SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  "He's active this time of year," I said. "Look at the date

  "Like a rattlesnake," said Parish, making an embarrassed avoidance of Mary Ing's sad face.

  "He always liked warm weather," she muttered.

  And then it hit me that Ing might have been leaving his name on the tapes he left at the scenes. "Coming," I said.

  "Seeing... having... willing... they're all on the Wynn tape. Ing."

  "Right, Russell," said Erik. "Gamesmanship. Mrs. Ing, was Billy fond of trickery, deceit?"

  Mary looked at Erik with her blue, red-rimmed eyes. "I don't know if he was fond, Mr. Wald. But he... well... he was what I would call a born liar. He lied about almost everything, just as a matter of course. Did he enjoy it? I don't know. Billy's emotions were almost never... visible."

  I stared for a moment at one of the glossy blowups of the photograph taken from the video. Ing's bearded, wild-haired face was a fear-inspiring thing to behold, precisely for the absolute lack of fear that it contained. Beneath the deep brow, his eyes had a look of determination, boldness, cunning. I saw something else there, too—superiority and arrogance. Here was the face of a man proud of the horror he could personify, a horror he had worked a lifetime to possess.

  "He was in some kind of trouble with the police or juvenile authorities every summer until he turned eighteen," said Parish. "At which time he dropped out of continuation school and took a job as—get this—a live-in attendant at a veterinary hospital."

  "Perfect," said Wald. "He was searching for integration."

  "Integrating what?" said Parish.

  "His hatred, which was directed at helpless animals. He was trying to find a way to live with that hatred, for the hatred to become manageable. If he could integrate the animals into his life, he could accomplish this, at least on a surface level. For Billy, it would have been a start."

  "Either that or he was looking for more animals to kill," said Parish stubbornly.

  "No," said Mary Ing. "He took that job against his own fear of dogs. Mr. Wald is right—Billy was trying to overcome his fear."

  "Of course he was," said Erik. "I'll bet he didn't look forward to his first days on that job."

  "He came down with the flu," said Mary.

  "I'll rest my case," said Wald. Then, to Parish, with a smile. "Read on, Captain."

  Ing had managed to keep the job for four years. He was fired after an argument with the doctor, who filed a police report in the summer—of course—of 1976, claiming that Ing had be stealing various drugs stored at the facility. The doctor had a claimed that Ing had "removed" bodies from the hospital freezer, though exactly what the night attendant had done with them he "couldn't imagine." Police interviewed Billy, who denied any wrongdoing. No charges filed.

  With Parish's mention of the word freezer, I looked hard at him, while he stared dully back at me. It had been clear to me how Martin's work in Amber's bedroom was supposed to turn out: the bloody walls, the bludgeoned woman, even the tape in the stereo would have been more than enough to aim investigators straight at the Midnight Eye. Parish had practically signed the Eye's name to the scene. Then, for reasons I still hadn't be able to decipher, he'd changed his plan and was trying instead to stage my and Grace's guilt by removing the body to my property and documenting its burial. Why the change of plan? What had Martin learned between the time he killed Alice on July 3 and the time on July the Fourth when he removed his victim and the "evidence" of the Midnight Eye? Why had he laid it on me? I remembered something that Chet Singer had told me once—that premeditated murder required audacity. Parish's just-spoken words rang in my mind—that the doctor "couldn't imagine” what Ing might have done with the carcasses stolen from the deep freeze. It was only the doctor's limited imagination that kept him from the truth. And that concept—the unimaginable---was always applied to the serial killer, to the fact that Randy Kraft would drive around with his latest victim in the seat beside him; to the fact that Art Crump would return to the rental yard a chain saw still clogged with blood and hair; to the fact that Richard Ramirez would simply walk into quiet suburban homes late at night; to the fact that Jeffrey Dahmer would cut up his victims with an electric saw right there in his little apartment while the smell of rotting human flesh crept out from under his door and filled the hallway. The audacity! It was all, truly, beyond imagination. So as I returned Martin Parish's stare, I understood the secret he had kept—that behind his calm exterior and his badge lived a man capable—quite literally—of the unimaginable, a man intimately familiar with audacity.

