Never Fear (28 page)

I looked at Cross for a moment. “What haven't you told us?”

Cross took a breath. “I think you would be better off just walking away, Lieutenant. There's nothing you can do.”

“Why?”

“Hazzard killed Victoria Fisher, then pinned it on your father and made sure he disappeared so no arrest would ever be made. No arrest, no questions, it all ends.”

“He claimed the body of a transient on the railroad tracks was my father?”

Cross nodded. “The investigation ended, nothing is provable. A perfect crime.”

“Except it isn't perfect,” I said.

“Why?”

“Thomas Manning didn't kill Victoria Fisher.”

“Without proof it's meaningless.” He looked at me for a long moment. “What do you know?”

“Thomas Manning couldn't have killed Victoria Fisher because at the time of her death he was inside his apartment raping a young actress.”

Cross stared at me in shock, then sank back into the seat.

“Two places at once can't be done.”

“That's right.”

“You're sure?”

“I've talked to her.”

Cross stiffened and sat forward. “That leaves only one possible scenario for what happened to your brother.”

I nodded. “Hazzard.”

“Can you prove any of this?” Cross asked.

I shook my head. “Not without the fax my brother sent me the night he was killed.”

Cross sat back. “What are you doing here at Caltech? ”

“We have an image of the car my brother's killer was driving the night he died.”

“Plates?”

I shook my head. “Just a make and the killer's hand holding an unlit cigarette.”

Cross looked at me for a moment then stared out into the darkness of the garage.

“That's not enough,” he said.

“It's almost enough.”

Cross began to shake his head.

“Almost can't do nothing but get you killed,” he whispered. “You think LAPD is just going to walk in and let you gut them like this?”

He took a deep breath. “You never talked to me, we never met, and I've never heard any of the things you just said. If asked under oath, I'll put my hand on the Bible and swear to it.”

He slid behind the wheel and sped the length of the garage and disappeared down the ramp.

A moment later the sound of squealing tires came roaring around the corner behind us. We turned, reaching at the same time for our weapons as an SUV drove past us, the front seat full of college students. My hand relaxed around the handle of the Glock, and I took a breath.

“You want to try pushing Hazzard?” Harrison said.

I shook my head. “Not until we have somewhere to push him.”

I drove back down the ramp, stopping the car as we emerged onto the street. There was no sign of Cross. Across the commons, clusters of students walked to and from class.

“What are you thinking?” Harrison asked.

“Science,” I said, as two clusters of students walking in the same direction became one group, then split into three groups, each heading in a different direction.

“How do you find structure in events that appear unrelated?” I said.

I looked at Harrison, who glanced over at the groups of students I had been watching.

“In bomb disposal you work backwards from a presumed point of detonation. Make connections that must be present for the device to work even if they aren't visible.”

“If the fax was the page from the report, let's say that's the point of detonation. Where do you go from there?”

“You work back from the last point of contact, or in this case anyone who's seen it.” Harrison played it out in his head for a moment. “Hazzard, your brother, your father if they talked to him, Gavin, possibly Detective Williams, and Danny.”

“I wouldn't count on Hazzard coming forward.”

“Which leaves Danny or your father.”

I let the idea settle for a moment, or tried to.

“Which one?” I said. “The hapless bicycle salesman, the love-struck Indian, or the Cyclops victim?”

Harrison looked at me, doing his best imitation of understanding.

“There're some things I haven't told you about my father and me.”

“I imagine those are private,” Harrison said.

“If my father had wanted to come to me with this, or was capable of coming to me with this, he would have by now.”

“You're still a cop,” Harrison said. “He's spent the last eighteen years hiding from them.”

“And the eighteen before that hiding from me,” I said.

Harrison turned and watched an intense young student walk by, lost in conversation with himself.

“Which leaves Danny,” Harrison said.

“Something's happening, probably right now, and we're missing it.”

“We could bring Hazzard in, hold him for as long as we can.”

I shook my head.

“It wasn't Danny,” I said.

“You lost me,” Harrison said.

“Danny may have seen the file, but he wasn't the one who requested it at the DA's office.”

“Why?”

“You have to be of age to receive records like that. He wasn't lying, it wasn't him.”

“He was a juvenile.”

I nodded.

“His grandmother requested the file,” Harrison said.

38

Danny's grandmother was waiting for us when we pulled into the driveway. I had called ahead but didn't give her any details except that we had talked to Danny in the hospital.

She led us back into the house and we sat down at the kitchen table as before.

“He won't see me,” she said. “I've tried several times, but . . .”

“He will when he's stabilized,” I said.

She took a deep breath and shook her head.

“I'm sorry about what he did to your house, if that's what your visit is about. I would be more than willing to pay for any damages—”

“That's not why I'm here.”

“I don't understand why he did that to you.”

“The only suspect in your daughter's murder ever arrested was my father, Mrs. Fisher. That's why Danny did what he did.”

Fisher stared at me for a moment in silence. “Your father?”

“Yes.”

She stood up and walked over to the window and looked out.

“Why did you come here?”

“I'm here because the private investigator who was murdered was my brother.”

She turned and looked at me.

“We believe he found evidence that points to the real killer of your daughter.”

“And you're going to tell me it wasn't your father.”

“That's what we think it suggests.”

