SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  I waited again.

  "Where does he keep a two-to three-foot-long, one-and a-half-inch-diameter—I would guess—club? Does he waste free hand on it? Does he risk being seen holding it as he approaches the scene? No. He fits one end with a loop. Leather or maybe thick twine, even a strip of cloth. He cinches the knot up against the cap, or maybe he's drilled a hole for it—remember, this pipe is manufactured to be relatively soft and rust resistant because it's often buried. The loop goes over his left shoulder, leaving the weapon to lie against his side. It's hidden, out of the way, but quickly accessible."

  "Raskolnikov's MO," I said.

  Karen frowned.

  "Yes," said Chet. "He's taken the page from Dostoyevski, although I doubt he's read Crime and Punishment."

  "How do you know what he reads?" Karen asked.

  "Nobody who misspells hypocrite or ignorance reads the masters," I said maybe a little snottily. I was hoping to buy Karen's kindness with forensic competence, but the tone of voice came out wrong. She colored and looked away from me.

  Chet gave me a very odd look at that moment but nodded, first to me, then to Karen, then studied me again. "Yes."

  "Nice, Chet, but a yard-long pipe dangling from a man's shoulder isn't exactly hidden," Karen said.

  "That is correct. And that is why, as Kim told Russell, the Midnight Eye wears the green robe."

  The green robe turned out to be a blanket—an inexpensive acrylic blanket, fibers from which Chester had already placed at all three scenes. It was likely old. It was very dirty. Fibers of it were found at the Wynns', mixed with decomposed granite and beach sand just inside and to the left of the master suite's door.

  "Holding a blanket around you still takes a free hand," I said. "If you're going to keep it over your shoulders."

  "He takes it off once he's inside—the CS team found the fibers tightly grouped in all three scenes. He has set down the blanket, in each case, just inside the bedroom door, always on the left, using his freer right hand to slip it down and off."

  "Like taking off his warm-up jacket," said Karen. "I wonder if he uses pine tar on his club, for a better grip."

  "No evidence of pine tar, Karen. But I had Evidence send up the Wynns' screen door this afternoon, for a closer look the cut. The jagged ends of the mesh were rich with green acrylic fiber—the top, where his shoulders went through, and the bottorn, too, where the blanket dragged across."

  Karen looked at me a little wearily. "Nothing on the blanket, Russ. It's too easy to ditch and get another. Winters said okay on physical description and method of entry only."

  Chester coughed quietly. "I would not release information on his facial hair, for roughly the same reason, Karen. A man with a full beard is much easier to spot than one who is clean shaven."

  "Too late, Chet. We're going with the picture."

  Chester shrugged.

  Karen hesitated for a moment. A flutter of confusion crossed her eyes. It was then that I realized she was truly making the calls for me, that for all her carping about Winters this and Dan that, Karen Schultz herself was in charge of me and what I wrote. That's why she'd been sitting on me so hard. A mistake was hers and hers alone.

  Chet coughed again, cupping his hand to his mouth. It struck me as a little nervous. I assumed he was plugged into Karen's distress at my presence.

  "We know he carries a knife—short-bladed, and I would guess a substantial handle for... leverage. It is likely a hunting knife, or one for skinning. So," he said. "That is the picture I've drawn for you. What do you see?"

