2nd Chance (6 page)

He got off the bed and dragged his slick, muscular frame to the mirror. He had always been strong. He had lifted weights for ten years now. He flinched as he drew blood and mass into his swollen pecs. He massaged a scratch. That old bitch had dug her nails into his chest as he wrapped the coil around the ceiling pipes. It had barely drawn blood, but he looked at the scratch with contempt. He didn’t like anything that disturbed the surface of his skin.

He posed in front of the mirror, looking at the seething lion-goat tattooed across his chest.

Soon, all the stupid assholes would see that it wasn’t just about hate. They would read his pattern. The guilty had to be punished. Reputations needed to be restored. He had no particular antipathy for any of them. It wasn’t hate. He climbed back on the bed and masturbated to the photo of Missy Preston, whose tiny neck was snapped by a rope in Childers County, Tennessee, in August of 1931.

Without even a groan, he ejaculated. The forceful rush made his knees quake. That old lady, she had deserved to die. The choir girl, too. He was pumped up!

He massaged the tattoo on his chest.
Pretty soon, I will let you free, my pet….

He opened his photo scrapbook and flipped to the last blank page, just after Morris Tub and Sweet Brown, in Longbow, Kansas, 1956.

He had been saving this spot for the right picture. And now he had it.

He took a tube of roll-on glue and dabbed all over the back of the photo. Then he pressed it onto the blank page.

Here’s where it belonged.

He remembered her staring up at him, that sad inevitability etched all over her face.
The eyes…

He admired the new addition: Estelle Chipman, eyes stretched wide, looking at the camera just before he kicked the chair out from under her feet.

They always posed.

F
IRST
THING
THE
FOLLOWING
MORNING
, I called Stu Kirkwood, who ran a hate crimes desk assigned to the police department. I asked him,
personally,
for any leads on these types of groups that might be operating in the Bay Area. My people had talked to Stu earlier, but I needed action fast.

So far, Clapper’s
CSU
team had scoured the area around the church with nothing to show for it, and the only thing we came back with on Aaron Winslow was that no one had a negative thing to say about him.

Kirkwood informed me over the phone that a few organized supremacist groups operated out of Northern California, offshoots of the Klan or some crazy neo-Nazi skinheads. He said that maybe the best thing would be to contact the local chapter of the
FBI
, who kept a much more active eye on them. Gay bashing was more his thing.

Bringing in the
FBI
at this stage didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. I asked Kirkwood to give me what he had, and an hour later he came up, carrying a plastic bin crammed with blue and red folders. “Background reading.” He winked, dropping the bin heavily on my desk.

At the sight of the mass of files, my hopes sank. “You got any ideas about this, Stu?”

He shrugged sympathetically. “San Francisco’s not exactly a hotbed for these groups. Most of what I gave you here seems pretty benign. They seem to spend most of their time hoisting back a few beers and shooting off ammo.”

I ordered up a salad, figuring I’d spend the next couple of hours at my desk with a bunch of nutcases railing against blacks and Jews. I pulled out a handful of files and opened one at random.

Some sort of militia group, operating up in Greenview, near the Oregon border. The
California Patriots
. Some summary information supplied by the FBI:
Activity Type
: Militia, sixteen to twenty members.
Weapons Assessment:
Minor, small to semiautomatic arms, over-the-counter. On the bottom it had:
Threat:
Low to Moderate.

I skimmed through the file. Some printed materials with logos of crossed guns, detailing everything from population shifts from “the white, European majority,” to media cover-ups on government programs to promote test-tube fertilization of minorities.

I couldn’t imagine my killer buying into this claptrap. I didn’t see him on the same wavelength at all. Our guy was organized and bold, not some pumped-up backwoods bozo. He had gone to elaborate lengths to hide the murders in the MO of a hate crime. And he had signed them.

Like most serials,
he wanted us to know
.

And to know there would be more.

I leafed through a few more files. Nothing jumped out at me. I was starting to have the feeling this was a waste of time.

Suddenly Lorraine burst into my office. “We caught a break, Lieutenant. We found the white van.