  He smiled at me and said, "What do you think Ing was doing with the bodies from the freezer, Russ? You writers are supposed to have imagination."

  And that was when it occurred to me that the only way to bring Martin Parish to any kind of justice was to out imagine him, to meet him on his own audacious turf. But how?

  "Maybe he had a friend bury them and taped it with a video camera," I said.

  Martin retreated behind the blankness of his smile, while Wald, Winters, Schultz, and Mary Ing all looked at me and then at one another with a series of unconnecting glances that left all eyes on me again.

  "Billy didn't have any friends," said Mary Ing in all seriousness. She was not fluent in the language of the unimaginable.

  "They didn't have commercial video cameras in 1976," added Wald, clearly a man who did not understand audacity.

  "Who in hell cares what he was doing with the dog bodies, Marty?" asked Winters. He looked at his watch. "Get on with this, Martin. Russell here has a story to file sometime this year."

  Martin looked a little gray but forced a grin at me.

  As an adult, Ing had been arrested three times, questioned on three other occasions, and had done a total of 123 days in lockup. At twenty-two, he'd been popped on a standard DUI and found to have a pocketful of peyote on him—no charges for the drug; no probable cause for the search. Two years later, while working as a groundskeeper for a private school, he was questioned on complaints from his employer that certain animals in the school's "zoo" were disappearing. No charges filed. Two years later, he was in on a complaint from his landlord, who said Billy had broken into three different apartments in the complex and stolen nothing but women's underwear. Nothing filed. In 1984, at the age of thirty, Billy Ing had been convicted of his first real crime—an indecent exposure to a woman on Laguna's Mai Beach. The ninety-day sentence was suspended in favor of out patient psychiatric counseling—seven sessions. A year later, Ing fell for grand theft auto, which earned him four months. The CAR was stolen from a side street in Laguna Beach and returned to hilltop residential area of the same city two days later. He was questioned in 1987 regarding an attempted rape at Laguna’s Thousand Steps beach, and again two years later for a series of dogs and cats that had washed up, beaten to death, near the Aliso Pier just south of Laguna. No charges filed.

  "Russell," said Karen, "this personal history may be of interest to our readers. Most of it is taken from the psych evaluations done here at County—the rest from some phone interviews Probation did. You can't quote the evaluations—they're confidential—especially what Billy Ing said. You may quote Martin, Sheriff Winters, Wald, and me. You may quote Mrs. Ing if she will consent. Are we clear on this?"

  "Clear."

  Ing was born in Anaheim, Orange County, in 1954. His father, Howard, was an aerospace draftsman at Rockwell; Mary worked in food service in the hospital in which Billy was born. He was an only child.

  "Nothing could have been more 'normal,'" said Wald, looking up from the sheet. "But while Mr. and Mrs. Ing worked hard and young Billy was left in the care of a day-sitter, he was beginning to lead, I suspect, a very unhappy life. Is that true, Mary?"

  "He was not a happy child," she answered, looking down at the page. "I can't believe how much you have on him. On... us."

  "Mrs. Ing," said Erik, with a look of deep gravity, "you have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. You have come here, and you are saving lives. You are a goo
d person."

  Karen shifted uneasily in her seat, as did Martin Parish. If Winters detected the massive condescension, he did not let on. Neither did Mary. She blushed deeply, looked down at the pages, and wiped her eye again with the wadded blue tissue.

  Parish went back to reading.

  Ing was a large child, plump and not athletic, shy and friendless. More aggressive boys hit him, girls derided or ignored him; teachers disliked him because he was slow and stubborn as a student. His epilepsy was a topic for chiding. Ing came in at 136 on the Stanford-Binet IQ test. He was often truant, for which he was beaten by his father. Howard, according to Billy, was "always drunk" and abusive, sometimes to the point of hitting Mary with his fists. Howard had told his son many times that Billy and Mary were "anchors" around his neck, that the long hours he worked to support them were hours he would have spent—without the curse of their presence—in a life devoted to, of all things, the study of law.

