The Fourth Motive

by Sean Lynch

  Sean Lynch

  THE FOURTH MOTIVE

  This work is dedicated to dogwatch patrol-jockeys everywhere; those brave souls who prowl the night armed with a pistol and a prayer.

  CHAPTER 1

  Paige Callen didn’t see the man until he was upon her.

  Her attention had been focused on a flock of seagulls that were grazing on remnants of bait left by beach fishermen the night before.

  Not that she would have noticed the man, anyway. The most pleasant aspect of her dawn jog along Shoreline Drive each morning was her ability to tune out the rest of the world, if only for a while, and lose herself in the music piping into her head via the earphones of her bright yellow Sony Walkman cassette player. It was Monday morning, so she’d chosen something a little more upbeat to jumpstart her mood for the impending workweek. Appetite for Destruction, the debut album from a two year-old band called Guns n’ Roses, was recommended to her by a co-worker. Most of the Guns n’ Roses songs on the cassette Paige found a little raucous for her tastes, but “Sweet Child o’ Mine” was beginning to win her over.

  At 6am, the beach was almost always desolate. Paige would rarely encounter another runner. If she did, they invariably would plod by, like her, oblivious to the rest of the world.

  As usual, Paige was clad in nylon shorts topped by an oversized UC Berkeley sweatshirt. Her long, freckled, and muscular legs continued into the tops of her running shoes. She eschewed socks. It was mid-September and she wouldn’t need to wear sweatpants for another month.

  Paige ran east along the water’s edge. Even without Axl Rose wailing in her ears, the soft, damp shore beneath her feet effectively muffled the sound of approaching footsteps.

  Paige felt rather than saw a brief flash of movement over her left shoulder. Before she had time to react, she was shoved forward with tremendous force. With the air rushing explosively from her chest, she went sprawling to the wet turf and landed on her stomach. Once more, before she could recover, her attacker pounced. He straddled her back, pinning her down. What little breath not torn from her lungs by the initial violent shove was now completely gone.

  Choking and struggling, Paige tried to look over her shoulder at the person holding her helplessly to the ground. Her assailant responded by pushing her face savagely into the dirt. As a tide of panic rose within her, Paige realized she was going to be suffocated face first in the soil. She gasped and thrashed but was trapped. She tasted the silt of the Alameda beach.

  A gloved hand released its hold on the back of Paige’s neck and ripped the stereo headphones from her ears. The same hand grabbed her long blond ponytail and pulled her head back sharply out of the sand. She gasped for air. Both her arms were held against her sides by the weight of the person atop her. Paige’s eyes watered but not enough to wash away the soggy grit embedded over her eyelids.

  Paige knew she was about to be raped. But in her overwhelming fear for her life, rape seemed strangely insignificant. She tried to convince herself that maybe another jogger had witnessed the assault and phoned the police, but quickly realized this was wishful thinking. She’d been jogging on the beach almost every day at this time for the seclusion it provided. And that’s exactly what she had today: seclusion.

  “Hi, Paige. Betcha never thought you’d see me again, huh?”

  A man’s voice. Deep and raspy; the voice of a heavy smoker. Paige could detect no hint of an accent, and her tortured brain struggled to find something familiar or identifiable in its tone. The assailant’s use of her name and implication of previous contact set her into an even deeper panic.

  He knows my name. This isn’t random.

  Paige felt another sharp pull on her ponytail.

  “That’s right, you fucking whore; you know me,” he said, as if reading her mind. “But I didn’t come here for a reunion. I came to make you a victim. Never been a victim before, have you?”

  Suddenly, the weight on her back lifted. She instinctively tried to get up. In the same motion, Paige brushed a forearm across her grime-covered eyes to clear her vision.

  Before Paige could open her eyes, however, she was struck a sharp blow over her left ear by a hard, heavy object. Though not knocked unconscious, the force of the strike flipped her over and put her flat on her back, dazed. She reflexively touched the place on her head that had suffered the impact, and when her eyes finally focused, she saw blood staining her fingers.

