by Sean Lynch
Kearns closed his eyes hard in an effort to stop the flow of tears. He opened them an instant later to see footage of the hospital, taken earlier that afternoon. Hospital staff scurried about tending to the hysterical children and adults in shock. He knew while those pictures were filmed he’d been inside the hospital getting his head sewn up. He listened to Buchanan’s estimation of how hard the solid, blue-collar community was rocked by the tragic event.
“We are receiving mixed reports that an off-duty sheriff’s deputy may have been somehow entangled in the day’s events. Unconfirmed rumors have surfaced that the deputy has refused to cooperate with the FBI task force. There’s been no comment from the deputy, who’s been tentatively identified as Deputy Kevin Kearns, a rookie with less than a year’s tenure on the department.”
Kearns’ jaw dropped. He watched his police academy graduation photo displayed on television. He was shaking his head in disbelief when the familiar face of Sheriff Buck Coates lit up the screen.
“...assure you that my department will do everything possible to apprehend the individual responsible for today’s crime. You all can count on that. You have Buck Coates’ word on it.”
Kearns couldn’t believe his ears. Coates was using the incident as a campaign platform. He began to understand Detective Parish’s assertion that a scapegoat was in the making.
The news story continued with a sketch artist’s rendering of the suspect. The description was given to detectives earlier by Kearns at the hospital. The story ended with an admonition that the suspect was considered armed and dangerous.
The news broadcast returned to the stern but friendly face of the anchorman, who said the current Tri-State manhunt for the suspect was the most extensive in the region’s history. Kearns switched the TV off.
He wiped the tears from his eyes angrily and drew the curtains apart. He hadn’t turned on the lights inside the motel room. Outside, gentle but heavy snowflakes descended on a blanket of fresh snow and reflected off the neon lights of the motel sign, casting an eerie glow. Kearns watched the falling snow. It reminded him of the picture of Tiffany Meade on the TV a moment ago. She was cuddling a kitten near a Christmas tree. But Tiffany Meade would never see another Christmas.
CHAPTER 9
Robert Farrell rolled over in bed and squinted at the digital alarm clock on his nightstand. Its radiant blue face read 7.43am. He rubbed his eyes and sat up, his bare feet searching the floor under the bed for his worn slippers. He stood, grabbed a tattered robe from the bed knob, slipped it over his rounded shoulders, and headed for the bathroom. There was a pack of Camels in the robe pocket, and he lit one with a wooden match while he relieved himself. Inhaling, he suppressed a cough and looked into the mirror.
San Francisco Police Inspector Robert Farrell, retired less than a month after over thirty years of service, stared at his sagging jowls and grunted. His thinning hair, which he’d grown long on the left side of his balding head and slicked over to the right, had flopped the wrong way during his sleep and stood straight up like an erection.
Exhaling smoke through his nostrils, he patted down his errant hair and said to his reflection, “At least one part of my anatomy will still stand up.”
Farrell left the bathroom and headed towards the kitchenette. He stopped at his apartment door long enough to pick up his morning newspaper and tossed it on the small kitchen table. He took a moment to open the windows. The atmosphere in his apartment was a haze from last night’s cigarettes. The moist San Francisco air filled the room, and he drew his bathrobe tighter about his chest.
His Lombard Street apartment resonated with the sounds of traffic as the morning commuters made their way through the city below. After putting on coffee, Farrell closed his windows. Most of the smoke had dissipated, leaving the apartment noticeably colder. After taking a final drag on his cigarette, he tamped it out and tossed it into the sink.
For over thirty years, Bob Farrell had been getting up and reporting to one of San Francisco’s police stations. Now retired, he found old habits hard to break. He always told himself he would sleep late in retirement, and on weekends actually did sleep in an extra hour or so. But on weekdays, like today, he was wide awake in time to report to a job he no longer held.
