SUMMER of FEAR Page 3

  "Not right to let them sleep with their screen doors open in a heat wave, if there's a serial out there."

  Marty Parish's face went from ruddy tan to sick pink. He looked back down to that place on his floor where Amber had been. He picked up the nail clipper. It clicked, loudly.

  "Shit," he said, raising his left thumb to his mouth. "Thanks for the shells, Russ. Maybe we'll go get some quail in October. I'll have a few days off by then."

  It was Marty's opening farewell, but I didn't move. "Okay. Keep the physical and thanks for the peep show. But at least come clean with me, Marty. Are we talking common sense here, or is Herr Sheriff leaning on you?"

  "Beat it, Russ. You want to know what the cops are doing, you should have stayed with the cops."

  "What's your gut say?"

  "Where will I read about what my gut says?"

  "Nowhere. I've never burned you, Martin—you or anybody else with a badge."

  "You burned Erik Wald."

  "He doesn't have a badge."

  "Neither do you. Look, Community Relations is calling the Ellison and Fernandez shots, but I'll tell you this much. Our evidence isn't matching up—that's the truth. We're looking at two different things, at least two different guys, not the same one. To be honest, though, whoever conked them didn't take anything."

  The idea formed that Marty was playing with me, fueling my tank with enough bad information to get me down the wrong road, or at least out of his office. It struck me as odd that the CS photos he'd just meted out to me contained no establishing shots, no wide-angles, no walls. Just bodies. Why?

  "Give me one thing on him, Marty."

  "Them, Russ."

  "Them."

  "You've got what I've got."

  "This happens again, how are you going to stomach yourself?"

  "See you later, Russ. I read about any of this and it's all she wrote for you here. I don't have to tell you that."

  "Don't worry."

  I stood to go. Marty was examining the drop of blood on his cut thumb.

  "Have you seen Amber lately?" I asked.

  Parish shook his head without looking up at me. The phone rang. He reached out, but before he touched it, he wiped his brow with the crook of his elbow, moving his arm across his forehead, blotting up the sweat.

  I lingered to see whether the call was Amber's 187.

  "Hi, honey," Marty said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I called my editor at the Journal from the car phone. Car phones are supposed to be for people who think they're more important than they really are, but they're also for people who don't want to be seen making calls they shouldn't be. Like one to Amber at 12:42 last night. Like this one.

  My editor's name was Carla Dance. She is a short, heavy-set woman, fiercely intelligent and unceasingly levelheaded. Over the last ten years, she had a way of dangling assignments just when I needed the money. I like her very much, and I think she likes me. Her father has cancer, and Carla takes care of him, except when she's at work. When Isabella was diagnosed nineteen months ago, Carla and I spent some anguished afternoons together in a bar up by the Journal offices. Something about her reasoned outlook helped me. Carla already knew then what I have come to know: When someone you love has a bad cancer, the line between hope and despair is one that you crisscross a thousand times a day. It is a true crazy-maker. I also learned that we are a closed society—we who love and care for someone with cancer. To the outside world, we proffer only optimism. But among ourselves, we can admit without feeling weak or needy or unduly bleak that the one we love may very well not. be with us for nearly as long as we'd like. We are a society of helpless helpers. But there is something in our bond of foxhole faith, and something of the cleansing that I used to feel, long ago, in church.

  "I may have something for you," I said.

  "Sunday magazine would pay best, if it's not too grisly.”

  "It's too grisly. I'd call this hard news. Real hard."

  "Breaking?"

  "Yes."

  "The Ellisons?"

  I didn't mention that Carla Dance is also prescient.

  "Yes again."

  "What's the angle?"

  "That he'll do it again."

  "We'd have to be real careful, Russ. The racial overtones are touchy."

  "Well, let the story slip and see how touchy it can get.

  "I've worried about that, too."

  "I need something first—space for another Dina story, wouldn't have to be front of the section."

  "Dina again?"

  "The big game starts next week."

