Cold Fear Read Online Free PDF Page A

“I’ve got to check on the birds, Dad. Want to help me?”
    “Sure, let’s go.”
    Sydowski was enjoying having his father stay with him
during these few days he was off. Sydowski lived alone in Parkside in the house
where he and his wife, Basha, had raised two daughters. It got a little lonely.
His old man, a retired barber, still preferred to live at Sea Breeze Villas, a
seniors’ complex in Pacifica. He had his friends, his vegetable garden, and
followed baseball. Sydowski liked his visits. Before their game they had
homemade cream of potato soup, the way Basha used to make it. With real cream.
    They went to the aviary Sydowski had built in his
backyard under the oak tree, a lifetime ago it seemed. Inside, they were met by
the cooing of some five dozen caged song birds. Photographs and ribbons won at
bird fairs covered the paneled walls. Sydowski liked coming here to listen to
the tiny birds and review cases. Like the doubleheader they cleared a few
months ago. That beast almost brought him to his knees.
    Sydowski was concerned about his new bred budgerigars.
They offered appealing cinnamon and opaline wing markings but he noticed their
droppings seemed off color and lacked consistency. Maybe if he fortified their
seed mix with some calcium.
    “You know, Dad, I met a nice lady a few months ago at
the Seattle show.”
    “Louise, from San Jose. You got the budgies from her.
You told me.”
    “I was thinking of asking her over for dinner.”
    “You need a woman? At your age?”
    “Watch it.”
    Sydowski smiled at last week’s conversation on the
phone, Louise asking him for coffee.
    “I could come to San Francisco, Walt. Or you could come
here?”
    “Well, I got some cases to work on,” he said. “Can I get
back to you?”
    “I’m not going anywhere.”
    They’d hit it off in Seattle. Louise was a budgie
breeder, also widowed. Her husband, a judge, had died three years ago. Stroke.
Her daughter owned a small computer-graphics company in Sacramento. Her son was
a medical lawyer in Pittsburgh. Aside from her birds, she taught drama classes
and was a working actor. She had done some national commercials and had been an
extra in a few movies. Louise was vibrant--sixty-one going on forty-one.
Gorgeous and, for some strange reason, smitten with him the moment she came up
behind him on the floor of the Seattle show.
    “Well where did you come from, Mr. Walt Sydowski?”
    He turned to meet mischief and flirtation in the green
eyes peering up at him over a coffee mug.
    Sydowski had a pleasing, solid six-foot-three,
two-hundred-pound build, wavy salt-and-pepper hair touching off his dark
complexion and rugged smile, which glinted because of his two gold-crowned
teeth. Most people were intrigued by his smile. Unless, of course, they were a
suspected killer.
    Louise had cast some sort of spell on him that day in Seattle. She had done some investigating, learning from other exhibitors all about
Inspector Wladyslaw Sydowski of the San Francisco Homicide Detail.
    They talked over lunch, about raising a family, about
losing a spouse, about acting, about memories, about birds. He liked her and
told her of the anguish of cases involving children.
    Being with her was like being with an old friend, and in
the weeks after Seattle, when they talked on the phone, Sydowski felt something
warm flowing into an area of his life that had been cold and empty for so long.
But why was he afraid?
    “You think you are cheating on Basha after six years? Or
that the girls might not approve? You want my permission to have a date?”
    Sydowski stroked a fledgling with his pinky knuckle and
shrugged.
    “I guess, something like that. I don’t know.”
    “Your problem is you maybe want to leave the job, or
need something new in your life. Those cases with the baby and the kidnapped
kids still shake you pretty good. I see it in your face.”
    Sydowski would always be haunted by the case of
two-year-old Tanita Marie Donner. Her little corpse