SUMMER of FEAR Read online

  "He liked electric things, electronic things. He took apart our phone once and tried to put it back together."

  "Did he succeed?" Wald asked.

  "Yes. It took him a while, and Howard was furious. He was... is quite talented that way. He made radios and walkie-talkie devices. He was always a good listener."

  "Did he like to dress up? In your clothes, or Howard's, or in any kind of costume or disguise?" Erik asked.

  "Oh my, yes. All of that. Halloween was his favorite day all year."

  "Who gives a shit?" asked Parish.

  "I do," I said. "Wald is onto something."

  "Like what?"

  I thought of Chet finding the heavily sprayed hair. I then remembered—began to remember—my train of thought while I was talking to the Eye at Joe and Corrine's house: Why was he so smug about having his picture in the paper?

  "Like the fact that the beard and ratty hair are fake," I said, looking at Erik. "He's wearing a costume. He sprays the hell out of the hairpiece to keep it looking... sharp."

  Wald smiled. "I'll take credit for that jump. It makes perfect sense on a psychological level, too. Part of what this man is doing is performing a ritual. He's reversing the roles of childhood trauma so that he can come out the victor now, not the victim. The long hair and beard are part of the ritual. Mary, did Howard—"

  "Yes! His hair was long—for the time, that is—and he was always bearded."

  Wald shot a glance at Parish. "There's another reason for it. It lets him run a normal life. He's got a job. He's got an identity—undoubtedly a false one—but during the day, when he's not the Midnight Eye, he wears no beard and his hair i probably short."

  "So we've got the whole county looking for the wrong face?" asked Winters.

  "Exactly," said Wald. "His own opposite. If it's a face you want—get Graphics to take off the hair. It would be close enough."

  I was once again impressed by Wald's understanding, if perhaps only because it aligned so closely with my own. "He right," I said. "Over the phone, he's almost always clear and lucid. If he holds a job, he doesn't wear that blanket around himself. He leaves the garbled tapes to make us think we're after a moron having a fit. He's signing with his left hand."

  Again the quiet prevailed. Finally, Winters stood and offered his hand to Mrs. Ing. "Thank you."

  She rose and took it. "I wish I could identify that picture for sure," she said. "I believe it is Billy, but I can't be positive. Needless to say, I hope it... it... isn't."

  "We will be in touch," said Winters.

  I stood myself then, checking my watch. "Dan, I think Mrs. Ing should stay."

  "What for?"

  "I talked to the Midnight Eye an hour ago. He said he be calling here at noon."

  A wry smile passed over Winters's face. "Here?"

  "It's about the 'dramatic statement,'" I said.

  "Oh Damn," said Mary Ing.

  "Mrs. Ing, can you wait another forty minutes and listen to his voice?"

  "Of course."

  Then, to Parish: "Martin, get Carfax in here for a CNI intercept. He's got forty minutes to make the installation."

  Parish grunted, glaring at me, then at Wald. "Now."

  "Russ," said Karen Schultz, already heading for the door, "Chet wants to see you in the lab."

  Chet sat, rumpled as usual, on his stool, his heavy mouth turned down as if not only gravity but years of acquaintance with the dark side of human nature were tugging his entire face earthward. His eyes behind the thick glasses were sharp as always. He glanced at Karen, and some unspoken signal sent her from the room.

  "Sit," he said.

  On the table in front of Chet was a tape player and a stack of cassettes. The tape I had given him sat beside them. He eyed them forlornly as I sat beside him. "I'm unhappy with what I have discovered," he said. "It makes no sense. And when I put it within the larger picture, it still makes no sense." He turned and stared at me over the tops of his glasses.

  "Students of the incomplete?" I asked.

  He looked at me again with his lugubrious and penetrating eyes. "Russell, what we have here is something far more disturbing than incompletion. I fear that we may be looking right into the heart of an evil. An evil very close to us."

  "You listened to my tape."

  "Yes, I want to know where you got it, and why it hasn't been properly booked into evidence here."

  "I got it from the trunk of Martin Parish's car."