Pouring a cup of coffee, Farrell sat down at his tiny table and glanced at the San Francisco Chronicle’s headlines. The phone rang behind him. He picked up the receiver without getting up.
“Hello,” he barked, sticking another unfiltered Camel in his mouth.
“Bob, it’s me. I called to...”
He rolled his eyes and took the receiver away from his ear. He instantly recognized the voice of his second ex-wife, Ann. Though separated for nearly four years, their divorce had been finalized only a few months before Farrell’s retirement. It had been a long and bitter dispute. By the time Bob and Ann Farrell finally completed their divorce even the lawyers wanted it to end.
Putting the phone back to his ear, he said, “Look Ann, I don’t want to talk to you. Do you know what time it is? If this keeps up I’m going to change my number again. Or get a restraining order.”
As soon as he said it, he knew it would have no effect. Ann would simply obtain his new phone number from Jenny, their daughter, whom Farrell would naturally give the number to. It was a no-win situation with Ann. He sometimes wondered if she merely enjoyed bothering him for the sake of bothering him.
“Now look here, Bob, if you think...”
Farrell took the receiver from his ear again and set it on the table. He heard Ann’s voice prattling away like the drone of a beehive from the earpiece. He lit his second cigarette, sipped his coffee, and turned his attention back to the Chronicle.
He skimmed the headlines, and was turning to page two, when his eyes widened and the cigarette dropped still burning from his mouth. Suddenly the room was much colder than the damp San Francisco air could have made it. The tiny mechanical voice of his ex-wife on the phone faded from his ears.
At the top of page two was the caption, MASSIVE MANHUNT FOR MIDWEST CHILD-SLAYER CONTINUES. Beneath the headline was a picture of a group of police officers and state troopers standing around a tree. In the tree, vaguely discernible in the photograph, was a body, hanging upside down.
Farrell picked up the phone and interrupted his babbling ex-wife. “I’ve got to go,” he blurted, and hung up. Then he stamped out his cigarette.
He located the article beneath the photograph. He read the grim tale of a seven year-old girl who was kidnapped, slain, and found hanging from a tree in a rural Iowa. The article announced that the largest manhunt in Iowa’s history was underway. Local law enforcement authorities had no leads on the identity of the suspect.
He let out a breath slowly and looked away from the paper, his mind in a trance. He shook another cigarette from the pack in his robe with trembling hands. It took four matches to light it. After inhaling deeply, he looked again at the blurry picture of a snow-covered Midwestern plain and the silhouette of a small body dangling from a leafless tree.
He sat motionless for many minutes, his eyes unfocused. The cigarette burned to his knuckles and jarred him back to reality.
CHAPTER 10
Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. April, 1967.
Staff Sergeant Bob Farrell nodded to the sentry as he walked briskly past the interior security perimeter and into the compound.
Farrell was sweating profusely. He’d never acclimated to the humid climate. Even though he was far enough from the jungle, Farrell considered Saigon more of a jungle than a city, and the barefoot throngs of people who occupied its crowded streets did little to dispel this belief.
He took off his cap after entering the building and checked his .45 with the desk officer, going past him to the CO’s office.
“Howdy, Bob,” said Colonel Edgewater as Farrell entered. “Thanks for coming. Coffee?”
The thought of coffee in the intense heat nauseated Farrell instantly. Shaking his head, he shook a pack of Camels from
the breast pocket of his fatigue shirt, offering one to his boss in the same motion. After both men lit up, Edgewater broke the silence.
“So how is he?”
“Eerie,” replied Farrell. “Eerie as hell.”
The colonel was referring to a young Marine who was at that moment locked securely in a cell at the Armed Forces Provost Occupational Headquarters, Saigon, one building over. Farrell, the Criminal Investigation Division’s Non-Commissioned Officer assigned to the case, had spent the better part of a day-and-a-half trying to elicit information about the Marine, without much success. He was irritated at being pulled from the investigation for an impromptu conference with Edgewater. To Farrell the colonel was little more than an overblown prison-keeper and of scant help in investigative matters. Farrell was too new in-country, however, to object.
