[Tom Reed and Walt Sydowski 04.0] No Way Back

by Rick Mofina

  The maid began in the bathroom, surprised at how clean the guests had left it. Scrubbing the sink, she enjoyed the way the electrician’s utility belt hung from his slim waist. He must have a girl.

  Vaughn worked fast inside, then went outside. You definitely wanted that exposed old stuff replaced with Bx. He worked expertly with his strippers between peeks through the window at the maid tugging at the linen. She was easy on the eyes.

  “Damn,” she said.

  The bed-sheets had whipped over the table nearby, scattering his paperwork on the carpet. She collected everything—supply page, schematics, job order. And what was this odd one? Seemed out of place. Folded lined notepaper. Looked like a woman’s handwriting. Maybe a love note from his girlfriend? She was tempted to read it, when he re-entered.

  “Sorry. I messed up your papers.” She smiled, tidied them together, including the little note, then handed them to him.

  Vaughn folded them, shoved them into his jeans. “Nothing in there to worry over.” He smiled right back.

  Vaughn got the maid’s name and number before he finished the cabin job. During his next job at the trendy Desert Dog restaurant to fix the stove, then the inspection at the Kennedy high school, the cooler at the corner store, and the two residential orders, she was on his mind.

  By the end of his day, Vaughn had forgotten that some of his installation work counted as hours toward his senior master electrician’s ticket. Judy pointed it out to him at the shop when he added all of his papers to the leafy collection she had from AJRayCo’s nine other electricians.

  Judy the red-haired beauty. That’s what the guys called her. She was the shop’s sixty-four-year-old drill sergeant and den mother. Held the place together, looked after them, even went along with their elaborate practical jokes, like the time they wired Christmas lights to the switchboard to flash with each incoming call, the time they convinced a local radio station that she was Marilyn Monroe’s long-lost baby sister, and that one where they hired an Elvis impersonator to phone her on her birthday. “Baby, why’d you break my heart, baby, why?” She never let on, but she loved the Elvis call.

  The gold chains on Judy’s bifocals jiggled as she flipped quickly through the work orders, pages snapping as she completed her end-of-day billing tally before the boys waiting by the garage bay door clocked out. It was business as usual, until a solitary slip of notepaper fell from somewhere in the pile.

  What’s this?

  Judy unfolded it. Reading the words, she gasped.

  Please call the FBI now. My name is Ann Reed, I was kidnapped by two men from the San Francisco Deluxe Jewelry Store armed robbery. I saw them shoot a police officer....

  Dear Lord. Judy had seen the news reports. She reached for the phone as she continued reading. Wait a minute. Her hand stopped. She turned the note over. This can’t be—

  “Hold on there!” Judy marched down the hall to the garage bay to confront the men waiting to leave. “Everybody freeze!”

  She came upon them, bitching or bragging about tricky jobs, sports, and weekend plans. Conversations trailed and all eyes went to Judy and the small scrap of paper she held up.

  “Whose work is this?”

  Judy read the note aloud:

  “Please call the FBI now. My name is Ann Reed, I was kidnapped by two men from the San Francisco Deluxe Jewelry Store armed robbery. I saw them shoot a police officer.

  “We’re going east. Men are named John and Del. Two white males about six feet driving a red late-model SUV with Calif. plate starting…” It ended there.

  “John and Del? Come on, Sparky, this is your style.”

  Sparky Dane was a crusty old electrical man who loved to push Judy’s buttons. He knew John was her despised no-good two-timing wig-wearin’ former boyfriend and that Nat Foosey was the shop’s young joker who’d set up the Elvis call. Judy expected they’d produce the rest of the “note” to say Two white males about six feet driving a red-haired woman crazy!

  Sparky shook his head, as if he hadn’t a clue.

  Judy turned to young Nat.

  “Foose, is this you?”

  He shrugged. “No, ma’am.”

  “Sounds like you better call the FBI, just to be sure, there, Judy.” Sparky sounded dead serious.

