“Would you mind telling me just what the hell we’re looking for?” Jill asked, seeming annoyed. “What the hell didn’t I see?”
“You saw it perfectly,” I said as I pawed through Frank Coombs’s effects. “So did I. But neither of us put it together at the time. Look at this.”
As if it were a silver chalice, I picked up the polished brass trophy of a prone sharpshooter aiming a rifle. 50 Meter Straight Target Champion, the inscription plate read. That was what I remembered from the first time I saw the trophy.
But the name above it changed everything.
Frank L. Coombs… not Frank C. Francis Laurence, not Francis Charles.
Rusty Coombs… The trophy had been awarded to Coombs’s son.
All of a sudden, every assumption and insight changed for me. Maybe because of all the paperwork I had looked at recently, Coombs Sr.’s full name had sunk into my consciousness.
Frank C. was the father, Frank L. the son.
“I’m not my father,” I remembered Rusty Coombs saying. I could see his face now, the convincing act he’d put on for Jacobi and me.
“It’s the son,” I whispered.
Jill sat back on the floor, stunned. “You’re telling me, Lindsay, these horrifying murders were committed by Coombs’s son? The boy at Stanford?”
Cindy blurted, “I thought he hated his father. I thought they hadn’t been in touch.”
“So did I,” I said. “He fooled everyone, didn’t he?”
We stood there, seeking one another’s eyes in the dim basement room. Did the new theory work? Did it stand up to scrutiny? My mind flashed again—the white van. The getaway car from Tasha Catchings’s murder… It had been stolen from Mountain View. Palo Alto and Mountain View were only a few minutes apart.
“The owner of the white van,” I said, “taught anthropology at a community college down there. He said he took on students from other schools. Sometimes, some of the jocks…”
All of a sudden, things were fitting into place. “Maybe one of them was Rusty Coombs?”
Chapter 112
I HURRIED BACK UPSTAIRS. The first thing I did was place a call to Professor Stasic at Mountain View Junior College. I was only able to get his voice mail. I left an urgent message for him to call me.
I punched the name Francis L. Coombs into the CCI databank computer. The father’s old conviction came up, but nothing on the son. No criminal record.
I felt that if the kid was cold enough to do these terrible crimes, he had to be in the system somewhere. I typed his name in the juvie databank. These records were sealed, unable to be used in a court, but we had access. After a few seconds, a file shot back. A long one… I blinked at the screen.
Rusty Coombs had had run-ins with the law at least seven times from the time he was thirteen.
>
In 1992, he’d been brought before a juvie court for shooting a neighbor’s dog with a pellet gun.
A year later, he’d been indicted for criminal mischief for killing a goose in a corporate park.
At age fifteen, he and a friend had been charged with desecrating a public place for spray painting a synagogue with anti-Semitic slogans.
He had been charged, but not convicted, with throwing beer bottles through a neighbor’s window. The complainant was black.
He was alleged to be part of a high school gang, the Kott Street Boys, known for race-based attacks on blacks, Latinos, and Asians.
One after another, I read on, stunned. Finally, I called Jacobi into my office. I laid the whole thing out for him. Rusty Coombs’s violent past. His name on the marksmanship trophy. The stolen van in Mountain View, not that far from Palo Alto.
“Obviously, they’ve seriously relaxed the admission requirements at Stanford since I applied.” Jacobi snorted.
“No jokes, Warren. Please. So what do you think? I’m losing it, right? Am I crazy?”