2nd Chance (29 page)

E
VIDENCE
TAKEN
INTO
CUSTODY
is kept under lock and key in a storage room in the basement of the Hall.

Fred Karl, the day duty officer, looked a little annoyed at the four of us. “This isn’t a social room,” he grumbled, pushing a clipboard in my direction and pressing a button that opened the chain-link gate. “You and Ms. Bernhardt can sign and go in. These other two, they’ll have to wait out here.”

“Arrest us, Fred,” I said, waving everyone through.

The contents of Coombs’s hotel room had been placed in large storage bins near the back. I led the girls to the spot and hung my jacket on a ledge as I pulled a couple of bins down from the shelf coded with Coombs’s case number. I started rummaging through the contents.

“Would you mind telling me just what the hell we’re looking for?” Jill asked, seeming annoyed. “What the hell didn’t I see?”

“You saw it perfectly,” I said as I pawed through Frank Coombs’s effects. “So did I. But neither of us put it together at the time. Look at this.”

As if it were a silver chalice, I picked up the polished brass trophy of a prone sharpshooter aiming a rifle.
50 Meter Straight Target Champion,
the inscription plate read. That was what I remembered from the first time I saw the trophy.

But the name above it changed everything.

Frank L. Coombs…
not Frank C.
Francis Laurence, not Francis Charles.

Rusty Coombs…
The trophy had been awarded to Coombs’s son.

All of a sudden, every assumption and insight changed for me. Maybe because of all the paperwork I had looked at recently, Coombs Sr.’s full name had sunk into my consciousness.

Frank C.
was the father,
Frank L.
the son.

“I’m not my father,” I remembered Rusty Coombs saying. I could see his face now, the convincing act he’d put on for Jacobi and me.

“It’s the son,” I whispered.

Jill sat back on the floor, stunned. “You’re telling me, Lindsay, these horrifying murders were committed by Coombs’s son? The boy at Stanford?”

Cindy blurted, “I thought he hated his father. I thought they hadn’t been in touch.”

“So did I,” I said. “He fooled everyone, didn’t he?”

We stood there, seeking one another’s eyes in the dim basement room. Did the new theory work? Did it stand up to scrutiny? My mind flashed again —
the white van.
The getaway car from Tasha Catchings’s murder … It had been stolen from Mountain View. Palo Alto and Mountain View were only a few minutes apart.

“The owner of the white van,” 1 said, “taught anthropology at a community college down there. He said he took on students from other schools. Sometimes, some of the jocks …”

All of a sudden, things were fitting into place. “Maybe one of them was Rusty Coombs?”

I
HURRIED
BACK
UPSTAIRS
. The first thing I did was place a call to Professor Stasic at Mountain View Junior College. I was only able to get his voice mail. I left an urgent message for him to call me.

I punched the name Francis L. Coombs into the
CCI
databank computer. The father’s old conviction came up, but nothing on the son. No criminal record.

I felt that if the kid was cold enough to do these terrible crimes, he had to be in the system somewhere. I typed his name in the juvie databank. These records were sealed, unable to be used in a court, but we had access. After a few seconds, a file shot back. A
long one…
I blinked at the screen.

Rusty Coombs had had run-ins with the law at least seven times from the time he was thirteen.

[_In 1992, he’d been brought before a juvie court for shooting a neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun.

A year later, he’d been indicted for criminal mischief for killing a goose in a corporate park.

At age fifteen, he and a friend had been charged with desecrating a public place for spray painting a synagogue with anti-Semitic slogans.

He had been charged, but not convicted, with throwing beer bottles through a neighbor’s window. The complainant was black.

He was alleged to be part of a high school gang, the Kott Street Boys, known for race-based attacks on blacks, Latinos, and Asians._]

One after another, I read on, stunned. Finally, I called Jacobi into my office. I laid the whole thing out for him. Rusty Coombs’s violent past. His name on the marksmanship trophy. The stolen van in Mountain View, not that far from Palo Alto.

“Obviously, they’ve seriously relaxed the admission requirements at Stanford since I applied.” Jacobi snorted.

