If Angels Fall

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Danny saw the girl again.

As the subway train eased out of the Coliseum station, he looked up,captivated by her frozen smile, her vacant stare, and the fact that she neverspoke.

Never.

She was dead.

Her throat had been cut and her body stuffed into a plastic garbagebag hidden in Golden Gate Park.

She was two years old and her name was Tanita Marie Donner. Twoeleven-year-old girls from Lincoln Junior High found her during a science classfield trip.

“She looked like a little naked doll,” Natalie Jackson, one of thegirls, told a San Francisco TV station.

That was a year ago. The nightmares were now less frequent for theschoolgirls. For most San Franciscans, Tanita’s murder was fading from memoryalthough her face still stared from bus shelters, store windows, and bumperstickers, an image as familiar to the Bay Area as the Gold Gate or theTransamerica Pyramid. For a time, it embodied San Francisco’s anguish. Ablurred, grainy blow-up of a color snapshot, Tanita timidly showing her tinymilk-white teeth as Mommy coaxed a smile. Two pink butterfly barrettes heldback her brown hair. She was wearing a cotton dress with lace trim, and crushingher white teddy bear to her chest. Her dark eyes shining like falling stars.

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