Never Fear (19 page)

“Are you going to hurt my daughter, Danny?” I asked.

He opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out.

“No, he's not,” Lacy said softly. She looked at him for a moment. “He wants to tell us something, that's why he's here, isn't it? He has a secret.”

Danny's eyes filled with tears and he whispered something barely audible, then said it a little louder, and then again louder still.

“Stop . . . stop it . . . stop it . . . make it stop.”

I lowered the gun to my side and he continued to repeat the words over and over.

“I'll make it stop, Danny,” I said.

Lacy reached out and took his hand and he fell silent.

“Promise,” Danny whispered.

“I promise,” I said.

He looked at Lacy's hand holding his. Then he sank to his knees, wrapping his arms around his chest, and began to shiver as he rocked slowly back and forth.

“I'll get him a blanket,” Lacy said, rushing into the house.

I holstered my gun, stepped over and knelt in front of him. His eyes were the color of a light blue gem-stone; his hair was as blond as I remembered his mother's being in the photographs of her. I could see her features in the lines of his face. Victoria would have only been a few years older than her son when she was killed.

“I'm going to make it stop, Danny,” I said.

He didn't appear to hear my words, then he began to faintly hum a song over and over. I didn't recognize it at first, but as he repeated it I realized what it was—a children's song. A game born out of the plague of the Middle Ages.

“It will be all right,” I said.

He began shaking his head back and forth, the song getting louder each time. “
Ashes ashes, they all fall down
.”

“Who falls down? Who falls?” I said gently.

He stopped shaking his head. “Everyone.”

I reached out and placed my hand on his knee. “Why do they fall?”

Danny's eyes found mine for just an instant.

“He's alive,” he whispered.

“Who's alive?” I said.

His eyes held mine for a moment longer and then were gone, staring at a point in the darkness.

24

Danny's grandmother met us at the hospital where Danny was admitted for observation. He had said nothing as we drove him there. Was he talking about my father or the River Killer when he said, “He's alive”? I called Harrison and told him what had happened and that I would stay with Lacy for the rest of the night in her dorm.

On the drive back to UCLA I told Lacy as much as I knew of my half brother's life. But the details were those a cop would know, not a sister—age, occupation, and time of death on the concrete banks of what Angelenos call a river.

The only detail I understood as a sister was that we shared a father who had vanished from both of our lives, and that something was left incomplete in each of us. In the last few hours, maybe only in the last moments, of John's life he may have unraveled that mystery. That he had thought of me when he did would be as close as I would ever get to knowing him.

I left out the details of the investigation that pointed to the possibility that her grandfather was a killer. That he was a troubled man was as much as I was willing to say about him. I think she may have guessed much of it anyway.

For Lacy, an only child, to suddenly find herself connected to another person by blood was like turning a page in a book only to discover the next page was blank. The promise of something more had been filled and then lost all at once. And the questions she was left with were no substitute for the possibilities that had been so close.

Lacy's roommate stayed with a friend and I spent the night in the small dorm room, lying just a few feet from my daughter. For a brief moment it felt like she was a small child again, and the events of the world outside were unable to touch us. But the feeling didn't last— couldn't. Just before drifting off, Lacy said something that had dogged me since I first saw my brother's face in the refrigerated vault at the coroner's.

“I wonder how much he was like you,” she said softly.

“He looked like your grandfather,” I said, knowing that wasn't really what she was asking.

“He was an investigator. You're a cop. Your lives have been lived as if they were leading directly to this,” Lacy said.

I stared into the darkness and knew she was right, or partly right. But what my daughter didn't understand, and what I knew, was that the moment this was really leading to hadn't yet happened.

What sleep I had reminded me of the nights spent on boats with the roll of the ocean sweeping me in and out of dreams and leaving me more exhausted than before I had slept. Shortly before six I slipped out of bed and kissed Lacy on the side of the head before leaving.

It was already warm when I stepped outside. The promised Santa Ana hadn't begun to blow this close to the coast, but I knew looking back toward the mountains through the crystal clear sky that a morning this perfect, like most things in southern California, was an illusion and wouldn't last.

As I walked to the car I scanned my surroundings to make sure no one had followed Lacy and me to campus. A few students walked the paths. A campus security officer patrolled in his three-wheel scooter, but there was nothing to raise any alarms.

The drive back to Pasadena took about forty-five minutes, the traffic having not risen to the level of gridlock that it would reach in another hour. I picked up a bagel and coffee at Starbucks just off Colorado, then drove past the plaza to headquarters.

Patrol shifts were changing as I pulled into the lot. The first-year officers and veterans on the force who liked the action of nights were heading home. Those with families and a sense of their own mortality were just beginning their day.

I climbed the steps to the second-floor squad room, heading for my office, but stopped when I passed the conference room. Harrison was sitting alone inside, staring at the wall where we had assembled Danny's map of the universe. I stepped inside but he didn't turn, his eyes focused straight ahead at the map.

“How long have you been here?”

Startled, he turned and looked at me. He looked as if he hadn't slept. “Most of the night.”

I was surprised by the flush I suddenly felt. My heart seemed to slip out of place in my chest for a beat or two. I closed the door behind me and walked over to him as he slowly rose from his chair. Our arms were around each other before I realized it and I closed my eyes and held him.

“I'm sorry,” Harrison said.

“It's just a house,” I said.

Harrison shook his head. “If they were just walls and floor and roof, it would be easy.”