  Singer studied me for a long while. I could almost see the thoughts racing behind his eyes, and I easily sensed in his deliberation the speed and economy with which Chester Fairfax Singer organized information.

  He nodded finally. "Let us backtrack. I am employed, as you know, in the Hair and Fiber section of our forensic trim lab, although I spend much time in the other areas of the lab. By default, seniority, and perhaps experience, it has fallen upon me to run the day-to-day operations here. I have a hand in almost every piece of evidence that comes through here, from fingerprints to semen samples to trace soils to spent cartridge And it has come to my attention, Russell, that there is forensic work being done in my lab on a crime for which we have no record, no file, no case number, no information at all. A certain... ranking official in this department has been doing the work on his own. He is inexpert in technique but patient enough to arrive at sound results. I have observed him both early and late, before and after hours. The evidence involves hair, latents belonging to a suspect, taken from the scene of what crime, I cannot fathom. Also, there are paint chips, fiber samples from the floorboard of the suspect’s car, which match samples taken---again, I assume—from the scene of whatever 'crime' was committed. I have come to learn the name of the suspect, if that the right term. I've said nothing of this to anyone yet except for you. Supply for me the name of this suspect, Russell."

  "There are two, if I'm not mistaken."

  He arched an eyebrow and smiled.

  "Grace Wilson and Russ Monroe," I said.

  "Your daughter, I believe."

  "That's right. Did you solve the tape I gave you?"

  Solemnly, he nodded, and looked down again at the offending cassette. "It's not an actual recording made by the Midnight Eye. It is his voice. They are his own words. But the tape you gave me is a composite, a collection of sentences from the tapes left at the Fernandez and Ellison homes. You knew that I assume."

  "I was pretty sure. I recognized the phrases from before

  "And Martin had this tape in his possession?"

  "Yes."

  "Russell, you will now be as forthcoming with me as I have been with you, and tell me what in the name of God is going on."

  "It's simple," I said. "Martin Parish killed a woman on the third of July and tried to frame the Eye. But he changed his mind—I'm not sure why yet—and now he's using your lab to build a case against Grace and me."

  Chester listened in a rapt, if not stunned, silence as I explained to him the drear events that unfolded on the nights of July 3 and 4. I told him everything—my desire to see Amber Mae, my witnessing of Martin leaving the house and wiping the gate, "Amber's" demolished body, and later, the sanitized crime scene, fresh paint and throw rug, the missing body, Martin's near-naked appearance in Amber's bedroom, and his claim that Grace had been there on July 3.

  Chester listened like a man hearing the unspeakable name of Jehovah for the first time. When I was finished, he moaned quietly.

  "What does Parish actually have?" I asked.

  Singer's eyes took on a focused ferocity I had never seen in him. "No. You will not get that information from me. You will take that tape of yours and proceed out of this office now. I will not allow my lab, or this department, to be used by Martin Parish, or by you, or by anyone else. You have made me feel filthy, Russell, as has our captain. And I will tell you right now that I will give my last breath of effort to maintain the high standards this lab has always sought. We are not going to be caught between you men and your primitive obsessions.
We will not be used."

  His chin was trembling.

  I could not blame Chester for his fury or confusion. I only admire his honesty.

  "Russell," he said. "Exercise extreme caution, grand jury. And I will ask you now not to betray m I've confided in you. At some point, I will protect only and the integrity of this department."

  "I understand."

  "And I understand nothing. Please, go."

  The Midnight Eye called Sheriff Dan Winters at exactly noon. Winters, Parish, Wald, Karen, Mary Ing, and I all listened to his voice on the conference phone while John Carfax monitored CNI intercept.

  "Hello, fellas," he began. "Hello, nigger Dan. Midnight Eye. Look for the pampered pets in the town that pampers perverts, too. I have a surprise there for you. Enjoy it in all its richness, and remember that I won't stop until every nigger, greaser, chink, slope, cocksucker, and kike start to pack his bags and get out of my home. I'd print something like that, if I were you. See you in hell."

  The Eye hung up.

  "What in Christ's name does that mean?" ask Parish.

  The canyon, I thought.

  Carfax shook his head, bewildered. "He's bypassing the intercepts. All of them. I don't know how."