“No jokes, Warren. Please. So what do you think? I’m losing it, right? Am I crazy?”

“Not so crazy we shouldn’t pay the kid another visit,” he said.

There were other things we could do to be sure. We could wait and see if Coombs Sr.’s
DNA
matched what was found under Estelle Chipman’s nails. But that took time. The more 1 thought about it, the more Rusty Coombs made sense.

My brain was buzzing now A tremor of recognition reverberated through me. “Oh my God, Warren…
the white chalk”

Jacobi leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “What about it?”

“The white powder Clapper found at two of the scenes.” I recalled an image of Rusty Coombs, his freckled face and wide lineman’s shoulders in a sweaty Cardinals T-shirt. The epitome of a superior kid who’d turned his life around, right?

“Remember when we met him?”

“Sure, the gym at Stanford.”

“He was lifting weights. What do weight lifters use, Warren, to hold on to the bar so it doesn’t slip?” I stood up. My mind settled on the vivid image of Rusty Coombs rubbing his thick, white hands together.

“They use chalk,” Jacobi muttered.

J
OGGING
BACK
from afternoon practice, Rusty Coombs took the four-mile loop from the field house around South Campus. He decided to make the last two hundred meters an all-out sprint.

A police car wailed past him. Then another speeding cruiser.

At first, the sight of the cruisers jolted him. But as he watched the cars trail away, he relaxed. His muscular legs churned on.

Everything was fine, just fine. He was safe here at Stanford. One of the privileged few, right?

He went back to what he’d been thinking about before the cops rudely interrupted. If he could get his body fat down to 7.8, and slice his time in the forty another tenth or two, he could maybe move up to the third round of the
NFL
draft. Third round meant guaranteed bonus. Stick to the plan, he told himself.
Fantasies had a way of becoming real, at least his did.

Rusty chugged onto Santa Ynez, a block away from the frat house where he and several other football players lived. As he turned down the street, his body slammed to a halt.

What
the fuck… They’re here for me!

The street was ablaze with flashing lights. Police cars… three of them, and two maroon campus security vehicles in front of his house. A crowd milling in the street. Town cops weren’t allowed on campus for anything trivial. No, this was bigger,
wide-screen….

He knew in a sickening flash that everything was over. He wouldn’t even have the chance to cut the lights out on the little bitch who had killed his father. His legs still moved, jogging in place.

What shot through his mind was,
How the fuck could they have known? Who figured it out? Not Lindsay Boxer!

A geeky student in baggy red shorts with a red knapsack thrown over his shoulder came up the street toward him. Rusty continued to jog in place. “Hey, what the hell’s going on?”

“Police are looking for someone,” the guy said. “Must be something big, ‘cause everyone’s saying cops from San Francisco are on the way.”

“No shit,” Rusty muttered. “All the way from San Francisco, huh?”

Too bad, he thought. He was pissed. He was also sorry it had to end. But he’d always fantasized about how this might play out.

He reversed himself and started jogging back in the direction of the Main Quad. His stride picked up speed, swiftly and powerfully.

Rusty Coombs turned his head as another police car, siren wailing, shot by. No point hiding out any longer. The cops were here in numbers.

Fortunately, he had the perfect ending.

J
ACOBI
AND
I
SPED
DOWN
101 toward Palo Alto at a steady ninety. Signs for Burlingame, San Mateo, and Menlo Park shot past. We were pumped to take this creep down within the hour.

I was hoping we could take Rusty Coombs by surprise. Maybe as he came out of a class. There were thousands of students on the Stanford campus. He was armed and very dangerous, so I wanted to avoid a confrontation if I could.

1 had arranged to meet Lieutenant Joe Kimes of the Palo Alto Violent Crimes Detail at the dean of students’ office in the Main Quad. As we closed in on Palo Alto, Kimes called back. He reported that Coombs couldn’t be found. He had no scheduled classes that afternoon. He wasn’t at his residence or the stadium, where the Stanford football team had finished practice about an hour ago.