I
STRAPPED
ON MY
GLOCK
and grabbed Cappy and Jacobi on the way out before Lorraine had even finished filling me in. “I want a
SWAT
team out there,” I yelled.

Ten minutes later, we all screeched up to a makeshift roadblock on San Jacinto, a quiet residential street.

A radio car on routine patrol had spotted a Dodge Caravan parked outside a house in tony Forest Hills. What made him sure this was the car we were looking for was the decal of a two-headed lion on the rear bumper.

Vasquez, the young patrolman who had called in the van, pointed toward a tree-shaded Tudor halfway down the block, the white minivan parked at the end of the driveway. It seemed crazy. This was an affluent neighborhood, not a likely haven for criminals or murderers.

But there it was.

Our white van.

And Bernard Smith’s Mufasa.

Moments later, an unmarked
SWAT
vehicle rigged to look like a cable TV repair truck pulled onto the street. The team was headed by Lieutenant Skip Arbichaut. I didn’t know what the situation entailed, whether we would have a siege or possibly have to break our way in.

“Cappy, Jacobi, and I will go in first,” I said.

This was a homicide operation and I wasn’t letting anyone else take the risk. I had Arbichaut deploy his men, two around back, three manning the front, and one with a sledge with us in case we had to bust in.

We strapped on protective vests and donned black nylon jackets identifying us as police. I clicked my 9mm off safety. There wasn’t much time to get nervous.

The
SWAT
truck started down the street, three black-vested snipers hugging its opposite side.

Cappy, Jacobi, and I followed the truck as cover until it pulled to a stop in front of a mailbox marked 610. Vasquez was right.
The van was a match.

My heart was racing now. I had been in many forced entries before, but none with more at stake. We cautiously wove our way to the front of the house.

There were lights on inside, some noise from a TV.

At my nod, Cappy pounded the door with his gun.
“San Francisco Police.
“Jacobi and I crouched with our guns ready.

No one answered.

After a few tense seconds, I signaled Arbichaut for a ram.

Suddenly, the front door cracked open.

“Freeze,”
Cappy boomed, swinging his gun into a shooting position. “San Francisco Police.”

A wide-eyed woman in powder blue exercise clothes stood frozen in the door. “Oh, my God,” she screeched, eyes fastened on our weapons.

Cappy yanked her out the front door as Arbichaut’s
SWAT
team rushed the house. He barked, “Is anyone else at home?”

“Just my daughter,” the frightened woman shrieked. “She’s two.”

The black-vested
SWAT
team barged past her into the house as if they were searching for Elian Gonzalez.

“Is that your van?” jacobi barked.

The woman’s eyes darted toward the street. “What is this about?”

“Is that your van?” Jacobi’s voice boomed again.

“No,” she said, trembling. “No..”

“Do you know who it belongs to?”

She looked again, terrified, and shook her head. “I’ve never seen it before in my life.”

It was all wrong; I could see that. The neighborhood, the plastic kid’s slide on the lawn, the spooked mom in the work-out clothes. A disappointed sigh was expelled from my chest. The van had been dumped here.

All of a sudden, a green Audi knifed its way up to the curb, followed by two police cars. The Audi must have gone right through our roadblock. A well-dressed man in a suit and tortoiseshell glasses jumped out and ran toward the house. “Kathy, what the hell’s going on?”

“_Steve… _” The woman hugged him with a sigh of relief. “This is my husband. I called him when I saw all the police outside our house.”

The man looked around at the eight cop cars,
SWAT
backup, and the
SFPD
inspectors standing around with weapons drawn. “What are you doing at my house? This is insane! This is nuts!”

“We believe that van was the vehicle used in the commission of a homicide,” I said. “We have every right to be here.”

“A homicide… ?”

Two of Arbichaut’s men emerged from the house, indicating that there wasn’t anyone else inside. Across the street, people were starting to file outdoors. “That van’s been our number one priority for two days. I’m sorry to have upset you. There was no way to be sure.