  I gathered my thoughts for a long moment, drawing Chester's images and information, extrapolating what I could, trying to let a coherent whole emerge. "A beach bum. One of the homeless you find in beach cities. He's got long hair and beard because he can't afford to have them cut. He wears blanket for warmth, and to hide the club. He spends his time at the beach because it's free, he can panhandle, use the public rest rooms, check the dumpsters for edible trash, steal from the tourists. On the tapes he made, I heard waves in the background, and voices. He hangs out at a place where the cops are halfway lenient, where other homeless people congregate—no use standing out, and at six two he's not exactly inconspicuous to start with. Venice Beach is a possibility, but it's too far north. The cops would run him out of Huntington or Newport, so Laguna is the best bet. I'd look for him in Laguna. He steals cars to get around because he's too poor to afford one of his own. He gets them in Laguna, leaves them there when he's done. You'd find beach sand in the floor mats, green acrylic fiber on the upholstery, and if you were lucky, Chet's mystery polymer on the headrests. He's a Rastafarian—or thinks he is—from all the Jah shit he paints all over the walls. Rastas smoke a lot of dope—it's part of their religion—so I'd expect him to be around the smoke. Again, he can't buy it, not much of it, so he hangs with people who supply him. We know he's got access to a tape recorder, so I'd guess he stole it from a tourist who was out in the water, not looking after his things. He's either got a speech impediment or he's heavily under the influence when he makes the tapes—maybe both. Epilepsy is possible. We could figure out only half of what he said, and that didn't make a lot of sense. Last, I'd say he's pretty smart. He wears gloves, hides a three-foot steel club under his blanket. He's brave and he's getting braver. First, two people alone in an unlocked apartment, then a couple in a locked house, then a family of four. He won't stop because the more he kills, the hungrier he is for more. There's no sexual turn-on for him in it; he does it because he thinks he has to. Probably hears God—-Jah—telling him he has to do this shit. Maybe that's who's talking on the tapes. That's what I see."

  Chet said nothing for a moment, then finally looked Karen. She had her back to us, staring out the vertical slot window that constituted—twelve hours a day—Chet Singer view of the outside world.

  "Good," said Chet. "I understand you have actually talk to him."

  "News travels fast around here," I noted.

  "Are you done?" asked Karen.

  "I'm done. Thanks, Chet. I'll be careful with this."

  "Good of you to visit," he said. "I'm sorry we lost you."

  Karen had already pushed through the door ahead of me when Chet quietly called me back inside. He gave me that odd look again, as if I were a specimen under his microscope. "That was perceptive of you to remember the Eye misspells simple words, and to mention the similarity to Dostoyevski."

  I waited, wheels turning inside my head, wondering what I'd done. "Thanks."

  "But nowhere, in any of our crime scenes, did he write the word ignorance—correctly or not."

  I could see IGNORACE on Amber's wall, clearly, as my mind streaked for the nearest plausible excuse. Even as I stood there, slack-jawed, probably, I saw a way to employ my befuddlement It was a superb lie, delivered with humility and aplomb. "I write and edit hours a day," I said with a minor smile. "I must have mistaken my ignorance for his."

  Chester continued to study me hard for a moment, then smiled. "Well," he said, "we all certainly have enough of that go around."

  For the next hour, I interviewed Erik Wald and Dan Winters to get Citizens' Task Force's information. The formulation of this force, I saw, was clearly a promotional move on Winters's part, a way of enlisting not only public support for the case but of enlisting votes in the next election—still two years away. I tried to remain uncynical. It was also, I understood, some kind of atonement—overatonement perhaps—for the fact that the department had taken so long to connect the Fernandez and Ellison killings. Still, the task force was theoretically a good idea, if it brought results. I personally thought the T-shirts and caps a bit much. Wald seemed almost to glow in his moment; he was sincere, glib, earnest, arrogant. I was reminded again that Erik was an outsider here and that no amount of infiltration of this department would ever render him a sworn officer. But for now, Wald would have heavy coverage, and his Task Force had already produced a potentially huge piece of evidence—the video and resultant photograph. Ca
rla Dance dispatched a photographer who shot Wald during the last few minutes of our conversation. Before the shoot started, Erik brushed his hand through his curly hair and loosened his necktie.

  "Hurry up," he told the photographer. "I need to get to work."

  The last thing I did before heading home to write the article was make a quick stop by Sorrento's up in the Orange hills.

  Brent Sides was indeed tending bar. He was tall and tanned, with a swatch of thick blond hair, and eyebrows sun-bleached to white, which hovered over his blue eyes like frosted comets. But in spite of his tan, he blushed deeply when I introduced myself as Grace Wilson's father.

  "I like your books," he managed. "And the article today about the killings. The waitresses here are all freaking out."

  I watched him drying glasses with a clean white towel before I spoke again. When I did, it was to tell him that Grace was in some very deep trouble with some very unfriendly men. He did not seem surprised by this.