“Does he know there’s an
APB
out on him?” I asked. “What’s happening down there, Joe?”

“It’s hard to keep a low profile here,” Kimes said. “He could’ve seen our cars.”

I was starting to worry. I’d hoped we could get to Coombs before he knew we were coming. He liked attention — he wanted to be a star.

“What do you want us to do?” Kimes asked.

“I want you to put the local
SWAT
team on alert. Meanwhile, try to find the big creep, Joe. Don’t let him out of our trap. And Joe, this guy is extremely dangerous. You have no idea.”

T
HE
ELEVATOR
ASCENDED
RAPIDLY
and when it opened, Chimera looked out on the observation deck of the Hoover Tower, more than two hundred and fifty feet over Stanford’s Main Quad.

There was no one up there on the deck. No one to bother him, no one to kill right away. Just the flat blue sky, the concrete WPA-style dome, the giant carillon bells that tolled thunder across the campus.

Rusty Coombs flicked off the elevator power switch, freezing the doors open.

Then he slung the black nylon duffel bag he was carrying onto the floor and leaned against the concrete wall, his back to one of the eight barred windows. He opened the bag, removing his disassembled PSG-1, the sniper’s scope, and two additional pistols, along with clips of ammunition.

This was something else — breathtaking, actually. The bomb, right? He could see mountains to the south and west, the outline of San Francisco to the north. It was a clear day. Everything was calm, perfect. The Stanford campus stretched out before him. Students crept like ants down below. The best and the brightest.

He began to hook together the rifle, clicking the barrel seamlessly into the stock, fitting on the customized shoulder rest, until the assembled piece rested in his arms like a prized musical instrument.

A sparrow perched on the carillon bells. He aimed and squeezed the trigger in a dry run.
Click.

Then he screwed the sniper’s sight onto the stock. He snapped in a twenty-round clip.

He crouched behind the cement wall. The wind rattled by, sounding like a gust snapping a canvas sail. The sky was a gorgeous turquoise blue.
I’m going to die, andyou know what? I really don’t care.

Students were casually traversing crosswalks, lounging and reading on benches. Who knew… ? Who suspected any danger? He could have his pick.
He could immortalize any of them.

Rusty Coombs swung the barrel of his rifle through the metal bars in one of the dome’s six-foot-high windows. He squinted through the sight and searched out the first target. Students popped into view: a pretty Japanese girl with auburn hair and dark glasses nuzzling her Caucasian boyfriend on the green. A geek in a bright yellow sweatshirt riding a yellow bicycle. He shifted the sight. A black student with long corn braids walking toward the student bookstore. Coombs smiled. Sometimes it even amazed him how much hatred he had inside. He was smart enough to know that he didn’t just despise them, he despised himself. Despised his buffed-up body, the imperfections only he knew about, but most of all he hated his thoughts, his obsessions, the way his goddamn mind worked. He’d felt so alone, for so goddamn long. Like right now.

In the distance, he caught sight of a blue Explorer with flashing lights. It pulled up in front of the administration building. The tight-assed bitch from San Francisco jumped out. His heart pounded.

She was here. He’d have his chance at her after all.

He fixed the sight on the pretty Oriental girl smooching her boyfriend on the lawn. Christ, he hated both of them. Disgraces to their races.

Then, as a second thought, he swung the rifle over to the jig girl with the cornstalks, a gold heart-shaped pendant bobbing on her neck, a glint in her brown eyes.

It’s
just my nature.
He smirked, coiling his finger around the cold metal trigger.

Chimera was back in business.

T
HE
EXPLORER
screeched to a stop outside the administration building. Jacobi and I got out and cut through the Spanish loggia overlooking the Main Quad.

We ran right into Kimes, barking orders into a handheld radio. He was with the grim-faced dean of students, Felix Stern. “We still haven’t found Rusty Coombs,” Kimes told me. “He was seen on the Quad twenty minutes ago. Now he’s disappeared again.”

“How are we doing with that
SWAT
team?” I asked him.

“They’re on their way now. You think we’ll need them?”