  Paige looked up to see her attacker standing over her. He was wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt and pants to match. The hood blended nicely into the ski mask covering his face. He was Caucasian, by the glimpses of skin she could see around his lips and eyes, and of medium height with a thin build. In one gloved hand was a large black revolver, held loosely at his side. She realized the weapon was the object he’d struck her with.

  The man stared down at Paige, chuckling. His laugh was a harsh staccato. Then he stopped grinning, leaned over, and leveled the revolver directly at her forehead. The distance from the end of the barrel to Paige’s skull was no more than a few inches.

  The hole at the muzzle gaped at her. Paige tried to look at the man and away from the black tunnel of the revolver barrel but couldn’t pry her eyes from the gun. She could feel herself trembling, convulsive shudders she was certain were visible to the ski-masked figure looming over her.

  “So long, slut,” the man said in his raspy voice.

  Paige could see the revolver’s cylinder rotating as the man slowly began pulling the trigger. She knew she was about to die.

  Paige squeezed her eyes shut as a sob escaped her lips. The revolver fired.

  CHAPTER 2

  At the sound of the doorbell, retired judge Gene Callen rose from his breakfast table and limped toward the front door. He reached for his cane leaning against the doorway. He’d been using the cane more with each passing year, though he had started limping on his return from the Pacific theater in 1945. As a junior officer aboard the carrier USS Sargent Bay, Callen had endured the unpleasant experience of being wounded during the Iwo Jima campaign. The shrapnel damage to his right knee hadn’t been more than a nuisance as a younger man, but as he approached his seventieth birthday, the war wound reared its arthritic head with a vengeance.

  The Judge hobbled through his large house toward the front door as the chimes sounded again.

  “I’m coming,” he said, forgetting whoever was ringing the doorbell was beyond his voice.

  His house, or mansion as some would describe it, was on Dayton Avenue, in the heart of Alameda’s Gold Coast. A widower, and retired from the Superior Court in the City and County of Alameda, Judge Callen shared his home with a part-time housekeeper. Though it was only a little past 7am, Judge Callen had risen and dressed, and was enjoying his coffee and morning paper as had been his custom for over forty years.

  Despite his age, the Judge was a remarkably vibrant man. And despite the cane, he stood ramrod-straight and sported a full head of white hair. Up until a couple of years ago, when his declining leg began severely limiting his mobility, it had been his habit to take daily walks at this time of day. The degrading condition of his gait the past couple of years had left him happy to get to his breakfast table each morning without intolerable pain.

  The Judge opened the door to find a uniformed Alameda police officer standing on his porch.

  “Good morning, Your Honor,” the officer said. “I’m sorry to disturb you at this hour, but there’s been some trouble with your daughter. I need you to accompany me to the hospital.”

  “What is it? What’s happened to Paige?” His heart skipped a beat.

  “She’s been attacked,” the cop answered. “I don’t think she’s badly hurt. I’ve been ordered to escort you to the hospital. That’s all I know. The s
ergeant can give you more information when we arrive.”

  “Then let’s go,” the Judge said, grateful Paige was alive but filled with dread at the word “attacked”. He stepped forcefully through the door and pulled it shut. Ignoring the anguish in his leg, he pushed past the startled police officer and strode down the walk toward the patrol car parked in front of his home.

  The Alameda Hospital was on Clinton Avenue, only a few scant blocks from Callen’s residence. Within a couple of minutes, he was clambering out of the patrol car, which had come to rest at the emergency room entrance. Waiting to greet him was a tall, middle-aged man in a suit, with a thick mustache and blow-dried hair. Callen recognized him as an Alameda police detective.

  “Judge Callen,” the man said, offering his hand. “I’m Detective Sergeant Randy Wendt. I’m with APD’s Homicide/Robbery Unit. I believe we’ve met before.”

  “I remember you,” the Judge said curtly, shaking his hand. “Where’s Paige? How bad is it?”

  “Follow me and you can see for yourself.”