  Dina was the DNA typing apparatus that the county crime lab bought the year before. It cost $800,000, it hadn't produce a shred of admissible evidence yet, and, worse, defense attorneys were just then getting the hang of demonstrating what "genetic fingerprinting" had been from the very start—complex, unproven, and without agreed-upon standards. There had been two reversals from higher California courts in the last six month and one acquittal by a jury that believed the defense had put genetic typing well within the shadow of doubt. Dina, needless to say, was supposed to become the county's biggest crime-busting star. But her luster was fading before she had even gotten to trial, and nobody at the crime lab, or the Sheriff's, or the DA's office could seem to talk fast enough to quell the increasingly vocal critics. The first trial in which she would be used—the Ballard rape case—was set to open next week. The defendant was on trial, but so was Dina. A pro-Dina story by Russell Monroe in the Journal could help set a more comfortable atmosphere for her tryout. For me, it was a bargaining chip.

  "Can the police link the Ellisons and the first couple— what's their name, Fernandez? We ran the story today that says they can't."

  "They can, but they don't want to."

  "We'd like it first, if and when they do. I'll make space for

  Dina."

  "Thanks."

  She told me to take care of myself, then hung up. I knew she wouldn't ask about Isabella, the same way I didn't ask about her father: The subject of cancer was not something you tagged onto the end of a business call, even one about murder. There were other times for that.

  Next I called Martin Parish's boss—Sheriff Dan Winters— and pitched him my deal: a good solid Dina piece in trade for pole position on... I almost said the Midnight Eye.

  I explained.

  He acted as if I was a fool, which I knew he would, pretended to dismiss my offer, which I also knew he would. But the seed was planted, and that was all that mattered. That, and perhaps the fact that I'd generously volunteered my minor celebrity (and less-than-minor money) to Daniel Winters's reelection campaign two years ago. Now Dan was knee-deep in bad ink: jail overcrowding, lawsuits, rising crime stats, shrinking budget. My offer of good ink would get under politician's skin and it wouldn't cost him much. He said he’d think about it.

  I kept the police scanner in my car turned up for the 187 at Amber's. I've got a scanner in every room of my house---a questionable luxury I paid for with the movie money from Journey Up River. In my early years as a successful news writer, I left the scanners on every minute that I wasn't asleep, and often when I was. Isabella put an end to this shortly after we were married. It wasn't hard for her to do—any man on earth would rather listen to Isabella's dusky smooth voice than a dispatcher droning code numbers.

  But the 187 didn't come. It was 5:30 and I was starting to wonder.

  So I called Amber's agent in Los Angeles and said I was Erik Wald. Erik Wald, like myself, was a former "companion' to Amber. I had introduced him to her, just as Marty had introduced her to me. That was six years ago, long after Amber and I were over, and I was escorting her socially, occasionally, without romantic interest on her part. It was my own somewhat pathetic way of keeping the possibilities open, but I brought what dignity I could to the job. Shortly thereafter, Amber and Erik were item. I was briefly jealous, but their affair was short, and I had since fallen deeply in love with Isabella. I tracked the dashing c
ouple in the society column of the Los Angeles Times. From my occasional social and professional contact with Erik, I know that Amber had managed to keep him immersed in the quagmire of her financial affairs as surely as she had managed keep me immersed in the swamp of my own desire. It seemed to me that Wald had gotten the better terms.

  Erik Wald had never been one of my favorite people, though I was a distinct minority in this matter. As do most people in semipublic life, Erik groomed an outward persona that, like the copper casing around the softer lead of a bullet, protected his passage through the perils of media coverage, county politics, and—in Erik's somewhat unique case—the often mercurial world of academia.