  I looked at Mary, who continued staring down at the papers on her lap. She gave off a clear, if inaudible, wail of distress. Sensing my attention on her, she glanced quickly at me, held my gaze for a moment with her hopeless blue eye: then directed them back toward her lap. Her fist clenched hard upon the tissue.

  Parish flipped a page and continued.

  According to Billy, Howard was a man "so stupid and fat” that he got along better with animals than people.

  "I expected this," said Wald. "It fits perfectly."

  "Then maybe you should let me read it," said Parish.

  "Pardon me, Captain," said Erik.

  Parish grunted and went on. According to Billy, the Ing always had three Staffordshire terriers (pit bulls) and three cat: One of Billy's jobs was to feed and clean up after them before his father came home from work. He hated the animals, the way they "slobbered and shit everywhere," the way they seemed, for reasons beyond his understanding, to receive more love and tender attention from his father than he did. He was attacked at age eight by all three of the dogs one night, receiving 135 stitches to close the wounds. As an adult, he grew facial hair to cover the scars.

  Karen interrupted. "Sheriff, what's your call on the scars? We can publish it, or we can hold it."

  "Why publish?" asked Wald, "He's wearing a beard."

  "It can't hurt," said Parish. "What if he shaves? Which is a distinct possibility, after the picture we ran."

  Winters contemplated this. "Drop the scars, Russ. Let' hope he keeps the beard. Mrs. Ing, any pictures of Billy with no beard and the scars visible?"

  She shook her head. "He's worn a beard and mustache since he was in his early twenties. The scars embarrass him. I don't think he would shave."

  Winters nodded. "Save the scars, Monroe. You got onlyso much space."

  Parish shook his big head as if he were dealing with children, then continued.

  According to Billy, the dog attack, although terrifying and deeply angering, was not nearly as painful to him as the incident that immediately preceded it.

  At this point, Parish looked at Mary Ing and asked with a gentleness that surprised me, "Is it okay to read this, Mrs. Ing?"

  She nodded but didn't look up.

  Apparently, during one of his rages, Howard began beating Mary. Billy could hear them behind the closed door of the bedroom. His father was "grunting," something—or someone— was slamming against a wall, and his mother was sobbing. Billy threw open the door. Howard's back was to him, and he had his coat on, but his pants were down around his ankles. All Billy saw of his mother, blocked as she was by his father, were her two hands, fingers spread against the wall, and the profile of her face—"strangely angled"—also pressed to the wall, "like she was trying to hear something on the other side of it." Billy said that it looked "painful" for his mother. So he jumped onto his father's back. Howard easily shook him off, and when Billy rushed to his mother's aid, she slapped him so hard across his face that he stopped dead in his tracks. Billy said later that the feeling of Mary's hand on his flesh was "the single worst pain I ever felt." Billy had then run out the back door of his bedroom, across the darkened backyard toward the fence, behind which lay the flood-control channel, and made two unsuccessful leaps to get atop that fence before Howard's pit bulls—in a snarling fury of mistaken protection—dragged him down.

  "Note the date," said Wald. "Fourth of July, 1962. The County shrink notes that the dogs might have been aroused by the neighborhood fireworks, which in '62 were legal and popular. Look, even Billy says, down at the bottom of the page, that he remembered hearing the scream of a 'Picolo Pete' going off as he tried to get over the fence. This is the answer to the question of why he took the vet hospital job. Not the answer actually—but the question itself. Fear and its governance. E you integrate it or isolate it?"

  "Who cares?" asked Martin.

  "If we understand him, we can help him," said Wald.

  "I thought we were supposed to stop him," said Parish.

  Wald, obviously trying to accommodate Mary's feelings---and to pave in advance a layer of trust, should we need her help—smiled at Parish and shook his head. "We help Billy, we help everybody in this county, Martin. That's what we're paid to do."

  Karen looked at me. "This isn't the kind of stuff we expect to see in your next piece, Russ. It's background."

