattern. Somehow, with the deprivation of sleep, I found this funny.

“You’re wearing boxers, Boxer,” I said. “You’re a witty old bastard.” Then I told him what had happened. As a former cop, he would understand. Surprisingly, my father was a good listener. Just what I needed right about then.

He came around to my side of the couch. “You want coffee? I’ll go make it, Lindsay.”

“Brandy would do the trick better. But there’s some Moonlight Sonata tea on the counter there if you’re up to it.” It was nice to have someone here, and he seemed eager to calm me.

I sank back in the couch, shut my eyes, and tried to figure out what I was going to do next.
Davidson, Mercer and now Claire Washburn
… Why would Chimera come after Claire? What did it mean?

My father came back with a cup of tea and a snifter of Courvoisier two inches full. “I figure you’re a big girl. So why not
both.”

I took a sip of tea, then drank about half the brandy in a gulp. “Oh, I needed that. Almost as much as I need a break on this case. He’s leaving clues, but I still don’t get it.”

“Take it easy on yourself, Lindsay,” my father said in the gentlest voice.

“What do you do,” I asked, “when everyone in the world is watching and you have no idea what to do next? When you realize that whatever you’re fighting isn’t giving in, that you’re fighting a monster?”

“That’s about where we usually called in Homicide,” my father said with a smile.

“Don’t try to make me laugh,” I begged. But my father had me smiling in spite of everything. Even more surprising to me, I was starting to think of him as my father.

His tone suddenly changed. “I can tell you what I did when it really got tough. I took off. You won’t do that, Lindsay. I can tell. You’re so much better than me.”

He was looking squarely at me, no longer smiling.

What happened next, I would never have believed. My father’s arms just sort of parted, and almost without resistance, I found myself burrowing into his shoulder. He wrapped his arms around me, a little tentatively at first, then, just like any father and any daughter, he squeezed me with tender care. I didn’t resist. I could smell the same cologne he wore when I was a child. It felt both strange and, at the same time, like the most natural thing in the world.

Having my father hold me unexpectedly, it felt like layers of pain were suddenly stripped away.

“You’re going to catch him, Lindsay,” I heard him whisper, squeezing me and rocking”

“You will, Buttercup..

It was just what I needed to hear.

“Oh, Daddy,” I said. Nothing more, though”

“L
IEUTENANT
BOXER
.” Brenda buzzed me early Monday. “Warden Estes from Pelican Bay Line two.” I picked up the phone, not expecting much.

“You asked if we had ever had a policeman imprisoned here,” Estes said.

I perked up immediately. “And?”

“Mind you, I don’t give a shit about some lunatic ravings from Weiscz” But I did go back through the old files. There was a case here that might have some relevance. Twelve years ago. I was the warden at Soledad when this scum arrived here.”

I took the phone off speaker, pressing the receiver to my ear.

“They had him here for five years. Two of them in iso. Then they shipped him back to Quentin. A special case. You may even remember the name.”

I picked up a pen and started racking my brain. A cop at Pelican? Quentin?

“Frank Coombs,” Estes said.

I did recognize the name. It was like a headline flashing back from my youth. Coombs. A street cop, he had killed a kid in the projects some twenty years before. Got run up on charges. Sent away. To any San Francisco cop, his name was like a warning bell for the use of excessive force.

“Coombs turned into more of a bastard in prison than he was on the outside,” Estes went on. “He choked a cell mate blue down in Quentin, which is why they shipped him here. After a stay in the SHU’s, they were able to cure him of some of his antisocial tendencies.”

Coombs…
I wrote down the name. I couldn’t remember anything about the case except that he had choked and killed this black kid.

“What makes you think this Coombs might fit?” I asked.

“As I said… ” Estes cleared his throat. “I don’t much care about Weiscz’s ravings. What made me call was that I asked some of our staff. When he was here, Coombs was a charter member of that little group of yours.

“My group?”

“That’s right, Lieutenant.
Chimera.”

Y
OU
KNOW
THE
SAYING: when one door slams in your face, another one opens. Half an hour later, I rapped on my window for Jacobi. “What do you know about Frank Coombs?” I asked when he came into my office.

Warren shrugged. “Dirtbag street cop. Got some teenager in a stranglehold during a drug bust years ago. The kid died. Major departmental scandal when I was in uniform. Didn’t he get a dime up in Quentin?”

“Uh-uh,
twenty.”
I slid Coombs’s personnel file toward him. “Now tell me something I can’t find in here.”

Warren opened the file. “As I remember, the guy was a tough cop, decorated, a solid arrest record, but at the same time, I figure this file’s got enough
OCC
reprimands for excessive force to rival Rodney King.”