Farrell had been a San Francisco police officer for almost ten years when his army reserve unit, the 390th Military Police in Oakland, was activated and sent to Vietnam. His MP unit’s mission was to supplement the staff at the Joint Services Provost Headquarters, in Saigon. Though Farrell disliked leaving his wife with her mother in San Leandro, he welcomed the unique challenges a year in wartime Vietnam would present. He packed his bags, and was off to the Criminal Investigation Division under Edgewater.
Though in-country less than three months, Farrell had earned a reputation as a tenacious investigator and a good cop. His superiors relied on his street experience obtained in the States, and he got along well with the MPs and soldiers he worked alongside. His present case was quite unique, and giving him more than the usual amount of grief.
A young Marine, hailing from somewhere in the Midwest, had been arrested the night before by MPs under Farrell’s command. The Marine had violently resisted his arrest. This resulted in the injury of two military policemen, one seriously. But it was the crime the young Marine committed which created the real problem.
Farrell had become accustomed to a strained relationship between the residents of Saigon and the American occupational forces. The problems associated with the recreational behavior of thousands of American servicemen in a foreign country were a constant source of irritation to both the Vietnamese and American war efforts.
There was also intense political and racial strife between the Vietnamese and the American GIs. The United States military and its political overlords in Washington wanted to dilute this conflict at all costs. The war was escalating, and the Pentagon was becoming sensitive to the wavering public support for the war effort stateside. This created a delicate situation for the military police.
While trying to diminish the stigma of being an occupational army, the MPs had the tough job of not only keeping a leash on the off-duty servicemen, but had to do it in a manner that wouldn’t bring international attention to the increasing levels of American-involved crime.
The case of the young Marine was a compelling and grisly one. Two nights before, a young Vietnamese prostitute reported her four year-old son missing from the upper floor of the tenement brothel where they lived. She would never have reported it to the American military police at all, except that she’d been servicing US troops on R&R when the incident occurred.
The young woman told the MPs that several of her fellow hookers saw a tall, husky American with a crew-cut and a distinct limp carry the screaming child from the brothel. When several of the girls tried to stop the American, he beat them savagely and made off with the boy. The child’s mother was careful to explain that these women, all prostitutes like herself, did not wish to come forward and become embroiled in an investigation.
The report of the missing child was taken by the desk officer, and broadcast to roving foot and mobile patrol units. Farrell, a CID investigator, would never have been involved at all had the incident ended there. It did not.
Within six hours of the report, the son of the Vietnamese prostitute was found hanging upside down from a lamppost in one of the more secluded districts of the slum-ridden city.
The child was dead, his throat cut, and both ankles were wrapped in green parachute cord which was used to drape the body over the streetlight’s arch. The boy had been sodomized, and had apparently been hanging only a short while when discovered by an intoxicated sailor who’d detoured into the alley to relieve himself.
Farrell was assigned to investigate, but within minutes of the body’s discovery the crime scene had to be abandoned. When the local Vietnamese discovered the body, anti-American sentiment in the neighborhood became understandably ugly. A full-blown riot ensued, with every available MP in the city dispatched to assist.
Farrell suffered a cut over his ear from a thrown bottle, and before the night was over, many other MPs received similar treatment at the hands of the enraged Viets. Only through the use of teargas and riot batons were the embattled MPs able to retrieve the body of the child. Farrell had the body taken to HQ, where the child’s hysterical mother made the identification.
Though no stranger to violent crime, Farrell was nonetheless deeply disturbed by the murder. Back in the States he was only a beat cop, and the investigation into such a brutal crime would have been handled by a team in the Inspectors’ Division. But in Saigon, Staff Sergeant Robert Farrell was delving into the investigation of a heinous child-murder virtually singlehanded.