  He was a professor of criminology at the local state university. He had been tenured twelve years ago, at the age of thirty-one, shortly after applying the principles of his dissertation, "Aspiring to Evil: Transference Identification in the Violent Felon," to help successfully discover the identity of a rapist who had claimed eight victims in the north part of our county in six short months. The gist of Wald's paper was that because certain paranoid types are subject to delusions of grandeur (a fact), these persecuted "geniuses" could act out scenarios in which they willfully play a role totally opposed to the higher behaviors approved by society. In effect, Wald argued, they were providing their own "evil" at which to gaze in their daily lives, while at the same time satisfying their inner needs for superiority/persecution.

  What it all boiled down to, he said, was a well-read, middle-class suspect of sterling reputation (possibly a churchgoer) who had aspired to a higher station in life than he had achieved, likely because of some profound unsuitably in his character, or perhaps even physiognomy. All eight of the women had been elderly, some enfeebled. While the police and sheriff combined forces to round up the usual suspects, Wald fed his thesis to an ambitious black Sheriff's Department lieutenant named Daniel Winters, who linked two of the victims to a Meals-on-Wheels service provided by a church located in the north county. An investigation of the volunteer drivers revealed nothing, but Wald pressed Winters deeper into the congregation, to find that one of the actual Meals-on-Wheels cooks fit the profile rather neatly. He was thirty-four years old, a bachelor with a law degree from a Catholic (!) university who had failed the California bar three times and seemingly retreated to a quiet of Christian service and paralegal work. He lived with his grandmother, who, it turned out, was a friend of three of the other victims. Winters's closing net ended in a stakeout and tail done after hours and without pay, which resulted in observing suspect—one Cary Clough—driving early one morning to a quiet suburban street, where he sat in his car until daybreak. The same afternoon, Winters established that eighty-two-year-Madeline Stewart lived alone in the house outside which Clough had parked. Madeline was a recent sign-up for the Meals-on-Wheels program. The following night, Winters waited for Clough in an unmarked station wagon, and when Clough approached the house in the dark morning hours, Winters shook him do for suspicious behavior. Winters's yield was a red ski cap and a pair of latex gloves. He made the collar, took Clough downtown, and after some exemplary work by the crime lab, matched not only fibers from the cap to those found on four of the victims but Clough's teeth prints to those left behind in a decorative wooden apple that Clough had mistakenly tried to eat after raping his third victim!

  This story, such a resonant marriage of the biblical a scientific, made great headlines, television fodder, even a "60 Minutes" segment. Wald's entry into the public eye was swift and certain. The state university tenured him a year later. Dan Winters was bumped up to the rank of captain, the youngest one in county history, and the first black. Clough got 150 years.

  More interestingly, Wald was made head of the Sheriff’s Reserve Units, a position for which he would neither be paid nor deputized. He was given an office on the same floor as the newly sainted Dan Winters, and the two men crusaded to make the Reserve Units into potent allies of the professional deputies. (The public ate up this idea, too: more law enforcement for the same amount of money.) All of this reflected well on Jordan Clemens, a tough politician whose years as elected sheriff would obviously not last forever.

  I watched these events from the uncomfortable position of junior investigator, uncomfortable because I could hardly wait to abandon the department ship in order to write and because my heart was still tender with the tramplings it had received from parting with Amber Mae Wilson. Moreover, I had met Wald on his late-day visits to the office of Dan Winters and had found him—against the sum of all my efforts—both intimidating and likable.

  Physically, he was impressive, one of those tall and slender men whose muscles knotted effortlessly with the most casual movements. He was handsome and knew it, but he played off it in an apparently unselfconscious way that the television cameras loved. His face was wide and boyish, with laugh wrinkles parenthesizing a mouth that was quick to smile. His hair was a curly golden mop that he managed to keep rather longish but still trimmed, a perfect compromise between academic eccentricity and Sheriff's Department conservatism. He was rumored to hold a black belt in a particularly difficult Chinese-Philippine martial art and to be a collector of antique weapons. Most impressive of all was his mind, however, which was possessed of a nonchalant sharpness that left most people—myself included—eternally off balance. He could be outrageously charming and mortally offensive, all in the same sentence. One more quality about Wald struck me in those early years— namely, his willingness to offer confidences and to receive them in return. I had never met a man in whom the illusion of trustworthiness had been so deeply and convincingly cultivated. For that specific reason, I did not choose to trust him. So, when Amber Mae began asking me about this "handsome crime-buster type," I was unsurprised, if somewhat angered. I was still not fully adjusted to the idea of being a used person.