  As Parish proceeded with his reading, I couldn't help but feel some pity for the Billy Ing who used to be. And I also couldn’t help but wonder whether anyone—especially a county psychologist—could ever really locate the reason why a human turns into a hunter of other humans, a thrill killer, a living nightmare. True, Ing's story was horrible enough—a violent family bad experiences at school, even the awful attack by his own dogs. But there were thousand of others with comparable—or worse—lives who had managed somehow not to break, not turn, not to slip over that final edge and fall into the numb, self-pitying, remorseless rage that is the hallmark of the sociopath murderer. Why Ing, if indeed Ing was the Midnight Eye? Why not someone who had suffered even more?

  I have a theory, though perhaps it's less a theory than simple point of view. I'm not a religious man, though faith has something to do with my theory, as does the cold truth of mathematical probability. (The idea has come to me that God and mathematics are one.) But I've always believed that there is God somewhere, that certain people are closer to that God than others, that some are tied to a "purpose" that seems to come from outside of themselves, from "above." My list would include people as diverse as Solomon, Buddha, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Muhammad, Blake, and certainly Jesus Christ. Thus, statistically, one in every Xmillion people are "chosen" or "choose" or simply end up being closer to God than the rest of us, and they function much as journalists, scurrying between above and below, reporting back, keeping us informed. It is their job to carry out the high-level diplomacy that people like me would only bungle— misquoting, missing deadlines, missing the point, losing the notes, erasing the tapes. Similarly, there are those "chosen" to do the darkest work of the world, to function as God's continuing curse upon us, or—for those amused by the concept of God—to fulfill the mathematical fact that for every X million men and women who walk the earth at a given time, one of them will be little more than a merciless predator of other men and women. Solomon was chosen for his gift of poetry; the Midnight Eye for his gift of rage. One celebrates his specific blessing; the other bears his unique curse. But both do their work so that we don't have to. The Eye was a serial killer for the simple purpose of allowing me to be a writer. In a sense, I owed him. I extend this sense of gratitude to all sufferers of disease, too. Especially to Isabella, who, I am convinced, received her sickness so that I would not. None of this is to say that the best place for the Midnight Eye is not the guillotine or some modern equivalent—it probably is. And if called upon to lower the blade, I certainly would, though less with a feeling of vengeance than a sense of duty. I would lower the blade so you wouldn't have to. Cancer is a serial killer; a serial killer is a cancer. No one chooses eithe
r. Parish then briefly reviewed Ing's history of epilepsy, while I wondered whether his taped stutterings might have been influenced by seizures, or post seizure confusion. Had he taped them during the "aura" experienced by some epileptics before a fit, those seconds of ecstasy, vision? Ing had admitted to being heavy drinker from the age of eighteen, when he left his parent: home and took the job as hospital night clerk. After his four year stint there, Ing began a life of localized vagrancy that took him further and further out of contact with his mother, and oddly, further away from contact with law enforcement.

  Something else I found fascinating, if pathetic: Ing had been questing for religious belief from an early age. He had tried it all. Lutheran, Methodist, and Baptist churches as a boy (his mother often moved the family's place of worship); as a young man on his own he'd tried Catholicism, the Four-square Church, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Rosicrucianism, Scientology. In his own words, Ing had been "looking for simple answers to complex questions. All religions, I discovered for myself, are based on the fraudulent assumption that there is Father who cares. There is no greater lie."

  An uneasy quiet settled over the office then, broken only by the distant sound of the General Services crew still yanking away at the sheetrock. Winters sat back, crossed his arms, and contemplated the desk in front of him. "Mrs. Ing," he said finally "you have anything to add?"

  She breathed deeply, squaring her burdened shoulders "Well... I think... I suppose that most of what you just read is true. When Howard died, ten years ago, Billy seemed to take on certain... courage? I can say that all through my life with Billy there seemed to be two of him—one that was there and one the was somewhere else. Truly, deep down inside, he's a good boy. I know that sounds like I'm blind, but really, he was never, I mean, he was always... I mean, I don't know what I mean."

  "You mean he's your boy and you love him," I said.

  "Thank you, yes."

  "What were his interests, his hobbies?" asked Parish.