If Angels Fall Read Free Page B

was traditionally assigned to
break in new detectives, he maintained the detail’s highest clearance rate.
Senior clicks told rookies Inspector Sydowski knew killers because he was one.
    It was near the end of the war, Sydowski was what? Eight or nine?
His family was working on a farm in southeastern Germany when he came up on a
drunken Nazi soldier raping his twelve-year-old sister behind a barn. Sydowski
grabbed the soldier’s Luger and held it to the sweating man’s temple, forcing
him to kneel and beg for his life. Then he pulled the trigger, scattering
master race brain matter against the pigsty.
    That was another life. Sydowski had erased the memory of it, or
thought he had. Somehow the rage he felt then, rage he thought he would never
again experience, had returned when he was given the case of a two-year-old
girl. The worst part of the job was always the murders of babies. Looking down
at their tiny bodies, knowing they never had a chance, that this world had
failed them, and it was his job to avenge their deaths. Remembering how he
would go home brokenhearted, kiss Basha and the girls, and tell them it was
another routine day.
    Over the years he had managed to remain detached from his cases, enough
so that he could do the job. Although he won most, he accepted losing some. He
had no choice. He couldn’t solve them all. But the abduction and murder of
Tanita Donner was different. It was a year ago. He was the primary and he
couldn’t close it. At one stage, he felt he was close. Now he had nothing. The
thing refused to be solved and it ate him up. Leo had suggested he let fresh
eyes go over it, that he concentrate on other files for a time. That didn’t
last. He had given a piece of his soul to the Donner case. How could he forget
about that baby for one goddamned second?
     
    It was raining when he arrived in Golden Gate Park with a rookie and
looked into the bag. He remembered the familiar foul smell, the flies and
maggots, how she was so white, the gash across her tiny neck, and how her
eyes, those beautiful little eyes, were open and staring at him. Into him.
Feeling something break inside, making him ache at that very moment to hold her
to his chest, in front of all the cops, reporters, and rubberneckers, all
standing there.
    Sydowski had crossed the emotional line with Tanita’s file. At the
morgue, seeing her doll-size corpse, then taking Tanita’s teenage welfare
mother and grandfather from their Balboa apartment to identify her. How he
caught the mother after she collapsed upon seeing her baby, hearing a groan
from the grandfather, who covered his face with his hands. He was dying of
cancer and had already lost his legs. Remembering how his wheelchair was held
together by coat hangers, how the mother let her crumpled snapshot of Tanita
fall to the floor and started screaming, and how Sydowski looked to the
ceiling.
    He knew he would never give up on this one, never let it go. He had
touched Tanita’s coffin at her funeral, vowing to find her killer.
     
    “Here you go, Pop.” Sydowski handed a bag of popcorn to his old man,
then took a couple of bites from his dog and tried getting back into the game.
But he’d lost his concentration.
    At the outset, the department had put half the detail on Donner. It
was a green light. The FBI assigned a couple of humps to inflict its
jurisdiction. The senior agent was Merle Rust, a soft-spoken, twenty-year fed
with a three-inch scar on his chin from a bullet that grazed him during a
shootout with The Order near Seattle in 1984. Rust was as fond of chewing
tobacco as he was of his young partner, Special Agent Lonnie Ditmire, a
by-the-book grad straight from the academy cookie cutter. He had an
all-American smile and believed all municipal police were bush.
    Despite the inevitable friction, everyone worked overtime. It was
always that way with child murders. They hauled in suspects, Quantico kicked
out a profile. They flashed information on the big screen of