  Winters glared at the conference speaker, then at Mary Ing.

  "Well, Mrs. Ing?" asked Wald.

  "It's Billy," she said.

  “He means the Pampered Pet Palace in Laguna, I said. “It’s in the canyon.”

  .

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There are only seven small streets that intersect Laguna Canyon Road, most of which branch into still smaller tributaries that narrow and wind and finally disappear into the rough hills above. The people who live there are an admittedly oddball lot, and I can say this with no sense of denigration because I am one of them. There is a history of lawlessness in the canyon, going back to the days when bandits on horseback preyed on the travelers who used the road, which was then just a wandering dirt path that was the only inland route into the city. Much later, in the 1960s, Timothy Leary's Brotherhood was headquartered on Woodland, moving many thousand of tabs of LSD outward to the continent. (Leary was finally arrested by a Laguna Beach patrolman, which led to the discovery of his operation and a prison term. The patrolman went on to become a very fine chief of police here; Leary, of course, is now a counterculture gadfly popular on the college lecture circuit.)

  In more recent years, the outlaw heritage of the canyon evolved into a quiet

  suspicion of authority, a prickly tone independence and pride at not living "in the city" at all. It was only four years ago that we canyon people allowed the city to annex us into its domain, a move not made without endless dickering for "concessions" and seemingly interminable meetings. The canyon is one of the few places in Laguna where artists can still afford to live, an irony in an upscale town that prides itself, profitably, on being an art colony. The canyon a hodgepodge place, by Orange County standards: a cave house stands beside a Jehovah's Witness temple, trailers hide on flattened pads hidden by eucalyptus and near mansions; artists live next door to tax attorneys, there are families, gay couples, horse people, bird fanciers, bonsai growers, snake collectors---the friendly, the meddlesome, the isolated, and the bizarre. There are also littered along the narrow roads a number ramshackle cottages no larger than rooms, really, that are rentable, cheap, and private.

  All of which is to say that as we climbed the steep, winding road called Red Tail Lane, I saw the houses and people in them as neighbors; I felt a sense of kinship with the dwellers there; I believed that so far as the word community went, we had fine one; and I was already wondering whether the Midnight Eye had chosen this place because of its proximity to my home, whether it was his way of showing how easily he could strike in this, my virtual backyard. No victim is faceless, but anyone of this canyon was of myself, too. I felt responsible. And I also felt in the pit of my stomach the soft, shifting reflection of dread as I pictured Elsie and Leonard Stein, proprietors of the Pampered Pet Palace. They were two very kindly people who ran the place, and they had taken fine care of Isabella's beloved dog one summer when we were away in Mexico. I remembered very specifically, that Mrs. Stein wore a small Star of David on a chain around her neck.

  Much can be said for the mercy of forgetfulness, although I have actually forgotten very little of what I saw inside the Pampered Pet Palace, 1871 Red Tail Lane, Laguna Beach, at 2:35 P.M. on Wednesday, July 7. Forgotten, no, but... well, edited. Organized. Arranged.

  I still own every detail of that scene, but they are far from useful in everyday life, in fact they are counterproductive. Occasionally, one detail—for example, the wall calendar in the lobby, picturing the July dog (a papillon) with a piece of human brain matter stuck to its surface, obliterating the dates 17, 18, 24, and 25—slips from its appointed place and I have to guide it like an escaped mamba back into the box. Sometimes—rarely, so far—they all manage to get loose at once, and I have a situation best described as untenable.