  Wendt led Callen into the ER and to one of the treatment rooms. There, surrounded by two people in hospital garb, sat Paige. She was still wearing her running attire and was coated head to toe in sandy grime. She had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders and sported a large shiner over her left eye. A patch of bloodied white gauze was being held over her left ear by one of the attendants. Paige’s face was an ashen color, and oddly enough, her forehead was covered with a bright, phosphorescent orange stain over a nasty bruise. At her father’s entrance, Paige looked up.

  “Dad–”

  “Paige; thank God. Are you OK? What happened?”

  The woman holding the patch over Paige’s head motioned angrily for the Judge to leave. It was then Callen noticed she wasn’t a nurse but a physician. She was busy sewing stitches over his daughter’s ear.

  Wendt took his cue from the attending doctor and firmly ushered the Judge out of the examining room.

  “C’mon, Your Honor,” he said. “You can speak with your daughter after she’s been treated. Let’s get a cup of coffee. There’s a break room down the hall; we can talk there.” He escorted the red-faced Callen to a room with a table, a refrigerator, and an industrial-sized coffee machine.

  Judge Callen sat down heavily and put his face in his hands. Wendt poured a cup of coffee and placed it on the table before him.

  “What happened?”

  Wendt sat across from the Judge. “We’re not sure yet. It only went down within the past hour. We’re still piecing it together. Paige was pretty out of it when she was brought in, so details are sketchy.”

  “Was she…?”

  “No,” Wendt reassured him. “As far as we can tell, Paige was not sexually assaulted. But she was definitely attacked and terrorized.”

  “What do you mean by ‘terrorized’?” The Judge looked up; his emotional moment had passed. He was all business now and sought the facts of the case.

  Wendt wasn’t surprised. Like most cops in the San Francisco Bay Area, he knew the Judge’s reputation well. A figure of legal prominence since the mid-Fifties, Callen’s exploits as a Municipal and Superior Court Judge were as legendary as the fiery man himself.

  “Iron Gene” Callen was a controversial and colorful character in the history of the notoriously tolerant criminal justice system of the San Francisco Bay. A staunchly law-and-order magistrate and fierce champion of the death penalty, Callen had made his name during the turbulent Sixties. He was well known throughout San Francisco Bay Area jurisprudence for his tendency toward maximum sentences when dropping the gavel. Criminals who had the misfortune of finding themselves before Judge Callen could count on the full weight of whatever the law allowed him to penalize them with. This made him popular with cops, prosecutors, and victims, but reviled by defense attorneys, criminal-rights advocates, and quite often the press.

  The Judge’s clout wasn’t entirely in the legal arena, either. Callen’s early inroads into Alameda real estate had earned him both great wealth and a formidable reputation as a shrewd businessman. Only his lifelong disdain for politics prevented him from rising to what many believed was his true calling: a seat on the California legislature. He’d been personally asked to run for political office first by Governor Reagan, and again by President Reagan.

  Judge Callen’s flame had diminished somewhat with the death of his wife several years ago, and his retirement from the Bench, not surprisingly, came shortly thereafter. Their only child, Paige, was his pride and joy. Paige had followed in her father’s legal footsteps and obtained her law degree from Berkeley’s Boalt Hall. Through Judge Callen’s clout but without Paige’s knowledge, she was hired as a deputy district attorney for the County of Alameda straight out of law school. Though not yet twenty-nine years old, Paige had been assigned to the City of Alameda municipal courthouse for a little over three years of the five she’d been a deputy DA.

  “This is what we know,” Wendt began. Callen folded his hands over his cane.

  “Apparently, your daughter was on the beach for her morning jog,” Wendt said. “Same route she takes every day.”

  “A habit instilled during our morning walks when she was a child,” Callen said. “Go on.”

  “Paige was running when struck from behind by an unknown assailant. She was listening to music. She didn’t hear him approach due to her headphones. The guy was wearing a hood and ski mask. She could tell he was Caucasian and thinks he’s at least twenty-five or thirty years old. He knew her name and implied Paige should know him.”