  I asked him about his whereabouts on the night of July 3, and he said he had been with Grace—first dinner, then the movies, then drinks. He took her back to her place, late.

  "How old are you?"

  "Twenty-three."

  He blushed again and looked away.

  "Do you love her?"

  He nodded. "We've never been to bed, if that's what you mean, but I love her."

  A cocktail waitress ordered a round of drinks, and Sid was relieved to be away from my prying eyes while he made them, set them on the counter, and recorded his action onto keyboard. He eased back my way when the waitress swung away from the service bar, tray loaded.

  "Have you seen these men?" he asked. "The ones who are after her?"

  "No. You?"

  "Yeah. They look heavy. I've got some friends, though

  "That's not the point, Brent. Describe them."

  He did, and his portraits were very close to those of Grace: one fat man with big ears and one slender young man with close-cropped hair and sunglasses.

  I was quiet while he wiped the counter, apparently deep in thought.

  "I'd never hurt her," he said finally.

  "You'd do just about anything for her."

  He nodded.

  "Would you lie?"

  "Probably. If she asked me to."

  I suddenly liked Brent Sides for his guilelessness, his boy’s shyness regarding my daughter, his obvious affection for her.

  "Please ask her to call me," he said.

  "I'll do that."

  I paid up, shook Sides's cool, moist bartender's hand, and stepped back out into the heat of the afternoon.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Neither Isabella nor Grace was at home when I got there. Instead, there was a note on my pillow:

  Dear Russ,

  I'm sorry but I can't be here alone. I fell in the bathroom after the maid left. Not hurt, but it scared me. Grace was gone. Mom and Dad came and got me up and are taking me to their place. I wanted so badly to be your baby, not your infant. I miss you already.

  Love, Your Isabella

  For a while, I stood there in our upstairs bedroom, listening to the roar of Isabella's absence. The sun was lowering over the hills, and through the picture window came a clear, fierce light that splashed across the carpet, hung against the far wall, angled over the lower corner of our bed. So much was missing: Isabella's wheelchair—a contraption that I'd despised at first,

  then grown to regard with some sort of odd affection as it came to be more and more a part of her; the bottles of pills that always cluttered her nightstand; the cane, upright on its four-toed foot, always waiting nearby for her; Isabella's journal, catalogs, cookbooks, novels, and travel books that were always strewn across the bed; even her favorite blanket.

  Now they were gone and the place—our place—was as forbiddingly neat as a motel room. A terrifying, urgent loneliness hit me then as I had a vision—not my first—of what this house and this life would be like without Isabella in them. A voice inside reminded me that the liquor cabinet was just downstairs. But I didn't move. I stood there in that unmerciful sunlight, drenched in a world without my wife.

  I looked around the room, wondering whether the truest and simplest measure of a person is in what they love, whether a life is, most basically, a time to discover what those things and who those people are. And here was so much of what Isabella had found to love: the crystal hummingbird dangling on a string just inside the window; the cheap cut-glass figure of an Aztec warrior we'd gotten in Mexico and that now stood guard on the TV; her piano, which sat against the far wall in all its burnished, pampered beauty; her books of Neruda and Stevens and Moore; her hundreds of music tapes—everything from Handel to the sound track of "Twin Peaks." There it all was, illuminated by the sun but enlightened and made precious by Isabella's love.

  And as I stood in front of her piano—her deafeningly silent instrument—and looked at the pictures framed and displayed there, I realized for the first time that of everything Isabella loved in this life, she loved me the most. There were pictures as we said our vows, as we climbed into the limo, cut the cake, waltzed the first dance. I'd looked at all these in passing a thousand times—every day, probably—and they'd always struck me as nice but common, charming in a ritual, almost institutionalized way. After all, didn't every married couple have a bunch of shots like these? But then, that day, standing in our room alone saw and really understood with absolute chilling clarity that Russell Monroe, was the prize of Isabella's life.

  I, Russell, who had stumbled upon her reading poetry in the orange grove, five million years ago.

  I, who had sworn to love and honor her.

  I, who had sat outside Amber Mae Wilson's home not once, but four times, wondering whether I should go in, knowing that one night I would.