The husband’s indignation rose. His face and neck were beet red. “You’re thinking we had something to do with this? With a homicide?”

I figured I had upset their lives enough. “The La Salle Heights shooting.”

“Have you people lost your minds? You suspected us in the strafing of a church?” His jaw dropped, and he fixed on me incredulously. “Do you idiots have any idea what I do?”

My eyes fell on his pinstriped gray suit, his blue button-down-collar shirt. I had the humiliating feeling I had just been made a fool of.

“I’m chief counsel for the Northern California chapter of the Anti-Defamation League.”

W
E
HAD
BEEN
made fools of by the killer. No one on the block knew anything about or had any connection to the stolen van. It had been dumped there, purposely, to show us up. Even as Clapper’s
CSU
went over it inch by inch, I knew it wouldn’t yield shit. I studied the decal and I was sure it was the same thing I had seen in Oakland. One head was a lion’s, one seemed to be a goat’s, the tail suggested a reptile. But what the hell did it mean?

“One thing we learned.” Jacobi smirked. “The SOB’s got a sense of humor.”

“I’m glad you’re a fan,” I said.

Back at the Hall, I said to Lorraine, “I want to know where that van came from; I want to know who it belonged to, who had access to it, every contact the owner had a month prior to its theft.”

I was fuming mad. We had a vicious killer out there but not a single clue as to what made him tick. Was it a hate crime or a killing spree? An organized group or a lone wolf? We knew the guy was fairly intelligent. His strikes had been well planned, and if irony was part of his plan, dumping the getaway car where he had was a real beaut.

Karen buzzed in, informing me that Ron Vandervellen was on the line. The Oakland cop came on chuckling. “Word is you managed to subdue a dangerous threat to our society masquerading as a legal watchdog in the Anti-Defamation League.”

“I guess that makes our investigations about equal, Ron,” I retorted.

“Relax, Lindsay, I didn’t call to rub it in,” he said, shifting his tone. “Actually, I thought I would make your day.”

“I won’t argue, Ron. I could use anything about now. What do you have for us?”

“You knew Estelle Chipman was a widow, right?”

“I think you mentioned that.”

“Well, we were doing some standard background on her. We found a son in Chicago. He’s coming to claim the body. Given what’s been going on, I thought what he told us was too coincidental to ignore.”

“What, Ron?”

“Her husband died five years ago. Heart attack. Want to guess what the dude did for a living?”

I had the rising feeling Vandervellen was about to blow this thing wide open.

“Estelle Chipman’s husband was a San Francisco cop.”

C
INDY
THOMAS
parked her Mazda across from the La Salle Heights Church and let out a long sigh. The church’s white clapboard front had been defaced by a pattern of ugly chinks and bullet holes. A gaping hole where the beautiful stained-glass window had been was sealed with a black canvas tarp.

She remembered seeing it the day the window was first unveiled, on her old beat at the paper. The mayor, some local dignitaries, Aaron Winslow all made speeches about how the beautiful scene had been paid for through community work. A symbol. She remembered interviewing Winslow and being impressed with his passion, and also his unexpected humbleness.

Cindy ducked under the yellow police tape and stepped closer to the bullet-ridden wall. On her job at the Chronicle, she’d been assigned to other stories where people had died. But this was the first one where she felt the human race had died a little, too.

She was startled by a voice. “You can stare for as long as you want, but it doesn’t get any prettier.”

Cindy spun and found herself facing a man with a smooth and very handsome face. Kind eyes. She knew him. She nodded. “I was here when the window was unveiled. It carried a lot of hope.”

“Still does,” Winslow said. “We didn’t lose our hope. Don’t worry about that.”

She smiled, staring into his deep brown eyes.

“I’m Aaron Winslow,” he said, shifting a stack of children’s textbooks to extend his hand.

“Cindy Thomas,” she replied. His grip was warm and gentle.

“Don’t tell me they’ve put our church as one of the scenic sights on the Forty-nine Mile Drive.” Winslow started to walk toward the rear of the church, and she followed along.