Through the Bookstore Window

by Bill Petrocelli

  “Tell me your name again.”

  “It’s Fallon. Davey Fallon.”

  “This is Sylvia—she’s my best friend and lawyer. She’s afraid to have you anywhere near me, and I can’t say I blame her. But I’m willing to listen.”

  He nodded slightly, giving the impression that he knew his presence there was hanging by a thread. If I didn’t like what I heard, I was going to call security myself.

  “I understand.” He glanced back and forth between us as he spoke.“The reason I need to talk to you is that I think I know the names of the men who shot you.”

  Sylvia’s reflexes took her to the edge of her chair. “Who are they?”

  “The two men I’m talking about fit the descriptions that I’ve heard about from the witnesses, and they always seem to travel together. They work for the God’s Children Foundation in Indiana. I don’t know whether they have any formal arrangement with that group or not. But they do jobs for them. Around the office, they’re known as Curly and Slim, but I can give you their real names.”

  Sylvia had her phone out and was already pressing the record button.

  “I want you to repeat what you just said and then give me everything you know about these two guys, including the full spelling of their names and anything else you might know.”

  Davey nodded okay.

  “And do you understand that I’ll be forwarding this immediately to the SFPD along with your name and all of your contact information?”

  “I know what you have to do. I’m a former cop.”

  Sylvia kept the recording device in motion as Davey told her what he knew about the two men. She interrupted him a couple of times with questions—mainly to find out the connection between the killers and the people they worked for. It was hard to be sure, but I thought he was telling us everything he knew. If it was an acting job, it was a good one. But when she got to the most important question, he had to admit that he had no more information than we did. He had no idea where they’d taken Alexi.

  When she had what she wanted, Sylvia snapped the phone off.

  “I’m going to step out into the hall where the phone reception is better and forward all of this to the investigating officer on the case.” She looked at me. “Are you going to be okay in here alone with this guy while I go make my phone call?”

  I told her I would be.

  www

  “I blame myself for what happened to you.”

  Davey Fallon hadn’t moved from his spot near the door. He looked uncomfortable—probably thinking he might need to get up and leave at any minute, if things didn’t go well.

  “I followed you around for days and kept a record of everything you and Alexi did. I took pictures and sent them to the office at the same time I was sending them to Susan Wilder. I’m sure that’s how the people at the foundation knew who you were and where to find you. It was a terrible mistake.”

  “I didn’t see you doing any of that.”

  He shrugged. “I kept out of sight. I can be pretty good at that. What happened to Morrie Richards has hit me hard. He was a nice man—someone who could take life in stride and make the best of it. I talked to him the night before he was killed.”

  That surprised me as much as anything. I wanted to ask him where that happened, but I didn’t want to interrupt what he was saying.

  “I know it might not make that much sense, but I feel responsible for what happened to him.”

  His head was drooped. There seemed to be more that he wanted to say. His voice was low—at times tentative.

  “Without me, they wouldn’t have known how to find you.”

  He was repeating himself. He seemed to have a need to go over and over what had happened.

  “If it hadn’t been for me…” He paused, his mind off somewhere. “Sometimes I think that if I had never been…” His eyes were moist. “It’s been a hard feeling for me to overcome.”

  “I’m glad you decided to tell me.”

  He nodded.

  “I’ve always had a bad feeling about the foundation, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I haven’t talked to anyone from there in several days. The only one I’ve spoken to is Susan Wilder.”

  He looked up at me. “I don’t know what anyone else has done, but you have to believe that Susan is a good woman. She really cares about Alexi.”

  “I’ve known that all along. And I know that Alexi loves her and misses her.” I felt a need to reassure him. “I never wanted to keep her away from her mother.”

  Davey nodded slightly. He seemed to appreciate that.

  “I didn’t know what to expect when I caught up with you. I figured out how it happened—that you’d met up with Alexi in Indianapolis and drove her with you to the West Coast. But I didn’t know why—I still don’t. When I started investigating you, I was expecting to find someone with some sort of criminal connections. I thought it might be drugs, or kidnapping, or child molestation—anything at all. I wasn’t sure. But after watching you for days, I realized how wrong I was. Alexi seemed to be free to come and go when she wanted. I’m not sure how to describe it… She just seemed happy around you.”

  “She is—more than I had hoped for.”

  Davey allowed himself a small smile. He seemed to be getting comfortable talking to me.

  “I don’t know why you got involved.”

  He shrugged a little, probably hoping I would give him an answer. When I didn’t respond, he just continued his own line of thought.

  “I’ve been trying to work backward from what I know. There had to be some reason why you went to all that effort. My only guess is that she was probably being abused in some way at home. Was that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it Reverend Wilder?

  I nodded. “It was pretty bad.”

  He sat quietly for a few minutes, probably trying to come to grips with what I had just confirmed.

  “But I still didn’t know your connection with Alexi. I’m thinking that it must be something going way back that I don’t know about. Otherwise, why would you have done it?”