  “Accomplices?”

  “Paige didn’t see one. Doesn’t mean there weren’t any. He pushed her face in the sand, and she believed she was going to be suffocated.”

  The Judge’s face became taut, but inside him a fury began to build. He remained outwardly composed. “Continue.”

  “The suspect struck her with the barrel of a revolver. He made a point of showing her the gun. Then he aimed it at her head and said, ‘Goodbye’, or something similarly final. He wanted Paige to believe she was going to be killed.”

  Hard lines formed around Callen’s mouth. In a hoarse but calm voice, he asked, “Why isn’t she dead, Sergeant?”

  “It was a paintball gun, Your Honor.”

  “A paint gun?”

  Wendt shook his head. “This type of paint gun isn’t used to paint a house or car. It’s an air gun manufactured to look and handle like a real gun, but instead uses compressed air to fire a ball of dye intended to mark its target. Survivalist types and gun nuts use them in simulated war games. Our departmental SWAT team sometimes uses them in training. They’re not uncommon, and can be acquired at many sporting goods stores.”

  “That’s the orange gunk I saw on Paige’s face?”

  “Right.”

  “I don’t get it,” Callen said. “Why would someone assault Paige, choke her, hit her, and then shoot her with a harmless ball of paint?”

  Wendt paused, choosing his words carefully. “Your Honor,” he started, “remember when I used the word ‘terrorized’ a moment ago? These paintball guns look exactly like a real gun. For all Paige knew, she was about to be executed. That’s what I meant by ‘terrorized’. It was deliberate. He was trying to make her think she was going to die.”

  Most of the color left the Judge’s face. He reached down with none-too-steady hands and took a sip of coffee.

  “I want this man found,” he said.

  “We do, too. It looks pretty bad for the cops in this town if our own deputy DA is assaulted and the crook gets away with it. But we don’t have much to go on. There are no witnesses and no physical evidence. We don’t even have a motive.”

  “What about the criminals she’s prosecuted?” Callen asked. “Isn’t that the logical and obvious place to start?

  “In theory, Your Honor, I would agree. But reality is a different story. Paige has been a deputy DA, here and in Oakland, for over five years. She’s prosecuted hundreds of cases. You want me
to go through every case she’s ever handled in Alameda Superior Court? Even if I had the manpower to do that, which I don’t, how do we know when we find him? Besides, we don’t even know if the attack is linked to her job. It could be anyone from an ex-boyfriend to a random creep who spotted her and took a fancy. Unless we can narrow the scope of the suspect pool, the possibilities are endless.”

  “So you’re going to do nothing? Is that it?” This time it took greater effort for the Judge to maintain his impassive demeanor.

  “Hell no, Your Honor. I’m going to do everything I can to nail this bastard. But you’ve got to be prepared for the worst.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the worst’? I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Wendt let out a slow breath and sat back in his chair. “What I meant is that our best chance to get this guy is probably going to be in the act. If he tries again and if we’re ready for him.”

  “And if you’re not?” Callen demanded.

  “He may never try again,” Wendt offered. “This might have been a one-time deal. Or maybe we’ll get a break and it’ll turn out to be an ex-boyfriend or someone else from her past. All I’m saying is there aren’t any certainties. We’ll do the usual investigative stuff and interview Paige’s neighbors and co-workers. We’ll check the local sporting goods stores for recent paintball gun purchases. But I don’t want you to get your hopes up. We don’t have much at this point.”

  “I know how police investigations are conducted, Sergeant,” Callen said sternly, his eyes flashing, “and I’m more than aware of their limitations.”

  “I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t,” Wendt said.

  Callen cooled his stare. Like Wendt, he sat back in his chair.

  “I’m not trying to argue with you, Sergeant,” he said, deliberately softening his features and tone to conceal the plans he was already hatching to take matters into his own hands. “I’m just an old man trying to protect his only child. I’m confident your department will do everything within the law to bring justice to bear.”