  So bear with me now, if you choose, some of the particulars—trapped but relentlessly active—that I will carry to my deathbed, such as the body of a woman (Elsie Stein, fifty-one) strewn raglike in the lobby corner behind the desk, face gone, head open and emptied, the gold Star of David necklace still attached and dangling in a red-black pond that rippled in the currents of a ceiling fan, all illuminated by the desk lamp, still on; such as the lobby calendar marred with her brains and the comet of fluids that struck the wall around it; such as the first room on the left down the hallway, the door to which said VIPOOCHES ONLY and contained in the very center of its floor an actual arrangement of small canine bodies stacked in opposing threes like firewood, the top row of poodle, miniature dachshund, and Pomeranian having slumped out of alignment and rolled off; such as the sweetish gag of urine and blood in that place; such as the room marked CAT HOUSE, in which all six guests ended their six or fifty-four lives in one corner—two tabbies, Siamese, two calicoes, a black, draped with such feline grace as to appear asleep if not for the heads; such as the outdoor row of kennels, six on one side of a cement walkway and six on the other, over the gates of which hung the larger dogs, like towels, drying on the chain link, shattered, leaking audibly---each drop distinct and resonant—into the narrow drains that ran along the front of each row and deposited by invisible slope their contents through circular screens at the end of the row each drain clogged red and black and stagnant; such as the guest house beyond the kennel run, squatting quaint and yellow beneath the eucalyptuses, potted pansies, and carnations on the steps, this small cottage, door open, housing sprawled and naked in the bedroom Leonard Stein (fifty-six) facedown and still clutching a long-barreled .38, a large, plump man with thin white legs bowed even at rest, the trail of black ants scintilla but orderly from his head to where they vanished cargo-laden through a corner crack in the floorboards; such as Dorsey, mixed-breed toy that had dodged the slaughter and wailed alone from the narrow space between the wall and the refrigerator the kitchen and had to be pried out, trembling, with a broom handle by none other than stoic Martin Parish, who announced in a voice almost a whisper that the sound was going to drive him crazy but that was understood by us others, given the context, as a brief escape from the helplessness of death to the terrified demands of the only thing left living there; such as, an hour later, the largely mute crowd that gathered at the crime scene tape suspended across the road between a crepe myrtle and a cottonwood, these faces bereft of everything but fear somehow fully understanding the scene behind the tape—old gray couple dispirited and solemn, a boy of perhaps ten who sobbed and inquired repeatedly after the condition and whereabouts of "Tiger," his mother with one hand pressed lightly to her face in an extended signal of tragedy while the other rested on the corn-silk pale hair of her boy: such as, almost astonishingly, the group of youngish women and older men arriving en masse, each bearing a walkie-talkie, each wearing the blue T-shirt marked CITIZENS' TASK FORCE and sporting the silk-scre
ened face of Kimmy Wynn, each conspicuously aware of and silently acknowledging how unsuitable he and she had been to the task, how superfluous and minor and absurd they were, what a great and unintended insult was their presence—you could see the profound shame on their faces mixed with the one faintly redeeming conviction they had left: to stick this one out, at least do what they could, even if nothing more than to bear witness to their own gross ineffectuality and confirm the terrible lopsided rout in a battle that their God was supposed to help them with because they believed He would; such as the ashen faces of Winters and Wald; such as Karen Schultz on the steps of the rear porch, her head resting on her arms resting on her knees and her back shaking; such as the chopper fiercely cutting the sky to little effect on the vultures who simply lowered their orbit so their shadows met the ground clearly and you could see the dark shapes of wings gliding across the road and angling without effort up the walls of the old house and finally into the trees, only to circle and pass again; such as the Labrador I nearly tripped over at the far end of the compound where the small yard met the canyon scrub, an animal beaten but still breathing, very rapidly, too damaged to do more, his smooth old dog's teeth red in his panting mouth and drops of blood still shining around the base of a staunch native oak; such as the fact that I sat down near that oak finally because my legs felt aching and old, sat there for a long while because it was the only thing I was absolutely positive I could do, and do well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Later, my legs still shaking and a storm of disgust brewing my heart, I walked into my house, to be greeted by Grace. She was wearing a kitchen apron belonging to Isabella, a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

  "Gad, Russell, your face is gray," she said.

  I don't think I answered her. I poured a large whiskey over ice, took it into my den, and shut the door. I stared out the window. I fanned through the mail Grace had left stack on the desk: the usual assortment of bills and junk fliers—and rather serious-looking envelope from case manager Tina Sharp. I filed it, unopened, with the unpaid medical bills. It was half an hour before I could lay eyes on another human being again. I felt as if my soul had been dragged through a sewer. Final I went back out.