  What sat most disagreeably upon my opinion of Erik Wald, though, was the simple fact that he had applied to the Sheriff’s Academy three times and been rejected each. This was common knowledge in the department and had even been written after in the first feature articles regarding Wald's unconventional help in identifying Cary Clough. Wald suffered from mitral-valve prolapse, a leaking heart valve brought on by fever in his infancy. I was pleased that Wald couldn't make the physical cut, though you certainly wouldn't have known it by looking at him. His powers of compensation were magnificent. More important, however, I was solidly resentful of the fact that he had risen to such prominence with the Sheriff's without ever making grade to join it. I saw him as some kind of immune diplomat, running stylish circles around myself and the other rank-and-file deputies. And I will confess, too, that the wit and clarity his dissertation language infuriated me. I envied him. I found ludicrous his intimations of securing, someday, a paid position as undersheriff to Dan Winters. His ego seemed to have no limit. I derived an arid comfort from realizing that his insight into character of Cary Clough came at least in part from kindred rumblings in his own thrice-rejected soul.

  Four years later, when I was working on Journey Up River, Wald offered me some astonishing insight into the mind of the killer, who turned out to be a forty-one-year-old part-time butcher (really) named Art Crump. Crump was not yet a suspect at the time of my interviews with Erik. Upon Crump's arrest, most of the "insight" turned out to be misleading, useless, or wildly ass-backward. I used it in the book anyway, much to the embarrassment of Erik. Crump and I had a laugh at this up in Vacaville.

  But I knew why Amber had been drawn to Erik Wald: Amber was always drawn to men who could inflict harm. And never since my first meeting of Wald did I doubt that his fury, if unleashed, might prove formidable.

  So I called Amber's agent and said I was Erik Wald and asked whether he could tell me if Amber was on a shoot today.

  He chuckled in the way that only busy, superior people can do.

  "Just one moment," he said.

  The next voice that come on was one of the last I expected.

  "This is Erik Wald. Who the
hell are you?"

  I told him. Erik laughed, too. It was a low, even baritone that spoke of advantage. I let him laugh some more. I could hear Amber's agent—Reuben Saltz—in the background, joining in. When the hilarity had waned, I asked him whether Amber was on a shoot or not.

  "Why?"

  "It's about Grace."

  I'm a good liar. Grace is Amber's daughter.

  "Why not talk to Grace about Grace? She's a big girl now."

  "I know that, Erik. Finding her is the hard part. I was hoping Amber could—

  "Finding Amber isn't any easier. She was supposed to work today, a shampoo deal, but she never showed. Nobody knows where she is. With five grand an hour at stake, Reuben here is a quivering mass of anxiety and thwarted greed."

  I tried to sound casual. "Maybe she stayed home sick."

  "Reuben has called every hour since ten. I imagine you have, too, if you really needed her. Reuben is enterprising, though. He just got back from the Wilson manse in Laguna— nobody home."

  The demons starting stirring in my blood again. "Maybe she was sleeping one off."

  "Nobody home is what I said, Russ. Reuben, the concerned mentor, has a key."

  It was one of those moments when the gravity inside your chest seems to multiply. My heart felt as if it were down next to the seat belt. I turned the air conditioner on high and aimed the stream into my eyes. What could possibly have happened? Didn't Reuben go upstairs?

  "Well," I said, trying to steady the breath in my throat. "You know Amber."

  "We know Amber," said Wald. "If I find her first, I'll tell her you were looking for her. Heh, heh."

  "Heh, heh. I'll do the same."

  Trying to sound satisfied, I changed the topic. "What’s your call on the Ellisons and that Mexican couple?"