  I, who carried a flask so as never to be too far from my beloved whiskey.

  I, who had left her alone to fall in her own bathroom who was now not even the first person she would call to help her get her suffering, besieged body off the floor.

  I was her greatest prize.

  The sunlight continued burning the room, bearing down into my eyes. I felt singled out by it, revealed, exposed. When I looked to the mirrored closet doors, there was no Russ Monroe to be seen, only the bright outline of something manlike and hollow—a glare. I wondered whether that was what Isabella saw when she looked at me: just the shape of a man where the substance used to be.

  I walked down the stairs, acutely tuned to the sound my shoes on the steps of our empty house.

  Joe Sandoval, broad-faced and barrel-chested, was doing something to his front door when I parked in front of his house half an hour later. He and Corrine lived in San Juan Capistrano, quiet inland town south of Laguna, known mainly for its mission, to which the migration of swallows in March of each year is both a local legend and a tourist event. Isabella and I were married in that mission on a scorching Saturday in September, a day that felt much like this one in the sheer overwhelming presence of its heat. I read the inscription on the silver flask again—"With all my love, Isabella"—after taking a slug of the whiskey inside.

  Joe stopped his labor and studied me as I came up the walkway. Years of work for SunBlesst Ranch had left his face lined and dark, his black eyes in a perpetual, dubious squint that contradicted his general good nature. His thick gray-black hair was combed straight back as always, tied in a short ponytail. He transferred a screwdriver and offered me a heavy, gentle hand. "She's okay," he said.

  "Was the fall bad?"

  "Just a bruise, but it scared her. Come in."

  He guided me into the house, one hand on my shoulder, the other on the door. I noted that he had been installing a second dead bolt, courtesy, no doubt, of the Midnight Eye. "Corrine is upset," he said quietly as we went in. "You know."

  The living room was small but comfortable, furnished in the affordable Sears version of American colonial. There was a braided oval rug on the hardwood floor, pictures of family o
n one wall, and a simple shrine to the Virgin Mary tucked into the corner by the TV. Corrine's handmade afghans were draped generously over the sofa and chairs. A Bible lay on the coffee table. A window-mounted air conditioner hummed loudly. Beside it stood a .30-06 deer gun.

  Corrine sat in the rocker, but she stood when I came in. I hugged her with the genuine affection tempered by dread that many men feel for their mothers-in-law. She had accepted me unconditionally as a husband for her daughter, but slowly over the last year I had sensed her respect eroding, based on the care I was—or wasn't—giving Isabella. She had never said one word to me about it, but I had decided that in Corrine's eye: I was not tending her daughter as well as I could. I began resent this judgment. The thought had crossed my mind, of course, that in my own eyes I was failing, and what I truly resented was myself. By design, a man's conscience is eager to betray him.

  Corrine is a tall woman, especially for one of Mexican blood. She was fifty years old then, the same age as her husband and only ten years older than I. Corrine is graceful in her height always immaculately groomed, and she is conspicuously beautiful when she smiles. It is a smile to die for. In fact, Joe has white knife scar across his belly, evidence of only one of the battles he fought in the dusty back streets of Los Mochis to win her hand and protect her honor. They had come north together just after they were married, in the summer of 1964, one year before Isabella—who would be their only child—was born.

  She hugged me generously, then sat. "She is sleeping. Please, sit down."

  I remained standing and looked toward the hallway. Joe sat down on the sofa and glanced at his wife, then at me. A minor point was about to be won or lost here. It was a matter of honor—or maybe only of pride—that I win it.

  So I walked past the sofa, went down the hallway, and opened the door of Isabella's room. She lay on her back, deep asleep, the breeze of a ceiling fan riffling the bedsheet at her neck/ The room was cool, shadowed by an immense pepper tree the backyard. From the wall directly above her head, an agonized plastic Christ stared, it seemed, straight down at Isabel His cheapness angered me, his unconcern for the tumor cells growing unchecked and with His blessing, I assumed, in Isbella's lovely body. To ask Him for help seemed to grovel—the very worst of bad faith. I shut the door quietly and went back to the living room, where I sat on the couch and looked out the window to the street.