  But Judy was sure she’d detected a twinkle and trace of a grin. She took stock of the others. They seemed to be watching the clock, or checking their watches. As usual they never betrayed the joke, milking it. The test was how long they could keep a straight face, as they fiddled with sunglasses, jingled keys to their cars and pickup trucks.

  The buzzer sounded. Quitting time.

  The men departed, leaving Judy alone in the shop shaking her head as she went to the big corkboard. Sooner or later, she’d get to the bottom of their latest trick. She grinned, posting the note with a map pin to the board.

  As she walked back to her desk, it began gnawing at her that it was a strange way to make a joke. She shrugged it off. Those boys were always finding strange ways to get her going. Less than an hour later, Judy activated the twenty-four-hour on-call message, cut the lights, locked up, and left.

  On the shop’s corkboard amid the clutter of labor regs, health forms, union news, and tool offers was Ann Reed’s plea for her life.

  37

  In the Star newsroom, Molly Wilson’s phone rang, breaking her concentration on the story she was writing after the latest press conference.

  “Wilson.”

  “It’s Tom.”

  She stopped typing. “Oh, Tom. How are you holding up? Everyone here’s praying for Ann, for Zach, for you.”

  “Molly, I need your help.”

  “Anything.”

  “I watched live coverage of the conference on Carrie Addison.”

  “It’s horrible. They’ve got to catch the bastards.”

  “What do you know about her?”

  “Just what they said. She was a former employee of San Francisco Deluxe Jewelry. They think she’s the link.”

  “But how? Inside info?”

  “Seems most likely. I wish I knew. We’re working on it.”

  “Molly, I need to know if any of your cop sources have told you anything more on Addison’s ties to the people who took Ann.”

  “Got nothing right now, Tom. They’re scouring her apartment for prints, paper. Checking her phone records. Your sources are way better than mine.”

  “What’s Addison’s address?”

  “It’s an apartment in the Upper Market, 707 Short.”

  “What about the jewelry store? Staff saying anything about her?”

  “Nothing. They’re screening calls. Won’t come to the door. Maybe they’re blaming themselves.”

  “What about Addison’s relatives?”

  “Haven’t located any yet.”

  “Thanks, Molly.”

  “Tom.” Wilson was puzzled. “Do you know something? I mean, aren’t the police keeping you updated?”

  A moment passed.

  “I’m going to find her, Molly.”

  “You’re going to find her? Tom, it could be risky if you jump on this.”

  “Molly—”

  “They’ve got a task force of a dozen agencies in two states now. I understand what you’re going through.”

  “No, you don’t. Unless you’re going through it, you can’t possibly know what I’m going through.”

  “I’m sorry. You’re right, I’m sorry. But maybe you should just sit tight, try to hang on?”

  “I’ve got to try to find Ann. I have to go, Molly. Call me if you get anything.”

  Reed collected his thoughts, shaping them into his next step as if he were covering the story.

  Carrie Dawn Addison was the link to the suspects. Somehow, in some way, Addison had to have known them, or the people who knew them. He had to get inside her life and he had to do it fast.

  Reed began flipping through previous editions of the Chronicle, the Star, the Merc, looking for names of jewelry store
staff members, scanning the first reports on the case, searching for their names in stories or photo outlines until one leaped out at him.

  Vanessa Jordan.

  The clerk who still had Ann’s receipt in her hand when he’d talked to her. She was the one who’d told him. Vanessa was distraught at the scene. She’d used his cell phone to call her boyfriend. Reed dug through the papers on his desk for his cell phone and notebook.

  He began punching the phone’s keypad. It beeped, calling up the menu, beeping as he scrolled through the call history. That’s right, she’d called her boyfriend. The numbers were swimming on the phone’s small screen. He confirmed it with date and time. There it was, 415-555-3312.

  Reed wrote it down in his notebook so he wouldn’t lose it. Then he called the number. What was her boyfriend’s name? The call clicked through. What was his name? Reed tried to remember that day. Tried resurrecting the memory of Vanessa in the alley behind the store, police everywhere.