  “That’s all true.”

  I knew he wanted to hear more, but I wasn’t ready to go into my relationship with Alexi—not just then. That would have taken our conversation way off course. Right now, he was talking, and I wanted to listen. But he was starting to fade a bit. He rubbed his left arm, like it was in pain, and I could see that he was perspiring. He looked pretty bad.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Me?” He seemed surprised that I might be concerned. “I think I am—but I’m not really sure. I’ve had a rough couple of days, and…I guess I’m just lucky to be here.”

  He paused for a second, looking like he was trying to decide whether to tell me something else—something more personal.

  “I had a heart attack a few years ago. And when I get a pain or anything like that, I always worry that I might be having another one.”

  “Well, if you need a heart specialist, the UC Med Center has some of the best in the world right here in this building.” I made a grand gesture with my arms, forgetting for a second about the trauma in my heavily bandaged shoulder. I winced from the pain.

  “How’s your shoulder? Are you going to be okay?”

  I told him what the doctor said, and he nodded. “Gunshot wounds can be tricky, so be careful.”

  “That’s what I’m learning. Did you ever have a bullet wound?”

  “Once, but it wasn’t when I was a cop. It happened years before that when I was in Vietnam. It was a serious wound, and they had to medevac me out of there. It almost killed me.”

  There was more to that story. There seemed to be things that had been bothering him for a long time, and I could sense that he needed to talk about them. He hardly knew me, but sometimes it’s easier that way. There’ve been times when I’ve bee
n too fearful or embarrassed to say something important to a friend, but then I found myself blurting out the same thing to someone I hardly knew. Davey had reached that point.

  “It’s not just the bullets. It’s the war itself that can kill you—it gets into your soul. You end up with the kind of wounds that can never heal.”

  He looked up at me, but his eyes seemed to be focused somewhere else. “You’re lucky if you never went through that.”

  In fact, I did. I’d had my own war. But I wasn’t prepared to talk about it.

  “When I think about what happened, I sometimes feel it would have been better if I had died right there instead of spending my whole life trying to figure out what went wrong. I’ve been hiding from myself ever since and denying what was eating me up inside.”

  He had one more thing to say.

  “I lost my best friend, Jimmy, that night. He was lying just inches away from me when the attack happened. I don’t think I’ve ever loved anyone as much as I loved him.”

  www

  Sylvia came back into the room, and she sensed that the atmosphere was emotionally charged, giving me a look of concern. “Is everything okay in here?”

  I told her I was fine. Davey had composed himself enough to shake his head in agreement.

  Sylvia was still wary. Her attitude toward Davey Fallon hadn’t softened nearly as much as mine. Still, she managed to thank him for the information.

  “The police were happy to get that. That’s the only solid lead they have. Right now, they’re checking all the auto rental agencies to see if they can find a van rented in the name of either one of those two.”

  Sylvia pulled her chair up to the only free table in the room and opened up her notebook.

  “Gina, do you feel like going over this report?”

  I was starting to fade a bit. The pain medication was wearing off, but I told her I wanted to hear what she had to say rather than putting it off any longer. She started peeling through a series of screens, looking for the one she wanted. She also had some printed pages that she pulled out of her briefcase.

  “It’s the report I was starting to talk about when he walked in.”

  She nodded her head toward Davey. Seconds later, her eyes followed, as she stared at him. I knew what she was thinking. She wanted him to leave. But Davey just sat there. He wasn’t being obstinate. He was probably just too lost in his own thoughts to take the hint.

  “Unless there’s something confidential in there,” I said, “I think Mr. Fallon can stay.”

  Sylvia shrugged. “Whatever you say—the report’s not confidential anymore, because I’ve already sent a copy to the police.”

  Sylvia turned back to the screen on her notebook.

  “The investigators had just put the finishing touches on the report and were walking into my office when we got the word that you had been shot.”

  Davey squirmed. Sylvia probably intended that comment for his benefit.

  “What it shows is this: the God’s Children Foundation is currently under investigation by the Justice Department as a front organization for a group that smuggles children into the US for sexual abuse. In many cases, the abuse is being committed by their so-called adoptive parents.”

  Davey looked shocked. I’d suspected something like that was going on, but for him it seemed like something out of the blue. But according to Sylvia, the child abuse was even more extensive than I had guessed. There hadn’t yet been any indictments, but the entire ring was being investigated by at least two federal grand juries. The foundation had arranged some legitimate adoptions over the years—enough, apparently, to satisfy their big supporters and garner some favorable press coverage. But those adoptions, it appeared, just served as a cover for the more lucrative sex trafficking of minors. The church was under investigation as well because of its close ties to the foundation, but so far the investigators hadn’t tied the church to any specific case.

  Sylvia stopped for a second and looked at me. “When we give them what we have about Allen Wilder, that information will probably cement their case against the church.”