She shook her head. “Why didn't you tell me this before?”

“Before, I thought it was possible that my father was guilty, but I wasn't sure.”

“I don't want anything to do with this. How dare you come to my house and use a disturbed boy to prove you're not the daughter of a killer. I want you out of my house.”

She started walking toward the door.

“You may already have something to do with it,” I said.

She stopped at the edge of the dining room and looked back.

“Who killed my daughter?”

I glanced over at Harrison.

“We think your daughter was murdered because she discovered something at the DA's office involving a police investigation,” Harrison said.

Mrs. Fisher went over the meaning of the words in her head. “You're telling me a policeman killed Victoria? ”

Harrison nodded. “It appears to be the most likely possibility.”

“Can you prove this?”

“A year and a half ago you requested your daughter's personnel file from the DA's office,” I said.

She gave a measured nod. “Danny asked for it. I didn't want to fuel his paranoia, but I thought there might be something in there to help him know his mother, how wonderful she was.”

“Did you look at it?” I asked.

“I tried . . . I looked at her ID picture . . . I couldn't look at the rest.”

“Did you copy everything in the file?”

She stepped back over to the kitchen table and sat down. “Yes. Danny was very specific about that. He wanted everything.”

“Do you know where it is?”

She nodded. “Danny took it into his apartment for a day or two, then gave it back to me. I haven't looked at it again. It's in the office in the other room.”

“We'd like to see it.”

She nodded and started to get up but stopped. “I don't understand. What does a personnel file have to do with my daughter's death?”

“She may have hidden what she discovered in that file until she could figure out what to do with it.”

Mrs. Fisher leaned back in her chair and took a breath. “And it's been there this whole time.”

I nodded. “Was there. Her file is missing. I'm assuming it's been destroyed. Your copy is all that's left.”

“With whatever evidence was in it?”

“Yes.”

Fisher sat in silence for a moment as if trying to digest a new chapter in a book. When she appeared to have examined it enough, she turned and looked at me with the fierce eyes of a mother still protecting her daughter.

“What did your father have to do with this? Why was he arrested?”

“My father abused my mother and had a history of assaulting pretty young women like your daughter. I haven't seen my father in a very long time.”

I didn't add any details about the attacks, though from the look in Fisher's eyes I doubted any of it would have been a surprise.

“The detective said he was dead, if I remember.”

I shook my head. “He's alive.”

“I'll go get the file,” Fisher said.

She walked out of the room and returned a few moments later with a thin folder and set it on the table. I opened it and began to go through the contents—a performance evaluation, a copy of her employee ID, her employment application, and a tax document.

“It's not here.”

Harrison quickly went through it also, but I hadn't missed anything.

“It would make sense that Danny would have removed it,” Harrison said.

“Is there anywhere in the house or his apartment where Danny may have hidden something—a special place he might have talked about?” I asked.

Mrs. Fisher looked out toward the darkness of the garage.

“Danny didn't share his secrets, at least not with me. I wouldn't know where to begin to search, but you can try if you like.” She turned and looked at me. “I suspect you may have more experience with keeping secrets than I do, Lieutenant.”

We walked out to the garage and opened the door to Danny's apartment. The walls had been stripped of the pieces of newspaper and handwritten notes he had taped everywhere. Every piece of furniture, every possible hiding place had been gone through by crime-scene techs. The room had the feel of a tree that had been stripped of its leaves and branches by a windstorm. All that was left that identified it as a place where someone once lived was Danny's intricate map covering the back wall.

“I wish you could have taken that away also,” Fisher said.

She stared at it for a moment, then turned and walked outside. Harrison and I began to go over the room again, but it quickly became clear that the few possible hiding places left held nothing.

“We may as well be looking for a needle in a pile of needles,” Harrison said.

“He tried to tell us when we were at the hospital what we are missing,” I said.

I stepped back to the door and looked at Danny's map.

“ ‘They all fell to the ground, but one of them,' ” Harrison said, repeating Danny's words.

He stared at the map for a moment. “If there's a connection pointing to something, it's beyond me.”

I reached for the light switch but stopped.

“Or we just weren't listening,” I said.

“ ‘They all fell to the ground,' ” Harrison said, shaking his head. “I don't see it. It just doesn't point us anywhere.”

“Maybe we're missing it because it doesn't sound like something that can help us. What else did he say?”

Harrison replayed the conversation at the hospital in his mind.

“He told us it was ‘here, that's where it is,' as he pointed to his head,” Harrison said. “And inside his head is the one place we can't go.”

I glanced at the spiraling orbits and swirling lines of words on the map, and then Danny's words seemed to fall into place.

“Maybe we don't have to,” I said.

“Danny's told me twice where it is, I just didn't understand.”

I looked at Harrison.

“I thought it was just a picture of madness. But that wasn't it. It was a message, it has to be, those words are too specific.”

“What words?”

“The ones he painted on the ceiling of my bedroom. ‘
This is what it's like in my head
.' He left it at my house. That's why he went there.”

39

Electricity had been restored to most of the neighborhood, though that mattered little to my own block, where there were no longer any homes but my own. The glow of flames was visible in the distance in several directions. The scent of burned citrus still drifted on the wind from the scorched lemon tree on the next lot. I slipped the key into the lock and pushed the front door open.