  “I need to call Stephen, my boyfriend. I need him.”

  It continued ringing.

  Stephen.

  It was picked up between the third and fourth ring.

  “Hello.” Male voice. Early twenties.

  “Stephen?”

  “Yeah. Who’s this?”

  “I’m a friend of Vanessa’s.”

  “Friend of Vanessa’s? Which friend? I don’t know your voice, man.”

  “Look, Steve—”

  “Don’t call me Steve. I don’t know you and this isn’t a good time.”

  “Who is it, Stephen?”

  Reed could hear Vanessa’s voice in the background. She was there. Next to Stephen. Reed had to talk to her, he couldn’t lose her.

  “Stephen, tell her it’s Tom Reed. I need to talk to her.

  “My wife, Ann, was the lady she was helping at the store when the robbery happened. Tell her, please. Please. Tell her I have to talk to her, that I’m sorry about everything. But it’s critical, please.”

  Reed overheard Vanessa, distraught, saying something about the police, the press, that they should hang up. Then Stephen was talking to her about Ann Reed.

  “Hang on man,” Stephen said to Reed. His heart nearly burst as he squeezed the phone. “Are you Tom Reed, that guy from the Star?” Stephen said.

  “Yes. Ann’s my wife.”

  “The one they took?”

  “Yes. I met Vanessa at the store, that’s how I got your number. She used my phone to call you that day.”

  “Hang on.”

  Reed heard more muffled conversation. It went on for several moments, only he couldn’t make out any of the words until Stephen came back.

  “Look, man, Vanessa says she’s sorry for you but she can’t talk to nobody about nothing.”

  “Stephen, it’s my wife’s life. Please.”

  “Man, I’m sorry but she’s scared to death. Look what happened to Carrie. Three people dead. The FBI’s all over this. The SFPD robbery is looking at her. Man, she’s waiting on a call from a lawyer. She is scared to death.”

  “Meet me. Just meet me for five minutes. You come too, Stephen.”

  “Hang on.”

  A long agonizing minute passed; then Stephen returned with a location. “You know it? It’s in the Haight.”

  “Yes.” Reed knew it.

  “Meet us there in ninety minutes. No cameras, no cops. Just you.”

  38

  Eighty minutes later Reed was in the Haight, pacing in front of a boutique displaying lava lamps. No sign of Vanessa Jordan or her boyfriend.

  Reed checked his watch again and the location they’d given him. The stretch between the Upper and Lower Haight, next to Masonic, on the side near an exotic carpet store with a bank of newspaper boxes out front. This was the place.

  The air carried the smell of incense, herbs, and the sudden earsplitting bass from a passing car that made him jump, pounding on the fact the clock was ticking.

  “You Reed?”

  He shot his head around, finding himself toe-to-toe with a white guy in his mid-twenties. Fullback proportions. Short sandy hair. Stone faced.

  “I’m Stephen,” he said, angling his head to see under Reed’s ball cap and dark glasses.

  But no Vanessa.

  “Where is she?”

  “Not here,” Stephen said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where?”

  “Not far. You came alone, right? No cameras or stuff?”

  Stephen stopped to invade Reed’s space. “Because this is so far off the record. There is no record.”

  “I just want to find my wife.”

  After two blocks they came to a pickup truck. Vanessa stepped from it and came to them. Her face was raw. Her eyes were red. She was gripping a crumpled tissue in her fist.

  “Take it easy.” Stephen grabbed her shoulders. “Let’s go over here.”

  They went to an alcove that offered some privacy from the street.

  “Vanessa, do you have any idea where they might have taken my wife?”

  She shook her head.

  “But police think Carrie Addison’s the link to the robbery,” Reed said.

  “I swear,” Vanessa said, “I don’t know who those creeps are, but I think it’s related to Carrie’s problems with drugs.”

  “Drugs?”

  “She was my friend from grade school. She had a hard life. Her dad walked out when she was, like, twelve. Then her mother married some guy who had three little kids and moved to Boston. Carrie’s been on her own since she was sixteen.”

