SUMMER of FEAR (3 page)

In the kitchen, I checked my knees
for blood. I saw none but sprayed them with a stain lifter, anyway. Stripping
down upstairs, I threw everything washable into the hamper.

I showered forever—hot at first, then
cold.

Isabella whimpered and placed her arm
across my chest when I got in beside her. Her face was next to mine and I could
smell the breath of sleep from her.

"Your heart is pounding,"
she whispered.

"It's because of you." She
"hmmed." I knew what it meant: a small smile, tender and brief,
already drifting back toward the sleep from which it had come.

"It's late, R-R-Russ."

"I only had three."

"Hmm..."

"I love you, Isabella."

"I love you, too."

"I really, truly love you."

"Hmm. You're my h-h-hero."

The pounding in
my chest got louder and faster. I remember it getting so big, it finally just
picked me up and carried me, with the sound of boots descending steps, down
into the detailed silence of dreams.

I spent the next
morning at the Laguna police station, waiting for the call. I was going to get
them to take me along. Although Amber's home stood on unincorporated land, the
Laguna force was contracted to respond to emergencies and felony calls. So I
flattered the chief about a book he wanted to write, but I had to cut off the
conversation and head for the bathroom, where I threw up, camouflaging it by
flushing the toilet. I had never vomited in revulsion in my entire life, before
that day.

My need to talk about what I'd seen—to confess—was an actual ache,
located near the center of my chest, just an inch right of my heart. I began to
understand what a guilty suspect feels under interrogation. Oh, to
know.
I spoke frankly, with grave sincerity, to the detectives—the subject was the
drought in California, I believe. I sneaked off to the rest room and threw up
again. I yakked with one of the narcs, the watch commander, the dispatcher, a
couple of meter maids. They all looked at me with suspicion.

But
the call never came. No reported homicide at 1316 Ridgecrest. It was a slow
morning, considering it was the Fourth. It made sense, I thought; someone might
not find Amber for days.

Besides, the Laguna cop house wasn't where I really wanted to be anyway.
Where I wanted to be was in Marty Parish's face—right, straight in it, looking
directly at him when he got the news. Finally, by noon, I couldn't stay away
from him any longer and I drove up to the county buildings in Santa Ana, where
the Sheriff's Department is headquartered.

He was at his desk, clipping his fingernails, when I walked in. I knew
he'd work the Fourth of July. Marty always had a thing about holiday pay: He
could get almost two days' pay for one day of work, then take off some time
during the season and go hunting on the county's nickel.

I put my briefcase on his desk and took out three boxes of new .20-gauge
shot shells. My hands felt flighty and cold. "Bought these by accident,"
I said, which was true. "Thought they were twelves. They're yours for the
Browning."

He nodded, set down the fingernail clipper, then stood and shook my hand.
His eyes were blue, shot with blood. The left lid hung just slightly lower than
the right, giving Martin his usual expression of sleepy calculation. His skin,
as always, had the weathered tan of the outdoorsman. He was forty-two years old
but looked to be in his upper forties.

Marty was a born predator. He had 20/15 vision, fine hearing, and a
heavy, muscular body that he could deploy with surprising speed and agility. He
was a superb marksman, one with a seemingly inborn understanding of distance,
trajectory, and lead lines. Years ago, in our hunting days, we had made each
other gifts of game freezers, along with an annual wager as to whose would be
filled with the most birds by end of season. (Marty always won.) Parish had the
thick hands and blunt fingers of a carpenter, though I never knew him to be
handy with hammer or saw.

The bags under Marty's bloodshot blue eyes were dark and heavy. He had
cut himself shaving, and a little horizon line was visible directly on top of
his Adam's apple. It had bled onto his shirt collar, which was open. Even in
the air-condition county building, the Fourth of July heat was a presence.

"How's Isabella?"

"Doing well. Strong."

"She's an incredible woman. You don't deserve
her."

"People keep telling me that."

"I guess the chemo is about over?"

"One more, then we wait and see."

"I admire you, Russell. You've been good about
all this

"I don't see much choice."

"Some guys would just give up. Take a hike or something."

"No."

Marty was a soft-spoken man, and he seemed to get even quieter when
Amber left him those many years ago. But when excited or drunk, he could be
loud and demonstrative. At time he struck people—me included—as almost dull.
But if Marty Parish was a little slower on the uptake than some, he never had
to be told something twice. Some people were convinced that Marty's brooding,
big-jawed silences were the mark of some deeper understanding. I was convinced
of that. There was, I had always believed, a certain moral force in Martin
Parish.

He had remarried since Amber, to a very pretty woman named JoAnn. They
were going on fourteen years together. They had two daughters. Marty was
uncommonly devoted to his family, if his well-known humorlessness about
womanizing was any indicator. Martin Parish was a private man. He drank too
much.

He pointed to the chair and I sat. "So, what's
up?"

I had prepared my cover, although my curiosity was real enough.
"The Ellisons," I said. What a strange, terrible thing it was to have
seen what I saw—and what I knew Marty had seen, too—and not say a word about
it.

"It was bad," he said.

"You guys serious about a two-eleven?"

"That's what it was—started as, anyway."

"Hmm."

"Hmm shit, Monroe. A robbery is a robbery no matter how it ends up.
Want to see the pictures?"

"Thought you'd never ask."

He threw a manila envelope onto my lap and I opened it.

