FOLLOW THE LEADER Chapter 6

After a week in the Arizona desert, I'm back with Chapter 6, wherein we meet Francis X Kelly. Francis has done his time in Folsom. Now he's back, catching bad guys, with the help of his brother, Colin. Colin is a Detective First Grade in the SF Homicide Squad. You'll meet him, as well.

One year later.



Chapter 6


From my office window I watched my client cautiously descend the sagging wooden steps, then negotiate the irregular brick pathway.  Miss Wilson was a tall mulatto with bright red hair and perfect teeth. We were in the process of digging up dirt on her brutish husband.

         She followed the curved walkway and disappeared, swallowed up by dense greenery.

         I need to wash this window, I thought. It’s blurring pleasant sights of all kinds. I’d been listening to bird songs but not seeing the birds. Now this. Miss Wilson looked great from any angle.

         “Well, hello!”

         My brother, Colin.

         He rounded the curve and bounced up the steps two at a time. It was different seeing him without a uniform. Now he was Detective First Grade with the SFPD, but he still looked like a football star.

         We shook hands. Which told me something was up. Most of the time we hugged.

         “Who was that?” he asked, first thing.

         “Just a client.”  I noticed he was carrying a small box. “What’s in the box?”

         “A little something for the office.”

         We laughed.

         My “office” was a small shack over one hundred years old. The family before me was four raccoons. Old houses set back from the street were almost invisible, particularly if they were up on a hill, like mine.

         He set the box down on a long, sagging camp table that I was using as a desk.

         “Open it.”

         I did.

         It was a two-way radio.

         “Cool!” I exclaimed. “Shall we try it out?”

         “Maybe later. Mind if we talk first?”

         I motioned for him to sit down.

         “What’s up?” I asked.

         His broad shoulders slumped. There was something eating at him.

         As if he guessed that I suspected something, he forced a smile.

         “Let me ask you something, Frank…”

         “Francis.”

         “Francis. Aren’t you a little tired of the divorce cases, the skip traces, and all the other chicken shit stuff?”

         “Not really. Hell, I’ve just started. Working for pay, that is.”

         “I got an Open Unsolved that will challenge your intellect, swear to God. You know, like the trafficking case.”

         That case was indeed a head-scratcher: how and where human traffickers were delivering girls from Vietnam and elsewhere.  The young women—girls in some cases—boarded a ship that was bound for America.  But they never arrived. The ship got there and was immediately searched. No sign of the women.  Eventually I figured it out. For a short while the feds and cops treated me like a latter-day Oedipus Rex, as if I had solved the riddle of the Sphinx.

         It didn’t last.

         I had killed one of their own and done the time. Which meant the rank and file SFPD cops would never forgive me.

         “Are you listening?” Colin asked.

         “Remembering.”

         “May I continue?”

         “Go on,” I urged.

         He cleared his throat nervously, which I took as a bad sign.

         “I got this guy who’s been busting my balls for a year. Calls, e-mails… Last two weeks he’s been coming into the station, like he and his wife did in the beginning weeks of our investigation.”

         A red flag popped up.

         “What’s he want?”

         “His daughter was murdered and—”

         “Stop right there. Is this the Death Valley copycat thing?”

         He hesitated.

         “Yeah,” Colin admitted. “But we don’t know for sure if the perp is a copycat.”

         “There’s a reason it’s unsolved. The killer is too smart for you guys. No offense,” I added.

         “None taken.  Look. Besides us, he’s talked with the feds. He’s tried some of the best investigators from top law firms. Mid-range P.I.s. He even tried a sleazebag from the Yellow Pages.”

         “And?”

         Colin was about to beg me for something, which he’d never done before. It was so pathetic that I helped him out.

         “You want me to become involved, is that it?”

         “Basically.”

         “Call me egotistical, but I like to take on cases I have a good chance of solving. And get paid for doing it. This one sounds like a complete loser on both accounts. It’s been what, one whole year, and you guys have come up with nothing.”

         “I wouldn’t say nothing.”

         “No?”

         He shrugged.

         “How about this? Just talk to him. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”

         He had me there.

         “What’s his name?”

         “Michael Rollins.”

         “The father?”

         He nodded.

         “You got his phone or e-mail address?”

         I reached for my address book, but Colin waved me off.

         “He’s here.”

         “Where?”

         “Sitting in his car.”

         “You bastard,” I said.

         “Now now.”

         He left my office, grinning from ear to ear.