I nodded. “Keep going… ”

“You read the file, Lindsay. He busted up a basketball game in one of the projects. Thought he recognized one of the players as some kid he put away for drugs but was spit back out. The kid said something to him, then he took off. Coombs went after him.”

“We’re talking about a black kid,” I injected. “They gave him fifteen to twenty, second-degree manslaughter.”

Jacobi blinked. “Where’re we going with this, Lindsay?”

“
Weiscz,
Warren. At Pelican Bay I thought he was just ranting, but something he said stuck. Weiscz said he’d given me something. He said it sounded like an inside job.”

“You dredged up this old file because Weiscz said it was an inside job?” Jacobi screwed his brow.

“Coombs was
Chimera.
He spent two years in the SHU’s. Take a look. The guy had
SWAT
training.
He was qualified for marksman status
. He was an avowed racist. And he’s out. Coombs was released from San Quentin a few months ago.”

Jacobi sat there stone-faced. “You’re still short a motive, Lieutenant. I mean, granted, the guy was a major asshole. But he was a cop. What would he have against other cops?”

“He pleaded self-defense, that the kid was resisting. No one backed him, Warren. Not his partner, not the other officers on the scene, not the brass.

“You think I’m reaching?” I grabbed the file, skimmed through, and stopped where I had circled something in red marker. “You said Coombs killed this kid in the projects?”

Jacobi nodded.

I pushed the page at him.

“
Bay View,
Warren.
La Salle Heights
. That’s where he choked that kid. Those projects were torn down and rebuilt in nineteen ninety. They were renamed… ”

“… Whitney Young,” Jacobi said.

Near where Tasha Catchings had been killed.

M
Y
NEXT
MOVE
was to dial up Madeline Akers, assistant warden at San Quentin prison. Maddie was a friend. She told me what she knew about Coombs. “Bad cop, bad guy, real bad inmate. A cold sonofabitch.” Maddie said she would ask around about him. Maybe Frank Coombs had told somebody what he planned to do once he got outside.

“Madeline, this absolutely can’t leak out,” I insisted.

“Mercer was a friend, Lindsay. I’ll do anything I can. Give me a couple of days.”

“Make it one, Maddie. This is vital. He’s going to kill again.”

For a long time I sat at my desk trying to piece together just what I had. I couldn’t place Coombs at a crime scene. I had no weapon. I didn’t even know where he was. But for the first time since Tasha Catchings was killed, I had the feeling I was onto something good.

My instinct was to ask Cindy to troll through the
Chronicle’s
morgue for old stories. These events had happened more than twenty years before. Only a few people in the department were still around from those days.

Then I remembered I had someone who’d been there staying under my own roof.

I found my father watching the evening news when I walked through the door. “Hey,” he called. “You’re home at a decent hour. Solve your case?”

I changed my clothes, grabbed a beer from the fridge, then I pulled up a chair across from him.

“I need to talk to you about something.” I looked in his eyes. “You remember a guy named Frank Coombs?”

My father nodded. “There’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Sure, I remember him. Cop who choked the kid over in the projects. They brought him up on murder charges. Sent him away.”

“You were on the force, right?”

“Yes, and I knew him. Worst excuse for a cop I ever ran into. Some people were impressed with him. He made arrests, got things done. In his own way. It was different then. We didn’t have review committees looking over our shoulder. Not everything we did got into the press.”

“This kid he choked, Dad, he was fourteen.”

“Why do you want to know about Coombs? He’s in jail.”

“Not any longer. He’s out.” I pulled my chair closer. “I read that Coombs claimed he killed the kid in self-defense.”

“What cop wouldn’t? He said the kid tried to cut him with a sharp object he took to be a knife.”

“You remember who he was partnered up with back then, Dad?”

“Jesus.” My father shrugged. “Stan Dragula, as I recall. Yeah, he testified at the trial. But I think he died a few years back. No one wanted to work with Coombs. You were scared to walk through the neighborhoods with him.”

“Was Stan Dragula white or black?” I asked.

“Stan was white,” my father answered. ‘“I think Italian, or maybe Jewish.”

That wasn’t the answer I had been expecting. No one had backed Coombs up. But why was he killing blacks?

“Dad, if it is Coombs doing these things… if he is out for some kind of revenge, why against blacks?”

“Coombs was an animal, but he was also a cop. Things were different then. That famous blue wall of silence… Every cop is taught at the academy, Keep your yap shut. It’ll be there for you. Well, it didn’t hold up for Frank Coombs; it came tumbling down on him. Everyone was glad to give him up. We’re talking, what, twenty years ago? The affirmative action thing on the force was strong. Blacks and Latinos were just starting to get placed in key positions. There was this black lobby group, the
OFJ
… ”