  “So how does that connect?”

  “A while back Carrie and I met at a bar. Old girlfriends. She told me she was having a hard time with money, needed a job. I’d been at Deluxe Jewelry about a year, so I talked to David, the manager—he’s a sweet man. He gave her a job.”

  “But she lost it?”

  “I’m going to tell you the truth, only so it might help you understand, you can’t put this in the paper, or tell police.”

  “Vanessa, please. It’s my wife.”

  “Stephen and I party. We used to like a little coke, some pot. Cripes, this is San Francisco. Carrie partied too. She started to score for us, she knew all the connections. Got us the best stuff, best price. It was fun.” Vanessa’s fist went to her mouth as the tears fell. “We never knew. I mean we never really knew how bad. I—”

  Reed struggled to understand.

  “Carrie was a hard-core addict, crack, heroin,” Stephen said. “She had a five-hundred-dollar-a-day habit and was running up huge drug debts to lots of different people, some in the Mission and Visitation Valley.”

  “David suspected she was stealing watches,” Vanessa said. “Once, a gang-banger came into the shop and demanded his money. That’s when David fired her.”

  Reed was shaking his head.

  “I saw her, a few months ago, right after she’d lost her job, and she said she was getting counseling and would be leaving California for a new job she had lined up in Florida, working on cruise ships. I believed her. That’s why no one suspected her after the robbery.” Vanessa sobbed.

  “We all thought she had straightened her life out and was in Florida. I was happy for her and she promised.” Vanessa had trouble voicing her words. “She promised to send me a postcard and I kept watching the mail for it but it never came. Somebody did those awful things to her, killed her and left her.” She sobbed into Stephen’s chest.

  Reed ran a hand over his face, overwhelmed, not knowing how this connected to anything. Or how it would help him find Ann.

  “How do you think this ties to the robbery?” he asked.

  “We’re not sure,” Stephen said. “We thought you’d figure it out.”

  “When Carrie was having her drug troubles,” Vanessa said, “we’d heard a lot of wild rumors through our circles but it all seemed like so much bullshit. It was just so frightening, I just couldn’t believe any of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like she owed this big dealer thirt
y-one thousand dollars and he was dead serious she was going to pay it. He said he’d throw her off the Bay Bridge, or turn her out on the street as a prostitute to work it off.”

  “What’s the dealer’s name? Or his street name?” Vanessa and Stephen traded glances, signaling to Reed that this was the moment of truth.

  “We heard it was Caesar,” Stephen said.

  “Caesar. You tell the police?”

  Vanessa nodded. “They’re trying to find him now.”

  “They think this guy’s connected to the heist?” Reed said.

  “They think he knows something.”

  “How would I find him?”

  “We’ve never met him. Only heard that he’s dangerous.”

  “How can I find him?”

  “You can’t say where you heard—”

  “Please, just tell me how I would find him.”

  Stephen handed him a business card bearing nothing but a phone number.

  “That’s one of Caesar’s sellers,” he said. “Usually deals out of the Mission or Sunnydale. That’s where the police started looking for him after they talked to us.”

  Reed thanked them.

  “Tom,” Vanessa said, “I’m praying for your wife.”

  Reed turned, then hurried to his car.

  39

  Sydowski studied Officer Don Valdosa as he worked the safe phones in the task force room at the Hall of Justice.

  Valdosa wore dark jeans and a dark track jacket. He had a diablo goatee and a New York Giants knit cap pulled tight to his dark glasses. As he shifted in the swivel chair, his gold neck chains chimed as he tried to get information on Leopoldo Merida.

  Leopoldo was an elusive Bay Area dealer, known only to a few people on the street. They called him el viento, “the wind,” because police could never find him. He never dealt on the street level. He was three or four people up the food chain. To some, he was known as Caesar. And the only hope Sydowski had of talking to him was Valdosa, one of the SFPD’s best narcotics cops.

  Sydowski knew that often you couldn’t score on a case unless you passed the ball. Watching Valdosa do his thing for the past half hour convinced him they were advancing.