  There was more to the report. Sylvia didn’t have the actual names of the men under investigation, but she did have the aliases that had been assigned to them by the DOJ. There were “John Does” all over the country that had been benefitting from this sex ring with preteen and teenage girls—as well as a few boys. The report referred to them as “International Johns,” and they included several accountants in St. Louis, a group of real estate executives in Atlanta, and as many as five lawyers New York. The list went on and on—there were three suspects in San Francisco, including a local doctor. The Reverend Wilder wasn’t named or identified on the list, but from the look on Sylvia’s face, I could see that it would only be a matter of hours before that was rectified.

  Sylvia stared at Davey, apparently trying to assess his reaction to what she’d said.

  “As shocking as this is, it probably shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. The signs were there. The International Labor Organization estimates that there are as many as one-point-eight million children sexually trafficked worldwide. That background information is included here in the report.” She stabbed at the page in front of her. “UNICEF reported in 2006 that the number was closer to two million.”

  Davey was shaking his head from side to side.

  “You have to believe me that I had no idea this was going on.”

  “I’ll accept that for now,” Sylvia said. “But I want to know more about the people you worked for. You said you worked with John Blaiseck?”

  “That’s the man who hired me, the one you could say I reported to.”

  “Well, I don’t want you to guess at anything. Do you know anything about his background? According to the information we have from the DOJ, he’s one of the main people behind the whole sex ring. He’s been masterminding an operation to get kids out of orphanages, war zones, or anywhere else where they might be vulnerable and them matching up with pedophiles. Most of his clients have been in the US, but there are some in other countries as well. He’s apparently been doing it for decades.”

  “I don’t know anything about his background.” Davey was almost pleading. “I never had any reason to look into it. I don’t know where he’s from. He has an Eastern European accent, and I always assumed he was Russian.”

  “Well, he’s apparently Bosnian, and he’s operating in the US under a fake identity. Reading between the lines on this, it appears that he’s also a wanted war criminal.”

  There was a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, and it kept growing as they talked. The painkillers were wearing off, but it was more than just that.

  “Sylvia, do you have a picture of this Blaiseck person?”

  She shook her head no. “There are no photos in the report.”

  Davey spoke up. “I might have one.” He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped through the files. “Here’s one of him standing in the hallway of the foundation office, talking to Reverend Wilder.”

  He gave the phone to Sylvia, and she handed it over to me. My hand was shaking so badly, I almost dropped it. It took only one glance at the phone, and I knew I was right.

  “Sylvia, he’s the one I told you about—the one from back in the war days.”

  Sylvia had heard my story enough to know immediately what I was talking about. “Good God,” she muttered under her breath.

  Davey was looking at me in confusion.

  “I knew this man in Bosnia during the civil war back there in the nineties.”

  Davey said, “I never knew…”

  “I’m sure you didn’t,” I interrupted. “I first saw him when I was growing up in an orphanage and then later on when he headed up one of the Militias. At the time, he was simply known as the Komandant. He had a brother that everyone knew as the Hijena—the Hyena—who was as
sadistic as he was. The man you know as Blaiseck is a vicious killer, and I’m sure he’s the one who ordered his thugs to kill me.”

  Davey still couldn’t make the connection, and I could understand why.

  “He wants me dead because I killed his brother. It was something I had to do. If I hadn’t shot him, he would have killed me and Alexi’s mother.”

  Davey looked speechless. I could see him trying to put together a question, but he couldn’t figure out what to ask. Sylvia, for her part, seemed to be caught up in a rapid thought process, probably playing out in her head all of the possibilities of this new information. Me, I was exhausted.

  “I need to be alone for a while, okay? Sylvia, could you ask the nurse to come in for a second on your way out? I need some more of the pain medication.”

  Sixteen years had vanished in an instant. For a few moments I was back in Bosnia, trapped in a cellar with the Hijena and Anja. The walls seemed to be tightening around me. The troubles from years earlier had finally found their way back to me.

  Davey

  Sylvia Kaplan confronted him as they left the hospital room. She acted like she wanted to talk to him, and she motioned for him to follow her down to the waiting room at the end of the hall. He stood there in that room for a second, not knowing what to expect, and then he finally sat down in one of the chairs. Sylvia pulled out a chair and sat opposite him, staring at him for a few moments. There was a time when that might have bothered him, but at the moment he just waited for whatever it was she had to say.

  She finally shook her head a bit and settled into a frown.

  “Why are you here?”

  He’d been asking himself this same question for the last twenty-four hours.

  The gun barrel stared at him, and the voice told his trigger finger how easy it would be. Why are you waiting?

  Why?

  That was the question he couldn’t answer.

  Drowning in his failures, that question kept interrupting him. Why?

  Why was he alone in that miserable room? Why had things gone so wrong and caused so much harm? Why had he spent his whole life trying to deny what was destroying him? If he ended it now, he’d never know the answers.