When I finished, there was silence again. They just stared. I wanted to pump my arm in victory.
Agent Ruddy cleared his throat. “So far, I haven’t heard a thing that links Coombs directly to any of the crime scenes.”
“Give me another day or two and you will,” I said. “Coombs is the killer.”
Hull, Ruddy’s broad-shouldered partner, shrugged optimistically toward the chief. “You want us to follow this up?”
I couldn’t believe it. This was my case. My breakthrough. Homicide’s. Our people had been murdered.
Tracchio seemed to mull it over. He pursed his thick lips as if he were sucking a last drop through a straw. Then he shook his head at the FBI man.
“That won’t be necessary, Special Agent. This has always been a city case. We’ll see it through with city personnel.”
Chapter 77
ONLY ONE THING was standing in the way now. We had to find Frank Coombs.
Coombs’s prison file mentioned a wife, Ingrid, who had divorced him while he was in prison and remarried. It was a long shot. The PO said he hadn’t been in touch. But long shots were coming in right now.
“C’mon, Warren.” I nudged Jacobi. “You’re coming with me. It’ll be like old times.”
“Aww, ain’t that sweet.”
Ingrid Thiasson lived on a pleasant middle-class street off of Laguna.
We parked across the street, went up, and rang the bell. No one answered. We didn’t know if Coombs’s wife worked, and there was no car in the driveway.
Just as we were about to head back, an old-model Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway.
Ingrid Thiasson looked about fifty, with stringy brown hair; she wore a plain, shapeless blue dress under a heavy gray sweater. She climbed out of the car and opened the rear hatch to unload groceries.
An old cop’s wife, she ID’d us the minute we walked up. “What do you people want with me?” she asked.
“A few minutes. We’re trying to locate your ex-husband.”
“You got nerve coming around here.” She scowled, hoisting two bags in her arms.
“We’re just checking all the possibilities,” Jacobi said.
She snapped back, “Like I told his parole officer, I haven’t heard a word from him since he got out.”
“He hasn’t been to see you?”
“Once, when he got out. He came by to pick up some personal stuff he thought I had held for him. I told him I threw it all out.”
“What kind of stuff?” I asked.
“Useless letters, newspaper articles on the trial. Probably the old guns he kept around. Frank was always into guns. Stuff only a man with nothing to show for his life would find value in.”
Jacobi nodded. “So what’d he do then?”
“What’d he do?” Ingrid Thiasson snorted. “He left without a word about what life had been like for us for the past twenty years. Without a word about me or his son. You believe that?”
“And you have no idea where we could contact him?”
“None. That man was poison. I found someone who’s treated me with respect. Who’s been a father to my boy. I don’t want to see Frank Coombs again.”
I asked, “You have any idea if he might be in touch with your son?”