Mr. and Mrs. Ellison—Cedrick and Shareen—had not strictly parted, even
in death. Shareen had gone down in about the middle of her bedroom, one cheek
against the hardwood floor. Her husband had come to rest on top of her. They
were both naked. Someone had done the same thing to their heads and faces that
had been done to Amber Mae Wilson's. I felt a cold wash break out on my face,
and that vein in my forehead beating.

There is something even more obscene about CS photographs than the
crime scene itself. The scale is reduced, the horror concentrated and
depersonalized at the same time. And there's always the sense that you're
intruding needlessly into some great, miserable intimacy. At the scene
itself—if you're a cop, at least—there's the redeeming belief that you are
there to, well, strange as it seems, help. In the case of these pictures was
the added mystery of where the blood began and the flesh left off, because the
Ellisons were both black, and the photographic contrast is different from that
of people with lighter skin. The sprawl of their young, strong bodies was
dreadfully graceful.

"You figure one creep, or two?" I asked.

"Two. That's a lot of bashing for one guy to managed drop them both
in their tracks."

"Have any physical
yet...
that shows two and not one?

Marty glowered at me and picked his fingernail clipped back up. We were
approaching a sore spot for him, and w both knew it. One of the consequences of
my quitting and getting rich and famous (ha) was that cops like Marty thought
they should hold out on me, as a matter of principle. It was a game If I
suspected something that they didn't want to see in the paper (I was taking
newspaper work from the
Orange County Journal
then), they tried to steer
me away from it. If I
almost
knew something for certain, they'd deny it.
If I'd start to look in the right place, they'd point me someplace else. A
game.

But this particular point—the one we both knew I was getting to—was not
part of a game at all. It was as dead serious as anything can get.

"Hell yes, we've got physical. We don't sit around here and dream
things up."

"If it was a robbery, what'd
they
take?"

"I can't release that now."

"No."

"No's right."

"So what about the Fernandez couple?"

"What about them?"

"Can I see the shots?"

If Marty didn't show me the Fernandez pictures, the assistant medical
examiner would, and Marty knew this.

The two envelopes passed in midair. I studied the CS shots of Sid and
Teresa Fernandez, both age twenty-six, brained while sleeping in their
apartment. Neither had even made it out of bed. The sheet was hardly disturbed.
Sid was scrunched down under it like any working man might be after a long day
in the shop. Fernandez painted cars. His head was broken open and most of what
had been inside it was sitting on the pillow beside his face. Teresa was beside
him, turned the other way, her face and right arm hanging over the mattress and
her dashed skull leaking hugely onto the floor. It looked as if their heads
were growing devils, and I thought of Isabella and wondered how big it was now.
It was the size of a golf ball thirteen months ago. Was this a better way to
go, all at once, or one cell at a time? The clammy wash had come to my face
again. I'd showered again that morning but already stank like a man who knew
too much.

"And of course, this was one creep," I said. "And you've
got physical evidence to prove it."

"We don't prove things. The DA does."

"You're avoiding the point."

"What is the point, Russ?"

"A serial."

"Two incidents don't make a serial. Maybe there's another book in
it for you, is what you hope."

"Look at this, Martin. Four bashings in a month. All in the county.
All around midnight. Point of entry the same—a sliding glass door left open
because of the heat. You say the Ellisons were robbed, but nobody's found out
what got taken. I talked to some of the evidence techs last week and they found
an eighteen-inch pearl necklace in the bed-stand drawer."

"The evidence techs ought to keep their mouths
shut."

"While you tell me it started as a two-eleven? The Fernandez
couple goes the same way, but you're not calling
them
a robbery. Look at
the Ellisons. How about this? He clubs the mister first, to calm him down. But
the woman is faster than he thinks—she gets up and starts across the room.
She's clear on the other side of the bed, remember. He catches up halfway and
lets her have it. By then, Mr. Ellison is coming at him, but Mr. Ellison is
naked, hit once already, and doesn't have weapon. Down he goes, with his
wife."

I could see Amber on Marty's floor now. She was so close, I could have
touched her lips again. My throat got so tight, I had to cough to get it open.

Marty didn't look much better. His eyes had that low gloss, matte finish
that comes from not enough sleep. He was looking at the same spot on the floor
that I was. Way out on the edge of my mind, somewhere between thought and fear,
I let the idea float by that Martin Albert Parish had killed not only Amber but
the Ellisons and Fernandezes, too. It was an ugly
construct, one of
those notions that start up high in your head then quiver down into your heart,
which then beats harder trying to get rid of it. The same thing a heart does
when it finds out that something horrible is real and true.
Broken Badge,
From Cop to Killer,
by Russell Monroe.

Christ.

"You're going to cover this for the
Journal?"

"Not as yet."

"Maybe they can't afford you."

"And maybe you're right—four unrelated
homicides."

"Well, then what do you want?"

"Let me in on some of the physical."

"No can do."

"Because you don't have any?"

"We've got it. If we can link these killings, we'll do it. You'll
know; the county will know. But, Monroe, I'm not going to start yelling fire
until I'm goddamned sure there is one. Two incidents, Russ. I've got plenty of
physical that tells us we're looking al two, maybe three shitheads at the
Ellisons and one at the Fernandez place. We're working on it. We've released
what we can release, and there isn't more to say. It isn't right to send people
into a panic over a coincidence."

"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.