2nd Chance - James Patterson [97]
My eye fixed on something as I knelt beside Coombs. “There it is,” I whispered.
A curled, reptilian tail in red and blue, leading into the body of a goat with the fierce and proud heads of a lion and a goat. Chimera… One of my shots had pierced the wicked beast’s torso. It looked dead, too.
I heard shouts coming from behind, but I continued to kneel over Coombs. I felt I had to answer what he’d said at the end. You don’t have the slightest idea what it’s like… to lose your father….
“Oh, yes I do,” I told his still eyes.
Chapter 120
THIS TIME the newspapers had it right. Chimera was dead. The multiple-homicide case was closed.
There was no great joy in the final outcome, at least not for me. Homicide didn’t get together and wipe the board clean. There were no toasts with the girls. Too many people had died. I was lucky not to have been among them. So were Claire and Cindy.
I took a few days off, to give my side and hand some time to heal, and the IA teams a chance to piece together what had happened at the shooting scenes. I hung out with Martha, took some long walks along the Marina Green and Fort Mason Park as the weather turned damp and cold.
Mostly, I replayed the events of the horrible case. It was the second time I’d had to fight a killer one-on-one. Why was that? What did it mean? What did it say about my life and what it had come to?
For a moment, I’d had an important piece of my own past given back, a father I never really knew. Then, that gift was taken away. My father had disappeared into the dark hole from which he had crept. I knew I might never see him again.
In those days, if I could have come up with one meaningful thing I wanted to do with my life, I might have said, Let’s give it a ride. If I could paint, or had some secret urge to open a boutique, or the stick-to-itiveness to write a book… It was so hard to find even the thinnest slice of affirmation.
But by the end of the week, I just went back to work.
Late that first day, I got a buzz from Tracchio to come up to his office. As I walked in, the chief stood up and shook my hand. He told me how proud he was, and I almost believed him.
“Thanks.” I nodded, and even smiled. “That what you wanted to say?”
Tracchio took off his glasses. He shot me a contrite smile. “No. Sit down, please, Lieutenant.”
From the edge of his large walnut desk, he picked up a red folder. “Preliminary findings on the Coombs shooting. Coombs Senior.”
I regarded it tentatively. I didn’t know if some IAB bureaucrat had found something suspicious.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” Tracchio assured me. “Everything checks out. A perfectly clean shooting.”
I nodded. So what was this all about?
“There is one thing outstanding, though.” The chief stood and leaned against his palms on the front of his desk. “The M.E. lifted nine rounds out of Coombs’s body. Three belonged to Jacobi’s nine millimeter. Two came from Cappy’s. One from your Glock. Two twenties from Tom Perez out of Robbery. That’s eight.”
He stared down at me. “The ninth bullet didn’t match up.”
“Didn’t match?” I raised my eyes. It didn’t make sense. The commission had every gun from every cop who was involved, including mine.
Tracchio reached into a desk drawer. He came back with a plastic baggie containing a flattened, slate gray round, about the same color as his eyes. He handed it to me. “Take a look…. Forty caliber.”
A jolt of electricity surged through me. Forty caliber…
“Funny thing is”—his eyes bore in—“it did match up to these.” He produced a second baggie containing four more rounds, nicked, flattened.
“We took these out of the garage and trees outside that house in South San Francisco where you followed Coombs.” Tracchio kept his eyes fixed on me. “That make any sense to you?”
My jaw hung like a dead weight. It didn’t make sense, except… I flashed back to the scene on the steps of the Hall.
Coombs rushing toward me, his arm extended;