His eyes held mine. The blond surfer who had found sanctuary from a terrible crime by dismantling bombs was gone. For the first time he appeared as if he belonged in Homicide. I recognized something in his eyes that I had seen for years in my own in the mirror. If by holding on to the memory of a murdered wife he had kept alive a sense of hope, then trading that in for the fatalism of Homicide was no bargain.

“I should have gotten into bed with you,” I said.

He reached out and took hold of my hand. “I should have taken you. . . . Timing, as you learn on the bomb squad, is everything.”

Harrison turned and looked at Danny's map.

“You've found something?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

He walked over to the wall where the photographs of the map had been reassembled into the mosaic of the entire thing.

“If, as Danny said to you last night, ‘he's alive,' it's only logical that he would have put that in here,” he said.

I stared at the map for a moment.

“‘If ' is a big word when you apply it to the young man I saw last night.”

“I remembered there were numbers in various places on the different rings.”

I stepped up next to him and he pointed them out. There was no order, no apparent mathematical logic as the orbits of Danny's world spun out from the center in wider and wider loops. Harrison had discovered that numbers were drawn in several of the planetlike objects that were connected to the pinwheel arms of the galaxy that spun out from the center. There was a five, an eight, a six, and a three.

“They could mean anything; they could be symbols for something that's only in his head,” I said.

“They could also be something very specific, something right in front of us,” Harrison said.

I stared at the map for a moment and repeated the number to myself silently several times.

“Fifty-eight, sixty-three,” I said.

“What does that sound like to you?” Harrison said.

“It sounds like an address.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Without a street name, it's meaningless,” I said. “It could also be eighty-five, thirty-six. How do you know the order of the numbers?”

“I didn't, so I tried them in every possible configuration. And then I began matching the different versions to every name or word I found on the map. Some were easy to eliminate, like your name, Manning, Hazzard. By three A.M. I narrowed it down to only the words that didn't seem to have any other place in this universe he drew.”

I noticed a
Thomas Guide
sitting open on the table.

“You found it.”

He nodded. “It's impossible.”

He motioned toward the
Thomas Guide
. “Look at the open page.”

I walked over and looked at the map it was open to.

“It's West Hollywood,” Harrison said.

“A lot of actors live in West Hollywood,” I said.

Harrison nodded.

“What am I looking for?”

“
D
seven.”

I found the coordinates on the map and began to run my finger over the streets until I found what he wanted me to see. I stared at it for a moment in disbelief, then looked back at the map.

“When I first saw it I thought he was making a reference to Homer and the journey he was taking, but I was wrong. It's a place,” Harrison said.

“Fifty-eight sixty-three . . . Iliad.”

25

Hollywood was just waking up as we pulled onto Sunset in Silver Lake and started west. The human wreckage from the night before was still being cleaned up. In a doorway a homeless man lay under a fire department's yellow sheet, his shoeless blackened feet twisted on the cement. Near the 101 a group of four runaways emerged from their sleeping place under the bridge in search of loose change and a meal scrounged from Dumpsters.

In another time Mary Pickford had built a studio on these same streets. Where D. W. Griffith had shot his masterpiece
Birth of a Nation
, four prostitutes sat handcuffed on the curb. One of them, who appeared to be little more than sixteen, had a black eye and a bloody knee under torn red stockings.

The address we had found on Danny's map was two blocks below Sunset on the edge of Beverly Hills. West Hollywood was an incorporated city a mile and a quarter square. The sheriff's department had jurisdiction, and not so lovingly referred to it as Boys Town. The annual Halloween parade could make New Orleans blush with envy.

I pulled off Sunset, dropped down the steep hill for two blocks, and made a left. In the middle of the block I pulled to a stop across the street from the address.

“The Iliad Apartments,” Harrison said.

The name was written in elaborate silver script above the glass doors of the entrance. Bird-of-paradise plants that were twenty feet high framed the entry. There looked to be four floors. Through the glass doors I could see into the courtyard, where I assumed there was a pool. The building appeared to have been built in the late seventies.

“I suppose they thought the name would appeal to a gay clientele,” Harrison said.

I nodded. “I don't imagine that's part of Danny's conspiracy theory.”

A man walking a small black dog passed us, his sideways glance in our direction clearly making us as cops—a habit of residents born of less than friendly relations over the years with the sheriff's department.

“Victoria Fisher lived in the Valley, worked downtown, and died next to the river. Maybe this is something else, maybe it's nothing at all,” Harrison said.

“Then why is it on the map?”

I looked over the facade of the building, trying to find some physical connection to the world Danny had drawn on his wall, and the one we had been chasing, but it eluded me.

“Are we looking at something from the past or the present? Is there even a difference? Are we going to find my father inside?”

“Danny said ‘he's alive,' but he didn't say who
he
was.”

I nodded. “But he said it at my house, after painting a plea for help all over my walls. Why would he come to me if it wasn't about my father?”

“Maybe the doctors will be able to get an answer from him at the hospital.”

I shook my head. “As of this morning when I called his grandmother, Danny hadn't said a word. He's been talking to shrinks and taking different med protocols since he was fifteen. Why would he start talking to them now? I don't imagine he sees doctors as allies.”

I stared at the building for a moment.

“I want to know everything we can about this building—ownership, management company, tenant records for the time of Victoria's death,” I said.

We got out of the Volvo and walked across the street and entered the lobby. The elevators were to the right through a set of glass doors that we had to be buzzed through. Mailboxes and the intercom to the apartments were on the left. Mounted on the wall of the inner lobby next to the elevators was a plaster replica of a Greek torso. The faint scent of chlorine from the pool in the center courtyard hung in the air.