That a fellow American was responsible for the killing was not lost on the young cop. Farrell, like most soldiers of his generation, had been largely supportive of the war effort and indifferent to the growing tide of anti-war sentiment. But three months as a cop in Saigon had done much to plant the seeds of doubt in his mind. The constant contact with American soldiers whose behavior ranged from drunk and disorderly, to assault, to rape was taking its toll. As a stateside cop, he’d dealt mostly with a separate and distinct criminal element, easily distinguishable from the average citizen.
As a Saigon MP, Farrell found more and more of the servicemen he was arresting appeared to be ordinary guys. Often they were young men with no prior history of criminal offending. They had come to Vietnam to fight a war as innocent boys next door, and somewhere in-country had become drug addicts, sexual predators, and hardened criminals. It became harder for Farrell to see the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. What was once black and white became gray.
The war made things fuzzy.
He committed himself to capturing the child-murderer. His office became the command post, and he stayed around the clock. Photographs of the child hanging from the lamppost were piled on his desk, and the more he looked at them, the more disturbed and determined he got.
Farrell believed the suspect was a frequent patron of the many Saigon prostitutes, but the task of checking all the brothels in the bustling city was a momentous one. The suspect met a very general physical description, and there were thousands of American servicemen in Saigon on R&R.
It was an idea he got from one of his MPs that eventually led Farrell to the child-killer.
As a group of MPs came straggling in from another night of riot-breaking in the wake of the murder, they more closely resembled crash victims than a military police detachment. Splinted fingers and hands, bandaged heads, and torn uniforms seemed the order of the day.
As Farrell watched the troops stumble in, it occurred to him that the suspect was described by several of the prostitutes as walking with a limp. Maybe the killer wasn’t on R&R? Perhaps the killer was a patient at the naval hospital, or the army medical center, where countless servicemen wounded in the field were transferred for treatment? Many of these wounded personnel, though not fit for return to full duty, were allowed leave within Saigon during their recovery. Maybe the limp was a battlefield wound?
Farrell had his invaluable translators re-query the prostitutes who’d witnessed the child snatching. They all concurred; the suspect limped on his right leg.
He dispatched MP units to each of the medical facilities within the Saigon Command. It didn’t take long to hit pay dirt.
At 1630 hours, F
arrell received a call to respond to the naval hospital regarding the apprehension of a suspect in the child-murder. He drove to the hospital code three.
When he arrived he was greeted at the entrance by a shore patrolman and a hospital staff officer. They led him to the emergency room, where one of his MPs was seated on a table.
Corporal Vincente Gomez looked like he’d gone ten rounds with the Brown Bomber. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and his normally dark-brown complexion was a sickly yellow pallor. His right hand was being wrapped in a cast by a navy doctor.
“Vinnie, what happened?” asked Farrell.
“We were checking with the orderly, Sarge, just like you told us, and giving him a description of our man.”
Gomez took a moment to swallow, his voice shaky. He looked as if he were about to throw up. “Go on,” Farrell said anxiously.
The corporal nodded. “The orderly told us to check the convalescent barracks where the outpatients and walking wounded are billeted. Orderly said there are too many dudes around here for him to keep tabs on. So me and Rick head over there.”
Farrell knew Gomez was referring to his partner, Rick Bryson, and wondered where the young MP was. “OK,” Farrell said, the nervous edge to his voice showing through, “get to the point.”
“So we go into the convalescent barracks, and the first guy we run into is this huge jarhead with a bunch of tattoos. He spots us coming into the room, and makes a bee-line for the rear exit. Only problem is, he’s got a limp, so we catch him in about three seconds.”
The young corporal grimaced as the doctor wrapped his hand. “So Rick says, ‘We want to ask you some questions, you’ll have to come with us,’ and the guy shrugs and sort of comes along, you know, real mellow-like.”
Farrell was looking intently at the MP. “Then what happened?”